Black Enterprise Magazine Article on TBLG Discrimination

Was surprised to see this link to a story on TBLG discrimination featuring Kylar Broadus.   I wasn't surprised about the fact he is one of the people featured in it, but the magazine that it appeared in.

Black Enterprise magazine is one of the iconic publications in the African-American community next to ESSENCE, EBONY and JET.   

So yes this is a big fracking deal to have a story on our discrimination issues in one of our iconic magazines.. 

Saturday Sellout-Jesse Lee Peterson

Today TransGriot class, it's time to get your learn on and be introduced to another Saturday Sellout.

Say hello to Jesse Lee Peterson.  The Alabama born Los Angeles based conservanegro has been on Fox News, hosted a cable TV show, has written for WingNutDaily, and as Renee of Womanist Musings can tell you, has a syndicated radio talk show in which one of the stations that carries that waste of airtime is here in Houston in addition to being broadcast on stations in Memphis, New Orleans, and Tampa.

Jesse is the go to guy when the conservafool movement wants a sellout negro to attack the Black community in general, 'The Revs' or individual African Americans.

In September 2005 he suggested in a WingNut Daily article that the African American citizens who were stranded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were 'lazy', 'welfare-pampered' and 'immoral'    He also criticized then New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin for slamming President Bush for the glacially slow response to the crisis and then tried flip the script on Mayor Nagin and blame him for the Bush administrations piss poor response..

He has said that Islam was an 'evil religion', attacked Rev Al Sharpton and Rev  Jesse Jackson. Sr. and called for the resignation of Michael Steele as RNC chair.

And like all good conservanegroes he has his hate on for President Obama.     He has cosigned onto Glenn Beck's comment and expanded on it.

"Barack Obama hates white people, especially white men" and that "Barack Obama is Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus!  He embodies the aspirations of every left-wing black group that wants to tear down this country and take power away from the "oppressive" white man. He's not an obvious race hustler like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson; but Obama is a smooth pathological liar—with a wicked heart"

Yeah, right.  Break out the double stuffed Oreos for this fool. 


But Peterson's most foul comment was thanking "God and white people" for slavery and describing slave ships as akin to "being on a crowded airplanes'.   This coming out of the mouth of a man who worked on the same Alabama plantation his ancestors did unpaid labor on.

Jesse Lee Peterson, our Saturday sellout.

Tired Of The 'Bathroom Bill' BS

One of the things we are going to have to insist on from our allies and anyone else is that they stop using conservalanguage designed to obfuscate and lie about civil rights issues.

The conservative movement knows that if you argue about trans rights issues from strictly a logic based perspective, they overwhelmingly lose.    They searched for decades to find a one sentence way to mess with trans rights legislation and finally went back to an old standard in anti civil rights history.

The bathroom.

Just as the Jim Crow defenders tried to use fear of Black people using the bathrooms to justify segregation,  the Forces of Intolerance have taken that and infused it with other lies to use it as a weapon to deny trans citizens civil rights coverage.


It's a bull feces non credible argument, the 'bathroom predator' one.   There has been no recorded case since 1953, the year Christine Jorgenson returned to the States from Denmark to this date in the second decade of the 21st century of any ciswoman being physically attacked or sexually assaulted by a transwoman.  

We had far too many examples of the opposite thing happening, though in terms of transwomen being physically attacked in bathrooms.   We've also had far too many examples of full blown ignorance over what transpeople do in the bathroom as well.

So let Moni school you on what happens when a transwoman goes to the bathroom.

We come in, find a stall, sit down, pee, flush toilet,  readjust clothes, wash hands, check makeup if we have any on and leave.
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I'm in there to relieve my bladder and get rid of feces from my colon, not find a date.

Closeted conservative politicians do that.
 
Another thing we've had happen far too many times is media outlets disrespectfully calling trans  civil rights legislation 'bathroom bills' .   People on the liberal-progressive need to stop using that conservaslander as well as call out any media outlet that engages in that practice..

This is not the language to use to talk about inclusive civil rights language for trans people, even if you are quoting our opponents.  It needs to stop.

Like I said, the only thing that's on my mind when I go to the bathroom is answering nature's call, not dealing with some ciswoman's unfounded transphobia or refighting for the new millennium an issue that should have died with Jim Crow segregation.

'Detroit 187's' Cissexist Trans/Cross Dresser Murder Episode

TransGriot Note: Nice post from Renee of Womanist Musings about a recent problematic episode of the ABC- TV show Detroit 187
I have stayed away from writing about cis-sexism and transphobia, because I ave hmade so many fails in the last year, that it became obvious to me, that I need to take my own advice and STFU and learn.  As part of this learning, I have been doing a lot of reading and trying to understand the ways in which society perpetuates cissexism.


I recorded this week's episode of Detroit 187, and just got around to watching it last night.  What I saw was a complete disregard of some very basic human decency aimed at what were potentially trans women or cross dressers.  What troubled me as I viewed the episode, was how normalized the approach was. It made me wonder how many people saw the episode and did not pick up on the "othering," because we have privileged not only cisgender status, but a specific form of performing gender.

At the beginning of the show, the detectives are called to a murder seen with a dead woman.  As they begin discussing the body, the coroner lifts up her skirt and announces, "hold the presses folks, yup dude looks like a lady. It looks like we've got ourselves a dead drag queen."  This was quickly followed by Special Agent Jess Harkins saying, "well if there's one thing they taught us at Quantico, it was always check for suspicious packages."

This happened within the first three minutes of this week's episode. Genitalia does not equal gender and assuming that the victim identified as male, before for ascertaining hir preference, is without a doubt cis sexist. 

In the very next scene, the detectives are at what looks to be a drag club.  Again, I feel it necessary to point out that just because the club appears to be a drag club, in no way means that there aren't trans women in attendance. The following is a bit of the dialogue from this scene.

Det Aman Mahajan: So how does one refer to a drag queen anyway? Is it he or she or what?
Agent Jess Harkins: She in when in drag, he when not.
Sgt Jesse Longford: I'm using he.  The one thing I can't overlook on a woman is a penis.

When Mahajan at least had the presence of mind to ask about pronouns, I thought that the producers and writers where trying to redeem themselves from the terrible "dude looks like a lady" commentary in the last scene.  It seems that once again, making sure that a strict gender binary was enforced, was the driving force behind this episode.

Would you say that is enough transphobia and cissexism for one episode?  Well guess again. Here is what happens when the detective sat down to talk to Christina (a woman at the club) and her boss about Detroit, the murdered woman in the alley.

Christina: That's her. I could recognize those Tina Turner legs anywhere. 
Det Aman Mahajan: What was her name?
Boss: Detroit like Detroit but French
Sgt Jesse Longford:We need the real name
Boss: That is her real name
Agent Jess Harkins: Sorry girls, what does her W2 say?
Boss: Donald Tucker
Sgt Jesse Longford: Was Mr. Tucker here tonight?
Det Aman Mahajan: Was uh Detroit here tonight?
Boss: She was on stage about 11, she was supposed to a private party in Troy later so she rushed out to catch the bus
Christina: D works all the time; she's a superstar. When she does it's raining men, you literally feel like it's raining men. 
Sgt Jesse Longford:She have problems with any of the other performers?
Boss: We're a family. Civilians don't always get us. 

It was left to these women to defend themselves against the cissexism of Sgt Jesse Longford.  No one called him out for his bigoted language, and when he did finally decide to use a feminine pronoun, he did so grudgingly. Proving that his transformation was temporary, the first suspect that Longford questioned, he accused of being gay, for being attracted to Detroit.  So, now not only do we have a cissexist hot mess, we can add homophobia to the list of wrongs with this episode.  Clearly he felt that anyone with a penis was absolutely gay, if they had a relationship with a trans woman or a crossdresser.  This ignored the gender like sexuality is absolutely fluid, and that genitals do not determine gender.

In the second interview they spoke to Detroit's boyfriend.  He insisted on calling her Don and referred to her with a masculine pronoun.  If that wasn't bad enough, he added that he believed that the ladies in the club weren't really ladies, because some of them were pushing 200 pounds.  I seriously could not fill out a bingo card fast enough to keep up with the fails.  In his commentary, we have a touch of sexism, cis sexism laced together with a lovely bit of fat phobia.  Yeah for isms Detroit 187.

In the end, Detroit was killed by his stalkers wife.  She called  Detroit a man in a dress, and blamed her for ruining her marriage.  I think that this ending was problematic, because it played upon the stereotype of deceptive trans women, latching on to unsuspecting men.  How many times have we seen this sort of thing as a defense in murder trials? Trans women face an inordinate amount of violence and usually it happens out of a desire to support and maintain cis supremacy. Trans women are hated simply for existing and no action is necessary on their part to end up dead.  The ending used by Detroit 187 heavily implied that Detroit was responsible for her own murder, because she didn't do enough to stop a man from stalking her.

I know that Detroit 187 is a crime/cop show, but honestly, I am tired of seeing these portrayals.  There are trans women and cross dressers living perfectly happy lives.  The meme of the murdered trans women/cross dresser is the only angle that the media wants to pay attention to.  Would it really have been that hard to just weave a trans character into the plot without relying on so many cis sexist memes? In the end, the viewer was left  with the belief that the victim (trans woman/ cross dresser) was still an "other," who had played a part in the violence aimed at her?  I wonder if the producers thought they did a good job, because they had a character who transgressed the gender binary?  Sometimes, no representation, is better than bad representation.

Peeps Throwing Transphobic Shade At Black Women Is Nothing New

I've got a few posts here about the too frequent outbreaks of transphobic shade that are aimed at Black women such as Wendy Williams and Ciara for instance.

But sadly it isn't a new phenomenon.    Check out this rap song that was recorded during the height of the Roxanne Wars in 1984-1985 in which Ralph Rolle went there and slammed one of the early female rappers in Roxanne Shante

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It was not only a diss to either Roxanne Shante, The Real Roxanne or both, it was full of disinformation about trans people in the first place.   You don't become trans after being sodomized in prison and laser hair removal and electrolysis do wonders for eliminating the scourge of razor bumps...  

But the Real Roxanne was targeted because of her androgynous looks, and Roxanne Shante because she dared to step up in what was considered the 'man's world' of rap and excel in it.

These ladies paved the way for the later success of Salt and Pepa, Queen Latifah,  Monie Love, and MC Lyte .

As we know too painfully well, if you don't meet the arbitrary markers of the ideal woman in terms of looks and deportment, you get the 'that's a man' tag thrown at you by 'the menz'.

And as I have to consistently point out to the transphobic, you get half your genetic material from mommy and half from daddy. We are all blends of traits from both.  

But one thing that needs to cease and desist is the aiming of transphobic shade at Black women.   We already get enough 'unwoman' crap thrown at us from society.    We don't need to hear it from our own men, too