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

ok the japanese mascot chiitan supporting trans rights is going viral i had to go and look it up and see what its whole deal is

Much of the media produced by Chiitan was often chaotic and involved the mascot acting clumsy or violent. Occasionally its videos were criticized for being "creepy",[7] "reckless", and "dangerous".[1] Some of Chiitan's videos included it hitting a punching bag with a baseball bat, jumping into metal boxes, flipping a car, twirling a motorized weed cutter around its head,[5] falling off a pogo stick, failing at bowling, and falling off a bike while trying to fire a bow and arrow.[8]

Some of the social media posts in which Chiitan and Shinjo-kun appeared together led some people to believe that Chiitan was a "bad influence" on Shinjo-kun. One post, in which Chiitan carries a miniature baseball bat and Shinjo-kun is dressed as a gangster, is captioned: "We're the bosses, don't mess with us or we'll commit otterocities."[10]

Following the segment, Chiitan, via its official Twitter account, stated that it was angry that Oliver had stolen its friend and challenged Oliver to a fight. It tweeted WWE-inspired challenges directed at John Oliver, inviting him to fight it in a "NO HOLDS BARRED MATCH". In another tweet, Chiitan stated that it "wants to give John Oliver a chance to explode through a table", and later attempted to enlist Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to help pressure Oliver. Oliver, in response to Chiitan's posts, tweeted "I'm in a public beef with an unsanctioned Japanese otter. I needed this."[10]

this is the kind of allyship we need

any mascot who will threaten to suplex john oliver through an exploding table is clearly on the right side of history

i don't care whether it's "transphobic" or not but i ran across someone on slsk with the username She'sABrick and have been wondering for the last half hour whether the subtext is intentional or not

that's how i am with subtext half the time mind you

now's a good time for me to remind myself that "subtext" and "bottom text" are two completely different things

It's a Ben Folds Five song.... I have no idea what subtext you mean though!

honestly kate, you are reading way too much into something that is almost certainly a reference to either the Commodores or Ben Folds. Not everything is about being trans.

and i say that with love and tenderness, fwiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBx6mAWYPU

honestly kate, you are reading way too much into something that is almost certainly a reference to either the Commodores or Ben Folds. Not everything is about being trans.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

you're absolutely right. having a weird brain weekend.

much love, though

oh absolutely, much love to y'all as well. :) i got a pretty good idea of why i wonder these things and like y'all are saying, it does in fact have nothing to do with being trans. i'll try to talk about it more elsewhere.

I've been rabbitholing on SNL for the past weekend. Trying not to think about things outside of my control. And I've been doing it for... typical Kate reasons, honestly. I'm fascinated by it because it's so often _bad_. So, so much of this show is just not funny. Not just "hasn't held up", like, this shit was never funny in the first place. They've made a lot of mistakes. They've done a lot of shitty things. They've given platforms to awful people. Lorne Michaels is more or less the main villain of _The People's Joker_, and from what I can tell he deserves to be portrayed in that way.

And sometimes, of course, it's fucking hilarious, in weird and unexpected ways. Maybe some of it is the juxtaposition. It kind of encapsulates the idea of "crate-digging", the idea of experiencing huge amounts of mediocre and bad shit and then stumbling on something that's awesome... that surprise, that joy, is greater for me than when I'm expecting something to be good. Yeah, that is what I'd say interests me about it - my belief that at its baseline, the show is _just not funny_.

Sorting SNL's Youtube channel by views gives a different experience. You don't see the whole shows, but the ranking is done by virality. Which means you get great sketches, but also sketches that are controversial, like the "Aer Lingus" sketch, or just plain fucking bad, like Elon Musk as Wario.

So when I'm browsing through and I see a sketch with 5.6 million views called "She's Got a D!%k" I think to myself, oh God, of course. Of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OslWqLHlCvw

Then I watch the sketch. Because I'm interested in the context. I mean, of course it's transphobic. No question about that. I know it going in. It's from 2013. I remember 2013. Everybody and everything was transphobic.

Part of the reason I watch it is because another clip with a lot of views is 2015... "Pete Davidson on Trans Rights". He's for trans rights, was for trans rights in 2015. I'm one of those olds who doesn't really know a lot about SNL past, well... season 5, to be honest. I'm that fucking old.

So I watched "She's Got a D!%k", prepared for the worst. It still amazes me how much changed in the course of two years. Much as I fucking hate Malcolm Gladwell, i kind of do feel like there was a "Transgender Tipping Point", and it was when Time Magazine said it was, around 2014. Hell, they probably had some role in making the tipping point, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy thing.

There's this page on TV Tropes called "Fair For Its Day". I think sometimes stuff that wasn't fair for its day gets excused on those grounds, but I do also think that... you know, having grown up in really transphobic times, the bar was a lot lower then. Wanda in the Sandman story "A Game of You", I think that was Fair for Its Day. I'd frame it more as... grading on the curve. Social standards were so low that stuff which today is pretty clearly bigoted is actually affirming, is actually helpful to a lot of the people the thing in question is bigoted against.

Which is to say that I did find "She's Got A Dick" (this isn't network TV, I can say "dick" here) to be unexpectedly affirming. First off, the person who wrote it - Michael Che, apparently, it was apparently the first sketch Michael Che wrote for SNL - the sense I get was that Michael Che was just... ignorant of trans women. Like it didn't even occur to him that some women have penises. So even though I'd say it's unquestionably transphobic, I wouldn't say it's _consciously_ transphobic. I'm really struck by the lack of malice in this sketch.

The second thing that's important to me is that Michael Che is, in fact, a good writer. A lot of jokes, transphobic or no, are written by people who are bad writers and don't know how to make something funny. I'd say that the old meme song "Transphobic Techno" is an iteration of this joke that isn't funny - from memory, the lyrics are just "Bitch got a penis", over and over again.

Che, on the other hand, fleshes out the joke. He frames it as a cliche romcom - the sort where the guy has to come to terms with the idea that the woman isn't perfect. She has kids. She's had a mastectomy. I personally... I personally suspect that one of the reasons these movies keep getting made is because a lot of women feel like we're broken or flawed in some way, that because of some issue or another a man couldn't really love us for who we are. So you have, for instance, the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope. When I was young, I saw _Pretty Woman_, which is kind of an iconic representation of that trope. It's a terrible representation of sex work and sex workers, but to me, the film presents Roberts' character not as a professional, but as a slut. Why, she even _sucks his dick_! I remember how terribly controversial people found that at the time, and it, like, represents a patriarchal standard to me, one of the ideas I was raised with. Good Girls don't suck dick.

For the record, I very definitely suck dick. I got a lot of shame about my sexuality in a lot of ways, but sucking dick - I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of that.

That might be a lot of why I find it affirming - because of how perfectly it replicates the structure of one of those cliche romcoms. I am, in a lot of ways, a basic white bitch, and the theme of this fictional movie is something I genuinely have anxiety about. I worry (not without cause) that people won't be into me because of my dick.

I did read the comments. Usually I don't, but in this case I did, just because, I guess... I wanted to see what people were watching it thought about it, and maybe get a sense of when people were watching this. It's been there for eleven years, since it was first broadcast, and a lot has happened in that time. Did people think it was funny when it first came out? Is it viral with transphobes now?

Turned out the top comments I saw were from about four years ago, when apparently Youtube decided to start recommending it to people for a while. God knows why Youtube does these things - and these comments weren't transphobic. Some of them were from other trans women who, like, me found the sketch validating. A lot of them were focused on the stereotyped character of the "Black best friend" - which is the funniest part of the sketch. It's a pitch-perfect critique of the, uh, _questionable_ racial politics of a lot of these films.

For me, the thing that I find most affirming about it is that that it speaks to my own past anxieties. Before I was with another trans women, I had a lot of anxiety about being sexually intimate with a woman who has a penis. To me, that's a common anxiety, that's a normal anxiety to have. I didn't want to admit to it. I felt like if I acknowledged that, I'd be admitting that I was transphobic.

I guess coming from that background is a lot of why I have this anxiety, that other people might avoid me because of my dick but noat admit it. I don't know how prevalent it actually is.

I am stil ignorant in a lot of ways, because I've never sucked a cis guy's dick. It's something I'd be interested in. I should probably find a sex worker to try that with. I know I could go to a bathhouse or pick up someone on Grindr, but it's an issue of fairness for me. I know I don't want to be someone's experiment. I don't want someone to get with me just because they're _curious_ about what it's like beiing with a trans woman. If it's in a professional context, though, I think it's fine to do that. That's one of the reasons I'm in favor of sex work - I think it is good for people to experiment sexually, and if someone is gonna do that I think sex work is the most ethical way to do that.

Anyway. More Kateposting. Hopefully it's a little more grounded than my last revive :)

I don't know anything about that sketch! But now I've watched the video and I do.

I ended up watching the Netflix doc Will & Harper about Will Ferrell's road trip with his trans friend/coworker Harper Steele over the weekend. Steele was a head writer for SNL for many years, and left the show around 2015, so it's possible she was in the writers' room for that one, although not out at the time.

I haven't had the chance to talk to anyone else about the documentary yet, but I didn't expect much and it exceeded that. I think the piece they address throughout is what they knew would happen, but couldn't quite plan for: what happens when a comedian who is instantly recognizable to many people travels the country with a friend, putting both of them in the spotlight regardless of where they are, and that friend is also a trans woman? Thankfully that's not the totality of the film.
I feel like they weren't sure what they were going to end up with before they started filming and anything comedic/goofy that gets attempted ends up working against them. I don't think their shared sense of humor was responsible for many things that are my type of comedy, really, so maybe it came off better for other viewers.
There were a few heartbreaking moments, conversations that took place with few others present (if any at all) that were probably the best parts.

I've heard really good things about it! I haven't seen it yet. But what I've heard has been overall positive. I've also heard... that there were bits that were kind of planned, to some extent, and that those bits didn't necessarily land great. I feel like a situation like that would be tough to negotiate.

anyone following the San Jose State women's volleyball story? there is a trans woman who has played on the team for years (she is a senior) but was only recently was publicly revealed to be trans. several other teams have forfeited their matches against SJS in protest, and one of the team's co-captains filed a lawsuit to stop her teammate from playing, alleging Title IX violations.

here is an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/us/trans-volleyball-san-jose-state.html

i recognize that this can be a complicated issue, but what gets me is that the people objecting to the trans woman playing (including the captain) *always* misgender her. how do you have a serious conversation about it if people won't even admit she's a woman?

this is one of those things where i don’t even think there should be a conversation, that everyone on one side of this issue is not only wrong but a hateful idiot, so yeah it doesn’t surprise me that they can only misgender her

“biology is destiny” - people who say they care about women but actually hate them

It is impossible to have any kind of “conversation” when one side is acting in total bad faith and using the issue as a site to vent their transphobia.

one of the team's co-captains filed a lawsuit to stop her teammate from playing, alleging Title IX violations.

that team co-captain:

Ms. Slusser, a senior from Denton, Tex., said she considers this fight “God’s plan” for her.

She said she initially didn’t realize that her teammate, who has played for the Spartans since 2022, was transgender, even when first living with her and rooming with her for away games. The two had been good friends, she said.

But when the article was published this spring about the teammate’s gender identity, Ms. Slusser said she felt betrayed. She said, “I truly don’t care how you want to live your life,” but a trans woman shouldn’t room with female teammates or use a women’s locker room.

ivy otm x2

'we can always tell' *years pass without telling*

congrats to the nyt for managing to get vile anti-trans bigotry into the limited space of a single photo caption btw

jaymc, you might be interested in this much more in-depth article: https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/42549609/inside-san-jose-state-university-2024-volleyball-season-gender-fairness-safety

among other things it actually analyzes claims about the player's performance rather than simply quoting awful bigots

ivy otm x3
you can't have a conversation with hateful idiots

love it when it's presented as "fairness in sports", because you'd think the same idiots would also care about it not being "fair" for transgender men but they never do.

Slusser alleged the player in question conspired with a few teammates and an opponent to clear space on the court to allow the opponent to basically spike the ball into her face unimpeded, in retaliation for the lawsuit/public comments.

"What did i do to deserve that? All I did was dehumanize her!"

The ESPN article also managed to frame the story correctly, portraying Slusser as an awful, hateful piece of shit without having to say so

Oof and today I learned about Fide banning transwomen from women’s chess. Batshit.

Why is there “women’s chess?”

So the chess bois don’t get distracted

Ugh of course Riley Gaines is involved. Grifted her way from being a good but non-Olympic-caliber college swimmer to a Fox host and pal of DeSantis and Trump, all by whining about Lia Thomas.

oh fuck i didn’t know the team refusing to play san jose state is my alma mater. fucking depressing. i think i’m going to write them a letter

or one of the teams rather

thanks for the espn link, rob. agreed it is a better-reported story.

Why is there “women’s chess?”

it's basically affirmative action because men significantly outnumber women in chess & the chess world is generally rather misogynistic (these two facts are of course very related). women are still able to compete in open tournaments

what gets me is that the people objecting to the trans woman playing (including the captain) *always* misgender her. how do you have a serious conversation about it if people won't even admit she's a woman?

this is the entire point of what they're doing, their aim to ensure that trans women are defined as men across all of society and sport is just an issue where credulous liberals have shown they're easier to convince

my ex-GF is from san jose so she's been following the story. not surprising to hear the NYT being transphobic - they're pretty routinely transphobic in the same way that pretty much all UK papers are. most NYT readers seem to not be particularly aware of this. i'd be depressed by this if the NYT's approach was the norm, the way it is in the UK.

since this is the "is this transphobic?" thread, for anybody who's not aware, the answer to the question "is the new york times transphobic?" is "yes".

Good news at least:

everal Montana Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday to block a measure that would have barred transgender lawmakers from using the state Capitol bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities.

The proposed measure would have banned Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democratic lawmaker who was reelected in November, from using the women’s bathroom outside Montana’s House and Senate chambers. Last year, Zephyr was silenced in the House after speaking out against her Republican colleagues for their support of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children.

Weeks ahead of her return to the House floor, Zephyr’s colleagues in the chamber rejected the bathroom measure in a 12-10 vote. Three Republicans joined Democrats in voting against it, characterizing it as a rule that would not add value to their work while also noting they didn’t necessarily disagree with the ideology driving it.

Zephyr told The Washington Post on Wednesday that she was grateful to her GOP colleagues who voted “no.” She said she has a “good working relationship” with them, adding that their votes against the measure showed they were “able to recognize this for the distraction that it is.”

I’ve got a friend (who’s also my favourite living author), who’s written a killer book with trans themes that his agent can’t place with a publisher. The rejection letters are glowing — he says he could pull quotes from them and use them as promotional blurbs — but it’s always “not a fit for us right now”. He says the elephant in the room is that publishers are scared shitless of the topic, basically, with the political climate. Fuck me dead, back when I was in publishing I’d have jumped at a chance to get my hands on this book. And if it got banned, even better! What the hell happened?

I mean what does “with trans themes” mean

Well it’s shorthand dangit

Dystopian novel where normalcy is being enforced by a GOP-like authority, main character is a trans girl.

Pretty much all of his books (publishing since ‘76) have had major threads of queerness/transness running through them. This is the most explicitly politically pointed one tho

I’ve got a friend (who’s also my favourite living author), who’s written a killer book with trans themes that his agent can’t place with a publisher. The rejection letters are glowing — he says he could pull quotes from them and use them as promotional blurbs — but it’s always “not a fit for us right now”. He says the elephant in the room is that publishers are scared shitless of the topic, basically, with the political climate. Fuck me dead, back when I was in publishing I’d have jumped at a chance to get my hands on this book. And if it got banned, even better! What the hell happened?

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante)

what i'm seeing around sadly tracks pretty well with your friend's experience

i just said this in the dystopia thread:

i just know that a lot of people who were loud about supporting trans people in '19 aren't as loud these days. media that supports trans people gets quietly shelved, trans-affirming scenes get cut. it's too controversial. god, these days it seems a miracle that a show like _the owl house_ got made at all. i don't think a show like it would get on the air today.

this trend is pretty fucking scary to me. there's a pretty strong push going on to make us disappear, and it's been terrifyingly successful. the talk in the bsky thread, where people _criticizing_ jesse singal are taken as being the issue, and not the campaign conducted by people like singal... i mean the wind seems to be blowing a certain way, and trans people, well, we seem to be on the wrong end of it.

heartening to see the Cindy Lee album ranked so highly (end of year) by the Guardian, I think it's awesome

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/19/the-50-best-albums-of-2024-no-2-cindy-lee-diamond-jubilee

I went out and got drunk last night with this lady. A couple years older than me. Trans and intersex. She's been through some shit. No point in talking about it. Water under the bridge. Thing is, though, all her life, all her life her mom has supported her, fought for her. More than fifty years, through hell and high water, this lady's mom has been there for her.

Until this year. Suddenly this lady's mom sees these videos online, then this lady's mom is saying all kinds of shit about her, predator, groomer, shit like that, and then this lady's mom isn't talking to her at all. Last Christmas her mom got her a beautiful handbag, this wonderful, thoughtful gift, and this year, her mom isn't talking to her.

They could make us disappear. They could make us disappear, and nobody here could do anything to stop them. Five years ago I didn't believe that. A year ago I didn't _want_ to believe it. Now? Now I have no doubts about that. We could vanish, and most people _wouldn't even know_ until we were already gone.

And what am I gonna say? People have already stopped taking me seriously when I talk about it, make little snide comments. It's boring. It's tedious. It makes me unpleasant to be around. Increasingly, people aren't around, so when things happen... they don't know, they don't see, they don't believe.

Five years ago, I was full of fire. I didn't want what happened to me when I was a kid, what happened to us when we were kids, to ever happen to anyone else. Joke's on me. Shit could happen to us, me, them, so many of us, that's so much worse - not just worse than what I went through, worse than I could have even imagined five years ago. A lot of people? A lot of people can't imagine it now. That's what scares me, more than anything.

That's rough, Kate... to see a once-loving parent brainwashed by the level of cruel scapegoating we're seeing these days

it did look like things were getting better for your community, but I think that stupid thing with the Bud Light lit a fire with the knuckle draggers; I'm sure there were other cultural things going on, but the Bud Light 'controversy' seemed like such a step backwards right when things appeared to be moving forward

That's rough, Kate... to see a once-loving parent brainwashed by the level of cruel scapegoating we're seeing these days

it did look like things were getting better for your community, but I think that stupid thing with the Bud Light lit a fire with the knuckle draggers; I'm sure there were other cultural things going on, but the Bud Light 'controversy' seemed like such a step backwards right when things appeared to be moving forward

― Andy the Grasshopper

All I can really say is that it looks different from where I'm sitting. It's not... every marginalized group has this experience, I know. There's a lot of stuff that happens to immigrant that I don't know about. There's stuff that routinely happens to Black Americans that I don't know about. I try to keep myself informed, I try to stay on top of things, but when things get bad for a group, one of the main signs is that you stop seeing _from_ them, stop hearing _from_ them. When you hear about them, that's exactly what it is - you hear _about_ them. What you hear about them might not even _seem_ hostile, might not even _seem_ bigoted. It's not unique to trans people. Other groups have it bad in ways that we don't.

It's important for me to say that because a lot of it is how it's framed. Because when I talk about my experiences, it's easy for it to sound like special pleading, particicularly when the person I'm talking to also has it pretty fucking bad. It's easy for it to sound like me being obsessed with this one thing, with me making way too big a deal out of things. So I don't want to seem like I'm making too big a deal out of it. Sometimes the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

It's what I know best, though, because it's my life. Because I remember how things were framed in the '90s, _The Silence of the Lambs_, which is a great movie with horribly transphobic representation, _The Crying Game_, which is a great movie with horribly transphobic representation. Neither of them were intentionally or overtly transphobic. These were people trying to be sympathetic, but what they were saying didn't come from trans experiences. That's the important point, not _who says it_ but where it _comes_ from. hardcore dilettante's friend, I don't know who he is or what he's written or if he's trans or not. That doesn't matter, his _identity_. What matters is he's trying to tell a story where the main character is a trans girl, a story that draws _from_ trans experience, even if it's not the author's own, and nowadays nobody wants to publish it, nobody wants to promote it.

I was reading or listening to an interview about Torrey Peters. She was talking about what it was like to promote _Detransition Baby_ in the US versus what it was like to promote it in the UK. In the US she was talking to more cis people, but she was also talking to bigger publications. Bigger media outlets would talk about her. In the UK, trans people would come out, but she wasn't talking to the BBC or the Guardian. She was talking to these small presses without the same reach, without the same distribution. That's what marginalization _is_, that's what marginalization _looks like_. The same thing that happened in the UK, it's happening in the US. It's harder and harder for trans stories to get told where cis people can hear them, because those stories are seen as too "divisive" or "controversial". The harder our reality gets, the more "divisive" and "controversial" it becomes to talk about what's happening to us, to point a finger at the people who are _doing_ it.

Nobody wants to believe that what's happening to trans people _could_ happen here, let alone that it _is_ happening here. More than anything, nobody wants to believe that they _can't stop it from happening_. This lady I was talking to last night, she told me, she really believed this, that if all the trans people presented a unified front, if we all stood up and said "These kids need these hormones, it's a matter of life or death", that the Republicans would listen. That's what she told me. What the fuck can I say to that? She's wrong, of course. I hope everyone reading this knows that. I hope everyone reading this knows that the Republicans don't care about the truth, don't care about the well-being of kids. That Republican policy is that trans people _should not exist_. She can't accept that. She's not ready to accept that, even though _she's_ trans, even though _she's_ the one who suffers by trying to assume good intent.

Because we have to stay alive. Because nothing is gained by despair. Because I nearly destroyed my own life trying to make a world where nobody else ever had to suffer like I suffered. I wish I could look away, not always, but sometimes, just sometimes. I wish I didn't always have this thing, both unspeakable and undeniable, resting in the pit of my stomach. It's _normal_, it's _natural_ to want to look away. The people who want us to not exist count on that. They use that. Because they can't make us not exist while people are looking. Nobody would tolerate it. If people knew, really knew, what's being done to trans people in America, what's being done to Black people in America, what's being done to immigrants in America, well, there wouldn't be an America. Because it's monstrous. Someone who sees it, even if we can't fight what's happening effectively, we can't go along. We can't do what's required of us. That's why people are still transitioning, are still taking estrogen, are still changing our names, even though we know in some sense we might be signing our own death warrants. _We do not have a choice_.

I don't feel like I can talk about it anymore. Not from where I'm standing. I don't have the podium. I am reliant on allies now, reliant on allies to put _themselves_ at risk for my sake. Reliant on allies to be willing to risk their jobs, their security, perhaps even their physical safety. The best thing I feel like I can do, at this point, is to _not_ make it about me. To try and speak up for other people. Because I know people are doing that for me now. I know people are fighting for me now, in ways I don't know, in ways I'll never know.

-

We're dying, and we're going to continue dying, y'all here - _you can't save us_. It doesn't mean it's futile. It doesn't mean you're helpless. It doesn't mean that you can't be _righteous_.

People here... don't need to know the full reality of what's happening to us. Don't need to know every detail. I guess the things it's important for me to say, the things I'd like allies to know, is:

1. There are so many things happening to us that you don't see, that it's hard to see. Things that are worse than you can imagine.
You don't need to confront the reality of it. You don't need to stare into the abyss. Probably you shouldn't. I try to avoid looking directly t it.

2. Everyone is, by necessity, complicit. You, me, everyone. That doesn't make you guilty. Being complicit in the acts of the oppressor does not require you to identify with the oppressor. There is no collective guilt. None of us are, right now, in a position to take up arms against a sea of troubles and, by, opposing, end them. Do what you can do.

3. Speaking up isn't always an option. There's this feeling I have, always, that I should be able to save people. That I should be able to do more. That I have an obligation to speak up. The truth is, it's increasingly unsafe for me to speak up. I have to be more and more careful what I say and where I say it. That's not something that only affects trans people, but it does affect me. Increasingly I don't tell cis people I'm trans. It's only going to get me hurt. Sometimes, I'm learning, I need to be silent, I need to be stealth, to do the most good - and it's my privilege that I can be.

4. You _don't have to comply_. When all else fails, there is this. This is what the people who want trans people to disappear fear more than anything. They want you to think they don't need you to comply, that your compliance or lack thereof doesn't matter. It does. Even if none of us can stop what's happening, we can choose to not look the other way. Seeing what's happening, knowing what's happening, is painful. It's soul-crushing. It's _necessary_. To live with that knowledge, to bear that understanding, is to be alive to alternatives. Once one sees a problem, one suddenly starts seeing solutions that were imperceptible before.

-

IDK. I talk a lot. I hope this helps someone else. Sometimes I need to talk about it.

i hate to say i'm easily triggered but anytime i read about anything i get pissed off

someone posts a picture of the dress lily james wore in cinderella and i look up the costume designer, because i don't know enough about costume designers and that's a fantastic fucking dress

sandy powell got her start working with derek jarman, costumed _orlando_, _velvet goldmine_

_the crying game_

neil jordan is a great director but he _does not fucking get_ why the way he presented dil in the crying game was _a problem_

(if people here don't know why, i recommend looking into it, lindsey ellis's video "the pop culture roots of transphobia" addresses it pretty well)

turns out she's doing costuming for a remake of _the bride of frankenstein_ directed by maggie gyllenhaal

i haven't kept up with movies. gyllenhaal is about my age it turns out, she's looking great. i was very influenced by _secretary_. course when you're a 47 year old woman you stop getting roles, so i'm glad she's doing good with directing. the film sounds like a great idea and then the music...

jonny greenwood. motherFUCKER.

i mean transphobia is kind of the background radiation of my life, one of the fnords that i guess a lot of people actually don't see, like the pelicot case. how anyone can _not_ be aware of the pelicot case... well, i mean, if nobody tells you something you don't know, right? and if you tell someone, they get mad at _you_ for telling them. i bring up that specifically because it's _not_ a trans thing, because there's a lot of awful shit that has nothing to do with being trans. i know there's a lot of shit i don't know about myself, because it doesn't directly affect me, because nobody tells me, even though i _should_ know, even though _everybody_ should know.

i'm watching a video about legendary old speedrunners, and narcissa is brought up. i haven't kept track of narcissa. there are some things i don't want to look too closely into. the person doing the video does it well. he's respectful, doesn't misgender her or deadname her. the narrative is, well, a downfall narrative. doesn't mention her transition at all, which in context is probably good. because it'd be easy to construct a narrative where her transition was a Problem.

except it is, it's a Problem for all of us, it's just that _we're_ not the ones with the problem. when i read about narcissa losing it and making threats and getting banned from twitch, i mean, she's responsible for that and i _understand_ it. i know the pressure people are under, not just from being visible on the internet, which is a dystopian hellhole, but, well, being visible as a _trans person_ on the internet.

a guy i follow, swolesome, he did a video... youtube always finds ways of hurting people. i've curated my feed enough that it doesn't feed me transphobic garbage. using it at all feels like hanging out at bars while trying to stay sober. because where else is there to go? swolesome is a good guy who's going through, i mean, he's a trans guy, he's going through it. and they got this new thing where they recommend him "inspiration" for making videos. and it's toxic sigma male bullshit and transphobia. well, i mean, if i'm not going to the bars, where do i go? i finally got a nebula account. one year. not sure i'll be alive for the five years it'd take for the lifetime membership to be worthwhile.

i'm just trying to not be isolated. to not carry all this shit without telling anybody. even if nobody can really _do_ anything about it.

Ugh: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/01/15/democrats-vicente-gonzalez-henry-cuellar-trans-sport-ban/

(AOC predictably otm)

There are three basic prongs to this attack, and all revolve around the rhetorical trick of making an extremely small and marginalized group of people seem like a threat. There are of course lots of interesting things to talk and think about with respect to trans identity, but whatever cultural conversations may have been have has been hijacked and narrowed down to really just three things: girls/women's sports, girls/women's bathrooms, and whether people under 18 should have access to gender-affirming care. Because those are the three points where trans people — trans women, because as noted elsewhere in conversations trans men and trans boys never appear in these arguments — can be painted as threats. The "threat" in all cases is fictitious and at odds with experienced reality, but since most people don't know or interact with any trans people, those are areas where lurid imaginations can be stoked.

I think about this when I see the growing number of gender-noncomforming young people working service jobs around town — both of the Kroger stores I go to regularly have trans/nonconforming cashiers, as does my local Taco Bell and probably half the coffee shops in town. When people are getting their groceries or tacos or coffee, I wonder how they square whatever Fox News trans panic they feel with the friendly (sometimes very attractive!) people filling their orders. My guess is they somehow compartmentalize it or maybe a lot of people just don't pay any attention at all to whoever's serving them.

oops sorry for the mucked-up sentence. Should read, whatever cultural conversations may have been had have been hijacked...

Great post.

I wonder about these things too: there is a particular store I shop at regularly where the cashier that seems to be there most of the time is this extremely friendly, cheerful (and, yes, cute!) non-binary person with an enby flag and other various anti-homo and -trans phobic buttons pinned to their uniform. Given that much of the clientele at this business (at least through my very limited observation) seems to skew older, I wonder what kind of dynamics might be going on between customer and employee there. I like to think there are at least some people entering this business with silly prejudices spurred on by Facebook and the other bullshit media only to have them challenged by an interaction with what turns out to be one of the most pleasant and certainly least scary human beings they could imagine, but as you say, this may be assuming too much about how much thought or attention people give the people who happen to be serving them.

I think about this when I see the growing number of gender-noncomforming young people working service jobs around town — both of the Kroger stores I go to regularly have trans/nonconforming cashiers, as does my local Taco Bell and probably half the coffee shops in town. When people are getting their groceries or tacos or coffee, I wonder how they square whatever Fox News trans panic they feel with the friendly (sometimes very attractive!) people filling their orders.

We're in mind-meld. I'm writing about this now.

is there a good analysis / comparison between the gay rights landscape vs the trans rights landscape? there are some obvious parallels (such as the asinine "grooming" fear mongering) and i'm particularly interested in the comparison of the tactics / strategies that worked before but don't work now, and why. one obvious thing is that the anti LGBTQ2S groups are much more organized now - and i wonder if that's mostly due to the social network effect, or is it because they learned. but it also feels like the resistance is _less_ organized now.

anita bryant's death was a stark reminder of this. just reading about the protests that erupted because of her - we don't seem to have this organized collective effort anymore. what happened? we have pride parades attended by millions. what's the point?

in regards to what tipsy said - i strongly believe that what really contributed to the advancement of gay rights was the general public learning that their aunt, accountant, next door neighbour were gay, which finally connected the abstract (to them) notion of human rights to real humans.

This 1979 Playboy interview with Wendy Carlos popped up in my feed on Bluesky. Apparently that was the vehicle she used for her coming-out. (As a journalist, the mention of 800 pages of unedited transcript in the intro nearly made me weep.)

Anita Bryant hasn't died: we'e living through her recrudescence.