First of all, I’d like to thank Grace for letting me post here. I’m very grateful and aware that this post is a bit far from the usual topics of her blog. Next, a little about me. My name is Liam and I’m a British student living in the UK. I’m white, which doubtless affects my experiences in ways I haven’t learnt to notice yet. I’m in my early twenties, I’m a trans man, I’m bisexual and I have a BA in Philosophy. Maybe all those facts about me will be pertinent to what I write today, maybe they won’t, but each will have affected my experiences relating to the next fact: I am disabled.

I was born into a world that has never quite known what to do with me; from physiotherapists with no idea what was “wrong” with me, to schools that couldn’t deal with a child who was bright and articulate but unable to read, write, or even draw a triangle, to University lecturers who don’t know how to react to a student saying, “I can either sit still or listen so you’re going to let me fidget in class. Oh, and don’t ask me direct questions cos I can’t always speak”. For me, that’s what disability has often boiled down to – a perpetual unexpectedness. For some strange reason people always expect an abled, neurotypical, mentally “healthy” person with no chronic illnesses and a reliably average IQ score, and when they get me instead they flounder and don’t know what to do.

A lot of disablism (the British word for “ableism” or prejudice against disabled people) comes, I think, from the sadness or anger or fear that disabled people cause by being so unexpected. This is not our fault as disabled people – it hardly seems logical to me that people expect others to be completely abled. No one has the “right” not to have an autistic child or depressed brother or blind partner. No one (not even people in Russia where many think they do) has the “right” to look around themself and see only people who can walk unaided, only people with 46 chromosomes in each cell, only people who look “normal.” Yet people act as though they have that right. Once upon a time in the USA (and probably elsewhere) there were even laws preventing people with disabilities from going out in public because we were considered too “ugly” to be seen. From our sheer unexpectedness comes shock and fear and shame; so of course people try to hide us away or to “normalise” us – often harming us in the process. But then fewer people see us around, get to know us, and learn that we are people too, and the cycle of fear and shame just repeats and repeats and repeats.

But for me, I feel the worst, worst, worst thing about disablism is how it creeps into the minds of disabled people ourselves and is often placed there by those who love us.

I was born functionally blind (but later gained sight after an operation), with hypotonic muscles and with an autistic brain that wouldn’t be recognised for what it was for 19 years. I spent most of my childhood in physiotherapy and occupational therapy for “dyspraxia” (a British term that roughly correlates with Nonverbal Learning Disability) that is now suspected to be unrecognised mild cerebral palsy. My childhood was dominated by extra lessons to help me keep up with my peers – my many learning difficulties making writing my thoughts down close to impossible in a school system where only written thoughts counted.

So, I spent my childhood thinking of myself as stupid because I couldn’t write and because I couldn’t always speak clearly. I still find both writing and speaking difficult but I now know that doesn’t make me stupid – even though many people still treat me like I am. You know that child you’ve seen in a playground, wandering alone, walking “funny” and occasionally stopping to tell someone a fact or a joke in a voice that sounds slightly “strange”? That kid who seems “odd” but you can’t quite work out what it is that’s odd about them? That kid is like me and they probably think they’re stupid. Go and tell them how clever they are.

Only God knows how many years I’ve had mental health problems. Depression, anxiety, eating disorder and now Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Do you know what I’d learnt about mental illness from society? That it meant you were selfish, manipulative, and trying to make excuses for how much of a failure you were. I took all of that into myself at a time when I needed self-compassion. I was hurting but all society gave me was more ways to hurt myself. That’s what disablism does.

I read somewhere recently that it takes just four incidences of two things being experienced together to make your brain conclude that they’re linked. How many portrayals of manipulative, selfish depressed people have you seen on TV? How many times have you been told to “Stop being so melodramatic” when you’re crying?

And now, though I’ve learnt to love my autistic brain and found others who love my brain too, I still feel ashamed sometimes because I struggle with things that are supposed to be “easy.” Though I’ve adapted and learnt how to manage a floppy, shaky possibly-CP body (and even learnt to laugh about having learn to walk three times) I still feel ashamed when I ask for help I know I deserve.

And sometime in the last two years, I got chronically ill. I’m suspected to have ME [myalgic encephalomyelitis, also referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - G]. And so much of what I’ve heard about ME is that people with it are just lazy, that we’re selfish, that it’s not real. And yet it is real and I’m not lazy and I’m not selfish, but that internalised disablism that crept into my mind says otherwise and asks me “Are you sure you’re not making this up?” I’m applying for disability benefits and taking some time off studying because I am too ill, too tired, in too much pain, to read and write about a subject I love dearly – and yet in the back of my mind it’s always there: “Scrounger! Fake! Liar! Cheat!” “You just want to get something for nothing!”

I walk with a stick now. I walked around in constant pain for a year before I got it, insisting almost to the last that I didn’t need one. Why? Because I didn’t want to “give in” because all I’ve ever been told about mobility aids by abled people is how much of a “shame” it is that people have “given up”. I may soon need a wheelchair and I’m being stubborn again because I don’t want to admit that I can’t walk very well.

And that’s what disablism does. It gets inside our heads and makes us scared and ashamed, makes us think we’re selfish and lazy and whispers to us all the lies abled people tell each other to chase away their own fear of becoming like us. And then when they join us, when something happens and they find themselves just as “unexpectable” as we are, they are not prepared because in their minds only selfish, bad, manipulative, lazy scroungers ever give in and admit that they are disabled.

Thank you to the organizers for the opportunity to speak today. It’s great to be here in solidarity with so many inspiring women and allies.

I write about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in conservative American Christianity, and today I specifically want to talk about how the language and narrative around womanhood on the religious right is racialized in ways that exclude women of color, especially black and brown women, from “real” or “true” womanhood, and how this language informs anti-woman political agendas. And echoing what others have said, I want to connect that to our work as a movement, or as a coalition of movements, in thinking about the stories we tell about women and about reproductive rights, about who those stories privilege or exclude, and what that means for what our activism looks like. What do we mean when we say “unite against the war on women?” What does it mean to unite? What makes up the war? Who do we welcome and stand in solidarity with as fellow women, or people in need of reproductive justice?

A lot of my writing on gender issues in evangelicalism is drawn from personal experience – I spent most of my childhood and young adult years in communities that are basically ground zero for the war on women. When my family moved to the U.S. and joined predominantly white, conservative, evangelical churches, I moved literally overnight from a context where everyone looked like me, to a context where I was conscious of my blackness in a way I never had been before, and increasingly conscious of the implications of my race and gender together, as a black girl, and then as a black woman, in racist and patriarchal white Christian communities.

I grew up hearing a lot about “God’s plan for women,” about what were framed as “traditional” gender roles, and about how our God-given “natural tendencies” towards “femininity” (as they defined it) were corrupted by sin and the influences of secular society. But the older I got, the more I noticed a pretty big discrepancy between everything I was taught about how a “true woman” behaves, what she’s like, who she is, and the assumptions and expectations of people in my churches about how black women behave, what we’re like, who we are.

True women were naturally chaste and confined their sexuality and reproduction within marriage to one man.
Black women were hypersexual, promiscuous, unmarried, and had too many kids by too many men.

True women invested all of their energies in their children, husbands, and homes.
Black women were lazy welfare queens, habitually neglectful or abusive of their children, who were just pawns conceived to milk more money out of the state.

True women desired and submitted to male authority, and particularly to the authority of one man.
Black women were loud, contentious, took the rightful place of men as leaders of households, and refused to be bound to any one man.

In short, black women were everything the romanticized, infantilized, non-threaning image of the “true woman” was not. Black women were not true women, or women at all.

The idea of womanhood I grew up with was one dictated by patriarchal, white, heteronormative, classist Western values. And it’s precisely this framing that informs the anti-woman and anti-reproductive rights political agenda we’re mobilizing against today. The systematic efforts to dismantle programs and attack organizations that working class women of color particularly depend on for reproductive and sexual health care are directly informed by framings of “true womanhood” that by their nature exclude poor women of color. It’s what informs attacks on black women, other women of color, and trans people of color with uteruses, with campaigns that paint Black and Latin@ wombs as “the most dangerous place to be” for Black and Latin@ children – effectively painting Black and Latina women as unnatural or failed women, i.e., not really women at all.

This rhetorical violence against our womanhood and our humanity fuels legislative attacks on us. This is not a coincidence. This is an attack on the womanhood and the humanity of poor women of color in particular. And as many of us know, this is just modern reworking of a very old narrative in which black women and other women of color have been inherently excluded from the privileges and protections of “femininity” – excluded from true womanhood.

So what does all of this mean for our activism? It means that while all women are oppressed by anti-woman political agendas, we are not all equally oppressed, or oppressed in the same way. Where middle class white women have chafed against the limitations of compulsory motherhood and domesticity, women of color, especially poor women of color – have had to fight to have the legitimacy of our motherhood and the sanctity and value of our bodies, homes, and families recognized.

So as we rally today to unite as women and allies against an anti-woman agenda, I want to urge all of us to think about what this means for us as activists and as a movement. Who counts more or less in our understandings of the “war on women?” Who do we privilege or exclude, deliberately or otherwise, by our framings of womanhood, or of reproductive justice? What does it mean for us to unite against a war on women? How we frame our agenda as feminists or women’s rights advocates, what we prioritize or center in our activism, makes a powerful statement about who we recognize as fully women, or fully deserving of reproductive rights and freedom.

“Unite women” has to mean that we are united in solidarity against all of the various attacks on women – not subsuming the entire struggle under the banner of a single cause, privileging certain women over others. “Reproductive justice” has to mean respect for the bodily autonomy, reproductive choice, and right to comprehensive care for all people who need it.

We must fight not only for affordable access to birth control and abortion services, but also against medical misogyny and racism that push more long term and dangerous forms of contraception and even involuntary sterilization on women of color.

We must fight not only for the right to not be pregnant, but also for the right to not be criminalized or suffer domestic or state violence because of pregnancy.

We must fight for birth justice and the right of all pregnant people to prenatal care.

We must fight against anti-worker, anti-family policies that force people to choose between having a wanted child and feeding themselves and the children they may already have.

We must recognize that the war on reproductive health services also harms not only non-trans women, but also transgender men and genderqueer people with uteruses.

We must fight against policies that force transgender people to choose between living and being recognized as the gender they are, and being able to have biological children.

We must fight alongside brown and black mothers and parents for the safety of our children in a violently racist society.

Our activism against the war on women must be intersectional. Our mobilization in defense of reproductive justice must be intersectional. They cannot be just otherwise.

There are many who think this kind of intersectional approach dilutes or confuses the message and makes the movement weaker. I say it makes us stronger when we are all truly in solidarity in face of the various struggles we face. When I know you have my back and you know I have yours, we are stronger.

Yes, there is a war on women. But it’s made of up lots of different and intersecting battles. And we need to take care that the rhetoric we use doesn’t inadvertently subsume all women’s struggle under the banner of one battle, rather than being a rallying cry against misogyny and gender injustice in their myriad forms.

As we rally today, CeCe McDonald, a young, black transgender woman in Minneapolis, is in jail awaiting trial for second degree murder charges. On June 5th of last year, CeCe and a group of her friends – all young black people, many of them queer – were attacked by a group of older white people, with racist, transphobic, and homophobic slurs. After confronting the group over their hate speech, CeCe was physically attacked with a glass, puncturing her cheek and her salivary gland. During the ensuing fight, one of her attackers was fatally stabbed. Despite the fact that she was defending herself and had serious injuries, she was charged with second degree murder, placed in solitary confinement, and denied adequate medical treatment for her injuries.

CeCe is a victim of the war on women, which is particularly brutal to trans women of color. For our activism to be truly just, it must not merely include but center and stand in concrete solidarity with the most vulnerable women, with women like CeCe.

In conclusion I want to leave you with a quote from Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in which she writes that we must embrace, not ignore, our differences in order for our activism to be effective and just:

As women we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each other’s difference to enrich our visions and joint struggles.

I encourage all of us to embrace both the equality and the difference in the various struggles we face, and to be united in concrete solidarity against misogyny and reproductive injustice in whatever form they take.

[Ed note:] I’ve been really appalled (not to say surprised) by the silence from most prominent white evangelicals – liberal, moderate, and conservative – on the Trayvon Martin case. There are a few popular white Christian bloggers and publications that have addressed the case – Fred Clark/Slacktivist and Sojourners, among others. Even uber-conservatives Franklin Graham and John Piper have weighed in. But for the most part, most white Christians – like most white Americans – have said little or nothing about this.

I have a lot more to say about this, but it’s too long for one post. For now I’ll just include a comment I left on Slacktivist’s first post about this case:

Fred, thank you so much for writing about this. I was just talking to a white Christian blogger last night about how disheartening it is to witness the silence of white Christians with a significant social media audience on this case. The same people who were investing so much time in writing about and looking into Invisible Children two weeks ago are absolutely mum on this, even though it’s an issue where awareness and spreading the word can actually make a huge difference to a grieving family. If white American Christians want to understand better why white churches have so much trouble attracting and retaining members of color, well, here’s an example. We see how little white Christians care about the issues that affect us – and in this case an issue that *everyone* should care about, because an innocent child is dead and his murderer is being protected by people who are supposed to work to see justice served.

So thank you again for posting about this. I hope others follow your example.

So I really appreciated seeing Natalie Burris’ post calling out her fellow social justice minded white “beyond evangelicals” for their silence on this case, and I appreciate her letting me cross-post it here.

Natalie Burris: Privilege and silence of white “beyond evangelicals”
(originally posted at Natalie’s Narrative)

Encouraging things are happening within U.S. evangelicalism. No longer solely aligned with Religious Right politicians, six-day creationists, anti-gay movements, and other conservative-leaning groups, many evangelicals are questioning the status quo. We’re concerned about the environment and poverty, and have moved away from a premilennial dispensationalism that disregards the now. Rather than dish out condemnation, we’ve learned to be more willing to extend grace.

Various labels describe these movements: emergent, missional, progressive. Frank Viola chose the name “beyond evangelical.” I’m conflating several different strains here, but the general direction has been away from the evangelicalism that emerged in opposition to modernism.

While these developments are encouraging, I’ve noticed most progressive evangelicals are no different from their predecessors when it comes to race. The heavy-hitters in these movements are white, and the privilege that comes with being white remains even in the new evangelical streams.

Efrem Smith often points this out, and I’ve shared how evangelicalism’s growth was spurred by corresponding growth of white suburbia and its racist underpinnings. If you follow Anthony Bradley on Twitter, he also provides great critiques of evangelicalism’s whiteness, and Lisa Sharon Harper discusses the black-white divide here.

What most determines what progressive evangelicals believe or what they feel worth promoting is not their faith. The dividing line is actually race.

A great illustration of this color line is the death penalty. Attorneys have meticulously researched the psychology behind jury selection. Researchers have found that “similar religious beliefs can lead to completely opposite policy preferences among respondents of different racial backgrounds.” Black evangelicals are more inclined to oppose the death penalty than white evangelicals, who are more likely to support it.¹

Although it’s fair to say that most of these new kinds of white evangelicals have reconsidered their stance on the death penalty, to have a more consistent pro-life ethic, another illustration of the color line between white evangelicals, including the more progessive ones, and Christians of color is happening right now.

Such a color line in my timeline re: Trayvon Martin. Who do you think is tweeting about his murder, who do you think has made barely a peep?

— Natalie Burris (@natalieburris) March 20, 2012

Yes, Twitter is anecdotal and unscientific. But the radio silence from white evangelicals – even the more progressive ones – is disappointing. White evangelicals yield a lot of influence, politically, economically, and in the media, enjoying massive amounts of privilege. Invisible Children’s recent “Kony 2012″ campaign demonstrated that earnest, well-meaning, young evangelicals are capable of spurring world leaders to action and causing 100 million hits on a YouTube video.

Trayvon Martin

But when the uproar over the murder of a black child, Trayvon Martin, goes viral, most white evangelicals are silent. Despite adhering to a religion that came from the margins, many white evangelicals’ privilege keeps them silent. White evangelicals are oblivious to the invisible knapsack (PDF) of privilege they carry around. Most don’t have to worry if their children will be shot when returning from the corner store. Most don’t even have to think about race itself. Whiteness is neutral, the air they breathe. White evangelicals can remain oblivious to the injustices that people of color face in the U.S.

Sadly, their whiteness, rather than their faith, is what informs their thinking. Here’s another take on the color line:

Blacks [...] support the death penalty less than any other major social group (about fifty-eight percent in the 1998 election survey), largely because they are keenly aware of the way in which capital sentencing values the lives of black victims and offenders less than those of their white counterparts. More white conservative Christians would be likely to appreciate this flaw at the heart of the system if they interacted more with their black brothers and sisters.
[...]
[M]any black leaders are skeptical of [white evangelicals' efforts to add black members to their churches]. In their view, such contacts have gone on for years, are largely symbolic, and have not increased white suburban evangelicals’ concern about the situation of racial minorities or the needs of the inner cities. Black leaders remark that whites want to form individual friendships with blacks, but that they balk at confronting social and political issues such as inequality in the economy and racism in the criminal justice system.²

Trayvon Martin’s murder is a major issue in the African-American community. It must hurt deeply to see a group as influential as white evangelicals not take initiative to spread the word, despite taking very energetic initiative recently to “make Kony famous.”

White “beyond evangelicals:” if you haven’t tweeted, blogged, signed a petition, or otherwise promoted the unjust circumstances surrounding Trayvon Martin’s murder, I’m interested to know why. As you can tell from the absence here on my blog, I’ve been busy, so I understand many simply don’t have time to react to every current event. But many are online all day, and many have smartphones.

I also have a broader question: do you know any people of color? If not, why not? Do you actively make efforts to read or listen to perspectives from Christians of color? If not, why not?

I’m curious about the general silence from my fellow white Christians with regard to Trayvon Martin. This silence should give us pause. Let’s examine whether our whiteness is the most important factor in our lives, rather than our faith in a subversive Christ. And to white evangelicals who push against the status quo: let’s keep pushing.

¹ Melynda J. Price, Performing Discretion or Performing Discrimination: Race, Ritual, and Peremptory Challenges in Capital Jury Selection. 15 Mich. J. Race & L. 57, 87-8 (Fall 2009).
² Thomas C. Berg, Religious Conservative and the Death Penalty. 9 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 31, 58 (2000)

Eta: you can contribute towards the legal fees for Trayvon’s family and a foundation in his memory here.

I recently shared the following excerpt from Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” on the AWH tumblr:

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

I’ve been thinking about this quote as I’ve been following the coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old boy who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a man on neighborhood watch who thought Trayvon was “suspicious” and “on drugs” because he was a black teenage boy walking slowly in the rain.

Trayvon had left the house he and his father were visiting to walk to the local 7-Eleven. On his way back, he caught the attention of George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain, who was in a sport-utility vehicle. Zimmerman called 911 because the boy looked “suspicious,” according to news reports. The operator told Zimmerman that officers were being dispatched and not to pursue the boy.

Zimmerman apparently pursued him anyway, at some point getting out of his car and confronting the boy. Trayvon had a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman had a 9 millimeter handgun.

The two allegedly engaged in a physical altercation. There was yelling, and then a gunshot.

When police arrived, Trayvon was face down in the grass with a fatal bullet wound to the chest. Zimmerman was standing with blood on his face and the back of his head and grass stains on his back, according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Trayvon’s lifeless body was taken away, tagged and held. Zimmerman was taken into custody, questioned and released. Zimmerman said he was the one yelling for help. He said that he acted in self-defense. The police say that they have found no evidence to dispute Zimmerman’s claim.

One other point: Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not.

Trayvon was buried on March 3. Zimmerman is still free and has not been arrested or charged with a crime. (Charles M. Blow, The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin)

There’s a Change.org petition to urge the prosecution of George Zimmerman – please sign and share it.

There are more details about the case with each day, each detail worse than the last. Witnesses have called Zimmerman’s claims of self-defense into serious question. The police have blown off or tried to lead witnesses who contradicted his account. They’ve stated that they have no evidence to counter Zimmerman’s statement and have passed the buck on to the state attorney’s office as the attention and pressure on them has mounted.

Tonight the Sanford police released 911 tapes of Zimmerman’s initial call reporting Trayvon as “suspicious” and subsequent calls from neighbors who heard or witnessed the altercation and shooting. They’re horrifying. On one of the calls, you can hear someone screaming for help. The screams stop abruptly after a shot is fired.

It stretches the limits of credulity to think that Zimmerman, who was basically twice Trayvon’s size and 10 years older, was the one screaming for help against 17 year old boy on the small side, and suddenly stopped after firing off a shot. But the Sanford police want us to believe that there’s no reason to doubt his story, and that these tapes will, if anything, calm the growing furor over Trayvon’s murder. They will not.

I struggle to put into words the fear, the heartbreak, the rage I feel. For Trayvon Martin and his family. For all the black boys growing up in a country that persistently and perniciously labels them as ‘criminals’ and ‘thugs’ and ‘trouble’ – and is so ready to take these labels as actionable fact. So ready to see them as less than human and deserving of any violence that befalls them. For the parents and guardians raising these boys, who live with the daily fear that their child might walk out the door one day and never come back, because of racism.

This was a kid. A child. With a family who loved and cared about him and still does. We talk endlessly about protecting children and family values when the truth is we don’t think many children are worthy of protection. Quite the opposite. We don’t value many families.

Look at this case and see how the basic decency that Trayvon and his family are owed as human beings has been trampled and spit on at so many points.

Despite the fact that the police KNEW George Zimmerman went after a smaller, younger kid, who wasn’t doing anything wrong, despite the fact that they KNEW Zimmerman was armed and Trayvon was not…

They ran a background check on Trayvon Martin, who was dead, but not on George Zimmerman, the man who killed him. They believed Zimmerman had a clean record – on his own assertion, apparently. Turns out he doesn’t. They ran alcohol/drug tests on Trayvon Martin (likely as a routine part of an autopsy), but not on Zimmerman, his murderer.

The police didn’t have the basic decency to do their job and investigate whether Trayvon Martin had a reason for being in the neighborhood, whether he had any friends or family in the neighborhood. Instead, they tagged him as a “John Doe.” His family thought he was missing. They had to call around and essentially do the work for the police of identifying their dead son.

Zimmerman’s father has defended his son in part by saying he’s Hispanic and has black relatives and isn’t a racist. The Sanford police chief has deployed a similar ‘I don’t have a problem with black people’ defense of himself.

Look, I don’t give a shit how George Zimmerman or Bill Lee personally feel about black people or what their personal relationships with black people are like. I am not in the least interested in whether they’re “really racist” or not. I care what they did. I care about the cultural and institutional realities that made what they did (and are still doing, on the part of the Sanford PD) possible, and made them think – with very good precedent for thinking so – they could get away with it. And those – the actions and structural realities – have everything to do with racism, no matter what Zimmerman or the Sanford PD feel about black people.

That Zimmerman had apparently called the Sanford PD 46 times in the past 15 months, that he intimated some of his neighbors in his role as a neighborhood watch captain, that he felt free to walk around on neighborhood watch with a loaded gun – in violation of basically any neighborhood watch guide ever – is a function of racism and white privilege. A black man who behaved as aggressively as Zimmerman apparently did, in a ‘safe,’ gated community, would never have gotten away with it for so long.

Also a product of racism: the assumption on the part of both Zimmerman and the Sanford PD that Trayvon Martin was ‘suspicious’ and couldn’t possibly belong in that neighborhood. Meanwhile, the Sanford police gave Zimmerman, a man who had disregarded the advice of a 911 dispatcher to act as a gun-toting vigilante, the benefit of the doubt as a ‘safe,’ law-abiding person and took his assertion of a “squeaky-clean” record at face value.

They can love all the black people they want – nothing changes the fact that this was, no question, racism at work. Racism isn’t just hate. It’s inequity. Privilege for some and contempt for others.

The challenge now is to bring Trayvon Martin’s case to broader national attention and help his family get the justice they deserve. It’s disheartening to see so little coverage of this case, despite how outrageous the facts of it are, and especially in light of the recent media blitz over Kony 2012 – a whole campaign ostensibly aimed at helping black children in Africa while a black child shot down in the streets here in the U.S. is roundly ignored by most outside black media and black communities. It’s disheartening when the mainstream media has made a whole genre out of breathless exposés of the latest scary trends among white suburban teens, no matter how slight the evidence for such trends, designed to send white parents into vapors, all while black children are actually being assaulted, abducted, and murdered every bloody day and no one says boo.

This case needs much more attention. This family needs our help. Signing this petition and sharing it with people you know and your social networks is a step towards that. [updated] Donating what you can, if you can, to the family’s legal expenses (and sharing the link for donation!) is a step towards that. This is a situation where raising awareness can actually help quite a bit, so please do what you can to do so.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Global Comment on the ongoing discussion in parts of the feminist blogosphere about Hugo Schwyzer, and more broadly on the place of people with a history of abuse in feminism and other activist movements. The short version of the controversy (from my article):

Schwyzer, a professor of gender studies and male feminist personality….has written prolifically, and controversially, about recovering from sex and drug addictions, his now 13-year sobriety, and his ”pre-sobriety” predatory behavior towards younger female students – including, at one point, sleeping with four students on a class trip he was chaperoning. The current backlash against him, set in motion by yet another article recounting this troubling history, took on unprecedented intensity after the resurfacing of a post, originally written a year ago [which Schwyzer has now redacted to protect himself from legal consequences], in which Schwyzer admitted to nearly killing a former girlfriend in a drug-fueled* murder-suicide attempt.

The subsequent outcry and campaign against Schwyzer has, for the first time, resulted in concrete consequences for him: the pulling of his writing from Scarleteen, a well-respected resource on teen sexual health, and his departure from Healthy is the New Skinny, an organization co-founded and directed by Schwyzer, dedicated to addressing body image issues in teen women and the beauty and fashion industries. Schwyzer did not fully inform either organization of his history.

*I included this in the article in the interests of stating all the facts, but unlike Schwyzer and many who have defended him, I don’t think the fact that he was high when he tried to kill his partner and himself is all that relevant. Many, many people manage to go on drug binges without attempting to murder anyone.

The debate about Schwyzer has touched on a number of important questions, including the role of men/male allies in feminism, about whether there’s space in feminism for people with checkered pasts, about what constitutes sufficient rehabilitation, restitution, and amends-making for people with a history of violence or abusive behavior. These are all important questions, and they’re certainly relevant to the debate around Schwyzer…but the more responses I read about this situation specifically, the more convinced and concerned I am that they are obscuring an equally important discussion of Schwyzer’s ongoing behavior - including, as Campus Progress aptly summarizes (under “Atonement”), disturbing aspects of how he writes about his past.

I was particularly struck by two responses defending Schwyzer’s place in feminism (and linked by Schwyzer as responses to the controversy for which he’s “personally grateful,” which…well, I won’t say anything about that) – one from Feminism and Religion, a space and project that I respect, and another from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. These responses describe the backlash against Schwyzer, as “cruel and vulgar,” “cutting and obscene,” “cynicism and ridged hostility,” an inability or refusal to live with the dualistic reality of the “darkness and light” that lives in all of us (Feminism and Religion), and “ridiculous,” “sadly typical of the feminist blogosphere,” an attempt to “cluster and ostracize [dissent],” and a rejection of “paradoxes and contradictions in the ideals versus lived experiences of its proponents.”

I have to say that reading comments like this in spaces I respect and that are sincerely working for justice for women is alarming and terrifying.

There are a few things we need to be absolutely clear on.

Hugo Schwyzer lied for several years about his attempt to kill a woman - on one occasion, falsely describing his attempt to kill his girlfriend and himself as a only a suicide attempt that “accidentally” endangered her. On the record, preserved in on Internet Archive here, “suicide attempt,” and here, “I came close to accidentally taking the life of my girlfriend.” This was long after he was self-identifying as a “male feminist” who was “recovering” and being “redeemed” from his past behavior.

And just in the past two months, since the backlash against him, Schwyzer has edited his past posts to conceal the fact that he repeatedly lied about his history . There are no disclaimers or notes on these posts to indicate that they’ve been edited in any way. For example, the post that once claimed that he accidentally endangered his girlfriend now reads:

As I’ve written before, my last episode of drinking and drug use ended on June 27, 1998; my body filled with massive amounts of alcohol and prescription pills, I blew out the pilot lights on the stove in my old apartment and turned on the gas, trying to kill myself and my girlfriend. Miraculously, we both survived.

This post is rather perversely titled “A very long post on how to rebuild trust.” Well, here’s a hint: it doesn’t involve lying about what you’ve done and then trying to cover up that lie.

There’s also the fact that Schywzer compared the guilt and remorse he says he feels over deliberately trying to kill a woman to the guilt and remorse someone else felt over having accidentally endangered a dog.

There’s the fact that until this backlash, Schwyzer appears to have never once called what he did “violence,” and had never once acknowledged that he was the perpetrator of an act of domestic, intimate partner violence, or gendered violence in a number of ways - despite the facts that:

• Over 90% of perpetrators of murder-suicides are male
• Over 70% of murder-suicides are committed against an intimate partner, and in 94% of these cases the intimate partner is a woman
• Over 75% of murder-suicides are committed in domestic settings. [Source: Violence Policy Center, PDF. ht Campus Progress]

We can have a conversation about what it looks like for someone with a history of abusive or otherwise harmful behavior to take full responsibility for their actions, but I hope we can all agree that “taking full responsibility” doesn’t ever involve lying about what one has done. It doesn’t involve concealing one’s history from people who invest trust in you and could be harmed by your withholding of relevant information.

We can have a conversation about what it means to be truly remorseful for abusive behavior, or to make amends for it. But there shouldn’t be any debate about whether or not sincere remorse over attempting to murder a woman should ever, ever be compared to accidentally endangering a dog.

We can have a conversation about whether and how men should be allies or leaders in feminist and woman-oriented spaces, but it shouldn’t be seen as cynical or hostile to insist that at the very least, men with a history of gendered, misogynist abuse and violence who want to claim a space as *leaders* or *role models* in feminist spaces should be able to own up to their history and clearly name it for what it is.

There’s a lot more going on in Schwyzer’s case and the responses to it than this – glossing over a history of abuse in a way that is enabling to perpetrators and silencing and harmful to victims, white privilege and tolerance of racism and racial double standards, different perspectives on what role male allies can have in women’s movements, and different perspectives on whether and how we should limit access to feminist/women’s spaces. And these issues need to be discussed as well, but not without addressing the the very clear cut dishonesty and lack of remorse in how Schwyzer has written about his past behavior, and why this is extremely dangerous.

This is what I can’t get out of my mind when people, especially other feminists, caricature statements that Hugo has no place in feminism as mean-spirited, perfectionist, even hateful exclusivism. I have to wonder if people – again, especially feminists – who feel this reaction is no more than pettiness are aware of the above information, or simply believe it’s irrelevant.

Yes, we’re all imperfect. Yes, there are always contradictions and shades of gray in the space between our stated ideals as advocates for women’s rights and our lived realities. In general, I’m sympathetic to the idea that we need to keep in mind that activists and leaders are real people too, with real flaws and needs and low moments and things we’re ashamed of – just like everyone else. In general, I’m sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn’t hold leaders to unrealistic expectations or put them on lofty pedestals. Part of respecting the humanity of others is not holding them to an unfair standard. I agree with all that.

But I think these objections are dangerously misplaced in this case. This is not about expecting perfection. It’s not about stifling dissent. It’s not about feminists and other activist women who object to Hugo being incapable of forgiveness, or refusing to come to grips with the paradoxes between feminist ideals and reality.

Because really, if we’re going to paint cynicism as a bad thing (and frankly, I don’t see why that’s automatically a given) which is the cynical position here? That we should be able to expect leaders and role models to not actively and consciously tell lies about past violent behavior? Or that it’s unrealistic and excessive to expect such a thing?

This past week The Atlantic ran an article on Schwyzer’s “exile” from feminism (a deeply irritating and problematic framing, but that’s a topic for another post) in which I was briefly quoted. I said a lot more about the situation to the author and wish more of those points (though not necessarily from me) had ended up in the final piece – particularly this: “I think we shouldn’t hesitate as a community to eject someone who has lied about and minimized his history of abuse, and I think feminists in Schwyzer’s circle really failed in this regard.”

Sadly, that failure is ongoing. The discussion about which men belong in feminism is allowing people to abstract the conversation from what Schwyzer actually did, not just before his “transformation,” but in recent years – in recent months! – and why it’s dangerous. It’s turning it into this theoretical discussion about parameters for letting people into feminism – which is a related but separate discussion from how feminists should deal with a case where there is a demonstrated pattern of abusive behavior from someone in the community. It distracts from discussions of concrete actions and their implications.

Talking about the presence of “darkness and light” in “all of us” obscures the fact that this one specific person has engaged in abusive and predatory behavior and lied about it. Not “all of us,” Hugo Schwyzer. And a community dedicated to social justice needs to address questions of accountability for perpetrators and justice for their victims – not implicitly paint the abuse as something anyone could do.

Accountability doesn’t look like lying about trying to kill someone. Remorse and amends doesn’t look like making money off of a history of abuse and predation – without the consent of the people whom you have harmed – or soft-pedaling this behavior as “what many addicts do” (no, actually, many addicts manage to not try to kill people while high), as “age-appropriate” and “less overtly predatory” than it could have been, etc. Remorse doesn’t look like comparing the near killing of a human being to the unwitting neglect of an animal.

Where is his “confession” on this point? How does someone work towards “redemption” for not just withholding information about, but actively lying about a history of violence?

Where is his recognition that his framing his past behavior in this way, all while claiming to be a women’s advocate and claiming to have been “redeemed,” inherently disqualifies him from being able to see what he’s done clearly? Where is his recognition that it’s a profound and dangerous failing on his part to not see how lying about past violence makes him an unsafe person to be around, how equating much lesser offenses to attempted murder makes him unsafe to be around? Where is his recognition that at this point accountability means that he has a lot more work to do before he fully grasps the harm he’s done to others and the danger he poses as long as he continues to minimize his past behavior?

That’s what accountability looks like. That’s what remorse looks like. That’s what responsibility looks like. If Schwyzer truly grasped how serious his behavior was, he wouldn’t hesitate to withdraw from women’s spaces to make them safer – or at the very least to make women feel safer in those spaces. That’s what really being willing to accept the consequences of one’s behavior looks like – being ready to accept that you may lose certain things because your behavior was just that egregious.

But to be honest, I don’t expect Schwyzer to take on that measure of responsibility for himself – few people with a history of repeated abuse ever do. It’s a sad truth that most habitual abusers opt for changing their external behavior just enough to get by over accepting hard consequences for their actions. And we can see it in this case, where at every point Schwyzer has had to be forced out of spaces where he probably shouldn’t have been in or tried to gain access to in the first place, if he had really understood the ramifications of his past behavior.

He has responsibility for his behavior, but those around him also have a responsibility for the spaces to which he’s given access. And the question we need to be asking is not – who’s allowed in these spaces – but rather, at what point is behavior so harmful, so dangerous, so beyond the pale that it makes a person unsafe to be around? At what point does allowing that person continued access to certain spaces become tolerance of and even complicity with their behavior? Is there such a point?

I think there is. I think when we defend the right of someone who has lied – is still lying – about his past abuses to be a feminist leader, we become complicit in fostering an abuse culture where abusers are tolerated and coddled and their victims are silenced and marginalized. This is alarmingly evident in defenses of Schwyzer that are focused entirely on him and his redemption and rehabilitation and recovery, and barely mention the victims, the still-living, quite possibly still hurting and recovering themselves real people that he exploited and harmed.

We’ll be discussing chapters 6 and 7 of Whipping Girl tomorrow at 2 pm EST; anyone who doesn’t have the IRC chat info can email me at arewomenhuman2 at gmail. Feel free to get a discussion going in the comments, too!

Details about how to get the info on the chat site are below, but first, a quick word on some guidelines for the discussion.

This is a discussion of oppression and privilege, specifically anti-trans oppression and non-trans (cis or cisgender) privilege. We don’t want reproduce those lines of oppression and privilege in our discussion, so for cis participants, that means deferring to the voices and lived experiences of trans participants. A good rule of thumb for cis participants (and anyone with any kind of privilege dialoguing with someone who doesn’t have that privilege) is to listen more than we speak. There are also some good guidelines on checking privilege in this post, particularly the section on “How to approach minority spaces.” Please try to check the post out (or at least that one section) before the discussion.

Folks who are on Twitter should be getting direct messages from me with the URL/server/channel info for the IRC chat. Everyone else should email me at [arewomenhuman2 at gmail dot com] for that info.

The chatroom is open now for anyone who wants to hang out there and get some small conversations going beforehand. Feel free to comment there and/or here!

Anyway, I’m back! And I’ve got a group reading project for anyone who’s interested in joining me :p I’ve wanted to have a book discussion on the blog for a while now. When I got Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on the Scapegoating of Femininity as a Christmas gift, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to start up a reading group.

The first discussion will be this Saturday, Jan, 28, in the early afternoon. I’ll post more details about the exact time and venues in coming days, but there’ll be a live-chat and also an opportunity for people who can’t make it for the live-chat to discuss on an open-thread here on the blog. We’ll aim to have about 1/4 of the book read for the first discussion.

Folks on twitter can follow the discussion and planning on the hashtag #wgirl.

Who’s in? Leave a comment letting me know, and feel free to make suggestions about what questions we can discuss and how we should approach the discussion.

This morning my daughter asked me if her dad pees out of his butt.

Back up for a moment. Mr. G and I are both feminists (shocker, I know), and committed to applying what we believe about gender equality and female empowerment to how we parent. Part of what that means for us is providing our toddler with accurate, age-appropriate information and terminology about her body and human anatomy in general.

So when she started saying a few months ago that her pee comes out of her butt, I explained to her that it actually comes from her vulva. (“Urethra” seemed like more detail than a 2 year old really needed.) Of course she wanted to know if her dad and I have vulvas, too. I explained that I have a vulva too, but her dad doesn’t. I may have explained that her dad has a penis. If I did, she didn’t remember.

Back to this morning’s conversation, then, which went something like this:

Kiddo: Does papa pee from his butt?
Me: Uh, no…*pause* Papa pees out of his penis.
Kiddo: He pees out of his penis?
Me: Yes.
Kiddo: Pe-nis?
Me: Yes.
[This may have gone on for a couple more rounds. Nightmares of my daughter randomly going up to strangers and blurting out "penis" - or worse, asking them if they have one - may have flashed through my head.]
Kiddo: Do you have a penis?
Me: No, I have a vulva.
Kiddo: Do I have a penis?
Me: No, you have a vulva too.

And so on. It became clear that she had more questions about this, so I explained further that her dad’s penis is in the same place as her and my vulva is.

And then I felt a moment of panic, because I could see she was heading towards asking more general questions, not just about her body or her dad’s or mine, and I didn’t know quite what to tell her. Translating what I’m so accustomed to writing here on the blog – gender isn’t determined by genitals, that sex and gender both come in a diverse array, not in rigid, mutually exclusive binaries – for a toddler? I didn’t quite know where to start.

Telling her boys have penises and girls have vulvas was out, of course, as it’s not true. Most boys have penises and most girls have vulvas, but some girls have penises and some boys have vulvas? Closer, but potentially more complicated than she can understand right now, and leaves out intersex and/or nonbinary people, whom we haven’t really talked to her about yet.

I finally settled on “Most people either have a vulva or a penis.” This seemed to satisfy her. And it seemed to me like an answer that gave her the information she was curious about without imposing universal claims on other people’s bodies or genders, and also leaving space for future conversations about sex and gender.

This brief conversation set of a frequent line of thought for me. Namely, about how the uncertainties and unexpected challenges of parenting are compounded by our choice to parent our child according to principles we weren’t raised by, and to which we’re quite new ourselves. And this applies to much of my life outside parenting. It can be scary territory.

Coming to believe something different that what you were raised to believe doesn’t erase all your prior socialization. I have a lot of lingering discomfort around talking openly and honestly about anything I was taught to consider “sexual.” This morning, some part of me was deeply uncomfortable with discussing not just penises in the abstract with our daughter, but my husband’s body specifically. Despite the fact there was nothing remotely sexual about our conversation, that it was simple, age-appropriate curiosity, that my daughter had a right to an honest answer and I had no reason to withhold one.

And at the same time I was conscious that shutting down, redirecting the conversation, or otherwise denying her an honest answer would send the message that these things were secrets, not to be discussed, not to be asked about. In fact reacting that way would have had, in the long run, the exact effect I was socialized to perceive in the conversation: it would have taught her to sexualize bodies, by seeing knowledge about them as taboo.

It may not be so long before my daughter can sense my hesitation, my searching for words, my awkwardness and desire to bolt in these conversations. I know these kinds of conversations between parents and children are often (always?) awkward for at least one party. But I don’t want her to think these things are secrets or wrong to ask about. For her sake as well as my own, I want to to work to make minimize my discomfort with talking about sex, to have a healthier attitude about it.

And this is the other scary part: I’m figuring out how to do this on the fly. Which is also part of the nature of parenting. Still, as a parent who has consciously rejected much of parenting “wisdom” from the communities Mr. G and I grew up in, I feel a heightened sense of being in uncharted territory. We have so few models for how we want to relate to to the kiddo. The conservative evangelical blueprint for “doing things right” as a parent is now mostly a set of guidelines to what we don’t want to do as parents.

Figuring out what we should do instead? That’s a lot harder. That requires actually seeking out people and communities who’re forging new models for parenting. Models that are often not as socially supported as “traditional” conservative models. Models that can seem less time-and-trial tested, less proven – even as I realize that the supposedly “time-tested” models haven’t worked out so great so far, certainly not for me or many people I know.

This is one of the things I think people who haven’t spent much time in or around conservative evangelical communities (or similar high-demand groups) really don’t understand. About why people stay, what people get out of it. One of the big attractions is the psychological assurance that having someone tell you what the “right way” to do things can bring. More than that, it’s having a whole community of people who are ready to affirm the exclusive awesomeness of this “right way,” who you can look to as “right way” examples and success stories. It’s the power of a common vocabulary, shared commitments and frustrations, living out the same blueprint together with so many other people.

This might sound contradictory, given what I’ve written about the ongoing negative impact this cultural emphasis on always “doing things right” has had on me personally, and how the seemingly endless litany of things you have to make certain you’re doing the right way is an extremely powerful means of controlling people. And it is absolutely that.

But part of what makes it so powerful is precisely the sense of security and community it offers, feelings that can coexist right alongside intense negative feelings about striving for the unattainable standard of “God’s way,” or not being able to choose how to live, or not being able to escape an oppressive family or church community. In fact it can be precisely this deliberately cultivated and ingrained confidence that one is doing things “God’s way” that gives people the ability to so thoroughly repress or deny negative feelings about being part of a high control religious group. That’s part of what makes it such a powerful tool for manipulating and controlling people.

And this is why I’m so grateful for feminist parenting blogs like bluemilk and Raising My Boychick. They make me feel not quite so alone in trying to cobble together an approach to parenting that doesn’t always come organically or easily. Because that kind of community support is important. Not a community that dictates a blueprint for “doing things right,” not a self-congratulatory, exclusionary community, but a community struggling together to turn ideals and principles into action, providing support and shelter through all the complications and unforeseen challenges and unsolicited lectures about how we’re doing it all wrong. Ideally, anyway.

All of that from a question about whether my husband pees out of his butt. Make of that what you will!