Dismantling queer families

TW: heterosexism, custody dispute

Let’s talk about how a lesbian couple is being sued for cohabitating in Texas. The logic behind this is that the father of at least one of the two children both of them are raising has the right to sue them for cohabiting together along with the child without being married. Such stipulations are common in many parts of the US as conditions for a divorce, so while this is a particularly public iteration of this phenomenon, the threat of this is a real issue that confronts many queer families.

To pick this apart, the problems here run deep. Cohabitation (widely defined as making a specific property the default sleeping space) is a comparatively odd issue to focus on within divorce papers. Even for male-female couples (who can easily avoid this issue by marrying), it seems like an arbitrary line to draw in the sand. While the ostensible point is to regulate who has access to the children as a means of protection, the policy seems designed to defer power to non-cohabitating legal kin at the expense of those who live with and potentially are more important if legally unrecognized within the household. As a protective measure, it only makes sense when assuming that pre-existing legal kinship is proof of having the best interests, and consequently should have de facto veto power over the introduction of new kin in their stead. It seems more interested in guarding recognized kins’ egos than their children.

(Just when you thought legal kinship norms couldn’t get anymore patriarchal, heterosexist, and cisnormative… from here.)

But to treat this as an issue that transcends heterosexist values and bigotry specifically towards queer families is to frustratingly miss one of the broader lessons here. The very existence of a shared social space is central to many conceptions of family in the United States – and the blatant attack on that for the Price-Comptons is consequently quite recognizable. But what about the nebulous issue of custody? Following a tragic or unexpected death, what if a non-biological mother is a more desirable candidate for sole custody than a distant, perhaps even former father?

Again, unlike male-female couples, same-sex or same-gender couples can’t easily transfer custody in cases of emergency to smooth out difficult transition periods for their kids. But, what’s more, in those often contested situations, queer parents often have their standing challenged not only for their lack of biological relationship with the children, but also for simply being queer.

In essence, there is no way of guaranteeing effective social protections for queer families without providing them means of establishing kinship, which male-female couples currently have easy access to. Dismantling onerous expectations of who can sleep where at what point is clearly a good idea, but ending the discussion there ignores the unique difficulties faced specifically by queer parents.

Bunny considers this treat!

Originally from here.

But what about White people?

TW: racism, colonialism, apartheid South Africa, class inequality

The BBC decided to do a story recently on the poorer Whites within South African society. Their article honestly begins- “The question I have come to South Africa to answer is whether white people genuinely have a future here.”

Wouldn’t a better driving question be whether Whites should have a future in South Africa? Their presence in South Africa is a result and element of the colonial disinheriting of the the indigenous Black population. The same should be asked about many other colonized parts of the world, including where I live, but that the issue is particularly relevant in South Africa considering that nearly 80 percent of the population has near-exclusively indigenous African ancestry (whether Bantu-speaking or the purportedly even more historied indigenous non-Bantu groups).

Speaking of how an overwhelming majority of South Africans are Black… the article includes this chart of income aggregated into the four common racial categories in South Africa:

So, just to remember or at least check Wikipedia, people of near exclusively White heritage comprise under 10 percent of the population of the country, but have only just seen their demographic cease to control a majority of its wealth. Yes, there are poor White people, but talking about how less than a tenth of the population now only controls more than a third of it…? Really BBC?

That’s about 80 percent of the population at the lowest rung there – with less than 10 percent of the income. If wealth were distributed proportionately across racial groups in South Africa – that’s what White people’s share would look like. Keep in mind, the end of Apartheid allowed the development of a small Black economic and political elite, who have gained inclusion in the previously Whites-only halls of power. Removing those few from the Black category would likely cause it to deflate to an even more miniscule amount.

There’s a point to be made here about how indigeneity and blackness are still the surest symbols, even in a nominally democratic and predominantly Black country, of being an undeserving investment, unreliable hire, or always suspected to be overpaid employee. But you missed it, BBC, for what about the White people!?

Confused lemurs!

Transgender and genderqueer self knowlegde

I’m just briefly going to post today with the suggestion that you, esteemed reader, might want to consider donating to the still-developing Transgender Studies Quarterly (or TSQ), which appears to be working to primarily create an academic space friendly to transgender- and genderqueer-centered evaluations of psychology, history, politics, and frankly humanity. In tandem with that is a subsidiary aim of making a platform for transgender and genderqueer peoples’ analysis of gendered phenomena, which are often ignored in favor of cisgender peoples’ perspectives.

It’s honestly a really well thought out publication from what they’ve indicated so far. The high visibility and power held by Dr Susan Stryker, one of its editors, seems like a very clear sign of how as a space, the TSQ is built on the very active inclusion of and support for transgender women, who often have to face a sexist and cissexist funk of transmisogyny even within purported trans-friendly spaces.

(The transfeminist symbol used by many theorists and activists that view sexist and cissexism as often interrelated, from here.)

Likewise, the third planned installment of the TSQ is set aside to discuss how the experience of being transgender is to some extent reliant on being raised within a European-style gender binary, which many societies (namely in the Americas, Oceania, and South Asia) had imposed on them through colonialism. I recently wrote about how liberation from heterosexist systems can in some cases be part of an anti-colonial struggle, but that’s equally true for the liberation movements for various traditional third gender-assigned or otherwise genderqueer people.

It’s important to note what kind of a space the TSQ is aimed at becoming: one that’s designed for a discussion ideally both by and for transgender and genderqueer people, but that’s also capable of addressing factors that intersect with those already diverse experiences – particularly including femininity and cultural diversity. This has the promise to be a really unique academic space, so I hope you’ll consider supporting it.

Protective chihuahua!

This week in “states’ rights”

Monsanto, a genuinely terrible biotech company, is trying to prevent states from enacting local regulations on the use, sale, or resale of genetically modified products. Isn’t it funny how states’ rights is sacrosanct when it comes to federal protections for marginalized people but are a needless burden when it comes to public safety concerns? And by funny I mean awful.

(Genetically modified ingredients are founds in 80 percent of packaged food in the United States, which requires no labeling of them. From here.)

The issue has largely been declared irrelevant in the United States, in spite of consistent scientific evidence that long term exposure to many of the popular genetically modified products can result in health problems in humans. There’s a distressing amount of misinformation about the political situation and medical concerns at play here – so I urge anyone interested in this issue to read the Organic Consumers’ Association’s accounts of the lobbying by Monsanto for friendly protections in the farm bill and one of the more recent and detailed studies on the chemical impacts of long term exposure to some of their more prevalent products.

Playful otter!

An interesting comparison

TW: colonialism, military intervention in Mali

I have to admit, a lot of the time, I have to carefully consider whether I should keep following the Johannesburg Times on twitter, because of how much of what they write about and post there are interesting-but-not-very-important factoids like this. But often, their coverage for all its faults is the most detailed examination of what’s happening in South Africa specifically and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa generally that’s easily accessible and understandable to non-Africans like me. With a good amount of frequency, the Times will share a couple of articles that even if not particularly revolutionary themselves help put together an image of what’s happening in that part of the world.

(On the left, Mali’s interim President Dioncounda Traore while raising funds in Brussels, Belgium, from various EU member states and EU international bodies, from here.)

Sometimes that’s pretty infuriating, however. Take, for instance, this article on South African economic development and this one on aid to the Malian state. In South Africa at the moment, disparate political groups with different perspectives on what state policies should be are in the process of negotiating at length how their society can improve its lot, which is quite the tall order after centuries of colonial occupation. It’s likely that few people in the United States will hear about these debates, and the few like you and me who have are unlikely to have much detail to them – but part of that is because of the internal nature of what South Africans are debating. I don’t know that the country can be declared decolonized (and I do know that I shouldn’t be the one to do that in any case), but it seems that they’re moving in a positive direction in terms of popular negotiation being central to creating economic policies.

The situation in Mali seems to stand in stark contrast to that. In the wake of what could be seen as another chapter in an on-going and multidimensional internal conflict, the power center that appealed to outside assistance is now working to receive aid from individuals and organizations largely affiliated with the military forces that intervened on its behalf. Perhaps France specifically should provide the territories under the governance of the state of Mali with restitution for colonial rule, but it’s important to note that that’s not what’s happening now. What’s happening now, is that the government of Mali has successfully pitched to the EU Humanitarian Aid Commission and other such bodies the idea that the intervention on the basis of security will be for naught without basic economic stability in the region. The colonial framework that the intervention reinforced is being explicitly expanded through this request for aid.

Unlike South Africa, the government of Mali seems to have decided to farm out its economic insecurities, but at the cost of autonomy and arguably its democracy.

Cats!

Quick notes on the Nakba

Among Palestinians specifically and Arab speakers generally, the term nakba or catastrophe has become particularly associated with the original forced removal of several hundred thousand Palestinians in 1948. The anniversary of that by Palestinian reckoning fell on today’s date, and was the sixty-fifth remembrance of the nakba. Even only somewhat sympathetic Israeli media acknowledged the significance of the date as protests (which escalated into confrontations with the Israel Defense Forces) were staged throughout Israeli and Palestinian areas.

(A decaying Palestinian passport from the pre-1948 period that was shared online today, form here.)

Today is one of those days when it’s more worthwhile to meander through the murky claims on twitter than to listen to me trying to make sense of it all, so I urge you to attempt to educate yourself on this, the sixty-fifth Nakba Day.

Intrigued bunny!

From here.

Rival unions, corruption, and the corporate state

TW: violence against protesters, violence against unionized workers

How about another quick peek at some conflicts in South Africa that I mentioned a few months back? Al Jazeera has been doing some excellent direct reporting on it, and in a nutshell: the inability for rival unions to reach a consensus, let alone coordinate, has led to some difficulties for the miners in Marikana, South Africa. That much should be clear from the fact that the body of one of the local union’s leaders was found this weekend, in his workplace, presumably after an altercation.

While it seems most likely that Mawethu Steven was killed by armed men in the pay of the mining companies that have operated at of the South African Lonmin site or the corrupt local government, as he was due to testify against their coordinated violence towards strikers, it can’t be ruled out that a more conciliatory and competitive union was involved.

(Some of the thousands of protesters in Marikana over the past few days, from Al Jazeera.)

The entire situation is an unfortunate warning for the US in terms of the dangers of disintegration of unions as a location for workers to establish their shared economic goals into business-like entities that compete to provide the workforce (or rather, portions of it) with benefits. To be fair to South Africa, our current predicament with unions is a warning for how easily stable systems that benefit that majority of workers can slowly degrade over time into far less effective systems.

Nonetheless, it seems important to note that when unions cease to operate as spaces for workers to organize and collaborate, the competition between workers to be held favorably by management (even if only in contrast to other workers), can lead to very violent extremes. That’s something that many workers in assorted information and technology fields should especially take to heart at the moment, as Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying for legislation that would pit local and immigrant workers against each other.

And when we compete with each other instead of them, they win.

Cat and alpaca!

How wrong is the Heritage Foundation? Let us count the ways…

The Washington Post is usually not the best newspaper, but it’s not above some surprises. Last Monday, they printed an excellent rebuttal to the report co-authored by the obviously racist Jason Richwine, which really digs deep into three major intellectual failings in their report on the “cost” to granting undocumented immigrants amnesty and full citizenship. I don’t have the time today to do a proper post, so I’ll let this be a let-me-link-you that’s hopefully enlightening about exactly how wrong the Heritage Foundation’s report was.

To begin with, it’s not exactly a measurement of the cost of changing the millions of undocumented people’s statuses, so much as the larger macroeconomic effect. As a result, it has to at least roughly model the current economic circumstances in order to compare them with a hypothetical future where amnesty and citizenship have been granted to the vast majority of currently undocumented people. Except they make some questionable decisions about how to approximate both the current and that potential economy.

Starting with our world – they effectively pretend that the most regressive aspects of our tax system don’t exist. According to the Washington Post the study omits the “mortgage interest tax deduction, the charitable deduction, the employer health-care tax exclusion, the preferential treatment of capital and dividend income” among other “massive benefits” to primarily wealthy individuals. In short, they’re biasing their comparison by making it seem as though a disproportionate portion of public benefits in the US are paid for by the most wealthy in the United States.

That might seem irrelevant, but given how they presume much lower use of public resources by people who are currently undocumented, meaning that the wealthy who typically have legal residency statuses are presented as effectively covering the poor, but only those that also aren’t undocumented. In short, they’re creating the impression that our current fiscal conditions are much healthier than they actually are – with fewer people deprived of basic services or needs (by arbitrarily deciding that undocumented people don’t currently count) and more people contributed their personal reserves of wealth to public benefit (through a more progressive taxation system than we actually have).

(Unfortunately this is what’s actually happened over the past few decades, from here.)

Those deceptions alone would have probably undermined any meaningful conclusion from the comparison Heritage set up in this study. That said, they don’t leave it there – they also presume that extending legal residency status (and ideally citizenship) to currently undocumented people won’t result in them being able to access hiring paying work or more effectively lobby for better pay (among other economic benefits). The degree of ignorance that shows about how a lack of legal residency status is used to exploit people within the current economy is astounding.

The Washington Post actually points directly to one study, which points to a conservative 15 percent increase in average income and a less cautious estimate of a 25 percent increase, as a counterpoint to this categorical belief that the lots of the currently undocumented won’t be improved by amnesty or at least significant reforms. Between more immigrants reporting their incomes and those immigrants having more income in the first place, there’s a clear reasoning behind why changing their statuses would translate into some growth in the tax pool, which would potentially cover any increase in service use by currently undocumented people.

In essence, this comparison between the current economy and this hypothetical one “wrecked” by immigrants rests on three major misconceptions of how the world actually works. It’s working towards the conclusion that granting immigrants rights and privileges would be ruinous, which it can only support by presenting the status quo as healthier than it actually is and imagining amnesty as simultaneously resulting in a run on public services but no other major economic impact. My hats off to the Washington Post for actually getting into the details to how Heritage lied.