My First and Last Word on Cisgenderism

The only thing I know for sure about this term "cis" is it's fucking confusing and deeply contentious. It came to my attention in the context of Deep Green Resistance's (DGR) alleged "transphobia" - and before you throw a brick at me, I only say "alleged" because I do not even understand the totality of the controversy, and what I do understand I have mixed feelings about: more on that below.

So as I understand this term, it suggests the connection between your assigned gender at birth - "It's a boy!!" - with your identity: I am a MAN; versus a transgender person - "it's a boy!!" - and your identity: "My name is Chelsea Elizabeth Manning."

Academics don't impress me. I love Gore Vidal's term for them: "scholar squirrels" because they are careerists perpetually gathering their nuts for the next paper to be peer-reviewed by other scholar squirrels. Enough favorable citations means tenure.

So an academic, and a Western one at that (German), inventing a term like "cisgender" means absolutely nothing to me. That it's trickled over into some austere, uber-educated activist circles is as impressive to me as the infamy of Eugenics in a not-to-distant generation.

We've been handed - and do ourselves reinforce - two gender roles by a patriarchal Western capitalist system. Blue for boys; pink for girls. And rather blow this open by taking a page from older, more sustainable, more psychically developed indigenous societies in the Americas and the global South, where - broadly speaking - there were two biological genders but many sexes, our ever-irrelevant academics have decided to create yet another duality - cisgender vs transgender.

Error, Mary Baker Eddy lectured us, cannot expel error. More binaries are not the solution to our current binaries. They may make for tenure-track professorships and publication in journals no one reads, but I already know who they serve so why pay any attention?

Since academics have almost always served the state and its power - if this is news to you I suggest you spend and afternoon reading Noam Chomsky's "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship [1969]" - it makes sense they would not draw from indigenous experiences across - god forbid! - the global South for their dissertations and aspirations for journal publications, endowed professorships, and tenure.

Now, my qualms about DGR's alleged transphobia. I read it stems from not allowing [trans-] women into women-only circles. I'm sure if I've got that wrong one of my sympathetic readers will let me know. This is where I have mixed feelings:

Can a person born white decide because of a cultural affinity or genetic test or whatever that he is actually African (Black) and in turn speak for the experience of Africans in the Americas?

My own suspicion is that he cannot. My own suspicion is that this African-identified person will bring his white privilege into the discussion, when Africans have no experience of this privilege.

Is this chauvinist? Maybe. But I can't help, in as much I understand the DGR debate, that women would not want [trans-] women to be a voice in their private spaces.

And yet, I accept that I'd rather have radical abolitionist John Brown speaking on my behalf than the surly and remote US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but this only opens the question whether to have spaces set aside for the Other is a value at all.

So aside from what continues to make sense to me from indigenous perspectives, I took like a fish to water to the term QUEER when introduced to its usage in the late 80's. I am queer. I know some straight people who are queer and some lesbians and gays who are not. I cringed when for a brief period in the middle 90's academics tried to employ this term but it was happily and epic failure (all those tomes from Routledge must be floating on a landfill in the Pacific now).

Is queer another binary? I hope not. To me it's just a broad canvass onto which anyone can explore the boundaries of themselves without the roles assigned to us by a dominant and domineering culture.

This is all I have to say on this cockeyed subject.

The Color Line will keep the US a slave state not a worker democracy

It boggles the mind that 50,000 Chinese workers can go on strike, while their counterparts in the US keep toiling at their machines [promised rewards in heaven!]

This demands wide analyses.

For my part, the color line - as WEB DuBois called it - holds the answer. He eventually moved [back] to Africa, and maybe this is OUR answer. In the meantime, white civilization loathes the African and must keep the American Indian Movement and its Indians in concentration camps, worse off than the poorest Africans in the US.

White civilization is dependent, fundamentally, on a system of racism. This is our caste system in the US.

But what does this have to do with 50,000 Chinese workers withholding their labor [strike] while their counterparts in the US remain toiling at their machines?

White civilization and its aspirants cannot tolerate to see the system unhinged in any way that would undo the caste system. Southern DEMOCRATIC PARTY Senators during FDR's New Deal only consented to support the emergency measures if Africans were kept out of it. These same white settler elites refused to support measures like the GI Bill unless funds were distributed locally and not the federal government - this enabled southern institutions to deny money to African GI's for home loans and college, keeping them out of the much lauded emerging middle class.

I'll keep assuring you that Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority decision in the Dredd Scott case is the cornerstone of African life in the United States. If you want to understand our legal place in US society, read it.

The progeny of these early white settlers are themselves white settlers and beneficiaries of this caste system of race, theft, and economic privilege, and they mean to maintain it. They'll allow a reform here and there. They'll let an African in here and there, but under very strict conditions, and the moment the "n*gger gets out of place" he/she is sent back into the fields.

These white settler descendents are just like their forebears. Minor adjustments are tolerated, but these adjustments cannot undo the status quo.

An Injury to One is an Injury to All confronts this color line in a white racist settler colony like the USA. The narrative goes that Africans either deserve their plight because they are "lazy" or must be seen to be kept there, in their place. The effect is the same.

A General Strike that would even rhetorically embrace all workers, across many fields, and many colors, threatens the settler state and its caste system.

Years ago when I lived in St. Louis, MO, a modest health care reform measure was put before the voters to expand services regardless of income. The measure failed. I tired of hearing white nativists, which pollute that strange city, say in open spaces they opposed the measure because to support it meant "those people from East St. Louis [Illinois: read AFRICANS] would come across the river and steal our services."

The whites stole the land then robbed Africa of enough of its population to set it back several generations, and yet: Africans in the Americas are the ones singled out as taking things they do not earn. White-settler logic says Africans in the Americas are suspect where jobs or services are concerned because we would abuse the system, as if this were our genetic disposition.

So, white-settler logic says controls must be kept on workers since the Africans might pilfer the system. Ergo, no worker solidarity. No strike. And like those piss-ignorant St. Louisans, we all lose.

The Right to Withhold your Labor

Germany, Argentina, Greece, Libya, Guandong Province [China], Haiti, Kashmir Province [India] ... these are just some of the places where massive strikes or general strikes are taking place.

In the US: zero.

In Panama, organizers sent out the message: "We are producers of your wealth and we are stronger than you when we unite and strike."

The 24-hour general strike in Buenos Aires involved 1,000,000 people and shut down public transportation and air traffic.

In the US: we keep showing up for our crappy jobs where we're treated worse than farm animals and prodded and tested like any prized pig.

In the US we keep saying how lucky we are to have a job.

In Haiti, workers are staging a two-day general strike to force the government to address lowering quality of life, rising costs of living, and worsening services.

In the US we face the same elements by getting second jobs where we are abused by two employers and have less leisure and recreation time.

In the US, we allow our Patrones [Fucking Bosses] to check our finances, look into our backgrounds - "have you met with anyone from a foreign government?" - test our blood for drugs and alcohol, administer "qualifying" and "certification" exams on a regular and harassing basis - exams, by the way, which often began as a means to keep Africans, various American Indians, and women out of employ.

These Patrones do this while paying us little, never adjusting it to ebbs and flows of the Wall Street bankers (inflation), and demanding things like: we be more professional [i.e., kiss more asses and don't answer back] or do-more-with-less [i.e., doing the job of the three other workers who've been laid off].

This doesn't look promising, and it's not meant to.

When I read what is flaring up and going ablaze in other countries, some economically on par with the US and many not, I wonder how did we here get so docile and dull.

The government and the 1% it really works for will not bend to our will and our interests based on letter-writing campaigns or online petitions asking for donations. These things are interesting for some of the issues they bring up, but they bring about as much social change/revolution as a Dear Abby column.

The intrusions into our lives [credit checks, what I smoke or drink, etc], the "high standards" met with low wages and zero benefits, the arbitrary firing won't begin to come to an end until workers in the US digest the principle that we have a right to withhold our labor from our employers.

In other words: STRIKE.

We do it small; we can do it big, but it's got to be done. Like a Radical Faerie solstice party, the more the sexier.

The United States is not only unique in the Western world for its abysmal health care system but also the steps it has taken in law to keep workers from really organizing effectively.

Strikes are prohibited for all federal workers and most state and city workers.

Almost half of our states have laws which prohibit a union from organizing a workplace. These are so-called right-to-work states.

Unions are restricted from sympathetic strikes - that is, solidarity with other workers.

Since the 1940's federal laws have curbed unions, when it should have been unions that curbed the United States government.

Faced with a weakened labor movement, may local unions, like for school teachers, have been forced to accept No-Strike clauses to their contracts. These clauses further restrict employees from discussing any kind of work stoppage or slowdown.

In the US, the Patron is a king, and the government arms and supports them just as it arms and supports other two-bit global South thug dictators against the masses of workers who want to organize their societies better.

And this is what we have to gain and what the Patron and the US government have to lose: a better society.

George Bernard Shaw wrote "You see things and say 'Why?' But I dream of things that never were, and I say 'Why not?"

So it's time we put the ownership of our labor back on the table. It's ours. It belongs to us. It is not lent with a blank check to the thugs of management and Wall Street to do whatever they want for their quarterly profit while more of us have to stand in food lines.

Remember what the organizers in Panama declared: "We are producers of your wealth and we are stronger than you when we unite and strike."

It's time for a GENERAL STRIKE.