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Anthropology Dating Decisions Free-For-All Pronouns Or Else

A Failure To Affirm

April 7, 2024 96 Comments

From the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, a tale of romantic complication:

Today, my partner of a year just came out to me as a trans woman, and I’m ashamed to say I don’t think I reacted very well. 

The feeling of being, shall we say, misled can do that, I suppose.

It was done over text, and basically consisted of me trying to convince them that their life will be so much harder if they come out as trans, much less a trans woman… I just don’t know what to do. I found them attractive before, what if I don’t now? 

Twist incoming.

I’ve been out as trans man for close to a year and a half now… I’m trans, I’m supposed to be gung-ho about all of this, right? 

Oh my, a spotlight shared. Awkward. Or, “Woman who wants to pretend she’s a gay man is thwarted by male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps.”

As I said, complications.

Readers are welcome to speculate as to whose feelings are more, er, valid in the scenario above.

And before you ask, the outlook isn’t great:

It just seems a lot easier to leave right now because things are already rocky, and this is just a rather large cherry on top. 

Update, via the comments:

Regarding this,

me trying to convince them that their life will be so much harder if they come out as trans, much less a trans woman…

Mags adds,

He she didn’t use her his pronouns. 

Indeed. A notable omission. One that results in finger-wagging from fellow forum regulars:

You do have to respect that SHE is the expert on her own gender, not you, 

It’s a bold claim. And despite which, the person being scolded, a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. There’s no she or her, just a grudging them. Which does rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

Readers who poke through the subsequent replies will note how almost any kind of questioning – even expressions of surprise and concern from an intimate partner – is promptly dismissed as “hurtful,” “transphobic,” and “pretty shitty,” something to apologise for. As if anything short of immediate and gushing affirmation – pretty much any hesitation at all – were an act of wickedness.

Also, this caught my eye:

I think my main fear is them looking like a drag queen? Where you can tell that it’s a man dressed as a woman, and that I don’t find particularly attractive. 

Which is something of a drawback, given the odds on that matter.

One of the commenters then replies that “drag queen is a look,” by which they mean valid, a possible aspiration, and that one should “interrogate those feelings” that looking like a drag queen is probably not ideal.

Via Rafi.

In other, happier news, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Reading time: 2 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All Travel

Perhaps The Cardboard Has Magical Properties

April 1, 2024 184 Comments

Lifted from the comments, where WTP alerts us to more fun times for commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area:

❓ Did you know ❓

You can ask any station agent for BART’s free bystander intervention cards, which you can use if you’re experiencing or witnessing harassment in stations and trains.

Here’s how they work 👇 pic.twitter.com/09WmyquxVS

— BART (@SFBART) March 29, 2024

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Though given the consequences of recent attempts at intervention – or what Bay Area Rapid Transit refers to as “allyship” – readers may wonder whether prompt and meaningful assistance may be less frequent than one might wish.

In case you had doubts, WTP adds, “This is not parody.”

Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.  It also calls to mind this uplifting scene from no-less-progressive Portland:

What the card for that would say, I leave to the reader.

Update, via the comments:

Diogenese asks, if direct and effective intervention has been discouraged and entails a serious risk of punishment,

Then what’s the fookin point? 

Well, I’m assuming the point is largely to misdirect, to conjure an illusion. To give credulous progressive women, like the ladies in the video, the impression that the situation isn’t as bizarrely horrible as it actually is. And to make credulous progressive women imagine that progressives are The Ones Who Care, while so much of what they touch gets much worse, quite rapidly.

By issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

And – and – every woman in the explanatory video, every single one of them, has brown skin. So there’s that.

Progress!

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Written by: David
Anthropology Art Politics

The Put-Upon And Marginalised Finally Get A Word In

March 25, 2024 81 Comments

Time, I think, to better ourselves. Come, let us peek at the culture pages of the Guardian:

the unicorn is the subject of a major exhibition opening next weekend in Perth.

That’s Perth, Scotland. Lest there be confusion.

The first UK exhibition to investigate the cultural history of this elusive, magical, and well-loved creature will be the centrepiece of the opening celebrations at the new Perth Museum, after a £27m transformation of the former City Hall, 

Bear with me. I’m setting the scene. Stoking your anticipation.

“We’re exploring how people conceptualise an animal that they’ve never seen,” says the lead curator, JP Reid, 

White horse. Big horn.

“The unicorn was a symbol of innocence and chastity, and, in time, the story develops that the only way you can catch one is by baiting it with a virgin woman,” says Reid. He pauses. “There’s obviously a lot of innuendo going on.” 

Again, big horn.

at least half of the exhibition is dedicated to present-day incarnations. A mass display of crowd-sourced items – including My Little Ponies, novelty hats, rainbow-hued stuffed toys, and clothing – reflects the creature’s ubiquity across pop and kid culture. 

Ah, tat.

Brace yourselves for a full-on face-blast of culture:

Such wonders you’ll behold. Memories to treasure forever.

Because the above is “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” And so, while claiming to give exposure to the supposedly marginalised and unseen, the virtuous by default, the curators are expecting visitors to be enthralled by objects of mass-produced banality that are, by their own admission, utterly ubiquitous.

But wait. There’s more.

the final section of the exhibition features six newly commissioned pieces exploring the ongoing challenges faced by the queer community globally, including transgender inclusion, conversion practices and institutional homophobia, transforming blank, life-size horse heads around the theme of “unicorn hunting in 2023.” 

One of the above. Presumably the most photogenic.

“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, the community co-production officer who has worked in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups on the exhibition. 

I’m just going to leave this here, I think. Consider it an illustration of what can be done. A cultural benchmark for our times.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Despite which, Ashleigh Hibbins, the head of audiences at the Perth Museum, where unicorns await, tells us,

“This is a £27m project and an opportunity to tell stories in a different way – we’ve been telling the pale, male and stale stories in museums from time immemorial and for institutions to stay relevant we need to represent the people around us. It’s not just a moral consideration but a practical one.” 

Ah yes, those unheard voices. The dear downtrodden.

Via Julia.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Psychodrama

But Don’t Call Her Neurotic

March 14, 2024 46 Comments

Lifted from the comments, a tale of what can happen when love, or professed love, collides with designer agonising:

Point of view: you just found out one of your favorite people in the whole world stopped masking and now you feel unsafe.

Also, that person lives across the country pic.twitter.com/teIMYiPBUj

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 12, 2024

For those who missed it:

I can’t have people in my life that make me feel unsafe. They live on the other coast, but that’s not the point. The point is, if I had the option to be around them right now, I couldn’t, because I wouldn’t feel safe. And that means something to me.

And so,

The best thing for me right now is to take a step away from this relationship.

As you can imagine, there was some speculation as to whether the outpouring above is a well-executed parody, a feat of satire.

Well. It turns out that no, it’s not.

Update, via the comments:

“It’s your choice to make,” says madam. As if the odd behaviour were somehow not her own. As if the party choosing to end the relationship – a relationship with “the person that I love most in the world” – with a weird ultimatum – were not her.

WTP adds,

It’s hard to tell parody from reality.

It is, I think, a signature of our times. Like many others, I watched the video twice and still wasn’t sure. Though in our defence, I don’t think there’s much reality in the reality, if you see what I mean.

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Written by: David
Academia Anthropology Politics

Fake Tears And Hissing

February 28, 2024 91 Comments

Here’s a tale for those who’ve wondered what happens when two Designated Victim Groups – both accustomed to deference – collide. Specifically, “Indigenous faculty members” at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the black Dean of the university’s social work department.

At the centre of the conflict is Kathy Hogarth, 

That would be our aforementioned black Dean and self-styled “radical.” A radical who invokes the “burden” of her unspecified “trauma,” who works “in the name of resistance,” and whose melanin-related grumbles include “the system of white mediocrity,” onto which her paler colleagues allegedly hold with “a vice grip.” One can only hope that Dr Hogarth’s “trauma,” whatever it might be, was at least partly soothed by the $200,000 salary.

Professors in the faculty of social work had some pre-existing grievances with Hogarth: they found her untransparent about hiring decisions and said she had a generally uncollegial attitude.

I’m assuming that includes using social media to publicly badmouth colleagues based on their race. All that “white mediocrity.”

But it was at a faculty retreat in September 2022 that the showdown between Hogarth and the Indigenous Field of Study (IFS) social work faculty came to a head.

Since you ask,

The IFS describes itself as a distinct programme within the faculty that is based on Indigenous “traditions, languages, and territorial protocols.”

In short, magic brownness.

The IFS asked to participate in the retreat remotely because its members were still scared of contracting COVID, but Hogarth had a preference for the department’s members to appear in-person. Hogarth allowed the IFS team to participate remotely in the morning, but said the afternoon session was not conducive to virtual participation… The IFS team said they experienced feelings of “confusion and exclusion.”

It’s perhaps worth keeping in mind that the claims of emotional injury – and the subsequent escalation in rhetoric, which we’ll get to – started with a question of whether attendance via a Zoom call was ideal at a retreat intended to “foster community.”

With outcry, the in-person faculty attendees created a new Zoom link for the IFS to participate in the afternoon session, and Hogarth “relented,” though she did not apologise.

Still, everyone’s happy now, right? Time for some collegial bonding.

The IFS team… claimed Hogarth’s “exclusion” of them was “an act of anti-indigenous racism” and “colonial violence.”

Ah, maybe not.

Hogarth later recounted in a report that the faculty were “rowdy” during the retreat, interrupting her and challenging her decisions, and that they wrote phrases like “less colonialism” and “less bullshit” on the end-of-day feedback notes. Hogarth interpreted this as “implicit racism.”

Shots fired.

Following the retreat, Hogarth sent out an email to the department faculty and senior leadership,

Before we venture further, you may want to pour a large one.

As one of less than a handful of Black Deans in Canada, I cannot divorce my Blackness from my leadership identity. The experiences of colonialism are embedded in my DNA. The enactment of colonial violence on my Black body is unrelenting.

And suddenly, we’re in the realm of opera. Capes are a-flutter. The dry ice will be billowing any minute now.

After being bloodied and bruised at the Faculty Retreat, and nursing the bloodiness of the day, I was forced to dry my tears, put a smile on my face and go welcome a new cadre of students to our institution. And I ask, how can I do that with integrity after witnessing and experiencing such violence at the hands of social work ‘professionals’? Yet, I had to be strong because that is what is expected.

Dr Hogarth was being strong, you see. Stoical. Not drama-queeny at all.

As a leader, and more so as a Black woman leader,

Yes, she has all the medals. See how they catch the light.

there is always a justling for power. I saw that. I saw the subtle and not so subtle attempts at destabilising, the micro-invalidations, and the micro insults. Anti-black racism was as real and alive as it has ever been on Wednesday. As painful as it is, I am naming that.

She suffers, heroically, and yet she pushes on, also heroically.

This accusation of racism – particulars of which were not forthcoming – was followed by an appeal to take the high road, to abandon “toxicity,” and to forge a “healthy community”:

I will not join the toxic. I will not engage in the violence. Those are not negotiable. I challenge you, both perpetrators of violence and bystanders, to do better.

Alas,

Days after Hogarth’s email, the tenured faculty sent the higher-ups of Laurier a petition to have Hogarth removed as dean, claiming a “crisis of leadership.” The petition was endorsed “with the unanimous support of all 16 tenured faculty of the Faculty of Social Work (FSW).”

And,

The professors wrote that Hogarth’s… email had been “extremely distressing.”

So many feelings. We’re going to need more tissues. And louder music.

“Unfortunately, the toxic and violent climate at the FSW as a result of Dr Hogarth’s actions have deeply impacted morale, weakening our sense of belonging and community, and have negatively impacted faculty members’ wellbeing.”

And then, inevitably, the big guns boomed:

“The anti-Indigenous racism enacted by the Dean is in itself completely unacceptable. Under no circumstances should any faculty member be intentionally excluded from participating in collegial meetings, especially a meeting designed to foster community and engage in planning,” read the faculty petition.

A second letter from the Indigenous faculty, sent to the university’s senior executives, continued the tearful thundering:

“We have recently experienced colonial violence and anti-Indigenous racism at the hands of our Dean… During our remote participation, she was actively violent towards the IFS team as witnessed by our FSW colleagues.”

Again, particulars of this “violence,” indeed “colonial violence,” remain oddly mysterious. We are, however, told that the Zoom meeting was “harmful and humiliating,” a “marginalising experience,” and “resulted in the team feeling unsafe in the workplace.”

I’ll spare you the full letter, which goes on to invoke the “aggressive and assaultive” properties of Dr Hogarth’s email, albeit in oddly non-specific terms, followed by a demand for a change in leadership “effective immediately.” Apparently, Dr Hogarth’s presence no longer enables the “meaningful decolonising” that the faculty regard as their Holy Mission.

Despite the competing feats of Olympic-level hyperbole, two formal investigations by the university uncovered no evidence of racism or indeed violence, whether colonial or of some other kind. However, the social work department – this bastion of “equity,” “diversity,” and “decolonisation” – was described in one of the reports as an intimidating and hostile workplace, with one witness favouring the phrase,

cliquey, scary, and tense.

In the wake of the dramas above, Dr Hogarth has relocated her talents, and her radicalism, to pastures greener:

Hogarth currently chairs the Canadian Military Colleges Review Board, a position to which she was appointed by Defence Minister Bill Blair in December 2023. Hogarth is now in charge of deciding if Canada’s two Royal Military Colleges should continue to exist, and if so, what their curriculum should look like. 

So, nothing to worry about there.

Wilfrid Laurier University and its farcical employees have of course been mentioned here before.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.