Fight like hell for the living
Nov. 20th, 2017 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistThe Transgender Day of Remembrance is a solemn occasion, a recognition that every year hundreds of people's lives (and those are just the ones we know about) end for no other reason than that they were trans.
This year's Trans Day of Remembrance has arrived in the middle of a 80s-style moral panic, the media (and not just the tabloids, the broadsheets and the BBC are absolutely fueling this in their fake-intellectual way) frothing up a good Section-28-style lather of hatred and hostility to trans people, who here are demonized as getting your kids to want to dress wrong for school, who are somehow "shutting down" anyone happy with the gender they were born in.
I keep hearing about this nefarious "trans lobby" but they can't get a word in edgewise among the daily -- more than one a day, now -- columns and radio and TV appearances of people stoking the transphobia. And there is a direct (and short) line between that and the transphobia that caused all the deaths we particularly mourn today (CN for link; it contains descriptions of lethal violence).
One of my first encounters with this kind of transphobic bigotry today was an extremely disappointing Pink News article I saw shared on their Facebook page, rehashing TERF lies from two months ago to try to make trans people look bad. Some of the comments there made me shudder in frustration and rage and shock. I'm an immigrant in a country that's ruining itself because it hates immigrants; I'm disabled in a country that's killing disabled people and violating our human rights; yet despite that hostility the level of cruelty aimed at trans people on the internet is like nothing I've ever seen. Of course it's overwhelmingly worse for trans women, for trans people of color, for trans sex workers, for any intersection with transness, but it's worse for even the most normative trans person than anything is for me as a cis person.
The transphobes bleat about men being in women-ony spaces. They call trans women (they don't mind trans men so much, you see, because they also don't acknowledge that they are men) pervs and criminals. They tell lies about children being forced into hormones or surgery when no one's even allowed those things until they're over 18, much less compelled to just by being a boy who once wore a tutu or played with a doll.
They are wrong and they are cruel. They have always been around, but lately they are feeling emboldened. And that does a lot of harm.
A couple of months ago, my corner of Twitter acknowledged that there'd be a transphobic article in a UK paper every weekend. Then it increased to nearly every day and one day recently there were three. Transphobia has been on Radio 4, it's been on TV, of course it's all over Twitter. It's everywhere.
And the trans people I know? Are exhausted. This onslaught is more than anyone can process or cope with. For all the transphobes' wails that the "trans lobby" runs everything and is silencing them, of course it's quite the reverse: there are few trans people in the population and they are systematically disprivileged and disempowered.
The cause of this scary spike in public, establishment-mandated transphobia in the UK seems to be the ongoing plan to update the Gender Recognition Act. The GRA was passed in 2004, which feels like a generation ago in queer rights terms, and it was criticized from the start for being laborious, intrusive, gatekeeping, inaccessible to many people who'd benefit from it, and in general just incredibly cisnormative.
Simplifying an obscure piece of legislation that will make life better for a small group of people and make no difference to anyone else's lives may seem a no-brainer, and it should be. But there are people out there who resist the fair treatment, the human rights, of trans women in particular but of anyone who threatens their cissexism.
Trans people are vulnerable, an easy target, in exactly the way gay people were in the 80s. And, as with bigots' doom-laden proclamations about what would happen if same-sex marriage were allowed, it is already possible to point to other countries who have had for years the kinds of laws the UK is considering upgrading to now, and the sky hasn't yet fallen.
In the same way that same-sex marriage hasn't hurt anyone who doesn't want one, better gender recognition laws would hardly even be noticed by anyone who is happy with the gender they were assigned when they were born.
But we're still a long way from this being sorted, and when this flood of media hate couldn't even stop for today, for the one day in the calendar set aside to remember those killed by transphobia, I have no hope or expectation it'll end any time soon.
Before now, I think some of we well-meaning cis people have kept to the sidelines a bit, not wanting to put our feet in our mouths about something we understand imperfectly, or not wanting to center ourselves when we want people to be listening to trans voices. But I think we have to strike a balance there and say what our trans siblings are too drained to say right now.
We have to challenge the idea that letting schoolchildren wear whatever uniform they want is some kind of apocalypse. We have to point out that trans people are so, so much more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator of violent crime. We have to point out that trans women are women, that trans men are men, that non-binary people exist (I just heard in a lecture today that singular they has been used as long as English has been a language, so if anybody tries to give you shit about that, you can tell them it's verified by linguists).
Trans people are people: the ones I know care about their families and their hobbies and their work...exactly the same stuff as the cis people I know. I am furious and I'm determined to channel that fury into helping bring about a world in which trans people don't have to dread seeing headlines in a newsagents, turning on Radio 4, or looking at their own twitter mentions. It's the very least they deserve.
This year's Trans Day of Remembrance has arrived in the middle of a 80s-style moral panic, the media (and not just the tabloids, the broadsheets and the BBC are absolutely fueling this in their fake-intellectual way) frothing up a good Section-28-style lather of hatred and hostility to trans people, who here are demonized as getting your kids to want to dress wrong for school, who are somehow "shutting down" anyone happy with the gender they were born in.
I keep hearing about this nefarious "trans lobby" but they can't get a word in edgewise among the daily -- more than one a day, now -- columns and radio and TV appearances of people stoking the transphobia. And there is a direct (and short) line between that and the transphobia that caused all the deaths we particularly mourn today (CN for link; it contains descriptions of lethal violence).
One of my first encounters with this kind of transphobic bigotry today was an extremely disappointing Pink News article I saw shared on their Facebook page, rehashing TERF lies from two months ago to try to make trans people look bad. Some of the comments there made me shudder in frustration and rage and shock. I'm an immigrant in a country that's ruining itself because it hates immigrants; I'm disabled in a country that's killing disabled people and violating our human rights; yet despite that hostility the level of cruelty aimed at trans people on the internet is like nothing I've ever seen. Of course it's overwhelmingly worse for trans women, for trans people of color, for trans sex workers, for any intersection with transness, but it's worse for even the most normative trans person than anything is for me as a cis person.
The transphobes bleat about men being in women-ony spaces. They call trans women (they don't mind trans men so much, you see, because they also don't acknowledge that they are men) pervs and criminals. They tell lies about children being forced into hormones or surgery when no one's even allowed those things until they're over 18, much less compelled to just by being a boy who once wore a tutu or played with a doll.
They are wrong and they are cruel. They have always been around, but lately they are feeling emboldened. And that does a lot of harm.
A couple of months ago, my corner of Twitter acknowledged that there'd be a transphobic article in a UK paper every weekend. Then it increased to nearly every day and one day recently there were three. Transphobia has been on Radio 4, it's been on TV, of course it's all over Twitter. It's everywhere.
And the trans people I know? Are exhausted. This onslaught is more than anyone can process or cope with. For all the transphobes' wails that the "trans lobby" runs everything and is silencing them, of course it's quite the reverse: there are few trans people in the population and they are systematically disprivileged and disempowered.
The cause of this scary spike in public, establishment-mandated transphobia in the UK seems to be the ongoing plan to update the Gender Recognition Act. The GRA was passed in 2004, which feels like a generation ago in queer rights terms, and it was criticized from the start for being laborious, intrusive, gatekeeping, inaccessible to many people who'd benefit from it, and in general just incredibly cisnormative.
Simplifying an obscure piece of legislation that will make life better for a small group of people and make no difference to anyone else's lives may seem a no-brainer, and it should be. But there are people out there who resist the fair treatment, the human rights, of trans women in particular but of anyone who threatens their cissexism.
Trans people are vulnerable, an easy target, in exactly the way gay people were in the 80s. And, as with bigots' doom-laden proclamations about what would happen if same-sex marriage were allowed, it is already possible to point to other countries who have had for years the kinds of laws the UK is considering upgrading to now, and the sky hasn't yet fallen.
This tsunami of anti-trans propaganda is because the govt plans to simplify the Gender Recognition Act. Here’s what that simplification looked like when Ireland did it. Simple. No fuss. No rapists in toilets. Just a dignified process that won’t affect anyone else at all. pic.twitter.com/BBgxTIDJO0
— Christine Burns MBE (@christineburns) November 19, 2017
In Argentina, it's been fairly simple to change legal gender since 2012. Ditto Denmark (2014), Malta (2015), Norway (2015) and Ireland, where it passed with barely a comment in 2015. There's no evidence that it's caused ANY problems. Hurrah! Put those legitimate concerns to rest!
— Paris Lees (@parislees) November 20, 2017
In the same way that same-sex marriage hasn't hurt anyone who doesn't want one, better gender recognition laws would hardly even be noticed by anyone who is happy with the gender they were assigned when they were born.
But we're still a long way from this being sorted, and when this flood of media hate couldn't even stop for today, for the one day in the calendar set aside to remember those killed by transphobia, I have no hope or expectation it'll end any time soon.
Before now, I think some of we well-meaning cis people have kept to the sidelines a bit, not wanting to put our feet in our mouths about something we understand imperfectly, or not wanting to center ourselves when we want people to be listening to trans voices. But I think we have to strike a balance there and say what our trans siblings are too drained to say right now.
We have to challenge the idea that letting schoolchildren wear whatever uniform they want is some kind of apocalypse. We have to point out that trans people are so, so much more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator of violent crime. We have to point out that trans women are women, that trans men are men, that non-binary people exist (I just heard in a lecture today that singular they has been used as long as English has been a language, so if anybody tries to give you shit about that, you can tell them it's verified by linguists).
Trans people are people: the ones I know care about their families and their hobbies and their work...exactly the same stuff as the cis people I know. I am furious and I'm determined to channel that fury into helping bring about a world in which trans people don't have to dread seeing headlines in a newsagents, turning on Radio 4, or looking at their own twitter mentions. It's the very least they deserve.
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Date: 2017-11-22 12:58 pm (UTC)Why would it be so bad to let someone else live their life however they want and you live your life however you want? Oh, right, the reason everyone is so down on trans women is because so many guys are paranoid they might unknowingly hook up with one. I suppose the idea of accepting your partner as they are, or waiting to have sex with someone until you get to know them a bit better and achieve whatever level of comfort you want, is a ridiculous one to these dudes.
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Date: 2017-11-23 02:27 pm (UTC)