that the irreversibility of trans body modification is supposed to scare us, trans people, too, is so bizarre. ever since i was forced to be a little girl i have wanted to annihilate this cage
like, social transitioning require immense patience with others. countless long, circuitous conversations with family and friends who "dont get it." unwanted stares, confrontations, and sexual harassment from people in public spaces.
and its not just other people you need to have patience with, which sucks! medical transition is one big long-ass waiting game! HRT takes months to even start working (whether you take E or T), and years to really kick into high gear. surgeries have massive waitlists, and prep/recovery can take months.
Being a weird little girl as a kid provides two options to you: becoming transgender or becoming a weird adult woman. Both of which are things the world needs more of
I don't know how else to explain it. If someone says something to me that initially hits as horribly transphobic, I'm going to be hurt. However, if, after I confront them about it, they go "Oh no! Jesus no, that's nowhere near what I intended to say, I mean X" - well, I now feel a hell of a lot better. I like knowing people aren't actually trying to hurt me.
So yeah - knowing someone's intent can drastically alter the impact, especially if the impact was negative. It can literally fix a horrible case of miscommunication that could've resulted in a permanent rift in a friendship.
But I've been in communities where trying to have the second half of that conversation is "abuse" and "invalidating their pain".
No! It's actually a really fucking important part of communication! And to silence that second half of the interaction results in no one learning anything, no one healing, and everyone remaining hurt.
Person 1 remains offended, thinking their friend meant to say something transphobic. Person 2 remains hurt because now everyone thinks they're transphobic.
The pain of being misinterpreted is not and should not be dismissed, and fuck anyone who tries to do so to me in the future.
accidentally saying something that comes across as hurtful is still hurting someone, even if you didn't mean to, and you likely still owe an apology for that hurt and not just an explanation, AND
people deserve the opportunity to correct themselves when their intention comes across wrong, and making that correction can be an important part of the amends process for having spoken insensitively and caused unintended hurt.
The thing about “the LGBTQ community” is that it has always been an explicitly political coalition. We didn’t all just come together and hug one day.
As a cis bi man, I have nothing individually at stake in political attacks on lesbians and trans people (sometimes I don’t even have anything at stake with certain attacks on gay men!) But I treat an attack on any of those groups as an attack on myself, because basically anyone who wants to target those groups also wants to target my group. This has always been the case: there is no inherent reason why gay men would form a community with lesbians, or lesbians with bisexuals, or bisexuals with straight trans people. But historically we know that an attack on one of us inevitably precedes an attack on more of us, so there was a choice made to unify under a shared umbrella.
The right knows this, and in recent decades has been investing in highlighting wedge issues to divide the coalition and weaken its collective power even as it grows larger. Attacks on trans people from cis LGBQs need to be understood as a form of support for these efforts at disempowering all LGBTQ communities (ex. those TERF orgs that signed on to a legal briefing opposing a comprehensive anti-LGBTQ discrimination law because it included trans people)
I have the same opinion of legal names as I do of gender markers on ID, as being colonial mischief that doesn't allow for growth and change and agency and if I had my way they'd be abolished entirely and people could change their names whenever and however they like.
This was inspired by the story of a Squamish and Blackfoot family being unable to register their baby's Squamish language name as a legal name, and a dear prudence column I read about someone who was deeply embarrassed by the name her parents gave her which had a slur in it and rhymed (she said it was similar conceptually to "g+psy pixie") and going thru the legal hoops to change it, and trans day of visibility, and a few trans friends who are in their late twenties to early thirties now doing a second legal name change because they gave themselves fandom names when they first came out and outgrew the names. All different situations where the concept of a legal name is interfering with growth and change and connection to culture.
[Text ID: “I do not know how to explain gender to people who have never wrestled with it like Jacob wrestled with God. How do you explain long hours of fighting, suffering, wondering if you would survive the toil, wondering all the way up and until the end? How do you explain, somehow, winning the fight? How do you explain its euphoria, riddled with holes, the ever-present doubt that lays in wait within those holes, and God considered unbearable, beaten? // You take a new name (you are given a new name). You are no longer Jacob. Do your mother cry when you tell her? Do it even matter to her that you fought God and won?” End ID]
The once-visionary author has been enchanted by an ideology that views cis women as easily corruptible and fears trans temptation lurking in every shadow.
I feel like the idea that “TERFs really only target trans women” has become a pretty widely-accepted one in recent years, and there’s a reason for that.
TERFs are louder about trans women, and they paint trans women as the aggressors and the perpetrators of the crimes of the trans community. They target them with violence, hate, and aggression, and those things are glaringly obvious.
But it goes unchallenged that trans women are the only victims of TERF rhetoric; even that TERFs love trans men. Look at all the transmascs who are TERFs! if they joined the cult, surely that must mean the cult honestly cares for them?
J.K. Rowling is only one TERF, but her “terfifesto” exemplifies the attitude TERFs have toward transmascs.
To say that J. K. Rowling is obsessed with trans men may sound like an overstatement, but consider that she spends more time on fears about women mistakenly transitioning and becoming trans men than any other single topic in her essay. […] In total, she devotes more than 1,200 words—about a third of the essay—to these fears she has about trans men.
Why is it that the common, widely-accepted narrative around Rowling is that she’s only spoken about her hatred for trans women? Is it really because she “loves” trans men?
Rowling goes on to claim that “[TERFs] aren’t even trans-exclusionary—they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.”
It’s worth pausing to linger on this. Rowling […] finds this defense—that trans men are included in TERF feminism by virtue of being misgendered and disbelieved—persuasive enough to be worth passing on to her readers. Where could she have gotten this from? Certainly not from trans men, who by definition aren’t interested in being included by a group of women who refuse to see them as they are.
This, for me, nails down exactly why this narrative persists. TERFs include transmascs because they are, to TERFs, just women who have been led astray. “Lost lesbians”. They don’t accept transmascs as they are; they don’t want us to be who we are.
TERFs believe that trans men are women, that they are victims of trans ideology, and that any day now a cleansing wave of detransitioning trans men will sweep through the population.
Their ultimate goal is to pressure, manipulate, and abuse transmascs into detransitioning. That is why they “include” us. That is why they obsess so much over us.
It’s deeply insidious, and it’s incredibly dangerous. Transmascs are not “loved” by TERFs any more than trans children are “loved” by transphobic parents who deny them life-saving healthcare, and attempt to manipulate and abuse them into denying their genders. “I know what’s best for you” abuser rhetoric is not love. Manipulation and abuse is not love. Corrective rape certainly is not love.
The article is a great read, and it goes much deeper into Rowling’s beliefs and how they work. I really recommend checking it out! For now I’ll leave the last point here:
The idea that young female-assigned people are uniquely vulnerable, easily led, and unable to know or speak for themselves is, of course, classically sexist. […]
It is unacceptable for us to be painted as victims led astray by trans ideology in this way. Trans men are autonomous individuals who make choices and decisions. Trans men can speak for ourselves, and we’re telling you: We are men. We are not women. We don’t need people who hate and demean us to tell us what’s good for us because they think we’re women and women can’t think for themselves.
“Transmascs are not “loved” by TERFs any more than trans children are “loved” by transphobic parents who deny them life-saving healthcare, and attempt to manipulate and abuse them into denying their genders.”
Cis people will never understand the true pain of watching your family grieve your death while simultaneously treating you as if you, personally, cut the throat of whomst their grief lies with, even though its you, and you're still living.
a lot of trans girls see link as a trans girl and were right and a lot of trans guys see link as a trans guy and theyre right and a lot of cis people see link as cis and theyre fucking idiots link isnt cis
TBH I kind of hate that Pride is all about love like I think about love constantly all day because I’m madly in love with my girlfriend but also I’m trans and like.. being trans has nothing to do with love… idk it feels like we’re an afterthought
basically straight people whose position on lgbt rights is “I think anyone should be able to love whoever they want” should think a little bit harder about things
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