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

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."

I'm sure I could Google and find objectionable things about Gov. Tim Walz, but this is good to see and hear.

MN Gov. @Tim_Walz: "The trans community is as terrified as they've ever been. [...] We have to be much more aggressive about making sure that folks are protected." https://t.co/B2cEJIipof pic.twitter.com/C97QWWclK1

— The Hill (@thehill) March 18, 2023

what minnesota is doing is a Very Good Thing. it's a real frustration for me that more people aren't recognizing what trans people are going through... there _are_ trans refugees right now, a _lot_ of trans refugees. trans people are facing genocide, and one of the things that concerns me the most is that most cis people don't seem to be taking it _seriously_. no one gives a thought to having their professional conference in texas or florida, taking a vacation there, _moving_ there. people who, like, have _children_. i mean, what the fuck are they thinking? do they really believe that it couldn't be _their_ child?

every week i see someone new up here in pdx, and a lot of times they're living on the street, because living on the street here is safer than living _anywhere_ in texas or florida or kentucky or... and then i see my co-workers complaining about all the homeless people, about how they don't feel "safe". _they_ don't feel safe? they have the fucking _gall_ to tell me that, to my _face_?

i don't know the practical effect of minnesota's law, but gov. walz's action makes me feel... that at least some cis people fucking _understand_ what we're going through, what the transphobes are _doing_ to us. because i'll tell you i don't get that feeling a lot from democratic party leaders.

Oh that is lovely. Often I don't even open this thread when I see it's been bumped because it's just too grim but it's so nice to see a cis person standing up for us lot like that. Ofc it's depressing that a politician treating us like human beings is very much the exception and noteworthy. Still warms the cockles though

Wouldn't it be great if a politician in the UK was to speak about trans people like that??? It would be amazing, can you imagine??

feeling hard for you paolo :(

Erin Reed has been documenting on twitter the arguments put forth with the various bills going through state legislatures in the US restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth (or in some cases even adults, which is the next goal for them) or denying health care coverage, even private health care, as in Florida today. Her threads have been very moving to read, and it’s all so shocking.

I take back what I said on 77 - Ohio is now as bad as Tennessee et al. : https://thebuckeyeflame.com/2023/03/20/an-ohio-republican-rep-just-introduced-legislation-to-designate-a-new-lgbtq-related-day-and-yes-of-course-its-bad/

^ fuck.

FL also hearing a bill which just added an amendment which would gradually discontinue care to any minor who is already receiving transition drugs

No idea if it passes, and will be challenged in court even so, might even get blocked, but it doesn't matter. The cruelty is the point. Always is and always will be.

All these politicians should receive daily harassment for the rest of their lives

Also I'm so very sorry Eliza :(

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/65051900

There it is - a complete ban on trans women in athletics.

i listened to seb coe on the today programme this morning just totally evading even the soft questions justin webb put to him.

i just read about the iowa laws. my heart is just breaking. it is so hard for me to understand the thought process. it takes a lot of work to draft and pass a bill! they want trans students, probably already bullied, to use the wrong bathroom. can you imagine being one of these students, and setting foot into one of these spaces? how the fuck is that a “safe space”? a bunch of dickhead boys sitting there waiting for you?

"You really don't get that the session is over."

Senator Megan Hunt says they will filibuster everything, even progressive bills put forward, if Nebraska moves forward with its attempt to ban gender affirming care for trans youth.

This is fight.pic.twitter.com/8F0ApJxMZn

— Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) March 24, 2023

she's amazing

Wow!

i don't want to talk negative shit right now. here is an instagram account for pictures of trans trucks.

https://www.instagram.com/transgendertrucks/

I am so weary:

The New York Times has left no stone unturned in its quest to crack down on staffers who signed an open letter last month criticizing the paper’s trans coverage.

After weeks of hauling staffers who signed it into meetings with high-level editors Carolyn Ryan and Marc Lacey—meetings described to Confider as intimidating “tongue-lashing” sessions—management sent written warnings to around 20 staffers, accusing them of conspiring against the paper and endangering their co-workers.

“Your colleagues whose work was criticized in the letter, some by name, have carried out their work in a fair-minded, sensitive, and journalistically sound fashion,” Ryan and Lacey wrote in the letters sent earlier this month, according to a copy obtained and reviewed by Confider. “They have endured attacks and threats as a result of the letter. By signing, you have not only amplified that campaign but endorsed it, too. That is harmful to them personally and to our reputation for providing quality, independent journalism.”

The warning memos, which were put on March 9 into each employee’s personnel file, came after hundreds of Times staffers and contributors claimed in their open letter that the paper “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language.” The open letter was a point of contention within the staff union itself, as dozens of reporters signed a separate letter lashing their colleagues’ “fundamental misunderstanding of our responsibilities as journalists.”

if only ya cared about the people you're endangering, NYT

sad lol at the idea that it was the letter that harmed "our reputation for providing quality, independent journalism."

ok serious time i do wanna say the megan hunt thing makes me _very happy_, i was gonna write up this whole big piece about it but no spoons and if i don't say things the exact perfect way i'm afraid people will come down on me for it.

at this point i don't really feel like anything i say to cis people matters. i feel like we're at the point where it ought to be pretty clear what's going on here. there's an anti-trans genocide going on, and the new york times is in favor. it doesn't matter what i do or say - what matters is what cis people do or say. how far are our allies gonna go to keep us from getting killed?

megan hunt is in a better position than most to protect trans kids, but damn if she's not a good role model. to me, her response, that's what i'd like to see from _every_ ally. if someone is trying to hurt trans kids - don't talk to me, i don't know you. if you want something from me, you're not getting it. if you need something from me, you're not getting it. trans kids are in danger, and _nothing else happens_ until that ends.

i don't actually expect that from anyone else. megan hunt, you know, she's fighting for her literal child. most other people probably _aren't_ going to go that far. those who are willing to often aren't able to. (i gotta say that in my book, the nyt union is a fucking rinky dink piece of shit excuse for a union given that the times is still being printed.) overall, though, the farther someone is willing and able to go in our defense (absent i should make it clear LITERAL PHYSICAL VIOLENCE please don't kill anybody to protect trans people thank you), the more it helps to keep us from getting killed.

mic drop

JFC.. I don't want to give these assholes any more attention, but:

“I came to the conclusion years ago that the trans movement is the greatest evil our country faces,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote on Tuesday. “I only become more and more sure of this fact with each passing day, and more and more determined to oppose it until my last breath.” Walsh has 1.5 million followers on Twitter, and, by the time of publication, this tweet was liked more than 31,000 times, and viewed 2.8 million times.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9ppz/nashville-shooting-marjorie-taylor-greene-matt-walsh-anti-trans

He's fucking toxic. And he's living here in our state, and our Legislature is basically taking marching orders from him. It's amazing and awful how much influence these right-wing social media dickheads have. I'm not sure most people even realize it.

he was a much more marginal figure pre-Trump. I mean, he had ample readership, but he was more or less known for being clowned in a meme response ("You're a blogger"). out of all of the talking heads, he would have been one of the lowest on my list that I'd have expected to jump to this level of prominence.

I guess he's about to speak on a campus tomorrow? it's supposed to have ample protest - I am just praying those protesting stay safe.

If nature could hasten his last breath that would be great.

otm

i've sat with it for a while and i guess i am feeling like... i need to write something where cis people can read it. and y'all are the only cis people i talk to aside from my co-workers. the way i frame things when talking to them is a little bit different. anybody here who's not cis - i apologize for putting this here. i know the toll Discourse takes on so many of us.

my hope is that by limiting my engagement to this obscure little corner of the public internet i can... limit the possible harm i might do here. hopefully taking a couple days to work through my most immediate emotions helps as well.

a lot of the stuff taken out of context to... portray us as terrorists are ideas that i legitimately endorse. an article i glanced over contained a tweet referring to the shooter as a "demonic tr-nny". and my take on that is that hey, i'd kind of like to be a demonic (censored), no fair making that look like a bad thing by applying it to some fucked up mass killer. i mean some of the things they're talking about as evidence that we're terrorists... things like "trans day of vengeance", you know, i call TDoV "trans day of vengeance". my girlfriend calls it "trans day of violence". we are pissed off and a lot of us (not me) are armed, with the goal of being able to provide for our own collective self-defense.

and we are all shocked and horrified by what this person did, and more aware of it than we are of the endless other mass shootings that are routine in america because we have to be. because we know that this will be used to support the already-in-progress genocide against trans people, and that a certain number of people will... will be _convinced_ by these lies.

the horror to me, the underlying horror, is that a number of people are _willing to believe that trans people think child murder is justifiable_. all of this rhetoric, calling us "groomers" and "terrorists", it's a concerted effort to portray us as inhuman. i have friends whose _parents_ call them "groomers". that's just incredibly sick and fucked up. and you know what, before last year, _nobody_ called us that. not a one.

i feel like... i need, for my own sake, to express my _particular horror_ of child murder, not because i feel the need to defend myself as a trans person, but because _as a trans person_ i am uniquely horrified by child murder.

these people who want us dead, they see this as an act of _trans_ violence against Good Christian Kids, against _cis_ kids. and i don't see that. i see my friends, my friends who were raised in conservative christian school just like the ones those kids who were murdered went to. my friends were mormons, hare krishna, homeschooled, spent their childhoods as missionaries overseas, grew up only watching veggietales. the people the shooter killed are kids who were _just like my friends_.

which is the stupidest thing about trans genocide, the stupidest thing about all of these people who want to exterminate us. you think it hasn't been tried? you think for all of history, you fuckers haven't been trying it? i mean, if it was just people like me they wanted to kill, that would be one thing, but these evil motherfuckers are _murdering their own fucking children_, just as surely and just as sadistically as that fucked up murderer did on monday.

i am horrified by child murder. i am horrified by child abuse. and when i see the things that the people who want us dead call us... shit, all of us know how abuse works. damn near every last fucking one of us has seen it, knows the cycle. you accuse your victims of the things _you_ want to do, maybe even the things you're _already_ doing.

the ideology of vengeance the tennessee killer was putting into action was sick and twisted. i'm familiar with it. i've heard it before.

"Happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks."

The word of the LORD. Thanks be to God.

Of course, they didn't read _that_ part of Psalm 137 in the Church I went to, the Church where we all _knew_ which priest not to be alone with. Nah, whenever you hear that one, it's usually the first three verses, maybe the first six. Never verses 7-9.

And there's something I have to be very careful, very careful where I say it. I hate Christianity. The Church I was raised in, the billion-person Roman Catholic Church? Yeah, I think they're evil. My experience with that religion is one big fucking child abuse cult. Me personally? No, not me personally. Not _directly_. My friend Ken - and I say his name only because he's passed on, because he can no longer speak for himself. Over and over again, there's this fucking culture of silence, and as I learned when I was young, the one thing I learned that _wasn't_ wrong, Silence = Death.

They covered it up, and when the victims got too loud for them to ignore, when there were too many of them to silence, they came up with this "expert", this asshole named Paul McHugh, this board certified psychiatrist who made up this entire syndrome specifically to discredit abuse victims. Called it "False Memory Syndrome". Made it up the same way Ray Blanchard made up autogynephilia to discredit trans women. And before he did that, Paul McHugh, what did he do? In 1979, he shut down the gender surgery program at Johns Hopkins, the best gender surgery program in the _world_. The 1980s, the 1990s, they were dark ages for trans people. My childhood. It was a dark age. Just as 2023 is a dark age, compared to 2019. And Paul McHugh, he was one of the harbingers.

The person who killed those kids on Monday... I don't know who they are. The reporting is muddled and misrepresentation is rife. Cis, trans, their name, I don't know any of this stuff. If they said they were trans, they are trans. But what they did... that is not vengeance. That is not demonic. That is not the way of me, the way of any of my friends. What that person did was _their_ way. The Christian way of doing things.*

Always. The Christians have always hated queers, have always sought to destroy queers, have always _lied_ about us. One of the cornerstones of the trans rights movement is an early '90s pamphlet by Leslie Feinberg, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come". Leslie talks about this, talks about Joan of Arc, who was hailed as the savior of France and then was put to death as a heretic. Heresy, and what heresy? She insisted that God spoke to her, that God told her to dress as a man. And for this they put her to death, they put her to death and then they canonized her as the "maid of Orleans". Christianity has been a force for good in many cases, many of the subjugated, many of the subaltern. It has been aid and succor and an encouragement towards liberation, as well as a force of repression.

Not for queers. Never for queers. Christianity has only wanted one thing of queers - our extermination. To seize not even their _enemy's_ infants, but _their own_, and dash them against the rocks. And then they make up lies, they make up lies and blame us. Fabricate ideas like "Satanic Ritual Abuse". My experience with ritual child abuse has nothing to do with Satan.

* yeah I know it's cultural appropriation of Hebrew scripture, I got no beef with Judaism, the harm here, I believe, comes specifically from its use in a _Christian_ cultural context.

❤

And golly, I never even got to Matt Walsh. Again, Matt Walsh... I'm not even mad at Matt Walsh personally. This, again... I don't hate conservatives half as much as I hate liberals. Because Matt Walsh, honestly, how is this man any different from Fred Phelps? How at all? Only in this: He is treated as _legitimate_. Not just "legitimate" - the people of the Anglosphere don't hear our voice, they hear _his_. Open a private window, go on Youtube, search for "transgender". Who are you going to see? Matt Walsh. Abigail Shrier. You want trans representation? Oh, of course, we have that, here's fucking BLAIRE WHITE. That's what people are learning. And you want to know why our parents call us "groomers"?

And maybe it's respectable, maybe liberals can think well of themselves if they say "oh, it's Fox News", and it _is_ Fox News, certainly, but it's not _just_ Fox News. It's YouTube. It's the New York Times. It's the Guardian, the BBC. His voice is heard. He's the one who's important. Trans voices? You want to hear trans voices? Jessie Gender made a four hour YouTube video calling out Matt Walsh's lies. She worked for months on it. It was immediately taken down due to "terms of service violations". The message is clear. Matt Walsh can lie with impunity, and if we attempt to tell the truth, these same outlets that promote Walsh's genocidal agenda keep us silent.

Before 2022 I never heard shit about Matt Walsh. He was a nobody. Suddenly he's everywhere. Suddenly everybody is listening to him. And me? I'm not disgusted with Matt Walsh. He's the same as he's always been. I'm disgusted with the people who have made it so that I have to _know his fucking name_. These are the people I hate. If I am killed, it's _those people_, it's the people at the NYT and the BBC and YouTube - _they_ are the ones you should look at when you want to know "why".

I have reinstalled Twitter to respond to this story and make sure my voice is fully heard. I am Casey.

My real name is Alex but my mom decided it would be best to hide it for anonymity. But this is my story, not hers. This is not the free press’s story. https://t.co/Okx47IGmtL

— 💙October💛 (@SleepyOktobur) April 4, 2023

This whole situation is fucked up. Case manager largely lied when they blew the whistle to begin with, now this "journalist" has presented a distorted story that comes solely from the patient's mom and basically told the child "fuck you".