#transantagonism

[transadvicecolumn]

Things are extremely scary right now. There is a very real and extremely harmful spike in anti-trans legislation, from blocks to gender-affirming health care to Tennessee's drag ban (which several other states are attempting to implement). Considering there have been record-breaking numbers of anti-trans bills being introduced each year for the past four years, none of this looks to stop getting worse any time soon. In addition to the obvious harm that this legislation does to individual trans a

[vaspider]

Hi. I want to know if I could ask you about the wi spa incident. I would like to hear your opinion on what happened. I'm a trans ally and I want to find counterarguments for terf claims about what happened.

Sure.

The tl;dr is that a woman who had no social media presence before this except for posting extremely right-wing Evangelical memes found out that Wi Spa was trans-affirming and went in to cause a ruckus. She did exactly that, and the whole thing was a lie. According to spa staff, none of their trans customers were present that day.

That's it. That's the whole story. A woman lied, no trans people were even there that day, but a lie will travel around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

And, let's be clear, it wouldn't matter if a trans woman had been changing in that dressing room, because Wi Spa is expressly trans-inclusive, and according to California Civil Code 51 (b), Wi Spa (like every single other business establishment in the state of California) cannot discriminate on the basis of gender identity. So if you go there, you accept the possibility of being in the same place as a trans person -- you know, like you might be in any other space. Wild, right?

What's most disturbing about all of this to me is that people decided that a random LA trans woman was the person who had allegedly been present, and she received intense harassment and death threats. It's deeply fucked up.

This is the last time I will address this "controversy," because it's a fucking hoax that doesn't deserve any more oxygen.

[profeminist]

Gay comedian obliterates Dave Chappelle over jokes about trans people in Netflix special

Gay comedian Joel Kim Booster eviscerated Dave Chappelle over his jokes about the LGBT+ and Asian communities in a recent Netlix special.

“Booster, who was born in South Korea and raised by adoptive American parents, said that he found the situation “kind of sad”.

He said that Chappelle is “someone who has been rich for a long time now and no longer has that many interesting things to say, because they’re not really living in the same world you or I are living in, at this point”.

Speaking to WNYC’s All Of It, he continued: “It’s kind of sad, I think Chappelle used to have really interesting and prescient things to say about power structures and things like that, and I just don’t think he’s interested in dismantling that anymore.

At least not from an interesting place, or at least not from beyond his own point of view – which is his right as a comic, I guess, but it felt a little bit, I don’t know, old, when I watched it.”

Lesbian comic Elsa Eli Waithe took offence to a section where Chappelle asked: “Why is it I can say [the n-word] with impunity but I can’t say the word f****t?”

“For the same reason whites can’t say the n-word,” she tweeted.

“You don’t belong to the group. This is mad simple.”

Read the full piece here

[aanlaiias-s]

not exactly timely but here are some thoughts on a bad youtube video -

arielle scarcella’s video thumbnail slots a picture of a “detransitioned” trans person between two reactions: on the left panel, her grimace; on the right panel, the incredulous smirk of her cohost, storm ryan

apparently the people to whom they’re “reacting” are sad because their looks have been irreversibly altered by T administered too young

later in the video arielle comes up with a theory of detransitioning. most compactly: often those who transition young (15-18) do so under the pressure of a trend, only to discover that their new identity has given them a dysphoria that didn’t exist before. according to arielle, these people give themselves body image problems they never would have had if they hadn’t tried (and failed) to transition

of course though her theory only makes sense if we accept her adjudication of what trans bodies should look like. negative affective criteria (arielle’s disgust, storm’s pity) cooperate with positive exemplarity (the ease with which arielle accommodates storm as the embodied instance of a successful passage from one end of the binary to the other) to make their schadenfreude normative. by working within the reaction genre, the video aims to make it common sense to take pleasure in recoiling from the pathos of anyone who violates or revises the ideal of linear transition

not only is this adjudication cisnormative, but it is actively transantagonistic. arielle and storm blame trans people for a dysphoria that in fact comes from the constant reiteration of reactions to the perceived failure to live up to cis-passing standards. all their reactivity does is crystallize those standards into a gesture of memetic immediacy -- its pre-animatedness ready to be shared or reenacted on the pretext of just being real about smth the “lgbt community” is presumed to already silently agree on -- meanwhile predicating trans inclusion in that imaginary consensus on the seamlessness of binary adulthood and a diplomatic / tokenized / consultant willingness to trash the type of person who hasn’t reconciled their body to that telos 

[wetwareproblem]

So. Since @virgodura posted this horseshit and then blocked a trans woman for daring to call “transphobia is good actually” a shit argument after I’d typed out the reply, here it is.

1. You literally linked a statement from the defense: Please, quote the portion where it actually disputes the facts of her claim in any way. Because I read it in its entirety, and the tl;dr is “Well they were right, she is a man. An evil man who’s just harassing these poor women for money.” Because that is the point, as I have amply demonstrated. The argument is that they should be allowed to discriminate against trans women because this is a political move being made by a fucking right-wing front. This is what you are siding with.

2. a) What competing right are 15 of the defendants even asserting? Please be specific.

b) The lawyer’s in Alberta and the cases are in BC. What the fuck exactly do Ontario human rights guidelines have to do with this?

3. See point 2a.

4. Do we? Because, uh, I read the articles linked in the OP. I read your shit-show of an article. I read the source it came from. I haven’t seen any evidence of this. If you have that evidence, maybe you should’ve brought it instead of “opposing counsel says she’s a man that’s good enough for me.”

5. a) By advancing their argument as a counterpoint to “hey maybe they shouldn’t have called this trans woman a man,” an argument that is steeped in and literally designed to advance their political agenda, you are, get this, advancing and supporting their fucking agenda. You don’t get to do that and then distance yourself from it.

b) Her representation said twenty-six. Not “several.” You can go ahead and read it yourself; I helpfully linked it for you above.

Now, let’s think for a moment: A business owner calls a transgender woman a man, and denies her service on the basis of this perceived maleness. BC has a very specific law that says “don’t do that.” (Again, the defendant is not disputing either of these points.) She went to 26 lawyers who turned her down, and then out of nowhere a highly-political right-wing law firm offers - free of charge, even! - to defend her by specifically undermining the rights of trans women and threatening the plaintiff in particular. (This is all borne out in the links above, except your unsupported assertion that it was pro bono.)

What do you think those 26 lawyers told her?

Because I’m pretty sure the answer is “Lady, you don’t have a case.”

c) You’re right. It must be extremely frustrating and difficult to be turned down over and over and over and over again by people who seem to be advertising their services to people like you.

I wonder what that fucking feels like.

This is kind of my point: You are so very ready to have all the empathy in the world for the plight of the poor cis woman who can’t get anyone to help her and is being (so you claim) harassed...

Because of something she chose to do.

And yet, you don’t seem to notice that the plaintiff is a woman who couldn’t get anyone to help her and is being threatened by people with power and money to burn...

Because of who she fucking is.

So please, spare me your cis bullshit; I’ve heard it before. The argument that convinced you - the one you brought as your best argument to convince people - was that the defendant should be allowed to discriminate against trans women. No amount of equivocating or “But I don’t actually support the argument I’m advancing” is going to change that.

[bitter-bitchbites]

.... the whole reason ppl dedicate their time to hating on aspecs is because they’re too scared to actually confront real cishets, online and irl, so instead they project it on us. cuz since we’re not actually cishets, like, many of us are lgbtqip, lots of other identities than cishets, even if you stay adamant aspecs arent part of the community (we are), you know. so we don’t actually have privilege over them. so it’s easy for them to pretend we’re mean little traitors or some shit.

we’re basically the punchingball they take their fear out on instead. 

just like terfs are terrified af of cishet men (understandably so) so they take it out on trans women cuz they misgender them, nb ppl cuz the moment we’re not women we gotta be men, and on trans men because they misattribute man’s privilege to them and call them traitor. which they also do to us nb cus they assume we’re all afab.

and that’s not only pathetic, because they’re basically creating their own problems and inventing strawmen, but also super dirty to pretend we’re a danger at all, cuz none of us oppress them. like. not because we’re aspecs. only way an inclusionist can oppress an exclusionist, is be a cishet (i’ve yet to see one, and like, they got no business here), or be lgbp and cis, and perisex, too, with a trans or intersex exclusionist. but. ace or aro privilege isn’t a thing. so we’re not endangering anyone. cuz unless an inclusionist is cis, we’re on equal ground, community-wise, putting white privilege and other things aside. 

the homonationalism and white supremacy in our community is a whole other subject, which can be pretty easily summed up to “stfu and listen cracker” but smh they still don’t get it.

[dysperdis]

Barry Neufeld, Chilliwack school trustee, compares gender transitioning to ‘child abuse’

"This is gaslighting, the attack on the foundation of a child's being, which is child abuse."

Last month, Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld wrote a Facebook post in which he said allowing kids to choose their gender was “child abuse.”

Two days later, he issued an apology to “those who felt hurt” by his opinion.

On Tuesday night, Neufeld made similar remarks to a roomful of people at Chilliwack’s Evergreen Hall, where he said that rushing into gender reassignment treatments such as hormone therapy is “child abuse.“

Neufeld’s remarks came as part of an event organized by Culture Guard, a group that works to end what it calls the “political tyranny of politically-correct idiotology.”

The event was a rally aimed at stopping the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) program, an educational resource that is aimed at supporting “marginalized LGBTQ students.”

Right now, these folks seem to be using a set of tactics that was outlined at the FRC’s Values Voters Summit earlier this year.

Neufeld’s rant also included complaints about kids not being taught to treat one mom + one dad as the default family arrangement (we haven’t had sex-based restrictions on marriage in Canada since 2005).

Unfortunately, the Fraser Valley is terrible, which means there’s a lot of people locally (and not-so-locally) supporting him and the group that’s taken up his cause in the comments of basically every article about the new SOGI guidelines, and it’s really tiring trying to counteract the fearmongering and other bs.

[miseriathome]

There’s this notion that I keep seeing that privileged people benefit from oppression of another class, and it’s an idea I never saw when I first started learning sociological theory.

Back in like 2012, tumblr was all about including men in feminism and talking about how feminism would benefit everybody because it would do away with homophobia/homoantagonism and toxic masculinity, etc.

Like... to say that privileged groups (if not individuals) actively benefit from oppression is to erase the performative aspect of privilege; entry to privilege is determined by the privileged (see: Straight determines Straight) and if you deviate Too Much from their expectations, they revoke your right to reap the benefits of membership.

For example, despite all the campaigns about how Real Men Cry or whatever, the prevailing cognitive understanding that society holds is that crying is not masculine, and men who cry are shameful. This is sets a very hard limit on the emotions that a man is capable of showing, which is absolutely a kind of marginalization (but not inherently oppression).

To put it another way, if a cis man wears a dress, would he not face tangible violence from society at large regardless of what he claims his gender is? Is it the same as systemic legal disenfranchisement? Of course not. But a cis man in a dress has less social power than a cis man following social norms. And that power difference is rooted in transphobia/transantagonism. Whether or not it necessarily is the same experience is debatable, but transphobia/transantagonism is inexorably linked to rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity and homophobia/misogyny and other systems that actively hurt both oppressed and privileged classes.

Orientation-wise, people have discussed how coercive heterocentricism can negatively impact people who have never thought about their own orientations before, regardless of if they would turn out straight in the end anyway.

Even aside from gender and orientation, does anyone really benefit from ableism? A student experiencing one-off anxiety will likely not receive any more accommodation than somebody with an anxiety disorder with no legal documentation of it. How often do able-bodied people feel awkward about using the elevator? And how many often do disabled folks feel similarly awkward about how soon it’ll be before somebody makes them justify their right to use accessibility features? Again, abled people are not systemically disenfranchised and stigmatized, but both classes would benefit from a world where nobody gatekeeps disability or bats an eye at accommodations.

The problem with the Us vs Them model of privilege and oppression is that it seeks to create new power structures alongside the existing ones, instead of dismantling the entire notion of power itself. If you let people do what they need to do (whether it’s using the elevator or wearing a dress) without trying to retroactively judge the validity of their experiences, then everybody gets an equal playing field to be themselves freely and openly. After all, the number of elevators (ie resources) that exist in a space should be determined by usage statistics, and not by some statistic of how many disabled people there are present.

Exclusive labels will always leave out a grey population or fringe groups of marginalization.  Everybody oppresses each other and that’s a fact of life and intersectionality. What needs to happen is an abolishment of the systems that keep everyone down; true revolution means aligning not through labels but through ideologies. Even Marx said that when the time comes to overthrow capitalism, some bourgeoisie will align themselves with the revolution. Disability and gender are social constructs that exist because people in power say they do, but those people in power would benefit more in the end from saying they don’t.