Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)

This past weekend, July 3rd, was the Toronto Pride Parade, one of the biggest if not the biggest pride events in Canada. This year’s parade was a historic one for a variety of reasons. The weekend included the largest trans march in the world and the first time that a sitting Prime Minister joined the parade. Another major historic event was the protest staged by Black Lives Matter.

For those who haven’t heard, during the pride parade, after a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando Shooting at Pulse Club, Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a sit in halting the parade. Their protest had the following list of demands:

Continue reading “Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)”

Rant: Let’s Talk About the BLACKLIVESMATTER Protest at PRIDE (Part 1)
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Am I Queer Enough to Grieve?

I denied being bisexual for a long time. There was always an excuse.

  • I didn’t like women that way, I just appreciated their aesthetic beauty.
  • I wasn’t sexually attracted to boobs, they were just fun. Bouncy and Jiggly all at once.
  • I dismissed the crushes I had on certain friends as just being a particular kind of closeness between two female friends. I appreciated the intimacy we shared, that was all.
  • I made up excuses that the reason reading sex scenes between two women turned me on was because they focused more on the type of pleasure I wanted to experience.

When I finally accepted that there was something more to my attractions and yearnings, I identified as hetero-flexible: still straight, just occasionally intrigued by certain women. I made the cis-sexist observation that for me, it just wasn’t fun without also having a penis involved.

All of these messed up ideas finally dripped away over time and I accepted that I really was bi and that I was attracted to all sorts of genders and bodies and people. It wasn’t about specific genitals, it was about the person, and I was just as likely to love women as I was men.

Looking back, I think even then I saw women as more romantic partners and men as sex partners. My pursuit of men had more to do with what was socially expected of me, but my interest in, my connection with women and non-binary people seemed deeper somehow. Continue reading “Am I Queer Enough to Grieve?”

Am I Queer Enough to Grieve?

Shaming Med Use Kills

In the last several weeks, there have been several news articles relating to opiate use and changing definitions regarding drug classification and how doctors can prescribe. As usual this has brought a lot of the stigma surrounding medicine use to the limelight. Whenever these conversations get sparked again, a lot of people start talking about over-prescription, abuse of narcotics, and how big bad pharma creates fake conditions in order to sell drugs. People start talking about patients who abuse the system and end up addicted. These conversations are usually had by people who have no personal experience with chronic pain or the type of conditions being discussed. These same arguments then get used to discredit conditions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and ADHD.

The shaming inherent in a lot of these arguments not only make life more difficult for patients, but they are actually an example of how “a little” knowledge is a dangerous thing. Take, for example, the frequent argument that ADHD is often over-diagnosed and an excuse to medicate children. Some people have gone so far as to claim that ADHD meds are the shut up and sit still drug and that ADHD itself doesn’t exist.

The first half of the argument is based on two problematic ideas: the lie of more-diagnoses which I discussed in a previous article, and a tendency by certain studies to limit their focus on white males. While there is some indication that ADHD may be over-diagnosed in white boys, in every other category girls, people of colour, and so forth, the opposite appears to be the case.

In white children misbehaviour is believed to be pathological, whereas in the case of children of colour, it is believed to be genetic and inherent. When behaviours that are believed to be disruptive appear in class, white children are often send to counselors and psychiatrists, while black children in particular are punished. We’ve seen this discussed when activists and studies discuss the school to prison pipeline. In many cases the behaviours being punished are the same that are said to be caused by ADHD in white children. Continue reading “Shaming Med Use Kills”

Shaming Med Use Kills

Living with Dignity too!

In the wake of elbowgate, the attention surrounding what has been going on in parliament has been displaced and an important bill ignored.

The bill being discussed right now is in response to a Supreme Court ruling that states that patients have a chartered guaranteed right to end their lives with dignity. In the coming month the laws regarding doctor assisted suicide will become void, and so parliament is in a rush to pass a bill that would more specifically outline what that would mean.

The discussion around the right to die with dignity is one fraught with emotion on both sides. I would like to admit from the outset that I am not as familiar with the contents of the bill as I should be. I plan to change that, but I wanted to offer my own opinion on this issue.

Continue reading “Living with Dignity too!”

Living with Dignity too!

I almost died last week.

CN: Descriptions of withdrawal, hospital admission, medical symptoms and needles.

It wasn’t an accident, or even a sudden onset of something like appendicitis. No, my brush with death came about as a result of fear. Specifically, other people’s fear. Fear of addiction, fear of being wrong, and fear of being fooled.

You see, the week before I was admitted with Crohn’s. I went to an appointment with my Gastroenterologist and he sent me straight to the ER. I was admitted, and put on high doses of Dilaudid, after the usual adjusting games where they started me on 1mg every 6 hours, before finally conceding that 2 mg every 4 was what was needed. In addition to that, I had Gravol and Benadryl to control the various side effects of the opiate.

I spent the week essentially zonked out after several weeks of increasing pain and nausea, and a trip to the ER every 2 weeks since Christmas. My admission came on the heels of two weeks of being sick with a sore throat, which kept me not just from being able to take my Remicade, but my medical marijuana as well. My throat hurt too much to handle the irritation from the smoke.

My crohn’s had gone into overdrive. I wasn’t digesting, I was in pain, and I needed help.

The reason the doctors agreed to finally treat my pain properly is that I told them, that once I got home I wouldn’t be taking dilaudid anymore.

Not one doctor stopped thinking about their fear of addiction long enough to hear what I was saying and remember their training. Continue reading “I almost died last week.”

I almost died last week.

Where is Your Condemnation Now?

TW: For Racism

During the Ferguson protests, during the Baltimore uprisings, during countless demonstrations that took place because black children, black men, and black women, are being murdered, there were countless and endless condemnations by white people of the protestors as being too violent, too angry.

Last night, white people came to a Black Lives Matter demonstration for no other purpose then to commit violence. Their purpose wasn’t to raise awareness, to express anger and hurt over government sanctioned murders. No. They were there to kill people who had the nerve to protest being murdered. They were there because they don’t see PoC as being human beings, as being people. They shot five people.

When the police responded, their response included macing protestors after they had just been shot at.

Continue reading “Where is Your Condemnation Now?”

Where is Your Condemnation Now?

Unpacking the Red Pill

I’m actually sort of upset that internet hate groups have managed to co-opt the matrix red pill analogy. It is actually a really good metaphor for social justice and the way that becoming aware of privilege and systemic injustice works.

It really is like suddenly opening your eyes and realizing that everything you thought you were seeing you were actually seeing incorrectly your whole life. It’s incredible. Where the analogy fails is by painting it as a single pill.

The truth is that becoming aware of social justice issues is really like swallowing a whole bunch of different red pills, each one exposing you to yet another level of interconnected systems of oppression. This is why we get some atheist activists, and other social justice activists, falling into this same trap over and over again of thinking that they couldn’t possibly be sexist, racist, transphobic, classist, etc. because they “already swallowed the red pill” so now they could see the whole truth.

There is also this idea that swallowing one red pill makes every additional one easier to see, but that’s not true. Sometimes you can swallow multiple red pills at ones at once. But the truth is that each one is painful to take. Each one produces its own side-effects, its own difficulties. Swallowing the red pill is never easy.

It’s not just one easily exposed system that once you see a part of, you essentially get an idea of the whole. It is more like a self-replicating computer virus that infects different system files. You can cut one out, but unless you get them all, it will just rebuild again.To really solve the problem, you have to root out every single individual corrupted system file. Otherwise, the program rebuilds itself, just using a different pathway, but ultimately yielding the same result.

Take the evolution of feminism throughout the years. Each wave of feminism exposed layers of patriarchal oppression, however, by failing to consider the interconnections of various issues and the level to which the system was self-replicating, rather than fixing the problem is shifted the scope of it. Such as when the response of women trying to prove that they were every bit as capable in “masculine” fields and tasks ended up reinforcing the gender binary. The focus was on showing that women can also do “masculine things” rather than on showing that the division of actions into an either or option was not based on an accurate social model of gender. The resulting surge in femmephobia reinforced a lot of harmful patriarchal concepts that are now that much more difficult to dismantle. It’s not that second-wave feminists went too far, it is that they didn’t go far enough. It failed to take into account how the system is also supported by race, by cis-centrism, by ableism. It failed to look at the matrix as a whole.

Imagine if the matrix actually existed as a series of levels. With every successive pill you see a little more of the matrix. But if you don’t realize there are more pills to take, you might be tempted to think you see the whole matrix. Agent Smith is counting on that, because as long as you believe you are outside the matrix, they can use the parts of the matrix you are still connected to to shift your perception of the world around you.  As long as you are still within levels of the matrix however, you continue to power the system.

If we take the premise of the matrix movie that human beings are being turned into a potato battery, becoming aware of different spheres of oppression is like discovering that your potato battery is charging other batteries and working to shut off those batteries so that your battery doesn’t die. Those are the first red pills you usually take.

The hard pills to take are those that reveal that even while you are struggling to unplug the connections that are causing other batteries to drain your charge, you are recharging your own battery from other people as well. These are the pills that make us choke, that stick in our throats. These are the ones that make us want to fight and reject what we are seeing, because more than anything the matrix relies on our denial that we could be harming people even if we have no intention to.

You didn’t know. The plugs were in your back and you couldn’t see them because you were in the matrix level whatever. But intentionally or not, you have been draining other people’s batteries. Whether you knew or not, you may have been the connection that added just that extra little drain needed to completely empty someone’s battery.

So now you have to make a decision, which do you pull out first?  The ones draining others or the ones draining you? Or do you try to pull them out at the same time? Do you leave others to try and pull out the ones draining them out themselves? Do you go back to pretending you never saw the ones in your back or deny that they’re there? Do you address some but not others? What makes you decide?

The choice you make is ultimately yours, but the one you make says something about you as a person.

My choice is striking a balance between pulling out both sides. I need to pull out my own because I can’t take out the system if my battery is completely dead. But I also need to work on pulling the ones that are charging me. Sometimes, when my battery is draining too fast, I need to take a break. I might need to focus on pulling out my own for a few moments, though I never forget about the ones in my back. Sometimes, I am being drained slow enough that I can forget about pulling out my own for some time in order to focus more on pulling out the ones that I benefit from. In fact, often when I am puling out my own, it is so that I have the surplus energy to spend more time pulling out the ones that charge me.

Everyone is interconnected into the system, but not everyone carries the same number of output and input energy. Some people only have maybe one or two output cabled, while being charged by several sources. Even when this happens, you might not be retaining a high charge, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are still draining others. The opposite extreme also exists with some people being almost completely output cables and none or almost no input cables.

The system is like a web and everyone is plugged into it.

It is essential that we all disconnect and break the system. When you have any system that depends on batteries basically sharing charge in a single continuous system, that leads to combustion. Just ask anyone who has had keys and batteries in their pocket, and ended up with burning pants because the two connecting created a single circuit.

The system is a path to destruction as long as it exists because either your battery gets completely drained or you combust. That’s ultimately why systems of oppression like patriarchy end up hurting even those they privilege.

Unpacking the Red Pill

Who Could it Hurt

Please note that this post is a repost from our old blog. The Ottawa Cancer Foundation retracted the invitation to Jenny McCarthy in part due to a twitter campaign #dropjenny.

In 1998 Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent paper linking autism to the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine. What followed was a growing movement of scared parents who began avoiding getting their kids vaccinated for fear that they would become autistic. For years scientists could not repeat the results found by Wakefield. Finally in 2004, Wakefield was found to have a conflict of interest in favour of finding a link between the vaccine and autism. In May of 2010, Andrew Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council and was struck of the medical register and banned from practicing medicine.

The rumour campaign against vaccines was picked up by Jenny McCarthy, an actress with no scientific or medical background. She became the mouthpiece for the supposed controversy, despite the fact that there was no scientific basis for any of the claims she made. Despite this, her fame allowed her greater publicity. She used her son’s supposed autism* to gain sympathy, and to tug at the heartstrings of worried parents everywhere.   Hordes of new parents opted against vaccines. Not just the MMR, but others as well. Parents began sending pox pops to one another, and holding chicken pox parties. Adults who had previously had their vaccines, opted against getting their regular boosters.

Continue reading “Who Could it Hurt”

Who Could it Hurt