| Tuesday, April 14, 2009 |
| The PETA pile-on |
Generally I try to cover things that are as new as possible on this blog, but since it's new I'm also playing catch-up. And one thing that I found from this October is an incredibly hate-filled page on PETA's Fur is Dead website:
Dressed to kill in gaudy furs and enough makeup to conceal their five o’clock shadows, our cross-dressing activists have been hitting the streets letting people know that fur is a drag. Looking more like lettuce ladies than broccoli boys, a group of gender-bending PETA drag queens even took home a third-place trophy in an April Fools Day costume parade.
Want to help educate people about the cruelty of the fur industry? Put on some pumps and show the world what a fashion faux pas fur really is! Whether you’ve got a flair for the flamboyant or you’re just an up-for-anything activist, staging a “Fur Is a Drag” protest is a terrific way to show people just how ridiculous fur really looks. You can enter a contingent of cross-dressers in a local parade or stage a drag of a demonstration outside a fur retailer. We have everything that you’ll need to make your event a raving success. You just need to supply a time, a location—and a few daring drag queens! And remember, a few hours in heels is nothing compared to what animals killed for fur go through, right, guys?
The Vegan Ideal breaks it down better than I can, but I thought I'd add to it a bit. First of all, as I've noted before, transgender people are 17 times more likely than cisgender people to be murdered, and are the most likely to be murdered of any minority group. Every year in November a day of remembrance is held throughout the United States where the names of all transgender murder victims from the past year are read, and candles are lit for them; oftentimes the programs for these events are out of date by the time the vigil happens because another murder has happened in the few days between printing and the Day of Remembrance. Furthermore, some studies have shown the unemployment rate of transgender people to be as high as 70 percent.
Yet somehow, it's still okay to call transfolk and drag queens "ridiculous" and foolish and to make fun of what are in PETA's eyes transwomen's pathetic attempts at "looking" like women. It's okay to reduce trans women, yet again, to their bodies and fashion choices, which are usually found wanting. They're flamboyant, they're hitting the streets and they're up for anything because get it? they're all prostitutes! And rather than bothering to educate themselves about where the term "drag" came from in this context, PETA uses it as an insult. The amount of hatred in this one short, completely stupid page is staggering; literally every sentence is offensive, transphobic and just plain ignorant. Not to mention the headline is just flat-out racist to boot. And of course it's misogynist, as transphobia usually is, because duh, everyone knows that anything feminine and even remotely resembling a dress is ridiculous and not to be taken seriously! It's completely revolting that PETA has taken one of the most completely vulnerable and reviled groups in our society and piled onto them like the cowards they are, leaving straight white men untouched and up on their thrones as usual. Somebody needs to tell Ingrid and Co. that minstrel shows weren't funny then, and they aren't funny now.
One might also think that given the recent anti-gay assault on Nathan Runkle, the openly gay founder and executive director of Mercy For Animals, PETA might stop to consider how much GLBT people have contributed to animal rights and the effect that their hate might have on people in their own community. But instead, they seem to assume that the only people worth having around are racists, homophobes, transphobes and misogynists. One has to wonder what the animal rights movement would be like for the rest of us if PETA got their wish and recruited all the world's bigots to their cause. I know that would be enough to make me run like hell from the cause I've supported since I was twelve. |
posted by The Venerable Vegan Empress @ 7:41 PM   |
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| 3 Comments: |
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PeTA sucks bottom line. Thank you for taking the time to call them out. The fact that they continually defend their behavior despite being told how offensive they are is just proof that they have no real concern for others.
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I love this blog. I hate Peta. This was exactly what i needed because all my vegan friends are all, omgz yay peta. They're so stupid. I can't stand their stupid sexist advertisements and hypocritical actions. Not to mention their money wasting corporation. THEY are the ones with blood on their hands.
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God, this kind of transphobia just fills me with rage. How can they claim this ad says anything other than "fur is bad because queers wear it"? How does mocking a marginalized group do anything positive?
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Name: The Venerable Vegan Empress
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PeTA sucks bottom line. Thank you for taking the time to call them out. The fact that they continually defend their behavior despite being told how offensive they are is just proof that they have no real concern for others.