a bell and a pomegranate

midwestmountainmama:

Midwest Mountain Mama: An Open Response from Tracy Oliver & Issa Rae

abellandapomegranate:

blackamazon:

issarae:

Some of our viewers may have been offended by some of the language in our recent episode. We take this matter especially to heart,…

Well, and naturally, what “may have offended” some people is language—as though that’s the important thing, that a nasty word (a word, to be fair, I cringe at) was used.  But of course it wasn’t—the meaningful portion of the trouble is that the use of “tranny” as an insult to cis women is about participating in the cultural notion that trans women are fake/grotesque/doing womanhood wrong/unworthy of respect and that it is shameful/disgusting for a cis woman to be similar to one.  It’s about functioning as a placeholder for certain policing discourses about the comportment and appearance of women in general by deploying the extreme danger of trans oppression as a veiled threat while subtly shoring up that oppression.(*)  That’s why people are troubled by the word in the first place, and why the first critiques of it were brought up—not because it is an inherently evil word, but because it participates in negative, damaging stereotypes about trans women.  It could have been any word.  The problem is that “tranny” is deployed as a shorthand for that cultural idea.  If they’d substituted in a nicer, less-charged word as shorthand to suggest that a given woman was like a trans woman and therefore fake/grotesque/doing womanhood wrong/unworthy of respect, it would still be transphobic.

When we focus over-much on contaminated words, we sometimes miss—and allow the people who use them to sidestep—the larger problem of what those words represent and why they’re hurtful in the first place. 

(*) You know, in the same way that young straight men calling each other “faggot” don’t literally mean “I think you are attracted to other men,” but “you are not behaving as I think a man should and if you don’t get in line I am suggesting you be treated as is appropriate for the disgusting people indicated by this word, who also don’t get in line and who you know are visibly punished for it.”  In the same way that “whore” and “bitch” are deployed—they suggest that there is a category of people who you are culturally aware have fewer rights/more vulnerabilities to violence/etc. and that if you do not behave as expected you might be relegated to that category and treated accordingly.  Capitalism does it by threatening people who have money with the constant specter of poverty and homelessness—and then uses that to enforce cultural norms of behavior.  Sexism does it by threatening that men might be treated like “bitches” and “pussies.”  And cissexism/transmisogyny does it by threatening cis women with words like “tranny” and “shemale.”(**)  It’s not the words by themselves that matter, it’s the threat behind them—and the implied endorsement of the violence to which people in the oppressed class in question are treated.(***) 

…and the only way to rectify the system is to uplift the people on the business end of the oppression in question and thus also free the oppressor class by removing the threat and rendering the enforcers of oppression powerless.

(**)  Words which, I want to note, are disproportionately weaponized against cis women of color, especially Black women.  So there’s that, too.

(***) So, you know, if you’re casually deploying this stuff just to make a point about how someone, especially someone not of that oppressed group, ought to behave, well. 

…so that went on a bit more than I intended.