Guest post: Wielding their imagined marginalization as a weapon
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Queering queer.
Queerness, he argues, is a fashion and a political statement that not all gay people subscribe to. “Queerness is also self-consciously and purposefully marginal,” he told me. “Whereas the arc of the gay rights movement, and the individual lives of most gay people, has been a struggle against marginality. We want to be welcomed. We want to have equal rights. We want a place in our institutions.”
So he’s saying that there’s a difference between being marginalized (by others) and pursuing marginalization (yourself). That makes sense. The former group would want access to the legal rights they are being denied (housing, voting, health, etc.; what we think of as “human rights.”) They want to be let in to the legal and social arrangements everyone else has. They’re not looking for special treatment, but equal treatment. The latter are seemingly heading out to the frontiers of “rights” and expecting society to surrender and acquiesce to their extraordinary demands (affirmation and validation of who they are not; erasure of sex in language and law; access to spaces reserved for the opposite sex: what we would call trans “rights.”) Those who have been marginalized want to leave their enforced marginalization behind; those who marginalize themselves (or who falsely claim to have been marginalized, like white males, claiming the plight of Black trans prostitutes in Brazil as their own), wield their imagined marginalization as a weapon, using it as leverage to gain special status and privilege on a permanent, continuing basis. It is used to reject reasonable accommodation in third spaces, and coerce admittance into spaces reserved for women. This is not a demand for equal treatment, but a rejection of it. It is a demand for colonization and usurpation, a demand that has succeeded in overturning previous standards based on sex in favour of new ones based on “gender.” These new standards, enacted and enforced by governments and corporations, put the lie to the claim that trans identified males are “marginalized.” They have been listened to preferentially, they have benefited, and they have marginalized women in the process. This is a feature, not a bug.
Which truly marginalized group could demand “NO DEBATE” and claim “NO CONFLICT?” And because debate is preemptively taken off the table, the very real and injurious conflicts with women’s sex-based rights are swept away as purely conjectural, hysterical scaremongering. With media collusion, too. Yes, oh so marginalized.
And once they’ve achieved their immediate goals, how likely would it be that TiMs would abandon their claim to “marginalization?” Not very. They would simply move on to the next target, bringing their “vulnerability” and “marginalization” (as well as the power and influence of captured institutions) along for the ride, always at the ready for brandishing.
It seems a bit funny to call them new “standards,” when the chief achievement of the new “standards” is to take away any standards at all. There’s no rule, no standard, that women can point to, meet, or articulate, when “women” have no definition, and effectively don’t exist.
‘This is not a demand for equal treatment, but a rejection of it.’ Fantastic line. And ties into the points that many women have made, ‘if [TIM] were an actual woman [x behaviour] would never have been permitted, let alone praised.’
This has certainly been true in the past. A good example is the fate of those who transgress against the movement by saying such things as “TWAW” is a meaningless statement: no apology is enough, no refutation of the past accepted. The transgressor is immediately and then repeatedly held up by the trans masses and their supporters an example of enduring evil, and the very epitome of their oh-so-woeful marginalization, despite that fact that it’s usually tens or hundreds of the trans ideologues against a single person. The fact is, while the transgender political agenda is not accepted in the USA (for example) in general, the loud and vicious members of the movement are quite mainstream on the left. President Biden himself made it one of his first stated policy initiatives to push for equal recognition of self-identity on the same level as race and sex. You can’t get much more mainstream than that, and they hate it.
Yet those who falsely claim to have been marginalized may not be aware that their claim is false. I suspect the group of trans-identified males is a philosophically mixed lot, divided between those who come at their transness from the postmodernist Queer Theory break-the-boundaries perspective and those who have fallen for the idea that they themselves are a woman trapped in a man’s body and it’s just pure torture.
Both enjoy using their marginalization as a weapon, but the target may be slightly different. The Queers want to run over those they perceive to be “normal” for the wider social purpose of eliminating the boundaries between male and female, gay and straight, normal and abnormal. The Sincere want to run over those who won’t let them be and do what they want for the wider social purpose of allowing people to be and do what they want.
Ironically, the means (I’m oppressed, obey me) may have become the ends, given that power corrupts. Gay rights didn’t involve making such drastic demands, so the effort involved in getting people on board trans rights has taken on a life of its own. I think you’re right and that many, drunk on power, will take their marginalization and move on to the next target. But I suspect that’s not the feature, but a taking-control bug taking control of the entire project.
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