Author: Dean

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We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary, proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm and exclusion that trans people face that lead to astounding rates of poverty, criminalization, deportation, and interpersonal violence. I agree with Jen that there is a lot of work to be done to address these injustices, and that engaging in practices aimed at helping people refer to each other respectfully in group settings is one small part of this work. I do not agree that it is more harmful than beneficial, or that it has run its course and can be discarded.

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“Having a Cause” versus Living in a Life Centered in Radical Transformation

Today is a horrifying holiday dedicated to false narratives that attempt to cover over colonialism and genocide, and also a day when many people make an effort to “give back” by volunteering somewhere. Images of friendly upper class people volunteering at soup kitchens to feed homeless people articulate charity narratives that hide the actual causes and consequences of wealth and poverty.

By Roger Peet, available at justseeds.org

I am sensing, all around me these days, how desperately frustrated, scared, and angry many people are about what is going on in the world around us–climate change, war-induced famine in Yemen, imprisoned children and parents at our borders and across the land, Amazon’s takeover of our food systems and cities, superstorms and disastrous fires, and so much more. I think a lot of people are wishing they knew more about how to plug in to processes of change they can believe in. I am frustrated watching misunderstandings about what change is and how it happens (“Care about poor people? Just volunteer in a soup kitchen once a year!”) circulate widely. I think their circulation is designed to demobilize us and keep us from participating in effective strategies to build the social conditions we want and need. So here is a very rough draft of a chart and some writing about the difference between “having a cause” as it is commonly described (or worse yet, the careerist version, “social justice entrepreneurship”), and living a life focused on our commitments to radical transformation. I hope it helps us imagine more creative, robust ways of being engaged with each other and the conditions we live in as we participate in resistance and transformation.

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How Should We Respond to the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Trans People?

For me, the conversation about the leaked Health and Human Services memo indicating the Administration’s plans to deploy an anti-trans definition of gender across several federal agencies exposes key misunderstandings about trans people, legal systems, and resistance. If you’re interested in my take, you can listen to my interview on the Citations Needed podcast, or read the op-ed I published in Truthout the day after the memo was leaked, which is below. I also want to highly recommend this article by Christoph Hanssmann which helps put the idea of genetically testing gender into perspective, and this article by Gabriel Arkles that argues that anti-trans attacks also harm non-trans women and LGBQ people and knocks down religious liberty justifications for anti-trans reforms. Continue reading “How Should We Respond to the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Trans People?”