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

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_?

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

ive been the sponsor the lgbtq+ club at the high school where i teach for the last 10 years, and this describes how about 80% of the meetings have ever gone

ngl most of the reason i started watching anime was so i'd have something to discuss with other trans people

unfortunately i seem to have greatly underestimated the popularity of kabaddi-based sports anime among the larger weeb population

"no, no, wandering sun with a u, the early 1970s shoujo anime about a girl who wants to become a pop singer, what did you think i was talking about?"

While ‘chestfeeding’ doesn’t really bug me, because trans men should be able to name their own anatomies, I note that all human beings have breasts, regardless of gender. Men (AMAB) can also get breast cancer - 2800 diagnoses per year in the US, 400 annually in the UK. Helpful explainer: https://amp.cancer.org/cancer/types/breast-cancer-in-men/about/key-statistics.html

Also, obviously, it’s important to me to post in this thread to offer all trans ilxors solidarity at this and all other times - I will always speak up for you in any space I happen to occupy. Fuck this entire administration for opening a giant can of FUD under your lives.

cosign with Suzy. i am furious right now.

thanks y’all i’m not really paying attention. did someone in power say i’m not real? just another week on earth tbh

not talking about anyone here but the lip service i’m receiving from cis ppl on social media (thanks for sharing that infographic!! i feel so supported!!!) is very alienating

I've been thinking about whether or not to post this... I've been going through a lot of emotions the last couple of days. I think I will say, though, in spoilers, what my perception is on Trump's and the Republican's ultimate plan, re: trans people, how they aim to accomplish it, what tools he has available, and what I feel like would be necessary to not just slow down that plan - which is _very_ possible, _very_ doable, and being done now - but to... get things to a place where trans people are not under serious existential threat.

First off it is important for me to note that this trans people being under existential threat is not new, nor is it unique. It's not, in my mind, separable from the existential threat faced by queer people in general, cis, trans, whatever. The whole "LGB drop he T" thing is a pretty brazen attempt at "divide and conquer". Most of the people pushing that line aren't actually queer. The ones who are queer, well, it's disappointing that they're acting in a way that can only really hurt queer people.

This is a challenge because most people, myself included, have been kind of primed and raised in a heavily transphobic environment. To me, it's important to recognize that, to recognize that we - including myself - aren't looking at things impartially, that we have certain biases ingrained in us.

That's important because, in a functional sense, Trumpists have _very strong_ control over American media at this point. Places like Youtube have been biased against trans people for quite a while, and that trend is going to continue. People, well, have a tendency to believe what they're told. These stories about people valuing Fox News over their own kids - that's not new nor is it unique. It's also not just Fox News. It's Google, it's Facebook, it's all of these corporate social media companies - they've gone all-in on Trump, which means promoting transphobic narratives. It is going to get a lot harder to hear trans voices. We're going to be a lot less visible.

I can say this because, again, this is not a novel situation, and it's not a situation I was (or am) unaffected by. All of this stuff I grew up hearing in the media - The Silence of the Lambs, The Crying Game, both of these excellent movies by excellent directors, films that were _not intentionally transphobic_. It's just going to inevitably happen when you tell stories about a marginalized group that don't center the voices of that marginalized group. It's certainly not a phenomenon that's unique to trans people. So you may see, for instance, stories that seem like they're supportive of trans people, and trans people are upset about it, and it may not be clear why. It's important in these cases to listen to the trans people, even though that's going to be _a lot more difficult_ than listening to the things that are more commonly said about trans people. Having people in your life who belong to marginalized groups can help. That's one of the reasons I'm on ILX. It doesn't benefit me if all of the voices I hear are white transgender women, not just because other people need to hear what I have to say, but because I need to hear what other people have to say about their own experiences. Just like with the "drop the T" thing, it benefits people in power to encourage _me_ as a white trans woman to buy into and/or promote bigotry against other marginalized people.

Trump's program is not _subtle_ exactly but at the same time I wouldn't say he's saying exactly what he means. The ultimate goal is to make trans people disappear. The thing that stands out to me is that this is already a goal that had _largely been accomplished_ when I was young. I was transphobic. Most of the people I knew were transphobic. It was totally invisible. I didn't see it or acknowledge it. I didn't recognize that trans people had a greater ability to define themselves than cis "experts" had to define them. I didn't _trust_ them, because they - possibly "we", I don't know if I can count myself in that group or not - were utterly marginalized. A lot of trans people were sex workers because bigotry meant that out trans people didn't have access to so-called "legitimate" jobs. Trans people who wanted legitimate jobs were strongly encouraged to make _themselves_ invisible, to "stealth". Not every trans person has the privilege of doing this. I should note here that this model of transness very much privileges whiteness, and that the people who suffer from transphobia most, then and now, are _not_ white trans people like me. As a white trans woman, I am taught and encouraged to erase and devalue the experiences and of people who aren't like me.

Lack of access to "legitimate" jobs is _very much_ a challenge for trans people today. We have a much harder time finding and holding down work than cis people, and the reasons for this are largely invisible _to_ cis people. One of the things that paradoxically has helped trans rights most is that for many of us, the jobs we can get are precariat service positions. These aren't great jobs, they don't pay enough to get by on, and the working conditions are terrible. We're visible, though. Visibly trans. This is why existing is the most important thing we can do, this is why I, as a trans woman with passing privilege, go out of my way to draw attention to my own transness when I feel safe doing so (that last part being the essence of why it is a "privilege"). Because anti-trans bigotry requires the restoration of the status quo that existed in my youth in the 80s and 90s - a state of total abjection. It requires that trans narratives, trans voices, be _completely unheard_ - either silenced, or overwritten with other narratives - narratives that call us pathological liars, perverts, sick and deranged. Narratives that justify denying our right to speak for ourselves.

This is also why I do feel like I'm a lot safer here in Portland than I would be in Texas. The pressure on trans people to get the hell out of Texas serves as a reinforcement for progressively more severe actions taken against trans people. The ones who are affected most are the ones who can't get out. By which I mean children. Transphobia couches itself in terms of "protecting children", but it is, fundamentally, child abuse.

I fucking hate this. I hate this so much. I hate being called a predator, a "groomer", but even more than that I hate that the people calling me that _are hurting children_ and they are _getting away with it_. The whole idea of "save the children", "protect the children", it gets used as a pretext for every kind of atrocity, every kind of cruelty. So much that I hate doing it, hate saying that.

And I just keep thinking of my queer friend Ian, who died in 2016, after a long struggle against a world that would very much prefer that he not exist. He was a big fan of the Manic Street Preachers, a band I've never heard. All I know is the title of one of their albums, an album he loved: _If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next_.

There is no "next". They are coming _now_ for your children, your friends' children, the children of some of us here. They are coming, in fact, _for their own children_.

That's what what transphobia is. That's what transphobia wants.

Trans people are going through it. We are really going through it. And anything we do, anything that is done _to_ any one of us, will be blamed on all of us. Trans people are not only not _better_ than cis people, we don't handle stress any more than cis people do. I've seen trans people do terrible things. I don't talk about it, because if I do, people will say it's because they're trans. When one of us commits suicide, we're blamed for that as well. The people who have created such an extreme environment pressuring us to _not exist_, the systemic forces leading to that outcome - they tend to not be considered. Trans suicide is _very much_ a goal of anti-trans policies. If it was acceptable for transphobes to admit that, they would - not just admit it, but boast about it. When it is acceptable, that's exactly how they behave. That's worth understanding as well.

The incitement to violence isn't just an incitement for trans people to commit suicide, of course. The Trump administration's actions are unquestionably aimed at inciting violence against members of marginalized groups. In this sense I _am_ at significant risk. Portland has dealt with armed white supremacists in the past. These sorts of people are being encouraged and emboldened. Any act of violence against trans people _will be blamed on trans people_. That's important for me to repeat. Frankly I think that's kind of a hard sell, but I'm sure they'll try, and I'm sure it will, to some extent, be effective.

That said, it's also important to understand that _most people are not transphobic_. Genuinely, most people do not give a shit about what's in my pants, one way or another. They have no reason to. Hatred against us is weaponized just the same way hatred against any other marginalized group is weaponized. Transphobia is, and always has been, an artificial norm, created and maintained at great expense on the part of the norms entrepeneurs. Great pressure was placed on me to accept transphobia as normal, and great pressure is once more being placed on all of us, cis, trans. All of us. It is _not_ normal and even if we do not have the power to _change_ those norms, their power to limit those norms is _limited_.

That power is chiefly economic in nature. Opposing transphobia may cost you friends, may cost you loved ones, but at some point it is very likely to cost you money. I don't mean that in a "trans people are broke" sense, though collectively, we are absolutely fucking broke. I mean that in the sense that opposing transphobia _will_ have consequences for anybody who does it, and the most important of those consequences will be _economic_. That fucking terrifies me. We're all barely getting by as it is, and to say that, God, it feels like I'm fucking pushing _austerity_. I'm not. That just happens to be the primary power the Trump administration has, the primary way they're trying to compel compliance.

I hate to say it, but situationally, complying in a given situation may be the better option. Sometimes it's in my best interests to make myself invisible. I can't imagine holding other people to a higher standard. I'm worth more alive than dead. I kinda feel the same way about everyone else here. Anything anybody does to help trans people will never feel like it's good enough. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing or that it doesn't help. The hardest thing for me to do is to try to help people I care about and fail. I've had that happen. Most of us, I think, are going to see that happen, in some form or another. Failure doesn't mean any of us are powerless. Failure doesn't mean that what we do doesn't matter.

What trans people can do for ourselves, well, it's limited. We don't have a lot of power ourselves. We don't have a lot of resources. If people who aren't like us choose to not comply with the demands of those in power, if people who aren't like us are willing, to any degree they can, suffer negative consequences for the sake of people who aren't like us - well. That's the extent of the hope I have. That's why I try my best to do that for people who aren't like me.

Anyway that's a long-ass speech, and I hate making speeches, but I guess some people sometimes say they're glad I can do it, that it's a skill or a gift I have, and I guess I might as well do it here and now. I hope it helps somebody else to read it. I guess it helped me to write it and it'll probably help me to post it.

A great speech, kate.

The reason I relayed the anecdote about my sister was not to talk about chestfeeding per se, but rather because it underscores something that seems to me (caveat: as a person who is not trans) so central to all the political and social debates around trans people, which is the way the policing of the border between genders is not conducted coherently, let alone equally - the western world seems hyper-obsessed with monitoring what are perceived to be transgressions by AMAB people into "female space" (which can mean both literal spaces, but also certain modes of behaviour, characteristics, perspectives etc.) while not merely ignoring the opposite phenomenon but functionally pretending that it doesn't even exist.

All of which to my mind, ultimately, reflects that the social fear of basically any type of queer person in large part boils down to a convoluted, multifaceted defence of attempts to uphold a certain circumscribed notion of the role of women in society.

The panic about trans women and public bathrooms (and prisons, and so on) presupposes that women generally should just accept that they are under constant threat of violence and assault from anyone deemed by society to "male", and the obligation to protect them from that threat is limited to selectively placing a few sandbags; but the idea that AFAB people can be men contradicts that presupposition in a way that cannot easily be resolved, so is easier to ignore.

This is effectively a repetition of how previous waves of gay panic focused hysterically on gay men and effectively denied or ignored the existence of lesbian women.

I've heard this analogy before: right before a star dies, it balloons into this giant, wild, really bright supernova, ready to explode.. the last, final fling

that's what I hope we're experiencing here with the hateful right-wingers... realize this might be incredibly naïve but it's all I have right now

Tim F, I think you're very on point. The one thing I do want to mention is that the cost of erasure is very high indeed. It's easy to draw the conclusion that trans women have it worse because we're in the spotlight, but as someone who performed self-erasure for a very long time, being erased and made invisible is _very, very hard_. This is particularly important for me to say because there is a lot of pressure for transmascs and transfemmes to fight with each other about who has it worse. I consciously want to resist that tendency. I see a lot of trans women talking about "femmephobia" and talking about "privilege" and "misogyny" and all of those things are _real_ and to me, they distract from the larger issue, which is patriarchy, which affects everyone in different ways (and which intersects with different marginalizing ideologies, like white supremacy).

I've heard this analogy before: right before a star dies, it balloons into this giant, wild, really bright supernova, ready to explode.. the last, final fling

that's what I hope we're experiencing here with the hateful right-wingers... realize this might be incredibly naïve but it's all I have right now

― Andy the Grasshopper

Extinction Burst. That's what my therapist said, when my ex started... behaving a certain way, after I broke up with her. All of the viciousness and the hatred burns itself out and then people are fine. It's a reasonable thing to believe! I believed it, about my ex.

It just didn't happen that way. Is all.

-

The thing I keep going back to is that old union speech. The guy said something like this: First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they try to kill you, then they build monuments to you.

That might be true. Having my name on a monument is of no value to me. Dead is dead. If anybody ever gets the idea to build a monument to me (unlikely), that's the quote I'd like on it.

That analogy, Andy, I believed it, deeply and fervently, three years ago. Now... I'd like to believe it. Maybe it doesn't happen like that. Maybe history doesn't vindicate us. Maybe I go down in history as a freak, as a pervert, as someone who disfigured the face of man and woman. That's the way it's always been. I believed that things could change, that things _would_ change, that we'd reached some kind of, I don't know, transgender tipping point...

Well. Maybe I was wrong. I genuinely didn't expect that people would hate us as much as they do, that people would go as far as they have to make us go away, that so _many_ people, ordinary, decent people, people I trusted, people I loved, would go along with them. If you're being incredibly naïve, well, I was incredibly naïve in the same way. There are worse things to be. I think it's OK to hope for a better world, even if I'm not personally quite up to it right now.

I saw multiple nb or possibly trans people in service jobs during my holiday travels, at rest stop food courts and as concierges/desk people at the hotel. They are simultaneously crappy jobs and also really visible ones.

I have a very close trans friend who is now officially concerned about traveling and leaving the country. She is worried her passport could be confiscated upon re-entering the country and is additionally worried about crossing state borders as well. She was hoping to go to Japan for work but now is going to avoid it. Ugh. The fact that this is now a thing is just fucked. Her verbalizing these realities to me really hit home how much has changed.

I have a very close trans friend who is now officially concerned about traveling and leaving the country. She is worried her passport could be confiscated upon re-entering the country and is additionally worried about crossing state borders as well. She was hoping to go to Japan for work but now is going to avoid it. Ugh. The fact that this is now a thing is just fucked. Her verbalizing these realities to me really hit home how much has changed.

― octobeard

yeah it's scary. i have read about some of the things that happened in 1933, how hard it was for people to get out of the country, let alone get back in. i mean in the case of trans people, there's not anywhere i'd want to go, there's not...

well i mean leah tigers' essay where she talks about "queer zion" says it better than i could

https://trickymothernature.com/thegenderrefugee.html

one of the reasons i came to oregon in 2017 was because i didn't know how long interstate travel would be possible... that was in one sense paranoid but in another sense not. because travel isn't just about travel itself. interstate (as in us states) border control is... i mean to me that seems a little impractical. i did find though very quickly on moving here that america isn't one nation, isn't under one law, and it's _very hard_ to... it's more expensive to live in portland than it is to live in "the middle of nowhere" in indiana or someplace. "the gender refugee", but we _have_ gender refugees. people come here from texas every week. i keep _telling_ trans people in texas to come here, that it's not safe to be in texas. one does get acclimated. people there don't necessarily understand how much danger they're in, what sort of danger they're in.

here in pdx, the danger is... it's no more than anything else. slow death by attrition. the thing that's hard for us as a marginalized group is that we _don't have a history of marginalization_. when someone's marginalized from birth and knows it, one learns certain things to... i don't know, coexist with other marginalized people. trans community, we don't fucking have that. white transfemmes, we have the sort of skillset that allows one to survive as a white cis guy in america, which... god if there's one thing folks in that situation are good at, it's denial and repression, and that's _not_ a useful skill once one is no longer denying and repressing.

for trans people, community is the difference between life and death. and we're a community made up in large part of refugees, of people going through puberty. my skill set is that i know a lot about prog rock. i haven't played "this war of mine", but one of the things it points out is that philosophers, professors, they don't do great in siege situations, and emotionally, at least, we're pretty besieged right now. my experience with community... you call the trans lifeline and nobody answers and then you realize that all of the stuff that was supposedly there for you, a lot of it just _isn't_.

i'm lucky. i do have people. i talked to a friend who's just getting over a bad flu. she never gets the flu, she says, and the last two weeks... anyway she says you want to go out to dinner, and we do, and i have to leave early because this abdominal pain i've been having... when this particular pain hits, it's at a level of 7, which is the point where i start involuntarily moaning in pain. i can't be out in public if i'm doing that. so she's really good and gives me a ride home even though i'd really wanted to be around her more.

i beat myself up for spending so much time in front of a screen, "touch grass", except of course there isn't grass to touch, it's winter, except... the attrition is i keep doing everything you can, and it keeps getting harder and harder, and i wind up falling despite doing everything i can to stay on my feet. when i can't talk, i stream.

i run a support group because it's the only way i can get myself to show up, and people _want_ to come and they don't. because it's just too hard to get out. i understand.

my efforts to change my name/gender marker on my documents have been effectively halted by trump's executive order and the resulting state department chaos. at first i took this in stride, like thank god i did not have my shit together to send out my passport this month, because it would be stuck at the non-functional state department that isn't processing gender marker changes (and, as of now, isn't sending passports back). but i spent the weekend crying about how much i was looking forward to not being called "sir" or "mr." at the airport. gonna be a long four years

btw never in my life have i been so directly effected by evil policy like this and it's really doing a number on me :)

<3

we are going through the same thing with our son's passport. we got all of his other documents (birth cert, ss card) updated in the past year but didn't get our shit together on his passport in time. we were going to go submit the paperwork on saturday in hopes of getting it in in a window before the state department could implement the EO but the post office didn't have a passport clerk available that day, and it sounds like maybe that was for the best bc the docs aren't going anywhere. now we're waiting to see what happens with legal challenges/injunctions but i suspect we'll eventually have to apply for a passport with the wrong gender on it so we at least have the option of traveling if we need to.

we also saw his gender care doc last week, it sounds like the EO over gender-affirming care doesn't directly touch us yet since it mostly impacts federal programs like medicaid, but they said that it could empower private insurers to stop covering gender-affirming care as well. fortunately testosterone is a relatively affordable medication, we could keep paying for it out of pocket, but obviously it would still be bad.

my biggest anxiety leading up to the election was that a trump administration would try to ban gender-affirming care for minors (or anyone) in general, and this is still my biggest concern in terms of things that could directly impact my family. i think this would have to be a law which means it would take a while and face lots of challenges, and it could start as or end up with a state-by-state decision possibly (fortunately we live in illinois). but i spent so long worrying about this before the election and now that he has been elected all i can do is wait and see what happens before doing anything.

Sending love and solidarity to yall

everybody i know is shaking, crying, terrified. the people i know are doing better today but this weekend... was really rough for a lot of us.

thinking about everyone in this thread right now, sending love and solidarity to all, like table said. shit is fucked

sending love and solidarity as well

Apparently Laverne Cox has a new sitcom on Amazon Prime, and this review suggests that it's not good because her character isn't miserable, surrounded by bigots, and constantly on the defensive.

not the takeaway I'm getting from that review

Clean Slate has gone all in on feel-good, and the effect on the series as a whole is that it’s both happier and emptier as a result. The effect of that choice for Desiree, though, is that she’s living in an America that does not look much like the America of 2025, where a slew of anti-trans rhetoric over the last several years has culminated in state-sanctioned erasure of trans people from governmental research and records and a list of executive orders demanding, among other things, that hospitals stop providing necessary care to trans youth. Desiree has no conversations about access to hormones. Her relationship with her father is so strong that at the end of the season, Harry offers her a beautiful assurance that he does love her and does want her … and the scene falls a little flat, because the show has been so clear all along that Harry’s thrilled to have Desiree back in his life. She lives in a country that does not currently exist.

Honestly, good for her.

...With more time, Clean Slate could become a richer and more confident comedy. But it may not get that time; Prime’s Freevee shows like Primo and High School certainly didn’t, and now Freevee no longer exists. So why shouldn’t Clean Slate use whatever runway it has to be an improbable love fest? Why not veer toward aspirational depictions of a close-knit community with stories about a woman who discovers her dad loves her and has always loved her? Why not turn Harry’s Car Wash into a place of secular spiritual rebirth, and let Desiree kiss hot people, and have a sweet show set in a town where things are generally great? It’s good to feel good for a little while, and Clean Slate can at least do that.

i have been thinking about these sorts of issues a lot because of the queer YA spree i have been on.

where do we draw the line on depicting reality vs showing the reality we wish to exist? does focusing on the latter mean yielding to escapism, or is it calling to a new world in the hopes of creating it? does being ‘real’ mean having to show ugliness all the time?

i mean, i am not trans, but in writing my own YA book, i have had to think about how real i should be about the homophobia and bigotry that existed in the time period of the book… on the one hand it feels irresponsible not to, and on the other hand, i don’t want some gay 13 year old to read my book and hate his life even more.

where do we draw the line on depicting reality vs showing the reality we wish to exist? does focusing on the latter mean yielding to escapism, or is it calling to a new world in the hopes of creating it? does being ‘real’ mean having to show ugliness all the time?

Exactly. Aspirational fiction is necessary.

where do we draw the line on depicting reality vs showing the reality we wish to exist? does focusing on the latter mean yielding to escapism, or is it calling to a new world in the hopes of creating it? does being ‘real’ mean having to show ugliness all the time?

i mean, i am not trans, but in writing my own YA book, i have had to think about how real i should be about the homophobia and bigotry that existed in the time period of the book… on the one hand it feels irresponsible not to, and on the other hand, i don’t want some gay 13 year old to read my book and hate his life even more.

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

Among the reasons I've enjoyed Openly Straight is its depiction of a gay boy from Boulder with two of the most liberal, loving parents other kids -- even straight ones -- could have asked for yet they can't understand how out of place he still feels.

Yes! One of the many things I love about the novel (and its sequel) is its affectionately parodic take on a certain straight of liberal "allyship."

Should read "certain strain," but an appropriate typo?

To reorient the discussion towards the topic somewhat, I think one of the great things about the current "queer YA boom" is the space that it allows for a variety of stories: queer joy (as the kids are calling it these days) and queer trauma can and do exist side by side on the same bookshelf, and often within the same book!

my gf's friend is trying to write some sort of fantasy novel scenario that resembles our current reality but it's fantasy. both my gf and i find this a little hard to get into, beyond our total antipathy toward fantasy as a genre, and the way i put it was that if you're going to relay a dystopian vision of the world when the world is currently in one, it has to have enough imagination to contain something else, another world that's possible. so imo it's not really an either/or, more of a balancing act

my favorite depiction of well-meaning liberal parents who just *love* (in a weird self-satisfied narcissistic way) that their kids are gay is in zazen by vanessa veselka

Love among the ruins.

Should read "certain strain," but an appropriate typo?

― cryptosicko, Thursday, February 6, 2025 7:30 AM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

To reorient the discussion towards the topic somewhat, I think one of the great things about the current "queer YA boom" is the space that it allows for a variety of stories: queer joy (as the kids are calling it these days) and queer trauma can and do exist side by side on the same bookshelf, and often within the same book!

― cryptosicko, Thursday, February 6, 2025 7:32 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

firstly, lol.

and secondly, yeah, i agree that this is a really positive part of the current "queer YA boom." even in a duology of books that is essentially about gay friendship like Stamper's "Golden Boys" and "Afterglow," there are accepting parents and lovely friends...with homophobic school officials, fellow teens, and other assorted bigots.

i think that one of the things that is really striking to me about these books, though, is that so few of them include homophobic parents...and speaking from my own experience, that was the biggest horror of growing up.

i haven't read as much trans YA lit, but i wonder whether this is the same in that sub-sub-genre.

i mean, i am not trans, but in writing my own YA book, i have had to think about how real i should be about the homophobia and bigotry that existed in the time period of the book… on the one hand it feels irresponsible not to, and on the other hand, i don’t want some gay 13 year old to read my book and hate his life even more.

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

the phrase i see used about a lot of trans stories is "trauma porn". and i mean yes queer joy and all that, and also, i mean... "write what you know" is a thing too, right? idk. i remember that early on when i was questioning, i'd look for trans stories, and i'd come across this one board and it was full of just... the saddest people in the world. and i would look at that place and run away in fear, terrified that i'd become _like that_ if i ever tried to transition. i tried so hard to not be like _those people_, and... now i guess i'm enough like them that i've learned to not judge them for not being good role models for me. i guess with YA fiction the pressure is even more intense to be a "good role model". i've never liked the idea of being judged by my work, and that's probably one of the main reasons i avoid creating work.

it’s strange because looking back on my teenage years, most people my own age assumed i was gay, and didn’t really give a shit.

it was my family i was terrified of.

Yup.

In the too-little/too-late category, the NYT Editorial Board finally decides demonizing trans people is bad (gift link)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/opinion/transgender-trump-orders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk4.k0Rc.QUdoeZBKp_R3&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare