By David Futrelle
Terry Gilliam is tired of talking about his movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Instead he’s decided to take advantage of the media attention surrounding the film’s late UK release to expound at length on his rather tiresome (and decidedly unoriginal) theories of gender and race and how white men like him are the most persecuted people on planet earth.
Yes, he’s turned into one of those guys. Or perhaps, given his reputation as kind of a dick, he’s always been one.
In an, er, wide-ranging interview with Alexandra Pollard of The Independent, the 79-year-old director called #MeToo a “witch hunt,” whined that white men are “being blamed for everything wrong with the world,” and then, for funzies, declared that his manifestly white self was somehow really a “black lesbian” because lots of people with his last name are black.
Refusing to talk for more than a moment or two about his movie, Gilliam began the interview with a tirade about the alleged evils of #MeToo.
We’re living in a time where there’s always somebody responsible for your failures, and I don’t like this. I want people to take responsibility and not just constantly point a finger at somebody else, saying, ‘You’ve ruined my life.’ .
#MeToo is a witch hunt. I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered.
After all this humorless bloviation, he then wondered aloud why people don’t think #MeToo jokes are funny. While admitting that a lot of #MeToo accusations are true, he added that “the idea that this is such an important subject you cannot find anything humorous about it” was just plain wrong.
Gilliam then brought race and gender identity into the mix, making the One Trans Joke that so many reactionary would-be comedians think is so hilarious.
When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?
Pollard, who at this point must have been inwardly cringing at each new pronouncement from Gilliam, told him it’s because, er, he’s manifestly not that.
He explained that many people with his last name are indeed black so maybe he’s half black or something? (The exceedingly white looking Gilliam doesn’t seem to realize that it’s infinitely more likely that his similarly lily-white ancestors owned the ancestors of the black people who now have that last name.)
He then gave up the fatuous claim, only to insist that
I don’t like the term black or white. I’m now referring to myself as a melanin-light male. I can’t stand the simplistic, tribalistic behaviour that we’re going through at the moment.
But he quickly returned to the joke about being a black lesbian.
I’m talking about being a man accused of all the wrong in the world because I’m white-skinned. So I better not be a man. I better not be white. OK, since I don’t find men sexually attractive, I’ve got to be a lesbian. What else can I be? I like girls. These are just logical steps.
It’s not hard to see why Pollard says that it’s “deeply frustrating to argue with Gilliam. He is both the devil and his advocate.” And a pretty tedious devil at that.
Get some new material, dude.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from an old Monty Python routine.
H/T — thanks to Twitter’s@WeaselFidget for alerting me to the interview.
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@ Sapphire:
My problem with this argument is what are trans people supposed to do? Spend their lives living as the wrong gender and consoling themselves with the thought that at least if they get murdered, the crime will be solved somewhat faster? Given that out trans people are already more likely to be murdered than cis people in the same demographic, I think they’ve quite understandably made the call that living as their true selves outweighs the risks.
@Crip Dyke, thank you for that absolute tour de force, for your patience, eloquence and generosity in sharing your knowledge.
I found the analogy you drew – between the way a women’s shelter might deal with the situation of a client who has a fear of black women and the way they might deal with the situation of a client who has a fear of trans* women – particularly helpful.
@Crip Dyke
Thank you for your deep and comprehensive explanations in your comments! They were very educative to me, and brightened my day somewhat.
@Sapphire
Sorry if I’m restating something that has already been said in other comments, but there’s something seriously icky here that I can’t easily let go.
On some level, I get why you feel this way. I do. But please consider the following.
People who think there’s something wrong with you for not conforming to gender stereotypes won’t stop thinking there’s something wrong with you if you take away some of possible excuses from them.
Long time ago, my parents apparently thought I was gay, for no particular reason apart from me not fitting the expectations of my gender well. Would they think I may be trans* or NB nowadays when it’s more commonly talked about, or if they fixated on some gender non-conforming behaviour of mine? Maybe.
But if only heterosexual and cis people existed in the world, would it have prevented them from trying to find reasons why there’s something “wrong” with me, as judged by the norms of cishet behaviour? No, of course not. Maybe they would have blamed mental illness, or hormonal imbalance, etc.
If people refuse to respect your gender identity, that’s on them. They’re the ones making you feel like less like you belong. Not trans* people.
And you may think it’s an opinion with no consequence that you’re not forcing on anybody, but I think you’re wrong, considering how you’re expressing it. In the fragment I quoted, you said that you see accepting NB people’s identities as something directly opposed to identities of masculine women. Can you not see how this can be upsetting to people who’s identities have been denied and vilified plenty already?
And no, I’m not trans* myself, but it’s not like I’m getting outraged on their behalf. The idea of someone turning on marginalized people because they think it would make heretonormative people accept them more is plenty upsetting to me.
@Crip Dyke,
You have the patience of Job.
@Beyond Ocean,
But those weren’t the words in her head and you’re totally mean to make assumptions about what she thinks based on what she actually said.
They may not know how to fix it. They just know it needs to be fixed and the more people who are more knowledgeable about it will know how to fix it, but unless someone has recognized it is an issue, no one will even try to fix it.
But if two people and one is white and one is black have a child, it is possible for that child to appear to be white or black. Society determines those traits.
Halsey for example is the daughter of a white woman and a black man. She appears white to most and has talked about her struggles with that because she feels like she is black.
But when trying to discuss concepts that are being broken down, it can be useful.
You could take everything to extremes yes, but it’s a different situation when you are talking about a woman who was just raped and beaten. But if you take gender out of it, then it’s more privacy or less privacy and so you don’t have that.
But to put it in a similar context, it’s a person coming in saying “I am not trying to say the black ice is anyone’s fault, and I don’t support anything people who are arsonists or blaming firefighters. I do want to talk about the black ice, and FYI, I’m on the spectrum so sometimes my displayed emotions aren’t what you might expect, but that doesn’t reflect my opinions, if you could please just take this discussion on how to solve the black ice problem as what it seems on the surface, that I want to talk about how to fix the black ice, not harm anyone else, and please try to remember when I speak that I’m not having a secret agenda to sue the fire dept or set someone’s house on fire, I just was thinking about possible ideas and solutions.”
and then the response is “I can’t believe you want to get rid of all firefighters and set houses on fire”, it can be frustrating.
I don’t know, definitely not them needing to live as their AAB gender, it’s just something that someone should think about and address – that’s what I mean by thinking about things that can have unintended consequences. Once people start thinking about the issue, they can solve it. Without knowing it is an issue, no one is ever going to address it. I know people would likely feel that needing to specify a missing person was transgender would have the potential (even if just in perception) to have less work/care taken for these victims (like, being afraid if they are ID’d as trans, being worried that the police might not work as hard on the case). So I am not sure what the right answer is. It just had literally just occurred to me. I was thinking about the reasons *why* sex is indicated on IDs, and then was thinking about previous info I knew about skeletal remains and identifying from that and how much harder it can be to bring justice with only skeletal remains, and then I thought about how many “doe” people get found or buried, and I thought how horrible it would be to be that person’s loved one and not find out because they were looking for a woman and no one realized a victim found who had male genitalia was her, so they never got closure or the chance to find who did it.
I would like to emphasis again that it is not a particular person saying “you are wrong”, it’s the subtle societal pressure that inadvertently get placed on people.
There’s nothing vilifying intended and I repeatedly have said it isn’t pressure from trans people, it’s an unintended consequence for the direction we are going. And since we are choosing that direction anyway, we have the ability to take that direction and recognize issues and potential issues and course correct before they become ingrained.
You look at it as “The idea of someone turning on marginalized people because they think it would make heretonormative people accept them more is plenty upsetting to me.” which would assume I’m “turning” on them and would advocate for anything harming them emotionally or physically. It’s rather that I think we can reach the same end result (acceptance of how you present your own gender) in different ways and I prefer a different way because I think it has less pitfalls and less likelihood of making someone feel as though they don’t belong.
You’re the one who’s trying to make people feel like they don’t belong, hon.
You can stop now.
@Sapphire
It’s comes down to this: you are insisting on an acceptance of your way of looking at particular situations in the world, regardless of how your stated perceptions makes other people feel, on the basis that, to paraphrase, your ‘brain needs to think about things this way’. In doing so, you are ignoring the exceedingly patient explanations of others who are in a much better position than you to understand, on an intimate level, why what you are saying is harmful and wrong. When anyone argues against you, they are dismissed as not taking into account your special circumstances. I strongly suspect, had this not been the case, you would have been hit with the ban hammer by now as this community isn’t overly tolerant of people who talk about their members in the ways you sometimes have. I say this not to make you back down or be on your best behaviour or anything like that, but to emphasise how caring and desirous of educating you this community has been. You are definitely not the only neuroatypical person in this room, but you ARE the only person using it to justify making some quite alarming statements. Try to learn from this, please. No one wants to kick anyone out if there is even a chance of them becoming a great addition to our ranks. But you should consider that we can only go on the evidence you give us that you are what you claim. And, quite frankly, if it looks like a sea lion, walks like a sea lion, and brays like a sea lion, at a certain point we’re all going to conclude it’s a sea lion. It’s not our job in life to do the heavy lifting for you or anyone else when it comes to understanding things. Perhaps it’s time to go away and have a bit of a think about what people like Crip Dyke have shared with you, and feel free to come back when you have to discuss it further.
It’s not like you’re out of options here. You could continue to ignore the people who are trying to help you, stick to your “that’s just how my brain works” line, and go on your way. You won’t be any wiser, but we won’t be hurt by that resolution. You could go and have that think – might be fun. You could ask for more help and acknowledge that there are things you might not be able to understand. We’re all dealing with something difficult in our lives. My brain is broken – I have bipolar disorder and some days I can’t trust the thoughts in my head, which might make me believe I can solve world hunger and sell out a stadium with my opera singing. (NB. I can’t do either of those things.) I have days when I think the world is full of idiots and I’m the only one who knows how things should be done. I also have days when I think the world would be better off without me. Those are the hard ones. But I don’t allow any of that to be a Get Out of Jail Free card when it comes to treating other people as, well, people. Because you have a choice about how you treat other people, and because you have a brain that, however different it might be from other people’s, is damn fine at at least one thing – learning.
@Sapphire:
Okay, I’m torn here. For a number of reasons (not least the fact that I didn’t think I was going to post here for 24 hours and it’s actually been more like 18 or something).
First, I really, really agree with @Hippodameia. There is so, so much to read and digest, to think about and compare to your existing thoughts and beliefs, that for someone in the situation you’ve described yourself (not having had any previous chances to talk through these things with others) walking away from these issues for 7 or 10 days -yes, literal days- would be very reasonable and very helpful.
Maybe you can’t do that. Maybe now that you found a place that can talk about these things you just can’t stop. Maybe it feels just completely, utterly intolerable that someone here might think of you less than completely positively and you feel absolutely, literally compelled to correct each and every single misimpression that any commenter has about you. I know the feeling.
I am not you, and it’s a free internet, and I am definitely not saying you’re unwelcome at We Hunted The Mammoth, but my very strong advice is to walk away from this thread for a while. Walk away from these topics for a while. Feel free to comment here, but comment about anything other than trans* people and trans* liberation. Let new ideas and new opinions rattle around in your brain for a few days.
Maybe read this thread without commenting, if you can manage it. Get to a place where your thoughts really are new, really are different. We have listened to your thoughts as they are, and disagree with many, but you haven’t burned any bridges. So wait. Mull things over. Think some new thoughts.
Then, if and when you come back, try out your new thoughts. Don’t bother explaining the old ones. Even if you haven’t said everything perfectly. Even if you think you’ve been misunderstood on some point or other. Remember how I said that everyone has the right to make judgements and express their opinions on issues, even when they are issues pertaining to a particular person? At the same time I said that repeatedly expressing the same opinion can become harassment or abuse.
Don’t run even a small risk of allowing the repeated expression of similar ideas to cause people to feel like you’re being harassing or abusive. That will definitely lead to you being unwelcome here, just after you found it. You seem to value this space, so I think you should treat it with the care necessary to preserve it for you
And again, I’m not making rules for you. I’m not telling you what to do. This is just my advice, but I’ve been commenting here for a long time, and though I also take long breaks sometimes, and thought I’m sure I’m not the person who has added the most comments ever, and though I’m sure that I annoy some percentage of people here (because no one has the perfect communication style that works for everyone), I have managed to stay welcome here for a long time, at least since 2012. So when Hippodameia and I agree on something, I think you should consider it pretty good advice.
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All that said, at some point you will comment again on trans* issues and trans* advocacy and trans* liberation. Whenever that moment comes, I think perhaps the most fertile ground you can move to is this:
This brings up several things that haven’t been specified yet. We’ve heard you talk about pitfalls (or “concerns” as you have previously called them), but we haven’t heard you talk about your strategy for reaching a place where each person is accepted in how they present their own gender.
Specifically:
1. What is your “way” (I would say “strategy” or “plan”) for reaching this end result?
2. Exactly how does your “way” differ from the “way” other people take toward this end?
3. How do you know what that other “way” is – did you read multiple books? Talk to someone who is the executive director of a large organization? Do a survey of hundreds of folks? Talk to only a couple people?
4. Why is it you feel you know enough about current trans* advocacy strategies to judge them wanting?
5. What are the odds that you might be wrong about characterizing something as “the way” that trans* advocacy is currently done? What things about the current “way” are you most hazy about? most likely to understand poorly or to misunderstand?
6. Which pitfalls do not exist on the path you set out that do exist on the other “way”?
7. Are there any pitfalls on your path that do not exist on that other path? What are they?
8. You say that your “way” has
“Less likelihood” is a comparison. How did you determine the likelihood of current tactics making someone feel as though they don’t belong? How did you determine the likelihood of your tactics ending in that bad result?
Did you do math? If you did, great! Show your work. We would absolutely all love to see it.
Did you do peer-reviewed research? If you did, great! Link your research. We would absolutely all love to see it.
Did you read the work of other people who did relevant research with a good methodology? If you did, great! Link that research. We would absolutely all love to see it.
=======================================================
These are questions that haven’t been addressed yet, and could help you make a clean break from old conversations to new, so what you write doesn’t feel repetitive to people. Whether you intend it or not, repetitive can quickly come to feel badgering, and I’m sure you don’t want that.
These are also questions that people here have investigated to varying degrees over the years, so many of us will also have answers to at least some of those questions.
It might also be that you think about it and come to decide that you don’t have any actual evidence for your conclusion that your way is better. Heck, it might even turn out that when you stop to write down your preferred strategy it’s kind of vague and not even specific enough to use for a single fundraising appeal, much less for building an activist organization around.
That’s also okay. If that happens, it can be part of your learning process. If it happens, I also won’t be surprised, because you tell me that you haven’t had a chance to talk about these things before, but you ALSO tell me that you have better solutions than those that have been talked about between thousands of different people over decades.
It would be surprising to me if your “way” was better than current trans* advocacy… but this is, actually, possible! When I started advocating for trans* survivors of DV, I found out that many if not most shelters excluded queer women abused by other women in intimate relationships.
That was bad.
But what was worse? In the early 90s, people had only just figured out that if you let in women abused by women, abusers could call up and get admitted to shelter. But what no one in the world seemed to have figured out the consequences of the fact that abusers are really skilled at talking about themselves as the victim… much less what to do about it.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the fake-but-archetypal abuse scene where a heterosexual husband hits his heterosexual wife because she burned dinner? The abusive husband in this classic scenario says, “You made me hit you,” because of the burned dinner.
Nowadays we call this “reversing victim and offender”, but it overlaps with other tactics like gaslighting.
The problem in queer women’s couples is that an abuser who thinks of herself as the victim can call up a shelter and get admitted. Once that abuser has been admitted, even if they later get thrown out, the abuser knows where the shelter is and the actual victim in the situation can’t rely on that shelter for help.
At one shelter I worked at we had a woman who came in and out of shelter a couple times. She kept getting really close to breaking the rules badly enough we would kick her out and not let her back, but she seemed to know that was a risk and would leave shelter before that happened.
Later, the person actually abused by that woman called us up. She wanted help and didn’t know if we were the shelter that housed her abuser, but wanted to come if we weren’t. The other staff immediately concluded that she was abusive and trying to find out where her victim’s occasional place of safety was. Staff refused to tell the caller if her partner had previously stayed that and also denied her help of any kind.
I was the one that pointed out that the person who stayed in shelter was really good at pushing boundaries and really good at testing what they could get away with and that the more likely scenario was that she had reversed victim and offender and come to stay in shelter as a tool to help her control her partner. This way she both denied her partner future shelter and also would have an excuse to tell her partner that she couldn’t know where the abuser was staying and generally set up a lot of dynamics where it was okay for her to know everything about the caller’s life, but not okay for the caller to know anything about the abuser.
People were fucking shocked. I called around to other shelters – literally from NY to SF – and nobody, nobody had ever seriously questioned whether or not we ought to train caller screeners to look for signs that the story of abuse being told wasn’t a story of reversing victim and offender.
…all of which is to say that I get it. You’re an outsider and so sometimes you see things differently. I only saw what I saw because people were constantly telling me that it was dangerous to let trans* people into shelter because that ran the risk of abusers trying to sneak into shelter by pretending to be trans. Because of that, I actually thought about the problem of abusers sneaking into shelters far more than anyone else. I mean, if heterosexual women who abused women showed up at shelter, that’s not good b/c it wastes resources, but that’s a smaller percentage of abuse cases and it’s not like it denies shelter to abused men who wouldn’t stay at a women’s shelter anyway. And most shelters didn’t accept queer women. And the ones that did were resolutely feminist and the inclination to “believe women” was strong enough, and the known consequences of quizzing women in an interrogating manner were so bad, that no one had ever stopped to seriously think about how you could screen out abusers without being an asshole who retraumatizes victims.
it was specifically because I was trans, not because I was smarter than everyone else, that I was able to see this.
So there are cases where outsider knowledge can be incredibly productive. It can be awesome. it can be transformative.
But really, the odds are that if thousands of people have been discussing trans* liberation for decades, they’ve probably thought of your concerns and considered your proposed strategies.
This isn’t a reason for you not to speak up. Like I said, you could be just the right outsider to see something everyone else missed. But do have the humility to think that maybe – if you haven’t been investigating these topics for years – maybe your estimates of likelihood are more about gut feelings and less about anything for which you’ve got good evidence. And if you don’t have good evidence, it might just be that the people who have been doing this work for a long time have it pretty close to correct.
So sure, be ready to turn the world on its ear with the best gender liberation strategy ever. But also be ready to have people still disagree with you even after you’ve answered those questions.
Be ready to be impressed with yourself that you’re able to perfectly articulate a really great liberation strategy. But also be ready to admit to yourself that your answers to the questions I listed aren’t that impressive, even to you.
I think this is particularly important in your case because you’ve said that you find it hard to separate yourself from your ideas.
==================
In any case, I do hope you take some time away from this particular discussion to breathe and think about what you’ve learned, what you’re still learning, and what questions you still need to research.
The internet is here forever. You can take as long as you want to think and this thread will still be here.
Maybe this person should take into account the fact that they keep repeating the same thing and getting the same result?
Maybe trying something different and talking with, instead of at, others might be a better use of their time if this person truly wants to raise awareness?
I’m going to assume that you merely missed the section of my reply where I specifically addressed biracial couples. There’s been a lot of text flying at you, after all. Here, I’ll provide it again and you can reply to that section instead:
Please reply to this point, thanks!
But women who have been raped and beaten need to use the washroom as well, do they not? Why is the bathroom situation different for them, but not the shelter?
Perhaps if that response keeps being what that person is getting, they should consider what about their approach keeps provoking that response?
Perhaps if they change their approach, they will receive a different response? Perhaps if they listen to people who tell them why they keep getting that response, they will get ideas about how to modify their approach, even when social situations are not the easiest for them?
Likely after this post, that’s what will happen, whether I come back or not.
This is typically how I am. So when people respond, especially insinuating that I am trying to harm someone, it is so upsetting, I feel I have to respond. I’m fine with people *disagreeing* with me and thinking their way is better. It might be. But what tends to get under my skin is that people think I’m trying to harm people.
I’m not going to go through the plan or the rest of the post at this point, because I do agree time off to formulate and think is useful, but I want to express clearly that I don’t mind when people disagree with my ideas, I love it, because I consider that an opportunity to refine the idea, incorporate new concepts in it and make it better. I don’t assume my ideas are universally better, but since the process and society isn’t perfect yet, more ideas only help. It can’t get better than it is, unless people are trying to brainstorm alternate pathways. And it could be that by talking through those different ideas, some will be horrible, some will be great, lots will be mediocre, but all of them together could inspire someone else with another different point of view to find something even better. I think too often the perspective of people outside the situation are dismissed, but like your situation with the shelter, distance and coming from another angle can be incredibly productive. Medical professionals don’t treat their own loved ones because they are too emotionally involved and can make more mistakes. Similar concept.
Thank you for taking the time, and I especially appreciate the insight with the shelter information, because now that is not an issue in my mind and I can counter anyone who says it might be a problem.
I’m not insinuating anything, I’m saying straight out that your behavior on this thread has been harmful.
You can play the poor misunderstood martyr whose “head words” are so much, much better than than the written words you’ve actually put here for everyone to see all you want. Just go do it somewhere else.
@Sapphire
I know you are leaving but I just wanted to point something out.
The reptilian brain thing is not supported by neuroscience and is mainly a psychology thing.
Although I don’t personally believe it’s a real thing.
Even if it was, that’s no excuse for being a bad person.
Also about the “cis women feel differently to trans* women” thing.
No, they don’t.
Not all cis women are the same so if you’re going to go there at least admit not all cis women would feel the same way either.
Yes, about the “making a trans*-only shelter” thing.
The problem with that is it only makes us an easier target to people wanting to hurt us.
Similar to how Planned Parenthood had some bombings, I don’t doubt a purely trans* shelter would too.
Someone’s trauma and feelings of someone else based on their preconceived notion that they are male isn’t really an excuse to not allow trans* women a safe place to stay.
I really feel like you are trying to play devil’s advocate here, making us try to see “the other side of the argument”, but we have seen the other side of the argument and it doesn’t matter.
Also about the physical difference thing.
1. No, not all people, trans* or not, are actually as physically different as you think.
2. Again, that doesn’t really matter in the way you think it does.
In death trans* people are misgendered all the time, plus if you put up a poster stating they are trans* you could receive a lot of hate and it may be taken down by anti-trans* people.
I know you like to think the world is only dangerous to cis women, but it’s not.
@Sapphire
It doesn’t matter whether you intend to do harm no one cares what your intentions were. I know it stings when you’re trying to be careful but still end up harming someone, but at that point it’s not about you or how you feel about realizing your actions were harmful. It’s about stopping the harm, fixing the situation where possible, and re-evaluating how to avoid this kind of harm in the future.
Instead, you’re digging your feet in and demanding people apologize for letting you know you’ve caused harm. Imagine if this were a physical harm. You accidentally step on someone’s foot. Instead of removing your foot, apologizing, and watching where you step, you just press down harder and insist the person whose foot you’re crushing is in the wrong because you didn’t actually mean it. That’s just a ridiculous reaction, isn’t it? Same goes for psychological/emotional harm.
@Sapphire
To be frank, I don’t really get this reasoning. These pressures don’t manifest from thin air. They’re exerted by people, and rather not by the mainstream progressive community with their “you’re the gender you identify as” approach.
Bit late to put my oar in here, but I do want to say that hearing talk about people being “biologically male” or “biologically female” or whatever – as if those are solid and known and reliable, despite everything going on around them – irks me up the goddamn wall. Those are artificial categories, as much as anything else, and the reason we’re even having this discussion is that it’s becoming more and more apparent that they are needlessly limiting, don’t fit the observable facts, and should be discarded.