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Justin Bieber jokes
15 years ago
General
NB: People who used to watch me on my old account may remember the rant I made once about rape jokes. This is similar.
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OK, look. I love making fun of pop singers as much as the next person. They're pop singers; they deserve it.
But the running Justin-Biebergender joke pisses me off. "Oh, it's a dude and we're calling him 'she'! Uh-hyuk!"
It's not funny. It's unimaginative. You know what? It's juvenile.
Why do people think it's funny? Well, here's this effeminate-looking guy, and we know he's a guy, but because he doesn't live up to our neurotic standards of what a "real" guy is, we'll call him "she" in all references to call attention to his inferior masculinity, thus making us feel better about our own attempts at gender. Ha. Ha ha.
Eat a dick.
When I was about 11, there was this new kid in school who rode on my bus. Zie was very ambiguously gendered. I wasn't sure what zie was, and, being 11, it didn't occur to me that it might be acceptable to just ask hir. I decided that zie must be a girl, because there was a lot of baby blue in that wardrobe.
The other kids on the bus (mostly boys - and mostly the boys who staked out the back of the bus, if that detail means anything to you) liked to throw things at this kid, to try to feel up under this kid's shirt for a bra strap, and to refer to this kid as "it" and "the he-she". I felt like this was bullshit from the start, and one day I'd had enough and verbally ripped those other kids a new one (and I admit that yes, I threatened them with severe physical harm - I was The Tall Kid so this was effective), and concluded with, "Leave her ALONE!"
It actually worked. The harassment petered off over the next week and then they left her alone for the rest of the year. But I shortly found out that she was, in fact, a boy, and liked being a boy, and wanted to keep on being a boy for the rest of his life. And I learned that, despite the fact that I was the only one on that very full bus to stand up for him (including himself), he hated me most of all, because I'd thought he was a girl.
...These kind of jokes are the least harmful part of an insidious branch of intolerance in society (and as someone who's seen a considerable sample of these 'jokes', I promise you that they're far from harmless). The more harmful spectrum of discrimination against the gender-variant includes job discrimination, housing discrimination, and murder.
About once a month, a transgender person is killed just because the status quo's myopic, self-important concept of male/female doesn't fit that person's reality. Once a month. It's like clockwork. You have to dig to find out about it when it happens, because the national and international media just don't give a crap.
OK, yeah. I don't give a flying fuck about Justin Bieber. The people I care about are the ones who deal with this kind of sophomoric, intolerant, transphobic bullshit on a daily basis. So why rant on the Justin Bieber jokes?
Because the easier it is to laugh at those stupid jokes, the easier it is to shrug it off when a hiring manager cracks a similar joke before rejecting a gender-ambiguous applicant (happens all the time, every day), or when all the doctors and nurses go home for the night, leaving a patient abandoned in the hospital because he's a guy who might have ovarian cancer (http://www.mntranshealth.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=1), or when a paramedic at the scene of a car crash makes jokes about a woman's penis instead of stopping her bleeding and, as a result, she dies (http://www.gendercentre.org.au/27article6.htm).
When people die, just because someone can't handle the simple fact of gender ambiguity and have to make jokes about it to make themselves feel better instead being valuable human beings... then, it's not funny.
Canadian pop stars aside, It's not. Fucking. Funny.
______________
OK, look. I love making fun of pop singers as much as the next person. They're pop singers; they deserve it.
But the running Justin-Biebergender joke pisses me off. "Oh, it's a dude and we're calling him 'she'! Uh-hyuk!"
It's not funny. It's unimaginative. You know what? It's juvenile.
Why do people think it's funny? Well, here's this effeminate-looking guy, and we know he's a guy, but because he doesn't live up to our neurotic standards of what a "real" guy is, we'll call him "she" in all references to call attention to his inferior masculinity, thus making us feel better about our own attempts at gender. Ha. Ha ha.
Eat a dick.
When I was about 11, there was this new kid in school who rode on my bus. Zie was very ambiguously gendered. I wasn't sure what zie was, and, being 11, it didn't occur to me that it might be acceptable to just ask hir. I decided that zie must be a girl, because there was a lot of baby blue in that wardrobe.
The other kids on the bus (mostly boys - and mostly the boys who staked out the back of the bus, if that detail means anything to you) liked to throw things at this kid, to try to feel up under this kid's shirt for a bra strap, and to refer to this kid as "it" and "the he-she". I felt like this was bullshit from the start, and one day I'd had enough and verbally ripped those other kids a new one (and I admit that yes, I threatened them with severe physical harm - I was The Tall Kid so this was effective), and concluded with, "Leave her ALONE!"
It actually worked. The harassment petered off over the next week and then they left her alone for the rest of the year. But I shortly found out that she was, in fact, a boy, and liked being a boy, and wanted to keep on being a boy for the rest of his life. And I learned that, despite the fact that I was the only one on that very full bus to stand up for him (including himself), he hated me most of all, because I'd thought he was a girl.
...These kind of jokes are the least harmful part of an insidious branch of intolerance in society (and as someone who's seen a considerable sample of these 'jokes', I promise you that they're far from harmless). The more harmful spectrum of discrimination against the gender-variant includes job discrimination, housing discrimination, and murder.
About once a month, a transgender person is killed just because the status quo's myopic, self-important concept of male/female doesn't fit that person's reality. Once a month. It's like clockwork. You have to dig to find out about it when it happens, because the national and international media just don't give a crap.
OK, yeah. I don't give a flying fuck about Justin Bieber. The people I care about are the ones who deal with this kind of sophomoric, intolerant, transphobic bullshit on a daily basis. So why rant on the Justin Bieber jokes?
Because the easier it is to laugh at those stupid jokes, the easier it is to shrug it off when a hiring manager cracks a similar joke before rejecting a gender-ambiguous applicant (happens all the time, every day), or when all the doctors and nurses go home for the night, leaving a patient abandoned in the hospital because he's a guy who might have ovarian cancer (http://www.mntranshealth.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=1), or when a paramedic at the scene of a car crash makes jokes about a woman's penis instead of stopping her bleeding and, as a result, she dies (http://www.gendercentre.org.au/27article6.htm).
When people die, just because someone can't handle the simple fact of gender ambiguity and have to make jokes about it to make themselves feel better instead being valuable human beings... then, it's not funny.
Canadian pop stars aside, It's not. Fucking. Funny.
The tale of the woman who died due to the medics being assholes is infuriating and knowing that this sort of thing goes on on a regular basis is infuriating. A person is a person, regardless. So what if they're mental gender doesn't match up to their physical sex, should we deny them basic human rights just because they're different? Are we as a society really this juvenile?
This needs to be spread. People need to open their eyes.