Trans Politics, Trans Activism, also 'rolling is this transphobic?' thread

Wouldn't it be great if a politician in the UK was to speak about trans people like that??? It would be amazing, can you imagine??

feeling hard for you paolo :(

Erin Reed has been documenting on twitter the arguments put forth with the various bills going through state legislatures in the US restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth (or in some cases even adults, which is the next goal for them) or denying health care coverage, even private health care, as in Florida today. Her threads have been very moving to read, and it’s all so shocking.

I take back what I said on 77 - Ohio is now as bad as Tennessee et al. : https://thebuckeyeflame.com/2023/03/20/an-ohio-republican-rep-just-introduced-legislation-to-designate-a-new-lgbtq-related-day-and-yes-of-course-its-bad/

^ fuck.

FL also hearing a bill which just added an amendment which would gradually discontinue care to any minor who is already receiving transition drugs

No idea if it passes, and will be challenged in court even so, might even get blocked, but it doesn't matter. The cruelty is the point. Always is and always will be.

All these politicians should receive daily harassment for the rest of their lives

Also I'm so very sorry Eliza :(

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/65051900

There it is - a complete ban on trans women in athletics.

i listened to seb coe on the today programme this morning just totally evading even the soft questions justin webb put to him.

i just read about the iowa laws. my heart is just breaking. it is so hard for me to understand the thought process. it takes a lot of work to draft and pass a bill! they want trans students, probably already bullied, to use the wrong bathroom. can you imagine being one of these students, and setting foot into one of these spaces? how the fuck is that a “safe space”? a bunch of dickhead boys sitting there waiting for you?

"You really don't get that the session is over."

Senator Megan Hunt says they will filibuster everything, even progressive bills put forward, if Nebraska moves forward with its attempt to ban gender affirming care for trans youth.

This is fight.pic.twitter.com/8F0ApJxMZn

— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) March 24, 2023

she's amazing

Wow!

i don't want to talk negative shit right now. here is an instagram account for pictures of trans trucks.

https://www.instagram.com/transgendertrucks/

I am so weary:

The New York Times has left no stone unturned in its quest to crack down on staffers who signed an open letter last month criticizing the paper’s trans coverage.

After weeks of hauling staffers who signed it into meetings with high-level editors Carolyn Ryan and Marc Lacey—meetings described to Confider as intimidating “tongue-lashing” sessions—management sent written warnings to around 20 staffers, accusing them of conspiring against the paper and endangering their co-workers.

“Your colleagues whose work was criticized in the letter, some by name, have carried out their work in a fair-minded, sensitive, and journalistically sound fashion,” Ryan and Lacey wrote in the letters sent earlier this month, according to a copy obtained and reviewed by Confider. “They have endured attacks and threats as a result of the letter. By signing, you have not only amplified that campaign but endorsed it, too. That is harmful to them personally and to our reputation for providing quality, independent journalism.”

The warning memos, which were put on March 9 into each employee’s personnel file, came after hundreds of Times staffers and contributors claimed in their open letter that the paper “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language.” The open letter was a point of contention within the staff union itself, as dozens of reporters signed a separate letter lashing their colleagues’ “fundamental misunderstanding of our responsibilities as journalists.”

if only ya cared about the people you're endangering, NYT

sad lol at the idea that it was the letter that harmed "our reputation for providing quality, independent journalism."

ok serious time i do wanna say the megan hunt thing makes me _very happy_, i was gonna write up this whole big piece about it but no spoons and if i don't say things the exact perfect way i'm afraid people will come down on me for it.

at this point i don't really feel like anything i say to cis people matters. i feel like we're at the point where it ought to be pretty clear what's going on here. there's an anti-trans genocide going on, and the new york times is in favor. it doesn't matter what i do or say - what matters is what cis people do or say. how far are our allies gonna go to keep us from getting killed?

megan hunt is in a better position than most to protect trans kids, but damn if she's not a good role model. to me, her response, that's what i'd like to see from _every_ ally. if someone is trying to hurt trans kids - don't talk to me, i don't know you. if you want something from me, you're not getting it. if you need something from me, you're not getting it. trans kids are in danger, and _nothing else happens_ until that ends.

i don't actually expect that from anyone else. megan hunt, you know, she's fighting for her literal child. most other people probably _aren't_ going to go that far. those who are willing to often aren't able to. (i gotta say that in my book, the nyt union is a fucking rinky dink piece of shit excuse for a union given that the times is still being printed.) overall, though, the farther someone is willing and able to go in our defense (absent i should make it clear LITERAL PHYSICAL VIOLENCE please don't kill anybody to protect trans people thank you), the more it helps to keep us from getting killed.

mic drop

JFC.. I don't want to give these assholes any more attention, but:

“I came to the conclusion years ago that the trans movement is the greatest evil our country faces,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote on Tuesday. “I only become more and more sure of this fact with each passing day, and more and more determined to oppose it until my last breath.” Walsh has 1.5 million followers on Twitter, and, by the time of publication, this tweet was liked more than 31,000 times, and viewed 2.8 million times.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9ppz/nashville-shooting-marjorie-taylor-greene-matt-walsh-anti-trans

He's fucking toxic. And he's living here in our state, and our Legislature is basically taking marching orders from him. It's amazing and awful how much influence these right-wing social media dickheads have. I'm not sure most people even realize it.

he was a much more marginal figure pre-Trump. I mean, he had ample readership, but he was more or less known for being clowned in a meme response ("You're a blogger"). out of all of the talking heads, he would have been one of the lowest on my list that I'd have expected to jump to this level of prominence.

I guess he's about to speak on a campus tomorrow? it's supposed to have ample protest - I am just praying those protesting stay safe.

If nature could hasten his last breath that would be great.

otm

i've sat with it for a while and i guess i am feeling like... i need to write something where cis people can read it. and y'all are the only cis people i talk to aside from my co-workers. the way i frame things when talking to them is a little bit different. anybody here who's not cis - i apologize for putting this here. i know the toll Discourse takes on so many of us.

my hope is that by limiting my engagement to this obscure little corner of the public internet i can... limit the possible harm i might do here. hopefully taking a couple days to work through my most immediate emotions helps as well.

a lot of the stuff taken out of context to... portray us as terrorists are ideas that i legitimately endorse. an article i glanced over contained a tweet referring to the shooter as a "demonic tr-nny". and my take on that is that hey, i'd kind of like to be a demonic (censored), no fair making that look like a bad thing by applying it to some fucked up mass killer. i mean some of the things they're talking about as evidence that we're terrorists... things like "trans day of vengeance", you know, i call TDoV "trans day of vengeance". my girlfriend calls it "trans day of violence". we are pissed off and a lot of us (not me) are armed, with the goal of being able to provide for our own collective self-defense.

and we are all shocked and horrified by what this person did, and more aware of it than we are of the endless other mass shootings that are routine in america because we have to be. because we know that this will be used to support the already-in-progress genocide against trans people, and that a certain number of people will... will be _convinced_ by these lies.

the horror to me, the underlying horror, is that a number of people are _willing to believe that trans people think child murder is justifiable_. all of this rhetoric, calling us "groomers" and "terrorists", it's a concerted effort to portray us as inhuman. i have friends whose _parents_ call them "groomers". that's just incredibly sick and fucked up. and you know what, before last year, _nobody_ called us that. not a one.

i feel like... i need, for my own sake, to express my _particular horror_ of child murder, not because i feel the need to defend myself as a trans person, but because _as a trans person_ i am uniquely horrified by child murder.

these people who want us dead, they see this as an act of _trans_ violence against Good Christian Kids, against _cis_ kids. and i don't see that. i see my friends, my friends who were raised in conservative christian school just like the ones those kids who were murdered went to. my friends were mormons, hare krishna, homeschooled, spent their childhoods as missionaries overseas, grew up only watching veggietales. the people the shooter killed are kids who were _just like my friends_.

which is the stupidest thing about trans genocide, the stupidest thing about all of these people who want to exterminate us. you think it hasn't been tried? you think for all of history, you fuckers haven't been trying it? i mean, if it was just people like me they wanted to kill, that would be one thing, but these evil motherfuckers are _murdering their own fucking children_, just as surely and just as sadistically as that fucked up murderer did on monday.

i am horrified by child murder. i am horrified by child abuse. and when i see the things that the people who want us dead call us... shit, all of us know how abuse works. damn near every last fucking one of us has seen it, knows the cycle. you accuse your victims of the things _you_ want to do, maybe even the things you're _already_ doing.

the ideology of vengeance the tennessee killer was putting into action was sick and twisted. i'm familiar with it. i've heard it before.

"Happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks."

The word of the LORD. Thanks be to God.

Of course, they didn't read _that_ part of Psalm 137 in the Church I went to, the Church where we all _knew_ which priest not to be alone with. Nah, whenever you hear that one, it's usually the first three verses, maybe the first six. Never verses 7-9.

And there's something I have to be very careful, very careful where I say it. I hate Christianity. The Church I was raised in, the billion-person Roman Catholic Church? Yeah, I think they're evil. My experience with that religion is one big fucking child abuse cult. Me personally? No, not me personally. Not _directly_. My friend Ken - and I say his name only because he's passed on, because he can no longer speak for himself. Over and over again, there's this fucking culture of silence, and as I learned when I was young, the one thing I learned that _wasn't_ wrong, Silence = Death.

They covered it up, and when the victims got too loud for them to ignore, when there were too many of them to silence, they came up with this "expert", this asshole named Paul McHugh, this board certified psychiatrist who made up this entire syndrome specifically to discredit abuse victims. Called it "False Memory Syndrome". Made it up the same way Ray Blanchard made up autogynephilia to discredit trans women. And before he did that, Paul McHugh, what did he do? In 1979, he shut down the gender surgery program at Johns Hopkins, the best gender surgery program in the _world_. The 1980s, the 1990s, they were dark ages for trans people. My childhood. It was a dark age. Just as 2023 is a dark age, compared to 2019. And Paul McHugh, he was one of the harbingers.

The person who killed those kids on Monday... I don't know who they are. The reporting is muddled and misrepresentation is rife. Cis, trans, their name, I don't know any of this stuff. If they said they were trans, they are trans. But what they did... that is not vengeance. That is not demonic. That is not the way of me, the way of any of my friends. What that person did was _their_ way. The Christian way of doing things.*

Always. The Christians have always hated queers, have always sought to destroy queers, have always _lied_ about us. One of the cornerstones of the trans rights movement is an early '90s pamphlet by Leslie Feinberg, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come". Leslie talks about this, talks about Joan of Arc, who was hailed as the savior of France and then was put to death as a heretic. Heresy, and what heresy? She insisted that God spoke to her, that God told her to dress as a man. And for this they put her to death, they put her to death and then they canonized her as the "maid of Orleans". Christianity has been a force for good in many cases, many of the subjugated, many of the subaltern. It has been aid and succor and an encouragement towards liberation, as well as a force of repression.

Not for queers. Never for queers. Christianity has only wanted one thing of queers - our extermination. To seize not even their _enemy's_ infants, but _their own_, and dash them against the rocks. And then they make up lies, they make up lies and blame us. Fabricate ideas like "Satanic Ritual Abuse". My experience with ritual child abuse has nothing to do with Satan.

* yeah I know it's cultural appropriation of Hebrew scripture, I got no beef with Judaism, the harm here, I believe, comes specifically from its use in a _Christian_ cultural context.

❤

And golly, I never even got to Matt Walsh. Again, Matt Walsh... I'm not even mad at Matt Walsh personally. This, again... I don't hate conservatives half as much as I hate liberals. Because Matt Walsh, honestly, how is this man any different from Fred Phelps? How at all? Only in this: He is treated as _legitimate_. Not just "legitimate" - the people of the Anglosphere don't hear our voice, they hear _his_. Open a private window, go on Youtube, search for "transgender". Who are you going to see? Matt Walsh. Abigail Shrier. You want trans representation? Oh, of course, we have that, here's fucking BLAIRE WHITE. That's what people are learning. And you want to know why our parents call us "groomers"?

And maybe it's respectable, maybe liberals can think well of themselves if they say "oh, it's Fox News", and it _is_ Fox News, certainly, but it's not _just_ Fox News. It's YouTube. It's the New York Times. It's the Guardian, the BBC. His voice is heard. He's the one who's important. Trans voices? You want to hear trans voices? Jessie Gender made a four hour YouTube video calling out Matt Walsh's lies. She worked for months on it. It was immediately taken down due to "terms of service violations". The message is clear. Matt Walsh can lie with impunity, and if we attempt to tell the truth, these same outlets that promote Walsh's genocidal agenda keep us silent.

Before 2022 I never heard shit about Matt Walsh. He was a nobody. Suddenly he's everywhere. Suddenly everybody is listening to him. And me? I'm not disgusted with Matt Walsh. He's the same as he's always been. I'm disgusted with the people who have made it so that I have to _know his fucking name_. These are the people I hate. If I am killed, it's _those people_, it's the people at the NYT and the BBC and YouTube - _they_ are the ones you should look at when you want to know "why".

I have reinstalled Twitter to respond to this story and make sure my voice is fully heard. I am Casey.

My real name is Alex but my mom decided it would be best to hide it for anonymity. But this is my story, not hers. This is not the free press’s story. https://t.co/Okx47IGmtL

— 💙October💛 (@SleepyOktobur) April 4, 2023

This whole situation is fucked up. Case manager largely lied when they blew the whistle to begin with, now this "journalist" has presented a distorted story that comes solely from the patient's mom and basically told the child "fuck you".

didn't know emily yoffe was one of these awful people, fuck her

Cosigned

yoffe has a long history of defending accused rapists (https://jezebel.com/emily-yoffe-is-back-on-her-bullshit-heres-what-an-alleg-1837679900) so it's no surprise she's now working for weiss's propaganda rag

the kid's mom is now in her replies, and still absolutely refusing to hear what her child is saying. all this is just extremely sad and heartbreaking.

when I was 16, all I worried about was passing classes and not screwing up badly in choir class. this poor child has spent the entire day trying to refute a transphobic ABOUT them that was written without their consent or input. amidst people shouting transphobia at them, including their own mother.

just heartbreaking, but Alex and their supporters are very inspiring with how they pushed back on this today.

will never understand why a parent would intentionally hurt their child like this. I don't mean that in the naive sense - lots of parents of trans children do it daily. but in the "why are you doing this, please stop!" sense.

it’s harrowing

Jezebel's got it!

https://jezebel.com/gender-fluid-teen-pushes-back-against-false-viral-story-1850301057?

will never understand why a parent would intentionally hurt their child like this. I don't mean that in the naive sense - lots of parents of trans children do it daily. but in the "why are you doing this, please stop!" sense.

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal)

one of the things that's most shocking to me about, not just being in trans community, but about the last year in particular, is how many parents just plain _do not love_ their children. it really is this universal assumption that everybody has and there's a lot of pressure, really, for parents to claim that this is the case. but when you actually talk to people about their parents, not just trans people but people in general, a lot of times it just doesn't hold up.

and i think you see this in its most extreme form when you look at parents of trans people, not just, i mean, parents who call their kids "groomers"... if you love your child, you don't call them a fucking "groomer". that shocked me when i first heard about it, that anybody would do that to their own child, but it's commonplace now. or, you know, i've had friends, their parents tell them they belong in death camps.

but it really isn't just that, we see some of the most extreme manifestations of it. and the truth is a lot of it is, with parenthood there's no real standard, no reciprocal expectation. in christianity, you know, the standard is that children who disobey their parents should be put to death, but there's just no concept of something like "parental abuse", the same way the christian bible condemns to death "men who wear women's clothing" but actively condones sexual assault.

my feeling is that... you know, it's just like with trump, there's a sense of both aberration and culmination. normative, acceptable behavior is fucked up and has been for a long time. it's normal and common for parents to abuse their children and for them to not be held accountable for it in any meaningful way. and parents are so oblivious that... one of the things that really opened my eyes to how endemic this is, there's this great series by issendai, "down the rabbit hole". and i don't... i don't even use the word "narcissist" but it's pretty normal for certain parents, including one of mine, to display behavior that... correlates pretty strongly with traits generally associated with narcissism.

anyway here's the link to "down the rabbit hole".

https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/index.html

woke up to this whole manufactured brouhaha this morning, WTF??

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/kid-rock-bud-light-woke-trans-protest-dylan-mulvaney-1234709445/

hey not to turn this too much from specifically trans issues, but as someone whose parents would say they loved me but consistently threw me to the wolves, this has been something i've been thinking about and noticing for a long time. i'll just say that family is cover for incredible amounts of inflicted pain, more than most people either realize or would care to admit to.

xp to kate, that's a fantastic post that gets to some of the most common dymanics between parents and children and some of the cultural and historical reasons for them. if you've experienced it yourself and you start seeing enough of it all around you, you might start to relate to polemics about the nuclear family like this one: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2890-abolish-the-family. or dj sprinkles / terre thaemlitz who has written some similar things.

the kid's mom is now in her replies, and still absolutely refusing to hear what her child is saying. all this is just extremely sad and heartbreaking.

― Roz, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Really jaw dropping.

xp again to Kate, that link is ... *phew*.. too much for me right now, but it might be really valuable for me at a later time. thanks for sharing.

Can’t find a YouTube link for this song, maybe a little relevant to the most recent discussion of family

https://open.spotify.com/track/0v0OLQRwhWZt0xRXR3up74?si=i2_33texQHSZzIKDgRiXaQ

It's really easy to clown on Kid Rock and all the other snowflake righties on their reaction to the Bud Light cans, but I'm not going to lie and say the implicit threat of violence directly towards trans people in that video doesn't frighten me.

there's not much to laugh about. it's all terrifying.

<3 to Eliza and rushomancy

I hope Spuds McKenzie is safe

i mean there's so much to despair all over but it just sucks so much that so much of america is processing trans rights through the lens of youth sports, which is such a fucked up and stupid culture in itself

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/kansas-lawmakers-poised-override-veto-trans-athletes-98384354

guessing the US is going to have more refugees leaving the country than entering it this year

So weird that all of a sudden society is supposed to structure itself around, uh, (checks notes) the integrity of competitive swimming.

Which would make sense if any significant portion of civil society in the last ten thousand years had competitive swimming as an organizing principle.

It's so very convenient that this concern surfaces now (no pun intended).

Like maybe when justice and empathy are better enshrined in public policy, I can give a fuck about who gets to play lacrosse or whatever

These are the same people who have railed against Title IX since it was enacted. They don't give a shit about girls' sports, or about girls, for that matter. They just need some marginalized group to marginalize further.

guessing the US is going to have more refugees leaving the country than entering it this year

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal)

i thought about leaving the country in 2016 when i was still a Really Good Ally(tm) but you know what, that's not... i mean most of us don't have the resources to do that. when we work, we're working, you know, front desk stuff, it's not like other countries are chomping at the bit to welcome us with open arms.

i think i've talked about this before but what you're _already_ seeing are internal refugees. people who can get out are getting out, even if it means living on the street. because the other thing is that certain places in america are... kind of the best places in the world for trans people right now. i genuinely believe that. the pac nw cities are good, and berlin is apparently good, and anywhere else, you know, you take your chances.

regarding the whole sports thing stacy cay had a good tweet about this over a year ago: "If a trans woman became the world champion in bubble blowing you'd hear some shit about male saliva density and lip stiffness".

the stuff about family trauma i... have probably a lot more to say about it but not on a public board.

They just need some marginalized group to marginalize further.

Yeah I have had this thought about the procession of hated out groups — over the past 10 years I've watched my state legislators be extremely concerned about a.) "Sharia law" (we hate Muslims), b.) the "immigrant caravan" (we hate Latinos), c.) Syrian refugees (hey, we hate Muslims again), d.) "critical race theory" (we hate Black people), e.) girls sports (we hate trans people), f.) children's medical care (we hate trans kids), g.) trans people (we hate trans people), h.) drag shows (we hate LGBTQ people in general).

The nice thing is they never run out, because if one issue loses steam for whatever reason you can always cycle back around. It really is just a permanent bully mentality, always looking for somebody easy to beat up.