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

piece of paper with message printed replaced by metal sign

Goddammit now a local institution that I really love — a park and nature center — appears to have canceled an all-ages Halloween-themed drag show because the local bigot brigade (most of whom I'm sure have never even been to the place) spread it around social media and peppered them with emails accusing them of enabling pedophiles etc. I'm still trying to get the full story, but this is a place that I would expect/hope to have a little backbone. The trans moral panic is in high gear in Tennessee.

god this is just sickening

literally everybody that rolls over without resistance just enables these groups even further

Exactly what I have been telling some local officials this morning. More than I usually say to them in my reporter role, but I'm not going to just sit back and document the bigotry, the stakes feel too high. We know what happens when vulnerable groups are demonized, it's always bad.

this is a great example of why all queer people have a common interest and a common cause. before bigots started falsely claiming trans people to be pedos and "groomers" they were saying it about cis gay people, and given the slightest excuse they'll say it again. drag isn't at all the same as being trans - there are trans drag queens and drag kings, but there are plenty of cis people who do drag as well - and now "trans panic" is being used as an excuse to erase _them_ as well. bigots don't have _reason_ to know the difference between cis drag queens and trans people - they hate us all. there's no lgb without the t.

and mothra, thanks for working to get the 411 on what's going on here. if we know who to fight, we will fight :)

Absolutely, the trans panic is an updating and narrowcasting of anti-queer panic more broadly, which has become slightly harder to sell politically even in East Tennessee. And I don't mean to imply all drag performers are transgender. But right, the panic doesn't care about those distinctions, it's just using "grooming" and "child abuse" as a cudgel against queer people in general. In the long and sorry tradition of socio-political scapegoating, obviously.

Fuck those people. The overwhelming majority of abusers of children are cis, "straight" men.

i'd put it more directly than that. transphobia is child abuse. promoting "christian values" is child abuse. of course it's a halloween show. christians burned joan of arc at the stake for being queer and then turned around and made her a saint. queerness and "witchcraft" are inseparable. the whole moral panic about that kid who played dungeons and dragons and then disappeared? james dallas egbert iii? he was _queer_. he disappeared trying to get away from his wildly homophobic surroundings. same reason he was playing d&d in the first place. died later of suicide, btw.

i strongly recommend the visual novel "we know the devil". can't recommend it highly enough.

I vividly remember that case. It happened just around the time I started playing D&D. Even then, the prevailing explanation struck me as completely improbable.

it took me surprisingly long for me to figure out how completely queer-coded D&D and role-playing games in general are. i guess if there's any consolation i'm far from alone in that...

https://i.redd.it/trjvcveye5u71.png

Well, sure. RPGs permit you to create a new identity--or explore your existing one.

right, and _yet_ it took _some of us_ 40 fucking years...

oh well.

the "grooming" rhetoric is so fucking backwards and fucked up. nobody ever _told_ me i was trans. i never _told_ anybody else they were trans. it's the prime fucking directive, and we don't have it because of _them_. it's because it's not _necessary_. there's no fucking _point_. sometimes earlier on i used to complain, christ, it was so fucking obvious, why didn't anybody _tell me_, but even then, i knew the answer. if anybody tried, i wouldn't accept it. i'd shoot back with "how do you know that? how can you possibly know that?" the entire basis of queer identity is that you can know yourself better than anybody else can. they're the ones pulling this fucking martin loring shit on people, spending all of this time and effort trying to convince us all that we _can't_ or _shouldn't_ be queer.

all i ever needed for myself, all i ever give to anyone else, is _permission_. as soon as i felt like i was _allowed_ to be queer, i fucking jumped at it, because it is so much better than anything being cishet ever had to offer me. oh, this could break up my marriage, cost me my career, alienate me from my family and friends? i mean, yes, that all sucks, but on the other hand, I GET TO EXIST. colonialist European ideology did a surprisingly successful job for a while coopting us into our own self-erasure, but as that particular strategy is not delivering the results it used to, i'm not entirely surprised that its advocates are taking more... _overt_ measures.

https://t.co/V1BCBZpvpP pic.twitter.com/vRhRzCs5iy

— CozyGuy SantaPost (@PetriClub) November 8, 2022

Mr. Gad "Size Queen" Saad

never heard of this bloke but "He is known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behaviour" is one of the more cursed sentences I've read on wikipedia

the only Gad Sa(a)d that I will acknowledge
https://imgur.com/a/a1PLgtD

also someone smarter than me needs to unpack the power these people invest in the phallus. blood and terf podcast has done some good work on this. I get the sense that he really had to hold himself back from describing the colour of his hypothetical invasive phallus as well

xxp

oops

https://i.imgur.com/HnyXYIf.jpg

who's that

jesus effing christ am I glad I deleted my Twitter account. The stressor of ***being trans*** on there and having this firehose full of shit shoved down your throat every day is just too much. I don't know how other people do it, I really don't.

sometimes it feels good to be hated and feared by all the worst people in the world but then you remember they have actual power

xp

Left, it's actor Josh Gad from when he was feeling sad.

thank you if he's not bad I hope he's less sad now

xp fundamentally they see us as threatening and destabilising on an ontological level as well as socially and politically. their world is absolutely incompatible with one in which we exist; we're an glitch in the system to be eliminated by all means necessary. I hate their world - it's boring and ugly and small and built on torture and blood sacrifice - if I die with it I'll die happy

a lot of this feels like liberalism running up against its contradictions in an endless hall of mirrors, constantly misapprehending its violence as that of others, those unreasonable ones who refuse to respect our way of doing things so have voided the contract so to speak and are excluded from whatever basic rights it was supposed to provide

(how many prominent islamophobes of the past decades have since expanded their repertoire to target trans people too? and I wonder what kathleen stock thinks about the hijab)

people get handwavey about the colonial roots of transphobia (which are real and deep) and I'm no different but so much of this feels like the most basic colonial projection applied to an ostensibly new problem- i.e. we need to murder/enslave/"save" these people because they're savages - for example they don't respect our gender norms and seem to live for things that aren't reducible or conducive to being reduced to a cold instrumental logic - this means they're against god/nature/science/reason and we need to break them as a people - let's say it's for their own good because the real reasons might make us feel bad about what we're doing

Extraordinary this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k

Made it one second into that

not enough money in the world to get me to click that. I know who those people are and they all wish me harm. That's all I need to know.

The interesting thing to take from that video, which may or may not come as a surprise, is the extent to which British TERFdom is being funded by US right wing orgs. Which is relevant because these ppl all claim to be pro-choice, pro-gay rights feminists.

They all suck, no exceptions.

xp, yeah there's very much a blissfully ignorant "I will team with the leopards on this particular topic, but surely they won't turn around and eat my face, right?" going on with UK Terves.

I'm kinda reminded of the allegiance between anti-porn feminists and the Christian Right in America back in the 70s /80s. The issues are obviously very different, but the willingness of such groups to align themselves with the far right is, sadly, nothing new.

Yes, I think the alliance between TERFs and right wingers is a public thing, and if you'd ask them they'd probably talk about tactical necessities and fighting the bigger enemy first and etc.

But what was new to me was finding out how often notable voices on the UK terf scene are directly funded by right wing orgs - this imo takes them out of Useful Idiot territory and into bad faith/grifter territory.

Not that their ideology would be any less hideous if it was in good faith ofc.

xp I wouldn't say the issues are *very* different- most of the anti-porn/sex worker radfems were terfish (dworkin less so than others) and are still a presence in contemporary movement- and terfs have always treated sex workers much like they do trans women (unsurprising considering the number of trans sex workers and the challenge both groups pose to bourgeois cis white womanhood's claim to hegemony over feminism) i.e. calling for state and/or vigilante violence against them (burchill calling for "prostitutes" to be shot for betraying "women" is one of the more telling and explicit examples)

sidenote those radfems made appalling choices in their tactics, targets, and collaborators, and willingly or not helped set the stage for where we are now, which means their better critiques and insights got lost and are still largely unaddressed in contemporary feminism - except, maybe ironically, from work-abolitonist sex workers who reject both criminalisation and (neo)liberal (sex-)work-as-empowerment bullshit as well as calling out the dworkinesque misogyny-disguised-as-critique-of-such rhetoric of "used holes" etc that is still as rampant and unchallenged among terfs/swerfs as it is among men

Ugh, Oklahoma: https://erininthemorn.substack.com/p/oklahoma-could-force-trans-people

A terrifying new bill was released late Wednesday night in Oklahoma that would ban gender affirming care for a huge number people. Oklahoma SB129 would ban gender affirming care under the age of 26 years old. Gen Z would be entirely banned from gender affirming care under this bill. This prospect is terrifying because Gen Z has been the most open about transitioning and a bill like this would medically detransition a huge portion of Oklahoma’s transgender population.

Good article from Parker Molloy on David French's hiring by the NYT: https://www.readtpa.com/p/david-french-nyt-anti-lgbtq

Yeah that is by far the worst thing about French. Well, that and his abortion stance. (The irony if you can call it that is that a lot of French's critics on the right routinely brand him as being pro-LGBTQ because he one time said he didn't think drag queen story hours should be illegal.)

it's good and no criticism of the writer or the piece but it's such a fucking drag that articles like this need to include so much hedging and qualification (whether out of legal or professional necessity or just well earned caution) and will *still* be taken as vile slander and abuse by the enemy, who meanwhile gets endless money and kudos for pissing all over everyone

seems like the nyt is going the guardian route right down to the firing and hiring practices. can't say i'm surprised, the alleged trans-positivity of american liberalism always looked extremely perfunctory and politically opportunistic and internally conflicted from a distance, i'm sure many are as relieved to jettison it as they were their tepid semi-support for BLM

I made the mistake of reading three comments from purportedly gay/lesbian/lib posters on this piece.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/opinion/lgbtq-rights-activism-alabama.html#commentsContainer

hard to tell the conservative trolls from the gay ladder kickers these days

Quite an episode. A Terf gave a speech quoting "The Big Lie".

Some attempts to say the anti-trans activist quoting Mein Kampf is actually criticising Nazism, but she helpfully turns up in the replies to clarify that she was simply giving Hitler appropriate credit for an idea that she believes is correct. https://t.co/mnmlAzwjhu

— Dave (@MediocreDave) January 16, 2023

That so many people believe that Trump won the election is testament to the power of his hypnotic suggestions. He primed them to support him becoming president for life. How he did this is set out in ‘Comply with Me: Trump’s Hypnosis Toolkit Exposed’. pic.twitter.com/g3oBSQugzK

— Lisa Morgan (@futureseeing) November 9, 2020

lol

Didn't pull this out but yeah..

imagine pulling out The Big Lie in an argument and failing to understand that Hitler wasn't talking about himself, he was accusing Jewish people of using "the big lie".

Great idea mentioning Hitler in the first place.

yeah it always goes well

🚨🚨 TONIGHT 🚨🚨

Especially important to turn out if you're cis.

We'll be there throughout. DM us if you want to find us, and let us know if you have any particular welfare needs.

Love and solidarity ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 pic.twitter.com/fYAowCP1qv

— Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants (@lgsmigrants) January 18, 2023

Glasgow is also having a Trans Rights protest on Saturday at 11am at Buchanan Galleries