Happy Pride month! 🌈
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@ceilidhtransing
Happy Pride month! 🌈
thank u clippy
Happy Pride Month!
Faust is back for the 5th time! If you want to use the flag of your choice as an avatar, they're under the cut. They're free to use as long as it's for personal use only.
Think tanks explicitly founded to "abolish transgenderism" will publish a report that's like "there's no evidence that trans healthcare works if you ignore all the evidence" and be taken seriously, meanwhile actual researchers go "there's seriously NO evidence that gatekeeping helps" and get ignored
Some Pride Elephant Emojis! Enjoy~
Hugging Trans Emojis! Enjoy :3
There is this idea that transmasculine experience can be simplified, and that there is no complexity to it that is worth analysis or care. This idea touches anything and everything, from something as inconsequential as a fandom headcanon, to something as heavy as how we discuss our oppression.
The image of a trans man is a simple one: A white, able bodied man who was once a lesbian and is now straight, who has taken Testosterone, gotten top and bottom surgeries, presents masculine 100% of the time, has a good paying job, and is only affected by trans bills in the sense that it would mean he would have to go to the bathroom in a different place, or he might need to fight harder for his prescription. There is nothing unique about this, his relationship to masculinity and femininity are the expected ones. He is essentially a cis man who used to be a girl.
As a result, trans male oppression does not need to be considered a complex interaction between societal expectations of assigned femininity in contrast with current masculine identity, combined with the act of transition and nature of trans identity. No, it can just be simplified to trans = oppressed, and man = privilege. There is no need for deeper though.
When a trans man is feminine online, it can just be simplified to the fact that this person is not actually a man. Trans men are simple creatures who yearn to be masculine 100% of the time. They are only trans enough when they present in this simple way.
No, this "cis" male character cannot be a trans man because that character's story is a complex exploration of how the expectations of masculinity are suffocating. Any other trans headcanon is okay, but trans men never experience masculinity in the context of forced expectation, because the lives of trans men are simple, and for them, masculinity is wholly good all the time.
There is no need to specifically platform trans men on this topic, because their relationship to it is uncomplicated. There is no need to say "especially trans men" when talking about sex work, or reproductive rights, or discrimination, or kink, or violence, or exploitation, because transmasculine experience is a simple one that can be explained in a single footnote against the other, more unique and kaleidoscopic experiences of all other gender experiences. Trans men can be marginalized in a literal sense because they are uncomplex, and unimportant because everything they go through, every else goes through in a much more vivid way.
And then no one believes trans men when we talk about ourselves, because they know better. Because it is so simple to know us, that not much thought need to be put into thinking about us, and not much listening needs to be done when listening to us.
The moral argument for allowing transition is trivially simple: Bodily autonomy is one of the most important human rights. No ifs, no buts.
On the social side, preventing transition is an enormous overreach with regard to freedom of expression. Legal gender change is a necessity to protect privacy.
This is all downstream of the simple idea that you should treat trans people like a type of people, an idea that a lot of people get really offended by, as they do with women, racialized people, disabled people, gay people, pretty much any marginalized group in history.
Because the moral argument is trivially against them, bigots will try to frame themselves as a rational, scientifically-minded group trying to rein in the naive optimism of their opponents. They will insist that the science is on their side, and by doing so handwave the moral argument because their point of view is "true".
It is not.
The playbook of these groups is old, reliant on a few rhetorical tricks that play on confirmation bias, and generally tries to do one thing: Engineer talking points that are wrong in ways that take scientific competence to debunk, so that a fully accurate debunking loses general audiences.
That's why it's important to get ahead of them and attack the foundations they're building their rhetoric on.
It's tempting to just fall back on the moral argument, it really is, because these shitheels are arguing positions that are pretty fucking heinous. That should be enough. Unfortunately, it gets you liberal "allies" who seem genuinely embarrassed to be on your side, because they're not confident that their position is empirically correct in addition to being morally correct.
That's why stuff like debunking "concerning" scientific results about trans youth in Finland matters.
Don't cede rhetorical space that belongs to you.
cis people are always so convinced you're transitioning to try to trick them and it's like. it really cannot be overstated just how much you are not a part of the equation whatsoever
I'm absolutely done with people in positions of power or influence who have chosen to spend years laundering transphobia, providing institutional normalisation to transphobes, both-sidesing trans rights issues, platforming transphobic ideas, and contributing to the mainstreaming of transphobia who then look at the material results of all this and act all horrified and surprised, as if they had nothing to do with it. As if “yes but I didn't want that to happen! I didn't want anything to actually come of it!” is enough to wash their hands of responsibility.
This goes quadruple if said people have ever complained about pushback from trans people - complained that they're being “cancelled” and “attacked” by an “intolerant mob” of “radical trans rights activists” or whatever. Why do you think we were pushing back? Are you genuinely this imbecilic or are you just pretending? Trans people take issue with, say, transphobic journalism because we already fucking know it has real-world consequences. It's absolutely fucking unbelievable - and yes, I do mean that genuinely, I'm not just being rhetorical - that the people doing the transphobic journalism are somehow unaware of the idea that this might spill out into areas of law and policy.
These sorts of shocked and horrified reactions are also so indicative of the way they have always seen us: not as actual people, but as a game, a political football, a thing to take a side on to help your career. It's so clear that this has never seemed real to them; it's all just theoretical discussions about “biological sex” and the nature of gender and chromosomes and puberty and bathrooms and children's safety that they and other cis people get to fill up opinion columns with. In their monumental ignorance and arrogance - never once thinking to actually, I don't know, consult an expert about any of this - they get to pick the “biological sex matters” crowd and get paid for inches and inches of navel-gazing transphobic nonsense, and not even feel like they're a hateful person for doing so, because none of this actually matters, right? It's all just a fun diversion! Dogs or cats? Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? Are trans people human beings who know their own identities or disgusting mutilated predators who will defile our precious single-sex spaces? Cream then jam or jam then cream?
Every time some new piece of horrible transphobic policy is brought forward, every single “journalist” who has ever treated this issue like some sort of chill consequence-free theoretical discussion where all views deserve to be platformed carries responsibility for that. I don't care one iota whether they “intended” or “wanted” such policy. I don't care whether they “thought it would lead to that”. You have spent years kicking us around as a political football, ignoring warning after warning that this shit has consequences, frequently declaring that your detractors are some kind of “hysterical mob” intent on “suppressing important free speech on the gender debate” or similar horseshit, and now that those consequences are here, you don't get to pretend that you had nothing to do with it.
Regardless of how wronged and hurt you are, regardless how much of a horrible piece of shit the other person is being, you still should not say bigoted things about them.
Bigotry is not a more advanced degree of insults that stings more, it's a reinforcement of the framework where certain marginalized traits are inferior. This is not about you and that person. This is about the society you live in.
in general i think it's kind of worse than useless to always fall back on this assumption that people are being "tricked" into being mras or twerfs or white supremacists or usamerican jingoists etc. etc. when you can ask the question "how do they stand to materially benefit from this hate movement" and 9/10 times find a very easy answer
also while we're at it and i hope this is obvious to most of yall, cis women are treated leagues better by society and authority than trans men. cis women experience privilege over trans men on account of being cis. i was treated way better by both transphobes AND misogynists when i was a cis girl, even a butch cis girl, than as a trans man. the misogyny i did and do experience as a trans man has gotten way worse and more violent than it was when i presented as a cis girl. on top of that, the queer and trans community would also be happier to accept me if i were a cis fem lesbian than as a straight trans man. my masculinity is weaponized against me as a trans man that it wasnt as a cis woman by the queer/trans community. this is not hard to understand if you talk to transmasculine people
The biggest bullshit with Adultism is basically that the people will defend it with: "Well, if we did not force X on kids, kids would not do it, because they hate X."
And then you actually look onto the research.
Kids do not generally hate learning or school. Quite the opposite. Children tend to enjoy learning and are naturally curious. It is exactly the fact that they are forced into school and into the rigid structure of it that often punishes curiosity but also is hostile towards the differences inherent in people, that kids hate it.
Kids do not naturally hate medical care. While medical care is scary at times, the fear usually comes from medical care scenarios being defined by adults overriding a child's agency, not explaining things to him, and otherwise being abusive, that makes children afraid of medical procedures. Additionally the way a lot of medical procedures go hand in hand with denying a child's reality ("Look, it is not that bad") tends to be traumatizing to children.
There have been studies done in this. If you explain a child - even a toddler - what you do and why, children will generally be a lot more okay with stuff like needles and simple procedures, and will even agree to necessary surgical interventions.
If you create a learning environment that allows more for self-directed learning, and involves less specific testing, most kids actually will enjoy learning.
The way kids hate school, and are afraid of doctors is the result of those interactions being associated with violence and coercion. The hatred is because of the coercion, rather than the hatred making the coercion necessary.
both trans men and trans women are punished for our proximity to both feminity and masculinity. people decide when we are men or women based on what is the WORST option at the moment. we both get treated like women only when someone needs to infantalize us or call us bossy, bitchy, stupid, vapid. we both get treated like men when someone wants to demonize and paint us as violent, predatory, abusive, perverted. NONE of us are benefiting from any gendered privilege, because we are always treated like the worst of either gender depending on the scenario. this is something all trans people experience, regardless of agab, both trans men and trans women. so why do we assume that the other side has the opposite experience as us?? why do you think that because your life as a trans man or a trans woman is painful, that a trans person of a different gender must have the opposite experience?? like i just dont get the preschool level understanding of gender like "well boys and girls are opposites so of course our experiences are opposites too" we are living the same transphobia and if you cant see it you need to listen to other people more
The reason why so many of y'all's feminism sucks is because you still believe deep down in your hearts that there are only two kinds of people in the world: precious, ethereal, fragile dollthings called "women", and violent, lustful, rage-fueled apes called "men". Until you throw that idea away, 3rd-grade-tier "girls rule boys drool, girls are princesses and boys are stinky :(" is as feminist as we'll ever get-- and I hope it's obvious that that's lightyears away from the bare minimum of where we need to be.
I don't know how I'm supposed to explain to ostensibly trans-friendly feminists that "women are beautiful soft things made of glass, men are obsessed with violence and sex" is exactly what the patriarchy wants you to believe. Patriarchy wants you to believe that being a woman and/or having a vagina (patriarchy generally believes those two things are synonymous) makes one shatter on impact with reality. It makes you easier to control if you are scared shitless of the other half of the population, and it makes you more compliant with your lot in life if you believe it is in the nature of the other half of the population to rape and kill rather than realise those were choices those individual rapists and murderers made. There is no way to make gender essentialism progressive and feminist, because it is one of patriarchy's tools of subjugation. Stop trying to make it progressive.
And I can scream all of that from the rooftops over and over again, and what I hear in reply is "Trans men really are men because no woman would ever decide to become an inherently evil repugnant rapist ape", and "You're so right. Trans women are women because they too are pretty delicate little objects I can fuck", and "You're non-binary? So are you fucktoy non-binary or sexpest non-binary?", and my patience runs ever thinner.
I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.
"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!
The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.
Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup