caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Esquire magazine has an article about a time long ago: 5 Transgender Americans on the Hardships of Transitioning, Then and Now.

Transgender men and women have lived openly for decades in America. Most of them transitioned before it was remotely acceptable to the wider culture—and so made possible the social transformation in gender identity that we are seeing today. The three women and two men on these pages lived much of their lives as one sex and then, along with thousands of others, have lived long, accomplished (and dangerous) lives as another. They are a comment on the abiding nature of the human impulse to change sexual identity (at a moment when it's almost regarded as a fad) and also emblematic of those who did so when it was so much harder.

Full disclosure: The author of this diary began transition 23 years ago.

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz and blues banjo player Ikey Robinson. Enjoy!

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Tuesday December 21, 1915
From the International Socialist Review: Nils Hanson on Organizing in the Wheat Fields

In the latest edition of the Review, Nils Hanson discusses working conditions, living conditions, and the great organizing drive, launched by the Agricultural Workers Organization, this past fall in the harvest fields of the mid-western states. He tells of following the wheat harvest from Kansas on up to North Dakota.

The A. W. O. of the Industrial Workers of the World, has become such a menace that the North Dakota farmers claim they will import Negroes as harvest hands next year. In response to that threat, the I. W. W. newspaper, Solidarity, recently gave "John Farmer" this warning:

The I. W. W. has some good Negro organizers, just itching for a chance of this kind. Thirty thousand Negroes will come and 30,000 I. W. W.'s will go bak. The red card is cherished as much and its objects understood as well by a black man as by a white one.

There was no better example of Hillary's clueless hawkishness than this moment in the recent debate.

/snark

Heads up, troops !

Today's full page ad in the New York Times announcing the opening of #WhereToInvadeNext this Wednesday... pic.twitter.com/wuPjw24nSe

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Monday December 20, 1915
From The Labor World: The Inside Story of How Rockefeller Won the Miners' Vote for a Company Union

Let's start with an obvious given- Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is the single worst Democratic National Committee Chairman ever. She is directly responsible for the devastating defeats of 2012 and 2014 (What? You say 2012 wasn't a defeat? Look down ticket dope.).

I always used to cringe when I heard someone try to explain being transgender in terms of "male brains" or "female brains."

It has been my belief that gender is more complicated than that. But then, it has also long been my belief that it shouldn't really matter why we ar transgender...we're all human beings and should all be according the respect and dignity due all human beings.

Be that as it may...science marches on.

Now that the Chicago Garment Workers Strike is winding down, citizens of Chicago are finding that crime is up in their city. The Day Book of December 17th cites evidence that this is due to the 600 to 800 sluggers and gunmen who have recently been released from duty by the private detective agencies and garment shops who had employed them as strikebreakers:

Judith Butler, well known feminist philosopher and the author of Gender Trouble participated in an email discussion with the feminist collective Broadly on the topic Why do Men Kill Trans Women?. It is intertwined with Broadly's own offering by Diana Tourjee, He's Not Done Killing Her

There were 23 known killings of transgender women in the United States in 2015. That number nearly doubled from the 12 reported in 2014. Broadly published an in-depth feature on these crimes in which we investigate their underlying cause. In addition to contacting police departments, victims' friends, and family, we interviewed the renowned queer theorist, Gender Trouble author Judith Butler.

One of the most disturbing, yet often easily overlooked, aspects of these crimes is the gender of the killers. Butler maps anti-trans violence back to the source, ultimately suggesting that trans deaths were caused by men because of men's need to meet culturally held standards of male power and masculinity.

She also insists that gender cannot be parsed from the other realities of the victims' lives. Ninety-one percent of the trans murders we investigated were people of color. They were primarily poor; many engaged in sex work. Law enforcement agencies have widely failed to classify these murders as hate crimes, maintaining a myopic perspective. By insisting that these facts be considered together, Butler does what the police have failed to do: recognize that the context in which these women lived and died is inseparable from their lives as transgender women of color.

--Broadly