Dreamer Easy

These ideas are so interesting, so compelling. I have no way to tell whether this is the end of depression or the start of hypomania. I only know I can't trust my brain, and that when I am hypomanic, I am prone to nonsense regarding sensitive subjects. Luckily no-one will see this!

Anyway:

This morning I had the mixed pleasure of reading Eevee's demolition of J.K. Rowling's online essay against trans people. Rowling offers no data to back up her statements (since, lbh, she couldn't) and in fact avoids saying things outright if she can. She also makes telling omissions. But what's relevant for my next paragraph is this phrase from Rowling: "I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class".

I keep coming across this idea and again -- that human beings must sort people into clear categories -- no, that human beings must sort themselves into categories, clearly. Tonight it was in Cory Doctorow's Locus column from last year about Jeanette Ng's speech on winning the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, when he used the phrase "women and racialized people".

I was on the treadmill and my eyes popped out a little. How many times have I used the phrase "people of colour" -- as opposed to normal people, who are colourless -- or the phrase "non-white" -- as opposed to normal people, who are white? And here's an expression that gets across the fact that "race" is an invention, a series of artificial categories unreflected in the genetic facts, assigned to people for a reason.

And there it is in the same breath with the category "women". Doesn't that have interesting implications!

What if "women" is another artificial category, ill-supported by actual biology? A category into which a group of people must be placed so that we will know who makes the sandwiches? Because if we get confused about that question -- who is assigned to menial and/or unpaid tasks, who is paid little or less or not at all -- the jig is up. Slaves make the sandwiches. Immigrants make the sandwiches. Get into the kitchen, woman, and make me a sandwich.*

But what if you're not sure who is a woman? You might have to make your own damn sandwich.

Of course, J.K. Rowling will always be able to pay someone to make her a sanga, which has to leave you wondering why she is terrified of trans people, who offer so close to no threat at all to cis women as makes no bones -- even Jo has too much shame to outright say "men will put on dresses and sneak into the ladies loo and assault us", as she'd be laughed off Twitter. But by her own words, this is about the thick black border around the category "woman".

The other categories which are relevant here are Us, The Good People, and Them, The Bad People. This is something I tried to address, with frustrating clumsiness**, at the start of my essay on Talons of Weng-Chiang. I'm fortunate in that I've never particularly liked the story***, so I don't suffer the cognitive dissonance of the majority of fans, who love it, but can see that, however hard they deny it, it's racist as fuck. The thinking goes this way: if you like a racist thing, you are a racist, one of the Bad People. But you are one of Us, The Good People! Therefore, if you do like something, it isn't racist. Cue the list of excuses, the blather about book-burning, etc etc.

Tumblr user what-even-is-thiss addresses a variation of this, in which Rowling is disconnected from Harry Potter -- presumably leaving a clean text, free of transphobia, unable to contaminate the reader. Apparently this is a frequent tactic.

Drop the Good vs Bad categories, and you're left with flawed creators, flawed texts, and flawed fans, capable of screw-ups, hatred, learning, improvement. And no fear of contamination; you can like even a bigoted thing or person, and comfortably acknowledge that bigotry, alongside the text's virtues and its personal meaning. For online culture, built out of headlines, kneejerks, and outrage porn, it would be no less confusing than doing away with categories like "Asian" or "man".

(If there's anything to these ideas, these connections, then I certainly won't be the first or only one to have made them. I have so much reading to do.)

ETA: Of course, Rowling divides trans people into two categories as well: a small number of real trans people who "just want to live their lives" on the one hand, and "trans activists" (malevolent) and trans teens (confused) on the other. The moment you stop being humble, grateful, and silent, and stand up for yourself, you lose membership in the category of "real" trans people; your permission to be trans is in danger of being taken away. The only "real" trans person is the one who can be safely ignored. Any feminist should recognise this tactic.

* Somewhere I read that these were the three categories that made up the Other for the Ancient Greeks -- slaves, barbarians, and women.

** Here's an extract from an article which looks deeply at this problem. "By making displays of bigoted behavior as the ultimate embodiment of evil we have a built-in justification for moving selfishly within the system because we’ve displaced our shame of our own cultural complicity with the destruction our way of life causes onto a convenient scapegoat. This, it turns out, opens the door for people to use bigoted language we have deemed “too far” as a show of power and dominance."

*** Come to think of it, I'm also lucky that I don't give a damn about Harry Potter.