There was a rather upsetting post recently that attracted a lot of apparently non-LGBT+ people with bad opinions. I’d like to remind everyone that “bee kind” includes not accepting, normalizing, and ignoring transphobic opinions and beliefs. We’re all together in this.
Here are some bad opinions I saw:
- “People need to be educated, and you’re not going to change their minds by becoming hostile.”
The first thing that’s obviously wrong with this is that it makes the people targeted by LGBTphobia appear to the the ones who are “overreacting” or being “hysterical,” but there’s more…
Certainly, education needs to happen, and patience is a virtue. A valid example of reasonable education to expect would be “I go by they/them now.” What education should not need to include on the part of the LGBT+ person is a defense of one’s validity as a human or one’s existence. Most people who think that it should point to examples like Daryl Davis, and I mean … good for him, but that’s not an example we all need to or even can/should follow. For many LGBT+ people, it can feel like a contant battle to live and be accepted. Expecting us to address every bad-faith argument or misguided belief on the part of LGBTphobes is … honestly, that’s just an offensive opinion in and of itself and very dismissive of reality.
- “[Famous person] literally did the bare minimum to support gay people, so I doubt they’re transphobic.”
Okay, first of all, I can only facepalm so hard before it creates a black hole that consumes the fabric of reality, but you said patient education is a thing we should do, so here it is: There are many, many people who claim to be “allies” while only supporting select groups within the LGBT+ spectrum. The reason I put “allies” in quotation marks is that these people are not allies. We are all in this together. You can’t be an ally for me, a cis gay person, without also supporting trans people. These are my siblings, my community too, and we should not tolerate it. Likewise, the LG people I’ve met who don’t support the BT+ don’t belong in this community. Full stop.
So no, supporting the LG is not really possible without supporting the BT+. Sorry, not sorry.
- “They’re from a different time.”
Absolutely one of the worst arguments I’ve ever heard, and I say this as a Gen X-er. No. Just no. There has never been a time in my life that transphobia was acceptable. Perhaps it was sadly normalized in certain times and places, but it has never been okay. If anything, it’s even more important to speak up in those times and places when and where bigotry is seen as “normal.” It’s even more important then to be an ally.
And my 80+ parents are not transphobic in the least. It’s so easy to understand the basics of what it means to be trans that there is not even the shadow of an excuse.
I really don’t think vapid and pointless arguments like those above should be allowed in a space that’s supposed to be a safe and validating community. I understand some of these people may be well-meaning non-LGBT+ people, but it’s exhausting having to address the gish gallop of absolute nonsensical attempts to make transphobia seem okay. It is NOT okay, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.
I even saw some people arguing that excluding trans people isn’t transphobic. That’s how unhinged some of these people are.
So TERFs and other transphobes stfu challenge 2023.
EDIT:
Thank you to everyone who responded with understanding. I think it had to be said. At first I wasn’t sure it was my place since I’m not trans, but I know how exhausting it can be. They did the same thing to me back in the day. It’s a silencing tactic. “Gish gallop” is the term that comes to mind.
But I’ve had a few ugly trolls in the thread behaving just as described in my post. I will report each and every one of you 💛
I’d like to remind anyone who takes issue with this rant to send your hot takes directly to my attorney where they belong. Thank you for your cooperation.
Hostility may be driving the transphobic to the polls and driving away the indifferent. You’re never going to convince the transphobic to vote for politicians who support trans rights. But you can convince people who regularly don’t vote to help you at the polls. But a lot of the people who don’t regularly vote that I know in real life, don’t vote because they hate the hostility and perceived pointlessness of politics. If you’re hostile then you’re not going to get their support. Convincing them that they can really help all the good people who are trans will bring them to the polls. getting them onboard would help a lot in elections.
stepping in because this whole chain past the parent comment seems to be arguing completely past each other and i think i’m seeing where those wires are crossed here.
as i understand it, the parent comment here is specifically talking about legislating transphobia, but most of the comments arguing against it seem to be talking about handling social transphobia. these are not the same thing and should probably be handled differently and distinguished. for example: in the former case, wanting the case for trans rights to be “respectable” and “presentable” seems more understandable because you need a broad coalition to pass legislative issues most of the time. in the latter case “respectability” and “presentability” are asking for people to compromise who they are interpersonally to bargain with people who mostly want them dead, which i think we can generally agree is unreasonable.
So 1 to 3% of the US population somehow has been hostile to a full quarter (25%) of the population?
Please explain to me how this is physically possible for the people in the extreme minority to have produced enough hostility to a much larger (like nearly 10 times as large) population? Because fully a quarter of the US voting population seems to be getting out to vote about trans issues, but I’m pretty sure they’re driven by fucking religious fascism not trans people being hostile.
I just don’t see how its conceivably even possible. Unless every single trans person sits downtown with a bullhorn ranting angrily while also ranting angrily in every forum they exist on.
No, it’s usually fucking shitheels coming to trans spaces to shit all over them. But the hostility from the trans people is the problem!
Give me a break.
If you are driven to the polls because you dislike someone for existing a way that upsets or confuses you, even though they do not hurt you or anyone else, you’re the one who is fucking valueless and needs to be stripped from fucking society. If someone being hostile is all it takes to turn you into an extremely shitty person, then the reality is you were already a shitty person looking for an excuse for it to begin with.
I get that you’re angry and certainly have a right to be angry. You have let your anger blind you to reason though. You comment reads like you didn’t actually read mine at all. Or if you did, then your anger wouldn’t allow you to at least understand what the main point was.
But tldr: the bigots are lost. The people who aren’t strongly aligned can be convinced to vote, but hostility towards people who aren’t being hostile towards trans rights is driving them away even if it isn’t directed at them. It’s not your job to win them over, but it would be effective at the polls.
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Just to step in with a personal anecdote in regards to point 3, and specifically “nobody who wasn’t transphobic to begin with needs to be convinced to not be it”:
About a year ago my wife’s cousin (17M) was visiting us for a party. I was showing him and his dad my gun collection, and the cousin noticed several stickers on my safe which reference support for the LGBT+ community. When we happened to be alone out on the balcony later, he asked me about them, and what I thought about LGBT+ people and issues, and it was a great opportunity to educate someone not in that community. It is also something that he wasn’t going to get from his parents or friends, because his parents don’t know anything about LGBT+ issues, and his friends are all 16/17 year old males, and that means they all watch manosphere-light assholes like JonTron.
I’ve written about this issue elsewhere at more length, but the Left has largely ceded the young-unaligned-male demo to the Right when it comes to outreach and education, and I do think a lot of the problem is this attitude that “anyone who’s not bad is already an ally”, or put in the inverse, “if you’re not already an ally, you’re bad”. But in the case of young people specifically, we do need some willingness to have these discussions, because a Google search gives you facts about the LGBT+ community, sure, but it doesn’t give you humanization.
The rest of point 3 I agree with, but I do think it’s unfortunately common- even if understandable- to see people lash out at what are very possibly good-faith questions about LGBT+ issues because of how used we all are to questions just being the lead-in to some bigot asshole’s screed.
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From what I’ve observed, all too often curiosity about trans people (which comes from a place of ignorance) regularly is misread as transphobia (especially when the curiosity is worded in accidentally transphobic ways - a lot of cis people with little knowledge of trans people genuinely don’t have the right vocabulary, and that gets misinterpreted as transphobic rather than just a lack of knowledge). Questions about trans lives regularly get a hostile “it’s not my job to educate ignorant people, they should Google it” response. If @t3rmit3@beehaw.org had responded to their wife’s cousin with an angry “it’s not my job to educate you!”, the result would likely not have been as positive as the conversation they had.
I always approach questions about trans stuff with an initial assumption that it’s made in good faith and comes from a place of curiosity. Those acting in bad faith reveal themselves pretty quickly, in which case I shut the conversation down. But more often than not, people are ignorant but curious, rather than malicious and hateful. So I absolutely agree with t3rmit3 on that front. Very little beats the human touch of having a real conversation with someone.
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What @frog said is spot on in regards to my wife’s cousin; the first thing he did when he saw the pride flag was go, “haha gay” because he’s and edgy teen. And when we were talking later, he absolutely sounded like a right wing anti-LGBT+ troll, because he didn’t have either the vocabulary or mindset to do otherwise. But he was asking questions earnestly.
There is tons of ‘casual transphobia’ in young male spaces (and casual bigotry in general), and someone has to be willing to wade into that bog if we want to pull those kids out of it. I’m not saying that has to be you or any other person in particular -not everyone can or should put themselves in that position- but if all transphobia is universally only met with hostility, even when the context of the conversation might otherwise hint that this is not someone who is a lost cause, it will drive those people further into the clutches of the Right.
That is why I brought up the lack of a Left-oriented outreach pipeline for young men; they’ve been ignored by the Left for long enough that their spaces are very hostile to LGBT+ people in general (looking at my fellow gamers), but we need to start clawing them back, and that has to start with not immediately treating them as lost causes worthy only of derision when they exhibit transphobia.
Many of them are just parroting the language and behavior of the spaces they occupy in order to fit in, not actively choosing or attempting to be transphobic.
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We need laws to protect people who are trans from trans phobic behaviors and laws. Voting is how you accomplish that.
I’m not policing. I’m suggesting a strategy to actually accomplish goals. Being aggressive towards people isn’t going to help even if the aggression is justified.
This is how I know you didn’t actually read what I wrote, because. I explicitly said that the bigots can’t be turned and that people have every right to be angry over transphobia.
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To clarify your opinion for myself: the most common reason cited by moderates for opposing the 1960s civil rights campaign was “I agree racism is bad, but why can’t black people be civil and polite when asking for equality?” Do you agree or disagree with that opinion?
The thing is that these people aren’t being honest when they say things like that. They’re lying, but they’re often lying to themselves as much as to others. They always have some objection or another to opposing bigotry. Because the reason they’re giving is just a post hoc justification for opposing progress.
Think back to the George Floyd protests. People said the exact same thing, that they oppose racism, but they can’t abide riots (even though the overwhelming majority of the protests were not violent). Then later, an NFL player kneeled during the anthems, literally the tamest, most inoffensive protest I can imagine. And people lost their minds.
It doesn’t matter how disruptive or civil the protest is, it will never be inoffensive enough, they will always oppose it. And if you somehow do find a form of “protest” so inoffensive that they accept it? Then they’ll ignore you.
Are you saying the Martin Luther King and his strategy was bad for the civil rights movement???
Seriously though. These kinds of trap questions are pointless and counterproductive.
MLK Jr has pretty famously discussed the issues with respectability politics wrt white moderate. He also shifted his beliefs towards socialism and realizing the necessity of violence to the success of the civil rights movement before being assassinated so… even MLK didn’t think his original strategy was going to succeed.
Nearly all of the accomplishments of the civil rights movement occurred during MLK’s non violent strategy. The switch to a more violent philosophy was not successful.
But more importantly, we’re not talking about violence. If trend supporters can force change through violence, then maybe it’s a successful strategy. But at the moment, the only strategy we have is legislative. And turning off the undecided instead of bringing them on board to vote with you is foolish and counterproductive.
First post on lemmy, just wanted to say this was a great comment. It was eye opening to think about how it’s probably not even physically possible, in addition to being a bad faith argument. I’d never heard it put that way, good point.
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The world is what it is. I’m suggesting a way to work within the world we have to secure trans rights. If you only care to have the support of people you define to be “good”, then you’ve already lost. We’re going to need the support of people we don’t fully agree with to secure trans rights.
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Absolutely not and if that’s your takeaway from what I wrote then I don’t think you actually bothered to use one brain cell when reading what I wrote.
That’s literally exactly what I’ve been saying. Help those that don’t regularly vote to care about trans rights enough to vote. We aren’t going to win them over by berating them for not being 100% aligned with us.
It’s possible. same sex marriage is an example.
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Social issues certainly aren’t solved by shouting at people on the internet or in person.