chewed up by the machine

Laverne Cox is going to be in a CBS pilot. Glee has gathered a goddamn 200-person all-trans choir. The BBC is making a transgender sitcom.

I'm mourning, and I'm goddamn furious.

Look, I love TV, probably more than anyone I know. I watch a ton of it, I write about it, I constantly agitate for more minority representation. I'm in no way saying that having more trans people on TV is in itself a bad thing (though God knows bumping a trans women of color in favor of a white trans guy reflects real life so perfectly that, on a decent show, I'd think it was a brilliant piece of meta-commentary).

But it's a bitter, bitter pill to be expected to rejoice, to cheer how far we've come, to grovel in thanks at the feet of TV execs who want to cash in on the current high visibility of trans people – to see all of this fanfare happening among the so-called LGB(T) community, while women are being murdered.

Trans women, mostly trans women of color, are being fucking murdered. Two hundred trans folks making jazz hands about how far we've come doesn't address their murders. If anything, it obscures that reality by focussing attention on an all-singing, all-dancing celebration of assimilation into the capitalist mainstream.

So far, a trans woman or gender non-conforming person of color has been murdered in the United States every week of 2015. This week, the horrifying trend continued when 21-year-old Black trans woman Penny Proud of New Orleans was shot multiple times early in the morning of February 10. She joins fellow trans women of color Yazmin Vash Payne, Ty Underwood, Lamia Beard and Taja DeJesus and gender non-conforming person of color Lamar Edwards, all of whom were under the age of 35.

Assimilation always leaves a remainder, and the remainder must be dealt with. Trans people aren't being welcomed aboard the shiny happy American Dream, even if it looks that way to those of us at the top of society's transgender league tables. We're being consumed by the machinery of imperialist, white-supremacist, heteropatriarchial neoliberal capitalism. If we're deemed the good ones, we slide willingly down its gullet, clapping along with a show choir as we fuel its ongoing machinations. Otherwise, we're chewed up and our mangled bodies are spat out to bleed to death in an alley.

(And I say "we" and "our" in that last sentence not to appropriate the struggle – since people like me, the white socioeconomically-privileged trans guys, are not the ones dying – but as a deliberate gesture of solidarity with my sisters.)

Nowhere is the operation of the machine of death clearer to me than in last week's appointment of a State Department envoy for LGBT rights around the globe, enshrining a supposed concern for LGBT people in US foreign policy.

“While there is currently strong momentum in the United States toward equality, there are many places in the world where the LGBT community is at risk, sometimes even for their lives,” added Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin in a press release. “This is an important way for the United States to facilitate diplomatic conversations with countries where we see ongoing violence, harassment and discrimination of LGBT people.”

Look at that phrasing, that eye-gougingly disingenuous phrasing designed to set up the US in opposition to "places in the world where the LGBT community is at risk," as if this is not one of the "countries where we see ongoing violence, harassment and discrimination of LGBT people." As if our very right to exist in public spaces isn't currently being legislated against right here. As if trans panic defense isn't still legal in 49 states of the union.

As if this is about human rights, as if this is about caring about LGBT people, and not just another excuse for neoimperialism. As if any of this means something, and isn't just about placating public outcry in the emptiest, most breathtakingly cynical way possible.

Women are being murdered. I'll join the party when that stops.

There's No Crying At Disneyland

“Disneyland [is] an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.”

– Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations

“There's no crying at Disneyland!”

– Parent/guardian to grizzling toddler in a Disneyland restroom, last Wednesday

I went to Disneyland this week, and I spent the whole time thinking about Baudrillard and marveling at the astonishing racism on display – thoughts that coalesced into a slight obsession with the question: Why do we go to Disneyland?

Baudrillard fingers Disneyland as the quintessential iteration of the simulacrum and the hyperreal: the artificial representation of reality that becomes more real than the real, to the point that reality as such no longer exists. (I had my most dizzyingly simulacrumtastic moment on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when it occurred to me that I was on a ride based on a movie BASED ON THIS SAME RIDE.) We all know going in that Disneyland is thoroughly artificial, and from this knowledge we (falsely) extrapolate the converse: that what is not Disneyland is not artificial; that reality exists. Is that why we go to Disneyland? For reassurance, however false it may be, that reality is real? But if we know that this reassurance is false, why do we still go there?

Maybe I read too many dystopian novels as a child, but I find something profoundly creepy in the enforced cheerfulness of Disneyland. Enforced cheerfulness is sinister enough when it's enforced in pursuit of explicitly spiritual aims, but when it's undertaken on a massive scale for the sake of commodification, commercialization, and unchecked consumerism, it's flat-out sickening. It's sickening because it tells us to suppress our awareness of the exploitation and oppression that undergirds the Disney-industrial complex. “Don't think about sweatshops and pollution and racism,” it says; “you're in the most magical place on earth!”

How one could fail to think about the racism, at least, is beyond me. The Jungle Cruise is one of the most astonishingly racist things I have ever experienced (and I grew up in a more or less neo-colonialist environment in East Africa). The official website proudly describes it thus:

“Depart civilization from a forgotten Victorian loading dock. Crossing continents and oceans, you'll explore exciting rivers around the world — including the Amazon of South America, the Nile of Africa, the Irrawaddy of Southeast Asia and the Ganges of India.”

Cringing yet? There's the conflation of, like, all of Asia and all of Africa in some textbook-Orientalist mashup of ~the exotic~; there's the framing of the West as “civilization”, in implied opposition to the primitive/barbarian/uncultured/wild; there are some truly horrible (neo-colonialist) stereotypical representations of ~the natives~ (including some Unfortunate Implications so breathtaking, I'm flabbergasted no one involved in the design and creation of the ride noticed them). I mean, it's not as though I was unaware of Disney's slight racism problem; but, because most of the really blatant racism has been whitewashed out of Disneyland (which in itself is not unproblematic), the massive unconcealed racefail of the Jungle Cruise was particularly appalling to me.

And yet it's Small World that really encapsulates the Disney ethos, in all its (utterly clueless) obscenity. Once I'd gotten past the giggle fit induced by noting certain similarities, I realized that, at its core, the message of Disney is really: “Diversity lies in the external trappings, beneath which we are all as one [in our relentless desire to purchase Disney products].” That, I think, is the great philosophico-cultural lie of our time – that diversity is skin-deep, and underneath we're all the same. It's not that we don't all share a certain fundamental humanness – to deny that is just as bad – but to insist on (and commodify) the sameness is to reduce the differences, to fail to respect alterity, and ultimately to perpetuate the power differentials of the status quo. It's nothing more than a salve for the oppressor's conscience, a way of empathizing with others just enough so that we can kid ourselves the world isn't in need of radical change.

I'm not convinced that the simulacrum always and necessarily has to function this way, to make perpetuating oppression palatable to the oppressor's conscience. Even if it does, I believe that it is possible to deconstruct it and be aware of what's going on; but that involves always being on your guard, always fighting it. And is your resistance meaningful if it's only ideological? I gave Disney my money. I showed up. Does it matter that I spent the whole day thinking critically about the many awful things going on, if financially and physically I supported them?

This continued failure to put my money where my mouth is – is this just the kind of acceptable compromise with the kyriarchy that we all have to make all the time because we live here, or is it straight-up hypocrisy? Consuming stuff critically is better than consuming it uncritically, but either way I'm consuming, consuming, consuming. And perhaps I go to Disneyland to seek what I know to be a false reassurance that this is okay, because otherwise I couldn't live with myself.

That's The Thing About Living In A Capitalist Kyriarchy

You have to participate.

Unless you're one of the lucky few with the ability and the spoons to opt out entirely (and probably even if you are; I've not visited any self-sufficient, totally egalitarian collectivist communes lately), you're not only psychologically tainted by the bullshit kyriarchal norms into which the culture has been indoctrinating you from the moment you left the womb/test-tube/mothership [delete as appropriate]; you also have to actively participate in oppressive systems. By which I mean, you need food and shelter and healthcare and entertainment; for which you need money; for which you need a job.

More and more, I'm convinced that capitalism as we know it is fundamentally not an okay system, and it's not just 'cause I'm lazy. (I am, but I have ideological objections too.) I'm still in the (probably lifelong) process of forming my exact political beliefs, so I'm not yet sure whether my objection is to capitalism as currently implemented – the “it's a good theory, but doesn't work in practice” line so often applied by left-leaning moderates to communism – or (hello, Karl) to the very theory and idea of capitalism itself. At this end, I suppose it doesn't matter terribly: either way, I'm compelled to participate in and contribute to a system I think is profoundly wrong.

What I want to do is establish a coherent ideology for myself, and seek ways to enact that ideology in the world. (Isn't that what we all want?) In order to do that, I'm going to grad school, which means I'm participating in and shoring up a classist and discriminatory system. (By “discriminatory”, of course, I don't mean the practice of discriminating between those with the aptitude for graduate study and those without; I mean the complex network of socioeconomic circumstances that contrive to deny aptitude its fulfilment.) In order to go to grad school, I need to save money, which is why I currently have a job.

Don't get me wrong: I quite like my job. I know, it weirds me out too, especially since my first experience working in the world of customer service was so completely disgusting – but that's a story for another day. My current job is pretty decent; but sometimes my ideals are clashing headlong with the requirements of my job.

I want to call out my 70-year-old coworker, of whom everyone – managers included – is a little afraid, when she's being racist. But I don't. I want to beg everyone that asks for a ticket to The Hangover Part II to reconsider this disastrous life choice and instead see a movie that isn't quite such a hatefully offensive piece of garbage. But I don't. I want to give servicemen and -women the same discount we give students, because having a student discount but no military discount strikes me as classist. But I don't. I need to keep this job, and I need a good reference when I leave, so I keep my mouth shut, I don't rock the boat, and I betray my beliefs so that I can continue to participate in a system that is also against my beliefs.

Is it craven? Undoubtedly. Is it pragmatic? Absolutely. It's compromise; it's jumping through hoops; it's a deal with the devil.

It's living in a capitalist kyriarchy. It's how it works.