07/02/2012

On Persecution Complexes and Rage

Posted by dentedbluemercedes

The interplay of rage and persecution complexes works to shape trans,
LGB — and in fact all — struggles against oppression.  It can become
an eternal feedback loop that can stymie any attempt to move
progressive causes forward, if it succeeds in establishing its
circuitous pattern.

This translates to many struggles, so I’m going to speak generally and
with varied examples — but I’m reminded of this most recently by the
claims of persecution over a confrontation that happened at the New
York dyke march, by Cathy Brennan, so will probably focus there most
frequently.

(Oh dear god, I invoked the name. Now here come the bajillion bloody
emails and the character assassination — it’s like goddamn
Beetlejuice.)

Because I’ll be talking in generalities, I’ll be using terms like
“oppressor / oppressed.” And because privilege is relative, and we all
have some form of it or another relative to someone else, there are
times when just about any group takes on the role of the oppressor —
ourselves included.  So if I jump around a bit, you’ll need to bear
with me.  The principle is what I’m focusing on, moreso than the many
players.  Rather than participate in the game, I’d rather dismantle
it.  Break the cycle, not perpetuate it.

Probably the most obvious model of how the persecution and rage cycle
happens is with the far right’s characterization of anything that
benefits LGBT people, women, science, atheism and just about anything
outside of fundamentalist interpretations of church doctrine
<http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/supreme-court-says-quebec-ethics-cou...>
as “anti-Christian persecution.”  As such, I want to preface this with
a clear statement.  My quarrel is with narrow branches of ideology
that seek to marginalize trans, LGB and any other class of people,
regardless of the excuse given.  My quarrel is not with Christianity,
and I acknowledge the affirming people of faith
<http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/in-defense-of-affi...>
, who give me hope.  My quarrel is also not with feminism, a movement
which I am very much in solidarity with and believe in.  Faith and
feminism are both often co-opted by narrow-thinking bigots who use
them to spin excuses for prejudice at the best of times, and in their
darker moments exploit them as shields for sympathy and to cry
persecution in a way that they hope will convince onlookers that
they’re the real wronged party.  In the end, Christianity and womens’
rights movements are victims of these ideologues as well — albeit less
obviously.

The persecution complex is a tactic used by oppressor classes —
sometimes fully believing their own jargon — to try to keep the right
to oppress. In some cases, those classes have experienced oppression,
and view that as a license to pass it on.

As minorities gain rights and power, of course, advantaged people
perceive that as a loss of power and interpret it as
counter-oppression.  This results in cries of reverse discrimination,
especially in the face of prescriptive remedies (i.e. legal remedies
ranging from equal rights laws to affirmative action policies), which
can be rightly criticized for not dealing with prejudice in the hearts
and minds of people, but at the same time are among the few early
remedies available to a minority.  As “reverse discrimination” becomes
an effective rallying cry, it encourages the advantaged to redouble
their efforts to use the many techniques that are used to keep
oppressive hegemony in place, which include — but are certainly not
limited to — these:

    • Demonize the oppressed.  Although these don’t necessarily happen
in a chronological sequence, this is usually the earliest tactic
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFSCPTZLxGs> .
    • Invalidate the oppressed.  “The oppression isn’t really
oppression, because the oppressed person isn’t worthy of being thought
of as one of us, anyway.”  The whole “people choose to be gay” meme is
a resurgent technique used to invalidate people, which overlooks
several facts, including that it shouldn’t matter whether one’s life
is a choice if it is lived ethically and responsibly.  It’s because
choice fails as an invalidation technique that the far right has now
shifted toward inventing think tanks and studies funded in stealth, to
manufacture apparent “evidence” of unethicality and irresponsibility,
while hiding the ideological bias of the studies.
    • Spin the oppressed person’s objections to your oppressive
actions as attacking your ideology and everybody who subscribes to the
most general form of it.  “See?  They’re being anti-Christian /
anti-Feminist.”  No, Cathy Brennan, sometimes, it’s just you.
    • Blame the oppressed.  “Well if the oppressed didn’t draw
attention to themselves and behave in a way that makes them different
from everyone else, they wouldn’t be oppressed.  If the oppressed
chooses to be different, it’s their own fault.”
    • Overplay the oppressed person’s power and status.  If it works
for the poor helpless oil industry against mean, powerful and
well-funded environmentalists
<http://ezralevant.com/2012/05/foreign-funded-environmentalis.html> ,
it can surely work for RadFem individuals who insinuate that when we
transition to female, we still somehow maintain some sort of male
privilege, or unfairly benefit from having once experienced it.
    • Being human, the oppressed will sometimes resort to brainfart
arguments.  Exploit that.  For example, are we really arguing that if
someone is not sexually attracted to a woman with a penis, then
they’re automatically transphobic?  I get the cotton ceiling
discussion, but when we tread here, we’ve slipped off the path.
    • Spin the oppression.  “It’s not segregation, it’s tradition
<http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2012/07/01/race-and-uncomfortab...>
.”
    • Deflect from the oppressed to one’s own victimhood elsewhere.
This is unique to horizontal violence (i.e. it’s something that can’t
be effectively parlayed by affluent white males), where one can point
to their own membership in an oppressed class as though it’s evidence
that they would never truly oppress another if it weren’t warranted,
or invoke the Oppression Olympics mindset of “who is the highest
priority” to claim that the oppressed is less deserving of empathy, or
that experiencing greater oppression excuses oppressive behaviour.
This is especially effective when the oppressor’s minority is larger
and characteristic in question involves some very real oppressions
faced.  Given the way that we prioritize our activism (rather than
keeping our eyes on the prize of ending all oppression), the impulse
to dismiss the “lesser” victim without scrutinizing the conflict
further can be seductive to left-wingers and centrists who might
otherwise be potential allies.
    • Create a false equivalence, by claiming that giving equal power
to a minority takes away from your rights and freedoms (a.k.a. your
power to oppress).  This is the whole gay rights versus Christian
conscience argument, right there.
    • Discredit the oppressed by accusing them of mischaracterizing
your position — which becomes especially easy to do when you yourself
characterize it differently, depending on who you’re speaking to,
sometimes with carefully coded phrasing to make it appear that there
is no contradiction (i.e. “I respect trans women as women,” and
“Females have a right to be free of Males if they so choose. Trans
women are male <http://bugbrennan.com/2012/05/01/follow-me-on-tumblr/#comment-891>
.”)
    • Co-opt the oppressed by holding them up as a victim of
oppression, but frame the oppression in your terms, rather than the
victim’s.  We saw this most recently in Ugandans’ reactions
<http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/15/watch-northern-ugandans-puzzled-a...>
 to the infamous Kony 2012 video, but surfaces in just about any
patriarchal instance in which external leaders know better than the
oppressed how to fix the oppression, whether the conflict is about
burqas <http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/father-knows-best-...>
 or deciding who (trans women, trans men, genderqueer people,
academics, the lesbian and gay establishment, medical professionals,
cis media, pretty people, RuPaul) gets to speak for trans peoples.
    • Bait the oppressed into doing something that would appear to
validate your hypothesis.  “So, If You React to Feminists Like You are
“Mentally Ill,” Are We Supposed to Ignore that? Just Checking
<http://pretendbian.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/so-if-you-react-to-femini...>
.“

This is not a rulebook of techniques to use to get what we want, but a
means of recognizing them when they are used against us.  Again, our
goal should be ending oppression, not elevating ourselves at another’s
expense.

That last point about baiting is especially effective, because anger
is a natural human response to oppression, especially when there has
been constant, cumulative aggressions directed at a person.  It’s like
a cornered or injured being’s automatic impulse to lash out at anyone
that nears.  It’s like the spontaneous bursts of rage born of
post-traumatic stress (which minority stress is most likely a form of,
however characteristically different from the battlefield-induced
version it might be).  The initial shock of violence stuns a person
into silence and submission; cumulative violence eventually boils
over, causing one to lash out in violent ways.  This is what the 1%
owners of society hadn’t counted on
<http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X584219&site=dentedbluemercedes.wordp...>
, and now deal with by directing minorities against each other in the
form of anti-abortion legislation, campaigns against same-sex
marriage, fomenting of racial prejudice, invention of wild conspiracy
theories, dredging up long-obsolete controversies like birth control
and far more.

This doesn’t excuse what we sometimes do with that anger, though.
Violent rhetoric — not to mention actual violence — are not needed,
not helpful, not constructive, not effective and not appropriate.
There needs to be a separation between that rage and the immediate
reaction. Most times, what comes out of angry mouths is actually
posturing (I seriously doubt, for example, that a 17-year-old trans
teen <http://planetransgender.blogspot.ca/2012/06/cathey-brennan-laywer-mal...>
would jump through a monitor and across continents to actually lash
out), but that doesn’t really make threats of violence excusable
<http://www.transadvocate.com/violent-threats-follow-dyke-march.htm> ,
either.

And face it: when oppressors play the persecution card, anything that
could conceivably be twisted into oppression will be taken that way.
When I first responded to
<http://www.bilerico.com/2011/08/less_than_woman_less_than_human.php>
the Brennan-Hungerford letter to the United Nations Entity for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women (which claimed that extending
human rights protections to transsexed and transgendered individuals
would do harm to women by by eroding their rights), I understood that
rage sometimes causes oppressed peoples to act rashly, and made a
statement cautioning against reacting in anger and responding with
violent rhetoric.  Naturally, this was spun as encouraging violence
<http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/who-started-the-campaig...>
.  People with a persecution complex will always be capable of finding
something to exemplify victimhood, and are not going to engage in
rational dialogue.  What is important is to not provide actual
validation of persecution claims.  The last thing we need to do is to
undertake actual conflicts and be actually menacing.  It only appears
to validate the concept that we’re somehow a threat.  It plays right
into that whole game.

When oppressed peoples lash out at their oppressors in ways that
appear to validate the excuses given for that oppression, they
instinctively slip into the trap that keeps their movement stagnant,
wrapped up in circuitous patterns that stymie progress.  Like it or
not, it is up to us to break that cycle, by not playing into it.  When
the advantage is the oppressor’s, the status quo benefits them.
Therefore, only the marginalized can change it, and in the process
will have to rise to a higher standard.

When Barack Obama was elected President, Monica Roberts talked about
the challenges before him and why he will likely be held to a higher
standard <http://transgriot.blogspot.ca/2009/03/why-barack-obama-will-be-outsta...>
than Presidents before him
<http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm> :

    Over the last 400 years of African-descended people residing in
the Americas, ugly stereotypes have been created and propagated about
us that still persist to the present day. So in order to overcome the
stereotypes that we are less intelligent, lazy, unpatriotic (well you
get the drift), every African-American kid has had it drilled into us
by our parents and elders that because of America’s original (and
continuing) sin of racism, it would never be enough for us to just
meet expectations, we have to exceed them. We were taught that we have
to be quicker, faster, better, smarter and more prepared than
non-Blacks. We were also taught that if and when we get a job, we have
to get it done right the first time.

    That pressure only increased if you were the ‘first Black’ in a
position. You not only had to excel for yourself, but were cognizant
of the fact that the hopes and dreams of an entire people rested on
your shoulders.

    You were also aware that, rightly or wrongly, our people would be
judged in some cases based on your behavior and performance. If you
didn’t do the job right, there might not be a second, third, fourth or
100th African-American following you and it might make it harder for
other minorities to catch a break as well…

It’s true that most people are not like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
But in order to accelerate our emancipation, we have to try to be.

It’s not right that it should be like that.

But it’s like that, anyway.

The solution is not to be passive, either, but to be smart about how
we respond.  We need to challenge the ideology, not the ideologue.
And we need to break the cycle that is used to justify our oppression
by refusing to validate it. Be angry, but act smartly.

(Crossposted to The Bilerico Project <http://www.bilerico.com/> )