Two Guardian blog pieces

[rozk]

One, about trans-positive and -negative language, was written ages ago and is now up here and the other, about demonic possession and its drift back into political discourse is here.

The demoonic possession one has some very interesting comments along the lines of 'if you had seen what I have seen, you would not mock' and demands that I read exorcism manuals before mocking.

Here's the thing - I am reasonably sure that a lot of people who do believe in possession, believe that I am possessed. They want either to kill me, or stop me being me. Am I really supposed to study their offensive nonsense in depth? I have better things to do with my time. I am, as it happens, reasonably well-informed in these matters, without being obsessional.

What I want to know is - where exactly north of Holborn is it that teenager-killing Baal cultists hang out? One would rather not intrude on the pub where they drink. Enquiring minds want to know.

Oh, and then there's the 'if no one identified as anything, there wouldn't be any problem' comment on the trans piece. Yep, and Americans have abolished class distinctions by never talking about class...

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I've just read the Demonic piece: revisit the link and see the context-sensitive ads in the page footer. Next time you publish an article with those keywords, give me a week or so to get a website going - 'Deliver yourself of the ANTICHRIST! Competitive rates for the posessee on a budget! - and buy up the relevant search terms.

On a less cynical note, we'd all welcome advice on dealing with fruitloops; I make a distinction between harmless loonies and dangerous zealots but I have no strategy for handling encounters other than a firm but kindly "Yes dear, of course you're right".

Meanwhile, the language for trans- (and cis-) people will settle down over the next decade or so. Assuming that a coherent set of underlying ideas emerges which, given the sheer variety of ways that people can be gender-queer, is maybe one assumption too many. For people with a clear gender identity, improvements in surgery and better skills in 'passing' might just make it all irrelevant anyway; the difficult issues lie with being temporarily gender-queer in transition, or permanently so by choice - but once the educated middle classes (and, eventually, the middle classes) have usable templates for acceptable behaviour, it will become far easier; I never thought it would be possible for civil partners to turn up at work social occasions or dinner-parties, but it's now accepted (and pretty much unremarkable) in most places. The question is how those behavioral templates arise: hopefully through favourable media images - not tragic figures, caricatures presented in a 'freakshow', or figures in a soap opera whose only plot point is their gender 'problem' - but images of ordinary people and their interactions n a functioning community. Even the crudest of stereotypes is of some use: think of 'are you being served' with the cartoonish figure of a camp gay man... Who is actually just another shop assistant in a group of people who work and converse and have nothing to freak out about or even notice as particularly unusual. Although, to be blunt, I'd like to think that the media can do better than that - the stereotype was unflattering and came close to being offensive! We need media portrayals of gender-queer people who are just being people - think Milly in 'This Life'; I think they only bothered with her Anglo-Indian identity as a plot point in a single episode; she was played as Milly-the-solicitor, Milly-the-urban-Twenty-Something, Milly-the-person and it was all far more interesting than Milly-the-strange-foreigner that would've dominated every second episode in the racially-polarised 1970's.

Be warned however: the language used in the first mainstream media portrayal will stick