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

yes

I think the main problem is that it is much more acceptable within left and liberal/centrist circles. The main public faces of transphobia being ppl like Rowling, Hadley Freeman, etc. adds to that.

xpost

Probably still easier for a trans person to access specific healthcare here than in the US tho (but they're working on making it more difficult).

most distinctive about the UK situation is the extent to which influential liberals and liberal publications have been basically leading the charge and spreading stuff associated elsewhere with the religious or fascist right (and the hard right following suit has made this stuff pretty much hegemonic in UK media). there was a minor outcry recently from prominent UK liberals when biden made some minor gesture towards trans rights ("I can't believe I agree with trump..." etc)

Probably still easier for a trans person to access specific healthcare here than in the US tho (but they're working on making it more difficult).

idk how much it varies between states in the US. it's bad here and probably getting worse

Why does the UK appear more transphobic than the States? Why does that UK transphobia turn up more noticeably on the Left, among progressives and especially people who identify as feminists, in the UK?

Like everything else to do with differences between the UK and the US, it comes down to Class, and attitudes towards Class, what Class is, and how it works.

The foundational myth of the US is the American Dream, the idea that class is something fundamentally malleable, mutable, alterable that individuals can and do change over the course of their lives. That an immigrant can arrive penniless, work hard at a blue collar job, buy a house and send their children to university, at which point the family becomes middle class. Yes, in reality this is completely unattainable to most, but it is still a myth that people *believe* in deeply. In class, birth should not be destiny, to most Americans.

In the UK, class is something far more inborn, inherent, inflexible, and unalterable. The very deep British belief is that if you are born into a class, then you will die as that class, no matter how much money you gain or lose. The circumstances you were raised in, what accent you have, where you went to school, these things *matter*, both conceptually and materially, they will shape your future outcomes in life. A working class person who accumulates a lot of money will be dismissed as “jumped-up” nouveau-riche; a middle class person with a plummy accent who insists they’re working class because their grandad was a milkman will be lampooned as a fake "mockney".

At the core of Feminist thought, is the idea that sex is a Power Relation, like race, like class. Women are disadvantaged, exploited and oppressed As A Class. How you are likely to think about the class of "Women", what it means and who it contains, is likely to be heavily influenced by how you think "Class" works, whether you view it as inherently inalterable or fundamentally mutable. Do you believe that it is possible for an individual to alter their position, within a systemic power structure? If you, like much of the UK, you believe that is inherently impossible, that’s how you end up with supposed progressives who believe that transmasculine people are "jumped-up lesbians" and transfeminine people are "fakes and mockeries".

And that’s the most important thing to grasp about UK transphobia - these appalling ideas don’t just turn up in the ~Gender Crit~ feminists – they turn up among people like the UK Skeptic movement, who played a huge part in the Guardian-New Statesman axis of transphobia, people who are deeply invested in maintaining the class status quo from Helen Lewis to Kier “trans rights are just a culture war” Starmer; and also among traditional ~Working Class~ leftists who refuse to see gender as a class or a class issue, such as the Mark Fisher wing and the SWP during their rapey years. Which brings up another problem, that in the US, trans rights are unequivocally a progressive issue; in the UK left, they are often a stick to beat 'feminists' with.

The state of trans healthcare in the US vs the UK... this is complicated, because quite frankly, US trans healthcare is better because the US healthcare system is so fucked up. It’s so fragmented that it is far more open to individual healthcare providers, whether they are trans affirmative or exclusionary. Trans friends in the US keep and share lists of therapists, surgeons, HMOs, private healthcare providers etc. who *will* offer gender affirming services, and gender confirmation treatments if necessary. If you can find the money, you can find someone who will help you.

The NHS, on the other hand, is a political football. Centralised gender clinics in the UK function as a bottleneck, by design. You have to pass arbitrary tests designed and administered by cis people. In the US, trans friends share lists of doctors who will prescribe hormones; in the UK, trans friends share the exact statements you have to make to pass the gatekeepers, lying if necessary, to access care. (It is the exact situation that Sandy Stone describes 30 years ago in The Empire Strikes Back – that’s how far behind the US the UK is, in terms of trans care.) Trans people being put on waiting lists that are years long, or being told the referral time is literally "infinite" – that is a political decision coming from the current government.

In happier news, that indicates the winds may be shifting on transphobia within traditional bastions of feminism:

https://feministlibrary.co.uk/statement-on-transphobia-and-accountability/

thank you, that explains a lot, appreciate it.

I thought this was a pretty good article on the phenomenon as well from a couple years ago: https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic

this fucking country

as a med student at Brighton and Sussex (i will be having my obs and gynae placements on the mentioned wards) THANK YOU!!! i've heard stuff about ward staff getting phone calls from angry old men about this and it's honestly baffling. like it's not going to affect you???

— ellen (@e_petersxx) February 10, 2021

re: fake story picked up by mutliple outlets about the trans police banning midwives from saying "mother" and "breastfeeding" on wards (non-gendered language has been recommended for people who aren't women, the press presumably thought it didn't sound dangerous enough unless they added the censorship bit)

one recurring theme in this shit is how provisions for trans men, nonbinary people and others keep getting portrayed as being done exclusively for the sake of not hurting trans women's feelings or something (this seemed to be one of JKR's contentions). it's clearly a strategic propaganda choice and related in some way to how trans men keep being identified as trans women, in public and in the press. has there been any writing on this phenomenon?

i literally couldn't sleep last night thinking about this wave of trans hostility currently sweeping across the UK, it's completely fucked up

my employer is now backing away from its relationship with Stonewall

i just literally cannot get my head around 1) why 2) why now

btw anybody who hasn't seen this Contrapoints should do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us

i feel you. between chave dappelle, the sports ban in tx, the bullshit in loudon county, it feels like the reactionaries are organized and amplifying more right now.

it makes me wonder if as a nation we genuinely accept LGB people or if we've just learned that it's not socially acceptable to discriminate against them the way it seems to be fine to do to trans people. The arguments are the same as they were in the 80s: the predatory concerns, the destabilising of family life, it's like we learned nothing.

yeah i suspect thats a major part of it. aside from terfs, its mostly the same interests (ie conservative christians/fascists) pushing these arguments and narratives. i think this is where the whole "you cant say [bigoted thing] about [marginalized group] without [non-material, superficial social repercussions] these days!!!!" complaint comes from, like this stifled antagonism that finally has a target that they can direct their reactionary hostilities towards with some greater degree of social validation.

it is odd though because in Britain a lot of this stuff is coming from a place you wouldn't necessarily expect. The Guardian isn't great but its unique selling point is its alleged left-wing perspective (comparatively, maybe, but generally lol) and to see it take such an editorial line has been confusing because it makes no sense.

it's going to be so obvious in 20 years to everyone what the right side of this argument was, the problem is that it's hurting people right now

^

If only there were actual problems in the world that people could direct their inchoate anger towards, maybe then they'd feel less harmed by the life choices of others that don't impact them in any meaningful way.

Bill 2 is 'the most transphobic bill ever proposed in Quebec,' activist says

Sorry if this isn't the right thread for this, but am I the only one who continually fucks up the right pronouns while speaking? My daughter's 12 year old friend is going by "they/them" and I keep messing up and saying "her/she". Really trying to get it right, but I'm becoming seriously concerned about my 51-year-old brain's ability at defeating my subconscious impulses.

practice! I’ve had a few people change pronouns in my life and just taking ten minutes a day to repeat to yrself a short script like “Their name is x. Their pronouns are they/them. They like x and it’s fun to hang out with them” or w/e works pretty well ime, and it doesn’t seem to occur to a lot of ppl

also gets easier the more they/thems there are in yr life, which will likely happen over time if you have 12-year-olds in yr life

also, it helps not to worry too much about it! not because it isn’t important (it is), but because the more of an anxiety you develop around it the harder it will be (again, ime). when you inevitably mess it up, correct yrself quickly and without any “oh geez it’s just so hard, I don’t know why I can’t get this, I’m so sorry” etc.

Thanks Nicole! Practicing is what I need for sure. Luckily, I’ve haven’t screwed up in front of my daughter’s friend yet and my daughter is more than happy to correct me when I do slip up. I’ll get there eventually.

I’ve had a few people change pronouns in my life and just taking ten minutes a day to repeat to yrself a short script

yeah, same ... also, what nicole says ... you will inevitably mess it up, but don't get defensive or demeaning

Open letter signed by 16,000 calls for BBC apology over trans article
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59074096

You’d think they could have at least recapped the reason that the study is said to be flawed.

Nice to know that some “appreciations” were sent in, though, I wasn’t aware of a formal avenue for those. Maybe they should keep a running ticker of how many they get.

Fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck

the implication that “many trans women are lesbians, and many cis lesbians enjoy fucking them” is an equal statement to “all cis lesbians must be willing to fuck any given trans woman” is so deeply absurd, and the fact that so many publications treat it like a reasonable debate that must be had sucks so much.

there are people with certain physical traits who I don’t want to fuck; people have sexual preferences within a given orientation! but if I were to make a big public stink about it and imply or outright state that those traits invalidated their identity and the sexuality of the people who do, I would expect to be called out for it!

my heart aches for trans women in the UK these days, it’s bad enough dealing with this shit when it’s thousands of miles away

yeah, same ... also, what nicole says ... you will inevitably mess it up, but don't get defensive or demeaning

― sarahell, Thursday, October 28, 2021 1:39 AM bookmarkflaglink

it's just weird *how* defensive people get when they make this mistake, like, if you call a friend by the wrong name or say their last name wrong, and they correct you, you don't sit there causing a scene.

i've fucked it up, been corrected just like anybody else, it's....feedback, you apologize, correct, move on. not that I wouldn't understand why someone who has been misgendered a lot might be momentarily frustrated, but usually the correction is just a polite one and people go apeshit over it.

https://archive.md/MwYYz

uk getting very scary, they're planning to lump in trans-affirmative therapy with gay conversion therapy (as transphobes have been pushing for) and totally ban it for under 18s, also likely banning mermaids

feels like it would be a good time to start taking to the streets? the polls always seem to show that the transphobes are a vocal minority, should start taking advantage of that

Trending now in UK:
#CisISASlur

(and not trending in a "everyone is taking the piss out of it" manner)

these fucking babies don’t know what a slur is

who’s the snowflake now??

Fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck

otm and also i think sussex have handled this quite poorly

there are people with certain physical traits who I don’t want to fuck

The problem is that women are being accused of transphobia for saying this exact thing, if one of those physical traits happens to be having a penis. Here's an example from Simon H. in a post on a different thread four years ago:

Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

a couple of trans comrades have outright stated that 1. sexual preference for certain/specific types of genitals are inherently transphobic

Further down in that thread, j. says they see people expressing this position as well and supposes it isn't too uncommon. It's clear that this line of thinking persists to this day -- it's easy to find very recent examples of it on Twitter. Stating the position is in itself an act of pressuring people into having sex with people they don't want to have sex with. Can we all agree that's a bad thing to do?

just to jump slightly backward to nicole and Neanderthal on pronouns upthread: yes it is new and will take practice.

But honestly it is really not that hard for well-meaning people to navigate this in a well-meaning way. As long as they're truly, y'know, well-meaning.

Currently I am navigating this because my eldest (14) is nonbinary they/them. So are many of their friends. I will likely mess up. But the guiding principle is just to... not be a dick, I guess? The people who are having the most trouble with it tend to already not be on board with the whole project. And of course if you're not on board with the whole project, your motivation to practice and be a non-dick is lessened.

For me, if I try to relate an anecdote about what Ash said to Jinx and how Sky reacted, well, I'm going to be using their names a lot more than I otherwise would. A sentence like "Jax said that Sky and Ash are going to Sky's house" both avoids misgendering, and avoids potential confusion between singular and plural.

the "not being on board" is key, if you support your trans or non-binary friends, you're not going to fly off the handle if you get corrected when you screw up. but if your viewpoint is "I'm really, really trying hard to do this bullshit for you, but as much as I love you, I think this is fucking stupid", you get angry when corrected because you think you shouldn't have to do it anyway.

dating while trans can be a gauntlet of managing different kinds of transphobia; i feel grateful to the few ppl who have been attracted to me without making me feel weird about their attraction. that's about as far as i care to have an opinion on the matter which is otherwise really dense and confusing to me

Stating the position is in itself an act of pressuring people into having sex with people they don't want to have sex with.

No. Conflating abstract discussions about ppl's preferences with coercion makes no sense to me - like if we were having a discussion about, for instance, whether it's racist not to be attracted to ppl of certain ethnicities, I think there'd definitely be ppl arguing that. Casting this as "lesbians pressured into having sex with trans women", as the BBC article did, strongly misrepresents the issue at hand - any casual reader browsing the headline will obviously interpret this as women being personally coerced into having sex, not some philosophical disagreement. Which of course is great for the gender critical crowd because their concerns all boil down to thinking trans ppl are sexually predatory anyway.

vtc, did u just not read the next sentence in my post or

cis people have long portrayed trans people as either punchlines or disgusting untouchables, often both. this absolutely informs who and who isn’t considered attractive collectively and individually.

this doesn’t mean that any given person must correctively fuck trans people, or that every person who doesn’t want to sleep with trans people is a bigot, but it does mean that we should all (trans people included, sometime especially so) examine and correct how those anti-trans biases affect our worldviews

now, if someone comes along and points this out, and someone else responds by loudly and publicly refusing to do so, rallies a bunch of cis people in support of their brave stand against being “pressured” to fuck trans people, and uses that organization to lobby against equal public services for trans people, then yes, they’re doing transphobia!

given that this is one of the main ways that anti-trans organizations have gained power and influence, and that that power and influence has led to very real material restrictions on our individual lives and collective well-being, you can perhaps forgive us for reacting to someone coming along taking the “just asking questions, let’s all be reasonable here” tone about “simply” not wanting to have sex with trans people comes off as in direct service of transphobia.

don’t want to fuck us? don’t fuck us! a billion tweets can’t make you. just keep it to yourself for god’s sake, it’s being used by more hateful people than you to hurt us.

last two posts otm

Neanderthal otm

nicole, I don't know if it helps you to hear this, but current 14-year-olds are apparently woke as fuck. I know I'm in a socially liberal bubble but still. If I were to judge by my child's school and my child's friends, everyone is either queer or queer-positive. And they appear to view trans inclusion (including respecting pronouns) as an integral part of LGBTQ+ acceptance. Their teachers and school administrations have been supportive as well.

I don't think you're in a bubble, it's just how people are as people tend to be supportive to each other. The terfs and other bigots have built bubbles for themselves.

nicole that post of yours is fucking outstanding

i'm also wowed by nicole's posts itt and elsewhere. i don't have anything of import to say about this other than i'm also mystified about 1) the timing of this wave 2) the uk axis and 3) the appeal of transphobia generally. threats to male supremacy in the u.s. i understand, but this seems different.

is fascism like viagra for imperialism?

fascism is a parakeet playing jenga badly

I am fascinated by the roman penetration binary and wish we knew more about how gender worked in those societies

at what age was a boy/man supposed to give up anal stimulation? did they actually give it up or just pretend they did in public?

it's about renaissance florence but recommend michael rocke's forbidden friendships

there's some kind of issue with a transphobic... tiktok... mortician? i feel like that last sentence was generated by an ai. probably it just means i'm old. and there are lawyers involved. i don't know. tiktok is like three generations younger than me.

Idaho's trans health care ban was struck down by the courts. I had to email my boss this morning to find out how this impacts my job — like, if we have to send out letters or something. No word yet.

An interesting New York Times interview with Eddie Izzard: comedian, marathoner, aspiring politician. (Free link; I'm a subscriber.)

Thanks for the link. Holy shit @ those marathons, my god!!!

Thanks for sharing the link unperson! I'm really glad I was able to read it. There are lots of media narratives about trans people, not always positive, and paywalls frustrate me because here are all these cis people saying all this shit about us and I have no idea what it is because I don't subscribe to their newsletter.

This is good to read because it is a trans person telling her own story, and I'm in favor of that. It's also more complicated... she's being interviewed by David Marchese, a celebrity interviewer who is, to the best of my knowledge, a cis man. Also, as the end of the article notes, "This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations."... and it's in the New York Times. My experience is that the NYT's editorial policy towards trans issues favors showing "both sides" of the "trans debate". This is in contrast to the editorial policy of the Washington Post, which from what I've read is pretty unambiguously on the side of "trans rights are human rights".

It's good for me personally to read because Izzard (who I thought was going by Suzy last I heard? But I'm not always up to date on these things) was very much a role model for me... she helped me to understand myself and accept my transness. I do want to talk about how, though, because the way Izzard describes her life in this story is very different from the way I understood Izzard when I was growing up. It's complicated and very much gets into the whole "gender as social construct" thing.

Izzard talks about having known she was trans since 5 and having come out and the article talks of her having coming out publicly as transgender in '85, but that's not how I understood it. There's a little.... I'm gonna blame the Times on this, actually. This is bad and biased framing. Now, admittedly I'm making an assumption here, but I find it _extremely unlikely_ that Izzard got up on a stage in 1985 and said "I'm transgender". No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

It's important for me to say this because of my experience the first time I tried to come out, in 1996. I wasn't able to understand myself, much less explain myself. All I could say was what I was not. I wasn't a "transvestite" because I wasn't a man who dressed in women's clothes. I wasn't a "transsexual" because I didn't want to get my dick cut off. (Other people might frame GRS different ways. That's the way I framed GRS at the time.) I was... well, I didn't know what I was. I just kind of felt like a girl?

The way Izzard influenced me was that she challenged the framing I grew up with. Not in the '90s, but later. For a long time I thought of "transvestites" and "transsexuals" as being distinct categories with nothing to do with each other. So when I found out that Izzard, who I thought of as a "transvestite", a cisgender, heterosexual man who just liked dressing in women's clothes, actually identified as _transgender_, it was really liberating. It helped me to understand that these weren't rigid categories that defined who we were, who we were allowed to be. That wasn't until around 2019, though. It was one of the many things that helped me understand myself as trans.

The thing that is most disappointing to me is to hear that Izzard is an open defender of J.K. Rowling's statements about trans people. Izzard's statement that "I don't think J.K. Rowling is transphobic"... I don't take that as the opinion of a trans person who I happen to differ with. Her statement is an untruth. It saddens me to hear trans people who are speaking from a position of relative privilege making false statements of this sort. Rowling isn't just a transphobe. Her transphobia is causing a great deal of harm to trans people. So this I think is one of those instances where a trans person is aligning herself with transphobia. I'm always saddened to see that happen, but it's particularly painful when it's someone who has been a role model for me, who did help me to understand myself as trans.

So yesterday I happened across a reference to a Mythbusters spinoff called the "White Rabbit Project" from 2016. Turns out one of the things they talked about was a supposed plan by British intelligence to, well, trans Hitler. Yeah, apparently somebody at some point had the idea of putting E in his food and, I guess, force femming him? This is one of those things that gets described as "unbelievable but true", and for me, the jury's out on the "true" part... the only source seems to be a guy named Brian Ford, who wrote a pop history book on "World War II Secret Weapons", and doesn't provide a source for his claim. So, grain of salt on that one.

What I was more interested in is how this 2016 show would approach the legend. It's fascinating to me because nobody on the show (which was presented by the old Mythbusters build team) seemed to have any concept of the possible relevance of this to trans people. They talked about the possible effects of it and they said things like "well it could cause nausea" which is... not really a major side effect of estrogen. Nobody mentioned gender dysphoria. It was all "he'd get boobs and his weenie would stop working". It was never stated outright that the gendered assumptions underlying this idea were bullshit, but yeah, look, Hitler probably didn't start World War II because of gender dysphoria. Sounds like an absolute waste of estrogen. There were so many people in Britain who really could have used that estrogen, but noooo, _they_ can't have estrogen, only Hitler gets estrogen. Fuck you Britain.

But also like. The world has changed so much in the last EIGHT YEARS. It's fucking wild.

I have kind of come back a lot to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" over the, I don't know, year or less since I've become aware of it. It's this... I guess the best I could call it "ambiguously trans". I like the ambiguity in these stories, their resistance to providing clear, straightforward trans narratives. That's probably why the least interesting character in "Bokura no Hentai" for me was the girl who's just a straightforward trans girl. The character I connected more with was Parou, the more "otokonoko" character, even though I was never anything close to or resembling the "otokonoko" trope myself.

Anyway, this video on "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" I thought was really good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illSp1oVXzA

First off I kind of love the weird way it's structured, to where it just takes ten minutes in the middle to have someone review some of Hibari's outfits. That's so much of what makes the show for me, she has just really amazing outfits... Hibari just has just a vibrant _style_. A lot of trans wish fulfillment is just thinking about all the cute outfits that would be possible. That gets put down a lot and treated as superficial... like, it's not specific to transness... under patriarchy to be concerned with fashion whatsoever is kind of dismissed as sort of vain and image-obsessed. The sad truth is, as much as I was actively hostile towards my own appearance pre-transition, I didn't really stand out. I'm there wearing ten year old pants that just look like clown pants because I'd lost fifty pounds since I bought them, and I see plenty of cis guys out there who are just that slovenly. It's not remarkable. Male privilege is kind of a double-edged sword... as a passing trans woman in her late 40s, a lot of my passing privilege is that I have the option of not being perceived in the same sense that cis women in their 40s aren't perceived, aren't seen as _suitable objects of desire_. Which sucks because being desired is kind of personally important to me. I don't want to not be perceived - invisibility for me is about as hazardous to my health as silence - but I do at least have the option of looking _unremarkable_.

The main thing, though, that I connected with is how Pyramid Inu talks about... the cost of doing this representation that aligns so closely with present-day trans experience, of depicting with startling accuracy both how trans women _behave_ and the way trans women are for a lot of us aspirational figures, the cost of that is that the show can't ever reach narrative closure, not in that era. Kousaku can't wind up with Hibari... it's not a product of a world that can see a cis guy and a trans girl get a "happy ever after" kind of ending. It's, like, literally unimaginable. That's a lot of what transness was for me, growing up... literally unimaginable. I think that's what strikes me about these sort of amgibuously trans figures from this era... they're sort of visions of a way that transness could exist in a time where I just _couldn't_ exist as trans. It makes me feel less, I don't know, invisible. Maybe.

BTW it's a fucking tragedy that there was never a manga or anime of Guldeen: The Future Wanderer. Trans mecha directly inspired by "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!"? Oh my God that this doesn't exist is proof positive that we live in the worst timeline.

I don't think, honestly, it would be possible to remake or do a sequel to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" today. A lot of it is dependent on the culutural role of gender non-conformity. Because today somebody who presents and acts like Hibari does in that show and you can just say oh, wait, that's a trans woman... and as soon as you do that you have to kind of deal with the reality of what it's like being trans in 2024. One of the things that really clicks with me about "Hibari" is that it's a work that _feels_ authentically trans but is at the same time escapist fantasy. Trans escapist fantasy just isn't something that's narratively _accessible_ in 2024. It's unimaginable to me in the same way that Hibari and Kousaku winding up together was unimaginable in 1983. At the same time, it's something I really desperately need, something I'll take wherever I can find it. I think that's a lot of what draws me to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!".

ok i know we probably have another trans thread but youtube keeps recommending me more and more niche trans-related weeb videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca5B1DxdkZw

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/01/trans-people-england-more-likely-mental-health-condition-study

i wonder why, the guardian

important to note that a majority still don't appear to have long-term mental health conditions. the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too. these results back up the notion that under conditions where they're not treated like scum by the majority of the commentariat they'd have similar mental health patterns to the population as a whole

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

You're correct - she made a big point of saying she was a tranvestite and not a transexual in his early shows! I used to know almost all of Dressed to Kill and being an executive transvestite was a huge part of it. She is going by Suzy but I also read that she doesn't mind Eddie or other pronouns since she knows that how most people have known her for decades.

*her* early shows obv whoops

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

― ufo

i think that if i were in the uk i would feel a lot more pressure to... act like i wasn't mentally ill, to mask (i don't think of my autism or ADHD as "mental illnesses", i'm just borrowing the framing here). because like imago says "the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too."

my being trans is strongly correlated with my being a fucked up headcase! for the first 40 or so years of my life i believed, because i was _taught_, that my wanting to be a woman meant there was something deeply, deeply wrong with me, that i was probably secretly a serial killer or something, and that i could never ever tell anybody about it. that shit didn't just _go away_ the second i started taking estrogen. it wasn't just like "oh i'm a girl everything's fine now and i have no problems".

and yeah UK media outlets like the guardian centering the trans "debate", the idea that it's legitimate to question the validity of my existence as a human being, that kind of thing does have a tendency to undermine a person's sense of self-worth. one of the things i struggle with is this constant pressure to be one of "the good ones". i'm not one of the "good ones" because there are no "good ones". like oh sure, being trans is fine as long as you're not also mentally ill or communist or polyamorous or kinky or, you know, _queer_ in any meaningful way. in a lot of ways that's what "passing privilege" boils down to, i have the ability to look like i'm _not obviously queer_ in certain contexts.

living in the us, in a trans-supportive environment, i have kind of a different challenge, which is communicating to people that i'm a fucked up headcase _because_ of systemic transphobia, when the assumption has historically been that the whole "trans" thing is in itself the mental illness. like i think there _is_ causation in a lot of cases, it's just the exact opposite of the direction a lot of people assume it is.

*her* early shows obv whoops

― Benson and the Jets (ENBB)

well that's the thing, it's hard to say even if it _is_ a whoops because she's "ok with any pronouns". it's one of those things where it's hard to know what that means. like in her case "preferred pronouns" are genuinely that? "preferred pronouns"? and suzy is her "preferred name". so it's ok, i guess, that the NYT does a whole profile on her and consistently calls her "eddie" even though her preferred name is suzy?

that's the thing that makes it difficult, again, all of the _pressure_ we're under. saying "oh i'm ok with any pronouns" is a great way to take some of the sting out of being misgendered. if people are gonna call you by a man's name and use male pronouns for you no matter what, you know? it's something i also saw in with, like, rachel humphreys, lou reed's partner for much of the 70s. will hermes, you know, he does his best navigating the shifting landscape of gender identities, and one of the things he points out in his prologue (which is all of his lou reed book i've actually read so far lol) that humphreys was ok with "any pronouns", and i mean, if you look at the shit people _said_ about her back then... it's not like she was in a position to say "no, i am a woman and you are going to respect that." i have the ability to be able to say that, _now_. i didn't in 1996, which is one of the big reasons i didn't transition back then.

i think you kind of see that in a lot of people who have been out as some variety of gender non-conforming for quite a long time. the stuff trans people go through now, it's often invisible to cis people and is really hard to talk about. i think there's a pretty strong likelihood that suzy has spent her whole life being called the f-slur. when people are transphobic, usually they don't call us the t-slur, they call us the f-slur. i mean, how do you deal with something like that? for a while i did the "i'm not an f-slur, i'm a dyke" thing, and now i'm like "sure, ok, i'm an f-slur, is that a problem?" (i'm "reclaiming" it but not to the extent that i'll say the actual word in ways that will make people uncomfortable!)

which is to say that while i'm horrified at suzy saying that she doesn't think j.k. rowling is transphobic, i absolutely understand where that impulse is coming from. i don't blame her for it. it is, though, especially horrifying to me, seeing a trans person caping for jkr. to me, that's a special case, that's when someone externalizes internalized transphobia. that's some of what gets contrapoints criticized from certain people within the trans community - there's specific stuff that's not wider public knowledge that makes that explicit, but again, when you look at where she came from, which is 4chan... you come up through there and you're gonna get a fuckton of internalized transphobia, you're really gonna learn to hate yourself in a way that a lot of trans people don't. and a lot of times it's people who in one way or another externalize internalized transphobia, the blaire whites, the caitlyn jenners, who are held up by cis media and cis culture as being _representative_ of us. but there are more complicated cases! richard o'brien is a positive role model for a lot of trans and gender non-conforming people, is non-binary, and they're also transphobic. contrapoints' videos, overall they've been very positive for trans people. her work has done a huge amount to promote trans acceptance. that's way more important than the occasional undercurrents of internalized transphobia in her work. those occasional undercurrents don't invalidate the tremendous things she's done to further the cause of trans rights. it's just _there_, occasionally, and sometimes it comes out in ways that hurt some of us.

like i said, suzy izzard was really influential on me, had a positive influence on me in a lot of ways. she just doesn't speak for trans people (any more than i speak for trans people) and some of the things she says are actively harmful to a lot of trans people.

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

those mental health stats are BS

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

No way was Izzard ever drag-as-comedy tbf.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

i mean i do think the whole tradition is interesting, there is a part of the gender non-conforming experience that is deeply conservative - i mean, just look at how many trans women come through 4chan. i do wonder, speculatively, if there is perhaps some correlation to how passing-centered one is and conservatism. a lot of times "passing" comes hand in hand with, you know, tradwifing. that's one of the reasons i was so, i'll say, ambivalent to the notion of "passing" early in transition. i didn't want to tradwife.

what i remember of izzard's stuff is that it was very "yes, i'm a transvestite, but when you think of what a "transvestite" is in your head, that's _not_ who i am". part of it is "hiding in plain sight" but part of it is that, i mean, the thing about being a "pioneer" is that a lot of the time one just has no fucking idea what one is doing. literally as far as most of us know we're just making this shit up for the first time. so izzard is out there in what we might call today "genderfuck". i mean even the fact that she's coming out there as a transvestite and _not wearing a skirt_ is kind of a mindfuck to me at the time but the genderfuck goes way beyond that.

but at the same time there's a lot of "look i'm also a basically normal person". that's still a difficult thing to me, i'm _not_ basically a normal person? but most of the shit i do is normal shit. and even when i do stuff that other people would think of as "weird", people make way too big a deal out of it. i don't want people to think of me as being "a normal person just like anyone else", but i also don't see why people would find it "weird" if i decide to go out in public wearing booty shorts and thigh-high striped socks (which i tend not to do, mostly because i'm not always up to being stared at). it's like, look, i just felt like dressing that way today! that's kind of the sense i get from izzard, she's up there on stage in tight leather pants and high-heeled boots and makeup and is like "yeah i like dressing like this, why is that a big deal".

that said i didn't, in the 90s, recognize her gender stuff as being in any way along the same spectrum as my gender stuff. a lot of it was that at the time i was interested in the more traditionally femme aspects of womanhood. looking at it now, it makes sense, like at that point she'd been publicly gender non-conforming for, i guess, a decade, and one's sense of style sort of tends to evolve over that period of time. a lot of it, i think, genuinely is a lack of lived experience. patriarchy sucks, being a woman sucks a lot of the time... at the same time, there are, like, 40 years of female gendered experiences that i've missed out on. transition isn't as simple as pushing The Button and going from a 43-year-old "man" to a 43-year-old woman. i've gotten a crash course in a lot things, good and bad.

there were all these ideas that just... wasn't any overarching conceptual understanding of them. i had a friend back in the '90s, when i was first trying to come out, who said they didn't have a gender. nowadays, that's easy for me to get, oh sure they're agender, cool, at the time, though? at the time i'm like that meme of columbo reading "gender trouble". "gender huh? see my wife got a cousin lew and she tells me lew don't have one. you ever hearda somethin' like that?" so izzard comes out and says "action transvestite" or "executive transvestite" and i come out and say "i don't know, i'm not really a transvestite and i'm not really a transsexual, i just, kind of, want to do girl shit sometimes", and it turns out those two things probably have a lot to do with each other... it wasn't something that was easy to recognize at the time.

-

when it comes to the larger notion of drag i do tend to... and this is a false binary, like a lot of binaries... differentiate between monty python-style pepperpot drag humor where it's like "ha ha, don't i look ridiculous and stupid, men wearing dresses are disgusting" and the sort of drag humor where the person has obviously put a lot of effort into it and knows how to look good. one of the things i think about with regards to "humor" is this 14th century rabbi by the name of kalonymus ben kalonymus, his big work was something called "eben bohan", which... i haven't read the whole thing, but apparently it's kind of a mix of serious pieces and more comedy bits. and there's this bit in there which is him lamenting over not having been born a woman. some critics have read this and said oh, yeah, this is one of his comedy pieces, god, that's hilarious, who would want to be a _woman_? a lot of trans people, on the other hand, particularly transfemmes, we read this and it's just like "oh my god, he fucking gets it, this is what gender dysphoria _feels_ like." and maybe it was just, you know, "satire" like people in the past have said it is, that its deep expression of gender dysphoria is just, i don't know, us reading into something that isn't there. who knows? the author has been dead for something like 700 years now. even if it is "satire" i find a lot of value and solace in being able to see someone writing 700 years ago writing something that resonates so deeply with me, with my experience of gender dysphoria.

it's not fucking "lola", is what i'm saying.

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

i mean she could always just have not said anything. she didn't have to call her out _or_ defend her.

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

― Left

i'll be honest my sample is skewed, there are some really good, legitimate reasons for people who are emotionally and mentally well-adjusted to, like, not actively seek out my company, haha

and also yeah the mental health people i engage with, there's a pretty common, if unspoken, understanding that a lot of "mental health" issues are caused by systemic oppression beyond our individual control. like yeah i feel like shit because people treat me like shit. that's not exactly a failure on my part, but i still gotta deal with the consequences of that.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

― Left

plus wanting to avoid media depictions of gender non-conformity that one suspects might be pretty hostile is... i mean, it's an evaluation one has to make. if i'm going to go see "the crying game" looking for an honest and sensitive portrayal of the trans experience i'm going to have a real bad time.

the news from yesterday - Cheshire Police didn't pursue Brianna Ghey's murder as a hate crime despite it being so very obviously so, and the sentencing judge made it perfectly clear in her sentencing remarks that she agreed.

ok lol anybody remember Val Venis
the 1990s wrestler with the pornstar gimmick
he's apparently now a libertarian and has decided trans people shouldn't exist. so someone bought up the domain valvenis.com and redirected it to a trans rights website, which is extra hilarious because it highlights how nobody is even slightly interested in val venis and certainly is not going to go to this guy's website
i bet gorgeous george would've said "trans rights"

Val venis
Has a small weenis

in less entertaining news tumblr's ceo's recent actions have led to a mass exodus of trans users (to cohost, i guess?):

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/

silberling's article notes:

Tumblr is in an extended downward spiral. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (now TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but the platform struggled to the point that Automattic bought Tumblr for just $3 million in 2019. Last year, Mullenweg said that the platform loses $30 million each year, and later, he reassigned the majority of Tumblr’s staff to other projects inside of Automattic. But no one on the trust and safety team was reassigned, so these moderation decisions likely weren’t impacted by the company shake-up. However, Tumblr has a bad track record for content moderation decisions, especially those involving trans people.

ok this shit is fucking wild

https://metalinjection.net/news/breakups/hardcore-band-fires-their-vocalist-for-the-most-insane-unhinged-behavior

lead singer dosed one of the other band members, sixx, with estrogen long-term so he could steal that band member's girlfriend

it, uh. didn't work. for the record.

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nassau-county-banning-transgender-athletes-from-competing-at-its-facilities/

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

doesn't reflect poorly enough on trans people, for the daily wire to make it a movie they'd have to make the diego character trans

god i'm giving them ideas now aren't i

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

oh yeah, institutional transphobia has been on the rise for a while now, and it's spreading

one of the reasons focusing on the positive is so important for me is because it's... not as _visible_ as the negative

i don't know anywhere in the world _less_ transphobic in pdx, but even here, it's very much on the rise. there's more hostility. every day it's something else. cishets mostly don't know about it. it's hard even for us queer people to know about it, because a lot of the reporting on it is paywalled. yesterday, for instance, the wall street journal published an article titled "Can Warner Bros. Uncancel J.K. Rowling?" i don't have access to the article, but yasharali writes about it:

https://www.threads.net/@yasharali/post/C3ys75XxGt5/

"David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery has mounted a full-court press to woo Rowling back into the fold which includes regularly speaking to her and flying out to London to have dinner with her"

and, i mean, i'm not really in the know about media companies, but the context i've heard is that well of course zaslav is, zaslav is a scumbag, a mercenary, interested in nothing more than artificially inflating the value of WB before dumping it on someone else

which may be true, but god, name me someone in charge of a major media property who _isn't_ a mercenary scumbag?

More about that here
https://www.therowlinglibrary.com/2024/02/24/exploring-the-relationship-between-warner-bros-and-j-k-rowling-three-key-points-revealed-by-the-wall-street-journal/

depressing but not surprising. honestly, most people don't have any idea that rowling is a transphobe. it's easy to look at that and conclude that there's no negative impact to supporting transphobes. obviously i'm hardly unbiased on this issue but i do think that conclusion is based on a misread of the data. while the current hostility towards trans people _is_ dissuading at least some people from transitioning or leading to them to detransition, at the same time, large numbers of people are continuing to pursue transition, even given a fairly hostile and repressive environment.

it's the small stuff, the everyday stuff, the little kindnesses. there's the headlines and then there's the viral tiktok about the guy and his child in smalltown texas who saw a trans woman for the first time and was overwhelmed with, like, happiness. joy is a social contagion. i keep saying that because i keep _seeing_ it.

i don't pay much attention when trans people get killed, only for my own well-being, not because it's not important. i know someone did, recently, and people are being hateful, and maybe it'll keep going like that. more violence. more killing. more blaming _us_. maybe nobody will connect that back to rowling. maybe it won't affect warner bros.' bottom line. ever. they'll keep raking in the bucks and turning a blind eye to the little "side projects" their business associates have and it'll just be some insignicant minority on social media talking about "cancelling" them.

well, i'm biased. i can't imagine i'd take that bet.

idk. i got called for jury duty today and i was surprised by how many just... ordinary-looking people there were. i'm not saying that as a put-down. it's just not something i see a lot of. i know that "ordinary-looking" isn't the same as "ordinary". i don't think of anybody as being actually "ordinary". there was one lady in front of me with pink hair on one side and black hair on another and stompy boots and a pentagram badge on her bag. behind me was a goth girl, the sort who dress goth even when it's cold and they're reporting for jury duty. and then there's me, looking as ordinary as anyone else, just with a trans flag-colored horizontally striped top from target's pride collection (i'm pretty sure the gay agenda has reclaimed _all_ horizontal stripes, at this point. all horizontal stripes are gay, just like rainbows are gay, just like love is gay). me and a couple hundred people in queueing for half an hour and then being told they can go home. is anybody else there seeing their first trans person? it sounds ridiculous, for god's sake, i live in _portland_, there are _thousands_ of us. even here, though. it's easy to not notice. maybe out of those hundreds of people, someone there saw me and was happy i existed, like that guy in small-town texas. joy is a social contagion, but it's not yet a pandemic. that doesn't bother me. i haven't gotten the impression that bigots are good at controlling pandemics.

Not sure where to put this but a week or so ago I saw a listing for a club night which described itself as "LGBTQIA+ and Hetero friendly" next to the address and hours info

lol

Let me tell you a short story how I “met” @HJoyceGender and two other leaders of @SexMattersOrg in the train to Cambridge last night. I didn’t know who they were at the time but I was sitting near a middle aged lady who was typing in very big letters on her phone. So I look.. 1/

— Letters Bunchofnumbers (@dschw89) February 27, 2024

tldr; Helen Joyce caught reading Harry Potter slashfic on a train

It’s not slash. Slash is male/male. It’s extremely funny that she reads in font huge enough that it can be clearly seen by someone sitting across from her. Also, JKR quite famously hates fic of her characters. Very funny thing to happen to this awful person.

oh nooooooooooooooo are we gatekeeping slash now :(

i'm actually reading a book by an old-school usenet veteran about "yuri" and the history of it, all the battles over it and who the audience is - is "yuri" an offensive term, should it be called "shoujo-ai" ("girls love"), stuff like that

with the added layer that these arguments are mostly taking place in the anglosphere about framings of gender and sexuality from another culture

but with the _added_ added layer that these framings were in themselves borrowed from english language framings

like for instance early on the term "rezu" started to being used, but a lot of its use was kind of similar to the way the word "lezzie" used to be used - stuff sort of based on cishet ideas of "lesbianism"

which then led to Actual Lesbians(tm) adopting the term "bian" to describe themselves

and all i can think of is "With our forces combined..."

ANYWAY to follow up i have now seen the tweet where the twitter CEO outed the trans user's alternate accounts, and i won't be sharing the account names because it was a privacy violation, but the alternate account names are fucking _hilarious_ and i am here for all of them. also hilarious that this guy thought by sharing the account names he would, like, shame the user. real "charlton heston reading the lyrics to cop killer" vibes.

No no, last week it was the twitter CEO, this week it's the tumblr CEO..

when does twumblr get involved

wtf

https://x.com/bowwowgoodboy/status/1774917359590916149?s=20

So I did watch the new Lily Alexandre video and it's as always a good watch, a difficult one, but I thought the peroration was particularly good at... succintly expressing things I see around me, things that I feel a lot and don't know how to express.

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

"With such a wide range of people committed to giving trans people a hard time, it can sometimes feel like the whole planet is conspiring against us. Nearly all the trans people I know are barely scraping by, struggling in ways they've done nothing to deserve, while the people working to intensify our struggling face no such stigma. A lot of people I know are withdrawing. A lot of them are coping in ways that worry me."

There's more to it than that. Lily's not saying that to be a doomer. I'm not a doomer either. The stuff she says after that is important. It's stuff I know, stuff I've known for a while, and it's important to be reminded of that, and since she says it, it's important for me to remind other people of that, in my own words this time.

The planet is not conspiring against us. I'm a longtime conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't say that there's a conspiracy _against_ trans people at all. It's not really _about_ us at all. The kinds of shit people are saying about us, they could be saying it about anyone. The Jews or the Palestinians or Black people or, you know, anyone. We're not the first. I don't think we'll be the last, though I'd fucking love to be wrong about that. It's comforting in a way, knowing that it's not just us, knowing that trans people aren't alone in this, but it's also frustrating. Alexandre quotes Bari Weiss, who's Jewish, parroting flat out anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, just with the word "trans" substituted in for "Jewish".

And it's not... I mean, someone like Weiss is exceptional in a lot of ways. Not, like, everybody is going to be as blind to the reality of things as Weiss clearly is. It happens more than I'd like, though, and it's so dispiriting. I am withdrawing. I am pretty withdrawn, because it just hits me so hard whenever I see someone acting like that. I don't really want to know just how _many_ people there are who'd do the same thing, under those circumstances. And do I blame them personally? Not for the most part. Weiss, yeah, sure, I'll blame her personally. Like I said. She's exceptional. Most people? No, I don't blame them. But it breaks my heart. Every time. I can't bear to see it. Even if that's only, like, one in ten - and I think that's a pretty low estimate, one in ten - it breaks my heart.

I've said this a couple of times, but it's good to be here lately. It's good to just... talk to cis people and know that y'all have my back. That none of you are against us, that if you were, you wouldn't fucking be here, one way or another. I value that a lot. It is easy for me to feel, sometimes, that I'm in a bubble, that I live in a different world from everyone else, that it could all just come crashing in, that we could all just be _gone_, and we would be... like what frogbs said about people who died from COVID.

even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

And, you know. If it's them, it could be us. It could be all of us. That scares me. I hope... I hope that fear is groundless. I still, haha, I still have a little bit of hope left, I guess. Even when I feel like I don't.

if anyone's in or near glasgow there's a protest at 6.30 today in george square. the local nhs board are due to announce a ban on hrt and blockers for trans youth

instagram.com/transprotestglasgow/

gotta say things aren't looking too great over here on terf island rn, and i can't see the situation improving any time soon :(

I feel for you. The utter bleakness is just overwhelming sometimes, particularly when it comes to things in the UK. Not that things in the US are all beer and skittles... people keep saying "2024 is an election year"... I don't know what that's supposed to mean and I don't want to know. I stopped following politics years ago... it's incredibly clear to me that whatever happens isn't up to me... at least in the US _some_ people will support us. I don't feel like I can talk about the reality of it, though, people turn away, they can't look at what's happening to us. I can't blame them. Sometimes I just, you know, feel like our lives are the abyss people avoid staring into...

Right now I can't bring myself to hope for a better world. I don't feel like... I don't feel like I have the _right_. That's just right now, though. How I feel changes a lot.