I Hope We Choose Love

A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

Kai Cheng Thom

• Editorial: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781551527765
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: LGBT Studies

Provocative essays on culture, community, and personal politics by an acclaimed poet and essayist.

Part 1

LET US LIVE

Righteous Callings

Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith

Deep down, I have always believed that I’m a bad person and that the world we live in is an awful place. Maybe that’s just what happens when you grow up an effeminate boy (secretly a trans girl) in a Chinese Canadian Christian-ish (not religious enough to go to church but enough to use the threat of eternal damnation as a motivator for household chores) family with class trauma and inherited mental health issues, you know? One of my first memories is of crawling on the kitchen table in our rat-infested house at four years old and thinking to myself, I’m spoiled. Mommy and Daddy have such hard lives. I wish I weren’t so bad. I better work harder. #migrantkidmentality

Fast-forward to me in a hospital bed in the psych ward, after my suicide attempt at sixteen years old, still thinking the same thing.

DOUBLE fast-forward to me at twenty-six, in 2017, first typing this essay through chronic pain and brain fog in bed on a Saturday morning, STILL thinking the same thing.

So in retrospect, it’s easy to see how I got into the whole social justice/radical queer activism thing. Like most of my peers, all I wanted was to be good—or, in the fashionable parlance of various political moments in the past ten years, “rad,” “down,” or “woke.” Like, my mentally ill transsexual ass was never gonna hack my parents’ idea of goodness (unlike my Harvard-educated, biodegradable plasticizer–inventing, engaged-to-a-hedge-fund-manager, psychiatry resident older sister), but the rad queer community offered me a whole new set of norms for performance and lovability that, at least on the surface, gave value to the identity factors (transsexuality, effeminacy, mental illness, general bad attitude) that had caused me so much childhood shame.

Oh yeah, and I was a crazy trans girl of colour living in a white, cis-dominant society. Where else could I go? What else could I do? It was a whole new chance to be Good, to be Righteous, to Do Good Works and become Lovable at last.

These days, a friend of mine (we’re similarly jaded) likes to jokingly/not-so-jokingly call me a “High Priestess of the Movement.” Putting it another way, my boyfriend calls me a “microcelebrity.” What this means is that I have published two books that are well regarded in the social justice art/activism scene, I’m occasionally stopped on the street by strangers, and I get a lot of likes on Facebook. Also, I get some money for speaking engagements, articles (not this one when it was first published, though), and book royalties (it works out to a tiny fraction of minimum wage, if you break down the money received per hour worked).

In other words, I made it. I’m Good/Rad/Woke™, at least for the moment—all it would take to change that is a few hasty problematic tweets. And all I had to do was incur a mild disability via burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder to get here. Hooray.

Beneath all this cynicism, I hold a genuine curiosity: How did we, the loosely defined social justice left of North America/Turtle Island (one of the original, Indigenous names for this continent) reach this sorry state? I say “we” and not “I” because I think that my personal narrative is illustrative of a general dynamic that a lot of folks in my cohort of social justice warriors (for those new to the discourse, SJWs is the preferred acronym) are experiencing in some form.

There seems to be a wave, if not a sea change, moving through online and RL leftist communities/scenes, a ripple of dis-ease (if you will) with the ways affect (the experience and performance of emotion) and orthodoxy (the creation of norms of political thought and action) are currently playing out. More and more, we are starting to question the ways we relate to politics and to each other.

You can see this ripple being articulated in several pieces of contemporary social justice writing, each of which has been met with some notoriety and controversy. I’m not attesting to the quality or importance, or lack thereof, of these texts. I agree with some of them, disagree with others, and generally feel complicated about all of them. The common thread is their critique of the social justice left from within the social justice left:

• Sarah Schulman’s book Conflict Is Not Abuse, in which Schulman analyzes and critiques what she calls the “overstatement of harm” as an activist tactic that breaks community bonds and reinforces the power of the state to control and imprison people.

• Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s essay “Hot Allostatic Load,” which is an account of how the author was bullied, exploited, and traumatized by queer scenes that weaponized social media call-outs against her.

• Trent Eady’s article “Everything Is Problematic,” in which the author draws parallels between student activism during the 2012 Quebec student strike and dogmatic cult thinking.

• Frances Lee’s article “Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice,” which is a comparison of virtue signalling and shaming dynamics between right-wing Christianity and the social justice left, and an appeal for greater open-mindedness on the left.

• Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies, in which the author argues that the current rise of the alt-right and neo-nationalism in American and, to some extent, global politics was largely inspired by the political polarization of the renewed culture wars between increasingly disenfranchised right-wing Americans and the alienating politics of the American progressive left.

More popularly, the YouTube vlogger Laci Green, a self-identified feminist sex educator who accrued mainstream acclaim and several hundreds of thousands of followers, initiated a subcultural scandal by “taking the red pill” and recanting many of her former progressive political ideas, among them the argument that the male/female sex binary is socially constructed and oppressive to trans people. Green also started hosting “dialogues” with vloggers “across the political spectrum,” starting with radical “feminists” who exclude trans women and sex workers from their movement and “anti-SJWs”—otherwise known as the alt-right. On Twitter, Green has decried the extremely negative reactions of many of her former fans as regressive, thought-policing, and discursively violent.

I know, right? Blargh! What’s up with the social justice crisis of faith? Why is it happening? And what’s an overachieving yet politically disenchanted, attachment-traumatized East Asian tranny who wants to survive and also be a decent person in the world supposed to do?

Well, she could write her own essay trying to make sense of it all, for one.

I’m expecting the majority of readers of this essay to be from the social justice movement (why else would you be interested? Are you an anti-SJW/alt-righter trying to use this as fodder for your masturbatory Reddit thread? Ew! Please go away.)

So it will probably come as no surprise to you when I write that, in my experience, there are many leftist and marginalized folks who are not always comfortable with the direction of the social justice left and, in particular, its focus on increasingly fragmented identity politics and the performance of virtue. In fact, most of what I do now when I’m hanging out with friends “in the community” is complain about the dynamics of “the community.”

Let me pause here to assure you, dear readers, that this essay is not going in an “and NOW I am a classic liberal! Both sides are wrong! I’m not like those other progressives” direction. Fuck that noise. I hold the following truths to be self-evident:

• We live in a world fundamentally shaped by the systemic exploitation and abuse of many oppressed peoples.

• Capitalism and ableism are dominant systems of oppression that reduce the worth of individuals to their ability to work and produce goods for the privileged classes. Everyone deserves access to life resources, dignity, and self-determination, regardless of ability.

• For the past several centuries, European capitalism and imperialism have resulted in the ongoing colonization and, in many cases, genocide of Indigenous peoples across the globe, as well as the enslavement and indentured servitude of people of colour. Black and Indigenous peoples particularly have been and continue to be disproportionately targeted for racist exploitation, violence, discrimination, and imprisonment to this day.

• The repression of women and gender-nonconforming individuals, as well as so-called sexual minorities, plays a fundamental role in upholding the structures of oppression at large.

• People who live at the intersections of oppression, such as trans women of colour sex workers, have unique and intensified experiences of marginality.

• TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN.

• The work of contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More is vital and necessary and must be supported.

• Sex work, when chosen freely by the worker, is legitimate work that provides valuable services to the public and should be decriminalized and respected. Sex work differs from human trafficking, which involves the exploitation of individuals’ bodies, often for sexual purposes but also for other forms of domestic and manual labour.

• Oppression is rarely, if ever, overthrown through peaceful demonstration alone. Economic and social pressure, as well as direct action and violent protest are all essential parts of revolutionary movements.

So maybe let’s just proceed from there, okay?

The mainstream critiques of social justice culture are many, vicious, and largely rooted in either liberal appeals to the status quo (“SJWs are undermining their own cause by being so angry and idealistic! Incremental change FTW!”) or outright misogyny, racism, and neo-fascism. I’m not going to bother deconstructing these arguments, mostly because this has already been done rather spectacularly by other thinkers and writers. I’m much more interested in the more complicated “grey area” within the left itself, which is where yours truly spends most of her time these days.

The following list is a summation of struggles I have with social justice culture, while acknowledging that “the community” and “the movement” are not in the least monolithic, or even necessarily a politically united body. I am talking in generalities taken mostly from my experiences of activism and rad queer community in major cities on Turtle Island, as well as from that venerable birthplace of revolutionary thought: the internet. I know that these thoughts are, for the most part, not original. And, undoubtedly, I am oversimplifying certain issues or presenting an unbalanced view of them. My goal here is not to claim the credit for a sparkling new piece of analysis but rather to capture the spirit of my own thoughts and feelings as they have been informed by readings, experiences, and conversations with friends.

And so! Some struggles I (and maybe others) have with the social justice movement’s internal culture:

• Fragmentation of Identity Politics and Essentialism: In case referring to myself as a “crazy East Asian transsexual” doesn’t get this across, I am an Original Identity Politics Girl™. Social justice ideas about identity, particularly race and gender, empowered and liberated me as a teenager and continue to do so today. The language of identity politics allows us to describe social power dynamics that would otherwise remain invisible, such as white privilege, shadeism, and transmisogyny.

However, as resources dwindle and income inequality widens under late-stage capitalism, I think we are seeing increasing fragmentation and oversimplification of identity politics via the Oppression Olympics: harsh competition for resources like funding, attention, and legitimacy, based on the number and type of oppressed identities one can claim. This often happens on an individual level—simply put, in Social Justice Land, we emphasize our marginalized identities and downplay our privileged ones to seem cooler and more important, and to shield ourselves from critique. Online, I sometimes see arguments in which people try to shut each other down using identities as weapons, e.g., “You can’t talk to me that way! I’m trans and you’re being transphobic!” “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m a femme and you’re a masc! Shut your misogynist, femmephobic mouth!”

This type of identity politics is based on a level of essentialism that I am uncomfortable with; it assumes that all people of colour, trans folks, etc., have the same experience, and that identity categories apply uniformly across the board. It also reduces people to a very restricted set of “relevant” identities and erases the rest of their life experiences, while fetishizing the pain of the oppressed. Strategic essentialism—the ability to talk and form groups based on generalities—is an important tool for activism. But the kind of identity politics that discomforts me is not strategic so much as disingenuous and self-serving. It often feels like we are far more interested in diversity of identity rather than diversity of thought.

• Reliance on Binaries: With essentialism comes the reductive categorizing of people and systems into false binaries: oppressor/oppressed, survivor/abuser, problematic/pure. Again, these terms are useful in particular moments, but they can also obscure the nuances and fluidity of any one perso...