My post on Gathering Forces on transliberation.

Sylvia Rivera, transliberation, and class struggle

Street Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was founded as a caucus within Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971 to put forth trans demands in the gay liberation movement. The co-founder of STAR, Sylvia Rivera, was a Puerto Rican trans woman who led the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 along with other trans of color. Yet gradually, the gay liberation movement was co-opted by white middle-class folks who are gender-conforming and became conservative. Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a New York based gay rights group was founded by ex-members of GLF who did not appreciate its radicalism and wanted to form a single-issued organization that only focused on reformist gay rights. GAA’s conservatism and transphobia showed when they dropped the trans demands while advocating citywide anti-discrimination rights in the 70s. They saw actions put on by STAR and Sylvia Rivera as too “dangerous,” “crazy,” and “extreme.”

Trans folks were not only attacked by mainstream gay rights groups but also in their own neighborhoods. In the West Village, a gentrified gay neighborhood, trans sex workers, who were mostly homeless and of color, were kicked out of the streets by white gay homeowners because they were “low-class, vulgar transvestites” not the usual entertaining drag queens. A real-estate-driven Quality of Life campaign led by the city continually pushed for the closure of clubs where trans folks hung out. Fighting for trans rights is thus a class issue. Rivera, who was homeless herself, saw the link and pushed STAR to organize a community space for homeless trans folks as well as fight for labor justice. They found a building for street gay kids, fed them and clothed them, while the government was cutting the healthcare, taking away food stamps, and putting more people with AIDS, youth, and women on the street. In Leslie Feinberg Interviews Sylvia Rivera, Rivera reiterates the importance of not only doing community work but also fighting against the government and the ruling class. STAR joined the mass demonstration with the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group, against police repression in 1970. STAR also built alliances with the Housing Works Transgender Working Group and the New York Direct Action Nextwork Labor Group to form picket lines at a club where a trans dancer was dismissed from work. Fighting for trans rights is a class issue–to resist the rich property owners who push trans folks out of their neighborhoods, to confront the managers that try to fire trans workers, and to fight back against the state that cuts back healthcare...

(read more on questions and comments)

breaking rules to survive

I enjoy very much using a white girl's bus pass found in the street to commute to campus and pretend that i'm still one of the college kids every morning. There's something that feels really great when you break the order of the universe, even just something trivial like pretending to be a blond college student. I'm reading my future PhD advisor's (no i really wasn't stalking her) interview with a feminist group--it really blows me away. Ever since i knew i got into the program i had some sort of intellectual crisis with this discipline i'm going into. Oh psychology. My training at UW focused so heavily on the classics, strict experimental methods, and decontexcualizing reality to find the precise variable that would get your statistically significant data. I had to stop and ask myself if i really wanted to be a scientist who objectively stays behind the scene and believes that i could understand human mind and human behavior this way? FUCK NO. She says in the interview and i agree with her, that it's important to ask where the knowledge lies and WHO HAS IT. Almost always when knowledge lies on the bottom of social hierarchy is neglected by intellectuals. Such as a custodian knows how to work under the repressive management and redistribute her shift with her coworkers. Or like a lesbian plumber knows how to navigate in a male-dominant workplace but still remain her queer working-class cool. And this kind of knowledge is not articulated enough, not in grad school.

There is something really problematic with the way psychology categories its subjects. If we wanna study race, we go find 100 African American samples and sometimes Latino. If we wanna study women, we recruit 200 college-educated white women and give them Starbucks gift cards after the interviews, and we would be glad if we had 5 lesbians or 20 women of color and maybe 3 immigrant women to make the sample somehow representative. If we wanna study class, we go to the low-income communities, and we find all sorts of folks--blacks, immigrants, queers, youth--so are we studying class or race or sexuality or immigration or what? Most of us get panic. This kind of categorical understanding of social identity is very limited. We simply can't understand class if we just go out to survey poor people, she says.

The hardest part is that in this discipline, researchers who use the classical methods (often white men with good intention studying "minorities") are the gatekeepers and they are the standers of who psychologists are--which means who gets the funding, who gets to publish, and who gets the job. The way to understand social injustice can't be monopolized by a singular method--and this would probably be one of the biggest challenges for me at least in the next 5 years. How can i navigate the classical but also the critical method? How can i estabalish myself as a psychologist thinker but also a serious organizer and revolutinary? At least it seems like my future advisor can very much be some sort of an anti-zionist socialist femnist--that would certainly make my grad school life a lot easier.

(psychology's feminist oral history project)

anxious spring

The weather is so nice out lately like spring is coming but i can't help but feel anxious over nothing. When i didn't have a job i felt anxious about it. Now i got a job i'm already stressed over it. I worry about school next year--how am i gonna prevent myself from becoming another academic bullshit. I worry about small things--address change, heater, email exchange, blogpost, this vanilla cereal yogurt that just tastes too sweet. During yoga i was tensing my shoulders while doing the warrior pose. When i get anxious i just feel mentally and physically stuck. Eager to look for solutions but not recognizing that this is nothing important in the big picture. I start believing that there's some genetic disposition that just makes me feel anxious while there's no acute stress. Speaking of biology and childhood--when i was a kid i bled my nose every time when i thought i was gonna be late for class. I asked L what to do and she, the referral expert, of course suggested me therapy. I said, maybe i have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Just look at the symptoms:

• Difficulty concentrating
• Difficulty controlling worry
• Excess anxiety and worry that is out of proportion to the situation most of the time
• Excessive sweating, palpitations, shortness of breath, and stomach/intestinal symptoms
• Fatigue
• Irritability
• Muscle tension -- shakiness, headaches
• Restlessness or feeling keyed up or "on the edge"
• Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep; or restless, unsatisfying sleep)

(google health)

See--i definitely have 5 out of 9! Anyways, there's probably no hope for curing unless i develop some sort of long term strategy to deal with those times i feel like i just get stuck with anxiety. Maybe this vanilla cereal fiber power yogurt is a good start for lifestyle changing. I believe there's definitely something about hiding my life from my family over the past 10 years that has made this anxiety become an essential part of my cognition. Now i've resolved some major conflicts with my mom i just need to eradicate the old anxious cells in my body. I think spring is a good time for that.

我和比我想像中還多的雜物生活了好久。

趁著好天氣要搬離住了快三年的公寓－－清理著在美國七八年來的生活用品後才發現原來有這麼多的東西是不那麼必要的。這些意識外存在的物品究竟是以怎麼樣形式被留下來的呢？關於要搬去紐約這件事似乎怎麼樣的準備都是不夠的。一箱衣物、一箱書、一箱電器產品。我真希望所有的物品都能夠像是電子檔案般的存在隨身記憶碟中。清理物品是件意外解放的事情。一袋一袋的大學筆記仍進回收箱裡。再見統計！再見認知心理！再見社會人格心理期刊論文！再見了跨性研究和我永遠都看不懂的judith butler！即使博士班的生活大概只會讓人得花更多的力氣去抵抗深陷於這類不必要深奧的理論之中。秋季開學之前我決定要非常樸、實、並、逐、字、地、生活。像是小學的夏令營，在公園做團康活動。任由一些奇異的事發生，比如說東海大學社會學教授趙彥寧的電子郵件，關於她來華大的台灣酷兒女性演講以及順道碰面這件事，大概隱喻著我未來至少五年將要非常非常酷兒的研究生活。

MARCH 4TH HELLA STRIKE!!!

Nearly 1000 students and workers came out to form picket lines with us. Lots of women and people of color leadership--that's what's up! We took over the Ave and had speak out in the busiest intersection on 45th. We got away with hella shit while the cops are around. The movement has just started and i can't wait for the day when we take over 1-5!

Some students were dissing my "Queer Struggle is Class Struggle" sign. But brothers this is the worst timing for you to hate on queers because WE ARE FIGHTING FOR THE SAME THING. Get used to it, don't fuck with us!

Video News on Kiro



What our comrades in California and NYC did:

STUDENT STRIKE ON MARCH 4TH! 1PM ON QUAD!

Post-racial soceity? That is white liberals' myth

A climate of campus racism
UCSD & UCLA sit in/occupation
Open Letter to White Student Movement

It turns out that the white supremacists hang out in UC San Diego. Maybe it's because I have been in Seattle for too long, this passive-aggressive city where racism is more subtle, it's hard for me to imagine some people can do such outrageously racist acts near a university campus. But this incident also shows how oppressed people united quickly to respond to the violence. The Black Students Union occupied an administrative building soon after the incident and put out demands for racial justice on campus. Anti-budget cuts activists from UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley soon responded by organizing solidarity actions on their campus. March 4th the National Day of Action to Defend Education is coming up. It seems like the movement has a potential to move away from the white liberal occupationist/dance party tendency to a mass movement for racial, gender, and economic justice. As people of color involving in the work that has been dominated by showy white men, we need to keep our demands and presence front and center. The struggle cannot be a mass movement if we don't engage or outreach to women, people of color, queer folks, and folks with disabilities. History has erased us thousands of times and we cannot tolerate to let it happen again.