Encountering the Mumbai Mafia, Pay-to-Publish Science, and Anti-Colonial Responses to the UW Attack - Dinner Table Digest № 55
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I couldn’t get it into the title because it would have made it too long, but today’s first piece is actually about a trans man who is speaking out for himself now that his mother is on a nation-wide anti-trans crusade. This is followed by a Netflix film about the shocking way that the Mumbai Police dealt with the underworld in the mid 1990’s. Also included is a post on the ever-increasing practice of pay-to-publish science, precipitating the resignation of the entire editorial team at the journal Critical Public Health, followed by a link to a podcast hosted by Toronto activist Desmond Cole on anti-colonial responses to the University of Waterloo Gender Issues class attack. Featured on the podcast is my friend and a force to be reckoned with, Fitsum Areguy.
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Sections: Trans Son of an Anti-Trans Influencer / Encountering the Mumbai Mafia / Pay-to-Publish Science / Anti-Colonial Responses to the Waterloo Attack
He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak - Christopher Mathias - HuffPost
Christians will go to extreme lengths to deny that 2SLGBTQIA+ people even exist. They will trick their children into being committed to a religious ‘psychiatric’ institution where the so-called treatment includes “speaking in tongues,” prayer sessions, and repeated religiously-based anti trans coercion. This is the story of Renton, a transgender man who’s mother is one of America’s leading religious zealots.
One day they told Renton they needed to stop by the hospital so Tania could get a blood test. But while waiting in the lobby, it became clear to Renton that it was a ruse: “I saw a sign saying ‘adolescent inpatient psychiatric’ or some shit, and I was just like, ‘God damn it, here we fucking go.’”
Renton says they kept him there for a week. Sometimes Tania visited with a pastor, the pair loudly praying over Renton in the visitor’s room and speaking in tongues — the practice, popular in certain charismatic evangelical churches, of harnessing a supernatural ability to speak in an unknown, divine language. (To nonbelievers, however, it can sound like gibberish.)
Tania would also bring Christian counselors for therapy sessions, Renton says, during which they’d sit in a room reading Bible verses and telling Renton that being queer was wrong. It was only years later that he realized this was conversion therapy.
“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Renton remembers.
Renton eventually was allowed to spend nights at home, but he claims he spent daytime hours when he should have been at school at the psychiatric facility. He was still forbidden from seeing friends, even the kids next door. Renton remembers his grandmother, Tania’s mom, telling him over and over that there was a war over his soul between angels and demons. He says he was put on a battery of drugs — lithium, Zoloft, Xanax — that made him feel “just completely fucking numb.” His mom took away his studded belts and any clothing she deemed unfeminine. She excised a shelf of books and DVDs that weren’t Christian enough. Renton cut a hole in the box spring beneath his mattress to hide his journal, one of the few places where he could be honest about his feelings.
The whole experience wore him down. Desperate to see his friends and get out of the house, Renton eventually quit talking about being queer. “I just kind of stopped fighting things, if that makes sense,” he says. “I completely was like back in the closet and almost forgot about it for like years.”
Mumbai Mafia: Police vs. Underworld - Netflix / Urban Cowboys - Alex Perry - Time Magazine
A few weeks ago I had been reading about gangsterism in India during one of my late-night wikipedia wanders. So when this film Mumbai Mafia: Police vs Underworld popped up on my Netflix feed I thought I’d settle in for a typical gangster documentary. It was anything but. In this documentary we learn about Encounter Specialists, a special taskforce of the Mumbai Police tasked with full-on killing supposed gang members on sight. It was, in a sense, the Rodrigo Duterte method of dealing with drug dealers in the Philippines: No Quarter! No Mercy! Kill ‘Em All!
The documentary interviews Times Magazine correspondent Alex Perry, who brought world-wide attention to these police hit squads in a 2003 feature story, causing a near immediate reversing of public opinion. I have linked the piece above, though it appears that you need a membership of some kind to access full copies of older issues.
Editors of public health journal resign over differences with publisher - Retraction Watch
I don’t normally feature this kind of article, but academic publishing has been going through a bit of a reckoning lately, with the corporate entities that own the journals trying to hoist more and more of the publishing costs onto authors themselves. This runs counter to the scientific process of peer review, which holds that scientific research should be reviewed by a selection of peers in order to determine the authenticity of the research, as well as generally accepting that research should not be pay-to-publish. That is, research should be published by an academic journal if it meets the acceptable standards, and should not be turned away if the author cannot (or, for that matter, is simply unwilling) to pay for it.
The press release and resignation letter from the Critical Public Health editors posted online cited a 2021 editorial by Green, McLaren, and two other board members discussing the history of the journal and consolidation in the academic publishing industry that led to Taylor & Francis owning the journal. They also cited the publisher “pushing” the editors to move the journal from a hybrid subscription/open-access model to a fully open-access model funded by charging fees to authors.
The editors opposed that change. Charging authors to publish their work “risks compounding existing inequalities,” they wrote, and “goes against the entire spirit of the journal,” which was founded to create “a space to challenge public health orthodoxies, shifting the centre and breaking new ground.”
Put simply, Pay-To-Publish is not good scientific practice.
PODCAST: What Does Real Safety On Campus Mean? - Desmond Cole
While I have already addressed the attack on the Gender Issues class at the University of Waterloo (see above), my friend Fitsum Areguy drew my attention to a podcast hosted by Toronto human rights activist Desmond Cole which looks at the topic of campus safety from a specifically anti-colonial perspective. Fitsum, who grew up in the area, is featured on a panel towards the end of the episode, where he talks about some of the history of anti-Black violence in the Waterloo Region and ties it to the apparent unwillingness of local leaders to take attacks like the one on campus seriously. Cole also talks to Alicia Wang, a reporter for The Imprint, the on-campus newspaper that broke the news that the attack was a hate crime, even while the public relations folks on campus and with the local police dilly-dallied around, giving non-answers to staff, students, and the local community.
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