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

I think it is time to separate the discussion, and leave the Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning thread as a space set aside *for* trans/queer/questioning people (cis people are welcome on that thread! It's not a 'no boys' situation, but I think it's better to allow that space to continue be trans-led and focused on trans, nonbinary, questioning and genderfull ILX0rs, rather than trans issues in general, because it's exhausting for trans people to have to be 'all transphobia discourse all the time'.)

So we should create a wider thread for discussion of trans issues, transphobia, politics etc.

This subject is intensely emotional for a lot of people, so please try to be respectful and thoughtful. Genuine questions of 'is this transphobic, can we talk a little deeper about how and why?' are OK. General 'let me play devil's advocate with your life' discourse is really not OK.

A note on language: cis and trans are not slurs, they are descriptors, but we should all be careful of making assumptions. (Yes, I include myself in that.) I'm going to respectfully ask people to think carefully about use of the other common trans activism acronym in terms of accuracy and specificity - if in doubt, spell it out, in fact, spelling it out is good practice in general. If people or groups or ideas are trans-exclusive, then let's talk about and address that trans exclusion. If you mean 'trans exclusive feminism' then say 'trans exclusive feminist' - and if the person or idea is really not someone or something that can be called feminist (I'm referencing your G-L*nners here) think about whether just plain 'transphobe' or 'trans hatred' or 'trans exclusion' is a more accurate term.

Gender GP are experiencing a lot of issues with their website (don't know if this is a DDOS or if they are having too much of a good thing in terms of support) but a description of the issues here:

https://www.gendergp.com/transgender-community-urgently-needs-support-trans-healthcare-petition/

You can skip directly to their petition / open letter here:

https://www.change.org/p/transgender-healthcare-services-in-the-uk-are-broken-urgent-improvements-are-needed

(Just a reminder, do not give change dot org money if you want that money to reach the organisation you care about - if you want to donate, do so directly via trans organisations, change dot org money goes only to change dot org. They WILL try to catch you if you're not paying attention.)

Oh! I think the petition is UK only, so be mindful of that, too.

https://gal-dem.com/transphobia-sexual-violence-sound-like-a-man-hang-up-vawg-investigation/

I want to be careful not to suggest that transphobia is in any way less of a problem in America

and I suspect this may be just my perception based on the fact that Rowling has become the face of this on Twitter and in the media

but I get this sense that anti-trans politics and transphobia is a little more pitched in the UK? Or more of a high profile issue publically?

yes

I think the main problem is that it is much more acceptable within left and liberal/centrist circles. The main public faces of transphobia being ppl like Rowling, Hadley Freeman, etc. adds to that.

xpost

Probably still easier for a trans person to access specific healthcare here than in the US tho (but they're working on making it more difficult).

most distinctive about the UK situation is the extent to which influential liberals and liberal publications have been basically leading the charge and spreading stuff associated elsewhere with the religious or fascist right (and the hard right following suit has made this stuff pretty much hegemonic in UK media). there was a minor outcry recently from prominent UK liberals when biden made some minor gesture towards trans rights ("I can't believe I agree with trump..." etc)

Probably still easier for a trans person to access specific healthcare here than in the US tho (but they're working on making it more difficult).

idk how much it varies between states in the US. it's bad here and probably getting worse

Why does the UK appear more transphobic than the States? Why does that UK transphobia turn up more noticeably on the Left, among progressives and especially people who identify as feminists, in the UK?

Like everything else to do with differences between the UK and the US, it comes down to Class, and attitudes towards Class, what Class is, and how it works.

The foundational myth of the US is the American Dream, the idea that class is something fundamentally malleable, mutable, alterable that individuals can and do change over the course of their lives. That an immigrant can arrive penniless, work hard at a blue collar job, buy a house and send their children to university, at which point the family becomes middle class. Yes, in reality this is completely unattainable to most, but it is still a myth that people *believe* in deeply. In class, birth should not be destiny, to most Americans.

In the UK, class is something far more inborn, inherent, inflexible, and unalterable. The very deep British belief is that if you are born into a class, then you will die as that class, no matter how much money you gain or lose. The circumstances you were raised in, what accent you have, where you went to school, these things *matter*, both conceptually and materially, they will shape your future outcomes in life. A working class person who accumulates a lot of money will be dismissed as “jumped-up” nouveau-riche; a middle class person with a plummy accent who insists they’re working class because their grandad was a milkman will be lampooned as a fake "mockney".

At the core of Feminist thought, is the idea that sex is a Power Relation, like race, like class. Women are disadvantaged, exploited and oppressed As A Class. How you are likely to think about the class of "Women", what it means and who it contains, is likely to be heavily influenced by how you think "Class" works, whether you view it as inherently inalterable or fundamentally mutable. Do you believe that it is possible for an individual to alter their position, within a systemic power structure? If you, like much of the UK, you believe that is inherently impossible, that’s how you end up with supposed progressives who believe that transmasculine people are "jumped-up lesbians" and transfeminine people are "fakes and mockeries".

And that’s the most important thing to grasp about UK transphobia - these appalling ideas don’t just turn up in the ~Gender Crit~ feminists – they turn up among people like the UK Skeptic movement, who played a huge part in the Guardian-New Statesman axis of transphobia, people who are deeply invested in maintaining the class status quo from Helen Lewis to Kier “trans rights are just a culture war” Starmer; and also among traditional ~Working Class~ leftists who refuse to see gender as a class or a class issue, such as the Mark Fisher wing and the SWP during their rapey years. Which brings up another problem, that in the US, trans rights are unequivocally a progressive issue; in the UK left, they are often a stick to beat 'feminists' with.

The state of trans healthcare in the US vs the UK... this is complicated, because quite frankly, US trans healthcare is better because the US healthcare system is so fucked up. It’s so fragmented that it is far more open to individual healthcare providers, whether they are trans affirmative or exclusionary. Trans friends in the US keep and share lists of therapists, surgeons, HMOs, private healthcare providers etc. who *will* offer gender affirming services, and gender confirmation treatments if necessary. If you can find the money, you can find someone who will help you.

The NHS, on the other hand, is a political football. Centralised gender clinics in the UK function as a bottleneck, by design. You have to pass arbitrary tests designed and administered by cis people. In the US, trans friends share lists of doctors who will prescribe hormones; in the UK, trans friends share the exact statements you have to make to pass the gatekeepers, lying if necessary, to access care. (It is the exact situation that Sandy Stone describes 30 years ago in The Empire Strikes Back – that’s how far behind the US the UK is, in terms of trans care.) Trans people being put on waiting lists that are years long, or being told the referral time is literally "infinite" – that is a political decision coming from the current government.

In happier news, that indicates the winds may be shifting on transphobia within traditional bastions of feminism:

https://feministlibrary.co.uk/statement-on-transphobia-and-accountability/

thank you, that explains a lot, appreciate it.

I thought this was a pretty good article on the phenomenon as well from a couple years ago: https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic

this fucking country

as a med student at Brighton and Sussex (i will be having my obs and gynae placements on the mentioned wards) THANK YOU!!! i've heard stuff about ward staff getting phone calls from angry old men about this and it's honestly baffling. like it's not going to affect you???

— ellen (@e_petersxx) February 10, 2021

re: fake story picked up by mutliple outlets about the trans police banning midwives from saying "mother" and "breastfeeding" on wards (non-gendered language has been recommended for people who aren't women, the press presumably thought it didn't sound dangerous enough unless they added the censorship bit)

one recurring theme in this shit is how provisions for trans men, nonbinary people and others keep getting portrayed as being done exclusively for the sake of not hurting trans women's feelings or something (this seemed to be one of JKR's contentions). it's clearly a strategic propaganda choice and related in some way to how trans men keep being identified as trans women, in public and in the press. has there been any writing on this phenomenon?

i literally couldn't sleep last night thinking about this wave of trans hostility currently sweeping across the UK, it's completely fucked up

my employer is now backing away from its relationship with Stonewall

i just literally cannot get my head around 1) why 2) why now

btw anybody who hasn't seen this Contrapoints should do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us

i feel you. between chave dappelle, the sports ban in tx, the bullshit in loudon county, it feels like the reactionaries are organized and amplifying more right now.

it makes me wonder if as a nation we genuinely accept LGB people or if we've just learned that it's not socially acceptable to discriminate against them the way it seems to be fine to do to trans people. The arguments are the same as they were in the 80s: the predatory concerns, the destabilising of family life, it's like we learned nothing.

yeah i suspect thats a major part of it. aside from terfs, its mostly the same interests (ie conservative christians/fascists) pushing these arguments and narratives. i think this is where the whole "you cant say [bigoted thing] about [marginalized group] without [non-material, superficial social repercussions] these days!!!!" complaint comes from, like this stifled antagonism that finally has a target that they can direct their reactionary hostilities towards with some greater degree of social validation.

it is odd though because in Britain a lot of this stuff is coming from a place you wouldn't necessarily expect. The Guardian isn't great but its unique selling point is its alleged left-wing perspective (comparatively, maybe, but generally lol) and to see it take such an editorial line has been confusing because it makes no sense.

it's going to be so obvious in 20 years to everyone what the right side of this argument was, the problem is that it's hurting people right now

^

If only there were actual problems in the world that people could direct their inchoate anger towards, maybe then they'd feel less harmed by the life choices of others that don't impact them in any meaningful way.

Bill 2 is 'the most transphobic bill ever proposed in Quebec,' activist says

Sorry if this isn't the right thread for this, but am I the only one who continually fucks up the right pronouns while speaking? My daughter's 12 year old friend is going by "they/them" and I keep messing up and saying "her/she". Really trying to get it right, but I'm becoming seriously concerned about my 51-year-old brain's ability at defeating my subconscious impulses.

practice! I’ve had a few people change pronouns in my life and just taking ten minutes a day to repeat to yrself a short script like “Their name is x. Their pronouns are they/them. They like x and it’s fun to hang out with them” or w/e works pretty well ime, and it doesn’t seem to occur to a lot of ppl

also gets easier the more they/thems there are in yr life, which will likely happen over time if you have 12-year-olds in yr life

also, it helps not to worry too much about it! not because it isn’t important (it is), but because the more of an anxiety you develop around it the harder it will be (again, ime). when you inevitably mess it up, correct yrself quickly and without any “oh geez it’s just so hard, I don’t know why I can’t get this, I’m so sorry” etc.

Thanks Nicole! Practicing is what I need for sure. Luckily, I’ve haven’t screwed up in front of my daughter’s friend yet and my daughter is more than happy to correct me when I do slip up. I’ll get there eventually.

I’ve had a few people change pronouns in my life and just taking ten minutes a day to repeat to yrself a short script

yeah, same ... also, what nicole says ... you will inevitably mess it up, but don't get defensive or demeaning

Open letter signed by 16,000 calls for BBC apology over trans article
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59074096

You’d think they could have at least recapped the reason that the study is said to be flawed.

Nice to know that some “appreciations” were sent in, though, I wasn’t aware of a formal avenue for those. Maybe they should keep a running ticker of how many they get.

Fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck

the implication that “many trans women are lesbians, and many cis lesbians enjoy fucking them” is an equal statement to “all cis lesbians must be willing to fuck any given trans woman” is so deeply absurd, and the fact that so many publications treat it like a reasonable debate that must be had sucks so much.

there are people with certain physical traits who I don’t want to fuck; people have sexual preferences within a given orientation! but if I were to make a big public stink about it and imply or outright state that those traits invalidated their identity and the sexuality of the people who do, I would expect to be called out for it!

my heart aches for trans women in the UK these days, it’s bad enough dealing with this shit when it’s thousands of miles away

yeah, same ... also, what nicole says ... you will inevitably mess it up, but don't get defensive or demeaning

― sarahell, Thursday, October 28, 2021 1:39 AM bookmarkflaglink

it's just weird *how* defensive people get when they make this mistake, like, if you call a friend by the wrong name or say their last name wrong, and they correct you, you don't sit there causing a scene.

i've fucked it up, been corrected just like anybody else, it's....feedback, you apologize, correct, move on. not that I wouldn't understand why someone who has been misgendered a lot might be momentarily frustrated, but usually the correction is just a polite one and people go apeshit over it.

https://archive.md/MwYYz

uk getting very scary, they're planning to lump in trans-affirmative therapy with gay conversion therapy (as transphobes have been pushing for) and totally ban it for under 18s, also likely banning mermaids

feels like it would be a good time to start taking to the streets? the polls always seem to show that the transphobes are a vocal minority, should start taking advantage of that

Trending now in UK:
#CisISASlur

(and not trending in a "everyone is taking the piss out of it" manner)

these fucking babies don’t know what a slur is

who’s the snowflake now??

Fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck fuck K4thl33n St0ck

otm and also i think sussex have handled this quite poorly

there are people with certain physical traits who I don’t want to fuck

The problem is that women are being accused of transphobia for saying this exact thing, if one of those physical traits happens to be having a penis. Here's an example from Simon H. in a post on a different thread four years ago:

Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

a couple of trans comrades have outright stated that 1. sexual preference for certain/specific types of genitals are inherently transphobic

Further down in that thread, j. says they see people expressing this position as well and supposes it isn't too uncommon. It's clear that this line of thinking persists to this day -- it's easy to find very recent examples of it on Twitter. Stating the position is in itself an act of pressuring people into having sex with people they don't want to have sex with. Can we all agree that's a bad thing to do?

just to jump slightly backward to nicole and Neanderthal on pronouns upthread: yes it is new and will take practice.

But honestly it is really not that hard for well-meaning people to navigate this in a well-meaning way. As long as they're truly, y'know, well-meaning.

Currently I am navigating this because my eldest (14) is nonbinary they/them. So are many of their friends. I will likely mess up. But the guiding principle is just to... not be a dick, I guess? The people who are having the most trouble with it tend to already not be on board with the whole project. And of course if you're not on board with the whole project, your motivation to practice and be a non-dick is lessened.

For me, if I try to relate an anecdote about what Ash said to Jinx and how Sky reacted, well, I'm going to be using their names a lot more than I otherwise would. A sentence like "Jax said that Sky and Ash are going to Sky's house" both avoids misgendering, and avoids potential confusion between singular and plural.

the "not being on board" is key, if you support your trans or non-binary friends, you're not going to fly off the handle if you get corrected when you screw up. but if your viewpoint is "I'm really, really trying hard to do this bullshit for you, but as much as I love you, I think this is fucking stupid", you get angry when corrected because you think you shouldn't have to do it anyway.

dating while trans can be a gauntlet of managing different kinds of transphobia; i feel grateful to the few ppl who have been attracted to me without making me feel weird about their attraction. that's about as far as i care to have an opinion on the matter which is otherwise really dense and confusing to me

Stating the position is in itself an act of pressuring people into having sex with people they don't want to have sex with.

No. Conflating abstract discussions about ppl's preferences with coercion makes no sense to me - like if we were having a discussion about, for instance, whether it's racist not to be attracted to ppl of certain ethnicities, I think there'd definitely be ppl arguing that. Casting this as "lesbians pressured into having sex with trans women", as the BBC article did, strongly misrepresents the issue at hand - any casual reader browsing the headline will obviously interpret this as women being personally coerced into having sex, not some philosophical disagreement. Which of course is great for the gender critical crowd because their concerns all boil down to thinking trans ppl are sexually predatory anyway.

vtc, did u just not read the next sentence in my post or

cis people have long portrayed trans people as either punchlines or disgusting untouchables, often both. this absolutely informs who and who isn’t considered attractive collectively and individually.

this doesn’t mean that any given person must correctively fuck trans people, or that every person who doesn’t want to sleep with trans people is a bigot, but it does mean that we should all (trans people included, sometime especially so) examine and correct how those anti-trans biases affect our worldviews

now, if someone comes along and points this out, and someone else responds by loudly and publicly refusing to do so, rallies a bunch of cis people in support of their brave stand against being “pressured” to fuck trans people, and uses that organization to lobby against equal public services for trans people, then yes, they’re doing transphobia!

given that this is one of the main ways that anti-trans organizations have gained power and influence, and that that power and influence has led to very real material restrictions on our individual lives and collective well-being, you can perhaps forgive us for reacting to someone coming along taking the “just asking questions, let’s all be reasonable here” tone about “simply” not wanting to have sex with trans people comes off as in direct service of transphobia.

don’t want to fuck us? don’t fuck us! a billion tweets can’t make you. just keep it to yourself for god’s sake, it’s being used by more hateful people than you to hurt us.

Ava I'm not going to be able to make it tonight - it was just too last minute for me, I got hit with an unexpected busy spell at work and I have a funeral tomorrow morning so I had to stay late. I'm with you there in spirit though, this is dismal.

i'm sorry for your loss, hope the funeral goes as well as possible, and thanks for your kind words

i have purposely avoided this cass bullshit cos most of my trans pals would seem to rather talk about other stuff (nerdy music chiefly) and i suspect it'd be too predictable and upsetting. like, it's obvious she's a GC plant right? and yet the guardian is rabbitting on about how finally science is prevailing. bullying is the last thing these people have left; you have to have faith these are terminal throes of an embittered older generation surely

i've been avoiding most of the media coverage too, it's deeply depressing and i just can't deal with it. i've been told that the telegraph used the phrase 'evil trans ideology' recently. even for a right wing paper that kinda shocks me. but not too much

and i hope you're right re the older generation thing. hopefully things will be better for us in a couple of decades or so

i understand the need to believe that trans hate will fade away organically but it didn't happen organically in the first place so i see no reason to think it's a demographic issue

the best hope would be a coalition with every other target of the establishment's moral panics over the last several decades the problem is everyone still around is traumatised and demoralised and suspicious of one other to varying degrees and in the worst cases have joined in this time out of fear or desire for leverage or revenge or whatever

if this is a conspiracy to disempower feminist and queer movements from the inside and provide cover for the crimes of cis men they really couldn't have done a better job

if it actually is something like that few participants are actually aware of it which reflects poorly on their understanding of their own history considering how many times gays and/or feminists have allied themselves with the right and been destroyed as a result (even if they felt temporarily empowered at first)

I know most of the people doing this are straight with nominal if any connection to actual feminist movements but I never expected better of those people anyway

the best hope would be a coalition with every other target of the establishment's moral panics over the last several decades the problem is everyone still around is traumatised and demoralised and suspicious of one other to varying degrees and in the worst cases have joined in this time out of fear or desire for leverage or revenge or whatever

right, it's always been a key tool in the colonialist/capitalist playbook - divide the opposition, pit them against each other - it's the guiding principle behind corporate social media. unfortunately it is really effective, at least in the medium term. not only does marginalization and oppression serve to pit oppressed groups against each other, it also causes tremendous conflict within marginalized groups. it's one of the reasons i'm thinking of getting the fuck out of portland. even those of us who have some small amount of financial resources, those resources a drop in the bucket. it's not enough to make meaningful change in even the life of one person, given the forces we're up against. i learned that one the hard way. getting adequate systemic resources and ending systemic oppression will never happen under capitalism, but at the same time we're too isolated and marginalized to overthrow capitalist oppression. by the time capitalism does in fact collapse, what'll be left in its wake are heavily traumatized and marginalized communities constantly at each other's throats. i don't really have any hope for a better future. i'm just trying to have the best present i can.

if this is a conspiracy to disempower feminist and queer movements from the inside and provide cover for the crimes of cis men they really couldn't have done a better job

if it actually is something like that few participants are actually aware of it which reflects poorly on their understanding of their own history considering how many times gays and/or feminists have allied themselves with the right and been destroyed as a result (even if they felt temporarily empowered at first)

I know most of the people doing this are straight with nominal if any connection to actual feminist movements but I never expected better of those people anyway

― Left, Saturday, April 20, 2024 6:53 AM (two hours ago)

lily alexandre's video on the topic actually addresses these points really well imo

i understand the need to believe that trans hate will fade away organically but it didn't happen organically in the first place so i see no reason to think it's a demographic issue

― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague)

well, it's more complicated than that. it _didn't_ happen organically, true. cisgender ideology, however, has been a key component of hegemonic christian colonialism. it systemically eradicated queerness and anything that didn't conform to their ludicrous idea of the gender binary.

the thing to understand is that it _failed_. i grew up in an age where the cisgender agenda had achieved total success. the only way to survive as a trans person was to "pass" - to eradicate one's own transness and spend one's life conforming to their gender norms. if such a hegemonic norm was truly sustainable, then we wouldn't have all of this overt bigotry now. transphobes are fighting a battle they've already won. it doesn't matter how many times they "win" - they cannot truly eradicate transness. trans and queer ancestors fought hard and fiercely against their own erasure for decades, and if people are fighting against us harder today, i truly believe they're fighting for a doomed cause.

because transphobia is based entirely on enforced ignorance. the only way their ideology works is if people believe, like i believed, that there was no other choice, no other option. it's utterly demoralizing that transphobia is entrenched in every single institution of power in the uk, all the media, both major political parties. and it is effective. people listen to the crap that comes out of organs of power more than they listen to their own children. monstrous. absolutely monstrous, this level of cruelty.

they have to _keep doing it_, is the thing. always and for all time. they can never stop. we're everywhere. we walk among them. we're their own children, their own _parents_. it's so much work, and the more of us there are, the harder it is. i know the cost. i know the toll it takes to hate like that, because they taught me to do that to myself. i carried their hatred for them for a long time, and i gave it back. it's theirs now.

and that doesn't _fix_ anything. for trans people it still fucking sucks. they hurt us, we suffer, we die, too often and too soon. and them? ok, they die alone, unloved and unmourned.

the reason we win is that they can just _walk the fuck away_ at any time. i've seen it, again and again. if i could walk away, you know, from all this. if i could walk away from me. i absolutely fucking would. in a heartbeat. if i had any kind of a choice at all i would absolutely not choose this. i can't. this is who i am. this is who we are. my life runs deeper than their hatred, signifies more than their fury.

do i think a better world will come from that? not really, no. the cruel of this world - and there will always be more of them - will find new people to hate and kill. they always do.

ok the japanese mascot chiitan supporting trans rights is going viral i had to go and look it up and see what its whole deal is

Much of the media produced by Chiitan was often chaotic and involved the mascot acting clumsy or violent. Occasionally its videos were criticized for being "creepy",[7] "reckless", and "dangerous".[1] Some of Chiitan's videos included it hitting a punching bag with a baseball bat, jumping into metal boxes, flipping a car, twirling a motorized weed cutter around its head,[5] falling off a pogo stick, failing at bowling, and falling off a bike while trying to fire a bow and arrow.[8]

Some of the social media posts in which Chiitan and Shinjo-kun appeared together led some people to believe that Chiitan was a "bad influence" on Shinjo-kun. One post, in which Chiitan carries a miniature baseball bat and Shinjo-kun is dressed as a gangster, is captioned: "We're the bosses, don't mess with us or we'll commit otterocities."[10]

Following the segment, Chiitan, via its official Twitter account, stated that it was angry that Oliver had stolen its friend and challenged Oliver to a fight. It tweeted WWE-inspired challenges directed at John Oliver, inviting him to fight it in a "NO HOLDS BARRED MATCH". In another tweet, Chiitan stated that it "wants to give John Oliver a chance to explode through a table", and later attempted to enlist Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to help pressure Oliver. Oliver, in response to Chiitan's posts, tweeted "I'm in a public beef with an unsanctioned Japanese otter. I needed this."[10]

this is the kind of allyship we need

any mascot who will threaten to suplex john oliver through an exploding table is clearly on the right side of history

i don't care whether it's "transphobic" or not but i ran across someone on slsk with the username She'sABrick and have been wondering for the last half hour whether the subtext is intentional or not

that's how i am with subtext half the time mind you

now's a good time for me to remind myself that "subtext" and "bottom text" are two completely different things

It's a Ben Folds Five song.... I have no idea what subtext you mean though!

honestly kate, you are reading way too much into something that is almost certainly a reference to either the Commodores or Ben Folds. Not everything is about being trans.

and i say that with love and tenderness, fwiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBx6mAWYPU

honestly kate, you are reading way too much into something that is almost certainly a reference to either the Commodores or Ben Folds. Not everything is about being trans.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

you're absolutely right. having a weird brain weekend.

much love, though

oh absolutely, much love to y'all as well. :) i got a pretty good idea of why i wonder these things and like y'all are saying, it does in fact have nothing to do with being trans. i'll try to talk about it more elsewhere.

I've been rabbitholing on SNL for the past weekend. Trying not to think about things outside of my control. And I've been doing it for... typical Kate reasons, honestly. I'm fascinated by it because it's so often _bad_. So, so much of this show is just not funny. Not just "hasn't held up", like, this shit was never funny in the first place. They've made a lot of mistakes. They've done a lot of shitty things. They've given platforms to awful people. Lorne Michaels is more or less the main villain of _The People's Joker_, and from what I can tell he deserves to be portrayed in that way.

And sometimes, of course, it's fucking hilarious, in weird and unexpected ways. Maybe some of it is the juxtaposition. It kind of encapsulates the idea of "crate-digging", the idea of experiencing huge amounts of mediocre and bad shit and then stumbling on something that's awesome... that surprise, that joy, is greater for me than when I'm expecting something to be good. Yeah, that is what I'd say interests me about it - my belief that at its baseline, the show is _just not funny_.

Sorting SNL's Youtube channel by views gives a different experience. You don't see the whole shows, but the ranking is done by virality. Which means you get great sketches, but also sketches that are controversial, like the "Aer Lingus" sketch, or just plain fucking bad, like Elon Musk as Wario.

So when I'm browsing through and I see a sketch with 5.6 million views called "She's Got a D!%k" I think to myself, oh God, of course. Of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OslWqLHlCvw

Then I watch the sketch. Because I'm interested in the context. I mean, of course it's transphobic. No question about that. I know it going in. It's from 2013. I remember 2013. Everybody and everything was transphobic.

Part of the reason I watch it is because another clip with a lot of views is 2015... "Pete Davidson on Trans Rights". He's for trans rights, was for trans rights in 2015. I'm one of those olds who doesn't really know a lot about SNL past, well... season 5, to be honest. I'm that fucking old.

So I watched "She's Got a D!%k", prepared for the worst. It still amazes me how much changed in the course of two years. Much as I fucking hate Malcolm Gladwell, i kind of do feel like there was a "Transgender Tipping Point", and it was when Time Magazine said it was, around 2014. Hell, they probably had some role in making the tipping point, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy thing.

There's this page on TV Tropes called "Fair For Its Day". I think sometimes stuff that wasn't fair for its day gets excused on those grounds, but I do also think that... you know, having grown up in really transphobic times, the bar was a lot lower then. Wanda in the Sandman story "A Game of You", I think that was Fair for Its Day. I'd frame it more as... grading on the curve. Social standards were so low that stuff which today is pretty clearly bigoted is actually affirming, is actually helpful to a lot of the people the thing in question is bigoted against.

Which is to say that I did find "She's Got A Dick" (this isn't network TV, I can say "dick" here) to be unexpectedly affirming. First off, the person who wrote it - Michael Che, apparently, it was apparently the first sketch Michael Che wrote for SNL - the sense I get was that Michael Che was just... ignorant of trans women. Like it didn't even occur to him that some women have penises. So even though I'd say it's unquestionably transphobic, I wouldn't say it's _consciously_ transphobic. I'm really struck by the lack of malice in this sketch.

The second thing that's important to me is that Michael Che is, in fact, a good writer. A lot of jokes, transphobic or no, are written by people who are bad writers and don't know how to make something funny. I'd say that the old meme song "Transphobic Techno" is an iteration of this joke that isn't funny - from memory, the lyrics are just "Bitch got a penis", over and over again.

Che, on the other hand, fleshes out the joke. He frames it as a cliche romcom - the sort where the guy has to come to terms with the idea that the woman isn't perfect. She has kids. She's had a mastectomy. I personally... I personally suspect that one of the reasons these movies keep getting made is because a lot of women feel like we're broken or flawed in some way, that because of some issue or another a man couldn't really love us for who we are. So you have, for instance, the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope. When I was young, I saw _Pretty Woman_, which is kind of an iconic representation of that trope. It's a terrible representation of sex work and sex workers, but to me, the film presents Roberts' character not as a professional, but as a slut. Why, she even _sucks his dick_! I remember how terribly controversial people found that at the time, and it, like, represents a patriarchal standard to me, one of the ideas I was raised with. Good Girls don't suck dick.

For the record, I very definitely suck dick. I got a lot of shame about my sexuality in a lot of ways, but sucking dick - I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud of that.

That might be a lot of why I find it affirming - because of how perfectly it replicates the structure of one of those cliche romcoms. I am, in a lot of ways, a basic white bitch, and the theme of this fictional movie is something I genuinely have anxiety about. I worry (not without cause) that people won't be into me because of my dick.

I did read the comments. Usually I don't, but in this case I did, just because, I guess... I wanted to see what people were watching it thought about it, and maybe get a sense of when people were watching this. It's been there for eleven years, since it was first broadcast, and a lot has happened in that time. Did people think it was funny when it first came out? Is it viral with transphobes now?

Turned out the top comments I saw were from about four years ago, when apparently Youtube decided to start recommending it to people for a while. God knows why Youtube does these things - and these comments weren't transphobic. Some of them were from other trans women who, like, me found the sketch validating. A lot of them were focused on the stereotyped character of the "Black best friend" - which is the funniest part of the sketch. It's a pitch-perfect critique of the, uh, _questionable_ racial politics of a lot of these films.

For me, the thing that I find most affirming about it is that that it speaks to my own past anxieties. Before I was with another trans women, I had a lot of anxiety about being sexually intimate with a woman who has a penis. To me, that's a common anxiety, that's a normal anxiety to have. I didn't want to admit to it. I felt like if I acknowledged that, I'd be admitting that I was transphobic.

I guess coming from that background is a lot of why I have this anxiety, that other people might avoid me because of my dick but noat admit it. I don't know how prevalent it actually is.

I am stil ignorant in a lot of ways, because I've never sucked a cis guy's dick. It's something I'd be interested in. I should probably find a sex worker to try that with. I know I could go to a bathhouse or pick up someone on Grindr, but it's an issue of fairness for me. I know I don't want to be someone's experiment. I don't want someone to get with me just because they're _curious_ about what it's like beiing with a trans woman. If it's in a professional context, though, I think it's fine to do that. That's one of the reasons I'm in favor of sex work - I think it is good for people to experiment sexually, and if someone is gonna do that I think sex work is the most ethical way to do that.

Anyway. More Kateposting. Hopefully it's a little more grounded than my last revive :)

I don't know anything about that sketch! But now I've watched the video and I do.

I ended up watching the Netflix doc Will & Harper about Will Ferrell's road trip with his trans friend/coworker Harper Steele over the weekend. Steele was a head writer for SNL for many years, and left the show around 2015, so it's possible she was in the writers' room for that one, although not out at the time.

I haven't had the chance to talk to anyone else about the documentary yet, but I didn't expect much and it exceeded that. I think the piece they address throughout is what they knew would happen, but couldn't quite plan for: what happens when a comedian who is instantly recognizable to many people travels the country with a friend, putting both of them in the spotlight regardless of where they are, and that friend is also a trans woman? Thankfully that's not the totality of the film.
I feel like they weren't sure what they were going to end up with before they started filming and anything comedic/goofy that gets attempted ends up working against them. I don't think their shared sense of humor was responsible for many things that are my type of comedy, really, so maybe it came off better for other viewers.
There were a few heartbreaking moments, conversations that took place with few others present (if any at all) that were probably the best parts.

I've heard really good things about it! I haven't seen it yet. But what I've heard has been overall positive. I've also heard... that there were bits that were kind of planned, to some extent, and that those bits didn't necessarily land great. I feel like a situation like that would be tough to negotiate.

anyone following the San Jose State women's volleyball story? there is a trans woman who has played on the team for years (she is a senior) but was only recently was publicly revealed to be trans. several other teams have forfeited their matches against SJS in protest, and one of the team's co-captains filed a lawsuit to stop her teammate from playing, alleging Title IX violations.

here is an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/us/trans-volleyball-san-jose-state.html

i recognize that this can be a complicated issue, but what gets me is that the people objecting to the trans woman playing (including the captain) *always* misgender her. how do you have a serious conversation about it if people won't even admit she's a woman?

this is one of those things where i don’t even think there should be a conversation, that everyone on one side of this issue is not only wrong but a hateful idiot, so yeah it doesn’t surprise me that they can only misgender her

“biology is destiny” - people who say they care about women but actually hate them

It is impossible to have any kind of “conversation” when one side is acting in total bad faith and using the issue as a site to vent their transphobia.

one of the team's co-captains filed a lawsuit to stop her teammate from playing, alleging Title IX violations.

that team co-captain:

Ms. Slusser, a senior from Denton, Tex., said she considers this fight “God’s plan” for her.

She said she initially didn’t realize that her teammate, who has played for the Spartans since 2022, was transgender, even when first living with her and rooming with her for away games. The two had been good friends, she said.

But when the article was published this spring about the teammate’s gender identity, Ms. Slusser said she felt betrayed. She said, “I truly don’t care how you want to live your life,” but a trans woman shouldn’t room with female teammates or use a women’s locker room.

ivy otm x2

'we can always tell' *years pass without telling*

congrats to the nyt for managing to get vile anti-trans bigotry into the limited space of a single photo caption btw

jaymc, you might be interested in this much more in-depth article: https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/42549609/inside-san-jose-state-university-2024-volleyball-season-gender-fairness-safety

among other things it actually analyzes claims about the player's performance rather than simply quoting awful bigots

ivy otm x3
you can't have a conversation with hateful idiots

love it when it's presented as "fairness in sports", because you'd think the same idiots would also care about it not being "fair" for transgender men but they never do.

Slusser alleged the player in question conspired with a few teammates and an opponent to clear space on the court to allow the opponent to basically spike the ball into her face unimpeded, in retaliation for the lawsuit/public comments.

"What did i do to deserve that? All I did was dehumanize her!"

The ESPN article also managed to frame the story correctly, portraying Slusser as an awful, hateful piece of shit without having to say so

Oof and today I learned about Fide banning transwomen from women’s chess. Batshit.

Why is there “women’s chess?”

So the chess bois don’t get distracted

Ugh of course Riley Gaines is involved. Grifted her way from being a good but non-Olympic-caliber college swimmer to a Fox host and pal of DeSantis and Trump, all by whining about Lia Thomas.

oh fuck i didn’t know the team refusing to play san jose state is my alma mater. fucking depressing. i think i’m going to write them a letter

or one of the teams rather

thanks for the espn link, rob. agreed it is a better-reported story.

Why is there “women’s chess?”

it's basically affirmative action because men significantly outnumber women in chess & the chess world is generally rather misogynistic (these two facts are of course very related). women are still able to compete in open tournaments

what gets me is that the people objecting to the trans woman playing (including the captain) *always* misgender her. how do you have a serious conversation about it if people won't even admit she's a woman?

this is the entire point of what they're doing, their aim to ensure that trans women are defined as men across all of society and sport is just an issue where credulous liberals have shown they're easier to convince

my ex-GF is from san jose so she's been following the story. not surprising to hear the NYT being transphobic - they're pretty routinely transphobic in the same way that pretty much all UK papers are. most NYT readers seem to not be particularly aware of this. i'd be depressed by this if the NYT's approach was the norm, the way it is in the UK.

since this is the "is this transphobic?" thread, for anybody who's not aware, the answer to the question "is the new york times transphobic?" is "yes".

Good news at least:

everal Montana Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday to block a measure that would have barred transgender lawmakers from using the state Capitol bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities.

The proposed measure would have banned Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democratic lawmaker who was reelected in November, from using the women’s bathroom outside Montana’s House and Senate chambers. Last year, Zephyr was silenced in the House after speaking out against her Republican colleagues for their support of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children.

Weeks ahead of her return to the House floor, Zephyr’s colleagues in the chamber rejected the bathroom measure in a 12-10 vote. Three Republicans joined Democrats in voting against it, characterizing it as a rule that would not add value to their work while also noting they didn’t necessarily disagree with the ideology driving it.

Zephyr told The Washington Post on Wednesday that she was grateful to her GOP colleagues who voted “no.” She said she has a “good working relationship” with them, adding that their votes against the measure showed they were “able to recognize this for the distraction that it is.”

I’ve got a friend (who’s also my favourite living author), who’s written a killer book with trans themes that his agent can’t place with a publisher. The rejection letters are glowing — he says he could pull quotes from them and use them as promotional blurbs — but it’s always “not a fit for us right now”. He says the elephant in the room is that publishers are scared shitless of the topic, basically, with the political climate. Fuck me dead, back when I was in publishing I’d have jumped at a chance to get my hands on this book. And if it got banned, even better! What the hell happened?

I mean what does “with trans themes” mean

Well it’s shorthand dangit

Dystopian novel where normalcy is being enforced by a GOP-like authority, main character is a trans girl.

Pretty much all of his books (publishing since ‘76) have had major threads of queerness/transness running through them. This is the most explicitly politically pointed one tho

I’ve got a friend (who’s also my favourite living author), who’s written a killer book with trans themes that his agent can’t place with a publisher. The rejection letters are glowing — he says he could pull quotes from them and use them as promotional blurbs — but it’s always “not a fit for us right now”. He says the elephant in the room is that publishers are scared shitless of the topic, basically, with the political climate. Fuck me dead, back when I was in publishing I’d have jumped at a chance to get my hands on this book. And if it got banned, even better! What the hell happened?

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante)

what i'm seeing around sadly tracks pretty well with your friend's experience

i just said this in the dystopia thread:

i just know that a lot of people who were loud about supporting trans people in '19 aren't as loud these days. media that supports trans people gets quietly shelved, trans-affirming scenes get cut. it's too controversial. god, these days it seems a miracle that a show like _the owl house_ got made at all. i don't think a show like it would get on the air today.

this trend is pretty fucking scary to me. there's a pretty strong push going on to make us disappear, and it's been terrifyingly successful. the talk in the bsky thread, where people _criticizing_ jesse singal are taken as being the issue, and not the campaign conducted by people like singal... i mean the wind seems to be blowing a certain way, and trans people, well, we seem to be on the wrong end of it.

heartening to see the Cindy Lee album ranked so highly (end of year) by the Guardian, I think it's awesome

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/19/the-50-best-albums-of-2024-no-2-cindy-lee-diamond-jubilee

I went out and got drunk last night with this lady. A couple years older than me. Trans and intersex. She's been through some shit. No point in talking about it. Water under the bridge. Thing is, though, all her life, all her life her mom has supported her, fought for her. More than fifty years, through hell and high water, this lady's mom has been there for her.

Until this year. Suddenly this lady's mom sees these videos online, then this lady's mom is saying all kinds of shit about her, predator, groomer, shit like that, and then this lady's mom isn't talking to her at all. Last Christmas her mom got her a beautiful handbag, this wonderful, thoughtful gift, and this year, her mom isn't talking to her.

They could make us disappear. They could make us disappear, and nobody here could do anything to stop them. Five years ago I didn't believe that. A year ago I didn't _want_ to believe it. Now? Now I have no doubts about that. We could vanish, and most people _wouldn't even know_ until we were already gone.

And what am I gonna say? People have already stopped taking me seriously when I talk about it, make little snide comments. It's boring. It's tedious. It makes me unpleasant to be around. Increasingly, people aren't around, so when things happen... they don't know, they don't see, they don't believe.

Five years ago, I was full of fire. I didn't want what happened to me when I was a kid, what happened to us when we were kids, to ever happen to anyone else. Joke's on me. Shit could happen to us, me, them, so many of us, that's so much worse - not just worse than what I went through, worse than I could have even imagined five years ago. A lot of people? A lot of people can't imagine it now. That's what scares me, more than anything.

That's rough, Kate... to see a once-loving parent brainwashed by the level of cruel scapegoating we're seeing these days

it did look like things were getting better for your community, but I think that stupid thing with the Bud Light lit a fire with the knuckle draggers; I'm sure there were other cultural things going on, but the Bud Light 'controversy' seemed like such a step backwards right when things appeared to be moving forward

That's rough, Kate... to see a once-loving parent brainwashed by the level of cruel scapegoating we're seeing these days

it did look like things were getting better for your community, but I think that stupid thing with the Bud Light lit a fire with the knuckle draggers; I'm sure there were other cultural things going on, but the Bud Light 'controversy' seemed like such a step backwards right when things appeared to be moving forward

― Andy the Grasshopper

All I can really say is that it looks different from where I'm sitting. It's not... every marginalized group has this experience, I know. There's a lot of stuff that happens to immigrant that I don't know about. There's stuff that routinely happens to Black Americans that I don't know about. I try to keep myself informed, I try to stay on top of things, but when things get bad for a group, one of the main signs is that you stop seeing _from_ them, stop hearing _from_ them. When you hear about them, that's exactly what it is - you hear _about_ them. What you hear about them might not even _seem_ hostile, might not even _seem_ bigoted. It's not unique to trans people. Other groups have it bad in ways that we don't.

It's important for me to say that because a lot of it is how it's framed. Because when I talk about my experiences, it's easy for it to sound like special pleading, particicularly when the person I'm talking to also has it pretty fucking bad. It's easy for it to sound like me being obsessed with this one thing, with me making way too big a deal out of things. So I don't want to seem like I'm making too big a deal out of it. Sometimes the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

It's what I know best, though, because it's my life. Because I remember how things were framed in the '90s, _The Silence of the Lambs_, which is a great movie with horribly transphobic representation, _The Crying Game_, which is a great movie with horribly transphobic representation. Neither of them were intentionally or overtly transphobic. These were people trying to be sympathetic, but what they were saying didn't come from trans experiences. That's the important point, not _who says it_ but where it _comes_ from. hardcore dilettante's friend, I don't know who he is or what he's written or if he's trans or not. That doesn't matter, his _identity_. What matters is he's trying to tell a story where the main character is a trans girl, a story that draws _from_ trans experience, even if it's not the author's own, and nowadays nobody wants to publish it, nobody wants to promote it.

I was reading or listening to an interview about Torrey Peters. She was talking about what it was like to promote _Detransition Baby_ in the US versus what it was like to promote it in the UK. In the US she was talking to more cis people, but she was also talking to bigger publications. Bigger media outlets would talk about her. In the UK, trans people would come out, but she wasn't talking to the BBC or the Guardian. She was talking to these small presses without the same reach, without the same distribution. That's what marginalization _is_, that's what marginalization _looks like_. The same thing that happened in the UK, it's happening in the US. It's harder and harder for trans stories to get told where cis people can hear them, because those stories are seen as too "divisive" or "controversial". The harder our reality gets, the more "divisive" and "controversial" it becomes to talk about what's happening to us, to point a finger at the people who are _doing_ it.

Nobody wants to believe that what's happening to trans people _could_ happen here, let alone that it _is_ happening here. More than anything, nobody wants to believe that they _can't stop it from happening_. This lady I was talking to last night, she told me, she really believed this, that if all the trans people presented a unified front, if we all stood up and said "These kids need these hormones, it's a matter of life or death", that the Republicans would listen. That's what she told me. What the fuck can I say to that? She's wrong, of course. I hope everyone reading this knows that. I hope everyone reading this knows that the Republicans don't care about the truth, don't care about the well-being of kids. That Republican policy is that trans people _should not exist_. She can't accept that. She's not ready to accept that, even though _she's_ trans, even though _she's_ the one who suffers by trying to assume good intent.

Because we have to stay alive. Because nothing is gained by despair. Because I nearly destroyed my own life trying to make a world where nobody else ever had to suffer like I suffered. I wish I could look away, not always, but sometimes, just sometimes. I wish I didn't always have this thing, both unspeakable and undeniable, resting in the pit of my stomach. It's _normal_, it's _natural_ to want to look away. The people who want us to not exist count on that. They use that. Because they can't make us not exist while people are looking. Nobody would tolerate it. If people knew, really knew, what's being done to trans people in America, what's being done to Black people in America, what's being done to immigrants in America, well, there wouldn't be an America. Because it's monstrous. Someone who sees it, even if we can't fight what's happening effectively, we can't go along. We can't do what's required of us. That's why people are still transitioning, are still taking estrogen, are still changing our names, even though we know in some sense we might be signing our own death warrants. _We do not have a choice_.

I don't feel like I can talk about it anymore. Not from where I'm standing. I don't have the podium. I am reliant on allies now, reliant on allies to put _themselves_ at risk for my sake. Reliant on allies to be willing to risk their jobs, their security, perhaps even their physical safety. The best thing I feel like I can do, at this point, is to _not_ make it about me. To try and speak up for other people. Because I know people are doing that for me now. I know people are fighting for me now, in ways I don't know, in ways I'll never know.

-

We're dying, and we're going to continue dying, y'all here - _you can't save us_. It doesn't mean it's futile. It doesn't mean you're helpless. It doesn't mean that you can't be _righteous_.

People here... don't need to know the full reality of what's happening to us. Don't need to know every detail. I guess the things it's important for me to say, the things I'd like allies to know, is:

1. There are so many things happening to us that you don't see, that it's hard to see. Things that are worse than you can imagine.
You don't need to confront the reality of it. You don't need to stare into the abyss. Probably you shouldn't. I try to avoid looking directly t it.

2. Everyone is, by necessity, complicit. You, me, everyone. That doesn't make you guilty. Being complicit in the acts of the oppressor does not require you to identify with the oppressor. There is no collective guilt. None of us are, right now, in a position to take up arms against a sea of troubles and, by, opposing, end them. Do what you can do.

3. Speaking up isn't always an option. There's this feeling I have, always, that I should be able to save people. That I should be able to do more. That I have an obligation to speak up. The truth is, it's increasingly unsafe for me to speak up. I have to be more and more careful what I say and where I say it. That's not something that only affects trans people, but it does affect me. Increasingly I don't tell cis people I'm trans. It's only going to get me hurt. Sometimes, I'm learning, I need to be silent, I need to be stealth, to do the most good - and it's my privilege that I can be.

4. You _don't have to comply_. When all else fails, there is this. This is what the people who want trans people to disappear fear more than anything. They want you to think they don't need you to comply, that your compliance or lack thereof doesn't matter. It does. Even if none of us can stop what's happening, we can choose to not look the other way. Seeing what's happening, knowing what's happening, is painful. It's soul-crushing. It's _necessary_. To live with that knowledge, to bear that understanding, is to be alive to alternatives. Once one sees a problem, one suddenly starts seeing solutions that were imperceptible before.

-

IDK. I talk a lot. I hope this helps someone else. Sometimes I need to talk about it.