What do these slogans mean?
If you’ve been across the Stanley Park Seawall, you might be curious about our chalkings. What do they mean? And did you miss any?
There’s more to sisterhood than victimhood
Focusing only on our oppression as women tacitly leads us into failing to acknowledge our own privileges, and the oppression that women carry out against each-other. Besides, it’s depressing. So think about our power and our strength, remember how society prvileges and oprresses us in other ways than our gender, and use our power for equality, or lose it.
2nd wave is the first draft
The popular wave of mainstream feminism in the 1970s did a lot of good things, from access to birth-control and abortions, to non-discrimnation policies to raising a generation of awesome ninjas. But for all the good it did, the people involved in it were not immune to the power plays that run through our society, and their perspectives often could stand some revision.
Exclusion disempowers
Prejudice relies on ignorance and ignorance relies on predjudice. If you want to maintain an unjust status quo, you gotta prevent people from mixing and meeting with the people who are oppressed. Ban the strange and the different and keep the world as-is.
Sex workers are the experts on sex work: talk to one today!
Not her mother. Not her sister. Not someone in the neighbourhood. Her.
Support Safer Sex Work
Sex work can be a dangerous profession with an unmatched stigma. Drug lords and professional burglars get more respect. Diving welders and soldiers have fewer “on the job accidents.”
Why? The stigma, the lack of legal protections, and other oppressions acting on women in sex work, combine to make it so.
The stigma attached to the label “whore” hurts and kills and this needs to change. When a sex-worker gets evicted, beaten, harassed, or raped, our society teaches us to react like we do to the pregnant teenager, or the rape victim who wore a skirt at night – lean over and say, this is your punishment for being not keeping your sexuality at home under the protection of your male relatives.
This needs to change. It can change. It is changing. End the stigma. Extend legal protections. And show some god-damned respect to those who work in the hardest service sector on Earth.
Unions for Prostitutes
Seriously. These things work. See the feminists in sex work, below.
Prostitutes Unionize!
See above.
My consent. My kink. My body. My choice.
Why the obsession with telling women what we can and can’t do with our bodies? Our sex lives? Why the idea that one kind of fun between consenting adults is normal and healthy, and another sick and perverted?
“Sisterhood” (with the “o’s” being the “female” and “trans” symbols’)
Alliances between cisgendered and transgendered feminists work! Every time I go to a trans-positive women’s space, I see a mix of trans, cis, and I-don’t-know-if-you’re-trans-or-cis-nor-is-it-my-business women volunteering together and changing the world. Every time. I do not exagerrate.
If a women’s organinazation is trans-postive, they will have more volunteers; happy volunteers who are able to work for women as women. I don’t just mean the transsexuals: I mean the whole trans spectrum: partners, family, friends and allies.
“Converse with a kinkster”
Before forming an opinion about kink, it would be prudent to go talk to a feminist kinkster.
Go chat with a sex-worker
If you want to understand that social impact of sex work, perhaps as part of formulating world-changing plans, talk to those most affected: the sex-workers. Not the Johns. Not the prostitutes’s mothers. Not the people who live near prostitutes (but who never talk to them). Go to the camgirls, streetwalkers, hustlers, strippers, pro tops, and human sushi mats. Heck, you might know some already, they just might not have mentioned it to you. Once you have talked to a variety of sex workers, then form a strong opinion about sex work.
“Have tea with a transsexual”
This should not be too hard. All transsexuals like tea. I think. I mean, everyone should like tea. So get some fair-trade or home-grown boilables and some mugs and talk.
“Parley with a prostitute”
See two slogans up.
“Same-gender abuse happens: ask your queer sisters.”
And ignoring same-gender abuse leads to more of it.
I practice “safe space”
So when we t
Trans liberation: because biology is not destiny
You want a demonstrable break between biology and gender roles? Look to transsexuals!
“Kim Nixon wanted to help”
Local woman gets raped. Local woman seeks rape crisis counselling and benefits from it. Local woman wants to help others the way she was helped. Local woman goes to a different Women’s Organization to volunteer as a councillor, not konwing that this organization is transphobic. People at said organization ostracize her and refuses volunteer training because local woman is a transsexual. Local woman takes them to court. Organization fights her, and trans rights in general. Organization loses several times in court, and keeps appealing until they win, then celebrate it as a victory for “women.”
The local woman is Kim Nixon. The first organization she went to, the one that helped her was “Battered Women Support Serivces.” (They’re really awesome people with a used clothing store on 1029 Commercial Drive.)
The second organization – the transphobic one – was Vancouver Rape Relief. Strangely, but a few hours after the femininjas chalked up the Seawall, Vancouver Rape Relief used it for a fundrasier walk. The same fundraiser walk that they advertised heavily in queer neighbourhoods. What a strange coincidence!
Transsexuals are like ninjas: they could be right beside you and you’d never know it.
Do you have an image in your head of what a transsexual looks like? If you do, you might want to check your head, because transsexuals can look like anyone. We come in all shapes, all sizes, all ages, all colours, all shades of feminine and masculine, all sexual orientations. Just as you can’t tell someone’s sexual orientation by seeing or hearing them, you can’t tell whether someone’s trans- or cissexed. Just as some people claim that they “never met a gay person,” when they probably know several, you probably know more transsexuals than you think.
So keep in mind that when poeple go on a transphobic tear, they often unknowingly do so right in front of trans folk , because they assume they know what a transsexual looks like.
“Feminism makes me wet”
Do I really need to explain this? Feminists are hot. Especially ones who are also ninjas.
Additionally: if you’re in one of those “two-person heterogendered relationships,” which are so popular in the media right now, some sciencey people say that your love life could benefit from a little hot feminist action.
Did I mention that I’m free on Thursday nights?
I ♥ kinky feminists
See “feminism makes me wet” and “my kink. my consent…” above.
Feminists in Sex-Work
Before continuing, check out this awesome book on the history of sex work in Vancouver, by some of the people who lived it. It’s available for free, online from SFU.
1 – Margo St. James
Born in nearby Bellingham and living on Orcas Island, Margo St. James set up health clinics for sex workers, helped found the sex-worker liberation organization COYOTE, and ran against Reagan for the GOP presidential nomination.
2 – Swapna Gayen
A Kolkata sex worker and secretary of the ‘Durbar Mahila Samanya Committee‘ (composed of around 65′000 sex workers). She’s active in finding new ways of listening to the women affected before we talk about human trafficking and sex work. Also an outspoken critic of “developmental programs” that cut off prostititutes from support. Also, she organized prostitutes to help monitor polling booths. Pretty cool.
3 – Gail Pheterson
Anyone who assembles an anthology called “A Vindication of the Rights of Whores” has to be awesome. Much of her work counters the stigma of the word “Whore.” She’s also big on abortion rights, questioning Neo-European societies’s ideas about earning money, and internalized oppression. A good portion of her work is en francais.
4 – Lily Cortez
Leader of the El Alto Association of Nighttime Worker, which organized a prostitute’s strike in El Alto Bolivia. You harass us? We’ll ignore your mandatory blood testing!
5 – Valerie Scott
With support from Sex Professionals of Canada, she is launching a legal challenge against the criminalization and marginalization of prostitutes’s lives.
Great Transgendered Feminists:
1 – Emi Koyama
She also writes awesome pamphlets.
2 – Pauline Park
She has an activist heart and a keen mind on race, LGBT issues, and adoption, among other things.
3 – Kate Bornstein
A former scientologist, ze’s a wise fool and eloquent clown of anti-oppression theory as well as one of those genderqueer transsexuals who melts my ninja heart.
4 – Allucquére Stone
Ironically more famous for campaigns of harassment conducted against her during her involvement in women’s radio than for her contributions, Allucquére Stone is a post-modern body/science theorist, and cutting edge media worker, among other things.
5 – Leslie Feinburg
The publicist for the 1990’s draft of gender-neutral pronous as well as a labour activist, frank writer, and all around transgender warrior.
If the above link doesn’t work, try the cached version.
6 – Julia Serano
She writes clearly, deconstructs all those crap articles about “boy vs girl brains” and champions putting the feminine in feminism. What’s not to like?
7 – Vivian Namaste
A Quebecoise writer who moves gender theory away from the classroom and into fighting oppressions (about bloody time). She’s the authour of “Sex Change, Social change: Reflections on Identity, Instititutions and Imperialism.”
My only complaint is that she overlooks genderqueers and seems adverse to coining new terms to describe all the shades of Queer.
“Visit our website”
You’re here ain’tcha?
“www.femininjas.com”
I can’t honestly tell you what this string of gibberish means. I mean, how do you even pronounce “www?” Maybe it’s Welsh. And there are periods in between with no spaces? What is this syntactical nightmare? Better just ignore it.
