Guest post: If acceptance is only skin-deep
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Advanced well-poisoning.
sexist & homophobic & transphobic
There it is again. That word, homophobic, as always, right at transpbobia’s side. It makes me increasingly uncomfortable to see it there. Upset even. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on why that is. It’s something like this:
Is this how they felt about gay rights? Is this how they felt about us? It scares me a little.
I thought society came to accept gays because they thought hard and came to truly understand in a deep sense what homosexuality is: namely, an immutable trait, not a choice, not a danger to society, etc.
But the way people are reacting to the trans agenda, and directly analogizing it to gay rights, indicates that the real lesson they learned from the gay rights movement wasn’t to listen, learn and understand, but merely to bury any doubts or discomfort deep inside and attack anyone who raises any issues or expresses any concerns.
It’s true that in the case of gay rights, it turns out most (though not all*) concerns about gay rights activism didn’t have any legitimate merit — they were merely “moral disgust in drag” (as Jane Clare Jones put it). But we figured that out by listening to people who spoke up with concerns and holding those concerns up to scrutiny — where they (mostly) failed to pass muster.
That’s a process that isn’t happening with trans activism. And it makes me feel like maybe nobody really did hold their concerns or discomfort about gays up to scrutiny but instead were merely conditioned to feel guilty for having discomfort in the first place, and that they had a moral obligation to suppress those thoughts. Here I’ve been thinking I’m living in a world where homophobia has been eradicated on the Left by the triumph of rational argument, and it’s looking more and more like it’s merely been suppressed on the Left by social pressure.
The trans rights agenda really is nothing like gay rights, and there are legitimate problems with it. I would have thought the left would gladly be pointing that out — making use of that rational thinking stuff that worked so well for gay rights, to expose the problems with trans activism, and strengthen everyone’s rights — women, gays and lesbians, and transsexuals. But all I’m seeing over and over again is a message that goes something like, “the gays taught us we’re supposed to shut up and be good allies no matter how we feel, and now we have to do the same for trans people.”
That’s not a healthy or stable basis for maintaining our rights. If those attitudes aren’t truly felt, but merely enforced by social norms, whats going to happen in a crisis where social norms are weakened? Global warming, economic or political strife? If gay and trans acceptance is only skin-deep, they will be the first things to go. Trans activism should be welcoming more debate, more critical inquiry, to strengthen everyone’s understanding of transsexuals’ rightful place in society.
*Pedophiles latched onto the gay rights movement; it’s a good thing critics had space to call the movement out for harboring them, and the movement eventually got its act together and pushed the pedophiles out. That’s a good example of how open dialogue led to a stronger, better gay rights movement.
I think that’s a very interesting point, but for what it’s worth, it doesn’t really describe my experience as a “cis” straight. It always seemed to me it didn’t take much deep thinking to see that there was just nothing to the whole “ew ick” reaction. There was no there there. It was an ossified taboo that rested on nothing. There had never been any real reason for homophobia beyond the “ew ick” taboo. I guess you could argue there was also the idea that the world needed more and more and more humans so everybody should get down to work and make more, but I think that got taken over by events a long time ago.
So in the case of gay rights I think social pressure was a reasonable approach. Homophobia was just a habit and people needed to be urged to replace it with a different habit, and I think that has worked with all but the evangelical segment.
@Ophelia I’ve always thought that sexism was folded into homophobia too. Lesbians are a threat because they have no use for men and gay men threaten them because they assume that gay men will target them for sexual harrassment or assault in the way straight men do to women.
That’s an interesting point. Like Ophelia I suspect that social pressure is necessary, but let’s hope it is not sufficient. Let’s hope that social pressure has led to better attitudes. Perhaps we’ll find out. That could happen, as you suggest, as social and environmental crises cause increasing stress, which they surely will. Or perhaps we’ll find out if and when the backlash against hard trans activism that lots of people seem to expect actually happens.
In the latter case it would be hard not to suspect that attitudes weren’t really changed because the ideology was dodgy in the first place. In the former (assuming homosexuals were among the first under the bus), it would confirm that we humans are as terrible as we look. I’m not sure anyone emerges the winner either way.
Although there’s always a sense of grim satisfaction in finding out that everything is even worse than you originally thought. Possibly that’s just me.
I remember being surprised to learn that a significant component of many people’s objection to gay relationships was that ‘you couldn’t tell who was the ‘man’ and who was the ‘woman”. The absence of clear dominance/submission coding, and the potential for nonhierarchical relationships, was genuinely disturbing, both because these relationships could potentially exist and because the absence of hierarchy in some gay partnerships might raise the possibility in heterosexual partnerships (this is what at least some people were referring to when they said or implied that legitimising gay partnerships would affect their marriages). It’s easy to believe that this discomfort with equality is a fundamentalist religious thing but I’m not so sure that’s true.
Another way in which the trans rights agenda obviously differs from gay rights is that the latter doesn’t come at anybody else’s expense. Despite frequent attempt to frame opposition to, say, gay marriage as a defense of “traditional” marriage nobody is seriously talking about taking away straight people’s right to marry.
What the trans lobby is demanding, on the other hand, really does come at somebody else’s expense. As I wrote in another post, the trans agenda – contrary to the rhetoric – is not really one of inclusion but rather of replacement. If they have their way, every right that the people formerly known as “women” have managed to wrestle from the patriarchy throughout the ages will henceforth apply to people like them instead of* the people for whom they were originally intended.
But it’s actually worse than that. If You follow their logic to its ultimate conclusion, nobody at all will be allowed to stand up for the rights and interests of biological females, since even acknowledging the latter as an oppressed group in its own right with its own separate issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by biological males who prefer to be called “woman”/”she” is exclusionary to “trans women” and hence a hate crime**. So the trans lobby’s ultimatum to biological females everywhere boils down to “Let the oppression You face go forever unadressed and undealth with, or have Your name pulled through the dirt all over the internet”. A hostile ultimatum if ever there was one.
* Of course we’re not supposed to notice the takeover since they’re still called “women’s” rights, but that’s just smoke and mirrors since the word “women” no longer refers to the same group of people.
** As always it only goes one way. The fact that the trans redefinition of “woman” by necessity excludes anyone who fails to think or feel the required way is never a cause for concern.
Bjarte Foshaug, this is where I’m at–I genuinely believe there is a need for a trans rights movement–but they should be fighting for trans rights, not trying to swipe women’s rights. The needs of the trans community, as identified by most trans individuals I’ve spoken with directly (who are not, in general, part of the TRA segment) deal with wanting personal safety, employment and housing rights, not access to women’s prisons or sports teams. There can and should be accommodations made for them, but the TRAs are instead attempting to hijack the accommodations women have managed to carve out for themselves.
For instance, I think there should be a federal incarceration facility for housing trans-woman inmates. The hellish nature of U.S. prisons is sufficient to warrant a specific population that would be targeted for extra abuse (and that would definitely include visibly effeminate males) be granted special protections. Trans women could then be given an option–transfer to the federal facility (even if incarcerated in state systems), or in isolated population in the male prison–the latter option only being attractive to those transwomen who have strong local support networks, like family who regularly visit.