What's Black & White & Trans All Over

 Hello My Abandoned Little Blogspace & All the Popeyes Peeping In,

I’m back! Just in time to wrap up this frenzied and fruitful year with a big red Xmes*/Chihuanikkah ribbon! When I say frenzied and fruitful I do not mean halcyon and pear-shaped — I really mean frenzied and fruitful.

By now you know that I began this year with a horrific pharmaceutical side effect called akathisia, that we made the rash decision to not only sell our house in Sarasota but to haul our asses all the way back to Tony “Moonchild” Egler’s incipient horizon, and that somewhere in between I managed to have a chapbook published by Alien Buddha Press and you can still buy your copy today**. (I also have some poems that will be published at different venues starting very soon. I’ll keep you posted on FBhook)

Pretty exciting, ha? Sometimes I want to shout “Make it Stop!” because as you know I like sloth-paced living best and this has been more of a tasmanian dust-devil trajectory.

But what I actually came here to discuss in this very serious space are some of the frenzied & tasmanian developments within the LGB  TQ errr, community[?]  First though, I will answer a couple questions you had regarding akathisia —

1) How can you tell if you’re just really depressed & anxious, or if you’re having a reaction to your medication?

I sort of explained this in the last blog, but it’s been awhile…You can tell if your normal depression/anxiety symptoms get dialed up to 111. Beyond anything that is bearable. You can tell if you are taking any of the medications I mentioned (anti-psychotics, benzos, anti-nauseates) and you just keep feeling worse and worse. You can tell if you feel like your skin is crawling, like your spine is being nibbled by rats and you keep twisting & turning and rocking to stop the ticklish/agony of it. You can tell if your brain is a non stop nightmare zone — senselessly horrific scenes rapidly forming in your head all day. Rapidly. Speedy, unstoppable scrolls of terror. Not just a bad thought here, a sad thought there…but floods of anguish that can’t be reasoned through. The subjective and objective will blur and these nightmarish thoughts will translate into regrets about your whole existence that cast you as some kind of monster or demon who deserves to feel the way you do (and that was the tricky part — I thought I was having valid realizations about what a terrible person I was, and how everything I did in my life was a terrible affront to humanity, especially those closest to me)

Here's the only art I did in 2021 (and I did it on Jan 3rd, so a whole year ago almost) Quintuplets' Supper on the Tour Bus w/ Barefoot Mom

Some of the terrifying thoughts I can remember having throughout the winter of ’20/’21 were of my house suddenly conflagrating and my pets getting burned alive. Knowing that if I didn’t run into the fire to save them I was a terrible selfish person. Hearing their cries of pain and death and not being brave enough to burn with them. Also had a strange fear of all the glass objects in my house — from kitchenware to decorations to windows — seeing them as animate beings that would shatter if I came too close to them and try to embed their tiniest shards into my skin so that it would take painstaking effort to remove them. 

These are not thoughts that I would willingly torment myself with, even if I was very depressed & anxious. It brings to mind what (I’ve heard) happens with postpartum depression. I kept wondering to myself, Why the fuck do I have p.p. depression at my age/gender/childlessness level??

2) What actually causes it?

The uncontrollable movements/thoughts that characterize akathisia come from flooded dopamine centers in your brain, coupled with depleted serotonin centers. It happens to people with schizophrenia/bi-polar/Tourette’s who are on these anti-psychotic medications for a long time, or if they try to stop them. It’s kind of a round robin of side effects being worse than the diagnosis, going off meds, experiencing symptoms of diagnosis, going back on meds that will eventually make your skin crawl. Caring, experienced professionals are needed to recognize and help manage these precarious balances. 

It can also happen with recreational drugs like cocaine. Key is knowing your own mental/emotional playing field well enough to recognize when suicidal ideations feel like electrical cattle prods rather than well thought-out end-of-life solutions. 

[Not advocating suicide here, but I respect those who make the decision to end their lives, if it is indeed a choice to escape insurmountable circumstances]

Which brings me to my intended topic regarding the LGB  TQ’s… starting with

DAVE & DAPHNE

By now we’ve all seen the latest Dave Chappelle comedy special and have our own opinions about how transphobic it was or wasn’t. I posted my own response to it on Facebook, along with an array of responses from the trans community (as it exists on Youtube). And if you’re one of those people who had to cry out about Well, why was the part about child sex abuse in the church glossed over? OR Why didn’t the joke about Space Jews cause a huge riotous protest? I’ll explain —

a) the punchline about Dave loving to cum in the priest’s face was a triumphant punch UP against the church & its conclave of pedophiles. ‘Mmmmkay? 

b) the joke about the ’Space Jews’ was met with a lot of groans from the audience. But I’ll bet this was Dave’s way of punching up at rich Hollywood executives (we’ve heard forever that Hollywood is run by old Jewish guys)

c) the bulk of the show was not about Dave’s complicated relationship with priests or Jewish people. It was about his complicated relationship with the LGB  TQs

[I’ll explain later why I keep separating the LGB from the TQ. There is a rift in the community and it is happening between those particular letters. I also don’t include the I or the A because intersex people largely don’t want to be lumped under the umbrella of sexual/gender identities. Intersex is a medical condition and most intersex people lean into the binary one way or the other by puberty. The A can mean Asexual or Ally —and asexuals, largely, are turned off by the overt sexualization of the whole LGB  TQ movement. Allies are allies and can be offended on our behalf (or not) but are generally cisgender, heteronormative folks.]

Anyway, the special pretty much has Mr Chappelle pitting the Black Lives Matter movement against the LGB  TQ movement (which in his mind is an all white movement? it seems?). He sees the LGB  TQs as very successful at effecting change in the world & the BLM movement as not so successful. Which may or may not be true, but totally trivializes the need for both movements to be equally successful.

 

Dave makes some pretty graphic jokes about trans women’s anatomy and way-of-being in the world. Which is not what offended ME personally — I allow for sexually gratuitous humor because I grew up in the 80s and I’m kind of inured to that explicit lowness of brow, especially from men. Yawn, I say. Dave is a straight, cis man who likes pussy and LOVES his dick. Wow! Who would’ve guessed.

What I hated about those jokes is that they demonstrated a total lack of understanding of what it means to be a trans woman. What gender dysphoria feels like…WHY a (biological) man would reject his body/social role/privilege even… to be a WOMAN (whether it’s a woman who still has a dick to whip out in front of the urinal, or one who has opted for that “impossible pussy” that just isn’t real pussy).

In my opinion, if you don’t have a deep holistic understanding of things you’re trying to satirize, you should probably steer clear of satirizing, or mocking, or demeaning these things, especially if these things are human beings.

Let’s talk about Daphne now. She was a friend of Dave’s from way back — 2006, I believe he said — before he even had his Comedy Central show. They somehow became engaged in a heckling dialogue at one of his stage shows, and Dave said he just couldn’t understand why she would want to go through life pretending to be a woman, and she replied that he didn’t need to understand why, he just needed to accept that she was having a human experience.

A comedian herself, Daphne was one who could ’suck it up.’ She was strong of spirit and character, not a petulant little snowflake who would stomp out of the theater in response to a little heckling. She even gave Dave a pass on understanding her — just believe I’m having a human experience. And Dave liked that. It freed him up to continue thinking (and joking) negatively about the trans people who weren’t so accommodating. What’s their fucking problem???

Now, I’ll have to admit that I’m probably more like Daphne than your average Millennial or Gen Z trans activist. I would rather fight ignorance with razor-sharp humor than foot-stomping insistence on conformity to the new world order. But I’ll also admit that my razor-sharpness has dulled in my old age, and sometimes all I can do is grumble Baaa, not this shit again…

…and that’s pretty much how I felt about this whole special and the fall-out from it —Baaaaaa!! Why are we still at square one on this??

What I discovered though, in trying to discern just where the public at large stood on trans issues in 2021, is that we are not at square one at all.  Somewhere in 2015 we may have all been at square one. But now some of us are at square 3,817 and some of us are at square -1billion.

So…let’s return to Daphne. She and Dave remained friends for many years. He invited her to open for him when he had a show in her hometown. She continued to stand up to hecklers like a champ. She continued to be tough & suck it all up. She defended Dave when TRAs (trans rights activists — more on them later) boycotted him and called for his “cancellation” — in 2019 I think — after his previous special, which was also very focused on the LGB  TQ community.

Then the TRAs turned on Daphne. 

And here’s where the whole thing goes pear-shaped for me. Because Daphne ended up committing suicide by jumping from a roof.  And Dave joked that it was the most dude-like thing she ever could’ve done, and said she would’ve loved that joke, and that it was the fault of the TRAs who attacked her online after she defended him…

…and I had to wonder if any of that was true. Would Daphne have loved the joke about her suicide? Was it the TRAs who forced her to her death? Was Dave using Daphne —his token trans friend! — as a shield against those he perceived to be too sensitive to suck up his brand of cis/hetero humor? Would Dave appreciate a white guy making insensitive jokes about black people just because he had a black friend? [I can answer that one — in fact Dave answered it in the 00s when he walked out of his lucrative contract with Comedy Central because of how many white people were appropriating his jokes that made fun of black culture.]

It turns out that after Daphne defended Dave in 2019, about 9 people on Twitter came after her for supporting his transphobic rhetoric. (Who knows how many in-real-life TRAs may have harassed her?) It also turns out that Daphne had a lot of other aggravating circumstances in her life — money problems, estrangement from her children, other family conflicts — at the time of her suicide.

Anyway…the special went from comedy to tragedy very quickly in my eyes. But my deep dive into the rabbit hole of post-Chappelle fall-out from the post modern trans rights movement was very …confusing in an enlightening way. This blog has gotten wayyyyy llooonnnngggg, and I know your attention spans are crying out for mercy so I will be kind and wrap it up —

 — I still have a lot to say though. Recall that Dave proclaimed himself “Team TERF” at the beginning of the special. I’ve known about TERFs for awhile now, and my understanding was that they were a minority faction of the latest feminist wave that were douche-y man-haters and their hate extended to trans women because they happened to be “biological men.”

I had no idea how douche-y and vocal TERFs actually were though, and I will regale you with everything I’ve learned about TERFs and TRAs and Autogynephiles and trans-medicalism and conservative trans bloggers and Detransitioners and vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and all the other “trans rites” surgeries and Jazz Jennings who returned to TV this week instead of starting classes at Harvard. Oh, and the rift between the LGBs and the TQs… 

…so very much fascinating sociology! HERE in the Octopus Diary.

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*Xmes = rhymes with Hermes (the fancy scarf designer)

**You can get my poetry collection True Stories of the Odd Equinox here