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

I don't really have much to add to this conversation beyond support to people who are just trying to live their lives.

I don't know if that's the best way to express that but I want to respect how people identify and refer to them in the manner they prefer, mostly because that feels like Being Polite 101 and it's baffling to me that that isn't everyone's baseline

I apologize for not putting my last post in hidden text. I honestly forgot that was an option. I tried to add many line breaks after the content warning, but apparently ILX doesn't allow that.

CW: more discussion related to the BBC article

whining/handwringing/concern-trolling about the punching-up (and any associated collateral damage)

Emphasis mine. I'm not going to respond to this here; just wanted to let it stand on its own.

that is kind of what minority position means?

"Minority position" just means less than half of people hold it. Doesn't mean it's not important. Here are a couple of people who are part of this minority:

Ryan John Butcher, head of news at PinkNews:

my friend, that’s literally the dictionary definition of transphobia

— ryan john butcher (@ryanjohnbutcher) May 22, 2020

Dr. Veronica Ivy, first transgender world track cycling champion, published in NBC News, Vice, and The Economist, featured on CNN:

You: "I like dick"

Girl with dick says 'Hey, wanna date?'
"Oh...no...I only like dick on guys"

Guy responds to date ad: 'Sup girl'
...guy has a vagina
"Oh, sorry, I only like guys with dicks"

Both cases trans people are left in the cold. 'Genital preferences' are transphobic.

— Dr. Veronica Ivy (@SportIsARight) September 30, 2019

And as far as how often these kinds of things are happening, even if something happens very rarely, that doesn't mean it isn't important either. (For what it's worth, re: Tracer's comment above, there are tons of articles about people getting struck by lightning. The Guardian had a long piece about lightning strike survivors earlier this year.)

One good thing that could happen at this point would be for PinkNews and Stonewall to publish guidance saying genital preferences aren't transphobic and no one should say they are, whether in publicly visible discussions or (especially) on a personal level as a means of shaming someone into having sex. PN and Stonewall wouldn't even have to say that this HAS happened; all they would have to say is "DON'T do this," which shouldn't be controversial. And, of course, this guidance should be directed at everyone, not just trans people. If they wanted, they could even frame it as "The BBC article was a bad article. It goes without saying that genital preferences aren't transphobic..." etc. This is a solution that seeks to answer ufo's concerns about this conversation inside and outside of trans communities, as well as minimize "collateral damage."

I'll stop posting on this thread now.

Ugh, can't believe I screwed up the hidden text formatting there. Really sorry.

ryan john butcher was responding to someone who was talking about people being called "transphobic for not accepting lesbians with penises or men with vaginas." which is a gigantic stretch to conflate with the "trans people want cis people to be obliged to have sex with them" position, especially since "trans women cannot call themselves lesbians", "lesbians cannot have penises" etc. are quite common transphobe positions.

veronica ivy is indeed the single trans person of some prominence from the bbc article who directly said "genital preferences are transphobic" and i don't really agree with her overall position, the broader point about how preferences are shaped by society is fine but it seems pretty clear that not everyone's sexuality works that way. but her being wrong about that is just her being wrong about that & not evidence of anyone trying to coerce cis people into having sex with them.

"Minority position" just means less than half of people hold it. Doesn't mean it's not important.

it's not even close to half. you haven't at all demonstrated it is important, even with your caveat about rare things being able to be important. you can dig up goofy fringe positions from all sorts of minorities if you really want to cause a moral panic, the media's been doing it forever. looking forward to the moral panics about people saying "everyone is a little bisexual" next.

One good thing that could happen at this point would be for PinkNews and Stonewall to publish guidance saying genital preferences aren't transphobic and no one should say they are, whether in publicly visible discussions or (especially) on a personal level as a means of shaming someone into having sex

trans people are capable of having those conversations on our own and top-down interventions into this very dumb discourse like that would do nothing helpful & only probably attract more attention from transphobes "oh so you admit there is a problem with TRANS WOMEN FORCING PEOPLE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM" etc. stonewall and pinknews are hardly the heads of the trans community.

come on lol

And as far as how often these kinds of things are happening, even if something happens very rarely, that doesn't mean it isn't important either.

Just want clarify that I was responding to imago’s “basically never happens” post here, where, based on his follow-up post, “basically never happens” should be taken to mean “happens very rarely.” I suggest people read his post with that in mind.

Absolutely bizarre understanding of Stonewall and pink news in that post. Why on earth would trans people take their definition of what is and isn't transphobic from an organisation that, despite taking it's name from a political event that trans people were crucial to, refused to campaign on their behalf for most of the period of its existence. The answer is they don't, these things are supposed to work the other way around as UFO points out, the organisation learns from the communities it represents, even in the case of mainstream, liberal organisations like Stonewall.

But yes there will always be some element of truth to moral panics and some fringe extreme and or attention seeking positions - a situation further heightened by the algorithm's appetite for delicious controversy to generate engagement. what a moral panic does is to connect those dots, exaggerate them, persevere with every fatuous debunked story without missing a beat, elevate the testimonies of bad actors, invite a conspiracy of dupes and grifters to superheat to boiling point a few weird isolated incidents (some YouTuber said 'genital preferences' are transphobic (actually more nuanced than that but ok) and a workshop for trans people about difficulties dating and being trans happened ten years ago and we can wildly speculate about its content) are represented in a hysterical and distorted way with the result of calling for action from the group who are targeted by it and ultimately putting the burden of proof on them to find ways to show that they are not in fact degenerates and predators. Anyone who has been targeted by this bullshit also knows that it is never-ending, those that come for you like this will only be further emboldened and will call for more and repeated action of this kind where you are forced again and again to repudiate any political assertions in the name of distancing yourself from zealous smear campaigns and complying. This "I'm not trying to force cis lesbians to have sex with me" t shirt has people asking a lot of questions, essentially. That's the goal of these talking points, to provoke and mischaracterise and ultimately insinuate nastier stuff with ever diminishing burdens of proof for the wild claims but more increasingly stringent ones on the embattled targets. You can quite clearly see all these principles at work in the BBC article that began this discussion.

Really striking to me how explicit most of the sources in the BBC article are about thinking trans women are men and considering "transgenderism" a menace in and of itself. Not just Lily Cade either. Impossible to view it as anything as in anything but bad faith no matter where you fall down on this genital discussion.

CW


Feel like I should address ufo’s comment on the Ryan John Butcher tweet, because I was definitely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that, but this exchange, further down in the thread, made me feel that my interpretation is correct:

you seem to have a really strange obsession with other people’s genitals

— ryan john butcher (@ryanjohnbutcher) May 22, 2020

why are we supposed to care about these tweets

i don’t read any kind of malice or sexual pressure in them, just maybe an unwillingness to deal with a fuckin weirdo who brings up trans boogeypeople in the replies to a fuckin unrelated tweet. that’s the full context. i would be as annoyed

oh i guess he was trolling the lgb alliance

whose bio is transphobic

We promote the rights of lesbians, bisexuals & gay men, as recognised by biological sex. #SexNotGender.

it's just so weird that literally everybody i see on that side of the argument is a transphobe

"we have finally created a LGB organization that does not include trans people at all, why would you accuse us of being bigots"

yes exactly, this to me seems like a confused and not especially fluent attempt(by a cis gay man?) to articulate why the language and ploys used by an anti trans organisation are transphobic. Quite clearly the final diagnosis is correct here as the lgb alliance is a hate group which claims to campaign 'on behalf of LGB people' but does nothing of the sort even as a fig leaf and is instead concerned with trying to position trans people as fundamentally antagonistic to other queer people and, as their quotes in the above BBC article make clear, worse.

Sara Ahmed talks about how:

"the “gender critical” feminist landscape is littered with phrases like sex is real, sex not gender, we need to ask what they are doing. Let’s call them catch phrases, words or expressions that are used repeatedly and conveniently to represent or characterize a person, group, idea, or point of view. These phrases are a way of signalling an allegiance to a political movement that has its primarily velocity, it seems, in a virtual space. They are relatively new ways of using old terms. Nevertheless, despite being relatively new, to encounter these phrases is to be given a snap shot of a history. To start to try and make sense of them by starting with them, would be like turning up in the middle of a conversation, hearing a reaction, and not knowing what came before that provoked a reaction."

The full article is worth reading ( https://feministkilljoys.com/2021/10/31/gender-critical-gender-conservative/ ) but its worth elaborating that one of the key ways these talking points work is to provoke particular kinds of responses that are easily misconstrued through a kind of bait and switch tactic. The LGB alliance here is engaging a certain kind of provocation by using strong dogwhistle language around 'genital preference' to invite refutations to the entanglements of suggestion and elision that are embedded in those talking points, the next move its to innocently point to the overly emphatic response to an 'innocent' and 'reasonable' suggestion of 'common sense.' These kind of simplistic but vexed statements are very popular in culture wars in general and specifically with transphobes for the useful way that they can erase antagonistic context to this end.

these posts by CAPTCHA remind me of someone I knew who would always say things like "I'm sure everybody will call me a TERF...." and then proceeded to recite TERF-talking points while insinuating they were not one.

I'll stop posting on this thread now.

― Vaguely Threatening CAPTCHAs, Thursday, 4 November 2021 00:38 (fourteen hours ago) link

Feel free to stop any time now.

admonishing someone who is directly supporting a transphobic hate group & elsewhere in the replies defines homosexuality as only being about same-"biological sex" attraction for being weird & obsessed with genitals is not at all objectionable

like this is very clear that captcha is determined to read everything in the worst faith possible

BBC removed the Lily Cade quotes and added:

We have updated this article, published last week, to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she has published on blog posts in recent days, which we have been able to verify.

We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behaviour by the same contributor should have been included in the original article.

"Inappropriate behaviour" is one way of describing rape accusations, I guess.

How strange to find that these totally legitimate concerns are being propagated in this reasonable form by individuals who are quite demonstrably motivated by wild hatred

"Inappropriate behaviour" is one way of describing rape accusations, I guess.

Not even just accusations, she has admitted to sexual harassment and assault. Honestly, despite the very low expectations I had, I'm still shocked that this wasn't enough for them to take the whole article down.

i think the article reporting statistical findings from a small internet survey by a hate group is well in breach of their accuracy guidelines too and bizarre they have found fit to defend it given in the past they have declined to report on a high profile BMJ article due to questions about its validity.

i've read a lot of deluded transphobic rants in my time but very few that have built up to "yes i am a rapist," pretty impressive

plax i hope you resubmit your complaint as what i’ve seen of it is very well worded.

“I know someone that walked out the other day over the article. I know someone else that left a couple of months ago. I know about eight trans people that left the organisation in the past 12 months because they don’t believe that the BBC is impartial anymore,” said one current BBC employee on the call.

some pretty shocking accounts there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4buJMMiwcg

That's about the size of it.

uk people, this is an incredible doc:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000xh73/storyville-petite-fille

texas activism. they are taking donations.

https://www.transtexas.org

^ only in the US tho, so get on it American ilxors

aww one of my former students works for TENT. they’re a great org.

The author is having quite a weekend (I won’t link to her tl but here’s some of who she’s been talking with & apparently following now I guess?)

JK Rowling sending love to the UK Campaign director for one of the world's largest anti LGBT anti women's rights religious pressure groups.

Heartwarming. https://t.co/fPRvvT3xtn

— Mallory Moore🏴 (@Chican3ry) March 12, 2022

Anti-trans troll Matt Walsh is after the transgender health clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center — specifically its healthcare for trans adolescents. And all it's taken is a few tweets by him to get our governor and state attorney general to launch "an investigation" into what everyone knows is by far the best hospital in the state. Ugly shit.

https://www.wsmv.com/2022/09/21/gov-lee-claims-against-vanderbilt-transgender-health-clinic-warrants-thorough-investigation/

Matt Walsh is seriously one of the worst human beings alive, and if there was literally any decency in the world, he would get mowed down by a semi-truck.

he use to be just a pathetic blogger, now he's actually putting people in crosshairs.

He is awfully fixated on other people's identities.

so i guess there's a couple interlocking problems here, let's break them down

1. youtube platforms matt walsh

this guy is huge, he's all over youtube with pretty overt hate speech, and youtube is absolutely fine with this. because of monopoly capitalism it's not like most of us have any viable alternatives for video streaming. this also limits the pressure people who are, like, against genocide of trans folks can exert on youtube.

2. republican control of tn

the republican party nationally has made perpetrating bigotry against trans people a key plank of their 2022 platform. i argue with friends sometimes whether they really want us dead or whether they're just killing us in a cynical ploy for votes. i mean we're just as dead either way, it's kind of a "do angels shit" debate (for the record, i'll say that yes, angels absolutely do shit).

i'd feel better about all of this if i had the feeling anybody in a position of power was taking any of this remotely seriously. this is not a difficult problem to deal with. matt walsh could be gone tomorrow. one day he will be gone, just like fuckin' milo is gone, just like kiwifarms is gone, and the threat level trans people face on a daily basis will be significantly de-escalated. boy, a fuck of a lot of us sure do wind up dying by the time anybody in power is willing to acknowledge the threat.

when somebody acts it _will_ be youtube, i'm pretty confident. this isn't because youtube are any more principled than people in nominal positions of power, but at this point the united states as a polity is basically a post-democratic necrostate. this both (1) prevents official institutions of power from taking any steps against fairly openly genocidal policies being autocratically enacted on a state level (who wants to be america's anthony eden?) and (2) gives corporate institutions unusually wide latitude to do what they want without fear of punitive government action against them.

if you're wondering how all this winds up affecting actual trans people, this world is Hell and i want to die.

(of course, my experience is only anecdotal. i am _unusually_ privileged. most trans people don't have it quite so good as me.)

Ugh, now Vanderbilt has taken down the entire website for its transgender health clinic. This is the leading transgender clinic in the whole state. At the moment it's just a 404.

Yet another sham investigation by GOP politicians based on some dumb cuntbeard's Twitter shit posts

At this point why even pretend to do an investigation. Just say "we heard y'all were doing this", it's basically the same thing and you have more time to drink beer and beat off to Golan-Globus flicks after.

Ugh . This is so fucked. Guessing the site being down is probably hateful internet trolls DDOSing it or something.

Nah that can't be it. Wouldn't look like that if it was.

Perhaps they're trying to avoid people calling and clogging up the phone lines/sending hateful emails. But coming at a real cost to patients at the moment.

My guess is the lawyers said to take it all down until they could review everything. Walsh quoted from a video posted on the website, where a doctor said that the clinic had actually been profitable for the hospital, so it had good institutional support. That of course has been spun into (per a chyron for Walsh's appearance on Tucker Carlson tonight) "Vanderbilt Ghouls Castrate Kids for Big Profit."

Walsh and Rufo and that whole ilk really are the very worst people.

i don't know how to explain how i feel when shit like this goes down. sickened, of course, but you know, there aren't enough _words_ for all the different sorts of disgust i've felt over the past couple of years. i'm gonna try it. a taxonomy of disgust, if you will.

i mean, there's the obvious level. tennessee republicans are going to shut down a medical clinic providing life-saving healthcare to kids on the basis of lies which were completely made up by a grifter. that to me is like... baseline. that's ordinary disgust. that's the level of disgust i feel getting out of bed in the morning.

more disgusting, to me, is how obvious and inevitable this all is. frankly it's more surprising to me that anybody, kids or adults, was able to get any sort of trans affirming healthcare in tennessee at all. they have a fucking bathroom bill, for god's sake! they past a bill making it illegal for trans people to fucking take a dump in their state, which is ironic considering how much effort they've put into turning their entire state into one enormous shithole. given that i as a trans person am legally barred from using toilets in their state, i can't find it within me to be terribly surprised that they're not going to refill my estrogen scrip either.

so let's get to next-level disgust, how many of y'all remember that happening? like, this isn't a call-out, i'm not disgusted at any of you _personally_, it's more the situation. six months ago tennessee passed a draconian law making it effectively illegal for me to micturate in public restrooms within their fair state and gee, you know, it's a busy year i guess. so here we are _again_ with a draconian anti-trans policy put into place by a regime that's pretty much openly genocidal against trans people and what does it affect?

i mean, for god's sake, do y'all have any idea how terrifying _airports_ are for a lot of us? i'm middle-aged and i have friends who fly for work and you know, i guess it's fine, we get booked on our connecting flight through dallas or SLC and jesus christ it's terrifying. one of my friends, christ, she's still traumatized, she was flying out of fucking _SFO_ last week and they decided to choose for for one of those fun full-body scans. it was brutal, dehumanizing, intensely traumatic, and you know that's just _normal_, that's just _part of being trans_. this is flying from _one of the most trans-positive cities in the world_ to _another of the most trans-positive cities in the world_. i mean if we don't let TSA intensely scrutinize trans people's genitals on a whim, doesn't that mean the terrorists win?

but you know, it's not like any of this is anything _new_. and that - again, i'm not calling anybody out personally. nothing that the people who are actively advocating for anti-trans genocide are doing is anything that wasn't considered _normal and ordinary_ 25 years ago. and i don't mean by _cis people_, i mean _i_ considered it normal and ordinary. the victims, you see, the ones who suffer most, they're not the patients. they're the ones who aren't getting a chance to _be_ patients. once you get to vanderbilt, you got a pretty good idea who you are and what you need. if you can't get it from vanderbilt, well, there are other places that can help. ending the Transsexual Menace isn't as simple as denying us care. you have to keep us from _existing_. and the way that was done 25 years ago? that doesn't _work_ anymore. we _were_ all that ignorant 25 years ago, nearly all of us, and now only about, you know, half of us are.

and that, that, is the final layer of disgust, the cherry stone on top of the faeces-cake. they're just killing these kids out of sheer malice, really. it's not going to gain them anything. they're not going to Defeat the Transgender Agenda. they're making a pile of dead kids just for the hell of it, as far as I can figure out.

well, i guess if i don't like that i should vote for the democrats this november, right? that's my option?

This week I heard The Guardian referred to as TERF daily is that a widespread perspective? I only pick it up for the review sections anyway.

yes - the guardian was/is pretty much the vanguard of UK/anglo terfism along with other british liberal outlets. i think there has been some mild pushback from guardian-US but not enough

(it took explicit right wingers longer to adopt specifically terf rhetoric but they're running with it obsessively now making liberal/terf and christian/tory/fascist transphobia increasingly indistinguishable - not sure how useful such distinctions are except that the right wingers tend to be positions of political power while the liberals are concentrated in media). in the UK at least trans people have almost no defenders in media and politics outside the "hard left" (i.e. semi-mainstream activists and commentators who are slightly to the left of acceptable liberal opinion) and not even reliably there (where it's limited and so often blase that it's hard to shake the feeling of many cis leftists only *opposing* terfs to "own the libs" - a perverse mostly UK-specific phenomenon I think)

i don't follow these issues as much as i should because the coverage is a reliable way to trigger suicidal ideation (an intended effect - sometimes i think spite is keeping me alive)

i think there has been some mild pushback from guardian-US but not enough

they published a letter condemning the uk guardian's transphobia a few years back & are quite pro-trans in their coverage. guardian australia is quite good on trans issues too, neither has any time for even both sides nonsense let alone the fairly aggressive transphobia of the uk guardian. both are very thankfully editorially independent of their parent

now making liberal/terf and christian/tory/fascist transphobia increasingly indistinguishable

yeah it's not particularly useful & hasn't been for years - there's the occasional one who's truly coming at their transphobia from an oldschool radfem perspective and has actual left-wing credentials of some sort but they're so few and far between & are either happy to throw in with the right anyway or are now just spending their time throwing an ineffectual tantrum about how no one at all agrees with them

pretty much every mainstream uk media outlet is fairly transphobic to some degree, the guardian has just been especially pernicious because it's had columnists who've had transphobia as a weird pet issue for decades & are largely responsible for giving transphobia its liberal respectability in the uk

i mean that's the really fucked up thing, for all the performative cruelty on display in tennessee, things are just as bad in the uk right now, maybe worse. in the uk, you don't _need_ to have someone like matt walsh going through all that hue and cry to shut down trans-affirming care, because nobody can get it.

some years ago, i heard an american liberal say that they thought abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare". i've since had opportunity at length to consider the implications of that statement, understand what it looks like in practice.

the state of gender care in the uk today looks, well, a lot like it did 20 years ago, when people in the us looked with envy at the uk as one of the "best countries in the world" when it comes to care. you think you're trans? great, get on the waiting list to be evaluated at a gender identity clinic. it's covered through the nhs. the wait time, last i heard a couple years back (like left, i haven't exactly been keeping close tabs on the ongoing genocide for self-care reasons), was a couple years. that's to be _evaluated_. that doesn't _actually_ get you on hrt.

they're not saying you _can't_ get care, like the republicans are. they just have to be _sure_. they have to be _absolutely sure_ because these drugs are, you know, they're _very dangerous drugs_. i mean we're not talking about aspirin here, we're talking about _chemical castration_.

matt walsh didn't make up that term. that's genuinely how medical experts described HRT a quarter century ago. it was a "real-life test", an _ordeal_ trans people had to go through in order to get The Surgery. you couldn't prescribe it lightly.

i mean that's where the shit-for-brains republicans in tennessee are coming from, that's why they treat _puberty blockers_ as comparable to _genital reconstruction surgery_. that's what they were _taught_. that's what we were all fucking _taught_.

"chemical castration". are you fucking kidding me? spironalactone, that's the bullshit they promote on fox news as being effective against covid. (it's not effective against covid.)

denying trans people care relies on meticulously maintained information control, an _enforced state of ignorance_. what that looks like in the UK, if you're a major media outlet, if you're the Guardian or the BBC, it's really fucking easy. you just Teach the Controversy. Trans people: ordinary people, or harbingers of a sinister plot against women? We report, you decide.

you all remember, that was fox news's slogan. they were _effective_, though! absolutely devastatingly effective. right now fox news are sort of at "iraqi information minister" levels of propaganda, everything is on fire and nobody cares, just say whatever shit will get anyone, anyone at all, to desperately keep hanging on to your every word.

now, how effective would it be if _every major media outlet in the country_ reported exactly like fox news did? that's the only way it works. there can be no alternatives. you want to know about trans people? ok! want to see a serial killer, or a pathetic joke? those are your options. both sides! you get to see both sides of the trans experience!

the fucked up thing is that matt walsh doesn't know how much he's doing to keep us _alive_ right now. how much he's doing to fuel our _rage_. like david byrne said. the burning keeps me alive. all of the shit people like matt walsh is saying now? that was stuff i _believed_, genuinely _believed_ about myself. five years ago, not 25, five years ago.

i don't know what the people who hate us think is going to happen. i had a friend who was at a panel with a republican congressperson talking about some issue related to her job, not a trans issue at all, and the congressman spent the whole hour just staring at her with these burning eyes of hatred. i'm sorry, but that shit is hilarious to me. like, their rage (which is a very, very different thing from my rage) is only going to cause one of us to spontaneously combust, and it's not going to be me. it's gratifying. it really is, sometimes it's the only thing that makes my life worthwhile, how much just _existing_ fucks up these assholes. i don't have to do anything, i don't have to say anything, all i have to do is _exist_ and these dumb motherfuckers get all red in the face. i mean there's always the possibility that one of them might get so mad they shoot me dead on the spot, might go dan white on me, but you know what? nothing i can do about that. you go for it, big man. see how that works out for you.

because before they came along, all of this shit was stuff i was doing _to myself_, and it is so, so much of a relief to be able to offload that burden to utter pieces of shit like them.

and in the uk, it's not like that. in the uk, advocating for anti-trans genocide is _respectable_, just like it used to be. i was listening to this fascinating interview with the author torrey peters on the "gender reveal" podcast, she was talking about her tour promoting her novel _detransition baby_, and she was doing major media outlets in the us, all over the place, and in the uk, it was much more small-press stuff, niche stuff. trans people doing stuff that's... i mean, if i say "zines", i don't mean that as a criticism, i don't mean that it's unprofessional, i mean there's a lot more DIY spirit, that you're dealing with people who are very clearly on the _outside_ of things.

see, the great thing about being in a place like tennessee? it might cost you everything, but it's a lot easier to _get out_ than it is to get out of the uk. i had a couple friends in, not tennessee, but south carolina, and they both did that. they got out, and their lives aren't great, but they're _alive_, they're getting life-saving treatment. they exist. things aren't so easy as that over in the UK.

I self-referred to my local gender identity clinic the other week. I'm expecting to get seen in about 2027

There's also this

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3adva3/liz-truss-scotland-gender-identity

I live in Scotland so this is concerning