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

oh yeah i understand we gotta get grandma on board, i just always experience this profound dissonance when ppl are generalizing about the trans experience in order to appeal to the heteropatriarchy. i guess i will for quite a while!!!!

I like to think my late grandmother would've understood Judith Butler.

what i was trying to get at with my earlier posts about why i think transness provokes a deeper bedrock prejudice in people (compared to homosexuality) is like — i think it is telling that on a national level the convo over trans issues has so often played out against the back drop of sports, because i think it provides cover for people who feel existentially threatened by transness to portray being trans as unfair. in the context of a game you can more easily launder your argument that transness is breaking the rules and it can’t be allowed to happen. but i think this is how these people view transness in general — rules are being broken, fairness is not being upheld. i think this dynamic was obviously true for gay people — being held back from upending marriage as a male-female institution — but transness takes the “rule breaking” further in destroying the binary system of gender that human history is based on in ways that cis homosexuality simply does not. americans are obsessed with the concept of fairness, the idea that someone over there doesn’t get to do something if i don’t get to do it too. it drives so much of our politics as it pertains to marginalized people — welfare would be the most obvious example. the idea of transness flies in the face of the notion that if i can’t/won’t/don’t then you aren’t allowed to either. it’s connected to the pro-cop backlash to black lives matter, the proliferation of ring cameras etc — most americans want people monitored for how they are adhering to rules and norms, and visible, open transness is a complete repudiation of that worldview and way of living. and i think that’s extremely destabilizing to a lot of people even if they don’t even realize exactly why they feel that way

i’m not attempting to appeal to the heteropatriarchy, only trying to interrogate why it fees like, to me, trans issues touch the deepest rawest nerve with some people, and how that is informing the politics around it

"human history"? you mean "history as viewed through the western colonialist views of the enlightenment," right? because trans people and non-binary genders have been integral parts of human history since well before the written word.

like, i get what you're saying, Jord4n, and think you're right in many ways, but i think that terms like "human history" aren't neutral in this case, and it's worth pointing that out rather than using shorthand.

xxxp

queer people are a _threat_. you, me, all of us. by our existence, we are a threat to patriarchy, to the idea that men are inherently better than women.

transness takes the “rule breaking” further in destroying the binary system of gender

I'm sure everyone is tired of me saying "I saw that on Tiktok!" but there's a very good video about this by a transwoman creator on Tikok, about why trans people are treated like such a threat to established order...because they prove that gender isn't binary or immutable, and that means that ANY gender-determined thing can't be real. Considering how much of America/the world is influenced by Christianity and the gender essentialism that derives from it, that does rather expose the underpinnings of a lot of what is keeping cis men in power in every way.

sorry cis straight men, you know the drill, white Christo fascist hetero patriarchal capitalism, the whole thing.

The creator is @decolonizationcoven if anyone is interested in these waning days

Considering how much of America/the world is influenced by Christianity and the gender essentialism that derives from it, that does rather expose the underpinnings of a lot of what is keeping cis men in power in every way.

Somewhat related, there's apparently an article in the Wall Street Journal today (their paywall's impregnable, I haven't read it) talking about how corporations' retreat from "DEI" programs/policies removes an excuse mediocre people have used to justify their own lack of success. It's not DEI, Ralph, you're just bad at your job.

Also, to give credit where credit is due, it was a queer ilxor who blew my mind years ago by saying that maybe trans-ness isn't about physical bodies or body parts, maybe you can just be the gender you know yourself to be and say that you are. To whoever that was, thank you! That idea was transformational to my thinking, and has had so much more generous, expansive, beautiful potential within it than the thinking that I had before.

like, i get what you're saying, Jord4n, and think you're right in many ways, but i think that terms like "human history" aren't neutral in this case, and it's worth pointing that out rather than using shorthand.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, January 16, 2025 11:13 AM (twenty minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

i hear you. i'm trying to explain how i perceive other people to be thinking but i don't want to parrot those words/thoughts in the process of doing so

xp I think that's part of what anti-trans folks find so destabilizing. Identifying as a gender that does not conform to one's visible biological sex is seen not just as undermining the gender binary but as denying the very notion of objective reality.

Yes, the "so biology is hate speech?!" people.

I'm waiting for the haters to retort with, "You call us out for denying the truth, yet here you are denying the TRUTH about your biology!"

idk i'm still having trouble seeing this as all that distinct from homosexuality destabilizing and compromising the "family" (patriarchal system of abuse much like the gender binary, inherently unfair psychologically damaging systems that are considered "fair" because they're all we know, etc. etc.) seems like history repeating itself to me, just with an adjacent marginalized group. though i really appreciate your posts j0rd, much as i reflexively bristle at the way this conversation is defined before we even start talking about it

pushing back on the idea that Portland or the west coast is better for trans people or gay people. if you’re white, sure. otherwise, i would argue that from Sacramento north to the border is as dangerous and racist as many other parts of the country.

there are tons of trans people in Philly. it’s cheap, lefty-liberal, and there aren’t roving gangs of white nationalist thugs always roaming around the city.

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

oh i wanna be clear i don't think portland is unilaterally "better" for queer people. my own experience as a queer person exists in a large context - the fact that i am white in a white supremacist culture is a significant part of that context. moving to portland helped me out in terms of my queerness, but my own white privilege also was a significant factor in that decision. i didn't really acknowledge or appreciate that at the time. portland _is_ a lot more dangerous for people of color, particularly Black people, in ways that many East Coast cities aren't.

hell, it's more than that. as a trans person, trans community is really important to me. that's not something that's only true for trans people! as much as i'd _like_ the PNW to, like, stop being racist, lol, i'm also not naive enough to think that the answer to that is for me, as a white person, to tell people of color to move to a city with a long history of marginalizing people of color, of systematically displacing communities of color, _including by promoting white queer community_. there _are_ groups here that work to support queer people of color, for instance Black, Brown, and Beyond the Binary. i'm glad that they exist. the people who need to be doing the lion's share of the work to fight the culture of white supremacy in portland, though, are white people like me! white supremacy is the problem, us white people are the ones who need to change :)

I like to think my late grandmother would've understood Judith Butler.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

alfred, i agree (i mean in principle, i didn't know your grandmother lol). a lot of times there's this idea of dismissing bigotry as a problem of _older generations_, and honestly, i haven't found that to be the case, either in my life or among the people i know. my impression is that a lot of older people have come to the conclusion that bigotry takes time and effort and that they have better things to do with that time and effort.

I'm sure everyone is tired of me saying "I saw that on Tiktok!" but there's a very good video about this by a transwoman creator on Tikok, about why trans people are treated like such a threat to established order...because they prove that gender isn't binary or immutable, and that means that ANY gender-determined thing can't be real. Considering how much of America/the world is influenced by Christianity and the gender essentialism that derives from it, that does rather expose the underpinnings of a lot of what is keeping cis men in power in every way.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

i haven't seen the tiktok in question but this exactly describes how i feel about gender and i wholeheartedly agree.

Yes, the "so biology is hate speech?!" people.

― cryptosicko

that argument is fascinating to me because people will argue that binary gender is, like, basic fifth grade biology. and it's true! i was absolutely taught about x and y chromosomes and binary gender in fifth grade. it's just that, like, the natural world is slightly more complex than most fifth graders are really capable of understanding. i can't help but notice the people who claim that binary gender is basic biology don't ever seem to be professional biologists. people want me, to, like, explain or justify why i'm trans in _precise, meticulous detail_, and i can't, any more than i can explain how i, like, walk.

their interest in and commitment to the findings of biological science is also exclusively limited to this one topic

Exactly.

i hear you. i'm trying to explain how i perceive other people to be thinking but i don't want to parrot those words/thoughts in the process of doing so

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.)

sometimes reflecting back what one hears other people saying can be really useful. i think it's a pretty important communication skill. from my perspective, one of the things i value a lot about your perspective is that you have said that you're straight-passing. one of the things that's hard for me to talk about is how it passing as a straight cis woman affects me. yes, it is a privilege, but for me, at least, it's a double-edged sword. i feel like i'm under a lot of pressure to conform, to differentiate myself from other queer and trans people. people look at me and treat me like i'm one of the "good ones", and i don't believe there are good ones. because i pass, bigots treat me different, bigots treat me better, and i don't _like_ that. i'm not like _them_, i'm like the people they yell slurs at on the street. i used to pass as a cishet white man, and i know how cishet white men talk around people they _think_ are other cishet white men. i know the pressure i felt to conform to patriarchal norms. i know how afraid i was, how afraid i was of being vulnerable, of giving any sign to them that i _wasn't_ like them, of being afraid of what they'd do to me if they realized i wasn't, in fact, just like them. that's the cost of passing, to me. that's why i work so hard to make myself visible, work so hard to make sure cishet people know that i am _not_ just like them.

so while i definitely respect your perspective, i genuinely don't believe that transphobes hate me any more than they hate you. my predecessors, my ancestors, the people who paved the way for me - a lot of them were and are queer cis men. i learned so much from that knowledge, that tradition, that experience. when i started transition it was really important to me that people recognize that i wasn't a man, that i wasn't _like_ cis gay men, and i think that was valuable and important and right for me, at that time. i think it's valuable and important for transfemmes now to insist on not being construed as gay men, to insist that they are categorically different from gay men. at the point where i'm at now, as someone who passes as a cis woman, that's not something i feel the need to insist on. anybody who looks at me and thinks i'm a cis man clearly has a very expansive understanding of gender. what's more important to me now is to build bridges with people who are different from me, to make common cause with people who are not like me, particularly since white supremacist patriarchy maintains power by pitting us against each other. ultimately, in fact, i do want to have cishet men as allies in the fight against patriarchy, because i genuinely believe that it's in the best interest of cishet men to oppose patriarchy, that they personally benefit from opposing patriarchy.

when people talk about "acceptance", one of the things i think about is my dating pool, as a trans woman. i like men. i'm attracted to men. a lot of trans women like men. i know a few trans women who have men as partners. none of these men are straight men. at first i thought it was about genital preference, which is something a lot of people who don't date trans people say, they have a genital preference, but the thing is, that some of these women do in fact have vaginas, and they are in long-term relationships with gay men. fellas, is it gay to have sex with a woman with a vagina? well, i mean, if i look at the data available to me, the answer is apparently "yes". on a basic logical level, does that seem really stupid? sure. would i have dated a trans woman, regardless of her genitals, before i transitioned? no. no, i wouldn't have. and i guess the vast majority of straight men - and there is data to back this up - think the same way.

the thing about the whole "genital preference" thing that confuses me is that people use that as an excuse to not date trans people, but, like. they don't have any idea what my genitals are. that's not a reasonable, informed decision. that's based entirely on assumptions. so as much as straight people accept me, it's pretty unlikely that i'll ever be in a relationship with a straight person again. i don't support prejudice against straight people. i think it's fine to be straight. sometimes, though... if someone thinks of himself as a heterosexual man yet doesn't view a certain subset of women with vaginas as potential romantic and/or sexual partners on no grounds, as far as i can tell, other than that they _used to have penises_... in that specific case, it's hard for me to not ask, dude, are you ok? tim walz is right, that shit is _weird_.

people will argue that binary gender is, like, basic fifth grade biology. and it's true! i was absolutely taught about x and y chromosomes and binary gender in fifth grade. it's just that, like, the natural world is slightly more complex than most fifth graders are really capable of understanding.

My understanding is that there are WAY more complex gender possibilities that most people have no idea about but part of that is that unless you have your chromosomes checked, there are plenty of chromosomal situations that wouldn't even be known by the person aiui??! The whole binary-ness is just factually, scientifically wrong in addition to being boring and unimaginative and not reflective of human experience.

the funniest thing about the "it's biology 101, stupid" crowd isn't that they think their basic understanding of biology makes biology itself basic, but that to them it justifies their bigotry. "my bigoted views aren't bigoted if they are based on science".

which goes back to the question of choice: these people intentionally position this as a question of scientific proof because it allows them to continue justifying their bigotry towards people who _choose_ their identity.

idk i'm still having trouble seeing this as all that distinct from homosexuality destabilizing and compromising the "family" (patriarchal system of abuse much like the gender binary, inherently unfair psychologically damaging systems that are considered "fair" because they're all we know, etc. etc.) seems like history repeating itself to me, just with an adjacent marginalized group. though i really appreciate your posts j0rd, much as i reflexively bristle at the way this conversation is defined before we even start talking about it

― ivy., Thursday, January 16, 2025 12:29 PM (one hour ago)

much love as always

the holidays are triggering ... even well meaning relatives tie themselves into knots talking endlessly about how to rewire their brains to address a member of the family now using nonbinary pronouns. this year i was subjected to the basic everyday doldrums of fox news via my grandparents and i was perhaps naively taken aback by the degree to which trans rights are currently fueling their outrage machine on a minute by minute basis. so my posts here have just been me talking out thoughts bouncing around in my head over the last few weeks as to why things are this way. but i've said my piece & am gonna cede the floor

My understanding is that there are WAY more complex gender possibilities that most people have no idea about but part of that is that unless you have your chromosomes checked, there are plenty of chromosomal situations that wouldn't even be known by the person aiui??! The whole binary-ness is just factually, scientifically wrong in addition to being boring and unimaginative and not reflective of human experience.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

yeah, that's one of the reasons i intentionally don't know my chromosomes. i could find out what my chromosomes are, but what does it matter? a lot of people want to find a biological basis for gender, some justification, and i don't feel that way. there are so many different ways to be trans, there are so many different trans experiences...

one of the things that makes me the most angry is when i read the utah bathroom law, the one that requires trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to their AGAB, i found that it was written in such a way as to _exclude me_. the law actually mandates that i use the _women's_ bathroom.* fuck that shit. i am not any more a woman than any single other trans woman on the planet, no matter what they've done, no matter what their legal status is. this is what's happened all my life... there's so much pressure on trans women to _gatekeep other trans women_, that once we do whatever we need to do to get ourselves recognized that we set ourselves apart from people who haven't done what we've done. i refuse to do that to a great extent. since i do have passing privilege, i don't _have_ to, if it benefits me i can allow myself to be treated as a cis woman. it _is_ an ongoing choice i need to make.

* i think. i'm honestly not sure what the law actually means for me. my birth certificate, my state ID, my social security, all say that i'm non-binary (which i am, i'm both non-binary _and_ a woman, if that confuses you, don't worry about it, just take my word for it). since i'm legally non-binary, does that just mean that it's illegal for me to take a piss in utah?

like, am i going to use the men's room in solidarity with trans women who _are_ required to use the men's room? no - not because i'm personally uncomfortable in men's rooms, but because that would be fucking stupid. they'd kick me the fuck out, even if the law _didn't_ mandate i used women's rooms. i'm very obviously not a man, and i have no way to prove that i'm "actually a man".

-

here's the thing i worry about. transphobes think they can tell when someone is trans, and sooner or later they'll have to confront the fact that they're wrong. that they don't know when someone's trans any more than they know when someone is, say, jewish.

no, i didn't pick that comparison out of a hat. because in fact someone _could_ figure out i'm trans, if they put enough work into it, even if i wasn't legally nonbinary. i didn't have my name and gender change court order sealed. because of the way i did it, i can't legally do that now. i don't know if oregon can or would change that law. if someone with legal authority where i live decides to a make list of people who've legally changed their gender - which in fact _has_ happened in texas - i'm on that list.

yes, that worries me. that worries me a lot.

i'm still having trouble seeing this as all that distinct from homosexuality destabilizing and compromising the "family"

Yeah I think it's on a continuum. Transness is destabilizing for many of the same reasons that queerness in general is destabilizing, and for many of the same reasons women's rights are destabilizing. Our current societies are still built on bedrock structures of distribution of power and privilege between "men" and "women," and all of those things are working to erode those structures. If anyone can do anything, and anyone can be anyone, then that threatens a lot of long-baked-in religious, social, cultural and economic assumptions. Conservatives react against all of this because that's what conservatives do — if conservatism is actually about conserving anything, it's the status quo of wealth and power distribution.

The things are interconnected because they're also all made-up categories that are used to oppress people in order to keep specific others in power (so are race and abled-ness and anti-fatness, for that matter).

Well put tipsy

The things are interconnected because they're also all made-up categories that are used to oppress people in order to keep specific others in power (so are race and abled-ness and anti-fatness, for that matter).

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

strong agree!

i was just thinking today about the idea of "getting grandma on board". my great-aunt barbara... she was one of the kindest, most compassionate people i've ever had the privilege to know. she died before i could come out to her, but i have _zero_ doubts that she would positively celebrate me as her darling girl just as much as she celebrated me, all her life, as her darling boy. she'd probably have been, i don't know, 100 now.

in fact, the person who's said the most transphobic stuff to me is my oldest brother, this christmas. it still shocks me that he said the ignorant, bigoted stuff he did. this guy is a radical leftist who's known queer people for ages. he's known i'm his older sister for more than five years now. he's never asked, never been curious, and for the first time, this christmas, he asks, he wants to know, and i start talking to him about my lived experience and he starts _arguing_ with me.

what can i say? he wants to know what makes me a woman, and the only response i can give is to ask him what makes me a man. whoo boy. i don't know if you've ever tried asking a cis guy what makes him a man, but a lot of them do _not_ like that. and he's mad... more than anything else he's mad that i keep acting like i'm _right_ and he's _wrong_. he literally tells me this. he says, look, i don't have the experience of being trans, but you don't know what it's like to be cisgender. he fucking says this, and he _means_ it. with god as my witness, what can i possibly say to _that_?

this whole idea of... oh, we have to conciliate to Older People. i see people in their 20s saying that about people _my_ age. _we're_ older people. _our generation_ (yes i'm generalizing) is the one whose bigotry people don't understand. yeah, i couch my words a certain way here, but i do the same thing around trans people. being mindful and intentional about how i talk about myself isn't the same thing as, like, dumbing it down for the olds.

-

FURTHERMORE. to me, it's a great example of how patriarchy pits marginalized groups against each other, making it about "grandma". again, i'm not saying this as a _personal judgement_ against anyone, and it's not any one particular statement. it's just, like... there's a pattern of, when people talk about transphobia, people blaming _cis women_ for it. ok, i'm speaking only for myself here, but i do genuinely prefer the phrase "gender critical" to "TERF". a lot of people who get called "TERFs" _don't_ think of themselves as feminists. even the ones who do... they don't exactly have a strong argument for it, in 2025. how the fuck is it "feminist" to argue that a trans man shouldn't be able to get a hysterectomy for gender-affirming purposes? a belief in bodily autonomy is kind of a fundamental tenet of feminism. like, so get me get this straight, first off, they have the absurd belief that trans men are women, and second off, they believe they have the right to control this man's body _while at the same time claiming he is a woman_? and that's supposed to be _feminist_? what the actual fuck?

i've just noticed that when people talk about transphobic, the people who get brought up as examples are disproportionately women. i'm not saying this to exculpate transphobes! jk rowling is fully personally responsible for the transphobic shit she says, for her promotion of transphobia, in the same way that amanda palmer is fully personally responsible for the things she did in perpetrating and enabling abuse. systemically, though, the institutions responsible for transphobia are patriarchal. the most powerful people in those systems are men. cis women and trans people have a _common cause_. we're affected by patriarchy in very similar ways. when i talked upthread about the way patriarchy and polices and controls trans bodies - that's language i think a lot of cis women will know, will understand, because patriarchy polices and controls their bodies in much the same way. trans people aren't a threat to cis women, any more than cis women are a threat to trans people. the women i've met, i talk about my experiences, know that, accept that, understand that.

very few people have been intolerant and bigoted towards me personally. very few. nobody here, nobody on ilx. but the people i've had the most trouble with personally, the people who have been the most intolerant and bigoted towards me, are _not_ cis women. they are cis _men_. and that's not a perspective i see reflected very often when transphobia is discussed in the abstract.

i don't know if you've ever tried asking a cis guy what makes him a man, but a lot of them do _not_ like that.

and of _course_ his answer is "i have a penis", because of course it is. dear cis men: YOUR PENIS IS NOT NEARLY AS MEANINGFUL OR RELEVANT AS YOU BELIEVE IT IS. Get the fuck _over_ the idea that your penis is somehow unique or special or intrinsically _valuable_. It's not. Also, for the love of God, stop sending me unsolicited pictures of your cock. I'm supposed to be impressed by that? Yeah, I know what they _look_ like, I had one for 45 years. I do genuinely like penises - I genuinely liked my penis - but I don't think they're much to look at.

the people i've had the most trouble with personally, the people who have been the most intolerant and bigoted towards me, are not cis women. they are cis men. and that's not a perspective i see reflected very often when transphobia is discussed in the abstract.

Maybe no-one expects any better of us.

do you need the pressure of expectations to be good

TERF should probably have been abandoned as a term a while ago (ufo made this point upthread two years ago btw). especially now that the most characteristically terf-y anti-trans talking points are also the core of the right-wing anti-trans agenda, there's no reason to identify them with so-called liberal feminists who are transphobic.

that said, this might vary a little based on your context? here in Canada, for example, I'd say Jordan Peterson is our most prominent transphobe. I may have missed something, but I don't know that the "gender critical" smokescreen caught on here as much (maybe one benefit of having a moribund media system). and I'd very cautiously say that transphobia is mostly correctly identified as a concern of the right, rather than a disease particular to "liberal feminists"

take all that with a grain of salt though as I live in Montreal not "Canada"

It makes sense that women are given the mission of policing and enforcing patriarchy and what you could call the anti-trans project. After all, women are "the softer side," able to put a smiling face on the front line. It's also, obv, an attempt to deflect accusations of sexism and misogyny.

Maybe no-one expects any better of us.

― Halfway there but for you

i can see that. "soft tyranny of low expectations" and all. i mean it doesn't help, it didn't help me pre-transition when people were afraid to call me on my shit. how the fuck was i ever going to learn when people wouldn't tell me stuff? and why would people explain things to me when i obviously wasn't fucking listening? _that's_ why it frustrates me. yes, cis women are more receptive to arguments against transphobia than cis men are! that's _why_ they're less transphobia. that's _why_ TERF was a term, because this is a battle queer people have fought over and over and over again. TERF did once have meaning because in the 1980s there _were trans-exclusionary radical feminists_. that was a legitimate debate people had, and it's _settled_ now. cis lesbians and bisexuals, feminists, i count them as the strongest allies trans people have. so i understand why it happens, why there's a lot more focus on jk rowling than there is on matt walsh. what's the point in trying to have a conversation with matt walsh? i wouldn't try and have a conversation with matt walsh.

like yeah, a lot of guys, i've learned to _not_ expect any better from them, which means that i can't _trust_ them, i can't feel _safe_ around them. you have so many dudes buying into this "alpha male" or "sigma male" bullshit pushed by, like, _men_, because they think it'll endear them to women, and that's incredibly fucking stupid. does that _work_? does that get _results_? it gets results for the asshole dudes who are grifting them, sure. not really anybody else.

to be clear, back in the Before Time, i wasn't an exception - i listened to men, trusted men, a lot more than i trusted women, including on such topics as "what women want in a relationship". because cishet white men are considered Authorities, they are Experts on anything and everything. they can speak for everyone. for some reason i actually _believed_ that bullshit. i wasn't _stupid_, just truly, profoundly ignorant.

that said, this might vary a little based on your context? here in Canada, for example, I'd say Jordan Peterson is our most prominent transphobe. I may have missed something, but I don't know that the "gender critical" smokescreen caught on here as much (maybe one benefit of having a moribund media system). and I'd very cautiously say that transphobia is mostly correctly identified as a concern of the right, rather than a disease particular to "liberal feminists"

― rob

well, that's the tricky bit, it's not an absolute thing! it's a _trend_, it's really only observable in aggregate, not in any individual cases. so there are always going to be tons of exceptions. there's still a trend.

conveniently, a new alt-right playbook video just dropped, this one narrated by PhilosophyTube:

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

i haven't finished watching it but so far it does a good job of talking about the reason trying to convince people rationally to, like, not be bigoted doesn't work.

a lot of trans people are still mad at dr. marci bowers, the head of WPATH, for talking to abigail shrier. because to a lot of us, including me, that was just giving someone who wasn't engaging in good faith, wasn't listening, a chance to twist her words, to make us look bad. and in fact that's what shrier did. i'm not mad at dr. bowers for doing that. i think sometimes one has to learn things the hard way, and from what i know about dr. bowers, she does seem to learn from her experiences, has learned from her experiences. but a lot of trans people do see her as an enemy, sees WPATH as an enemy, simply because she talked to shrier.

xp that's true Kate, and tbc I definitely recognize the trend you're talking about!

I am concerned that, from my pov, the trend seems to be shifting now as transphobia becomes a more prominent, key, useful part of the patriarchal backlash. iow, there's less of a need for the alibi provided by terfs now, so transphobia could become more identified with cis men (for terrible reasons).

that said, any leftists still focusing on terfs are in increasingly dubious territory yeah

I am concerned that, from my pov, the trend seems to be shifting now as transphobia becomes a more prominent, key, useful part of the patriarchal backlash. iow, there's less of a need for the alibi provided by terfs now, so transphobia could become more identified with cis men (for terrible reasons).

― rob

i'd like to hear more about this perspective! from my point of view, transphobia being more identified with cisgender men is one of the things that makes it easier or me to be trans in the US as opposed to the UK. oh, you mean someone's transphobic and is _also_ a misogynist white supremacist ultranationalist christian dominionist? cool! i'm still mad that bigots stopped hating rock and roll. i hate having things in common with awful people.

as a gay man who has been intimate with other cis men, cis women, trans men, and trans women, I simply must say:

kate, you are wrong. all penises are remarkable. having pictures of them sent nonconsensually is the problem.

kate, you are wrong. all penises are remarkable. having pictures of them sent nonconsensually is the problem.

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

hmm, i could have phrased it better. i mean, yeah, every penis is a unique and beautiful snowflake. i'm not here to penis-shame. it's the idea that penises are _categorically_ somehow special and unique, that having a penis sets someone apart from anyone who doesn't. i believe every penis is beautiful and remarkable. i also believe that single pudenda on the wallogina is beautiful and remarkable, each in its own way.

the essence of patriarchy, to me, is a guy who'll send you an unsolicited picture of his own cock and then be unable to say the words "napkin dispenser".

i'd like to hear more about this perspective! from my point of view, transphobia being more identified with cisgender men is one of the things that makes it easier or me to be trans in the US as opposed to the UK. oh, you mean someone's transphobic and is _also_ a misogynist white supremacist ultranationalist christian dominionist? cool! i'm still mad that bigots stopped hating rock and roll. i hate having things in common with awful people.

― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, January 17, 2025 2:46 PM (two hours ago)

ha well it's true I hadn't thought about it like that! that is kind of reassuring lol

but fwiw what I was getting at was something along the lines of (this is all admittedly a little hand-wavey and half-baked): previously transphobia had to be slipped into the mainstream via "terf-ness" due to how vehement the negative reaction was to things like the NC bathroom bill. anti-trans hate/politics had to be laundered or disguised as concern for the safety of cis women, indeed concern voiced by cis women themselves, cis women who were "defending their right" to women-only spaces or fairness in sports etc. This was a ploy to cleave trans rights from women's rights and gay/lesbian rights and to delegitimize trans rights as actually driven by misogyny. (Later, widening the moral panic to include children helped even more.) Now that anti-trans politics has been successfully made mainstream, right-wingers don't need to pretend to care about women...or rather they can continue to cast women as hapless victims needing patriarchal protection while attacking and oppressing women, cis and trans alike. The reason I think this is bad is because the right wing is politically ascendant right now and much more able to change material reality and force awful ideas into the mainstream than terfs were.

I haven't been following things in the UK much lately, but I wonder if the US/UK divide is as sharp as it once was? My vague impression is that, in UK politics at least, terfness has given way to the same generally acceptable transphobia as in the US (though possibly even more bipartisan there)?

apologies if none of that makes sense, I just spent 4 hours trying to do things that are totally alien to me (math, accounting, python)

but fwiw what I was getting at was something along the lines of (this is all admittedly a little hand-wavey and half-baked): previously transphobia had to be slipped into the mainstream via "terf-ness" due to how vehement the negative reaction was to things like the NC bathroom bill. anti-trans hate/politics had to be laundered or disguised as concern for the safety of cis women, indeed concern voiced by cis women themselves, cis women who were "defending their right" to women-only spaces or fairness in sports etc. This was a ploy to cleave trans rights from women's rights and gay/lesbian rights and to delegitimize trans rights as actually driven by misogyny. (Later, widening the moral panic to include children helped even more.) Now that anti-trans politics has been successfully made mainstream, right-wingers don't need to pretend to care about women...or rather they can continue to cast women as hapless victims needing patriarchal protection while attacking and oppressing women, cis and trans alike. The reason I think this is bad is because the right wing is politically ascendant right now and much more able to change material reality and force awful ideas into the mainstream than terfs were.

― rob

oh, yeah, i definitely see that perspective! i think the important thing for me is that the most radical, extreme, overt proposals by right-wingers were considered unquestioned and indisputable _facts_ 30 years ago, when i was 18. the fact that it's more overt is, honestly, kind of a relief to me, because it means that more people are willing to _recognize what's been happening all this time_. patriarchy has always considered queerness and existential threat, in any form, and has always worked to erase it. 30 years ago what i knew about trans women came from movies like _the silence of the lambs_, _the crying game_, brian de palma's _dressed to kill_. these were not positive representations. 30 years ago not only couldn't i have gotten insurance to pay for hormones, i couldn't get a doctor to _prescribe_ hormones. 30 years ago i didn't know hormone replacement therapy _existed_. 30 years ago i got on the internet and the chief way i saw transness represented there was t-slur porn. yeah, i was transphobic. nearly all of us were. i mean, old ilx was right there. "trans exclusionary radical feminism" was a thing in part because radical feminists were the only folks willing to acknowledge trans people as potential human beings at all - because, after all, the term "trans exclusionary radical feminism" implies the existence of trans _inclusive_ radical feminism, which has been part of second-wave feminism from the beginning.

things are scary now. extremely scary. people want us gone, powerful people, and i don't know how far they'l go to make that happen. i don't know how much other people, the majority of folks who don't really have a stake in any of this, will tolerate. for the first 43 years of my life, though, i served as an agent of the patriarchy, at great personal cost. i made myself invisible and silent, because i felt i had to, because i probably _did_ have to. "transition", for many of us, is a choice - either we transition, or we kill ourselves. gender dysphoria is that fucking bad. not everyone makes the choice i did.

the more people learn, the more of a choice we _have_, the more people will choose gender non-conformity, no matter what price they put on it, no matter how difficult they make it. because this is _who we are_. because for many of us, once we know the truth, we can't walk away. because we know the alternative. i think they know it too. i have every reason to believe suicide is the outcome transphobes would _prefer_, no matter how hard they work to not say the quiet part out loud.

i'm not going to be invisible. i'm not going to be silent. and i'm not going to kill myself. ball's in their court.

<3

i used this quote recently and i was reminded of it by your post (and i have a feeling it will be more relevant than ever in these times):

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

Philip K Dick "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later"

Philip K Dick "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later"

― scanner darkly

oh god i love Dick so much

i used to read him so much when i was younger. the themes he talked about really articulated something about how i experienced my own transness. dissociation, depersonalization, that stuff. that's obviously not just a trans thing, but the way my dysphoria manifested was heavy on the dissociation and the depersonalization, feeling like i wasn't a "real person" in some way i couldn't quite articulate. my favorite stuff of his is probably the stuff just before he had his religious epiphanies. flow my tears. scanner darkly. the whole business about having a lesbian twin in another universe, or whatever that was... i still have the books but i haven't read them in a while haha

i don't have the book where i read "how to build a universe" anymore... the thing i remember most about that was him admitting at the front that he preferred universes that did fall apart two days later! i thought that was cool.

that's kind of a tangent but i just wanted to fangirl out a little bit

it's available online: https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html

i'm rereading it now (it's been a few years) and it's scary how otm he was.

i read "a scanner darkly" when i was 15-16 and for some reason i couldn't explain at the time it had a profound effect on me. and some events in my life ended up mirroring some events in the book (and the book was partially inspired by his time in vancouver which is where i live now)..

A trans communist Catholic lawyer talking about secular types not being able to handle trans issues and more

https://www.voidpod.com/podcasts/2025/1/20/trans-activism-in-secular-spaces-with-kat-grant

is this the thing steve shrives was talking about in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NinY-m0_jB0

i can't really manage an hour-plus podcast. it's interesting to hear that Grant is a Catholic, since "What is a woman?" does specifically call out that present-day transphobia is in large part attributable to Christian colonialist ideology. Christianity, as I alluded to elsewhere, is a fraught topic for many queer people. I do have multiple trans friends who are Christians, and my own values and ethics are strongly influenced by Christian teachings.

I generally agree with Shrives' argument that transphobia is not science, any more than "scientific" racism is science. I also think Grant's article does really highlight a lot of the implicit issues with the a lot of the older "New Atheist" thinkers like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. The transphobia they exhibit is, IMO, entirely congruent with the Islamophobia many of them have previously exhibited.

One of the things that stuck out to me at Pride last year was the number of people, including myself, with Palestinian flags. To me, at least, the reason we do this is obvious. The Israeli government, aided and abetted by the United States government, is perpetrating genocide on the Palestinian people. They are coming for the Palestinian people. As a trans person, I'm extremely aware of who's next on the list. I think I talked upthread about how people being openly bigoted is in some ways a relief to me. I'd count this as one of those circumstances. If someone is a white Islamophobic "New Atheist", I _don't_ count them as a supporter of trans rights, whether they claim to be or not. If atheists are a marginalized group, being Islamophobic in a Christian Dominionist culture is not an effective act of advocacy for that marginalized group, and in fact acts against the larger interests of that marginalized group.

It makes sense to me that a lot of secular spaces, particularly more traditional secular spaces, are often transphobic, just like it makes sense to me that my oldest brother, a fervent atheist, said transphobic things to me while believing that he was being "objective". Transness, when I was younger, was defined strictly in what are now called "transmedical" terms - a framing devised by white cisgender people. I do not believe they were acting maliciously. Indeed, the people doing so genuinely believed themselves to be allies. By privileged their own "medical expertise" over the lived experiences of the people they were pathologizing, though, they replicated imperialist and colonialist norms. This is still a serious issue in trans culture today, as Jules Gill-Peterson shows in her recent book _A Brief History of Trans Misogyny_.

Relatively few trans people are Christians, but a great many of us are radical leftists, frequently openly communist. I don't call myself a communist because I agree with the theories of Marx and Engels - I haven't read Marx and Engels. It's certainly not because I support Soviet-style Communism. Weird as it sounds, I call myself a communist for entirely practical reasons. Liberalism, well, wasn't there for me. It didn't act in my best interest. It promoted bunk pseudoscience that reflected imperialist, colonialist, white supremacist norms and denied the reality of trans people's lived experiences. Liberalism's latter-day change of heart frankly often strikes me as a matter of convenience, bereft of any real understanding of why trans rights are important, of liberalism's own pivotal past role, on a systemic level, in suppressing trans rights.

That said, I don't oppose secularism! The scientific method is about basing one's beliefs on the evidence, and trans healthcare, trans rights, is _evidence-based_. Gender-affirming care succeeds where other interventions, including _far more invasive_ interventions, don't. This isn't just supported by the evidence, but it's something I've experienced firsthand. The secularists I know today, the secularists who are relevant to my life, are anti-colonialist, oppose white supremacy, oppose transphobia. I don't think that Coyne's bigoted and false beliefs about trans people represent secularism any more than, say, Germaine Greer's transphobia represents feminism.

so i have a support group in two hours and it's going to be filled with people who are very worried that they are now, i guess, illegal or something? i have no idea what it means but yeah i'm a little stressed out.

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.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, January 15, 2025 3:39 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

My sister said to me, "I don't have a problem with trans women, but..." (pausing to sigh at that formulation) "...I don't know why they would want to change the term "breastfeeding" to "chestfeeding", when they mostly can't produce milk anyway?"

I said, "I think it can mean a couple of things, but IME the term is mostly used by trans men who have had top surgery but still lactate."

And my sister almost seemed to glitch, like she could not process that anything to do with trans people could be about a category or categories of people other than trans women.

you know what, that answer is the right one to give your sister who is Trying Really Hard, and also i know way more than i would like to about the circumstances under which trans women are capable of lactating. i've never actually heard the word "chestfeeding" before, though, i think it's a cool one!

btw the support group went fine, we pretty much just nerded out about anime for a couple hours

i mean what the fuck is there to even _say_?