Dissident Veteran For Peace

My primary source of daily news is National Public Radio, which, in my experience, was never a fountain of unadulterated truth. In the Trump era, although they profess otherwise, NPR has pretty much abandoned any vestige of a commitment to non-partisan truth-telling. Trump Derangement Syndrome has done that to a lot of people.

That said, I have always been keenly aware that NPR and other Left-liberal-Democratic outlets hold no monopoly on biased, dishonest journalism. The story and image below from Breitbart is a case in point.

I think the issue of transgender athletes, especially primary school and college amateurs, competing against cisgender athletes of the gender to which the transgender athletes have transitioned is not amenable to an obvious, straightforward solution. However, publishers, editors, and journalists with integrity will strive not to mislead their audience or play to their emotions. They will present them with all relevant facts about an issue. Sadly, such integrity is largely missing from outlets such as NPR and Breitbart.

Notice that the photo Breitbart used for their article (really a rehashed press release) is credited but un-captioned. I can only assume this is because Breitbart does not wish to trouble their readers with some facts that don't fit their agenda.

First, the short-haired wrestler dominating the other wrestler with a neck hold is Mack Beggs of Texas. Second, in that 2018 photo Beggs is a transgender boy competing against girls because he was prohibited from competing against boys. Beggs is not a "biological male" identifying as a girl/woman.

There are other facts the average reader would be unlikely to discern from the article alone. The press release Penny Starr all but plagiarized is from WOLF, a radical feminist organization. Here are a few things they believe:

•     That female humans, the class of people called women, are oppressed by men under a male-supremacist system called patriarchy.
•     That patriarchy is organized around the extraction of resources from female bodies and minds in the service of men, including reproductive, sexual, emotional, and labor resources.
•     That gender is a hierarchical caste system that organizes male supremacy. Gender cannot be reformed – it must be abolished.
•     That we are enmeshed in overlapping systems of sadistic power built on misogyny, white privilege, stolen wealth, and human supremacism, and all of those must be dismantled.

Breitbart and its readers are not known for their opposition to "patriarchy" and the other issues WOLF decries. But, tellingly, they'll climb into bed with WOLF to unite against transgender athletes.

Another undisclosed and ironic fact is that the Idaho law touted in the Breitbart article—even if it survives judicial scrutiny—would not prevent another transgender boy such as Mack Beggs from wrestling girls. You see the "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" only requires that "Athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to students of the male sex." Under the Idaho law a transgender boy is a girl and permitted to compete against cisgender girls. So, all in all, the photo selected for the article could hardly be more misleading.

Labels: gender, law, LGBT, media, National Public Radio, politics, Trump

I finally got around to reading Starship Troopers (1959, 2006) by Robert A. Heinlein and The Forever War (1974, 2009) by Joe Haldeman this summer. Over the years I've heard and read a lot about the books.

I also watched Paul Verhoeven's film treatment of Starship Troopers (ST) not long after its 1997 theatrical debut. Regarding the film, I am in general agreement with Joseph Sale's take (which I've edited slightly below):

Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film, while a masterpiece in its own right, misses much of the nuance of the original novel. He makes Starship Troopers into a satire of fascist states, casting Aryan, white, blonde, beautiful people in the lead roles to further his point, and it works brilliantly, but the novel itself is not an advocate of fascism to begin with. Johnnie is not an Aryan, he is Filipino (Juan Rico is his real name), and the [Mobile Infantry] is made up of people from all over the world. In fact, Heinlein bizarrely presents us with one of the most utopian and unified visions of future human society I have ever read. The film also makes use of over-the-top violence to contrast with its propaganda-interludes, no doubt highlighting how the lies of the state juxtapose with the realities of war. This is intriguing, almost a reverse of the novel which flits between Johnnie’s excruciating mental and physical training, which make explicit the gravity of war on every level of understanding, and the action sequences, which it's undeniable Johnnie seems to enjoy. In the novel, the state is far more responsible than Johnnie is.

It's interesting that at least one key didactic point that Heinlein wrote into ST was more or less faithfully preserved in Verhoeven's film. In the book, Major Reid, an Officer Candidate School instructor in History and Moral Philosophy asserts:

To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives—such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will!—the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force.¹

Why did Verhoeven leave this (without the reference to the fasces) in the film? I suspect it is because he believed it furthered his case concerning the alleged fascism of Heinlein and/or ST. In fact, it is a profound truth that force and violence underlie voting and political power. Yes, even in representative democracies.

Why is it acceptable to coerce people simply because 51% of the voting population agrees that people should be punished for doing or not doing x, y, or z? In nearly all cases, criminal laws are never even put to voters, they are enacted by politicians viewed unfavorably by large segments of the population.

The case that is made in ST is that the truth about voting logically leads to the following solution:

Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility—we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life—and lose it, if need be—to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal.²

Approached from a slightly different angle it seems to me quite reasonable to expect from those who would wield the coercive power of the state against others to demonstrate some tangible civic virtue, to have some literal skin in the game.

However, there is an unspoken corollary that I find even more appealing. That is, by reducing the coercive power of the state—if you're going to have a state at all—one can expand the franchise and lower the bar to participation. That is, a widespread franchise would be appropriate only where the state has little or no coercive power. Steps in this direction might be to abolish capital punishment and military conscription and then to progressively redistribute centralized authority downward.

(The most interesting take I've read of 'the voting problem' in ST is in Dan Thompson's account of a discussion he was involved in at a WorldCon in Baltimore. I've included a link to it below in the See also section.)

Recurrent accusations of Heinlein's alleged personal and literary fascism are well known. Despite the many problems I have with some of Heinlein's later political positions, I think the charge of fascism is an unfounded example of the scurrilous name-calling too common among political ideologues.

It's interesting that Haldeman and Heinlein were friends. Moreover, in 1999, Haldeman was asked "about the whole 'fascist' argument, that ST is a novel about fascism, etc.?" He responded: " 'Fascist' is too easy an epithet. My problem with ST is more complex than that." Haldeman also penned the introduction to the 2018 Folio Society edition of ST (I have not read it yet though I would like to).

It is almost a commonplace that ST is an inadvertently dystopian novel meant to present a (fascistic) utopian vision. By contrast, The Forever War (TFW) is often taken as "an anti-war classic" and a refutation of ST. However, Haldeman himself has said that although he did not pen a reply to it, he was influenced by Heinlein's book.

In any case, of the two books I find TFW to be markedly more dystopian than ST. If forced to choose between living in the sci-fi future world of ST or TFW I would unhesitatingly choose ST.

I do not subscribe to the view that every act or idea in a work of fiction is endorsed by the author. Yet, authors generally do not let acts and ideas to which they object go unchallenged. Moreover, Haldeman has stated the TFW is based on his own experiences in the Vietnam War and, as others have pointed out the main character's name (Mandella) is a near anagram of the author's surname. Haldeman earned a degree in physics before he was drafted as did Mandella.³ Mandella's lover and companion is Marygay Potter while Haldeman's wife's maiden name is Mary Gay Potter.

So, I think it's fair, in this case, to assume that TFW reflects, in no small part, the author's personal views at the time he wrote the book. And Haldeman leaves a number of objectionable things in TFW unchallenged. For instance, in Haldeman's fictional world women are integrated into the military by requiring them to be sexually "compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law)".⁴

In TFW, several dubious ideas about war are also left unchallenged: War is good for the general economy, the war in TFW is mainly the fault of bellicose veterans, and once begun, "only continued because the two races were unable to communicate".⁵

In fact, economists have shown that wars and unnecessarily large peacetime military establishments are macroeconomically detrimental. Arguably, wars may sometimes be necessary but as the authors of Economic Consequences of War on the U.S. Economy concluded, "Regardless of the way a war is financed, the overall macroeconomic effect on the economy tends to be negative." Wars benefit those who supply the weapons, munitions, and other material used to wage war but everyone else loses, especially the human casualties which seldom, if ever, include war profiteers.

As for bellicose veterans starting wars, it is perhaps just as likely that veterans will oppose offensive wars. For instance, in the aftermath of WW I, the American Legion was founded in 1919 proclaiming that a "large standing army is uneconomic and un-American" and pursuing "National safety with freedom from militarism ..."

In its early years the Legion was a major actor on the international stage in a citizen-led peace movement. Among other things, it actively supported and endorsed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact "condemn[ing] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounc[ing] it, as an instrument of national policy". Though largely ignored this treaty remains in force. While it has arguably drifted far away from it roots, the Legion, to this day, exists, in part, "to promote peace and good will on earth".

In any case, modern large scale wars are not initiated by a single individual or small group of people. One could argue that a veteran named Hitler started World War II but that war was set in motion by the outcome of World War I and Hitler could not have initiated it without the support of the German establishment and a large segment of the German population. Likewise, I am aware of no war in history that continued (or began) simply because of a miscommunication.

Sexual orientation in TFW is also problematic. Haldeman seems to see it as strongly dichotomous, culturally determined, and easily changed.⁶ In TFW, human sexual orientation collectively swings between extremes. Without going into further detail I am a bit troubled that Haldeman did not imagine a future where society was not so polarized in terms of sexuality.

Finally, Haldeman also tacitly endorse eugenics.⁷ His solution to ending war is to erase nearly all human diversity and individuality. At the end of TFW, most of "humanity" is comprised mainly of "clones of a single individual."⁸ In TFW, humanity's fate is to become something resembling the Bugs—with their "total communism"—in Heinlein's ST. ⁹

I'd like to hope that humanity will one day abandon war and I disagree with some of Heinlein's ideas. However, if the price of peace is a future like Haldeman imagines in TFW (and I don't think it is) then I would choose war in the ST-like world.

Notes:
1. ST, p. 193. Emphasis is in the original. All ST page references in this post are from the 2006 Ace trade paperback edition.
2. ST, p. 194. It is often asserted, mostly by those critical of Heinlein, that in the ST's Terran Federation the only way to earn the franchise is to serve in the military. Although Heinlein could have been clearer in ST on this subject there are several passages suggesting what is required is not necessarily military service (see pp. 32-33, 190-194). For an in-depth and fair discussion of this perennial controversy see "The Nature of "Federal Service" in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by James Gifford.
3. TFW, p. 7. All TFW page references in this post are from the 2009 Thomas Dunne Books paperback edition.
4. TFW, p. 45.
5. TFW, pp. 139, 261, 281.
6. TFW, pp. 118, 129, 189, 197, 260.
7. TFW, pp. 197, 260.
8. TFW, pp. 260-262.
9. TFW, p. 261; ST p. 194.

See also:

• "Who Deserves To Be A Citizen? A Reflection On Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by Farzan Sabet
• "Starship Troopers and the Right to Vote" by Dan Thompson
• "Over the hump: Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by Jo Walton
• "Blasting bugs is more complicated than you think" by Sam Jordison
• "Fascism and Starship Troopers, Once More" by hyperpat
• "Heinlein's Female Troubles" by M. G. Lord

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, communism, culture, eugenics, gender, Heinlein, human reproduction, LGBT, military, politics, quotations, voting, War

(click on images to enlarge them)

Source: Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples, Saga (Image Comics, 2018) vol. 8

Labels: art and literature, gender, quotations, Saga

Labels: film & television, gender, LGBT, video

Many transgender Americans are concerned about how the Trump administration may impact their lives and with good cause. However, a week ago at Donald Trump's inauguration something occurred that may be a harbinger of good (or at least indifference). I'm referring to Trump's choice of singers for the national anthem, that choice was Jackie Evancho.

Jackie has been very publicly supportive of her transgender sister Juliet since at least 2015. So, people in the incoming Trump administration undoubtedly knew what they were doing when they selected an inaugural singer who has a transgender sister involved in a bathroom access lawsuit. And on this choice it seems that the Left has been more intolerant* and dished out more grief to Jackie for agreeing to singing at the event than the Right has. Juliet has been supportive of her sister's decision.

Below is a 2015 "All of the Stars" cover video Jackie made in support of her sister and transgender people, in general. Below that is the explanatory text that appeared on Jackie's web site.

The video is very close to Jackie’s heart as it was inspired by her own personal experience of someone close to her who is going through transitioning and are transgender. It’s a tribute to the bravery and personal journey that people go through as transitioning transgender teens. The video features a girl and a boy, looking into the mirror and confronting images of themselves that are very different from reality. When Jackie looks in the mirror, staring back at her is a beautiful and glamorous version of herself. When the boy gazes into the mirror, a girl stares back…the girl he has always felt like on the inside. “I was inspired to make this video after witnessing personally the struggle that people go through as young transitioning teens. The person they see in the mirror doesn’t match the person they feel inside. And while our struggles are different, I could relate to their insecurities as I have my own issues with self-image…as I think most teens do at one point or another. This video is about empathy, communication and self-appreciation. For me, it has been learning to love myself, flaws and all. For others, it is about being true to the person that they always wanted to be. Everyone wants to feel accepted but I think that starts from within, even if people don’t always agree with your choices. We are all unique stars in the sky and what makes us unique makes us beautiful,” says Jackie.

* "Intolerant" is one of those terms I think functions mainly as an epithet. It is overused and usually inappropriately so. I use it here hesitantly but I think it is apt for a situation such as this where people are telling a 16-year-old entertainer that: "those who aid and abet transphobia like Trump have the blood of our wounded and murdered sisters, brothers and kindred on their hands ... For that reason, there's no way for someone to sing for Trump, stand with him or otherwise support him without some of that blood sticking to them."

Labels: gender, LGBT, music, politics, Trump, video

Marc Antony: Queens! Queens! Strip them naked as any other woman, they're no longer queens.

Rufio: It is also difficult to tell the rank of a naked general. And generals without armies are naked indeed. 

Source: Cleopatra (1963) with Richard Burton as Mark Antony and Martin Landau as Rufio.

Labels: film & television, gender, military, quotations

The video above is from a 2006 ABC News 20/20 segment entitled "A Self-Made Man". Norah Vincent's experiences as "Ned" were the basis of her book Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man (Viking, 2006).

Labels: gender, video

Labels: critical thinking, gender, identity, LGBT, video

The ABC News video below tells the story of Bianca and Nick, the transgender parents of two young children. As an article in the Mirror Online explains: " 'We have the parts so we will use them,' she says. 'If we could change them we would, and they would be the other way around – but we cannot afford it and the children come first.' "

Labels: gender, human reproduction, identity, LGBT, video

Years ago I was honored to unexpectedly be asked to share a speaker's platform with Adolph Reed, Jr. at a labor conference. I had admired his writing for some time. While I don't fully endorse all of his positions, I still think he has one of the most compelling approaches to class and race in American discourse and sheds more light than heat (and, believe me, he puts out a lot of heat) on the Rachel Dolezal affair. Below are a few excerpts from his "From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much".


By far the most intellectually and politically interesting thing about the recent "exposé" of Spokane, WA, NAACP activist Rachel Dolezal’s racial status is the conundrum it has posed for racial identitarians who are also committed to defense of transgender identity. ... Their contention is that one kind of claim to an identity at odds with culturally constructed understandings of the identity appropriate to one’s biology is okay but that the other is not ...

This brings me to the most important point that this affair throws into relief. It has outed the essentialism on which those identitarian discourses rest ... The essentialism cuts in odd ways in this saga. Sometimes race is real in a way that sex is not – you’re black only if you meet the biological criteria (whatever they’re supposed to be) for blackness. 


There is a guild-protective agenda underlying racial identitarians’ outrage about Dolezal that is also quite revealing ... The charge is what those making it want to be true; they assume it’s true because they understand black racial classification as a form of capital.


... the Dolezal issue has captured such attention only because it rankles the sensibilities of those who essentialize race ...


... race politics is ... the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism.


... the more aggressively and openly capitalist class power destroys and marketizes every shred of social protection working people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations have fought for and won over the last century, the louder and more insistent are the demands from the identitarian left that we focus our attention on statistical disparities and episodic outrages that "prove" that the crucial injustices in the society should be understood in the language of ascriptive identity.


The fundamental contradiction that has impelled the debate and required the flight into often idiotic sophistry is that racial identitarians assume, even if they give catechistic lip service ... to the catchphrase that "race is a social construction," that race is a thing, an essence that lives within us.


The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality.

Reed concludes his article by saying: "It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end." I really hope that's true but, sadly, I see very little evidence of it.

Labels: Adolph Reed Jr., class, gender, identity, quotations, race, Rachel Dolezal

Right: Rachel Dolezal poses in front of a mural she painted at the Human Rights Education Institute offices in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Nicholas K. Geranios/AP 

On June 11, 2015, the Coeur d' Alene Press broke the story that the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, had woven a web of lies in order to falsely present herself as a Black woman. In a testament to the highly charged and contested nature of modern racial discourse the story has since "Gone viral" and international.

The phenomenon of so-called light-skinned Black people "passing as White" has long been a source of curiosity to me. If someone has so much non-African ancestry that they appear to the casual observer as White and they have/have adopted "White" cultural values and behaviors—whatever those may be—then who is to say they are not White? Do we take the White racist's and/or the Black racist's word for this?

Of course, it is true that the "one-drop rule" was a creation of White people made for enforcing slavery and later Jim Crow but now it seems just as many, if not more, Black people accept it (see, e.g. a recent Atlanta Blackstar photo gallery with the contradictory title "9 Black Celebrities Who Rejected The One Drop Rule" and especially the photo captions for Devyn (#2) and Zoe Saldana (#5)). It is in no small part because many Black people embrace the one-drop rule or some version of it that Rachel Dolezal was able to "pass as Black," apparently, for years.

This Black and White madness over racial identity leads to other bizarre outcomes. So, on The Atlantic we have Baz Dreisinger, author of Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, telling an interviewer: "The earliest cases [of Whites passing for Black] that I look at are from the slave era. There are cases of white people who are kidnapped and sold into slavery, and which therefore are cases of involuntary passing." While on Slate, Jamelle Bouie writes:

Of course there were also black Americans who could pass but chose to stay in the black community. Walter Francis White led the national staff of the NAACP for nearly a quarter-century, from 1931 to 1955. The child of formerly enslaved people, White looked, well, white. And yet he chose blackness. "I am a Negro," he wrote in his autobiography A Man Called White. "My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me."

White is Bouie's example of a Black American who stayed Black. Bouie nowhere admits the possibility, if not fact, that the obviously European traits of White's race were quite visible upon him. Instead, implicitly, slavery is equated with Blackness (because there was no such thing as White slaves in the antebellum South, right?) and the one-drop rule is affirmed.

So why did Rachel Dolezal decide to deceive people about her identity? If anyone knows for sure, and that's not clear, it would be Rachel Dolezal herself. However, there are some interesting possibilities to consider. First, as Baz Dreisinger claims: "Anytime you're talking about the cultural domain, it certainly can be advantageous to pass as black." Dolezal is a talented artist whose work seemingly has mostly African-American themes. So there's that.

Second, and this is the one I find more compelling, there's the possibility that Dolezal is a victim of self-hatred for being White. As David Smedley, a Howard University associate professor, who was Dolezal's Master of Fine Arts thesis adviser told the Washington Post:

" 'White' people who have inherited a privileged place in society seemingly have just two choices: stay ignorant, accept and continue to justify the delusion that America is and always has been great and democratic; or do some research and then feel the heavy guilt and shame upon discovering the ugly truth about the systemic unfairnesses that their ancestors perpetuated.

"Neither of these are healthy, and I suspect that this isn't the last time we will see another white person chose to switch sides."

One need not accept Prof. Smedley's beliefs lock, stock, and barrel to see that there's more than a grain of truth to what he says about the choices White people are presented with in terms of how they see themselves. More evidence for this perspective comes from Dolezal's adopted Black brother, Ezra Dolezal. According to CNN:

Dolezal's time at predominantly black Howard University may have been a major turning point in her transformation, her adopted brother said.

"When she applied they thought she was a black student," he said. "When she came there, they saw she was white and she wasn't treated that well, especially by people that worked there. She probably started developing this kind of dislike for being white and dislike for white people. She used to tell [her Black adopted brother] Izaiah ... that all white people are racists. She might have developed some self-hatred."

Rachel Dolezal unsuccessfully "sued Howard for discrimination in 2002, the year she graduated from the historically black college with a Master of Fine Arts degree." If her brother is correct, then Rachel Dolezal would not be the first person to internalize perceived and/or actual discrimination and bias as self-hatred. In the case of White people like Dolezal there is also the poisonous concept of trans-generational collective guilt for the past sins—real or imagined—of others.

If the story of Rachel Dolezal is a case of self-hatred then one can hope that she will examine the lies and distortions that led her to this point and reject and combat them. She doesn't need the people who she may have thought needed or wanted her to be Black and there are probably far more Black and other people than she imagined who would have embraced her openly as an artist and humans rights activist who is White.

I want to shift now to the comparisons of Rachel Dolezal to Caitlyn Jenner. As Nick Gillespie writes: "... what conservatives dig most about Dolezal is that she is a punchline regarding not racial misrepresentation but gender identity. Hence, conservative folks are using Dolezal's unmasking to yet again mock Caitlyn Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion and reality TV star formerly known as Bruce." I agree but I also think it overstates the case to say that "There is no comparison between transgender people and Rachel Dolezal", as does the title to a Guardian article by Meredith Talusan.

Talusan, who is transgender, claims:

The fundamental difference between Dolezal's actions and trans people's is that her decision to identify as black was an active choice, whereas transgender people's decision to transition is almost always involuntary. Transitioning is the product of a fundamental aspect of our humanity – gender – being foisted upon us over and over again from the time of our birth in a manner inconsistent with our own experience of our genders. Doctors don't announce our race or color when we are born; they announce our gender. People who are alienated from their presumed gender and define themselves according to another gender have existed since earliest recorded history; race is a medieval European invention. Thus, Dolezal identified as black, but I am a woman, and other trans people are the gender they feel themselves to be.

I wonder how fully Dolezal experiences/ed her decision to pass as Black as voluntary. And "our race or color" is frequently determined when we are born by our parents or a bureaucrat via a birth certificate. Talusan's insistence that she is different from Dolezal because "I am a woman" strikes me as a case of protesting too much. Mind you, I'm not disputing her claim to being a woman, it's her vehemence in the service of criticizing another that I find troubling.

I suppose I am more, though not fully, in agreement with Camille Gear Rich, who, in "Rachel Dolezal has a right to be black", writes: "The central issue that separates Jenner's and Dolezal's choices is deception. Jenner chose carefully how and when she would disclose herself as actually female." In Dolezal's case I think the problem with the deception is that it was active rather than passive and she hitched that deception to her status as a Black community leader.

If Bruce Jenner had long ago ceased to have been a recognizable celebrity would Caitlyn Jenner then have any blanket obligation to out herself as transgender to anyone? No, but I think she would have an ethical obligation not to deliberately mislead people into thinking she'd had a girlhood or the lived social and biological experience of a typical natal female, except when her safety or well-being was at stake. To be clear, in light of the violence and discrimination faced by transgender people when I speak of deliberate deception I'm talking about steps akin to what Dolezal did—inventing a fake father, presenting her adopted siblings as her own children, and, possibly, falsifying hate crimes.

Camille Gear Rich writes: "People allow Caitlyn Jenner to change because she has some biological basis for believing she is female. But is this all identity is? Are we prepared to accept the implications of this view?" She raises a good point but I would go further, I've never been fully convinced by the science suggesting that biology is behind transgender (or LGB) identity.

Mostly, the studies I've read (admittedly quite a few years ago now) fail to address the question of causality: Are you transgender because your biology is different from a non-trans person's or is your biology different because you're transgender? Often, due to small sample sizes and ambiguous findings, they also fail to convincingly show that there actually is a biological difference. In any case, while I'm willing to go wherever the evidence leads, I also think it should be kept in mind that biological explanations are potentially dangerous.

See also:

• "Adolph Reed, Jr. on the Dolezal Affair" on the Dissident Veteran For Peace blog
• "Pike County, OH: As Black as We Wish to Be" by State of the Re:Union
• Gulliver as Slave Trader: Racism Reviled by Jonathan Swift
• Quotable: Fraud, Gunpowder, A Soldier on the Dissident Veteran For Peace blog
• "The Bad-White Body" in Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema

Labels: Black America, gender, identity, LGBT, race, Rachel Dolezal, science, slavery, White folks

In New York there's Rikers Island, a whole island devoted to pre-trial detainment, and on visiting day on the men's side there's a three-hour wait, the visiting room is packed with all these women going to visit their men folk, whether it's mothers visiting sons or wives visiting husbands or girlfriends visiting boyfriends. And then you go to the women's side and it's empty.

Source: Victoria Law as quoted in "Women in prison: an unquiet minority" by Adam Hyla in Real Change, May 6, 2009.

Labels: crime, gender, quotations, United States

My "Green Berets: Who's the Coward?" post of last year has attracted a steady trickle of comments from anonymous militaristic my-government-right-or-wrong types. A macho bent to the comments--from "You could not and will not every [sic] hold these mens jock straps" (true enough, I hope and pray) to "you're unmanly" (flattery will get you nowhere)--brought to mind an Arizona Daily Star article from last February. That article suggested that the ranks of the US military may be disproportionately filled with people whose military service/masculinity is an act to cover or compensate for decidedly un-masculine feelings. A "classic" study cited in the article calls such military service a "flight into hypermasculinity." In this light, I see the remarks of the anonymous commenters as somewhat ironic and their own macho militaristic posing strikes me as a kind of imposture or performance to cover up something else.

In any case, I provide forthwith some anecdotal evidence that the special operations forces may have an even higher proportion of closeted transwomen in their ranks than the rest of the military. First up: The obituary of Rebecca Lynn Cross, "A former Special Forces medic and combat veteran, Cross underwent sexual reassignment surgery in Thailand last year." Next is the video clip below about a former US Army Special Forces Colonel who also transitioned to living as a woman. I can't end without saying that the ALCU's exploitation of Diane Schroer's case strikes me as a sort of imposture, too. They are cloaking the struggle for transgender rights in the garb of patriotism and the dishonorable, mythical 'war on terrorism.' It's really kind of disgusting.

Labels: gender, identity, LGBT, militarism, video

Below are three images from "Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait" by Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan. The first image, called "Prison Uniforms," depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. As I mentioned in "Lenin's Foresight," the US locks up more people than any other country.

The last two images are from "Barbie Dolls," comprised of 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast-augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. in 2006. To see more images and read an interview with Jordan go to "Chris Jordan photographs our culture of excess in hopes of changing it."

Labels: art and literature, environment, gender, identity, repression, United States

Below are the first few paragraphs from a new article by Kari Lydersen on Infoshop News.

Korean massage parlors are a common presence in most major U.S. cities – so much that those in the know refer to them with the acronym of KMPs. It is also widely known that these venues offer more than a massage – they function essentially as brothels, where South Korean women work as prostitutes controlled by a wide-reaching, shadowy and highly profitable network of traffickers and pimps.

Anti-trafficking, women's rights and immigrants rights advocates are increasingly focusing on this segment of trafficking and sexual exploitation in the United States. The Polaris Project has focused extensively on Korean massage parlors and trafficking of Korean women in California. In Chicago, a coalition of immigrants' rights, anti-domestic violence and ethnic groups are in the early stages of developing an outreach and advocacy structure for Korean women caught up in these situations.

Trafficking for sex work, domestic work and other types of labor is a poisonous manifestation of the increasingly global economy, where people in impoverished countries – especially women – fall prey to traffickers' false promises of a better life in another country or are even literally sold into slavery by family members or kidnappers. The U.S. government estimates that about 17,500 foreigners are trafficked into the U.S. annually, though some NGOs put the number much higher. Sex trafficking is considered to make up about 80 percent of cases, with trafficking for domestic, agricultural, food service and other types of labor making up the rest.

In general the pipeline of trafficked people flows from the most impoverished countries to wealthier ones within a region; for example from El Salvador to Mexico; or Romania to the Czech Republic; or Nepal to India. Then, either after going through those pipelines or directly from their points of origin, people are trafficked across continents to the wealthiest destinations: the U.S., Israel and parts of Western Europe.

South Korea ranks third as the point of origin for trafficking cases in the U.S., according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, behind Mexico and China and ahead of the Philippines and Thailand. Though exact numbers are impossible to come by, it is estimated at least 10,000 Korean women are doing sex work in the U.S.

Read the rest of the article here.
See also:

• Opposing Prostitution As a Form of Male Violence: the Swedish Model
• Apologies & Global Dimming
• Glass Houses & 'Comfort Women'

Labels: Empire, gender, inequality, prostitution, United States, violence

Last night, a couple of questionable things were said at a seminar I attend. First, it was said that the first court case of child abuse in the US was brought on the grounds that children are animals (see here and here for online examples). This isn't exactly true. The case in question is known as the case of Mary Ellen. The American Humane Association has a web page which corrects some of the myths around her life. The case is discussed also in The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice, and Research by Peter J. Pecora:

The case was brought to the court under the premise that the child was covered by laws protecting all "animals." That premise was recently debunked as an historical myth (Watkins, 1990). That the Little Mary Ellen case was the first child protective service (CPS) court intervention on behalf of a child is also not correct. Although the girl's case was finally addressed by a court of law in 1875, reported criminal cases involving child abuse date back to 1655 (Bremner, 1970, 123- 124, as cited in Watkins, 1990, p. 500).

It was also said last night that, until recently, fertile women generally had a child about every year. I think it is illuminating to consider that women in many, if not all, societies had developed herbal and other methods to control their own fertility and this was strongly resisted in patriarchal societies.

Some scholars have advanced a compelling argument that the Medieval European witch hunts were motivated, in part, by the desire suppress female control of female fertility (see esp. "The Elimination of Medieval Birth Control and the Witch Trials of Modern Times" by Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger in the International Journal of Women's Studies, 3, May 1982, 193-214 and "Population, Conquest and Terror in the 21st Century" by Gunnar Heinsohn). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers", which also sheds light on the patriarchal suppression of women healers in Medieval times.

There's another more recent (2004) paper by Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger on witch hunts and birth control here (PDF). Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

The time of early Renaissance Europe, with the extreme losses of labor in the wake of the Little Ice Age and the Great Plague, brings about the Great Witch Hunt. Its content is the repression of the highly developed culture of artificial birth control of the Middle Ages, especially contraception and abortion, which in late medieval and early modern times deprives feudal and ecclesiastical lords of the manpower required to regain economic prosperity. Its target are the foremost experts of medieval birth control, the “midwives = witches”. The thesis is discussed with respect to ecclesiastical and secular laws of the 15th and 16th centuries punishing all forms of birth control, the disappearance of medieval birth control knowledge in early modern times, and the dramatic rise in birth rates leading to the European Population Explosion of the 18th century. While the midwives are the prime target during the Great Witch Hunt, suppression of contraception and abortion continues after the end of the persecutions by other methods, making knowledge of birth control the great taboo of the Occident until the 1960s.

Labels: children, Empire, gender, human reproduction, resistance

In the wake of her recent assassination, Benazir Bhutto is being touted in the West as the first woman to lead a predominantly Muslim country and so on. Typical is the remark of Joe Pascal on the US N&WR web site: "the first woman leader in the Muslim world" or at feministing.com: "Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim country." The only problem is that it's not true.

Long before Bhutto came on the scene there was Shagrat al-Durr, who became the Sultan of Egypt in 1250 AD and I'm sure that more knowledgable people could cite other early female leaders of predominantly Muslim countries. A'isha, the wife of the Prophet Mohammed, was an amazing leader of Muslim people although she never had formal authority like Shagrat al-Durr or Benazir Bhutto. To learn more about A'isha, I recommend The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam by Fatima Mernissi.

Bhutto was, of course, the first elected female national executive of a modern Muslim majority nation-state. And it is interesting to me that, arguably, Muslim countries have a rather better track record in this regard than Christian majority countries. See the table below. This is my original research and I welcome corrections.

Elected Female National Executives in the Five Most Populous Christian and Muslim Majority Nation-States
Nation-State	Population	Name of Female Executive	Year Elected
United States+	301,139,947	None	NA
Indonesia*	234,693,997	•Megawati Sukarnoputri	2001
Brazil+	190,010,647	None	NA
Pakistan*	164,741,924	•Benazir Bhutto	1988, 1993
Bangladesh*	150,448,339	•Khaleda Zia •Sheikh Hasina Wazed	1991, 2001 1996
Russia+	141,377,752	None	NA
Mexico+	108,700,891	None	NA
The Philippines+	91,077,287	•Corazon Aquino •Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo	1986 2001
Egypt*	80,335,036	None	NA
Turkey*	71,158,647	•Tansu Çiller	1993
Notes: 1. The plus symbol (+) indicates that the country has a Christian majority population while the asterisk (*) indicates a Muslim majority. 2. All population figures are from the CIA's World Factbook.

Labels: Benazir Bhutto, Christianity, gender, Islam

Recently, I was doing some research for a friend on Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a multi-talented man and one of the greatest grassroots organizers and advocates of nonviolent direct action in this country's history but he was a giant with feet of clay.

It seems to me that too often people are disheartened when they learn about the flaws of a personal hero but I think such knowledge should be reassuring. We don't have to be perfect to work in important struggles or try to do great things. Imperfect people can work for justice, too; indeed, we're the only ones who can.

So, I'm going to dish some dirt on Bayard Rustin because I think we can learn from both the powerful positive example of Rustin's life and from his negative example, too. Rustin was in the thick of many important social movement in the US in the last century and what he did or did not do tells us a lot not just about Rustin but about those movements. A final lesson is that we must be on guard for our own blind spots.

This isn't going to be an exhaustive list and it won't include some of the faults others find with him. To me, the three most outstanding flaws in Rustin were his sexism, his support for Zionism, and his internalized homophobia. He can hardly be faulted for the latter, except that it lasted so long—after Stonewall, even—and it was, in at least one instance, weaponized against someone else.

Rustin was the main organizer for the August 28, 1963, March on Washington but he sidelined women. The meeting mentioned below was the first major planning meeting after all the mainline civil rights organization had signed on. Daniel Levine writes:

[O]n July 2, at a luncheon at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, the "Big Six"—Randolph, King, John Lewis from SNCC, Whitney Young from the National Urban League, James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins—met. Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women was not at that meeting. The NCNW was listed in the New York Times article as one of the original sponsoring organizations. The stationery of the march, however, did not list it. The addition of the National Council of Negro Women, as an afterthought, was typical of the whole march effort. It was as though the organizers came to the thought "Oh, we mustn't neglect the women." But they were not included as fellow planners or, as it turned out, as speakers at the march itself. ...[1]

A dozen days before the march, Randolph received letters from Anna Arnold Hedgeman, on the board of the SCLC and a member of the administrative committee of the March on Washington, pointing out that women were not being recognized. In response, Randolph, or maybe Bayard, suggested to the ten speakers that since they "were all men and since it is imperative that the role of women in the struggle be made clear, " important women should be invited to participate. Randolph suggested Rosa Parks, Mrs. Medgar Evers, Mrs. Daisy Bates, Mrs. Gloria Richardson, Mrs. Diane Nash Bevel. "The difficulty of finding a single woman to speak without causing serious problems vis-a-vis other women and woman's groups suggests ... that the chairman should introduce these women and tell of their role in the struggle and tracing their spiritual ancestry back to Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman," that they should be applauded, not speak, and then sit down. The male speakers and Rustin all agreed, and that is in fact what happened. Not one woman spoke from the platform.[emphasis added][2]

At that same meeting the men agreed "to add four white cochairmen to the march leadership" but black women were sent to the back of the bus.[3] Jervis Anderson writes:

The program at the Lincoln Memorial was not as smooth in conception and execution as it seemed to the tens of thousands who applauded it. There had been, and probably still was, a brooding feminist rebellion behind the scenes. ... Only Daisy Bates (who had led the struggle to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957) was allowed a brief ceremonial turn on the platform, to introduce five "Negro Women Fighters for Freedom."

Imperatively, those five included Rosa Parks, heroine of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. It was that event which not only produced the celebrated leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., but also inaugurated the modern phase of black protest activism—a phase that had now reached its moral and popular zenith in the March on Washington. In fact, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, one of the newly disgruntled black women—she had been a passionate supporter of every mass initiative A. Philip Randolph had launched since 1941—now declared that the March on Washington would have been rightly called "Rosa Park's Day."

Perhaps, the strongest voice of feminist complaint was Pauli Murray's. Then studying at the Yale School of Divinity, she was among the black civil rights activists who had admired Randolph since the early 1940s. Seethingly displeased with particular arrangements for March on Washington, Pauli Murray wrote to Randolph a week before the event:

I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. ... It is indefensible to call a national March on Washington and send out a Call which contains the name of not a single woman leader. Nor can this glaring omission be glossed over by inviting several Negro women to appear on the August 28 program.

The time has come to say to you quite candidly, Mr. Randolph, that "tokenism" is as offensive when applied to women as when applied to Negroes, and that I have not devoted the greater part of my adult life to the implementation of human rights to [now] condone any policy which is not inclusive.

Perhaps such a letter would have been more appropriately addressed to Bayard Rustin; for it was he who organized the program and procedures of the March on Washington. [Murray's decision to write to Randolph is understandable since women were excluded from the March leadership and, thus, not privy to the behind-the-scenes decision to make Randolph the titular director while Rustin did the real organizing—VFPD] ... [Pauli Murray's] letter to Randolph echoed the earlier view of the feminist Ella Baker that black men did not want women to share the highest level of civil rights leadership.[4]

Obviously, Rustin was not the only black male civil rights leader with a sexism problem but is it too much to ask a man who had repeatedly been pushed out of the limelight because of his sexual orientation to be more sensitive to issues of sexism? In the case of Rustin the answer may be yes.

As Randall Kennedy notes in his review, "From Protest to Patronage:"

Before the late 1970s, Rustin spent little if any energy advancing the cause of equal treatment for lesbians and gays. ... [Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin author John] D'Emilio notes, however, that even with Rustin's forays into gay politics, he was never quite of it. The year before Rustin died in 1987, gay activist Joseph Beam invited Rustin to contribute to an anthology of writings by black gay men. "After much thought," Rustin responded, "I have decided that I must decline. ... I did not 'come out of the closet' voluntarily—circumstances forced me out. While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights. The credit for that belongs to others. ... While I support full equality, under law, for homosexuals, I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter."

This last remark by Rustin is an understatement. In fact, it seems that for most of his life Rustin accepted his own marginalization as a gay man as reasonable or even justified. Moreover, in 1971, when War Resisters League staffer David McReynolds " 'came out of the closet,' Bayard wanted him fired," according to McReynolds.[5] Levine writes that Rustin's "judgment was purely tactical" and Rustin wanted to protect the organization from the fallout over McReynold's admission. Ironically, after Rustin was sentenced to sixty days in jail in 1953 on a "morals charge"—he was arrested while having sex with two men in a car—McReynolds had been supportive and even visited him in jail. Rustin's internalization of homophobia may have led him to turn a blind eye to the marginalization of women, too.

In 1948, Jewish violence in Palestine killed thousands of Arabs. The creation of Israel also created 750,000 Palestinian refugees, driven from their homeland by Jewish terrorism and ethnic cleansing. Although Rustin was keenly sensitive, even self-conscious, about Jewish suffering in World War II he was callous about the suffering of Arabs at the hands of Jews just three years after the end of the WWII.[6] At one point, he even referred to Israel as "the opiate of the Arabs."[7]

In 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war on neighboring countries, killing thousands more, seizing additional Arab land and creating tens of thousands of additional Palestinian refugees. Although Rustin visited refugee camps in Thailand, Somalia, Pakistan and Puerto Rico as a representative of the International Rescue Committee, he pointedly refused to visit Palestinian refugees in the West Bank.[8] Just three years later, in 1970, Bayard Rustin betrayed his pacifist values and history and publicly lobbied for the United States to provide Israel with all the jet fighters and bombers it had requested.[9] Many of Rustin's old friends and colleagues were appalled.

After the United Nations General Assembly declared "zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" in 1975, Rustin started the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee.[10] He recruited an impressive list of national Black leaders but also attracted a number of Black critics, including one who wrote to a Jewish publication to say: "It is an insult to the collective intelligence of thirty-five million blacks that one hundred 'leaders' use their good name to support Zionism."[11] Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark was among those who refused to join BASIC. " 'I felt,' he explained later, 'that the Palestinians were human beings too; and that we could not have peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian problem was solved.' "[12]

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon killing nearly 20,000 Arabs, mostly civilians. Rustin helped whitewash Israel's atrocity as "an act of legitimate self-defense" and "not terribly destructive."[13]

Notes:

1. Daniel Levine. Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Pr, 2000) pp. 134.
2. Levine, pp. 140-1.
3. Jervis Anderson. Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen. (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) p. 248.
4. Anderson, pp. 258-9.
5. Levine, p. 72.
6. Anderson, p. 339.
7. John D'Emilio. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. (New York: Free Pr., 2003) p. 483.
8. Levine, p. 230.
9. Anderson, p. 339; Levine, pp. 224-6.
10. Levine, p. 226.
11. Anderson, pp. 339-40.
12. Anderson, p. 340.
13. Levine, p. 231.

Additional Links on Pauli Murray:

• http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/murray.html
• http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2001/p_murray.html

See also:

• More on Bayard Rustin
• Black American Anti-Zionism: From Boggs to Badu
• Black American Anti-Zionism II

Revised: 10/30/2006, 2/6/2008

Labels: Bayard Rustin, Black America, gender, history, Israel, LGBT, nonviolence, race, resistance, United States, Zionism

Right: Artist Mona Mark created this poster for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women for the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995. Image source: Prostitution Research & Education.

From the old news department comes an article in the June-July 2005 issue of the American Friends Service Committee's Peacework Magazine. Below is an opening excerpt from "Opposing Prostitution As a Form of Male Violence: the Swedish Model" by Marie De Santis, director of the Women's Justice Center/Centro de Justicia Para Mujeres.

In the fog of clichés despairing that "prostitution will always be with us," one country's success stands out as a beacon lighting the way. In just five years Sweden has dramatically reduced the number of women in prostitution. In the capital city of Stockholm, the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of "johns" has been reduced by 80%. There are other major Swedish cities where street prostitution has all but disappeared. Gone too, for the most part, are the infamous Swedish brothels and massage parlors which proliferated during the last three decades of the twentieth century, when prostitution in Sweden was legal.

In addition, the number of foreign women now being trafficked into Sweden for sex work is almost nil. The Swedish government estimates that in the last few years only 200 to 400 women and girls have been annually sex trafficked into Sweden, a figure that's negligible compared to the 15,000 to 17,000 females yearly sex trafficked into neighboring Finland. No other country, nor any other social experiment, has come anywhere near Sweden's promising results.

By what complex formula has Sweden managed this feat? Amazingly, Sweden's strategy isn't complex at all. Its tenets, in fact, seem so simple and so firmly anchored in common sense as to immediately spark the question, "Why hasn't anyone tried this before?"

Sweden's Groundbreaking 1999 Legislation

In 1999, after years of research and study, Sweden passed legislation that a) criminalizes the buying of sex, and b) decriminalizes the selling of sex. The novel rationale behind this legislation is clearly stated in the government's literature on the law:

"In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem ... gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell, and exploit women and children by prostituting them."

In addition to the two-pronged legal strategy, a third and essential element of Sweden's prostitution legislation provides for ample and comprehensive social service funds aimed at helping any prostitute who wants to get out, and additional funds to educate the public. As such, Sweden's unique strategy treats prostitution as a form of violence against women in which the men who exploit by buying sex are criminalized, the mostly female prostitutes are treated as victims who need help, and the public is educated in order to counteract the historical male bias that has long stultified thinking on prostitution. To securely anchor their view in firm legal ground, Sweden's prostitution legislation was passed as part and parcel of the country's 1999 omnibus violence against women legislation.

Read the rest of the article here.

Labels: gender, prostitution, violence