How Odd, Part 20 in an Ongoing Series

[Trigger warning for transphobia and diminishing the gravity of sexual assault.]

So I'm looking at Yahoo's News Photos page, and discover the below strip featuring the top photos in the "Odd News" section, which, as I have written many times previously, typically includes content that equates gender-based violence with stories of water-skiing squirrels or other inane crap:


On the left, an image of what appears to be a female midwife's hand examining the belly of a pregnant woman (likely in labor), which is being used to represent the following story: "A Finnish doctor who said he sucked a patient's nipple in line with an old midwives' diagnostic trick has been fined for subjecting the 20-year-old woman to a 'sexual act', a court said Wednesday."

That story is neither "odd" in the sense that it's rare (sexual abuse of patients by doctors is not, unfortunately, uncommon), nor in the sense that it's quirky or amusing. It doesn't belong in the Odd News at all, no less with this image.

In the middle, pictures about picnicking with a polar bear and potty-training pigs.

On the right, an image of the male and female gender symbols, which is being used to represent a story about a couple who are trans, one of whose daughters is also trans. The actual article is headlined: It's in the genes, suggests Czech transsexual 'family'. Scare quotes original, obviously.

This is the detritus of our continued marginalization. Being sexually assaulted is kooky. People who are trans are zany. Just so much fodder for the "Odd News."

And naturally anyone who objects is just looking for something to get mad about, just another hysteric who's too sensitive for a cruel world.

But I'm not offended; I'm contemptuous.

And I'm also clever enough to know that it is the pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable little things that create the foundations of the rape culture and institutional transphobia on which the big stuff is dependent for its survival. It's the little things, the constant drumbeat of inequality and objectification, that inure us to increasingly horrible acts and attitudes perpetrated against marginalized people.

Irrespective of intent, the recommendation to "ignore the little stuff," so often intertwined with accusations of looking for things about which to get offended, is not just ill-advised, but counter to the ultimate goal of full equality. The little stuff, like the Odd News, is the fertile soil in which everything else takes root and from whence everything else springs, the way that fundamental ideas like sexual assault is funny and people who are trans are less than are conveyed over and over and over again.

I object to that.

Asking me to not care is to ask me to participate in my own marginalization and the marginalization of people I love, which I am unwilling to do.

[How Odd: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen.]