Category Archives: gay wrath

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gloria steinem and the CIA

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i went looking for this online as soon as i heard she’d died, and could not find it anywhere. i don’t know whether that’s because the corporations have destroyed internet searching or because people were reluctant to post it while steinem was alive, but i figured i’d just solve the problem myself, since my copy of Redstockings’ book Feminist Revolution has the insert version of the chapter their publisher deleted from the Random House edition.

so: here it is. the original 1975 write-up, with documentary sources included, on gloria steinem’s long and close relationship with the CIA.

Gloria Steinem and the CIA – Redstockings 1975 compressed

it’s a hellova ride! i recommend reading all of it!

steinem is also very important to keep in mind as a very central example both of what recent and contemporary enemy feminisms can look like and of how well-protected enemy feminists who present themselves as tolerable liberals or moderate leftists often are by people whose fundamental political commitments are in direct contradiction to those enemy feminists’ work and ideological anchorings.

that plays out in all kinds of ways, but one thing that steinem is not usually given appropriate credit for her role in is the transformation of the u.s. feminist movement from basically supportive of palestinian liberation (through the early- to mid-1970s) to largely captured by a zionist framework and the transparently useless fantasy of partition (a/k/a the “two-state solution [sic]”). her magazine, Ms.1, was at the forefront of pushing a zionist line before and during the 1982 israeli invasion of lebanon (and the sabra & shatila massacre), as well as with increased energy afterwards.

steinem’s co-editor letty cottin pogrebin took the lead, writing some memorably racist pieces while cultivating astroturf support for the u.s./israeli intervention at the 1985 UN women’s conference in nairobi, to prevent a renewal of the feminist resolution explicitly opposing zionist colonialism and south african apartheid (acting in parallel to the Heritage Foundation, among others). but she had the backing of the rest of the magazine’s editors, with steinem the most important voice among them.

  1. incidentally, the honorific “Ms” is not an abbreviation, and does not need a period following it – Ms. magazine’s use of one is likely key to why that is still confusing for people. never trust a liberal project that uses a term or phrasing that comes from justice movements improperly in high-profile writing. it shows that they don’t understand what’s behind it and are already actively refusing to learn. ↩︎
gay wrath, gendertreyf

Callen-Lorde to trans people: fuck you

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for more on these matters, here are some past posts, with links to other past posts: from 2022 and earlier; from earlier this year.

i’ve just received a notice from Callen-Lorde Community Clinic (known to new yorkers as “big gay health”) asking me to sign a “SPECIFIC INFORMED CONSENT FOR GENDER AFFIRMING HORMONE THERAPY – ESTROGENS” form (pix/alt-text below).

i will not be signing it.

this is adapted from what I wrote to the Callen-Lorde leadership, and what i posted elsewhere:

this new “informed consent” form is either (1) pre-emptive compliance with the regime’s demand for a list of trans people receiving medical care; (2) an ill-thought-out and utterly useless attempt at ass-covering against the regime by creating exactly the documentation they want; (3) a scare tactic to push trans people off HRT.

the form’s list of side effects of exogenous estrogen is based on research that was not done on trans women, and is in many cases outdated. it is framed in ways that directly use the language and scare-tactics of the anti-trans far right.

this is a conscious and disgusting betrayal of Callen-Lorde’s trans patients. that’s true whatever the motives behind it, whatever imaginary game of fuck-you-dimensional chess the clinic’s leadership and lawyers think they’re playing.

you resist genocidal policies by refusing to do anything that even vaguely complies with them, not by doing what they tell you – and especially not by doing what they tell you and pretending it’s non-compliance.

here is where you can find a list of the people in charge at Callen-Lorde (though without contact information for any of them). the only person i found on social media (a very shallow search) willing to admit to their job at CL is Executive VP for Research & Education asa radix: @asaradix.bsky.social

give them all a piece of your mind.

tell them not to collaborate with the regime & its anti-trans allies. tell them to yell at our mayor (who has so far done nothing to protect trans health, despite specific policy and funding promises) to have their backs.

and remind them we can see them.

remember:

“informed consent” gatekeeping is just regular gatekeeping whenever the doctors and other “experts” in charge decide it is – including trans “expert” gatekeepers.

you can’t identify yr way out of a structural relationship.

you can’t 501c yr way out of a structural relationship.

this underscores why we (trans ppl, but also others) need full-scale autonomous healthcare structures to have secure, sustainable access to health care. and why it’s a damn good thing the starting point for that has been HRT compounding and redistribution.

if you want estrogen, there is a project near you who can hook you up. ask a trans woman who’s a punk, or an anarchist, or both. and remember: the fearmongering about sources of HRT is the same as the fearmongering against HRT. more on all that here.

take care of your sisters & siblings.

refuse to collaborate with the regime. as keguro macharia asks: “how are you imagining freedom today? how are you practicing freedom today?”

and as margaret killjoy writes: “love comes before tear gas like ozone comes before a storm.”

the state will not protect us. even your favorite politician.

the 501Cs will not protect us.

we will protect and free ourselves.

autonomous trans healthcare now! and nothing less.

and because we cannot be free unless all of us are free:

abolition now! and nothing less.

(edited to fit alt-text length limit) CALLEN-LORDE SPECIFIC INFORMED CONSENT FOR GENDER AFFIRMING HORMONE THERAPY - ESTROGENS Hormone therapy is an important component of transition for some transgender and nonbinary people to change secondary sex characteristics to affirm a gender presentation that is consistent with their gender identity. Estrogens have been used for decades for this purpose, but its use in gender affirmation is still considered off label by the FDA). While there are risks associated with taking hormones for the purpose of gender affirmation, when appropriately prescribed they can greatly improve quality of life and psychological well-being. However, there is limited high-certainty evidence about the effects of estrogens used for gender affirmation on health outcomes such as bone health, fertility, and cardiovascular health. The goal of this consent form is to review the potential risks and benefits associated with the use of estrogen therapy and review the risks associated with its use. A. The full medical effects and safety of estrogen therapy are not fully known. Potential adverse effects may include, but are not limited to: Increased/decreased cholesterol which may increase risk for heart attack or stroke Increased risk of the following: ◦ Blood clots (deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolism) ◦ Breast tumors/cancer ◦ Heart disease, arrhythmias, stroke ◦ Pituitary tumors ◦ Infertility while on treatment Decreased number of red blood cells Decreased sex drive and sexual functioning, including erectile dysfunction Psychiatric symptoms: depression and suicidal feelings; anxiety; psychosis (disorganization and loss of touch with reality), and worsening of pre-existing psychiatric illnesses Genital changes (i.e., smaller testes & penis) Infertility Cholelithiasis (gall bladder disease) B. Some side effects from hormones are irreversible and can cause death. C. The risks for some of the above adverse events may be INCREASED by
• Pre-existing medical conditions • Pre-existing psychiatric conditions • Cigarette smoking • Alcohol use D. Irreversible body changes (potential increases with length of time on hormones) resulting from hormone therapy may include, but are not limited to: • Breast growth • Possible lifetime infertility E. Estrogens are usually given with androgen blockers. Potential adverse effects may include, but are not limited to: • Increased levels of potassium in the blood, which may cause abnormal heart rhythms (if spironolactone is prescribed) • Liver inflammation (flutamide, bicalutamide, cyproterone acetate) • Decreased bone density (GnRH agonists, e.g., leuprolide, buserelin, histrelin, goserelin) Medical Treatment with Estrogens • 1. I have been told about the risks, benefits, and possible side-effects of treatment with estrogens. Initials: • 2. I understand the likely physical changes associated with the use of estrogens. Initials: • 3. I understand this treatment is voluntary and not required. Initials: • 4. I understand some changes from estrogen are permanent and even if I stop estrogen treatment, some changes will persist. Initials: • 5. I understand estrogens have been used for a long time to treat other medical conditions, but their use in gender affirmation is considered off label. Initials: • 6. I understand that the long-term effects of estrogens in this context are still being studied. Initials: • 7. I understand estrogens may affect future fertility. Initials: • 8. I have been informed about the option of fertility preservation before starting treatment. Initials: • 9. I understand that stopping treatment should be done with support and planning from the medical team. Initials: • 10. I understand that I can ask questions at any time and receive support to make informed decisions. Initials: • 11. I understand that I can withdraw consent at any time and stop gender affirmation treatment.
Initials: Consent statement By signing this form: I confirm that I have been given information about estrogens and their effects. I have had the opportunity to ask questions and discuss this decision with my medical provider. I understand he potential risks and benefits of treatment. Signature of client: Legal name of client: Primary Care Provider - PCP's name:
gay wrath, revolution

for the record…

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well, i went back to look at something i wrote in september 2018 about the then-upcoming midterm election. and while i may have overestimated the degree that the senior partner in the current bipartisan fascist regime had its shit together then, and thus gotten some details wrong, it holds up well enough as a description of this year’s midterm election for me to post it here unedited:

Continue reading for the record… →
criticism, gay wrath, longer writing, revolution, yiddish & jewish

Repair and RETVRN

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lies, shams, and “tikkun olam”

this is a slightly repetitive collage of various things i’ve written about “tikkun olam”/”tikn oylem”1 as a framing for jewish liberatory work, arranged according to the ACT-UP rubric for criticizing and rejecting supposedly helpful policies and programs: “it’s a lie, it’s a sham, and it won’t work”.

It’s A Lie

in the 1970s, a cluster of young liberal Zionist men entered jewish political and religious life (i’ll get to some of the key figures in the next section). they soon seized on a theological phrase to depict their politics as an outgrowth of their new role as rabbis: “tikkun olam.” the phrase had never had a social or political resonance before; it was about reincarnation, predestination, and the individual spiritual athletics of kabbalistic and Hasidic religious leaders who sought to bring about the apocalypse by gathering the fragments of divinity scattered in an irredeemably sinful world. that earlier history, however, has very strongly shaped how “tikkun olam” has functioned in the institutionalized jewish left over the past 50 years.

previously, the term’s only political deployment was in a few places in the Mishnah, where it designates small legalistic shifts that ease the conditions of the worst off, in order to ‘repair/maintain [tikkun] the existing social order [olam]’ without structural change.

Continue reading Repair and RETVRN →
gay wrath, revolution

files and conspiracies

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(1)

so: the core module of u.s. conspiracist thinking is the one it inherited from the european christian intelligentsia, whose history norman cohn traced brilliantly in Europe’s Inner Demons (if a little dryly, especially if you’re not an archive-rat like me). it goes back to ancient roman political maneuvering – in sallust’s account of the “catiline conspiracy”, from the last century before the christian era, for instance – and perhaps even further1, but consolidated itself through anti-jewish and anti-christian attacks over the first few hundred years of the christian era.

that module says:

there is a hidden group of people who seek power for themselves and control over our society; they gather in secret and hold perverse sexual rites, abusing children (and also adults – willing or unwilling – often incestuously); they ritually kill humans (often children, specificially) and drink their blood or eat their flesh; their ultimate goal is to undermine the political and social systems that we live within.

i won’t go into the history of that module (i’d only be summarizing cohn, and you should just read him instead) but it moves essentially unchanged from roman anti-christian polemic through christian anti-heresy and anti-witchcraft polemics and the anti-jewish blood libel, inspiring and excusing a massive number of murders and massacres along the way. almost all of those deaths, importantly, were carried out by the state (whichever one, of whatever form), or with the explicit or implicit support of the state.

we’ve seen a very classical version of this module emerge and grow over the past decade: the ongoing Pizzagate/QAnon movement.

and we’ve seen an equally classical mobilization of it in a more open-ended form over a slightly longer period: the ongoing anti-trans campaigns centered in the u.k. and u.s.

and we have also, over more or less the same years, seen more and more detailed evidence of something else:

the actual involvement of an impressive number of public figures with someone they knew was actively involved with the sexual exploitation of both children and adults on a very large scale, which many of them directly participated in or saw happening.

(2)

one response to that has been “the conspiracy theorists were right”.

it’s a tempting throw-away line, and i can understand why i’m seeing it so often from people in my circles.

but it’s also both untrue and dangerous.

Continue reading files and conspiracies →
criticism, gay wrath, yiddish & jewish

sex, lies, and primeval matriarchy

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or, how i learned to stop worrying and hate fake history written by fascists

or, you can’t fool me, it’s enemy feminisms all the way down


i’ve been thinking about this for a while, and picking up pieces of the story here and there, but i haven’t had the time (or, to be real about it, the languages) to do the deep dive it needs. so here’s what i know, in hopes that others will run further with it.

one of the most lastingly popular narratives to come out of the cultural feminist sphere1 is the idea of an ancient matriarchal culture, suppressed by later patriarchal oppressors. this currently appears in all kinds of forms: contemporary “noble savage” depictions of indigenous cultures of turtle island; historically dubious accounts of the medieval and early modern european/euro-colonial anti-“witchcraft” moral panics2; and, above all, grand presentations of the prehistory of europe and west asia, or/and of “indo-european cultures”.

that last one is not only central to a widely popularized cultural feminist “common sense”, but central to most contemporary paganisms. at its core, it holds that prehistoric goddess-worshiping societies were supplanted by patriarchal invaders (either physical or ideological) who brought with them monotheism as well as misogyny.

leaving aside the straightforward critiques of the basically laughable idea that there was a common culture across the vast geography involved in these claims – and that it would be reconstructable if there were3 – this simply doesn’t hold up to any detailed scrutiny. but that’s not what i’m interested in here; and neither is the narrative’s transparent recapitulation of the christian myth of the Fall from Eden. where i’m headed is towards the history of that narrative, the history of the fantasy itself. this is all still preamble.

frequently, but not invariably, this narrative of indo-european prehistory turns explicitly anti-jewish. take, for example, the version presented by z budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca and one of the most influential figures in the history of feminist paganism. at a 1976 Women’s Spirituality Conference in boston, she declared “the Jewish religion began as a backlash to the goddess religion”.4 another presenter at the same conference, mary daly, a post-Catholic theologian who played a similarly central role in women’s spiritual movements outside the pagan sphere, held a similar position.

if that sounds like a feminist version of the openly anti-jewish strains of “reconstruction”-oriented paganism – from slavic “native faith” groups to U.S. Odinism; often though not always aligned with neo-Nazi politics – it ought to, because that’s exactly what it is. and that’s what this piece is about.

Continue reading sex, lies, and primeval matriarchy →
gay wrath, revolution

the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state

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As the U.S. President and other members of his administration say aloud that they will ignore court orders that disagree with their actions just as steadfastly as they will ignore legislators’ objections, there’s more and more talk about “the rule of law” and a “constitutional crisis”. That may, for certain purposes, be a reasonable account of what’s happening within the state, but it’s useless as a lens for looking at what’s happening in the country – that is, on the expanse of stolen land that the U.S. state rules. In fact, it is a way of actively avoiding dealing with what is going on in any way that can inform strategic or tactical thinking about how to resist.

Again and again, over the past five years of uprisings and discontent, we’ve seen progressive and radical groups (especially, but not exclusively, 501c corporations) and prominent movement figures fall back on two core strategies for responding to the far right.

One is elections: either backing the Democratic Party as a whole, as it moves steadily from the right to the far right1, or backing liberal candidates within it, who are uniformly marginalized, attacked, and defanged by the party leadership even as their presence legitimizes that leadership. It would be nice if that approach’s abject failure to win any material victories over the past decade discredited it, but given that its abject failure over the previous four decades didn’t, we can’t count on that.

The other is lex ex machina – intervention by the courts. That alleged strategy is based on the idea that legal decisions command a moral force that cannot be countered (which every U.S. justice movement’s history disproves), or that they are fundamentally self-enforcing magic words that control the state.

On the practical side, Andrew Jackson pointed out the problem with that last position back when the U.S. Supreme Court tried to restrict the State of Georgia’s authority over the Cherokee Nation. “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” is the way Horace Greeley imagined him phrasing it; Old Hickory himself just called the decision “still born” (and in practice embraced, rather than rejecting, the court’s guidance on how exactly to go about committing genocide). But the problem for movement strategy isn’t the practical side, it’s the ideological underpinnings that let so many radicals who know that punchline continue to act as if they’ve never heard any such thing.

There is no such thing as a government of laws. There is no such thing as the rule of law. Laws are words on paper (or graven in stone, or incised on clay tablets, or preserved as digital 1s and 0s). They do not rule, they do not govern, any more than the Statue of Liberty does, or a pothole on I-95, or any other inanimate object.

States are made of people, say the state-preservationists of the left, and they’re correct. There’s even a grain of partial truth in their fantasy that this makes the state as a structure infinitely malleable. Laws are products of the state – of specific people within its structures – but what being a state means is that the people who act in its name decide what concrete effects its laws will have. The state is a specific kind of structure, and a key part of that specificity is the discretion that its agents hold.

We see this every day.

Continue reading the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state →
gay wrath, revolution

on sponteneity

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i wrote this in september 2023, thinking back on the lessons of the previous few years (and of my many more years of movement work). this seems like the moment to put it in the world, incomplete as it is.

one of the left/progressive snarl words of the moment is “spontaneous”. we’re told that our struggles can’t rely on “spontaneity”, on “spontaneous revolts”. we’ve heard this again and again over the past few years. the grassroots mutual aid that sustained many of us and saved untold thousands of lives during the first two years of the pandemic was “too spontaneous” to last. the george floyd uprising’s “sponteneity” was its fatal flaw. that spectre of unreliability is used to push the idea that we should “build organizations” – on a centralized and hierarchical model (choosing only among the basically indistinguishable variations of the vanguard party, the 501(c) corporation, the trade union, and the membership organization) – “not movements”, to use the alinskyites’ phrase for this dogma.

but if we look at the material realities as we all experienced them, while we still have them fairly fresh in our minds, we see a very different picture. “spontaneity”, in the 2020s as always, is a fiction. what’s being decried, dismissed, and declared useless are projects that are or were self-organized and self-managed by the people participating in them. every one of them drew on deep experience (whether shared by people involved or through lessons passed on in a variety of ways) to plan its work and develop the structures its participants felt it needed based on the context where they were working. none of this came out of thin air in an instant – that’s a fantasy projected by people who cannot imagine anything happening without Someone In Charge except by some form of incomprehensible magic.

“spontaneity” is what you call self-organization and self-management if you’re against it.

what limited the success and sustainability of these projects was precisely the intervention of the organizations and people now putting the blame on “spontaneity”. rather than redirecting material resources into self-organized mutual aid structures, they created shoddy copies that they could tell their funders were “scalable”, or offered supposed support that in practice put them in control, or persuaded people to adopt their models of work. rather than find concrete ways to strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of increasingly militant street actions, they actively worked to make them less militant, promoted “peaceful” and “nonviolent” tactics, intervened physically and in the media to divert people from effective direct action towards symbolic gestures, and steadfastly pushed fantasies of legislation and electoral campaigns as the properly “serious” channels for creating change. predictably, these kinds of poison pills were damaging or deadly.

this same pattern played out over the last sixteen months of work in solidarity with the palestinian resistance, with the same results: opportunistic cooptation and demobilization through wheel-spinning activity, by both 501(c) corporations and vanguard parties. the flattening of tactical and strategic imagination into paths that decades of experience have clearly shown to be ineffectual. hierarchical organizations strengthened at the expense of the movement. and very little critical assessment of the successes and failures of the work.

as we in the u.s. head deeper into an overtly fascist regime’s rule (a meaningful and terrifying change in degree and tone, but not a shift in the state’s structure or priorities) we need to not do this same fucking thing again. our resistance will not – cannot – be effective unless it is self-organized and self-managed by its participants. let’s be spontaneous. together.

gay wrath, yiddish & jewish

when the enemy of my enemy is my enemy

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as usual when the israeli state accelerates its ongoing attempted genocide against palestinians, Neturei Karta is getting attention (this time, from what i’ve seen, almost entirely under their publicity label “Torah Jews” as opposed to the usual name of their sect).

which means it’s time to remind people that they are a part of the religious far right, and should not be considered allies to any liberation work. their anti-zionism is not based on any anticolonial vision; it is theological, and even so a matter of disagreeing with the zionist movement about the timing and conditions of the conquest of palestine. NK believes that it should only happen under the auspices of the messiah, whose coming they hope and pray for. when he cleanses the holy land, it’ll be just fine by them.

[edited] they also directly tie their antizionism to their virulent and violent anti-queer politics, as in the NK statement from 2006, below. it is about the jerusalem Pride march scheduled for the next day, but is in response to that summer’s (rather small) pinkwashing World Pride march in jerusalem and the (quite large) queer palestine solidarity march that countered it. both are “perversion”, “desecration”, “evil” in their eyes, and responsible in part for the existence of zionism.

[edited to add] to be clear: this statement is their endorsement of – and promise to follow through on – threats of physical attacks against queer and trans people at Pride, which the previous year had involved the stabbing of three participants, and would escalate to murder during another stabbing spree in 2015. because of those threats, the mainstream (i.e. zionist) march was cancelled in 2006 – which meant that only the pink-and-black bloc of queer and trans radicals (mostly involved in militant palestine solidarity work) took the streets the day after this statement came out. where NK and their friends attacked them, with the support of the israeli police.

the far right has no place in our solidarity work. NK should not be welcomed or celebrated by anyone committed to liberation.

When the fear of the Almighty is Absent All Becomes Permitted

A Neturei Karta Statement on the Parade and Demonstration in Favor of Moral Abominations in Jerusalem

Continue reading when the enemy of my enemy is my enemy →