The Black Unicorn Press

“Hey Ben, you are still writing these?”

Yes, The month of June has been a busy one, filled with traveling and other writing projects, but always, in my heart and somewhere in my mind, I am asking myself and my community: How can we stop letting patriarchal misogyny ruin our lives?

So for this blog post, I want to talk about the challenges of building communities are are resistant to the influence and violence of Patriarchal Misogyny. I think most of this would apply to any community or group that doesn’t want to be controlled by someone exerting hierarchal authority over the group, but I tend to specifically think about groups that are actively dedicated to dismantling authoritarianism on a large scale, not just existing without it in their group. Perhaps I should take time to explain why, at least in the US (I haven’t really experienced community building in any other country enough to speak on it), authoritarian power structures are inherently patriarchal, but that gets me away from the topic I want to write about. So if anyone is skeptical of that claim, or wants me to try to explain it better, they can ask and it can be the subject of a future blog post. 

So what I have noticed about people working together in groups that have been derailed or destroyed by one or more person attempting to dominate and control the group, in order to steal the power of others?

1. Without talking about how power is used within a group, people who are effective at harnessing and controlling the power of others will do so. 

2. Using or accepting authoritarian methods of decision making and action taking is a trained/socialized behavior of being a US citizen that will serve as a default for the vast majority of people (in groups in the the US) in instances of crisis and immediacy. 

3. Expecting everyone in a group to always be capable of listening openly, considering all possible options for decision making, and then patiently participating in the process of collectively making that decision is unreasonable. 

4. Catching authoritarian tendencies and behaviors early on in a group’s formation and decision making processes will almost always result in less severe consequences and more generous and forgiving group members than when these tendencies are ignored until they can’t be ignored any longer.

5. At the same time as 1 through 4 are all true, communities that over-commit to establishing rules for the flow of power and its utilization can create internal structures that act as controlingly as any authoritarian leader. These institutionalized rule systems can be tricky because they can appear to be for the purpose of not privileging any individual within the group, but the reality is that all rules that get followed are to someone’s benefit. This is why rich and powerful people almost never feel compelled to follow their own rules unless the consequences for breaking them are incredibly swift and powerfully enforced. Think French revolution levels of enforcement on economic and political rulers. 

6. This usually means that groups that are really resilient to the creep of authoritarianism into their power structures and dynamics are not groups that have one certain, specific set of rules in place to stop it, but instead are groups that are composed of people that are comfortable and confident in their abilities to work together to solve problems given the specific contexts in which they arise.

7. It might be more effective if people stop thinking about the idea of community as existing as a static noun, that just is, and might even be commodified into a property that some people directly own, and instead think of community building as verb which its members must keep doing and will only be “done” when that community no longer exists. 

8. Patriarchy arose around the “domestication” of land, the establishment of property, and a need to enforce rules around the distribution and acquisition of property. It will always be present in situations where people are acting as if the community is a property of its members, even when its members might not be socialized or recognized as men. You don’t earn the right to be a member of a community. You practice the values that bring that community together, which means being capable of listening to what those values are and showing how you respect them/live them. 

9. Communities that want to make standing up to authoritarian power structures a part of their community practice have to make talking about power and authority something that is a shared community value that requires a constant and evolving conversation and not a one time workshop or training. 

As I write this post, the president of the United States deployed 2000 National Guard troops to the city of LA  to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers performing detainment and deportation raids that have resulted in over 100 arrests in the last 2 days. This was against the wishes of the state of California government and the LA city government. There will be no sanctuary cities in the second Trump administration and the only thing slowing ICE down is direct protest in the streets. 

I have kinda, sorta, started to touch on how the Trump administration’s crack down on immigration connects with the values of patriarchal misogyny (PM) and Transphobia in post 47 0f 100, but after some conversations with awesome radical folks here in Seattle, I want to come back to talking about the connection between Transphobia and Anti-immigration sentiment within the framework of patriarchal misogyny being used by the Trump administration, because these have been 2 of the most successful rhetorical tools he has used to galvanize his base and win elections in particular counties and states that have swung federal congressional elections. 

Maybe some of my readers might question whether it really makes sense to try to draw a connection between transphobia and the xenophobia of anti-immigrant rhetoric, as the immigrant community and the trans community are often depicted as being antagonistic to each other in media that paints immigrants as ardently religious and  anti-LGBTQIA2S+, and the trans community as both predominantly white and fairly well off economically. In the few months of organizing and anti-authoritarian/anti-capitalist community building I have done here in Seattle, I have seen some tension in who will show up to events, actions and demonstrations centered around immigrant rights and safety and trans folks rights and safety, and I think it is natural for people to have specific issues and concerns that motivate them to action. However, within a PM framework, especially the one at the heart of 2nd term Trumpism, I think it is absolutely vital to understand where the attack on trans people and the attack on immigrant communities is intersecting and how they can be countered simultaneously. 

In post 48 of 100, I talked about how hierarchies require essentializing value traits into the people these hierarchies are meant to control. This is why the very possibility of trans identity is an attack on patriarchy. Because patriarchy cannot exist if gender identity is any kind of flexible or fluid in nature. The authority of men over women has to be seen as fundamental or else it is exposed as arbitrary. In other words, when the border between masculinity and femininity becomes porous, the privileges and authority that comes with being identified as a man become vulnerable to critique and attack in ways that don’t happen when everyone believes that gender is fixed and based upon innate traits. 

National identity occupies a much more similar place to gender than gets talked about in mainstream media, or even radical/academic criticism. Especially for white US Americans, our national identity is a deeply rooted building block of personal identity that feeds into everything from what language we think and speak in, what defines our “inalienable rights,” and thus what power and privilege we are entitled just by being born here. Perhaps most US citizens acknowledge that citizenship and national identity are a little more flexible than they think of gender, but making sure that national identity remains a very restrictive container for power and authority is absolutely why people like Stephan Miller, have risen so prominently in the Trump administration. 

To be an immigrant is, inherently, to transgress the borders of national identity. For some, like the wealthy, identity categories that are used to control and enforce hierarchies have always been more fluid than they are for others, and you see this flaunted in ideas like Trump’s Gold Card Visa. But for pretty much everyone else, especially those trying to cross borders for reasons of survival and obtaining the most basic opportunities of living in a different nation, nation states lean heavily towards being restrictive about opening up the category of “citizen” to anyone who might jeopardize the power and privilege that having that national identity currently bestows. National identity tends not to be as binary as gender identity, as in people don’t usually immediate dismiss the possibility of being a dual citizen, or people changing citizenship multiple times over the course of their lives, but people do tend to lose their minds as soon as they start to think that just about anyone could come and start claiming the same national identity as them, infringing upon their access to the limited powers and privileges being a citizen in that country entails.

All of this tends to be a bit nebulous for most people in their daily lives, and thus easily ignored unless either their national identity or gender identity become something of concern to the people with authority in the immediate world around them, but authoritarian governments, like Trumpism, immediate draw this into much more real and practically situated terms when they do things like declare English to be the official language of the United States and try to create an essentialist definition of gender in an executive order. They absolutely know that creating legal barriers that force people into accepting essentialist identity categories is the first and most important step in establishing authoritarian control over society. The way they want to accomplish that is to label the people who step outside these essentialist categories of identity as criminal, not just in their actions, but in their very act of existing. 

There is much more to say about these essentialist categories of identity and authoritarianism in future posts, like about why Trump relied on race baiting much more in his first term than he has thus far in the second term, and how much of that has to do with political expediency and how much his base already was looking at black people as inherently existing as criminals, but I think that will derail this specific conversation about the intersection of national identity (which also includes much more complicated racial components of identity than I talked about in this post) and gender identity. 

So as the Trump administration promises to crack down more on sanctuary cities that are protecting immigrants and refusing to look at undocumented people as inherent criminals and threats to the national identity of US citizen, I hope people realize that the work of standing up to that repression and violence is the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny and transphobia at the same time. Because who we are is defined and constructed by the society around us and if we let authoritarians have that power—of defining what are safe and protected identities under the law and which are criminalized and not worthy of protection under the law, then the other world that could still yet be is already lost. 

In Post 44 of 100: Transphobia is patriarchal misogyny, I got very focused on talking about why confronting Transphobia directly, even spectacle-seeking professional transphobic organizations, is necessary. Then I talked about a specific event that inspired these thoughts here in Seattle. 

What I didn’t talk about in that post (although I sort of started to touch on in post 41 of 100: why do some people care so much about gender?), is why transphobia is patriarchal misogyny in the first place. 

Before I, a cisgendered man talk about this, I want to point my reader to “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” as one of the most accessible readings that I can recommend that starts to explain how and why feminism isn’t really feminism if it excludes trans feminism. It also does a very good job of explaining why feminism that tries to exclude trans experience or queer experience from its analysis of patriarchy is ignoring an aspect of misogyny that will always server to strengthen patriarchal systems. Beyond that source, I am probably not going to include a whole lot more links, as I am not trying to replicate a complex academic philosophy paper in this blog. The following is a synthesis of many authors who have shaped my ideas about gender and its multiple roles in society, and if you are interested in any of these ideas, please feel free to ask me about them.

There are as many ways of being trans as there are ways of being a women as there are of being a human being. I would be an idiot to pretend to be able to speak for the experience of trans people, and that is largely why I pointed to the Transfeminist Manifesto above. But I am a human being who has experienced gendering from a social perspective, a familial perspective and a personal perspective. I think there is a reasonable perspective on the topic of misogyny that says “ a patriarchal society that reinforces its gendered hierarchy by sowing misogyny, a hatred of and contempt for women, is going to cause the most harm to people who have experienced life with the gendered expectations of being identified as a women.” This is pretty much the most straight forward way of thinking about the impact of misogyny, AND it would clearly apply to any transperson who began life having the gender expectations of femininity placed upon them, or who experienced life in the world and saw feminine gender expectations as something that expressed and authentic part of themselves. Thus it works pretty well as a starting point for arguing that misogyny affects at least all trans men, trans women, and any non-binary people who have ever identified or been identified as feminine. 

However, I think when you look deeper into patriarchal constructions of social, political and economic power, and how basic concepts of property, citizenship and basic human rights are defined to reinforce patriarchal systems, it becomes clear that the category of women is perhaps the critical element that patriarchy requires to exist. What I am saying it isn’t the existence of men or masculinity that underwrites a patriarchal system, it is the constructed category of gendered being called “woman” that enables the existence of patriarchy. That might seem a little confusing and convoluted, because a universe with only one gender is actual a universe without any gender at all. Because no one would be able to notice or talk about their gender without having something to compare it to. This is true of all identity markers. There is no being alive without death, no being able-bodied without disability, no being healthy without sickness, no such thing as being white without having people who get classified as non-white, and no one is rich, in a capitalist economic sense, without others living in poverty.

So patriarchy requires at least 2 genders in order to establish a society in which one group are innately expected to inherit decision making power over the other. Now, if there always have to be at least two categories in existence for any hierarchy to function, and only one of those categories can be argued to have inherent claims to power and authority because of innate functions of that category, then those categories also have to be innate, or ESSENTIAL, to a person’s functional identity. In other words, for patriarchal logic to function at all, if the category of “woman” is not intrinsic and consisting of traits that are immutable, then there is no functional argument for saying that women are incapable of filling X leadership position, or of inheriting property, or that women have to prioritize child care because their bodies are immutably designed to be baby factories as their primary purpose on earth. This makes trans-ness existing as a real human possibility an inherently hostile reality to patriarchy, even if it is still possible for trans people to believe in patriarchy or perform acts of misogyny.   

In other words, trans-ness itself is an assault on patriarchal authority and that is why people who might never realize they have ever encountered a trans person before can be so easily convinced to support transphobic rhetoric. Trans-ness will always muddle a world view of gender and sex as immutable categories that can be used to define and assign power within a society.

Now there is another kind of Transphobia that is a reactionary response to patriarchal and misogynistic violence, and this is transphobia that gets called trans-exclusive radical feminism, or TERF, and I think its perspective is most clearly and publicly pushed today by J.K Rowling. 25 years ago, I was much more sympathetic to this argument myself, as I was coming to terms with how much violence is perpetuated in the world in the name of masculinity and preserving patriarchal power. Even though I am a cis man, I could easily understand why many woman would want to inhabit a world without men. One of the things that attracted me to books like Refusing to be a Manat this time was wondering whether it was possible to socially deconstruct masculinity in its entirely, and possibly live in a world where gender itself was as useless an identity category as “Roman” or “Saxon.”    

It took me a really long time, lots of reading, and having close friends come out to me as trans to help me see that the problem with the TERF perspective is that it is a perspective that is inherently defined by a trauma that only gets projected forward when you concede to essentializing the underlying characteristics of gender. As a trauma response, it can be acknowledged and accommodated in certain situations for those whom have experienced violent patriarchal misogyny as they heal and recover from those traumas, but I think it is necessary to also question what the need and safety concerns really are when people start placing demands on large scale public spaces built upon TERF logic. In the case of someone like J.K. Rowling, who has enough money that she is already capable of creating a fortress to protect herself from whatever she is afraid of happening from public “women’s only spaces” including trans people, it is pretty obvious that even if her believes in trans-exclusion are coming from a place of personal experience and need, she is being used by patriarchal misogynists to reinforce a society where the kind of violence she is afraid of is going to be rampant and uncontrollable. 

In other words, to sum all of this up: Attacking trans women will never make cis women safer from the violence of patriarchal misogyny. It might protect their racial, class and cisgendered privileges within a patriarchal society, but only by deflecting the attention of the bully/abuser of authority onto a different target. It is impossible to dismantle patriarchy or misogyny, or want to put an end to patriarchal misogynist violence without also targeting transmisogyny and transphobia.  

Pride began 2 days ago. Jonathan Joss was murdered. His husband, who was there, says it was an act of homophobic violence. The police deny this. Maybe the police are lying. That seems likely to me. But I will concede that it is possible that the police are incapable of seeing homophobic violence for what it is because they are trained and conditioned not to connect those dots unless the evidence is overwhelming obvious. I believe they are still going to look like idiots either way as more comes out about this case.

In Gaza, Palestinian people are still starving and Israel military forces are making it as difficult as possible for food and medical aid, including firing upon people approaching aid distribution sites almost every day. Israeli media claims all of this is lies and that it is Hamas that is manipulating world media agencies into propagating lies. According to the Israeli government, it is Hamas who is preventing aid from getting to people in Gaza. This is the same Israeli government, run by Netanyahu, that helped fund Hamas in the first place to prevent a unified Palestinian people. A fact that Netanyahu continues to deny, even though many people in his government and his cabinet do not. Netanyahu expects the world to believe him even though he is still on trail in Israel for fraud, because he has weaponized the word “Anti-semitism” to be a bludgeon he can use against anyone that opposes him or the extreme violence his administration has employed against the people of Gaza. 

In Boulder Colorado a man carried out an attack against a group of mostly Jewish people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Thankfully, no one died in this attack. The man is being charged with an antisemitic hate crime. The man had planned (apparently for over a year) on throwing 18 Molotov cocktails but didn’t cary out his full plan because he got scared and he had never hurt anyone before. Perhaps surprisingly to some, I personally do think this act of violence qualifies as antisemitism, even though Mohamed Soliman has been pretty specific in talking about Zionism and not the Jewish people as a whole, because the attack happened at the start of a Jewish holiday and is having the very real effect of making Jewish people feel like we are under attack anywhere we go. I don’t think intentions necessarily matter when determining whether acts of violence feel targeted to a group of people when it is clear that there are only specific groups of people who are going to be targeted by that violence. Soliman’s target was a “Run For Their Lives” group that claims to be apolitical, but is clearly pro-Israel, with participants carrying Israeli flags, so I understand why some people might disagree with me and argue that Soliman’s attack was anti-Israel or maybe anti-zionist, and not antisemitic, but, for me, the people he attacked are not in any functional way actually connected to the State of Israel’s war machine. I believe unscrupulous actors, like Benjamin Netanyahu, are absolutely overusing anti-semitism in their rhetoric to dismiss anger at the violent acts of an authoritarian, war-frenzied nation, but I also think it places a pretty intense burden of alienation from Jewish communities for any Jew to be expected to deny that this act of violence feels like it is directed at Jews and not the State of Israel. There are real currents of antisemitism that are running along side Israeli State propaganda and if that cannot be acknowledged, it makes it very difficult for avowedly anti-zionist Jews like me to call out how harmful Netanyahu and his like’s  propagandistic use of anti-semitism is actively responsible for hurting Jewish people. It is possible to say that what happened in Boulder was antisemitic violence that makes me sad, but also that people like Netanyahu claiming events like this for political posturing to try to silence dissent against Israeli State violence against the people of Gaza is sickening and disgusting. It is also possible to feel empathy and sadness for the family of Mohamed Soliman, that have been taken into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and threatened with swift deportation (like maybe tomorrow), and almost certainly without any further due process , despite his claim and theirs that no one other than Soliman knew anything about the attack. This is a situation I will be keeping an eye on, because deporting people for the crimes of their families feels very much fascist state violence to me.

And lastly, speaking of the violence of the state against migrant people, families and communities, here in Seattle, a supposedly sanctuary city, people who are trying to follow the legal paper work process of asylum seeking and obtaining work permit through immigration court are having their cases routinely dismissed, and then being immediately detained by DHS to as of yet unknown ends. I have been a part of a Spanish language learning group for the last couple of months that meets specifically to enable communication and support for the folks being targeted by ICE and DHS harassment and disappearance, and have heard directly from observers in the immigration courts and from people who have had family members taken that these things are going on and no one is sure yet whether city officials are complicit in allowing this to happen, or if it is happening behind local government’s back. Either way, it is happening in my city. Children are being separated from their families, families who just a week or two ago felt safe in their immigration status/process are now terrified to show up to the necessary appointments and meetings to continue those processes and this is not yet being reported as news anywhere. 

It is pride month. A time to remember that people and not governments or churches or schools or any authoritarian institutions get to tell any of us who or how we can love, or who or how we get to exist within our own bodies. Maybe it seems weird or disrupting to be thinking so heavily about the relationship between citizenship, sexuality and gender identity during pride, but I cannot help but see the connected violences being perpetrated by people who feel like it is necessary to label the very existence of others different from them as “illegal.” This month I want to fight not just for myself, my family, my friends and my communities and my neighbors’ right to exist as we all are, but to exist as we all are, right here, right now, together, even if the face of so much hate and violence. 

I am going to have more to talk about with anti-trans hate groups organizing across the US and in Seattle specifically, as well as how to respond to them more successfully in the future because trans people are actively under attack from the highest levels of the federal government as Trump and his political allies try to enforce essentialist gender ideology into every state and city they think they can…and the only thing that is going to stop that is loud, constant, in-their-face resistance and refusal to accept all that bullshit. 

But building towards some of those posts, and trying to help my myself and my reader connect patriarchal misogyny; transphobic, gender-essentialist ideology; a racist/fascist/colonial understanding of nationalism; crony capitalism; AND theocratic fundamentalism, I think it is really eye opening to look at this BBC article about the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States.

If you don’t want to read the article, the basic summary points that will be relevant to this blog are:

1. The Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia (ROCOR)  is the most conservative Orthodox Church in the US, it recruits men almost exclusively by preaching misogynistic ideas about masculinity and trans-misogynistic ideas about gender. However, for all of its social conservatism, it doesn’t follow US. Conservatisms inherent nationalistic zeal for things like the sanctity of the constitution or idolization of the founding fathers, nor for blind faith in capitalism. 

2. Its followers idolize Putin and Russia as an ideal nation exactly because of its homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic laws. They see Russia, even soviet Russia, as a still thriving Christian Empire that has lasted for over a thousand years that has always prioritized protecting traditional social values over pursuing endless economic growth, because all individual freedoms must be balanced first by social responsibility. 

3. ROCOR is finding great success recruiting cisgendered men into the fold by presenting itself as the “Manliest church,” that promotes an intensely patriarchal family and social structure and includes religious community building activities like “working out with the pastor,” and participating freely in online rhetorical cultural war battles to espouse deeply misogynistic gender-essentialist ideologies. 

One of the reasons I find this trend so interesting is because, on the one hand, it is almost like a counter conservatism to the kind of “traditional” republican conservatism I am used to encountering in more than 2 decades of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist organizing. It doesn’t inherently look at western civilization and neoliberal capitalism as any kind of divine mandate. In fact it is pretty critical of both of these things. However, it is critical from the most terrifying perspective possible, and that is that Western civilization has been corrupted by the greedy pursuit of economic opportunity into the idolatry of individual freedom.  Thus while traditional US conservatism will minimally have to pay lip service to upholding constitutionally enshrined freedoms (even if that lip service feels nominal at best), ROCOR conservatism is completely without obligation to do so and is prepared to hit the ground running in the promotion of theocratic fascism. The more Trump flirts with Putin and the idealization of Russian authoritarianism, the more he prepares and even invites his most ardent followers to consider abandoning faiths that might still be tied (even vestigially) to semi-democratic organizational and structural principles in pursuit of a faith willing to place absolute authority into just about any strongman politician that enforces totalitarian, patriarchal family values over any other political ideology. ROCOR is about as “anti-woke” as any religion can possibly be and will be very appealing to a base that has become convinced that “wokeness” is the ultimate political enemy. With no need to even pay honorific acknowledgement to traditional, European enlightenment conceptions of liberty or freedom, a ROCOR-styled theocratic fundamentalism will be able to advocate for an abandonment of any constitutional protections like freedom of speech, freedom from government seizure, protection from cruel and unusual punishments, etc. 

I don’t personally think that ROCOR currently has much of a chance of completely sweeping western christian fundamentalism away from the US Republican Party and Trumpism. The churches at the heart of Trump’s brand of Christian nationalism have just spent far too much time and energy into their network building to be completely swept away in any kind of hurry, but Putin is a very savvy political player, who, like Trump, has managed to place himself at the head of a religious fundamentalist movement without personally demonstrating or honoring any of the actual socially conservative values that these movements purport to prioritize, and it must be impossible for Trump and his political allies to see how zealously Russian Orthodox adherents can be to pure bootlicking authoritarianism. Even if it remains a small percentage of the theological demographics supporting Trump, I can see their voice within the movement being given increasing power and privilege the more it is willing to abandon the reliquary accoutrements of “American values,” like democracy, and move Trumpist followers to venerate authority and abandon liberty. 

This will still take some work for the right to accomplish, as anti-communism is deeply woven into the fabric of US conservatism and many of the folks that are economically supporting Trump are doing so from a place of purely capitalistic exploitative interest that they will balk very hard at a shift to a state-controlled economy unless they are given extreme cronyistic control over the state institutions that will be running those industries…but we have already started  to see this in how Elon Musk is getting pushed out of Trumps inner circle of political advisors (at least superficially) now that his political money is no longer working to provide Trump with political victories that couldn’t already be won. And it is not like Putin has been bad for Russian oligarchs as a whole. Crony Capitalism is certainly not antithetical to Russian Orthodox Christian (ROC) theocracy, as long as the depraved flaunting and exercise vice of that wealth is kept out of the national public spot light. ROC is not inherently anti-capitalist after all, it is just anti promoting capitalism as a value over maintaining tight social control over patriarchal family structures. 

Certainly the democratic party’s complete abandonment of anything but the most vestigial socialist economic policies and heavy reliance on promoting itself as a party of liberal social values has paved the way for the US conservative right to give up the need to be so fiercely oppositional to state-control of the economy, but those anti-socialist seeds run very deep in US conservatism, a political movement still dominated by a very old guard of capitalist barons. With the republican voter base gaining ground in young men who are feeling as excluded from avenues of economic prosperity as they are from what they perceive to be their political and social authority as men, it really would not surprise me to see more and more national socialist (read: NAZI) policies creep into the Republican Party platform, as long as those policies can be very exclusionary to anyone but those deemed as righteous and deserving…hence an inherent need for intense xenophobia and anti-immigrant zeal, a very narrow state-defined definition of gender, sexuality and family, and nationalistic purity tests that can be used to surveil and police dissenting thought. 

This is why I find an article about a relatively fringe religious movement in the US so fascinating and concerning. Not because I think the inherent religious aspects of the faith have a lot of potential for growth in the US, but because it is such an obvious match for what Trump (and Putin) are trying to accomplish on a global scale, that I think its voice and influence will be something that all those opposed to fascism will have to keep very close eyes on. 

Yes.

The police are also the enforcers of capitalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism in the contemporary world, but they are fundamentally an institution of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM), even when the cops are women or trying to march in pride or think that they are participating in community oversight or standing against racism. The very concept of creating a class of people whom rich people believe are their to protect everyone (because they believe the police will protect them and their property even when they are breaking the law)…and everyone else who sees law enforcement at worst as a direct threat and at best as useless institution that will never help anyone, is an essential component to most authoritarian hierarchies, but especially one like patriarchy that is dependent on convincing women that they all, universally need protection, and that only the police can safely provide that protection outside of maybe the immediate family structure.

This is why almost all threats of the “dangers of lawlessness” work back into concerns about sexual violence and “who will save the women and children?” even though the police are almost never responsible for stopping acts of sexual or domestic violence in progress and that law enforcement families experience domestic violence at a rate of 40% instead of the national average of 10%. The rise of authoritarians trying to target trans folks as sex traffickers and groomers is always about the fear of young men being convinced to surrender their masculinity or about “deviant men” trying to sexually assault or prey upon women or girls, and the solution is always to expect police enforcement to intimidate trans folks from existing in public spaces and be the shield between their imagined righteous/pure society and the degenerate masses. There are papers about the role of militarizing masculinity as being foundational to purpose of law enforcers, so I am not going to try to go into it too much here, we all new the title of this blog post was just click bait with an assumed answer. 

Instead, in this post, I want to draw people’s attention to this wild statement put out by the Seattle Police Union that sounds exactly like the kind of red-faced stomping and pouting that we see coming out of the Manosphere about how “nobody respects how hard it is to be a man these days” and to just squarely scape goat a (unfortunately) marginal group in terms of state or city political power that is being imagined as waving around far more authority than is actually the case…a pretty obvious parallel to what PM media sources have been trying to say about how the reason men are struggling to be men is because women just have too much power over them. 

Seriously, if you get a chance to read that Seattle Police Officer’s Guild (SPOG)’s press release, it manages to be pathetic and infuriating and comically bad all at the same time. Like, of course one of the reasons I love living in Seattle is because the ANTIFA presence here is real and strong and makes me feel infinitely safer (yes, even me, a white, cis man) than the police ever have, but it is such a weirdly self-shaming flex for the union representing the police to claim that ANTIFA are the ones in Seattle dictating the political terms of public safety. If only this concession were actually true and not just a sadly flat lie to attempt to play the victim card. I have talked previously about how weird it is that the current example of “alpha” masculinity is so adverse to accepting any kind of responsibility for anything and has so fully rejected accountability as a value, so I won’t repeat all of that here, but there is something strangely surreal about essentially seeing the entire police force of Seattle parrot the same sad-boy-loser defense for why they just can’t exert the authority that everyone knows that real leaders and protectors are supposed to be allowed to use. I guess they are just parroting their leader, and trying to sound as much like Donald Trump as possible. But the document really gets weirder. The Press Release seriously claims that the SPD was standing with Seattle in morning the loss of George Floyd to police violence? This is just such bizzaro stuff to claim, at least to someone like me, from a very different part of the the US than one where the police would surrender so much of their image of authority so easily. And then to end on a note of “oh yeah, this poor pathetic, beat down institution of justice is hiring. Come join a collapsing train wreck!” It is all just so weird to me. 

Keep in mind too, as I talked about wanting to talk about in post 44 of 100, the event that inspired this press release was the city allowing a trans-hating organization of very suspect intentions plan a Trans-hating event in a park that the SPOG calls “the heart of ANTIFA land,” but is really just the most blatantly queer and trans friendly park in the city, and then the SPD super over-reacting to some kids allegedly throwing water bottles at the police that were protecting the transphobes. Yes, the out of control ANTIFA that is going to bring forth a new 2020-style “summer of violence” in Seattle, and is forcing hundreds of police officers to retire is apparently armed with water bottles and hurtful words.

To get serious though, SPOG is calling for the city courts and prosecutors to throw the book at 23 protestors who got arrested, very many of them trans, for throwing water bottles, while the SPD sprayed pepper spray all over a busy city park, hitting themselves and many bystanders in the process, and shooting pepper balls into protesters at close range. This is where I think it is really important to see the parallels that are spreading out from Trump’s outrageous, self-victimizing rhetoric about “everyone being out to get me,” into every authoritarian institution and feels like it is seriously gearing up to scream the common patriarchal misogynist  refrain when it really dials up the retaliatory violence: 

“LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!”

I sincerely hope that with the SPD and with Trump and all the rest, that we do just see them give up, because no one will play nice with them, but I think we all need to think through and be prepared for who we really know has the power to set off 2025 as a serious summer of violence. 

and must be confronted, even in the face of state repression.

I am not sure anyone reads most of these blogs, much less if the people doing so are friends from places beyond Seattle, or new friends in the Seattle area, so I am going to try to establish some context first. 

A terrible group, named Mayday USA (they have a website but I have no interest in directing traffic to them), planed a public attack on the existence of Trans people, in the most LGBQIA2S+ park and gathering space in Seattle. In their internal documents promoting the event (stuff available for looking at on their website), they use language like “taking to the streets to take back family in America,” and calling for “every man and women in America to stand with us” to defend family and attack “sex traffickers” who are trying to groom children. This kind of horrific bullshit is all over their website, their PR materials for their events and is very transparently aggressive and confrontational. 

This group looks very similar/modeled around the Westboro Baptist Church, with the goal of going to places they know they are not welcome and trying to incite a response that they can then use to try to paint themselves as victims, lying directly to media saying things like “They say we don’t like people…We’re here to love Jesus” and performing stunts like giving away free haircuts (you know, to enforce essentialist ideas about gender), while really just picking cities and locations in those cities where they can get a bunch of attention, influence and money for themselves. Seriously, they wave their fundraising ability like a flag on the front page of their website, if you had any doubts about why they are doing what they are doing. 

***This was my first read on the organizers and leadership that planned the event and I still think it is true, but I did receive word from folks that were at the protest that the majority of people that the Mayday people brought, a couple of hundred (more likely than the 500 reported in the Seattle Times), seemed like they were “true believers” who were there to “pray the gay away.” If they were being used by their organizations’ leadership, they were doing so pretty willingly. ***

So if this is essentially a charlatan con job looking for attention and the ability to cast themselves (and of course the innocent children being exposed to the idea that gender is not an essential trait bestowed upon humans by god) as victims, wouldn’t it be better to just ignore them? 

This is the exact same question I have been hearing about confronting Klansmen, homophobes, Nazis, and other public spectacle hate-inciters for going on 30 years that I have been actively organizing to confront such groups, and while my answer has always been, “NO! We don’t ignore hate-mongering, we confront it.” I will try to talk through the complexity of why that is still the right answer without being dismissive to people who might disagree.

1. Being ignored doesn’t make hate-mongers go away, especially not professional/organized ones. Like the colonial invaders that came before them, the goal of these kinds of hate groups is to take up all the space that they can get their hands on. When streets/parks/etc are given up freely, they claim them proudly and make a show of trying to appear like their hate-speech and ideology is the “normal,” accepted rhetoric of that space/community, and that is what all the kids and bystanders see too. Sometimes they are also looking for confrontation, but only ever confrontation that they believe they can win, and in conditions where the smallest possible harms they might possible experience can be overblown for political exploitation. The “True believers” of these groups can absolutely be terrifying fanatics with no fear of death, but I have personally never seen that be the unified majority of any of these groups and the leadership is almost always scared pathetic losers that are trusting fully that the local police are going to be able to protect them successfully from the consequences of their own hatred. I think it can be a lot easier to believe that the overwhelming violence of the state will make the answer to that question be, “yes, the cops will be able to protect the leaders of these hate groups from the consequences of their rhetoric and actions,” than it is to imagine the circumstances in which we can make the answer “No, they will not.”  

2. Some of us are not physically, emotionally, mentally, materially or socially in a subject position to step into the role of what we imagine to be “the confronters of hate-speech and hate-speakers.” That is a funny, maybe academically weird way to say something similar to “some people might not personally be ready, comfortable or able to take confronting hate groups in the streets”…but that is because it is supposed to mean more than that too.  There are some tried and true tactics that have worked and continue to work to shut down hate groups, but those tactics have also failed in many situations to accomplish that goal, and those tactics can come with a lot of risk that will affect different people differently. It is getting really late for me and my mind is pretty scrambled, so I will come back to this point in the future, but I very intentionally want to talk about ways we can imagine resistance to violent and oppressive authoritarianism in the future.

3. I think pretty much every other argument people have tried to make about trying to “spread love instead of hate” or “we have to try to connect with the human on the other side instead of their hatred” really just boils down to people misunderstanding what groups like this are trying to accomplish, as well as making the mistake of using their imagination to pretend like the kinds of supportive mutual aid and community building that actually could have shut down a group like this can just be organized on the spot in response to events like “Transphobia and hate as religion instead of political philosophy,” and is not something that requires months (if not years) of horizontal power sharing, community building and dialog. Hence why trying to organize counter events to pull people away from these hate rallies always just ends up looking performative activism in service of the state or at least the status quo.

 4. Even if, on a personal level, for some reason, I feel like a group is just trying to entrap me into doing something stupid that they plan on using as a catalyst for future rhetorical purposes or to sue the shit out of me (like what the Westboro Baptists turned into their whole economic strategy), the thing is, that personal perspective  and understanding don’t change the reality on the ground of the other people in the path of the hate group. When young angry kids see nazis, klan, misogynists and transphobes coming into their protected spaces and spewing hate, the political posturing and con artistry behind it don’t matter any more. What matters is that you can either try to be the police, and force your probably convoluted and personal political reading on the situation on to everyone else around you, as a condition of your support…or you can not do that, and make your support for Trans youth, or any other group in the line of fire unconditional on how they respond to being targeted, and instead something they can count on and actually use. 

I really want to write a whole lot more about the event, the police’s out of control violence in response to balloons and water bottles, what it is like to be on the front lines of events like this and what it is like to not be able to be on the front lines of this specific event, and how to build stronger movements that will protect our communities from the hate these groups bring in their hearts to hurl at us, our friends, our family, and our neighbors. But I am old and tired, and I want to post this before I let too much time go by and my words and actions of solitary, support and aid are just performative after thoughts. 

People showed up in Seattle to protect Trans kids (young and old). They took a beating from a Seattle police force that just got permission again to use all their old protest smashing weapons they treat like toys, and 23 comrades and friends got arrested and will suffer continued harassment and intimidation from the state unless we make it clear to the city that we know who was really acting to protect our communities and who was acting as the hired goons of outside agitators who had come to town to spread their hate.

hint, this is not what a community protector looks like:

I don’t think I emotionally have it in me to write another post like 42 out of 100 as there is little more to say beyond questioning Netanyahu’s statement about Europe trying to pressure the State of Israel into expediting aid to starving children and the elderly that “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” I mean, I think the statement is true, but 29 children and elderly people have died from starvation-related causes in the last couple of days, and they are not Israelis. It is the Israeli’s that are insisting that the UN move the trucks full of aid along dangerous routes that will be the most likely to inspire looting and attacks, according to the UN.  I will probably have to keep coming back to this topic. In updates as it really sits heavily on me, as a human being and father to a child who would be starving in Palestine, but today I don’t have it in me to solely focus on this and go to bed so completely devastated and hopeless.

So instead, I want to talk about a different BBC article, and why it is impossible to really confront Patriarchal Misogyny without talking about capitalism.  It is a little weird to me how much the topic of stay at home fathers and emasculation have ben coming up in mainstream news lately, but I am guessing that a lot of mainstream media folks are all encountering the same Journal of Family Issues research article, “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Breadwinner’ Mother?” And it feels like novel enough information to combine with the latent interest that has been generated by the show Adolescence, for the purposes of in-depth exposés. The reason it feels weird to me, of course, is because I have been doing the stay-at-home parent thing for about a year now, and so it is a particularly relevant topic to me, even if a lot of what is being said about it hasn’t really been my experience. The BBC article, “Why money and power affects male self-esteem” is pretty tame in its political conclusions, but I expect I will soon be reading Manosphere responses to the research the article is based upon soon enough, especially as the people who are most likely to judge stay-at-home fathers are the younger Gen Z adult males. I explored the youth and media angle of this topic in post 28, so I will wait to come back to it until I find some Manosphere “hot take” about the imagined harms to the male psyche of losing economic control over the family, and instead focus on how this BBC article that is probably read as “pro women’s liberation” is just kind of conceding self-worth and one’s importance to the family to capitalism. 

The main (pretty obvious) argument of the article is gender pay parity is likely to result in healthier power dynamics in relationships, and that if men learn to be more comfortable deprioritizing their own incomes, and focus on the relationship-building opportunities provided by being a stay-at-home parent, that we, men, might eventually change the overall social expectations that make some men insecure in the homemaker role. It acknowledges that one of the difficulties of this is that women generally get paid less than men for doing the same job, and thus families with a woman “breadwinner” are often making less money than the same family would if the male was working, although, this is not true for the younger adult generation, as women in their early twenties are earning slightly more than men of the same age, largely because men are falling behind in educational achievement than women. All of this seems pretty true to me, so what exactly am I trying to say?

Towards the end of the article, the author starts talking about how men are changing their understanding of masculinity to one of a “caring masculinity” that places caring, empathy and other “feminine” softer skills above economic skills. In many ways, I think this entire blog project could be considered an attempt to foster an ethic of caring within masculinity, and I I have no objections or disagreements with encouraging men to take on more domestic responsibilities and less economic responsibilities, especially if we can acknowledge that men will need to find other means of taking care of themselves emotionally than can be accomplished by spending money. But the obvious issue to me is that most families cannot afford to have anyone stay home for very long.

Now, to be fair to the article, the author does address this issue in part, by suggesting that nations provide more paternity leave, the shining examples provide a couple months of leave at most, while the other suggestions for achieving gender parity in child care responsibilities focus on men pursuing more flexible working situation that provide them more caregiving opportunities, and all of that is screaming class-based privilege to me. The author’s only real address of this is to suggest that “welfare systems should be doing more to help.” Again, I agree that a lot of gender-based power disparity is rooted in economic systems that demand most people surrender their entire selves over to the pursuit of making money, and that robust social services are pretty much the only way that many working-class families are ever going to be able to meet a minimum level of survival, but that is because, as I have argued before (in post 37 of 100), the kind of capitalism that has come to dominate Neo-liberal world econmics inherently breeds a need for as much individualism as possible.

This article might appear to be countering that by suggesting more equitable sharing of economic responsibilities and caregiving responsibilities within a family, but that definition of family is so nuclear, that it gives itself away as being incredibly class-privileged, white idealism that imagines caregiving only as a role that needs to be provided to children and must be provided by each family unit individually. Maybe it is a my failing, as a citizen in a country that miserably fails to provide for the healthcare and welfare of any of its people who cannot afford to buy those things on their own, but it is nearly impossible for me to imagine state run welfare institutions that provide adequate and respectful care for the all people experiencing the socio-economic disability of “not currently functioning as a laborer producing an income in excess of their personal needs” (so including children; the elderly; many people with long term, chronic or genetic disabilities; but also, it turns out, more than 60% of the people living in the US), that burdens of developing a welfare system that can meet these needs…and not so dependent upon racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, transphobic philosophies of what kind of care that welfare system is responsible for providing is going to result in the kinds of horrific, historic decision-making that resulted in residential schools, insane asylums that locked women up for hysteria, educational institutions that get labeled “pipelines to prison,” and assisted-living centers where people past the point in their lives of viable economic contribution disappear from society except occasionally at family holidays and celebrations. Not for everyone of course. The richest people will grow old and become politicians, members of various governing boards, or social organizations. Their family wealth will be protected by the state while paying the lowest tax rates possible, while everyone else over pays for the most basic services, get taxed at rates they can’t afford, and pretty much lives on borrowed time before they slip into a welfare system designed around preserving the economic and social order for as little money as possible. 

This might seem like a critique of socialism instead of critique of capitalism, but it is really a critique of the authoritarian control over people’s construction of family and community units capable of meeting the needs for care of people on a personal level. When something like “caring masculinity” is only theoretically feasible in a social welfare state that will need to provide humane standards of living for 60 percent of the people, I see the ideological breeding ground for a genocidal techno-fascism that believes itself having advanced past the need for the vast majority of human labor, and thus the need for the vast majority of human beings. Thus while I do value the idea of disrupting ideas of masculinity that require men to be breadwinners and to base their sense of self-worth on what they can own, and I actually like the appeal of how the article tries to encourage men to see the value that can come from socially productive labor instead of economically productive labor…I guess I sort of worry that an attempt to counter Patriarchal Misogyny exclusively by presenting what something like “caring masculinity” can look like without more directly addressing the personal and social harms of what uncaring (read: patriarchal misogynistic) looks like, articles like this (maybe even like the blog posts I keep writing), are basically just providing fodder for the manosphere and the system of patriarchal misogyny currently in power to use to call proponents of something like “caring masculinity” and out of touch delusion that is only possible in a woke/elitist bubble. 

Should more men be involved in providing the social and domestic labor of caring for family and community? Absolutely. 100%. But structuring that as something targeted solely at the fathers of nuclear families, and in particular the ones who just can’t make enough money to be the family’s real breadwinner, or the men who have so much inherent class privilege that they can take a few months off of work to be with their children before turning that domestic and social care work back over to servants (possibly including family members and spouses) is a mistake. Every man should be more involved in the domestic and social care work of their families/communities, focusing that gendered labor expectation change exclusively on men who have had children is way too late, and while children do need to see their father figures more involved in care work, they need to see their grandparents, uncles, family friends, siblings and men involved in their community support networks doing that work too. Expecting Patriarchal Misogyny to surrender the nuclear family over as a tool that was used for enforcing gender inequity over into a tool for accomplishing gender parity feels like it will be about as successful as creating lasting change as expecting the same from having more women CEOs, or how having a black president solved racism in the US. Having a bunch of rich guys talk about how caring their masculinity is while poor guys who have to stay at home because their female partners can make more money than them get ridiculed by gen Z kids online for being failures feels very much like the kind of rhetorical move that gave Donald Trump the presidency. 

I did not want to be writing this post. I wanted to write about the topic of property/land ownership, income disparity and gender. I hope I remember to write that post in the future, because I think it is important to understand how patriarchal misogyny has woven capitalism into gender identity…but thousands of babies are likely to starve in Gaza, perhaps in as little as 48 hours and this is not something anyone in the world can stand by and let happen and still call themselves a human being. Does this topic belong in a blog about patriarchal misogyny? Does women and children dying of starvation have anything to do with a system designed to allow men to treat women and children as property that can be confiscated, controlled and destroyed? I hope that answer is pretty obvious, and I don’t intend to spend much time tonight trying to explain that in the face of what is happening, because letting the people that are murdering children have any opportunity to side track the immediate conversation of “how do we stop this now?” with a debate about definitions is letting children die.

This is also why I am not going to write about whether it is necessary or valuable to call what Netanyahu and his Likud party’s war of the mass murder of children a “genocide” or why it has been such a colossal waste of time trying to create international courts with precise legal definitions of crimes, that have to be proven to judges that powerful nations have now had decades to position and control, because those conversations too are useless to saving children who are starving today.  

The state of Israel is already playing games with people’s lives in many different ways, and for this specific issue, of stopping babies from dying in mass from starvation, they are keep engaging in acts of murder, like pretending to try to provide food to starving mothers, but doing it so slowly and in such restricted quantities that other nations of the world will feel comfortable threatening them with meaningless gestures instead of taking action to remove IDF soldiers from Gaza and accelerate food distribution. The political and military leadership of Israel is playing these games intentionally because they believe that it is ok to threaten children (thousands and thousands of children) with one of the slowest and most painful deaths imaginable, in order to apply political pressure to an unpopular (only about a fifth of the people in Gaza currently support Hamas) political party. 

The State of Israel is not the First Nation to use the starvation of children as a weapon of war, and it will only be the last when the people of the world hold political and military figures that do so to a level of accountability that is far more serious than anything the International Criminal Court has done in 60+ years. That probably feels like a hopeless endeavor to many people, because the wealthiest and most powerful nations of the world have colluded with each other to make holding the leaders of these countries accountable for their crimes against humanity…a hopeless endeavor. Hopelessness guarantees complacence and complicity. We need to believe that people want to put an immediate end to the use of starving children as a weapon of war and bend our rhetoric and our actions to making that happen as immediately as possible. 

I personally think the best way to accomplish that is to save conversations about how this happened or what needs to happen for restitution for a future where the mass-murdering of children for political gain has been put to a stop, and focus relentlessly on the goals of removing the IDF from Gaza and making sure that food is getting to the people in Gaza as immediately and effectively as possible, even if that means handing all of the food aid directly over to Hamas and letting them distribute (or shoulder the consequences of failing to distribute that food)  for themselves as they see fit. 

I think many supporters of the State of Israel will argue that Hamas will try to manipulate the distribution of aid, holding it back from many of the most vulnerable people in Gaza and then claim that it was the Israeli’s fault; that there wasn’t enough food, or it wasn’t coming in fast enough, or that they will try to use the distribution of that food to motivate fighters into increasingly desperate acts of violence. They will try to argue that this is what Hamas has done in the past and what they will continue to do until they are eliminated.

To which I say, “maybe so.” Maybe Hamas will let 14,000 of Palestinian children starve to death in an attempt to somehow “make Israel look worse”…but I don’t care if they actually have done anything remotely close to as bad as starving 14,000 children in the past before or if that is purely false rhetoric to justify endless war…because massive amounts of children are starving (some already to death) and allowing large quantities of children to die by starvation, even the children of my worst-of-the-worst-imaginable enemies, would be the complete surrender of my humanity to cruelty and destruction. 

Children are already dying and thousands of more might die within less than two days. That isn’t anyone who is reading this post’s fault, and political urgency always ends up being used as a weapon against the emotional and mental health of the people it is directed at. I accept that my alarmism around this might very well be an act of emotional violence against people I care about deeply, who don’t feel like know what to do or have the ability to do what they think might actually make the message clear that the mass killing of children will never be tolerated or forgiven. Calls to action always cary that potential consequence, and should weigh heavily on the hearts and minds of the people who make them. But silence has consequences too, and I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I wasn’t acknowledging that there are no political leaders that are supposed to represent me that are going to do anything to stop this, and thus it falls on all of us. 

600 trucks a day are going to be necessary to tackle the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza right now. Today 93 entered Gaza, but 0 have had their aid distributed (see the article I linked to at the beginning of this post). This is a crime against humanity. I hope, I pray, and I call myself in to have the courage and strength to do more myself tomorrow, but at least today I can at least refuse to be a silent observer to the murder of children.

This is a topic I have touched upon many other times in my writing, in these blogs and elsewheres on the internet, so much so that I would need to really do some digging to find specific examples, which I will happily do if anyone asks me about something specific, but otherwise, I will try to consolidate some of my ideas about why expectations about gender roles seem to matter so much and to whom, here, now. 

Whether it was actually a simmering issue in the minds of many US citizens who voted in the 2024 election or an issue manufactured by far-right/Patriarchal Misogynistic (PM) media saturation because those media personalities knows the center-right democrats don’t actually believe in youth voters enough give power to platform issues young folks care about, the topic of gender identity (who defines it and why) has really moved into the US political mainstream. Contrary to how many gender scholars and radicals probably imagined gender becoming an active political conversation, it has largely been the right that has been the most effective in generating the stories that define the conversation around gender identity, sensationalizing and exaggerating a very, very small handful of accounts (many of which have turned out to be false) about the threat of a trans people as sexual predators preying on children. On the one hand, this is the argument the right has been making for decades about trans people, queers and anyone that doesn’t conform to “traditional” (read: authoritarian and essentializing) definitions of gender and sexuality, so it isn’t really shocking that it continues to be the avenue of attack. At the same time, the actual, factual violence inspired by people’s ideas about gender and sexual essentialism is so massively lopsided against LGBTQIA2S+ folks, that it is fairly telling how thoroughly centrist democrats have decided to ignore the issue as toxic, rather than use it to strike back at rightwing paranoia and cultural authoritarianism. 

The reason why is pretty obvious. Democrats don’t believe that gender violence (violence directed at people based upon their gender identity and gender presentation) is a winning political issue. They don’t think the people whose votes they are trying to prioritize care about the harm being done, and worst of all, they have pretty much conceded that violence against women is something different than gender violence which has enabled the right to argue that women need protecting from trans people and not misogynistic men. 

I am not someone that most people would think of as being at risk of experiencing gender-based violence. I am a large white dude who (especially now as a boring old man) looks like a large white dude most of the time, and large white dudes who pass as straight experience gender-based violence much less frequently than anyone else. At the same time, over the course of my life, the scariest and most threatening violence I have ever experienced has always been directed at me for reasons related to my portrayals of masculinity and sexuality. Literally the only time I have ever had anyone but a police officer push me around or lay hands on me in anger have been accompanied by homophobic slurs, or when I was younger, people calling me a girl, a pussy, or other words questioning my ability or authenticity as a man.  I think there has been a tendency to write off the vast majority of this kind of violence as “boys being boys,” and even in my own thinking about the issue, I dismiss a lot of the violence I have experienced along these lines as “kids at play,” but even ignoring problematic examples of gender-based hazing and roughousing (much of which I am certainly guilty of, some of which I remember, and probably even more that I never even thought of that way),  when I am talking specifically about things like a group of young men chasing me around town in car and throwing rocks at me, for example, situations where I actually thought someone else might actually kill me, the violence was always tied into my gender presentation.I guess there was one time I had someone pull a knife on me, and another time where someone (who was not a cop) pulled a gun on me that should also qualify as experiences of violence, but the thing about both of those situations is that I knew that the threat of violence being made against me was for a case of mistaken identity or purpose that I was going to easily be able to talk my way out of. But the times people, well, men, have threatened or attacked me related to my presentation of gender or sexuality, I knew that there was going to be no talking my way out of those situations rhetorically. 

And this is where I think the Democrats have really dropped the ball by refusing to take up the cause of gender violence as a political issue. Pretending like it is an issue that only affects specific, marginalized communities (when it does horrifically, disproportionately affect marginalized communities), has made it an issue that they are afraid to touch. They have largely (deliberately) ignored the decades of feminist and queer theory writing that has drawn the connections between authoritarianism and gender-based violence, and thus left themselves in a position where they don’t know how to read the newspaper, see example after example of violence with direct ties to patriarchal, misogynystic, homophobic and transphobic views about gender, and say “This keeps happening because, as a society, we refuse to talk about the connection between gender identity, power and violence within society.”

Meanwhile, the right runs rampant getting to claim that leftist “gender ideology” is a real danger to people’s lives while their own vile and reductive gender ideologies are actually, literally killing people.