Dear Housemates of Our Radical Progressive Queer Co-op
In general living here has been a wonderful experience, however I have a few issues I would like to address:
- I believe in our fragrance-free policy, for the sake of allergies and sensitive noses. Speaking of unwanted scents, I also believe in showers. They don’t have to be daily, especially if you’re not physically active. They don’t have to involve shampoo every time. But they should be in your schedule somewhere, preferably after dumpster diving on Tuesdays.
- You are absolutely correct that neither shaving nor keeping your legs hairy is empowering to women unless its by choice. However, after you choose to shave your legs in the shower, please also choose to get that hair out of the freaking tub.
- While it’s totally true that nobody’s sexual orientation should be enforced or coerced or made into law, we do have an enforced law in the bathroom: When you replace the toilet paper (or more accurately, if you replace the toilet paper), make sure it rolls over the top, not down below. I don’t want to go on a treasure hunt every time I take a poop.
And please, leave a backup roll. While I fully embrace the clothing-optional atmosphere of our body-positive home, I don’t want to shimmy down the hall with my ass hanging out in an emergency dash for TP.
- Invisibility is an important topic: Invisible minorities, femme invisibility, trans man invisibility in the mainstream media… Just because the mainstream can’t see oppression doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Similarly, just because you can’t see dirt on the stove, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Get those corners, please. Scrub under all the things on the counter. Take them off the counter and clean under them.
- It is totally unfair for the “G” and the “L” of the acronym to get their rights first and put off everyone else’s rights for later. On that note, when I ask you to dust the living room, don’t wipe down the two most visible and easy-to-reach surfaces and then call it a day. No surface is dust-free until all surfaces are dust free. Don’t be a slacktivist with the Windex.
- I get it–I’m disabled too. You’re out of spoons, I’m out of spoons… However, the kitchen is also out of spoons, and I did the dishes the last ten times. You can see my chore points clearly marked on our handy-dandy co-op whiteboard.
(Which I’ll note, does not keep score for every time someone merely wiped a damp rag across the table one or two times, without even applying pressure or soap, and called that “cleaning”. My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Likewise, that wash rag will intersect with soap or else you won’t clean a damn thing.)
By following these simple guidelines, I believe we can create a more loving, supportive, and radical living space for everyone. We might even have a few less cockroaches.
Sincerely,
Amy
(originally posted on my main site)
cocksucking-accent asked: Dearest Amy, Tobi spoke about you and your masturbation diagram and all the things today at PTHC! It was really cool and I thought you'd like to know that a really crowded room (I'd roughly estimate 500 people?) got to hear of you and your blog and your diagrams. <3 Wish you were here!
Oh my! Soooo awesome! :) I never thought my little drawing would help so many people! I love you guys, seriously. Wish I could have been there!
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class privilege! [tw: abuse, rape]
(or read the slightly edited version on my main blog)
i have class privilege… and i am finally seeing it clearly. growing up upper-middle class left me with a sense of economic entitlement. even WITH the extreme abuse. i see it now. so clearly. i had little other forms of entitlement, certainly not entitled to be treated like a human being or have my gender respected or bodily autonomy and safety……. he took a LOT from me with his sadistic abuse. and yet, the economic entitlement still survives through all that. privilege is a strong force.
at denny’s tonight, its like i see the servers there through new eyes. maybe they hate this fucking job. i stopped seeing them as servers and saw them as people who are currently at a job but have lives outside of it. and then it all clicked. if it weren’t for my white privilege, class privilege, and resulting easily-gained government benefits and other benefits-of-the-doubt… i would probably be dead right now. with my disabilities and the damage done to me as a child… if i had to survive in the world many PoC and lower-class (whether past or present) people live in… i may have died.
even though i’ve lived my entire adult life in poverty on government assistance, even though i’ve worked shitty food service myself and know what it’s like, i still grew up in a wealthy household. that experience has ingrained within me a feeling of entitlement, for better and for worse. for better because it makes me demand better treatment. for worse because it makes me less driven to work toward improvement, because i feel like it should be a given (economic stability SHOULD be a given for every human being on the planet, but that’s irrelevant here). my dad was horribly abusive, but my house was big, the yard was bigger, and i was surrounded by peace, quiet, and trees. i could run off to escape, even if only temporarily, into the woods or into the surrounding suburbs. at home, we had AC, heating, a fridge of food (even if my dad sometimes didn’t cook or was gone for weeks at a time or yelled at us for EATING that food). there were no metal detectors at school. i was fast-tracked into the “gifted” program (after nearly landing myself in the “special ed” classes, but that’s another story).
so yes, the abuse was horrific. i was prostituted, raped, literally tortured. but through it all, since we had economic stability, there was this sense that, if i waited things out long enough, it would get better on its own. all i had to do was wait long enough, and it would get better. (sound familiar? “it gets better” is the voice of privilege if ever i heard it!) that was the lesson my environment taught me subconsciously. i carry it out now: i hibernate, i escape when things get scary. because that tiny child in me still believes—if i wait it out, things will get better. after they’re done raping me, i’ll eventually return back home, where i can hide under a blanket next to the AC without any worries of losing shelter or not being fed. my environment basically trained me to live like i was in a cryogenic sleep chamber. that method of survival is NOT working for me anymore. now i am in poverty, i constantly have the threat of homelessness and economic destruction. but my gut instinct is to curl up and wait it out. which will. not. work. anymore.
this isn’t to say my pain isn’t real or that i’m too lazy to handle poverty… nooo not at all. my pain is real, my suffering is real, the discrimination i face is real…. but now i’m seeing there’s a much bigger picture to all this, that exists alongside my own story. i’m outraged at the problems i’ve had keeping my SSI benefits, at the problems i’ve had getting a job as a trans person, keeping a job as a disabled person… but in some parts of this very same society, that’s the tip of the iceberg. to me it feels like the most outrageous of all things ever outrageous. but there is EVEN MORE and it’s always right under my nose in the world around me. there’s a bigger picture surrounding me. my story is a part of it, but it’s not the whole story. and there are many ways i’m privileged, despite all the hardship i’ve endured. that’s how bad things are: you can have the privileges i have and STILL barely cling to life. that’s how skewed this world is toward those at the top. we are all connected in our suffering. it sounds trite and meaningless (and IS trite and meaningless if you don’t understand your own privilege), but it’s also true.
It just clicked
That’s why I was so excited to do a clip for The Woman’s POV and for QueerPornTube. Despite my dysphoria. These are environments where my only discomfort is dysphoria itself. Absent the violent pressure of cissexism, I can tease apart what fears come from dysphoria and what doesn’t. In safe spaces, I can play around and not feel like I’m being erased or attacked. That space to play and experiment is necessary for personal growth and understanding one’s self. Cissexism polices bodies like a totalitarian state. There’s no breathing room. No room to discover yourself.
Re: I Have Ideas #1
As a trans person,I have to say that I would never want to be nude in front of other people, LOL.
Even with my dysphoria I’d love the opportunity to be naked in a safe space like that. It’s saying “even if this feels weird for me, I won’t be shamed into submission for it.” It’s saying “my discomfort is about ME, not about social pressure.” Just like the times I go with unshaved legs. I don’t like hair on my legs, but damn it, that’s about MY preference, not society’s preference. And for me, sometimes it helps reinforce that truth by openly violating social expectation. Not because I prefer to be that way, but to fight against power structures in place and prove to myself they don’t have to control me.
I’ve gone naked at play parties, and even with the dysphoria it was wonderful. I was never pointed at, stared at, made fun of, or anything. It’s freeing to expose the things I’m most insecure about, in environments where I will be accepted “warts and all”. Then the social judgment washes away, and all I have is my own dysphoria, instead of dysphoria and all the baggage people pile on top of it. I’d love to experience that in a non-sexual setting.
Dysphoria is an excruciating thing, but for me cissexism is even more unbearable. When it’s a relief to feel just dysphoria, that really says something about the weight cissexism places on trans people’s shoulders.
(Source: lucypaw)
Innocence is remarking how sad it is that people have to know about things like child molesters and kidnappers and so now have to think about ways of protecting their children. Or how terrible it is that they have to be knowledgeable of rape culture and so have to be concerned for themselves when they walk to their car. Which is implicitly shaming survivors for daring to speak and breaking one small piece of their precious little innocence.
Or how horrible it is to tell your children that gay people exist, or trans* or maybe one day (heaven forbid!) that people who defy these neat categories also exist.
God forbid anyone who isn’t straight or cis or white or financially comfortable or non-abused not live in fear and shame and silence for the sake of your own comfort and innocence.
I’m not saying, “CHILDREN SHOULD BE TOLD EVERYTHING FROM BIRTH.” But I am saying that innocence, as a concept and as the way it is reinforced, comes at the expensive of trampling on those that aren’t innocent. It is as though by families shielding their eyes from the wounded bodies lying on the ground, they can walk all over them and claim good intentions and innocence as their excuse. And sometimes? In fact, far more than sometimes, it’s your own kids that you’re walking over.
”The price of innocence, Somaticstrength (via somaticstrength)
The common understanding of “innocence” is broken, in my opinion, and broken in a way that harms children. For most people, “innocence” is really a synonym for “ignorance”. But to me, innocence is about a lack of ulterior motive. It is the most sincere and loving version of honesty. It cuts through superficial trained behaviors and beliefs down to the core of our humanity. In that sense, innocence isn’t something that one starts with and then has taken away, like virginity, but instead innocence is something one can strive for. Instead of children’s innocence being a frail short-lived moment of “purity” (which objectifies and dehumanizes all children just as much as the concept of virginity damages girls) it is a trait we always have access to. Instead of innocence invoking pity and patronization, it is something to respect. Many people claim children have a wisdom few adults possess, but the common understanding of “innocence” denies that wisdom the reverence it deserves.
tw: non-graphic talk of child abuse
The gist of what I’m processing internally lately: My abusers “programmed” me. There was purposeful conditioning going on. fghjfghlkjslkjwtpoak. Next-level messed up. Some of my abusers may have had past connections to bigger child trafficking circles, ritualized/cult abuse, or government torture programs. That’s what it seems like, based upon the things they knew how to do. They weren’t just sadistic; they had some amount of training in what they did to me. I’m glad to be on the periphery of it all. My abusers were acting on their own rather than as a part of a bigger organization. They just took what they learned previously and used it on us, almost as a hobby or pastime. A few good laughs and a few extra bucks, that’s all it was to them.
Thankfully, most of them are dead or near-death now. The rest, like the ones who paid for time with me, I know nothing about. There are no lingering connections. It feels like the ashes are settling. i almost have a space separate from their oppressive aura of violence, that feels something like normal life.
it’s good recovery and my life feels more linear and normal after accepting this, paradoxically. but what a lot to take in. i may need to cancel even more obligations, apart from my most core important works, as a bit of self-care. i’m gazing into the abyss and trying not to get tangled up in it. accepting its existence and moving on with my life.
TW: Discussion of sex offender
Obviously the police officer who questioned and ticketed Paula Witherspoon represents a real structural problem. The idea that an agent of the state got to decide a woman’s gender for her and call her “disorderly” for abiding by her actual gender is not only ludicrous, but also structural violence.
But the cis lady who looked at another woman and decided she “looked like a man” on the basis of whatever transphobic bullshit criteria is the one who called that officer and started the police interaction. That is FAR from a neutral act in a world where trans* interactions with police so often turn discriminatory and even violent. And it is an overtly discriminatory act that she decided she got to be the Arbitrator of Womanhood and literally police who was and was not considered female. This, too, is cissupremacy. And it, too, is systemic and far from isolated.
Transphobia and cissupremacy are far from the sole domain of men. Cis women, we, too, are a part of it. We have an incredible ability to do harm to our trans sisters. It is our responsibility to keep each other from doing so.
With all due respect, Amy, Paula Witherspoon might not be the best example for your case here. She is, after all, a thrice-arrested paedophile and a convicted sex offender currently on parole (and one of the contingencies of that parole is not being around minors (<18). Often, minors 18 and under are present in washrooms and as minor females are Witherspoon’s target age….
Well. Gender aside, allowing a convicted sex offender unremitting access to their target demographic is… probably not the best idea.
If you’re looking for an example, Chrissy Polis might be a better one.
But trying to defend a three-time sexual predator is probably not the best move from a PR perspective.
I didn’t write the original post, so why are you addressing me? I didn’t know about her history until now. Thanks for pointing it out to me, though. It definitely makes the story less clear-cut, and could possibly be relevant to what happened.
The details of the arrest aren’t clear, from what I’ve found online, and haven’t been publicly released. If she wasn’t banned from using public facilities at the hospital, then there was no reason to arrest her. If she was, then obviously there’s a problem. Either way, it seems she was arrested specifically for being trans, and if that’s the case then it’s still a problem, even if this leads to a real criminal charge.
This is that tricky place where we fail as people if we completely erase a person’s humanity for having a criminal record, while at the same time we fail if they are able to commit those crimes again. Reoffense is especially troubling when it comes to child rape, and as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse it’s a topic I have intense feelings about.
What complicates this incident further is that we also fail as people if we allow the ends to justify the means in criminal investigations. The profiling of minorities is a big problem across the board. It gives me mixed emotions–if she is found guilty of violating parole, then it’s a good thing she was arrested. But it’s still a bad thing when trans people are targeted for being trans.
The whole situation sucks, basically. It’s fail from every direction. It’s like one of those crime procedural dramas with an ending that leaves you twisted in knots even though you agree with the verdict.
So
This weekend I connected some dots about my history and realized something incredibly terrifying, even moreso than what I had already known. Still pretty sure I’m at the very end of the “surprises” phase and heading into the “all that’s missing are the fine details” phase. I’m pretty sure I don’t want or need to know all the specifics. It’s just… horrific. I’m just fine knowing the basic gist of things without recovering every single memory. I’m sure it’ll happen on its own without even trying–triggers being the persistent things they are–but I’m fine to let my body set the schedule on its own.
TL;DR It’s fucking amazing I’m still alive, and every day I continue to live and even attempt a halfway normal life is a testament to how intelligent, strong, tenacious, and amazing I am. Holy shit.
