Answer: Fact-Free Blogging

Question:

Today’s asterisk:  That question would also be the correct response if the given answer is:

A blog so chock-full of dodging that one can be excused for wondering whether, via some bizarre time warp, the National League baseball franchise that now resides in Los Angeles was actually named after it.

Today’s illustration:

Well, lets see…

[A]ffluent? I have to go back to Indiana next week for my house foreclosure and I’ve been reduced to posting pleas for readers to donate to cover the rent. I’m hardly rolling in the dough.

I’m aware that Bil isn’t affluent, so there is at least one problematic word in Ashley’s post.

But wait…

[T]o set Ashley straight on the facts… GLAAD isn’t honoring me or Dan Savage.

I actually don’t know who all GLAAD is honoring – and I’ll take Bil at his word about Savage.  But I had actually heard that GLAAD is honoring Bilerico.  Am I mistaken?

They chose to honor Bilerico Project – the work of a lot of people.

That’s why the blog is named The Alotofpeoplerico Project, right?

Oh…

That’s right…

Its named The Bilerico Project.

But, a lot of people Bil was just getting on a roll:

The article on Transadvocate was written by the same person I highlighted in “The Stupid Burns Files: No 3842” and regularly features Katrina Rose – the trans woman who thinks that bloggers who say glittering allies is a stupid idea are only doing it to prevent a transgender nondiscrimination bill from passing in Maryland.

Lets refresh everyone’s memory about what a lot of people Bil was lying about in the last clause of that passage:

What Then…

…does this say about the silence of non-trans gay men and lesbians regarding an elite handful of gay male bloggers who (to maximize gay animosity toward the notion of any energy being expended on the more legitimate of the two bills currently being considered in Maryland, perhaps?) lie through their teeth about trans participation in an event that may or may not have actually happened and then not only refuse to acknowlege the inaccuracies but go further and claim that the lies were justified because, to them, trans people have it coming?

Okay…

There it is…

Do you see me go directly from the ‘Point A’ of “thinking that bloggers who say glittering allies is a stupid idea” to the “Point B’ of “[said bloggers] are only doing it to prevent a transgender nondiscrimination bill from passing in Maryland”?

Can anyone find anyone on the internet saying that?

I doubt it.

But on Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico you can find Bil Browning using his affluence-apologism-centric worldview (memo to Ashley and others: use that phraseology instead; that covers a wider range of sins and incompetencies and, most importantly, actually doesn’t demonize people who are affluent who actually happen to be our allies) to factually undermine any discussion of what did (or did not) happen in Vancouver by delegitimizing any analysis of anything starting at ‘Point A’ that isn’t willing to accept the underlying claim that Dan Savage is an ally.

So…

‘Point A’ on Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico: Me asserting that ”thinking that bloggers who say glittering allies is a stupid idea.”

Wrong.

I – and shitloads of other people – refuse to accept the gaysplaining declaration that Dan Savage is an ally.

And my opinion of the stupidity of glitterbombing him in Vancouver (I think I may well have given a rah-rah to the first incident)?

Even if Savage is worthy of a defense – which he isn’t – the glitterbombing is getting old and, perhaps most importantly, is and always has been a criminal act…

I guess I imagined writing that over at Queerty.

Now lets look at ‘Point B’:

According to Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico, I’m asserting that the bloggers who are saying that glitterbombing Dan Savage (well, lets quote Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico exactly: “allies”) are “only doing it to prevent a transgender nondiscrimination bill from passing in Maryland”?

Really?

Well, if you’re in the Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico camp and have drank a heapin’ helpin’ of ‘chock full o’ we-know-who-are-nutjobs’ coffee (kool-aid would be indelicate, eh?), then you would already know that my head-scratching about the Fab(rication) Five’s malcharacterization of what occurred in Vancouver began with this assumption:

In the Works: A Faux-Populist, Gay, Inc.-Engineered Push for a Gay-Only ENDA in 2012?

Oh…

Did you notice the question mark?

Punctuation matters.

Of course, to be fair, I made it clear that the question I posed in the title of that post emanated from conclusions I’d drawn from what was, even by then – and by any objective standard – evidence of a bizarre unwillingness of the American gay male bloggers who seemingly wrote into a Canadian report something that they must have simply wanted to see to in any way simply acknowledge that the Canadian report did not say what they were saying that it said.

[O]nly Canada’s Xtra, the publication which put out the original story about the alleged Vancouver glitterbombing – a story which, had it been written more clearly and been better sourced, might not have provided The John, Bilerico, Joe.My.God, Towleroad, and Queerty (as well as Raw Story) the wiggle room to claim that the incident, if it happened, was perpetrated by “trans activists” – has not only acknowledged that that original report said nothing about the alleged glitterbombers being “trans” activists and that the original report made it clear that the alleged glitterbombers did not have a trans-specific agenda but also has made such an acknowledgement without nevertheless claiming a right to blame it all on trans people in spite of all of the facts to the contrary.

My interpretation was a surface image; it was what it appears as: organized Nixonian disinformational propaganda designed to (further) demonize a group of people – trans people – for a specific purpose, which, given that the loudest, most obnoxious voice of the bunch was the loudest, most transphobic 2007 voice, I figured to be an insider-provoked (lets face it: we still don’t know if there actually was a glitterbombing committed against Dan Savage in Vancouver; someone handing out anti-Savage leaflets, yes, but the glitterbombing……?) pre-emptive strike against the non-Gay, Inc.-ers, who likely would be the first (only?) people to come out against the possible election-year thrown bone of an allegedly pragmatically-necessary, ‘incremental progress’-addled ENDA.

But, for purposes of proving Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico wrong yet again – this time re: “only” – the fact that I was referring to ENDA at all there and to marriage in general in the following paragraphs, well…

you know…

Yes, you do know.

Just like you do know what this paragraph actually says:

[W]e all know how repulsed most of Gay Marriage, Inc.,™ is by the mere notion of gays and lesbians no longer having legal superiority over trans people.

Yes, we all do know it; some of us simply aren’t willing to admit it.

And the italicized “most” wasn’t sarcastic; not all people who wrongly prioritize gay marriage are transphobic.

But shitloads of them are.

And not all gay men who run blogs are liars who mischaracterize news stories and, when called out for doing so, respond with more lies and other unfiltered multi-species excrement, spewed with an ‘eviscerate the messenger’ ferocity that would make Newt Gingrich wet himself with glee were his HRC sister to pass all of this along to him…

I didn’t say the folks who glittered him were transgender. I said they were “trans activists.”

The main folks advancing the theory that all gay men hate transgender women…

But at least one (well, one in addition to The John) is.

According to Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico I’m a nutjob who thinks that bloggers who say glittering allies is a stupid idea.

Well, this Alotofpeoplerico Bilerico-consecrated nutjob is going to end this post with a question and a purloined observation.

The question: If “trans activists” are anyone who even remotely activisms for trans issues as part of a laundry list of concerns irrespective of whether they are trans themselves and if, as you assert, Dan Savage is an ally of trans people, is he then a “trans activist” too?  And, if so, why didn’t the first line of your trans-mafia-meme screed of January 23 (which, to remind everyone, had as its only source a news item from Canada’s Xtra which only described the alleged glitterbombers as “six activists, who named themselves The Homomilitia”) read:

A trans activist was glitterbombed again by other trans activists

Or, perhaps:

Trans activist Dan Savage was glitterbombed again by other trans activists

What say you, Bil?

Well, that’s the question.  Now, the Dan Savage-themed observation – from Ethan St. Pierre:

I’d really like to know how it’s going to get better for our youth while these prominent, gay bloggers are spewing such rabid hatred aimed at our whole community?

I’m a big boy, I can take this crap but it’s our youth and the message it sends to them I worry about the most.

You’d think that in their defense of Dan Savage, that would be first and foremost on their minds. The fact that it’s not is disgusting and reveals nothing more than self absorbed arrogance.

I seriously fear for our youth.

After all, it was that rabit hatred – sprouting from the comments sections of the Fab(rication) Five blogs like mutated Monsanto mushrooms – that concerned me even more than the factual malrepresentation that spawned them.  ENDA? Marriage? Maryland?  Those are indeed just theories.  They were attemps on my part to fathom prcisely why trans activists like Bil Browning, The John Joe Jervis, Andy Towle, and whoever the fuck wrote the Queerty piece (trans stuff is one of a long list of things that they activism for, right?  that makes them trans activists, right?) would refuse to, in any way, correct the error of their reportage which had unleashed some of the worst anti-trans hatred ever seen this side of Free Republic, RadFem Hub, Chuck Colson, Dirt, Paul McHugh and AROOO – and then refuse either to police their comments sections while The Bil, The John and The Joe are not only refusing to correct their errors but instead doubling down byclaiming that whatever others did in the past justifies whatever broad brush they might paint with in the present.

Janice G. Raymond, Ph.D.

Janice Raymond is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. Her ideas of feminism appear to have been influenced by her Catholic Christian background. She is infamous for having written her doctoral thesis attacking transsexuality, denying its medical reality, and for viciously attacking individual transsexuals, notably Sandy Stone and Angela Keyes Douglas in her book, based on her dissertation, The Transsexual Empire, 1979, 1994. Her quoting out of context a letter written by Douglas was tantamount to intellectual dishonesty. The letter origanally written as political satire of misplaced lesbian separatist hysteria over Sandy Stone�s employment at Olivia Records was misquoted as representing typical transsexual hatred of women. The book uses insensitive and transphobic language thoughout, while vilifying feminine MTF transsexuals as tools of patriachy for upholding stereotypes of women, and vilifying androgenous lesbian identified MTF transsexuals for being tools of patriachy, fifth columnists infiltrating womens�space and �raping womens� bodies�, a typical �damned if you do, damned if you don’t� trap. She dismisses FTM transsexuals as deluded and misguided lesbians, afraid of the label �homosexual�. Her thesis rests entirely on arguments that sex/gender indentity are fixed within the genitals at birth, an essentialist theory that excludes the possibility of transsexuals being a form of intersex, a topic which Raymond never addresses.

The book, while it did not create the transphobic attitude in the lesbian community, did tap into and �validated�, as least for the transphobes themselves, the discrimination they practiced. Thus, what began in the ’70s, occasional attacks on individual transsexual women, became institutionalized discrimination against all transsexuals in the ’80s.

The book is not the most damaging writing that Raymond has penned. Far worse is a United States federal government commissioned study in the early 1980′s on the topic of federal aid for transsexual people seeking rehabilitation and health services. This paper, not well publicized, effectively eliminated federal and some states aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals. It had a further impact on private health insurance which followed the federal government’s lead in disallowing services to transsexual patients for any treatment remotely related to being transsexual, including breast cancer or genital cancer, as that was deemed to be a consequence of treatment for transsexuality.

Scoreboard – if that’s what you really want.

Its not what we want, but if you don’t stop lying about us, what is our incentive to stop telling the truth about you regarding the present - much less the past (given that all of the malreportage, misrepresentation, lies and rabid (see, Bil…I can use that word too) transphobia enshrined in the comments sections of the Fab(rication) Five gay male bloggers are now part of the past, part of the historical record)?

Oops, I think I actually ended with a question instead of an observation.

My bad.

I made a mistake.

You see, Bill…

That’s all you – an the rest of the Fab(rication) Five ever needed to do.

I shudder to think why – or how – anyone could disagree with what Ethan had to say (originally in a comment at TransAdvocate.)

And yet…

 

3…2…1….

[Cross-posted at ENDABlog]