US Government rules on Gender Identity

[Heaven Swan]

Interesting that Sheila Jeffreys mentions a US goverment paper that came out in the '70's which projected a large increase in transexuality (terminology used prior to the coining of "transgender") in coming decades and how Australian feminists were concerned about this projection and responded to it in their writing and analysis.

Could this foreknowledge by the US gov support a 'deep state think tank' social engineering hypothesis?

[American Dream]

An unfounded suggestion, framed as a question, in support of a highly biased agenda, is not good for much more than fostering bias and/or hatred...

[Heaven Swan]

An unfounded suggestion, framed as a question, in support of a highly biased agenda, is not good for much more than fostering hate...

Or perhaps fostering genuine care for the victims of an (at least partially) engineered movement that has decimated the lesbian community and is the darling of leftist misogynists and big pharma alike.

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: http://katipunan09.wordpress.com/analys ... evolution/

Love and Revolution

By Nick Southall

[The following speech was presented to the socialist youth group Resistance national conference dinner, held in Thirroul, Australia, on April 24, 2010.]




Tonight I will be looking at love as a form of power, a form of work and a form of wealth, as a need, desire, intention and action, and I will be locating our ability to transform social relations in political acts of love.

Capitalism poisons our lives with a concentration on consumption, materialism and competition, undermining loving relationships. Yet, alongside the system’s violence, exploitation and oppression, there are continuing struggles about who has control over social relations, social cooperation and labour, over whether love is destroyed, suppressed, harnessed to strengthen capital or used to build and extend loving alternatives.

The development of non-capitalist projects requires more discussion about, and a renewed awareness of, love. While love is often absent from political discussions and analyses, it has long been an important component of revolutionary praxis. In 1911 Emma Goldman (1911) pointed out that love was “the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; … the defier of all laws, of all conventions; … the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny”. Still love is too rarely discussed as a political concept and many people feel unable to love because they do not know what love is.

Our use of the word “love” is often so generalised and unspecific as to severely interfere with an understanding of love (Peck: 1978, p. 107). Capitalist culture has purged political conceptions of love from language. Love has been corrupted by religious and romantic fantasies, it has been enclosed within the couple or the family, within narrow notions, as love of the same, love of those closest to you, love of a god, the race or the nation (Hardt and Negri: 2009).

The idea of making love is often restricted to our sexual encounters. Yet conceiving of love politically means that making love is about much more than sex. My current writing is concerned with a reinvention of the concept of love, not limited to the couple, the family or identities. Instead I consider love as an expansive social concept involving struggles for community, cooperation and mutual support. Rather than there being a clear definition of love, love struggles toward definition and the struggle over love as a political concept can make good on the heritage the concept has. Today there is a renewed interest in love amongst anti-capitalists and an upsurge of experiments to unleash our positive desires for connection, for more constructive and profound relationships. Anti-capitalist love does not unify as suggested in romanticism, marriage, or the love of a god. Love is not a fusion, the destruction of difference, or a striving for sameness. Rather love is a desire for collective development and fulfilment, a social process that satisfies the need for love at the same time as satisfying the desire to love.

We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Feminism offers understandings of how patriarchal power relations permeate our lives and that patriarchy needs to be confronted; if we want to know love. Without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds. But, according to bell hooks (2003: pages 37 & 57), although feminism has exposed how patriarchal notions of love are ideologies of domination, it has also, at times, encouraged women to “forget about love”. Women have been encouraged to repress their will to love and to give up on “their desire for men to embrace emotional growth and become more loving”. This is partly “because progressive men have often been unwilling to be just in their relationships with women”, communicating to women “a lack of genuine political solidarity” (hooks: 2003: pp. 65-66). A successful revolution requires male conversion to feminist thinking and practice, as genuine love can only emerge in contexts where people come together to challenge and change patriarchal praxis.

The recognition of the value of what is often called reproductive labour must acknowledge that this work is still mainly undertaken by women (Donaldson: 2006: pp. 10-11); although, the loving relationships between all of us are crucial to communal relations and the resilience of class social networks. The work of kinship, the maintenance of family and friendship networks and sociability more generally are sources of material, emotional and psychological support playing pivotal roles in nurturing class connections of mutual aid which constitute a non-capitalist political economy. These social networks of love are the basis of class organisation, both within capitalist workplaces and outside them, organising and sustaining class action, a vital part of our class power (Donaldson: 1991 & 2008).

Militant women’s and queer liberation movements are part of a widespread understanding that the personal is political and that opposition to capitalism entails both an individual and collective rupture from capital; that revolutionising the world involves a production of ourselves and an ability to transform society; that helping others is not in tension with making our own lives better. To make revolution, we don’t need to give up anything of real value, we need to gain more valuable, rewarding and joyful lives (Hardt: 2004d).

Political conceptions of love assist in the clarification of our class power and how it flows from the strength of our social relationships opposing and negating capitalism. The recognition that love exists because of the labour of our class, and that it can be extended, helps us to compose social relations alternative to those of capital. Our class continuously organises ways to avoid, resist and subvert efforts to capture and control us that can be hard to recognise yet exist in the capacities we exercise in our daily lives. Love is crucial for powerful class struggle, generating the solidarity, support, connections and the common activity that builds the class. These loving social relations make our lives worth living despite, against and beyond capitalism, not just after it has ended.

Ignorance of how to love is a serious obstacle to revolutionary change. Yet love is something we learn by doing and we have learnt from previous struggles, creating a firmer basis for revolution, a foundation of loving experiences, lessons and successes. But wherever we organise loving alternatives, they come under attack from capital, and the difficulties of defending love in isolation make more apparent the urgency of deeper and more widespread revolutionary change. Our optimism and hope for the future can affirm the importance of love to a world that is different, where competition isn’t the nature of human relations, where our desires are real. Appreciating the value of love highlights the importance of moving beyond an appeal to individualistic yearnings for economic wealth or power towards collective desires for deeper and richer social connections, desires to share, to act in solidarity, to organise better lives together.

Our loving resistance is at the heart of the crisis of capitalism, because love is a demand that capitalism cannot provide, instead love is created by struggling against capitalism. Love is a gift produced by our labour; it is our wealth beyond the measures of capital, our class’s invincible power. The work of love is shared work, work that is vital to freedom, revolution and the creation of non-capitalist values.

Today there is a global movement to promote love as a power for revolutionary social development and change. And together we are already part of an alternative community, producing non-capitalist society, as a revolution of love.



[Nick Southall is a long-time community activist in Wollongong. He has been involved in a wide variety of political, labour movement, peace and environmental struggles. He is currently completing a Phd. at the University of Wollongong investigating contemporary communist theory and practice.. The socialist youth group Resistance is an affiliate of the Socialist Alliance of Australia.

[Luther Blissett]

No, they died from the ill effects of a long life of poverty and homelessness brought on by rote hate of a black trans man, fed by standard everyday transphobia.

[Luther Blissett]

One silver lining in this election, looks like progressive hero Pence will save everyone from the trans restroom scourge.

[Heaven Swan]

Transgender activist Dana Rivers Arrested for Brutal Murder of Lesbian Couple and Their Son

Link to the story:

https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/transgender-activist-dana-rivers-arrested-for-brutal-murder-of-lesbian-couple-and-their-son/

Dana Rivers was one of the men who led the (successful) campaign against treasure of the feminist movement, Michfest, which after 30 years, had it's last festival in the summer of 2015.

Citation:

donesoverydone Says:

November 16, 2016 at 11:36 pm
Dana Rivers was a member of Camp Trans and was involved in protesting Michigan Women’s Music Festival for wanting a female only private gathering.

“More than 60 gender activists from
these groups [Camp Trans Planning
Committee, Boston and Chicago chap
ters of Lesbian Avengers] plus members
of Transsexual Menace, supportive
attendees and renowned activist Dana
Rivers gathered across the road from
the Festival this year to do outreach and
education on what they viewed as a
discriminatory policy being unfair”

https://luceononuro1.files.wordpress.co ... ttacks.pdf

[Agent Orange Cooper]

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/15/o ... e-killing/
Oakland: Woman charged with killing Berkeley teacher, wife, son, then setting home ablaze

"woman"

http://www.ktvq.com/story/33740628/mont ... ng-a-minor

Montana woman charged with raping a minor

"woman"

[guruilla]

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/15/oakland-san-jose-woman-charged-in-triple-killing/
Oakland: Woman charged with killing Berkeley teacher, wife, son, then setting home ablaze

"woman"

http://www.ktvq.com/story/33740628/mont ... ng-a-minor

Montana woman charged with raping a minor

"woman"

From comments section in first article:

"Biological reality" is also a social construct, Suzy Q.

The same person accuses anyone who points out that it was a man who committed the crime as transphobic.

[slomo]

Silver lining: at least it is now once again socially acceptable to assert that biological sex is not, in fact, a social construct.

[tapitsbo]

It's funny because it looks like you guys (guruilla and agent orange cooper) are saying committing the crime is cause for revoking their status as a "woman" as if women don't commit crimes...

I do understand and sympathize with many of the points made with those who criticize the very influential "trans*" politics, though

it's interesting that many cultures have a different understanding of what is going on than the official line you guys are criticizing

I would agree that biological reality is socially mediated - it takes a lot of social mediation/construction to get to a point where discussing sexual dimorphism is a taboo

slomo: when was that rubicon crossed/silver lining unearthed? depends on where you live I guess. "peak trans" happened a couple years ago here, I feel

it's telling that those most incensed about trans politics often themselves want an exclusive say about what attitudes everyone else should have, going by forums I have been shown

[guruilla]

It's funny because it looks like you guys (guruilla and agent orange cooper) are saying committing the crime is cause for revoking their status as a "woman" as if women don't commit crimes...

I do understand and sympathize with many of the points made with those who criticize the very influential "trans*" politics, though

it's interesting that many cultures have a different understanding of what is going on than the official line you guys are criticizing

I would agree that biological reality is socially mediated - it takes a lot of social mediation/construction to get to a point where discussing sexual dimorphism is a taboo

If I come over and cut off your arm and tell you, don't worry, biological reality is socially mediated, what would you say to that?

Saying your a woman doesn't make it so, any more than saying you are innocent makes you innocent.

Having surgery to "become" a woman is a bit like taking pills to forget a crime you committed; it doesn't actually change the past, only perception in the present.

The base "criticism" as you call it is about misrepresenting reality: a man who rapes (or "rapes," since it seems like it was statutory) a girl is not a woman. That's a fact. It's not negotiable, or rather, the moment it becomes negotiable then the foundation of factual reportage is over & done.

What would you suggest referring to then, if not facts? Sincere question, I am curious.

[slomo]

A point of clarification. I have no wish to tell any man that he can't take estrogen, wear a wig, skirt, and lipstick, and call himself a woman. I'll even indulge his fantasies by applying female pronouns. If (s)he's an interesting person, I'll even have a beer with him(her), and judge him(her) on the merits of his(her) overall character.

But I will also simultaneously defend the right of any and every lesbian to reject him(her) as a sexual partner with the transparently obvious justification that this person is not, in any meaningful sexual sense relevant to most lesbians and straight men, a "woman".

And I will also simultaneously assert the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, given that it is a model that accurately describes 99.99% of the human population.

[tapitsbo]

Haha, facts are mediated too. That sort of feels like one topic of this board... getting to the foundations of factual reportage is tough when "conspiracy" shortcuts seem almost necessary on the route there...

I might agree with you guruilla that saying you're a woman doesn't make it so, but for many this IS a fact and they refer to it as such. It's very important to treat it as a fact if you work for certain institutions, for example

The position slomo just took sounds reasonable enough but a lot of people would get very loudly angry at him over it. Two or three years ago they were firmly in charge of the public discourse... they still have a big sway

If we don't believe trans woman is really a woman then I don't see what any crimes they might have committed have to do with it

[slomo]

The position slomo just took sounds reasonable enough but a lot of people would get very loudly angry at him over it. Two or three years ago they were firmly in charge of the public discourse... they still have a big sway

They absolutely still do have big sway in my local professional environment. And I resent having to publicly support a social convention so obviously fictional and at odds with empirical reality that it almost seems designed to provoke extreme cognitive dissonance.

I don't think I'm alone. Caitlyn Jenner may very well have been the proverbial straw that broke the progressive camel's back and led to a Trump victory.