Friday Night is Rage Night: the sex edition August 1, 2008

My friend Lorelei and I have rage sessions together. We unconsciously developed a pattern to rage at each other about infuriating things every Friday night, recent or not. Of course, every night is rage night, and I just can’t help myself. Everything I rage about with her could be in separate posts, but often they are too rage-y that I can’t do anything but cuss and link to more coherent posts and articles.

So, with that preface, this week’s theme is PEOPLE WHO SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAVE SEXUAL/ROMANTIC FREEDOM BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT HUMAN AND CAN BE KILLED OR HELD AGAINST THEIR WILL, and is also painfully US-centric. If anyone wants to continue raging in the comments, please do!

Case 1: Transwomen are disgusting and should be killed if they try to have sex with a man. [TransGriot]

Another woman is dead just because she happens to be trans. From the link:

Zapata picked Andrade up in Thornton where he lived and the pair returned to Zapata’s Greeley apartment together. Andrade told police Zapata performed a sexual act on him.

The following day, the affidavit explains, Andrade started to look at photos in the apartment and questioned Zapata’s sex. That night, Andrade questioned Zapata directly, according to the affidavit, and Andrade says Zapata responded, “I’m all woman.”

Andrade told police he grabbed Zapata in her genital area and felt a penis. He became angry and hit Zapata with his fist before grabbing a fire extinguisher and hitting her in the head twice, according to the affidavit.

Andrade explained to police that he thought he “killed it,” referring to Zapata but when she made gurgling noises and started to sit up, he hit her with the extinguisher again.

He also admitted to police that he stole Zapata’s car and drove away.

Ladies, gentlemen, and variations thereupon, let’s stop for a moment and try to figure out when the fuck trans people lost their right to live. What did Angie Zapata do to deserve death? When did she become “it”? When did she lose her right to human dignity? When did she stop being a person? Why isn’t she allowed to date or have sex with whoever she wants?

Angie Zapata is only one of many people who are killed every month because they don’t fit into an “appropriate” distinction between male/female. 60% of trans people have experienced violence [pdf], and I would make the safe guess that number is higher in reality. At least one trans person is murdered every month in the United States, usually soon after being disclosed as trans by people they know or are about to be intimate with, because people like myself, cis-gendered people, are transphobic and take it upon ourselves to dehumanize transgendered people. We stick to this stupid two-sex system where men must be born male and women must be born female and only “opposite” genitals attract! Grah. (ETA: While I was writing this post, I missed an entry about the murder at Questioning Transphobia who does much better rage than I do.)

Case 2: Disabled people don’t deserve sexual/romantic freedom because the state likes telling everyone if they’re allowed to touch willies. [Cleveland.com]

All disabled people are asexuals (and probably the reverse!). From the link, emphasis mine:

Judge Nancy Margaret Russo called officials from the Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare facility to Common Pleas Court on Thursday to question them about their handling of a mentally ill Shaker Heights woman who the judge sent for treatment last year.

Russo said she was shocked to learn the 33-year-old woman received birth-control pills and counseling after she was caught having sex three times with two other patients at the facility.

…“I am appalled that you think sex is a freedom they deserve,” Russo said. “I believe it’s a betrayal of the trust I placed in you” to treat the mentally ill woman.

In its policy statement, Northcoast acknowledges that sexual behavior between patients at the hospital, while discouraged, is “not always harmful or possible to prevent.”

…

Russo also ordered the woman not to engage in sex at the hospital again, and ordered the staff to enforce her restrictions.

“I don’t care if they tell you it’s OK to have a boyfriend,” Russo told the woman. “I’m telling you it’s not.”

What planet is this judge from?! Oh, right. Earth. She’s from Planet Earth. Only an Earthling could pull something like this. Disabled people never have sex. They’re not allowed. They’re too ugly. All disabled people are allowed to do is feel pain and be an annoyance because they’re not like us “regular” folks who are just so damn beautiful. Able-bodied people should feel sorry for them and make all of their choices because disabled people as a whole have no mental capacity to act autonomously.

Unless you’re a white man. Then maybe we’ll let you masturbate every once in awhile.

Honestly, how hard is it to comprehend that disabled people are still people after all? They have the right to have consensual sex and the right to refuse sex. They have the right to be asexual and the right to be sexual. Sexuality is not some exclusive club where only able-bodied people are welcome. As sarcastic as my first paragraph was, those are things that able-bodied people have said and do say in regards to disabled people.

Case 3: Old people having sex is GROSS. [Slate]

Even more gross when they have dementia! I don’t even know what I could cite from the link. It’s three pages long and every bit of it is important. The gist is that two elderly patients with dementia at a nursing home met and fell in love. They started having sex. The world freaked out.

Because both Bob and Dorothy suffer from dementia, the son assumed that his father didn’t fully understand what was going on. And his sputtering cell phone call reporting the scene he’d happened upon would have been funny, the manager said, if the consequences hadn’t been so serious. “He was going, ‘She had her mouth on my dad’s penis! And it’s not even clean!’ ” Bob’s son became determined to keep the two apart and asked the facility’s staff to ensure that they were never left alone together.

But according to the facility manager, the son was convinced that Dorothy was the aggressor in the relationship, and he worried that her advances might be hard on his father’s weak heart. He wasn’t the only one troubled by the physical relationship. The private-duty nurse who had been tending Bob also had strong feelings about the matter, said the manager: “At first, she thought it was cute they were together, but when it became sexual, she lost her senses” for religious reasons and asked staff members to help keep the two of them apart.

…

At one point, the manager had to make Bob stop “pleasuring her” right in the lobby, where Dorothy sat with a pillow placed strategically over her lap. In all of her years of working with elderly people, the manager said, this was not only her worst professional experience but was the only one that left her feeling she had failed her patients. She had a particularly hard time staying neutral and detached, she said, because she kept thinking that “if that was my mom or dad, I’d be grateful they’d found somebody to spend the rest of their lives with.”

I haven’t read much about the sex lives of elderly people or how their sex lives are treated, and I suppose that is ageism on my part: I’m not interested when I should be concerned with how age is constructed in terms of discrimination and equity. Hopefully, I will be old and sexing my lover up in a lobby somewhere too. It’s relevant.

This article made me angry. This falls into both ageism and ableism. Using Bob’s son’s logic, dementia, or the deterioration of the brain, means you have lost all ability to make decisions. Clearly these two were in a consensual sexual relationship. Who is Bob’s son actually concerned for? What he thinks is appropriate behaviour or his father’s well-being? The guy is 97 years old. In the article, someone notes that if he hasn’t died yet, a little sex isn’t going to do him in. It’ll probably improve his quality of life. Plus! Let’s not forget, it was assumed Dorothy started the whole thing! Interesting how she’s getting on in her years and it’s still implied that she’s the seductress! God forbid a woman express her sexuality.

Oh, world.