Now Gay Men Are Declaring That Trans People May Only Lash Out Against Those Who Gay Men Can Accept as the “Worst Enemy” of Trans People

Oh, the oh-so-horribly-victimized-by-us-oh-so-powerful-trans-women gay male blogosphere is just positively overflowing with the vay-puhs!

The vay-puhs, ah say!

For a half-decade now (at least), The John has been crying about how he is treated for ‘merely asking questions’ – you know, the way corporatists merely ask questions about why poor kids aren’t allowed to work as janitors at the same schools their Romney-ite privileged friends attend and why the wouldn’t be happy to do so if given the opportunity to ‘join’ a de facto (soon to be de jure) neo-untouchable caste – about the trans-inclusion that he sees as having inflicted itself upon his pure-gay caste five years and five minutes ago.

Yet…

How much lamentation has he ever expended over trans people and those gays and lesbians who supported trans people at the time who were never allowed to ask – publicly or substantively – questions about whether it was a good, wise and/or moral thing to throw trans people and issues out of the G(LBT) civil rights movement back in the 1970s? I guess only those who hyde in plain sight know for sure, eh?

From Xtra:

Dan Savage was glitter-bombed before his appearance at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on Jan 21, the third such action against the high-profile sex columnist and political commentator in recent months.

A group of six activists, who named themselves The Homomilitia for the event, said they confronted Savage as he entered the theatre through a back-alley entrance.

In an interview with Xtra after the confrontation, activist Fister Limp Wrist accused Savage of “ableist, racist, transphobic, fat-phobic, sero-phobic and rape-apologist attitudes and views.” Activists handed audience members bright pink pamphlets outlining their accusations as they entered the theatre.

Fister Limp Wrist?

The Homomilitia?

Who came up with their names for them, James O’Keefe?

I smell something, but as of yet I’m not quite sure what….

I certainly smell a typically-disingenuous headline from The John:

Hmmmm….

ableist, racist, transphobic, fat-phobic, sero-phobic and rape-apologist

And, lets see what the pre-event press release had to say regarding telegraphing what was allegedly going to occur:

Press Release

WHAT: Dan Savage Un-welcoming Party!
WHEN: Tonight, Saturday January 21st, 2012

WHERE: The Vogue Theatre (Granville Street), Coast Salish Territories

Tonight, January 21st, queers and allies are coming together outside Dan Savage’s live speaking event at the Vogue Theatre on Coast Salish Territories. Currently, dozens of us are outside this pricey event, shit-disturbing and making a ruckus! We are here to form an un-welcoming party for Dan Savage noted for his ableism, ageism, classism, misogyny, racism, rape-apologism, serophobia, sizism, transphobia and, oh yeah, that column.

“We are here to express solidarity with glitter bombers in Eugene, Oregon and Irvine, California. Dan Savage is GGG – Going to Get Glitter-bombed!” – Lavender Menace

“We refuse to band together behind a man or a movement that fails to acknowledge the realities of poverty, racism, colonization, ableism, criminalization, transphobia, and other forms of violence experienced by queer communities.” – Fister Limpwrist


Examples of Dan Savage’s oppressive speech and behaviour are far too numerous to outline in their entirety, but here’s a few to mull over: 

Dan Savage has a shameful history of relying on abelist, transphobic and fat-phobic language. During the Proposition 8 debate Dan repeatedly placed blame on Black and Latino communities for the success of the homophobic legislation, despite being called out by queer people of colour for the racism underlying these claims. As well, Dan has described HIV positive people who have unprotected sex with HIV negative people as “deadbeat infectors,” advocating for mandatory drug-support payments from people who transmit the virus.

We seek to join our voices with all those calling out Dan Savage, his apologists, and a broader culture of oppression that legitimizes his words and actions.

And yet The John can only mention trans people (BTW, hang on to this; has he actually mentioned trans people yet?  Are there actually any to mention?) and gay marriage.

Ah yes…

The John loves to dog-whistle about himself – apparently believing that cats (and Kats) either are prohibited from hearing the dog-whistling or actually can’t hear it.  (Memo to The John: We hear it plainly and clearly – and we have no intention of respecting your pathetic wishes that we not speak about it in polite company.)

Oh…

And lets also compare what The John led off his piece with:

Trans activists are now publicly demanding that gays not be permitted to wed until trans people get more of their civil rights

in comparison to what someone involved with the Vancouver protest against Savage actually said:

He’s part of a broader [group] of gay, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied gay men focused on gay-marriage priorities. We want to say those priorities are messed up.

Full of shit, much, eh John?  Or, as a commenter queried:

I followed the link to the original article you’re quoting and read it painstakingly three times, and I could not find the part where anyone was demanding that gay people not be allowed to marry. Could someone please point me to that quote?

It can be found in the MichFest book barn right next to the eighteen-volume set of the collected, super-secret pro-transexual works of Mary Daly.

While I’m sorting out all of the smells – including that of The John’s perpetual disingenuousness - peruse some non-trans-authored analysis of why someone might have issues with Dan Savage:

I gotta say, I don’t get the joke, Savage. The joke—that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna is transgender—is a culture-jamming brainfuck foisted on the world by Savage years ago. It’s probably the longest-running inside joke about a local elected official around here, even though, in the history of jokes, it has a pretty glaring flaw: It ain’t that funny. Yes, it can be funny to call a person the thing they hate, assuming McKenna hates transgender people. But that’s it?

“I just don’t quite understand—I’ve heard Dan make this joke many times over the years, I don’t know what the basis is,” said Josh Friedes when I called him yesterday. He’s the executive director of Equal Rights Washington, he ran the campaign to get Ref-71 passed, and he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. “It’s terrible to make stereotypes about people based on their appearance, and it’s also very problematic when we assume that because a person looks a certain way or has certain characteristics they are gay or transgender. That’s exactly what we are fighting against.“

You know….

This?

Well, that was less than two years ago.

Trans people were – and apparently still are – expected either to accept that part of that piece was not animus or to simply abide by Savage-apologist standards of Shit Scummy Trannies Shouldn’t Get Upset About.

We are expected to bow – and bend over at the same time apparently (instruction manual, please) - at the altar of gay male fabulousness…

you know, such as that critiqued here:

I did say in the wake of Prop 8 that if Dan Savage kept it up with the racism I’d have to stop liking him altogether. And while I haven’t seen that kind of overt racism from him since, a) I’m sure it’s still there, b) he’s been terribly offensive about bisexuals more times than I can count, as well as not having a good record with fat folks and people living with domestic violence, and c) this week we have some equally shocking transphobia. There will be no more “He’s a good sex advice columnist, but…” from me anymore. I’m flat out of patience and excuses. If anything, it took me too long.

In response to a reader who doesn’t know how to tell his girlfriend that he paid a trans woman for sex, Dan writes [heads up: offensive words for and thoughts about trans women below the cut]:

Paradoxically, RAGE, going down on a shemale escort shores up your heterosexual bona fides. Gay guys don’t frequent and/or fellate shemale escorts (on purpose or by accident); getting with shemales is an entirely straight-male pursuit. So you can go right on identifying as straight, RAGE. Of course you aren’t totally straight—try thinking of yourself as something more than straight, not less—but you’re close enough that you can round yourself down to straight with a clear conscience. (Offer void the day you start blowing hemale escorts.)

Shemale? Shemale? For real? And after the person who wrote in used the much less problematic “transsexual”/”TS”? Was that really necessary? (Hint: no.) It would have been so easy to stick with the terminology already in use, but no, let’s see if we can find the word that’s most likely to offend the highest number of people. All of the objectification of the porn industry, and even more successful than “male-to-female” at rooting people in their assigned gender rather than putting the focus on their authentic gender. Everybody wins.

No, what matters is that today’s middle-to-upper-class white gays and lesbians – getting all testy that the previous generation of middle-to-upper-class white gays and lesbians didn’t do a good enough job of completely exterminating trans existence and, so, the John Aravosis generation now has to deal with us – win everything that they want when they want it including the ability and unchalleneged right to always define trans people and the limits of what we’re allowed to expect.

Sorry, Marriage Derangement Syndrome sufferers.  We made the best of what you and your forebears did to us politically…

and we’re still here.

Get used to it.

Having said that…

Is glitterbombing actually the way to go – even against someone who either is obnoxiously transphobic or so dangerously uninformed as to where trans-whatever is applicable that his voice really should be absented from public discourse?

Well, let me offer some stark legal advice here: glitterbombing is literally an assault (or battery, take your jurisdictional pick), so you will have no place to complain if a glitterbombing is taken literally legally either by its target or by anyone with authority to do anything about the glitterbombing.

Unless…

there actually is no forest and there actually are no trees.

What if it isn’t literally a glitterbombing but is, instead…

a fake glitterbombing arranged to whip up the oh-so-put-upon-by-us-trans-scum gay masses into yet another lather of self-righteousness?

Or, as some might say,  producin’ the vay-puhs?

Bil the shill does his usual drill:

If you think that Dan Savage is the worst enemy of the trans community, you’re sadly mistaken.

So, during the Revolutionary War, you would have forced the colonists to choose who their worst enemy was – either the British or their German mercenaries?

Mussolini vs. Tojo tonight on WWE, perhaps?

Ah, the shit shills say…

Dan the Sham (running a scam?):

“If I’m an enemy of trans people,” he said, “then [the trans struggle for rights and recognition is] over; it’s lost.”

Well, only the ‘she-male’ portion of your readership will know for sure, eh?  Or the ‘she-male’-blowin’ portion of your readership, eh?  (Oh wait – you feel confident in declaring that no gay men are into that.)  Or how about the dad/mom/whatevers-who-are-unwilling-to-wait-a-measly 36-months-to-cut-their-dicks-off portion of your readership, eh? Or the portion of your readership that was stupid enough to lat you extort money from it in order to fill the psychic pockmark where your personality may have once resided, eh?

The smell…

The smell…

Day-old Marriage Derangement Syndrome?:

Marriage equality is the most winnable part of the civil rights are human rights struggle, and it will lead to the elimination of discrimination.

And the deodorizer of a Long-ago proven point:

The next speaker talked about how marriage equality should not be “the” goal of the community (who said it was?)

I’d like The John to volunteer to submit to a lie detector test to answer the following question: Have you really never heard any gay man or lesbian utter the phrase ‘Once we have marriage, nothing else will matter’ or some phrase substantively similar? Because I damn sure have

I’ve also seen a shitload of deception:

So who’s next for trans activists, Evan Wolfson and the crew at Freedom to Marry, Ted Olson and David Boies who are leading the legal fight against Prop 8?

Here’s a thought: Lets strap all three of those men to a lie-detector and see if they actually give a shit – or know anything – about trans-anything or what the results of their litigations will be on transsexuals if said litigations backfire and produce hardcore ‘traditional family values’ rulings.

In your heart, you know what the results will be.

Are trans folk being denied the right to marry if same sex marriage passes?

Anyone want to bet that the author of this snark would rant and rave night and day that trans folk aren’t denied anti-discrimination protections when gay-only rights laws pass?  Or when gay marriage supplants trans rights of any kind?

But overly-privileged, obnoxious loutmouthed gay male apologists for Gay,Inc. don’t have to justify their assertions any more than overly-privileged, obnoxious loutmouthed lesbian trans-exterminationists.

You have no idea the shit I’ve had to put up with these past several years for daring to express a contrary point of view on ENDA a few years back. Hell, most of my essay was posing questions that dare not be asked.

No, John.  You can self-sanctify all you want…

But do wipe up afterward, please.

Fister Limp Wrist?

The Homomilitia?

Hmmmm…

Thus far I’ve seen opportunistic, gay primacy-centric ‘coverage’ of this on The John’s site, Bil the Shill’s site and – as its origin – Canada’s Xtra…

which says plenty.

 The only pic Xtra has?

Yes, christianists smile too – as do at least some trans-exterminationistic lesbians who suck self-loathing trans people into their orbit – and whatever might actually have taken place might have happened immediately after this photo was snapped (and to be fair, her smile isn’t as ghoulish as either Maggie Gallagher’s or Hillary Rosen’s.)

But I am suspicious nevertheless.

And what about the other report I’ve seen that has pix?

I’m not affirmatively stating that it didn’t happen…

but I am suspicious.  Raw Story is repeating the allegation – hook, line and sinker and with the Aravosispin to boot – which, again, may be accurate re: some element of trans participation…

…or it may not be – but the Raw Story piece is eight paragraphs in length, none consisting of original reporting about the Vancouver incident and only three directly relating to it:

Transgender activists threw glitter on sex columnist and gay rights advocate Dan Savage over the weekend before his appearance at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver, according to Xtra.

The six people who pulled off the stunt accused Savage of being “ableist, racist, transphobic, fat-phobic, sero-phobic and rape-apologist attitudes and views.”

“Savage is taking on being a speaker and leader in this movement. We have to take that into account,” one of the activists told Xtra. “He’s part of a broader [group] of gay, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied gay men focused on gay-marriage priorities. We want to say those priorities are messed up.”

The others are background info – and not even all of those are about Savage (one is about the glittering of The Newt.)

The smell…

The smell…

The smell…

Dan Savage would never – nev-ah! – engage in self-promotion, would he?

Would he?

Its about as likely as The John being completely disingenuous in an attempt to trash trans political viability.