RSS Feed

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Marriage is not Equality: Thoughts on #MarRef from a worried radical queer

Posted on May 21, 2015 by AB Silvera

This article is based heavily on the script for the 15/05/15 episode of my radio show, 30 km/s, which airs live online every 2 weeks on www.subcity.org

I also recommend reading this compilation of writings put out by Aidan Rowe, one of the many people in Ireland eloquently providing a radical critique of the very concept of marriage equality, as well as other real problems with the Referendum campaign, from an anarchist-queer perspective.

It’s been with interest and trepidation that I’ve been observing the campaign for the Marriage Referendum from afar, desperately wanting to be there. Between the overt homophobic abuse spouted by the ‘No’ campaign and the rather horrid effect of single-issue liberal politics and policing of identity from the mainstream, acceptable parts of the so-called ‘Gay’ community, I’ve felt quite homesick for Dublin, where I lived for 11 years.

While I’ve resided in Glasgow for the past couple of years, I came out as a trans woman and a lesbian, and began transitioning, in Ireland. I was heavily involved in the LGBTQ community/ies, both with the mainstream and the more radical elements. I’ve been a member of numerous LGBTQ organisations, such as TENI, and the late Queer Spraoi and PinC, and was the content editor for the defunct BoLT magazine, a magazine by and for LGBTQ women and trans people of all genders. I am still a strong part of the community with numerous bonds of friendship and solidarity with my LGBTQ friends living there, and I try to make it over at least a few times a year (especially for my fave Pride festival, Northwest Pride, when I can manage it!).

However, I feel the referendum has brought out some of the worst aspects of Irish society, both the homophobic, bigoted, misogynistic right-wing elements (church-led and otherwise) as well as the assimilationist, clean-cut ‘we are just like you’ part of the gay community, which seems more focused on adapting to a cishet norm than actually fighting for queers in the streets. To the extent of advising people to call the police on LGBTQ people who take down and vandalise the homophobic posters put up by the No campaign.

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re in Ireland, do I think you should vote yes, no, or abstain?

Vote yes. Clearly. Obviously.

Voting no is simply objectionable. Voting yes grants LGBTQ people rights that we should already have. If you’re a particularly politically minded LGBTQ person, abstaining should not be an option, considering the rather ghastly politics that make up the No side, from the homophobic and misogynistic Iona Institute to other typical right-wing, antifeminist elements in Irish society. And for many people, the rights granted are crucial and life saving: Adoption, citizenship, visitation rights in hospital, etcetera are all sorely needed. The state declaring that same-sex relationships are equal in the eyes of the law can have a strong effect on other parts of society as well.

Are we cool on that? Because from this point on, things get complicated.

Let’s start with the institution of marriage. If you’re in love, committing to someone for life, if that’s what you’re both into, that’s rad! Go ahead and do it, more power to you. But why do we need the state to get involved?

On a practical level, the issues around rights I’ve highlighted above are an obvious answer. But I ask you to take a step back and ask yourself: Why does citizenship depend on marriage? The fact of the matter is, historically, the state are heavily invested in regulating who comes and goes from their countries, and how family units are organised -a cursory look at the last 30 years of Irish history is proof of this. At different points in history, states will encourage immigration or discourage it through policies as well as promoting xenophobia, like we have seen in recent years. So I pose another question: why are our rights limited by whether or not we get access to a specific state-sanctioned form of relationship? What if we need those rights but we do not want the state involved in our affairs? What about the other things we have a right to but are often marginalised in? Housing and homelessness, unemployment, poverty, which studies in Ireland, the United States and UK show LGBTQ people overrepresented in those categories in proportion to the general population? Not to mention many other areas of discrimination in every day life I couldn’t hope to cover. Check out the following studies and reports that show marriage isn’t the only, or even the central, issue:

Ireland

List of publications by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (I couldn’t link just one they’re all bloody important)

United States

Injustice at Every Turn – A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey

New Patterns of Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community

UK

An Examination of Poverty and Sexual Orientation in the UK

Debunking the ‘Pink Pound’ – LGBT Poverty and Place in Scotland

One answer is that marriage equality is something that is achievable within our lifetime. All of your radical ideas about no borders, abolishing capitalism, etcetera, are all well and good, but they are unrealistic and impossible to achieve, the argument goes.

But let me ask you: would we have gotten to where we are now in terms of achieving same-sex marriage in many countries, if people had not fought for that specifically? The interesting thing is that back in the late 60s, when queens and dykes and faggots were being beaten up by police in New York, incarcerated and abused in my native Argentina, when the revolutionary voices of Stonewall and so many other places rose up, were they calling for a seat at the table of mainstream acceptability? Were they asking for marriage equality?

No. They were saying the table rests on the back of people like us. the poor. the disabled. the ones who are not acceptable faces of a marriage campaign. The migrants, the sex workers, the people of colour, the people with mental health issues and physical disabilities. Not to mention the majority of people who live in poverty. In the face of this, Gay Liberation was a call to arms for us who were considered deviant by society due to breaking gender and sexual norms, for us to reform society from the ground up for a radical concept of equality. Not equality based on a single law, a single yes or no question, but rather on true equality for all.

My problem isn’t with marriage per se, but marriage does not exist in a vacuum. The fact is that same-sex marriage will change absolutely nothing for 99% of queers I know. I accept that is a biased sample, but most of the LGBTQ people I know fall under one of the many following categories: Disabled with either physical or mental disabilities; people of colour; survivors of abuse; migrants; with experience of homelessness; sex workers.

What does marriage do for us? We are poor. We are kicked out of welfare systems designed to keep us in poverty. Trans people are frequently targeted to be kicked out of social welfare system due to conflicting documentation.

We have an asylum system in both the UK and Ireland that is despicable in its utter dehumanisation of people. And if you add to that the extra scrutiny afforded to LGBTQ asylum seekers, the picture is grim.

Sex workers struggle with the violence of a state that will deny the right of vulnerable people to try to make a living, often in really difficult situations.

Racism in Ireland and the UK is an everyday occurrence, as is xenophobia, ableism, misogyny.

And let us not forget the elephant in the room: how marriage equality does nothing for those members of the LGBTQ community that need an abortion and are not able to get one in Ireland.

We can’t address all of those issues at once, of course. But is ticking ‘yes’ on a box all we can really do? Is our political imagination so constrained? Why must we accept reducing everything we are and all we live and suffer through to whether this referendum passes?

Here’s where the rub comes in for me: the famous saying that a society or community can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. Let’s not kid ourselves: the Irish LGBTQ community as a whole has an appalling record in this regard. Racism, misogyny, ableism, and even transphobia have been rampant and unchecked for a long time within it, and not enough has been done to fight this. The mainstream LGBTQ community does precious little work for asylum seekers and people of colour. There’s virtually no campaigning around LGBTQ people with disabilities and/or in poverty.

So, with all of these issues, I have more questions to ask: Why are we campaigning for marriage now, instead of working to help the vulnerable sectors of the LGBTQ community in Ireland? Where is the money coming from for all the signs, vans, etcetera? And after the referendum, if it’s a Yes, where will all that money, energy, door-to-door canvassing, go to? If Ireland follows precedent, all that political mobilisation will vanish overnight. If we’re lucky, it will help mobilise for gender recognition for trans people as it did in Argentina, but even that will not fix all the other problems I’ve mentioned.

The fact of the matter is that marriage, in general, is a reform that is easy to attain and does not disturb the capitalist, patriarchal status quo. Marriage has always been, from the point of view of the state, about organising workers and property, determining who lives where and how. It is not a revolutionary institution and it will not bring about the change the most vulnerable LGBTQ people in Ireland sorely need.

Will the money and huge organising energy from the Yes campaign go to campaigns to abolish the direct provision system? Will money be raised by the big orgs to help out LGBTQ asylum seekers? What about campaigns to help improve the standard of living in local communities?

Ireland has a chance in this regard, because in all other countries, once they got what they wanted, these campaigns disbanded. They didn’t mobilise the LGBTQ communities over which they have so much sway to fight poverty, police violence, or for the decriminalisation of sex work. The system of global capital will still stand. Will the Yes campaigners stand with us?

7 Comments

Posted in Equality, Politics, queer and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

An open letter to Tom Meagher, from St Kilda street-based sex workers

Posted on May 16, 2015 by feministire

In September 2012, Jill Meagher was abducted and murdered as she walked home on the streets of Melbourne, Australia. It later emerged that her killer had been released on parole after attacking a number of other women, some of them street-based sex workers in the St Kilda area of Melbourne. Jill’s husband Tom has now joined a campaign in Ireland to criminalise sex workers’ clients. Here, St Kilda street workers share their views on his participation in that campaign.

Dear Tom Meagher,

As street based sex workers from St Kilda we have come together to urge you to reconsider your position endorsing the campaign “We Don’t Buy It” and to share with you some of the implications it has for us as sex workers.

All of us have different experiences in our lives including our experiences of work.

One commonality we share as street based sex workers in St Kilda is being subject to laws and policing operations that target us and our clients. And this really makes it harder for us to best look after our safety. One thing we thought we shared with you is an understanding of our justice system, and the way it discriminates against sex workers. For us it is more of an injustice system, and as you pointed out so well, this tragically not only affects us, but our whole society. To report crimes committed against us we risk being charged ourselves and being known to police for further profiling and harassment. Even if we take on this risk and report crimes we know it’s unlikely our cases will be treated fairly and with the same seriousness they would be if we were not a sex worker.

It was such a powerful and meaningful moment when you also recognised the injustice sex workers receive in our legal system, and what this means for our society. So in seeing your passion for justice and respect be given to all, including sex workers, co-opted into a campaign which does just the opposite of this is hugely disappointing and upsetting. We decided to write this letter to you because we want you to be able to support us and our safety. We aim to have you see things through our eyes. It’s imperative that everyone understands what we need and what we don’t need, because too often others talk for us and they get it wrong. We want to be safe in our work place and we want to stop violence against sex workers and to stop men’s violence against women. We have attended rallies representing women who we knew personally that have been verbally, physically or financially abused, hurt very badly or even killed while offering paid services in St Kilda Victoria.

Any campaign which calls to end sex work or stigmatises our clients ends up further stigmatising and dehumanising us as well, and ultimately serves to take away our agency and increases violence towards us. Sex work itself is not inherently violent or exploitative or dangerous. But the laws and social attitudes and stigma around sex work as a whole has an impact on our ability to look after our safety. Maybe it can seem confusing, feminists are often saying all kinds of things and it is important men listen to women when it comes to ending violence against women. But unfortunately not all women listen to sex workers, or some only listen to some of us, and only when we say what they want us to.

“We Don’t Buy It” has argued that paying a sex worker means paying for “temporary suspension of [her] desire not to consent and that’s coercion.” For this to be selectively applied to sex work and not other industries is problematic for us especially when sex workers already experience high levels of patronisation, including assumptions that we are not capable of making our own decisions. Arguing that paying someone equals coercion could be said about any worker under capitalism if you wish to term it that way. Would office workers really turn up 9 to 5, 5 days a week and do overtime if there was no incentive for it and no consequence if they instead spent their days with their family, their lover, or doing whatever they felt like? Probably not, yet the question is selectively and repeatedly asked of sex workers. The implication is that we are being specially exploited if we wouldn’t do our job for free.

Exploitation (for example being forced to do something we do not consent to) is very different, and it is not something that should be conflated with any work.

The problem with targeting clients in all of this is that clients are not the problem. By virtue of being a client, they must agree to paying the price mutually agreed upon for the services we wish to offer. No matter if its sex work or any other job, paying a person should never mean you have “bought” them or can do whatever you want with them, that would be violence and/exploitation, not work.

One big problem we face working in St Kilda is that our clients are targeted by police, and the conversations between sex workers and our clients are criminalised. This means it’s harder to negotiate, it’s harder for us to be upfront and check with each other if we are happy to do a business deal, or if it’s not actually a client, but rather someone who may be disrespectful or violent. This is not helped by campaigns which tell us that sex workers are “prostituted women” who don’t have any ability to properly consent anyway.

It also doesn’t help us to campaign for men to stop buying our services. Sex Work is our livelihood, it’s how we make our money and support ourselves. Some feminists claim that shifting the focus on to stopping men buying sex is the way forward, but people need to consider how that pans out in reality. Our colleagues in Sweden have clearly explained to us what happens when the police focus “only” on stopping the client. As one sex worker explained to us “how do you think they find the client? the

police don’t follow a man around, waiting for that moment he might buy sex, no they follow the sex worker, camp outside the sex worker’s house, knock down the sex worker’s door.” Sex workers working in St Kilda already work under laws similar to the Swedish laws, our clients are already criminalised and harassed and we have been vocal about their negative effects for years. Bringing the “Swedish Model” to Victoria would only potentially serve to increase our chances of losing our homes and further isolate us from our peers and other support systems. In contrast, full decriminalisation would enable us to use the safety mechanisms which are criminalised and attract police harassment under our current laws and the Swedish model.

Decriminalisation is the only legal model that would also meaningfully reduce some of the barriers in reporting to police when we are victims of crime.

Whilst it is important for men to ally with feminists to achieve gender equality, it is important that the groups of women who are supposedly being campaigned for are consulted with about what we need to stay safe. In this case, as street based sex workers, we want to make it clear to you: this is not what anti-sex work groups such as the Reach Project in Ireland or Project Respect in Victoria are campaigning for. For street workers in St Kilda to be safe, we need to live free from stigma and criminalisation based on what we do for a living. This means recognising sex work as work, and it means full decriminalisation of sex work, our clients, our workplaces. We want to be seen as equal and not seen as an easy, stigmatised target that will not be taken seriously. For this to happen we need to be treated fairly and with respect, not only in the courts, but also when it comes to campaigns and policies that are about us.

Please stand with us for our right to health and safety.

Halo, current St Kilda street based sex worker

Rory, current St Kilda street based sex worker

Skout, current St Kilda street based sex worker

Holly, current St Kilda street based sex worker

Signed in support:

Ruby Soho, current sex worker/former St Kilda street based sex worker

Dee, former St Kilda street based sex worker

Veronica Hum, current sex worker/former St Kilda street based sex worker

Christian, current sex worker/former St Kilda street based sex worker

Pj, former St Kilda street based sex worker

Rahni Belle, current sex worker/former St Kilda street based sex worker

197 Comments

Posted in Sex work, Violence against women and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Mayweather v Pacquiao: Don’t Watch the Fight

Posted on May 2, 2015 by feministire

Guest post: The author of this piece has chosen to duck SEO. She doesn’t mind if you know who she is, but please show the respect of not including her name, tagging her, or leaving comments that identify her by name. You are free to post this on your own blog or website, provided that you don’t change anything, or identify any of the individuals in it who have not already been named. If you get a lot of traffic from it, do please make a donation to the local women’s charity of your choice.

Yesterday I learned what a ‘rabbit punch’ is. In case you didn’t know, it’s a punch to the base of the skull, and is banned in the sport of professional boxing because it can cause spinal damage. Since most instances of punching someone in the head are illegal, it’s pretty much a no-no generally, but it’s also what Floyd Mayweather did to at least one of his former girlfriends. Or, well, allegedly did, since there are ‘no pictures’.

I also know what a rabbit punch feels like, and unlike Mayweather’s ex, I do have pictures. But you’re not going to get them. You’re not even going to get my name, not because you can’t easily figure out who I am, but because of the impact of SEO on my career, and how badly it’s been damaged by outing myself in the past.

It was, weirdly, three years to the date of this fight, and I’m only now starting to reclaim the first page of my search results for things other than what happened to me. Like it or not, people do think less of you once you’ve taken a few nonconsensual punches to the skull.

But also because if you need photographic evidence, or if you need the kind of evidence that’s needed to secure a criminal conviction that actually sticks, you’ll never grasp the size, scale, and depth of the problem of violence against women.

So, no pictures.

Yesterday I also found myself in a conversation on my friend and editor’s Facebook wall. My friend had written a piece about not giving Mayweather your money, and some complete tool argued that Mayweather has ‘served his time’ and that it’s a problem with the justice system, and not much concern to fans of professional sports. That, in fact, as a sports fan, he would be a hypocrite if he didn’t watch the fight. After all, if we held every man in sports accountable for every incident of violence against women, wouldn’t we run out of sports to watch? I told him I hope he gets his free will back.

But in a way, that guy was right. If you actually held every man in the world accountable for his violence against women, what would actually happen? We know that the extreme cases are just the tip of a very ugly patriarchal violence iceberg, which means that the stability of the world we live in relies in part on minimizing, denying, and enabling violence against women.

So what happens if you watch the fight, even if you don’t pay for it? Nothing. Mayweather gets richer, thinkpieces get written, and people call for radical action while others lash out at them for dragging us into some kind of PC nightmarehole where it’s Godwin’s Law everywhere you look. What happens if you watch the fight, even pay for it? The same thing.

What’s the point of not watching?

The point is what you do to make the world less of a misogynist shithole when nobody is looking, when there are no prizes. Because violence against women, the worst of it, the things that lay the conditions for it, those all happen when nobody is looking.

Sometimes radical actions are needed to draw attention, but real change is a new set of habits, a whole new pathway that lays out a very different outcome, both for women who are victims of violence, and the men who commit it. It’s in deleting someone’s phone number because he hit his girlfriend. It’s in not inviting a rapist to a party. It’s in choosing the respect for and humanity of victims, and of all women — not just the immediate safety — over the comfort of men who may or may not be remorseful or reformed. It’s in challenging male entitlement and patriarchal violence and in listening to women when they say ‘no’.

My ex received a two-and-a-half-year sentence for one of his assaults on me. His sentence was suspended entirely, and is up officially in less than two weeks. I guess you could argue that he ‘served his time’, despite never serving more than a few hours in a cell at our local police station.

Since there is no crime called ‘domestic violence’ in the place this all happened, each assault is treated individually. This meant that on the day of his sentencing, I wasn’t allowed to talk about how he hounded me while I was pregnant until I was suicidal, then told everyone he knew that I was threatening to kill our baby. I wasn’t allowed to talk about how he refused to call me an ambulance when my miscarriage turned dangerous, how he opened the door to a charity canvasser and stood there talking to him for 45 minutes while I tried to convince him I needed a doctor. (I eventually got one, and in retrospect, the hospital should have done a little more digging around instead of letting me leave with him the next day.)

I wasn’t allowed to talk about how he put his hands around my neck two days after I lost the baby. I wasn’t allowed to talk about the times he smacked me, punched me, told the neighbours I made him do it because, legally speaking, none of those things had anything to do with the one and only thing he was being sentenced for. I wasn’t even supposed to say very much about the actual incident because anything I said could be used by his defense barrister as a segue to talking about what a terrible person I was.

When you push a violent man’s actions back onto the legal system, you’re also pushing it back into a context where there really is no way, legally speaking, to acknowledge the depth, breadth, and absolute terror that comes with living in these kinds of conditions. The things that become normal would horrify you, and you would ask why I didn’t just go to the police, despite the fact that I did, and that, legally speaking, there wasn’t a whole lot they could — or were willing to — do.

There is, legally speaking, no comprehensive or holistic way to account for the realities of domestic violence in the legal system, partly because it’s a problem of an abusive dynamic that often has nothing to do with the law, which means it’s also a social problem, a public health crisis, and a totally preventable epidemic.

Three years ago, after my rabbit punches, the black eyes, and the permanent marks he left on my face, I was laying on a trolley instead of the slab it could have been, getting spinal x-rays and bleeding all over myself. I guess he’ll have, like Mayweather, done his time, and he’ll always have his version, where I made him do it. He’ll always have people who excuse him and believe him, and I’ll always have this scar on my face and this PTSD that fucks my life up.

But legally speaking, there isn’t much left to be done. So, now what?

Try not watching the Mayweather fight, not as something you do in isolation, but as one step of many present and future occasions where you build small habits into your life that make it harder for men to be rewarded for violence against women. Make it such a regular habit not to enable, deny, rationalize or minimize the impact that male entitlement and patriarchal violence have on the wider world that dropping your habitual actions into conversation would be like telling people how often you pee or brush your teeth or pick your toes.

Make it as boring and unremarkable as anything you do when nobody’s looking.

6 Comments

Posted in Equality, feminism, Violence against women and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.