An investigation by the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, has turned up allegations that the government of Tanzania is sidelining the country’s Maasai population in favor of tourism.
The government and some foreign investors worry that the Maasai, semi-nomadic herders who have lived in the Rift Valley for centuries, are degrading parts of the Serengeti ecosystem.
The authors of the Oakland Institute’s report argue that approaches aimed at conservation should focus on the participation and engagement of Maasai communities rather than their removal from lands to be set aside for high-end tourism.
The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report published May 10.
The four-year investigation revealed that groups of the Maasai in the Loliondo division of northern Tanzania have been kept off lands vital to their survival so that wealthy safari-goers and foreign royalty can have unfettered access to East Africa’s iconic wildlife.
The policy has led to widespread hunger and fear among the population, said Anuradha Mittal, director of the California-based Oakland Institute.
A map showing the location of Loliondo Game Controlled Area in northern Tanzania. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
After thousands of Maasai have been threatened or displaced, “Their sentiment is that the next person to be evicted and displaced will be me,” Mittal said in an interview with Mongabay. “This is a fear that the villagers live with.”
The report cites firsthand accounts, communications with and within a safari company, and government and legal documents. It argues that authorities, eager to keep the deep-pocketed tour companies that operate in Tanzania happy, are driving the Maasai into poverty and dependence on aid to maintain the country’s tourism sector. The reason they often give is the protection of the environment.
But this issue isn’t confined to Loliondo or Tanzania, Mittal said.
“This is not just about a specific company. This is not just about a specific government,” she said. “This is happening across the world in the name of conservation, in the name of economic opportunity for governments.”
An elephant in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
Conservation and the Maasai
It’s difficult to pin down an exact figure, but perhaps a million or more Maasai live in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, stretching across northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. For centuries, large numbers have grazed their livestock in the area around the Serengeti plain. The name Serengeti translates to “the place where the land runs forever” in Maa, the group’s language.
In the 1950s, the colonial government in charge of what is today Tanzania asked the Maasai to leave Serengeti National Park, which was created in 1951, so the area could be devoted entirely to conservation. The Maasai living in the region agreed and moved into the vicinity of the nearby Ngorongoro Crater. But when concerns arose that too many people living there would impact the wildlife, they were again asked to move, with many ending up in Loliondo division.
This pattern, the Oakland Institute contends, has continued, justified as efforts to keep ecosystems intact, but also as a way to maintain the flow of tourism dollars, mostly from high-end safaris, into the country. Restrictions by the government on where the Maasai could and could not go, as well as their ability to cultivate small farm plots and gardens, had by the 1990s led to widespread malnutrition, one study found. The authors, who published their research in the journal Human Organization, concluded that the government’s success in protecting the region’s wildlife was coming at the cost of the health of the semi-nomadic Maasai.
In 1992, Tanzania’s prime minister, John William Malecela, lifted the ban on gardens in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to ease the pressure on the Maasai, and laws passed in 1999 were aimed at codifying customary claims to land in Tanzania. But that wasn’t the end of the setbacks to the Maasai’s way of life, according to the Oakland Institute’s investigation.
A herd of cows in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
Mittal and her colleagues point to an emblematic example of the challenges that Maasai communities face in Loliondo, centering on a piece of land originally called Sukenya Farm near the border with Kenya. In 2006, Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland, the owners of Thomson Safaris, a safari outfitter based in Watertown, Mass., that has operated in Tanzania since the 1980s, bought a 96-year lease on 12,617 acres (5,106 hectares) of land for $1.2 million. Thomson and Wineland intended to turn the land into a nature reserve, according to the company’s blog.
“Purchasing the land in Loliondo was a way to protect a wildlife corridor from Kenya to the Serengeti, to provide a refuge for the endangered wildlife, to provide a place for tourists to see wildlife in the wilderness, to walk amongst the wildlife in an authentic setting, to meet the [Maasai] who have been our friends for years and to provide benefits to the community around us,” Thomson told Mongabay in an email.
But it would also mire them in an ongoing dispute over the land that started in the early 1980s. In 1984, Tanzania Breweries Limited purchased 10,000 acres (4,047 hectares) of this land from the district council. The sale drew the ire of some of the local Maasai, who said they grazed their animals on the land and should have been consulted.
In the ensuing years, however, Tanzanian Breweries Limited didn’t use much of the land, ostensibly abandoning it in 1990. Meanwhile, the Maasai continued to move their herds through in search of grass and water, and they would set up traditional compounds called bomas in the area.
An entrance to a new boma built by the Maasai. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
When Wineland and Thomson acquired Sukenya Farm through their company, Tanzania Conservation Limited (TCL), some of the adjacent Maasai communities objected. For one, the size of the land had grown to include an additional 2,617 acres that the Maasai say the brewing company illegally took several years before the sale. Maasai communities also said that once again, their traditional lands had been sold without their consent, and their lawyers argued that the Maasai communities’ use of Sukenya Farm in the preceding decades amounted to a legal claim on the land.
This all came as a surprise to Thomson and Wineland.
“Unbeknownst to us,” Thomson said, “we would be used as a pawn, a political football, in a broader game on the board of Loliondo that is a struggle between NGO local interests and national government interests for political, economic and territorial control of Loliondo.”
The land has been the subject of several court cases. In 2015, a Tanzanian court upheld TCL’s claim to the land for 10,000 acres, but said that the extra 2,617 acres had been illegally acquired.
If it should not have been part of the sale, Wineland contends that the addition happened before she and Thomson purchased it. “The title deed reads 12,617 acres,” she wrote in an email to the Oakland Institute on Nov. 21, 2017. “Any changes made to the size of the land did not happen under the ownership of the land by TCL.”
In the 12 years since TCL acquired the land, according to the report, Maasai communities point to several instances in which herders have been driven off the land, now called Enashiva Nature Refuge. The Oakland Institute surveyed the testimony by both sides of the recent court case over the land involving several communities and TCL, which alleges that at times TCL staff would call in the local police to force the Maasai off the land. That led to arrests, beatings, shootings and the destruction of bomas, the report says.
A leopard in Serengeti National Park. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
“All these will remain allegations as the villages could not provide evidence in court to prove any of the allegations,” Wineland wrote in her emailed response to the Oakland Institute.
Thomson also told Mongabay that Mittal’s team “failed in its due diligence” because it didn’t speak with representatives of Thomson Safaris while in Tanzania. Nor did the researchers include the perspectives of village leaders who are supportive of the company’s work.
Mittal said she aimed to find unvarnished accounts of what was happening in Loliondo, and she said that in village after village, she saw people who weren’t happy with TCL and Thomson Safaris’ presence in the area.
Thomson, who said that Thomson Safaris “vehemently” denies any allegations of abuse, insists that the company’s relationship with local communities is quite different than how it’s portrayed in the report.
“There are no conflicts with our neighbors, in fact we have letters requesting more dispensaries, water bore holes and school buildings,” he said, referring to the clinics, wells and schools that the company has helped fund in communities near Enashiva. Wineland also co-founded Focus on Tanzanian Communities, a nonprofit charity involved in social and economic development.
In his testimony during the court case, Thomson said, “The police are only called when the situation is escalating and people are feeling like they’re being threatened or something of that nature.”
However, Mittal points to internal communication within TCL that surfaced during the discovery phase of the litigation, indicating that TCL staff would call the commissioner of Ngorongoro district (which includes Loliondo) in response to herders grazing livestock, cutting wood or farming. The district commissioner would then call the police, according to court documents.
On July 30, 2012, a TCL staff member wrote in an email, “Nice to know that it is the [district commissioner] and police that are dealing with this, that we are out of that picture in the sense that we did not have face to face conflict and the usual thing of being accused of beating people …”
People from the village of Naiyobi line up for water. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
A hunting concession
In another part of Loliondo, a land dispute has long simmered between Maasai communities and the Otterlo (sometimes spelled Ortello) Business Corporation. In 1992, the Tanzanian government gave Otterlo permission to hunt on 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area, which the Oakland Institute estimates is home to 50,000 Maasai.
The Oakland Institute reports that the license has effectively turned the Loliondo Game Controlled Area into a private hunting reserve for the family, complete with an airstrip and Emirati cellphone networks.
Otterlo has also played a part in keeping the Maasai from using the land, according to the report, as in a 2009 eviction of 200 bomas by Otterlo security and a government “paramilitary” unit. Accounts hold that the action affected 20,000 people and rendered 3,000 homeless. Government officials said the Maasai were evicted because their cultivation of the land was degrading it.
Otterlo did not respond to several requests for comment through social media, and the telephone number listed for the office in Tanzania is no longer in service. The Oakland Institute’s attempts to reach out to Otterlo by telephone and postal mail also went unanswered.
A boma in Ngorongoro District. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
John Cannon is a Mongabay staff writer based in the Middle East. Find him on Twitter:@johnccannon
Citation
McCabe, J. T., Perkin, S., & Schofield, C. (1992). Can conservation and development be coupled among pastoral people? An examination of the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Human Organization, 353-366.
Native Americans have long existed in a legal and cultural limbo, surviving the devastating impacts of a trail of broken treaties by the U.S. government with staunch determination to maintain their unique cultures and legal federally recognized tribal sovereignty.
In further defiance of the nearly 600 treaties that the U.S. government signed with tribal nations, the Trump administration now appears to be on the move to bring an end to that centuries-old struggle, by committing a “paper genocide.”
The phrase ‘paper genocide’ is used when a culture is wiped from mass consciousness and visible autonomy through tactics such as removing their ethnic designations from a national census – or in this case, having their sovereignty dismantled by the notion that Native America is a ‘race’ and not a diverse sum of distinct cultures and subcultures of sovereign Nations, tribes, and Peoples.
Trump slipped this into negotiations surrounding Indian health care—a move that may very well breach the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution which establishes that all treaties made under its authority “constitute the supreme law of the land.”
Politico broke the story on April 22, reporting, that “the Trump administration contends [that] tribes are a race rather than separate governments.
“The tribes insist that any claim of ‘racial preference’ is moot because they’re constitutionally protected as separate governments, dating back to treaties hammered out by President George Washington and reaffirmed in recent decades under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, including the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.”
Trump, however, seems to have little regard for his predecessors.
In February of this year, a legal memo was submitted by Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker LLP to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the hopes of preemptively avoiding a long, drawn-out battle with an opaque and slippery administration that has already made grotesque moves towards appropriating Native America’s remaining wealth of natural resources and sacred spaces.
The White House’s most recent budget cuts have also taken aim at crucial but extremely vulnerable institutions serving Native America – such as the Community Health Representative program under the Indian Health Service.
The newly proposed requirement that Indian Nations be subject to Trump’s naïve ‘catch all’ solution of forcing all recipients of federal healthcare funds into jobs is obtuse and out of touch with the realities of Native reservations in the U.S.
It could also have potentially disastrous consequences given the lack of employment opportunities on reserve. What’s more, this clumsy and obtuse assimilation policy runs the risk of destroying the very fabric of Native America – the remaining webs of family and culture – their very identity and existence – all towards the vulgar end of opening more land for commercial extractivism and every other industry.
Senator Tom Udall – a Democrat representative of New Mexico – is currently leading a pushback against these efforts in Congress; and, a group of Senators (including a Republican — Lisa Murkowski – from Alaska) signed a recent letter to the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar. Their collectively endorsed statement issues an accusation that the Trump administration has failed,
“…to recognize the unique legal status of Indian tribes and their members under federal law, the U.S. Constitution, treaties, and the federal trust relationship.”
Although many comparisons have been made between the Nixon and Trump administrations’ scandalous tenures…even Nixon left a solid, positive legacy on Native American policies at the federal level.
Nixon advocated for a reversal of historical policy and efforts of “termination” and endorsed the concept of “self-determination” regarding federal relations with Native Americans. It is rumored Nixon’s legacy to Native Americans – which stands in juxtaposition to his historical image – stemmed from a promise he made to his mother that when he became president he’d “be good to the Indians.”
According to the Nixon Foundation website, other instances Nixon fulfilled this legendary promise to his mother were by:
1) Returning the sacred Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in 1970
2) Enacting the Menominee Restoration Act, restoring the recognition of the previously terminated tribe in 1973
3) Signing the Indian Healthcare Act
4) Laying “the groundwork for the signing of the Indian Self-Determination Act
5) Increasing the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) by 214%
6) Establishing the first special office on Indian Water Rights
7) Passing the Indian Financing Act of 1974, and:
8) Pledging that all available BIA funds be arranged to fit priorities set by tribal governments themselves.
Trump is currently forging ahead in a race to the bottom for the designation of “worst president ever” in the history of the United States; and, via his crude efforts at going after Native Americans’ very cultural and legal existence at this juncture, he may have stamped the final seal on his fate in garnering this “honor.”
Featured image: San Francisco Public Library exhibit featuring blood stained t-shirts encouraging patrons to attack feminists, and deadly weapons—baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, axes, and more—designed by men to kill feminist women. Credit: GenderTrender. Threats of violence against women branded as “TERFs” are increasing—will liberals and progressives speak out before it’s too late?
In January, a woman was photographed holding a sign at the Vancouver Women’s March that included the words, “Trans ideology is misogyny.” This might be viewed as a hyperbolic message for those who consider themselves good, liberal people and who care about a group they have been informed are in extreme danger, and particularly marginalized. And perhaps, if you were unfamiliar with the way women and feminists are addressed by trans activists, you might wonder what statements like this are rooted in. A few years ago, I might have questioned this as well, thinking, “well that’s a bit much, isn’t it.” But as trans activism has gained ground and as I myself—as well as many other women—have begun questioning and speaking out about the aims, ideology, and policies supported in the name of “trans rights,” it has become impossible to deny what is being supported through trans activism: violence against women.
San Fransisco Public Library exhibit
Last week, photographs of an exhibit currently on display at the San Fransisco Public Library emerged online, depicting bloody shirts with the words, “I punch TERFs,” alongside baseball bats and axes, painted pink and blue to reference the gender ideology being touted, some covered in barbed wire, in order to amplify the grotesqueness of the threatened beating. The exhibit was set up by “Scout Tran,” a trans-identified male and founding member of the Degenderettes, a group that now has chapters throughout the United States. The group attends queer and feminist events, including the Dyke March, the Pride parade, and the Women’s March, carrying these weapons, which they claim as defensible activism, but is undeniably a visible threat and incitement to violence against women.
The threats attached to slogans like “I punch TERFs” are not theoretical. Earlier this month, a trans-identified male who goes by the name “Tara Wolf” was convicted of assault after beating 60-year-old Maria MacLauchlan, who had gathered with other women in Hyde Park to attend a meeting discussing gender identity ideology and legislation. Wolf had posted on Facebook about his desire to attend this gathering in order to “fuck up some TERFs.” In what other circumstance would anyone—self-identified progressives, in particular—defend viable threats of violence against women? Sadly, lots.
Liberals and the left have broadly defended violence against women as “art” or “sex,” though perhaps in a less overt way than they have outright threats of violence to feminists who wish to question or discuss the notion of gender identity. Pornography, for example, is one area where violence and abuse is consistently defended on account of it being “sex,” “fantasy,” or “free speech.” The ability of men and their allies to avoid viewing a woman being choked, hit, or gang-raped as “real violence” because it is connected to men’s desire and masturbation is without bounds. Similarly, the notion that a man offering a women financial compensation in exchange for permission to abuse her is framed time and time again as “consent,” regardless of the impact on that woman and the broader message this practice sends to all men and women, everywhere.
What is unique about the approach we’ve seen in the trans movement is that it doesn’t attempt to disguise the incitements to violence against women with rhetoric around “consent” and “empowerment.” The claim is not that this is not “literal” violence, because women like it, or because they consented to it, or because it’s “just fantasy.” Rather the violence advocated for by trans activists is said to be justified on account of opinions, associations, language, or the sharing of articles or links determined to be “wrong”—all of which is dishonestly framed as “violence” (ironic considering where the literal threats and violence are evidenced to be coming from).
The threats of violence against women, on account of having been branded “TERFs,” are frightening not only because we must fear for our physical safety or because of the way these threats act as a silencing mechanism, but because this violence is not being condemned, by and large, by most. Being forced to defend ourselves, alone, with few resources, media platforms, or influential public allies, due to the blacklisting that has occurred en masse in relation to this debate, is challenging, because our voices, interests, and well-being have already been dismissed as we are the baddies who deserve to die.
And indeed, this is where the connection between liberals’ and the left’s treatment of pornography, prostitution, and trans activism coalesce. The way that “TERF” has served to dehumanize women (Bad Women—women who speak unsayable truths and ask questions one is not meant to ask) in order to justify the gruesome violence they are threatened with operates in the same way women are dehumanized in pornography in order to pretend as though they aren’t truly being hurt or abused and, of course, in the same way women were branded witches in order to claim their torture was deserved, on account of their being wicked and dangerous.
Disagreement is not violence. This should not have to be said, yet apparently we must. Violence is violence. And when a group of people are actively advocating for and defending violence against another group of people—particularly an oppressed group of people, like women—there is no defense. At this point, those who accommodate this movement, as it is currently operating, are culpable of something very dangerous indeed.
While the San Fransisco Public Library removed the bloody shirt, they did not remove the exhibit entirely, nor do we know why anyone imagined such a display would be appropriate in the first place. One wonders if they would display bloody shirts with the words, “Kill bitches” or “I beat Muslims” next to a display of baseball bats and axes.
Will liberals and progressives stand up before this gets worse? I fear not.
If you thought the age of scold’s bridles and dunking pools designed to torture and kill disobedient women were a thing of the past, you would be wrong. The San Francisco Public Library unveiled an exhibit this week featuring blood stained t-shirts encouraging patrons to “punch” feminists, along with several installations of deadly weapons painted pink: baseball bats covered in barbed wire, axes, among others, all designed by men to kill feminist women.
More weapons to be used against women who harbor what the designers call “oppressive belief-sets” against males, defined in the accompanying literature as lesbians.
The male creators of the exhibit also included a helpful manifesto, blaming lesbians, feminists and other uppity women for causing more deaths (by “harassing” men with their dastardly opinions!) than all the actual real murders committed by violent men.
Materials include riot shields inscribed with the slogan “Die Cis Scum.” Cis is a transgender community term, generally used as a slur, for non-transgender people.
From the exhibit manifesto:
“The Degenderettes are a humble and practical club, fighting for gender rights within human reach rather than with legislation and slogans. Their agit-prop artwork has come to permeate internet trans culture, national television, and headlines as far as Germany.” (From the San Francisco Public Library website.)
Posted at the exhibition, MRA/incel complaints of “reverse sexism”: The fact that violence against feminists and lesbians is considered more likely to be perpetrated by males (as evidenced by all crime statistics worldwide throughout human history) is a conclusion that discriminates against men. Hmm. Never seen that one before. (sarcasm). Explicitly states that acknowledging male violence against women is “anti-transgender.”
Followed by bizarre claims that feminists “induce suicides” of men and threaten to kill them.
Posted at the exhibit. Part one.
Part two.
The largely heterosexual “heteroqueer” group’s claim that they created the slogan “Your Apathy Is Killing Us” in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting is incorrect. It was created by gay male Reagan era AIDS activists who were fighting for their literal lives demanding medical treatment for a deadly epidemic.
The Degenderettes slogan “Die Cis Scum” was popularized in 2012 by transgender White Nationalist “Char The Butcher”.
“Due to concerns raised by library patrons, we are altering the degenderettes antifa art exhibit at the Main Library to remove a shirt, a piece of artwork that could be interpreted as promoting violence, which is incompatible with our exhibitions policy.”
At the time this report was published, the weapons as well as the anti-feminist and homophobic materials remain.
Since the beginning of history, attempts have been made to develop power techniques with which our moral sensitivities can be undermined, so to speak, which activate less resistance in the people. These power techniques are now often referred to as soft power. Soft power is the full range of techniques to manipulate public opinion. Intermediaries for these forms of exercising power are supported by foundations, think tanks, elite networks and lobby groups — in particular private and public media, schools and the entire education and training sector as well as the cultural industry. The effects of soft power techniques are largely invisible to the public, so protests against these forms of indoctrination are unlikely. Economic reasons speak in favor of primarily using soft power and refining and optimizing these technologies for manipulation purposes on the basis of scientific research of our cognitive and affective characteristics. This has happened over the past hundred years in a very systematic and consequential manner.
—Rainer Mausfeld
Along with destroying livelihoods and community, one of the most important things our “culture” needs to do to function is the destruction of the self. Because if our very selfs wouldn’t have been destroyed, we wouldn’t put up with any of this shit. We wouldn’t go to work to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We wouldn’t let our world be destroyed by rich, pathological, insane men. We wouldn’t inflict daily violence, even if oftentimes in a quite “soft” form, on our own children.
Of course, the destruction of the self is a very long and painful process, and therefore has to start at an early age. Rainer Mausfeld, professor of psychology and cognition research at the Kiel University, stated that the term competence (or skill) is one of the most ideological inflicted terms of our time. “The question those in power have been asking,” Mausfeld says, “is ‘how do we disassemble the self of the individual into a bundle of skills.’” He also states that “School is the most important soft-power instrument of the state.”
After all, what children learn in school are skills and competences; at the very best they would learn some form of social competence. What they don’t learn is to be a human being, to evolve, to think, to feel, to just be.
This concerns me a lot, because I’m the father of a little loving sunshine named Leonard, who will start attending school this summer.
When Leo started going to kindergarten, for me that started a process of remembering my own early childhood. I remembered how much I hated kindergarten as well as school, and it got me thinking about these forms of soft power.
Leo’s kindergarten is indeed a very good one. It is one of the famous German “forest kindergartens,” which means that the kids will be outside in the forest all day. Still, we had to go through what they call acclimatization phase, because a child of three has to be accustomed to being left alone by its parents. During the two weeks of this phase, one of us had to stay with our son at the kindergarten, leaving now and then for a while to get him used to being without us.
So often I have seen little children cry, when his or her mother would hand him or her over to one of the preschool teachers and leave. “Don’t go mom, don’t leave me!” the little ones would scream in sheer panic. “I’m so sorry my little darling, I have to go to work” was the usual answer.
I live in a pretty decent social environment. Most of the middle-class people here are kind and gentle; they love their kids and care for them. Some of them even told me that it breaks their heart to leave them. But they have been conditioned–like all of us–to believe that this is the way things are.
One time a child, whose mom had just left with the usual explanation, cried and just wouldn’t stop. Ian, who was at that time the oldest boy in kindergarten because he hasn’t been considered “ready” for school (seriously, who is?), commented with one of the smartest lines I’ve ever heard:
“We have to go to kindergarten because they have to go to work; If they don’t work, they won’t earn money; without money, they can’t buy groceries, and we’ll have to starve; starvation is worse than kindergarten.”
That morning I went home and cried. Seven year old Ian had just covered most of the internal violence of our culture in one sentence with a few semicolons.
Today, I had to wake Leo early at 6:00 in the morning, because I needed to bring him to his mom who would drive him to kindergarten. He hates to be woken up, as much as I did as a kid and still do. He was crying and resisting a lot. I hate it when I have to do this, because I know I’m inflicting a “soft” form of violence on him.
I love the quote by Smohalla, the Wanapum dreamer-prophet: “My young men shall never work, men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams.”
I indeed believe that it is very unhealthy to be woken up early on a regular basis, because natural cycles of sleeping and dreaming are disturbed. That most of us have to get up early from an early age on, for kindergarten, school, work, is very bad for our mental health and therefore must be considered as part of the destruction of the self our “culture” is inflicting on us.
Usually, I wake him for kindergarten as late as possible. With everybody busy working, there is no community and no kids to play with in the neighborhood. This is the reason I want him to attend, because kindergarten is the only chance for him to regularly get in contact with other kids and gain some social competence.
We’ve had some meetings at the elementary school he’ll attend. I went there with him, and we stood with a bunch of kids from different kindergartens waiting for the teacher, with school kids playing around us. “Class 2b, to the classroom!” a teacher shouted. Immediately, about 25 children would run after her. It is amazing, I thought, how they are conditioned at a very young age to follow military-style orders.
Our teacher came and called us to follow her to the gym. At the door, she took Leo’s hand, smiled at me and said: “Daddy is going to wait outside.” While everybody else went in, I was the only one who had to stay in the cold schoolyard. After a short startling moment I understood. I’d been the only parent, while all others where preschool teachers.
The system needs to separate us very early, to destroy the strongest bonds of relationships, to make us weak and compliant. Of course, most of the teachers are nice and well-meaning people, at least at the elementary school near where I live. But they’ve gone through the very same process of conditioning. They learned that the most important thing is to follow orders. And that is what they do. Especially here in Germany, we should know that this in itself is very, very dangerous.
It terrifies me.
“Indian children are never alone. They are always surrounded by grandparents, uncles, cousins, relatives of all kinds, who fondle the kids, sing to them, tell them stories. If the parents go someplace, the kids go along,” said John (Fire) Lame Deer. Schools have been used in the US in a systematic and fierce way to destroy the kind of community Lame Deer describes. Of course, school has been much harder for them then it is for us civilized people. One reason for this is racism, another the systematic destruction of their native languages, that was largely done through school. But it is also because they just weren’t used to it. That time, they still knew how freedom and genuine community feels like. They still had something that we’ve lost long ago.
I’ve been asking myself why school is taking so long. I attended school for 12 painful years, and seriously, most of the time was wasted. Learning to read and write is not that hard; neither is learning some basic math. There are thousands of great books out there that cover much more than the things they teach you in school. Any average intelligent person could prepare for graduation in one or two years.
So, why all the wasted time?
Because the function of the school system is, first and foremost, to condition us with the experience that our lifetime doesn’t belong to us, but to a system. We have to be conditioned to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We have to be conditioned, and broken, to identify with the company we work for instead of identifying with a community of family and friends, or even the land.
This is why they destroy all of it. The community, the land, and even the self.
Otherwise, we’d never put up with any of that shit. We’d resist, just like the American Indians did, until death.
“Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability” aims to clarify, but succeeds only in highlighting the lack of clarity which dominates transgender theory.
“Let me define the terms, and I’ll win any debate,” a friend told me years ago, an insight I’ve seen confirmed many times in intellectual and political arenas.
But after reading Jack Halberstam’s new book, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, I would amend that observation: Debates also can be won by making sure a term is never clearly defined. The transgender movement has yet to offer coherent explanations of the concepts on which its policy proposals are based, yet support is nearly universal in left/liberal circles. Whether or not it was the author’s intention, Trans* feels like an attempt at an outline of such explanation, but I’m sorry to report that the book offers neither clarity nor coherence.
I say sorry, because I came to the book hoping to gain greater understanding of the claims of the transgender movement, which I have not found elsewhere. Halberstam — a professor in Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University — has been writing about this subject for more than two decades and is one of the most prominent U.S. trans* intellectuals. The table of contents looked promising, but the book only deepened my belief that a radical feminist and ecological critique of the transgender movement’s ideology is necessary.
Rather than be defensive about the ambiguity of the transgender argument, Halberstam celebrates the lack of definition as a strength of the movement, an indication that trans* offers deep insights for everyone. If we shift our focus from “the housing of the body” and embrace “perpetual transition” then “we can commit to a horizon of possibility where the future is not male or female but transgender,” he writes. Instead of “male-ish” and “female-ish” bodies we can realize “the body is always under construction” and “consider whether the foundational binary of male-female may possibly have run its course.”
The very act of naming and categorizing imposes limits that constrain the imagination, according to Halberstam, hence the use of the asterisk:
“I have selected the term ‘trans*’ for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic [relating to the sense of touch] relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”
I quote at length to demonstrate that in using shorter excerpts from the book I am not cherry-picking a few particularly abstruse phrases to poke fun at a certain form of postmodern academic writing. My concern is not stylistic but about the arguments being presented. After reading that passage a couple of times, I think I can figure out what Halberstam’s trying to say. The problem is that it doesn’t say anything very helpful.
To be fair, Halberstam is correct in pointing out that the instinct to categorize all the world’s life, human and otherwise — “the mania for the godlike function of naming” — went hand in hand with colonialism, part of the overreach of a certain mix of politics and science in attempting to control the world. But like it or not, humans make sense of the world by naming, which need not go forward with claims of imperial domination or divine insight. We define the terms we use in trying to explain the world so that we can meaningfully communicate about that world; when a term means nothing specific, or means everything, or means nothing and everything at the same time, it is of no value unless one wants to obfuscate.
But, if Halberstam is to be believed, this criticism is irrelevant, because transgenderism “has never been simply a new identity among many others competing for space under the rainbow umbrella. Rather, it constitutes radically new knowledge about the experience of being in a body and can be the basis for very different ways of seeing the world.” So, if I don’t get it, the problem apparently is the limits of my imagination — I don’t grasp the radically new knowledge — not because the explanation is lacking.
After reading the book, I continue to believe that the intellectual project of the transgender movement isn’t so much wrong as it is incoherent, and the political project is not liberatory but regressive. What this book “keeps at bay” is a reasonable, honest request: What does any of this mean?
In other writing — here in 2014 and again in 2016, along with a chapter in my 2017 book The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men — I’ve asked how we should understand transgenderism if the movement’s claim is that a male human can actually be female (or vice versa) in biological terms. If transgender signals a dissatisfaction with the culturally constructed gender norms of patriarchy — which are rigid, repressive, and reactionary — I’ve suggested it would be more effective to embrace the longstanding radical feminist critique of patriarchy.
Rather than repeat those arguments here, I want to try another approach, stating simply that I have good reason to believe I’m real, that the human species of which I am a member is real, and that the ecosphere of which we are a part is real. That is, there is a material reality to the world within which I, and all other carbon-based life forms, operate. I cannot know everything there is to know about that material world, of course, but I can trust that it is real.
The cultural/political/economic systems that shape human societies make living in the real world complex and confusing, and the ways those systems distribute wealth and power are often morally unacceptable. But to challenge that injustice, it’s necessary to understand that real world and communicate my understanding to others in clear fashion.
In left/liberal circles, especially on college campuses, “trans*” increasingly is where the action is for those concerned with social justice. It offers — for everyone, whether transgender-identified or not — the appearance of serious intellectual work and progressive politics. Endorsing the transgender project is a way to signal one is on the cutting edge, and work like Halberstam’s is embraced in these circles, where support for the transgender movement is required to be truly intersectional.
My challenge to those whose goal is liberation is simple: How does this help us understand the real world we are trying to change? How does it help us understand patriarchy, the system of institutionalized male dominance out of which so much injustice emerges?
Halberstam likely would put me in the category of “transphobic feminism” for “refusing to seriously engage” with transfeminism, but I am not transphobic (if, by that term, we mean one who is afraid of, or hateful toward, people who identify as transgender). Nor do I refuse to seriously engage other views (unless we describe a critique of another intellectual position as de facto evidence of a lack of serious engagement). I am rooted in radical feminism, one of those “versions of feminism that still insist on the centrality of female-bodied women,” according to Halberstam.
On that point, Halberstam is accurate: radical feminists argue that patriarchy is rooted in men’s claim to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality. Radical feminists distinguish between sex (male XY and female XX, a matter of biology) and gender (masculinity and femininity, a matter of culture and power), which means that there is no way to understand the rigid gender norms of patriarchy without recognizing the relevance of the category of “female-bodied women.” It’s hard to imagine how the binary of male-female could “run its course” given the reality of sexual reproduction.
This is where an ecological perspective, alongside and consistent with a radical feminist critique, reminds us that the world is real and we are living beings, not machines. In discussing his own top surgery (the removal of breasts), Halberstam speaks of working with the doctor:
“Together we were building something in flesh, changing the architecture of my body forever. The procedure was not about building maleness into my body; it was about editing some part of the femaleness that currently defined me. I did not think I would awake as a new self, only that some of my bodily contours would shift in ways that gave me a different bodily abode.”
We all have a right to understand ourselves as we please, and so here’s my response: My body is not a house that was constructed by an architect but rather — like all other life on the planet — is a product of evolution. I resist the suggestion I can “build” myself and recognize that a sustainable human presence on the planet is more likely if we accept that we are part of a larger living world, which has been profoundly damaged when humans treat it as our property to dominate and control.
This is the irony of Halberstam’s book and the transgender project more generally. After labeling the project of categorizing/defining as imperialist and critiquing the “mania for the godlike function of naming,” he has no problem endorsing the “godlike function” of reshaping bodies as if they were construction materials. There’s a deepening ecological sensibility in progressive politics, an awareness of what happens when humans convince ourselves that we can remake the world and ignore the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. While compassionately recognizing the reasons people who identify as transgender may seek surgery and hormone/drug treatments, we shouldn’t suppress concerns about the movement’s embrace of extreme high-tech intervention into the body, including the surgical destruction of healthy tissue and long-term health issues due to cross-sex hormones and hormone-like drugs.
I have long tried to observe what in rhetoric is sometimes called “the principle of charity,” a commitment in debate to formulating an opponent’s argument in the strongest possible version so that one’s critique is on firm footing. I have tried to do that in this review, though I concede that I’m not always sure what Halberstam is arguing, and so I may not be doing his arguments justice. But that is one of my central points: When I read this book — and many other arguments from transgender people and their allies — I routinely find myself confused, unable to understand just what is being proposed. So, again, I’ll quote at length in the hopes of being fair in my assessment, this time the book’s closing paragraph:
“Trans* bodies, in their fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms, remind all of us that the body is always under construction. Whether trans* bodies are policed in bathrooms or seen as killers and loners, as thwarted, lonely, violent, or tormented, they are also a site for invention, imagination, fabulous projection. Trans* bodies represent the art of becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy insistence of transitivity.”
Once again, after reading that passage a couple of times, I think I understand, sort of, the point. But, once again, I don’t see how it advances our understanding of sex and gender, of patriarchy and power. I am not alone in this assessment; people I know, including some who are sympathetic to the transgender movement’s political project, have shared similar concerns, though they often mute themselves in public to avoid being labeled transphobic.
I’m not asking of the transgender movement some grand theory to explain all the complexity of sex and gender. I just need a clear and coherent place to start. Asking questions is not transphobic, nor is observing that such clarity and coherence are lacking.
