How To Mourn A Relative 101

Wouldn't it be great if there was actually a guide to mourning? Like, "your relative died, this is the appropriate and healthy response, you're welcome". Life would be so much simpler.

My great great aunt died today. That probably does not seem like a big deal, because most people die before they have the opportunity to be anyone's great great anything. But my mum's family tend to be both unusually long of life and unusually close to one another, so it kind of is a big deal, because to me my great great aunt is almost on a par with a grandparent or a non-great aunt. Not that it makes it a big deal for you, because if you were sad every time someone's relative died, you would never stop being sad. IDK. "Big deal" is kind of hard to define.

I've been up in the Scottish Highlands for a week, for the purpose of a) spending time with my grandparents and b) climbing the shit out of some mountains. Today is my last full day, so we were preparing to leave for my last hike of the summer, when my nan materialised in front of me and was like "Auntie Eileen died in the early hours of the morning". My nan has a uniquely businesslike way of imparting bad news, which tends to rub off on the people she's imparting to, so I was just like "recieved and understood". Had you been watching the conversation but unable to understand English, you would probably have assumed we were talking about a sports result or the weather or something. It was kind of weird.

So then we left for our hike, which was actually the only hike of the week which took place upon a Proper Decent Mountain. I didn't realise this until I was climbing up it, but then I remembered that it's only a Proper Decent Mountain if you spend at least 60% of the time like "OH GOD MY LEGS ARE BURNING AHH AHH AHH". If you can remember what it's like to experience physical pleasure, then it doesn't count.

So I was caught up in drowning in lactic acid and admiring various views and meeting this other hiker and trying to understand his words through his Glaswegian brogue, which meant that I forgot about Eileen for most of the day. Which I then felt guilty about.

I have this theory about the difference between sadness and depression, which is that sadness can peacefully coexist with your other emotions without much interfering with them, whereas depression taints all good news and chokes every sensation of hope and happiness. Today seemed to reinforce that idea. The sadness of Eileen's death did not affect the beauty of mountains and the pain of climbing them, and vice versa.

Part of me reached the conclusion that the saddest thing about Eileen's death was how little impact it had. Eileen was the sweetest of sweet old ladies, composed of approximately 70% generosity and 28% love of family. But her being gone did not stop the Highlands from being beautiful, or most of her relatives from enjoying their day; it didn't even register with well over 99% of the human race. Why I think this is sad, I don't know. I certainly don't want beauty or enjoyment to cease after my death, and I somehow doubt that Eileen felt any different.

Maybe it's just the fact that death is something that one should pay attention to. Perhaps that's one of the purposes of family, to have a group of someones who will witness and acknowledge the end of your world. If so, then I haven't done that very well today. Until now, I suppose.

So maybe that's the how one is supposed to mourn one's relatives. Just quietly pay attention to their death for them, once they become incapable of paying attention to anything.

To Eileen. 

Laci Green

There are two things I would like to draw your attention to:

1. The existence of Laci Green, a Youtube vlogger and brilliant human being who has committed much of her life to encouraging people to think positively about their bodies, dispelling harmful myths about sex and gender, and empowering people to take safe control of their sex lives
2. The fact that said brilliant human being has been driven from the internet by death and rape threats, which the perpetrators justify by the fact she once used the word tr*nny in a video as a young lass, and that she has accused Islam as being an inherently misogynistic religion.

Never mind that Laci has extensively apologised from her use of the transphobic slur, and explained that it arose from ignorance rather than hate, and dedicated whole fracking videos to the empowerment of trans and genderqueer people; the bitchy internet trolls in this world have decided that she is irrecovably transphobic.
I accept that only trans people get to decide what counts as transphobic and what doesn't, and that cisgendered people have no place telling them not to be offended by the wonrds and actions of Laci or anyone else. But there is room to object to anyone condemning Laci as an inherently transphobic and prejudiced individual, when there is so much evidence to the contrary; and it's frankly a moral obligation to openly oppose the kind of threats and abuse she has received. There is never any justification to stalk and violently threaten another human being. It sounds obvious, but a lot of tumblr-commentators seem to have forgotten this.
I couldn't find the video(s) in which Laci criticises Islam, but frankly I don't think it matters what she said. Even if she had been outright provocative, it would still be no justification for her to be treated the way she was. It's also just pretty fracking stupid to respond to an argument or opinion with the threat of violence, because you do nothing to improved to standing of your viewpoint in the eyes of do nothing, and end up reinforcing the other side's points. If you disagree with someone, then words are the only legitimate way to settle it.

A few off-pissing responses to Laci's situation have been these:

People of colour and trans people get threats all the time over the internet and no-one does anything about it, why should she get so much sympathy?It's an unfortunate fact of life that the more visible someone is, the wider the support and response to their misfortune will be. The more people you touch, the more people will be hurt by you being hurt. This is just life.
I do not accept any speculation that white people are sympathising with Laci more simply because she is white. That is beyond ridiculous. More people were sad when Michael Jackson died than when my white next-door-neighbour died, because more people knew who he was.
So to the (well, at least two) people complaining that everyone sympathising with Laci didn't sympathise with every black person who has been racially abused over the internet, that's simply because they didn't know those people existed. Get over it.

Yeah alright death threats are bad but ZOMG SHE SO TRANSPHOBIC I WANT TO RAGE ABOUT IT.
It really does piss me off that people are trying as hard as they are to shift everyone's attention from the fact that a lovely human being has been horrifically abused to the fact that said human being once made a mistake which offended some people. As one tumblypoo pointed out, if the most offensive thing Laci has done is to once use the word tr*nny, then she's way ahead of everyone else.
I mean, I realise this analogy has serious proportion issues, but can you imagine if someone tried to de-legitimise the mourning of a victim of 9/11 or 7/7 by continuously bringing up the fact that the victim once flicked a v-sign at a Muslim? A person's suffering is not made less terrible by the fact that that person is not perfect. If this were the case, then the same people to wail that we shouldn't sympathise with Laci should be wailing the same thing about everyone who has ever suffered.


Members of minority groups are silenced by oppression, therefore it is less bad that Laci was silenced by death threats.
Yeah, not sure if this is even worth going in to. But there seems to be this idea that you need to have some sort of qualification in order to really suffer, like, you have to be materially impoverished and/or a member of a minority group, otherwise your pain is trivial and not worth sympathy. This is not the case. First world pain is still pain, even if it's not the specific type of pain which comes from absence of luxury.
The comments in the post linked to are using the fact that minorities are silenced by oppression to try and overshadow what has happened to Laci, which is not acceptable to me. It's like when you briefly moan about your life to a friend, and their response is "well, you think you've got it tough, you should listen to what happened to me...". Suffering does not have to be the worst suffering in order to be legitimate, and "who has it worse" competitions help literally no-one. So just, stop. 

I would also like to address the obsessive hate culture which has surrounded Laci in certain corners of the internet. A few tumblr users have made it their goal in life to track down every comment Laci makes which has a vague hint of cissexism, and angrily blog about each one individually. It's also their intention to snottily disparage every single attempt at an apology Laci makes for these comments. (You can find them pretty easily from the two links in bold above.)
Do I think that these people are partially responsible for the threats Laci has received? I have my suspicions, and they may or may not be correct. It's certainly easy to see how a culture like that could make a certain type of person think it okay to resort to stalking and violent threats. Regardless, it is never acceptable to turn a human being into a hate figure like this. The tumblr-based Laci-haters are so blind in their desire to hate that they point-blank refuse to give Laci the benefit of the doubt which every one of us needs and deserves. They react to the comments she makes with such bile and manufactured outrage, despite none of them indicating any worse character trait than the ignorance which all cisgendered people are guilty of.
Hate is never an appropriate response to non-willful ignorance. Everyone is ignorant about something, and none of us can go through life without slipping up and displaying non-inclusive language once in a while. Once again: Laci is no worse than any other cisgendered person, and she is in fact much better than most of them. The anger which has been directed towards her is neither proportionate or reasonable, and can only be the result of the internet-troll urge which seeks out an individual to hate obsessively.
This happens to almost everyone on the internet, of course. It just breaks my heart to see it to happen to someone so kind and brilliant who has helped so many.

Anyway, that's probably enough of that. Please watch Laci's videos if you aren't already familiar with them, because they handle so many issues so smartly and thoughtfully. And if you will, please show you support for her situation by using the #strongforlaci hashtag on Twitter.

Until next time...

Gay Pride Explained

Two interrelated things which I often hear people not understanding are a) what the point of gay pride is and b) why gay people feel the need to have their own support groups and internet forums and whatnot. So I'm going to do my best to concisely explain both of them, speaking from my infallible position of informedness as A Person of Gayness.

Firstly, Pride. People are often confused about Pride for understandable reasons, like, how is being gay something to be proud of? Homosexuality isn't an accomplishment, it's just a thing you are; we don't have "tall pride" or "blonde pride" or even "straight pride", so why gay pride? Similarly, marching down the streets with rainbow flags seems to be in direct conflict with what people understand to be the whole point of the LGBT rights movement: to assure straight cissexuals that gender and sexual minorities (GSMs) are not so different from them, and thus discretely integrate gay etc. people into straight-dominated society.
The point of pride is that it is the opposite of shame. Shame is what opponents of GSM rights would have gay, bi and trans people feel; and it is often the default emotional setting for GSMs when they are coming to terms with their own "weirdness" in the face of a society where heterosexuality and cissexuality are consistently showcased as the way to be. So the point of gay/LGBT pride is to declare unto the world that being gay etc. is not something that people should be ashamed of.
If it helps, try to tweak the definition of "pride" in this context from "a reaction to one's accomplishments" to "open satisfaction with the way one is", which is closer to the definition of the word when used in, say, Pride and Prejudice. I think a lot of the confusion surrounding rainbow-ardorned capital-P Pride basically comes down to semantics.
So Pride gives people a chance to be open about something which they usually spend a lot of effort trying to hide or suppress, and it serves to show the world that being gay etc. is not something to be ashamed of. The reason we don't have straight pride is that the straight equivalent of Pride is embodied in everyday life: in all the advertisements and TV shows and various other media outlets which showcase heterosexual relationships, and also the cultural assumptions about how every child and world leader and next-door-neighbour is going to be straight.

The other thing is GSM groups online and IRL, which is kind of a smaller-scale version of the 'ghettoization' drive which creates gay-centric districts and communities in cities. I remember a specific occasion when someone told me they thought such things were pointless, in response to a gay Christian online forum. His reasoning was that having gay-specific groups and forums implies that gay etc. people are incapable of discussing issues with straight people, which is quite demonstrably not the case. So why bother?
The reason I, personally, have been prone to seek out gay-specific groups online and IRL is that I want to briefly be somewhere where being gay isn't weird. The truth is, no matter how accepting the people around you are, being a marked minority is always going to be kind of wearing. Knowing that, for instance, everything you say about sex/romance/whatever will always have a kind of strange novelty for most people, and that at any point someone could ask you if you have a girlfriend and you'll have to explain and they could be one of the ones who react badly, and that well over 95% of your acquaintances are privileged in a way that you will never be and can't help sometimes resenting, is something that you just need to not be the case every once in a while. Creating gay groups, or gay 'ghettos', gives us the privilege of being the majority once in a while, and there's a certain kind of freedom interlinked with that; which, by necessity, people who are white and heteronormative have difficulty understanding, because it's something that they take for granted every day and probably can't really imagine not having. (I also take that freedom for granted when it comes to my accent, the colour of my skin, my cultural background, and to a certain extent my sex.)
Also, while gay people are not incapable of talking to straight people about life and stuff, there are certain issues which do apply pretty much exclusively to GSMs, and which few straight-cissexuals are empathetic enough to understand or want to talk about. This isn't a bad thing or something I'm trying to make straights feel guilty about, it's just the way it is. I'm talking coming out to your family, trying to tune your gadar (you laugh, but it's hard!), what the gay scene is like and how not to freak out whilst navigating it, etc. In the average room of people, where the vast majority is probably straight, conversation is naturally going to be guided away from these topics, because most of the people talking don't care. Having organised gay groups lets GSMs talk about this stuff without the uncomfortable feeling that most people present are bored and want to start talking about boobs.

So, there you have it. If you're not convinced or have further queries, then I welcome you to ask me. If you want. You might not. It's ultimately your life, I suppose.

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"Religious people are stupid."

There seems to be this idea shared by an unfortunate number of atheists, that anyone who believes in God is automatically less intelligent than anyone who doesn't. This idea is perpetuated by ridiculously unfunny comedians, like Jimmy Carr and this guy I just discovered today, Jim Jefferies, who has this to say:

"Here's the thing about people who believe in God: they're idiots. There's no dancing around it, you're a borderline fucking mentalist. You're an idiot. You're like a thirteen year old who still believes in Santa. Fuck you."


Wow.

Here's the thing: negatively caricaturing a group including billions of people, and reducing their reasons for holding a certain opinion to "they're idiots", is always bad. It is phenomenally unscientific, unless he's actually performed IQ tests on a sizable sample of theists, which somehow doubt. It incites tribalism, by riling atheists up against theists for no good reason. It denies the need to imagine other people complexly. And above all, it denies the fact that many theists have logical reasons to believe in a God or deity. Because who cares about the truth, when we can reassure ourselves about our position by dismissing the opposite view with a few words?
So all this is bad, and what's more, it's the kind of thing which non-religious types criticise religious types for doing all the time. But so many otherwise rationally-thinking people are going along with it; they are lampooning the intellectual worth of their fellow humans, and they are refusing to think deeply about the issues which they claim to have the better understanding of, and they feel entitled in doing so.

The explosion in the popularity of atheism that has occurred with the release of books like The God Delusion, God is Not Great, etc, has caused a great many viewpoints to be rationally challenged when before they were just accepted. And that's fantastic. But for some, it's having the opposite effect, by providing atheists with a kind of zealous entitlement to mock and deride theists and caricature them with their own unfounded assumptions. It's also making people have an intellectual reverence for jackass comedians who want to be provocative for the sake of it, when in fact nothing they're saying nothing particularly intelligent at all.
I mean, are we seriously supposed to accept that someone who uses the word "mentalist" to refer to mentally ill people is automatically more intelligent that Issac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Aquinas etc, simply because he has rejected the idea of God?

So, no, Mr. Jefferies, religious people are not just "idiots". Some of them are, of course, just as some atheists are. But many of them are more intelligent than either you or me. 

Truth is better than an illusion, no matter how comforting the illusion is. This goes for the illusion that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot as much as for any other.

Book Banning is EVIL.

So recently, there has been a wave of attempts by certain people to stop teenagers from reading books which handle certain subjects in a certain way. Any book which admits the existence of gay people, vaguely describes any sexual act, contains any sort of violence, or makes the slightest allusion to magic or vampires or any sort of supernatural phenomenon, is in the potential firing line.

Of course, you already know this. It was all over the news when religious groups started frothing that JK Rowling was going to turn our children into Satanists, and parents who flail their arms around whenever a book contains the word "penis" tend to crop up everywhere.

But, it's important to stress how hurtful, ignorant and just plain silly all book-banning attempts are. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Groups and individuals who promote the idea of forcing certain books off shelves and out of classrooms like to encourage an idea of teenagers as brainless drones who will uncritically absorb and mimic everything they are told in literature. The justification of one school/district/whatever for banning John Green's Looking for Alaska, a book which amongst various other things includes characters smoking and one sex scene, was that reading about sex and smoking would inevitably make teenagers want to light up and get down themselves. The spokeswoman actually used the phrase "mokey see, monkey do" in her explanation.
Not to mention the crowning jewel for the book banning movement, the recently viral Darkness Too Visible article from the Wall Street Journal. This article cries that teenagers need to be deliberately surrounded by "images of joy and beauty" in order to develop property, and unless subjects like self-harm and abuse are censored from them, they will never be capable of happiness (or something). Also, we hear once again that allowing teenagers to read books about self-harm will cause the behaviour to spread; a conclusion which, frankly, the writer wouldn't have come anywhere near if she had any first-hand or professional understanding of the nature of self-harm.

Here's the thing: teenagers aren't robots. Every single individual between the ages of twelve and eighteen has an independent brain capable of critically analysing input, more or less as effectively as an adult's. As such, it is ludicrous to argue that a teenager's response to reading about an activity will be to unquestioningly mimic it. Hell, not even the average five-year-old reacts to a book like that. No reader expects a novel to be an uncomplicated demonstration of desirable behaviour, and rare is the author who intends it to be. John Green doesn't want his readers to engage in emotionally empty oral sex, JK Rowling doesn't want hers to try and magically inflate their aunts (or, for that matter, don a black cloak and start murdering Mudbloods). And teeage readers get that; they get it because all humans know, from the moment they finish their first book, that that's not what reading is for.

But book-banning isn't just insufferably patronising. It's both a symptom and a weapon of a much greater evil, one which is made more apparent by some of the crazier banning going down in places like Arizona.
A few months ago, following the suspension of a school's programme on Mexican-American studies, a number of books relating to the course were confiscated from teachers and students. Essentially, the school systematically denied students any possibility of reading about Latino issues from the perspective of a Latino writer. Now, imagine being a Mexican-American student in that school; being implicitly told by the people in charge of your education that the voice of your community must be silenced. The word "alienation" doesn't quite seem to cover it.
It's a similar case with the Darkness Too Visible writer's complaint that novels about self-harm "normalise" (God, how I hate that word) self-destructive behaviour. By necessity, then, what the writer wants is for issues like self-harm and suicide to be sidelined, and for teachers and writers to reinforce the idea that people going through such difficulties are "weird". Which, you know, is the exact opposite of what people need when they're suffering from depression.
We see the same pattern with banners who want to pretend to teenagers that sexual abuse doesn't happen, that gay people don't exist, that drug abuse is a fantasy. What this does is prescribe to teenagers that there is only one acceptable way to be: that if you are gay or trans or mentally ill then you are an unacceptable deviation from normality, and if you have been abused or fallen into drug addiction then you are fundamentally Other and can't ever expect anyone to empathise with you. For the privileged white heteronormative mentally healthy majority, their opportunity of learning about and trying to understand other ways of being will be largely denied to them. As such, the social divisions between majority and deviant, which already cause so much suffering in this world, will grow wider and deeper with each generation.

Adolescence is the time when we grow from child to adult. Hiding all dark and diverse things from adolescents stunts that process, because the primary difference between a child and an adult is the amount of experience they have internalized. Censoring potential input for young people, literary or otherwise, helps no-one; least of all those it is intended to protect.