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

Thanks for posting it here.

As I may have said, my eldest child is an enby teenager who is the absolute light of my life. I also have hope for the youths.

I spent much of this weekend volunteering at a color guard event with 400 or 500 teenagers. I strive to keep appropriate distance while respecting the people with whom I interact, but: per my casual observations there are a heck of a lot of trans folx here, and also pretty universal respect and inclusion. In this realm at least. A good sign, I hope - for Sky and for their peers.

They're making the world they want to live in and I think that's awesome.

The intelligence, compassion, and ability to think their way through the complexity of matters of gender and sexuality that I regularly see my (queer and non-queer) university-aged students display definitely gives me hope, but I still see a lot of queer twentysomethings struggling with a lot of the same crap that I did 20+ years ago, which is less encouraging. What really blows my mind is that my 13-year-old niece already has a few queer friends--including one trans kid--and just how normal (for lack of a better word) all this stuff is to them. A few years ago my niece even made my husband and I "Pride cupcakes" for June.

Anyway, it should go without saying that anyone who fights these developments, or tolerates those who do, are truly the worst trash on earth.

just for the record, i am very much in favor of dreaming the culture forward by all means necessary and it is heartening how much the baseline has moved... though the rapidity of that shift seems to be sparking the current flurry of freakout from trans/homophobes seeing the world change faster than they can handle. Nina's advice about "going slow" still applies.

I signed the NYT Letter, but credit where it's due, this piece is good at laying out how the wave of anti-trans legislation is affecting families of trans kids:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opinion/trans-gender-missouri.html

though the rapidity of that shift seems to be sparking the current flurry of freakout from trans/homophobes seeing the world change faster than they can handle.

respectfully disagree, the personal lives of trans people have such little impact on the daily lives of cis people, you have to go out of your way to be transphobic.

no, you're right. more accurate framing would be "political media depiction of that shift seems to be sparking" etc

There's a lot of hard work going on right now to make sure being transphobic isn't such a niche interest.

What I'm seeing of it in the U.S. may or may not be different than the political/cultural path it's taken in the U.K. It seems to me that here it's mostly being used as a way to resuscitate the broad anti-LGBTQ agenda that took a serious hit with the Obergefell decision and general growing public acceptance of queer people (as measured by opinion surveys etc). For a few years it was hard to get any traction with anti-gay legislation, and North Carolina got so much shit for its bathroom bill that other states kind of backed off temporarily. But by focusing on kids specifically and riding the coattails of LibsofTikTok and Matt Walsh, they've found a way to recycle all the old pedophile/coming-for-your-kids gay-bashing that had become harder to sell.

Which is to say, it very much is a specifically anti-trans/transphobic agenda, but it's also a stalking horse for the anti-gay culture war that has been right-wing bread and butter for decades.

I'd love to disinter the Atwood-influenced memo suggesting to shift the fight from "anti-gay" to "protecting your kids."

Yeah, and that's always been the rallying cry going back to Anita Bryant's Save Our Children. It just became politically difficult to sell as more and more people knew more and more gay people. But reframing from "gays are pedos" to "trans people and drag queens are pedos" has more currency because fewer people know trans people or have even seen a drag show.

they've found a way to recycle all the old pedophile/coming-for-your-kids gay-bashing that had become harder to sell.

this is how I see it and why it seems so absurd because I remember it the first time around ... but it's also scary af because it's happening again

There’s a long list of stuff the right has tried to protect your kids from over the decades:

Drugs
Rock lyrics
Mixed race pregnancies
Demonic possession
Liberal professors
Rainbow parties
Choosing to be gay
Mask wearing
Online schooling
The Knockout Game
White slavery at Ikea
Pronouns

Must be hard to remain ever vigilant

there’s also the LGB Alliance/Gays Against Groomers bullshit to try to sell the idea that reasonable gay people understand that trans rights are totally different from gay rights, and it’s just a weird coincidence that you can do find-and-replace for the scare tactics of 30 years ago.

Also of course anyone who knows any actual teenagers in the 2020s knows that they are far and away the most queer-accepting age group on the planet. Both of my kids have many classmates in their Tennessee public schools who are gay, trans or nonbinary (and fwiw my own oldest kid identifies as asexual, which he's found a lot of reassurance in as a guy on the autism spectrum). So the idea that these are the kids being "protected" by a bunch of pearl-clutching Baptists is as funny as it is infuriating.

It does give hope that being said!

When I told my younger son, who was in middle school at the time, about the Florida "Don't Say Gay" bill for elementary schoolers, he snorted and said, "Well those kids are gonna be confused when they get to middle school and a quarter of the kids are gay or trans." (I think he was exaggerating the number, but it showed his sense of things.)

I hoped for one day without thinking about Don't Say Gay

(Not your fault, tips! Florida sucks)

Yeah tipsy every teenager I know is essentially saying "thanks but no thanks about all this alleged 'protection,' and also shut the fuck up about swimming, because no actual young person gives a single shit about your sudden valiant efforts to use the intEgriTy of sPoRts as a Trojan horse for toxic bullshit."

Sorry Aflred! We're not far behind you, our governor totally wants to be DeSantis' bff.

And yeah, on the State of the Teens, a lot of this is anecdotal but I've heard from friends who have exposure to evangelical culture that even there there's a movement of younger Christians against the culture war stuff. But I'm sure there are still plenty of true believers being molded out there.

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-s-exclusive-interview-with-j-k-rowling-1850141221

They’re pulling zero punches and it’s great.

White slavery at Ikea

i missed this one

This is doomy, per Tannehill's norm (her Twitter bio literally says "Harbinger of doom"). But even if she's hyperbolic, she's not wrong about what's going on. Trans hate is the point of the spear.

Something that is missing from the discussion of all of this is that MTGs rationale for why there should be a "national divorce" is "sick and disgusting woke culture issues." 1/n https://t.co/Q6TwlLBVOG

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 23, 2023

Okay so kinda weird story, but I'm not kidding about this and I am kinda embarrassed 1/?https://t.co/zZmqcwV6zv

— Sophie ✨ From ✨Mars (@sophie_frm_mars) February 27, 2023

Ugh. I love how the offended lady is all self-congratulatory about how well she handled things right up until she thought somebody said the word "penis." Like, "Here I am being all open-minded but the trans weirdo just couldn't help throwing their dick in my face!"

Sorry but anyone who becomes a Tory councillor at age 22 is the biggest weirdo in any story. To be honest though, my main thought on reading that story was why are there so many pubs called The Marquis of Granby?

... mind you, I've only just read the tweet and wtf?!?!?

I’m glad if young tories tell u

Ugh. I love how the offended lady is all self-congratulatory about how well she handled things right up until she thought somebody said the word "penis." Like, "Here I am being all open-minded but the trans weirdo just couldn't help throwing their dick in my face!"

I feel like there is something missing in the story she's telling

You mean like how appearing in the Daily Mail as a victim of the culture wars will get her noticed and help her political career?

yeah I looked at her twitter for a while and the zeal with which she's pursuing this (e.g., @ing JKR) is not surprising but awfully telling

These are the transphobic women calling cis female trans allies handmaids and “pick-me’s” if I’m not mistaken?

lol at the idea that she misheard "wipe my hands on my pants" as "wipe my hands on my penis"

It was apparently "wipe my hands on my jeans," so maybe easier to mis-hear, but COME ON.

It's just so telling of the phobic obsession with trans people's body parts. As if it's trans people walking around thinking about their genitalia all day instead of bigots. (And a direct descendant of the age-old homophobic obsession with how gay and lesbian sexual mechanics. "I don't even know what goes where!" "Who's the man?" etc etc)

Saying you were going to wipe your hands on your pants would elicit some funny looks in the UK!

Even if she had said "wipe my hands on my penis", that's a very weird thing to say but honestly not a very threatening one. Trying to imagine a burly man saying it while indicating his cock and seeing if I would be intimidated, but I keep giggling instead.

The whole thing is so pearls-clutchingly prudish as well. The word "penis" must not be uttered in a women's toilet, ever. IT IS SACRED WOMAN'S SPACE, NO PEEN ALLOWED.

Yeah I always wonder wtf these people do in bathrooms, becz ime it's basically just get in, do your natural excretory business (which is p much the same regardless of your genitals), wash your hands (ideally), and gtfo. Also, as a guy who uses guy bathrooms, guys in bathrooms do not just, like, walk around with their dicks hanging out. That's not a thing. We also don't talk about our dicks. We don't talk much at all in the toilet!

Also, I've been in men's rooms in clubs etc where women were using the toilets. It's not really that big a deal.

At my local Starbucks patrons use the bathrooms indiscriminately, even the MAGA ones.

even the MAGA bathrooms!

I'm going to wipe my hands on my Grande

yeah lots of restaurants and bars in Montreal have non-gendered bathrooms, usually with stalls and a communal sink area: inclusive and saves space for the establishment, is obviously the future, would happily never use another stall-less urinal in my life

and emily. otm, the way UK transphobes fixate on bathrooms and prisons is almost parodically Victorian (no surprise in the US they're trying to make headway with sports)

I mean, if anyone had a penis that was made of fluffy terry cloth...I still wouldn't expect them to use it to dry their hands.

grats to suzy eddie izzard on her new name

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2023/03/17/52722/graham_linehan_turned_down_%C2%A3200k_to_take_his_name_off_the_father_ted_musical

the 2nd part of that Chortle piece where they speak to him is actually insane; has anyone ever had less self-awareness than GL? He deserves 1000 x more shit than he has already had.

He said: ‘I thought this would be over in a few months and someone would step in. I really did think as soon as people heard what’s been happening to children, all my friends, satirists, comedians, progressives, people who marched against the Iraq war, lesbians, gay men, they’d all come rushing to my aid.

‘And no one turned up. Just no one turned up. All I got was dirty looks, people ghosting me.

‘I have met people, people I’ve worked with — big names — and begged them to become involved. Begged them. Please just say, "Graham Linehan is right," or "Graham Linehan has some important contributions to make on this," anything that makes it sound as though I’m doing this for anything other than recreational cruelty.

‘That’s how I’m portrayed. Like a recreational sadist. And none of them will stand up for me.’

i love it when people _almost_ seem to be self-aware

Probably took offense at being considered merely "recreational."