The intended effect
Wait who is doing the obsessing here?
Arwa Mahdawi wrote a column on creepy advertising by Tampax and Balenciaga, but in the process she managed to take a swipe at The Designated Enemy.
If any brand has licence to make jokes about things being up vaginas, it’s Tampax. Sexualising tampons, however, is revolting. Still, the tweet had the intended effect, I suppose, which was to get people talking about Tampax. The gender-neutral language also sparked a heated argument about trans people because, hey, what doesn’t spark a heated argument about trans people these days? While I admit spending 60% of my life on Twitter isn’t healthy, it’s not as unhealthy as spending 99.99% of your waking hours obsessing over trans people’s right to exist, which is what a depressing number of people seem to do.
No they don’t. That’s a stupid lie, which keeps being told despite the billions of corrections.
It’s not that we think trans people don’t have a right to exist. Saying we do implies, none too subtly, that we want genocide of trans people. The issue is not existence, it’s definition. We think that trans people don’t have a right to define themselves as literally the sex they are not, and then proceed to help themselves to the rights that go with being that sex.
Definition is not the same as existence. I’m not a tulip, and I don’t cease to exist if I’m told I’m not a tulip. You can swap any noun for “tulip” and it remains true.
I know this isn’t a revelation around here, but the “(why do) you spend all your time obsessing about this” canard is a common (and fallacious) rhetorical device. It’s a lie, an ad hominem circumstantial, and a complex question rolled into one.
Trans love to believe we spend 99.99% of our time thinking about them. That’s the whole context of being trans. If they got everything they wanted today, they would continue to fight and scream for more, because they thrive on the conflict, the feeling of being ‘marginalized’ by a group of women they hate. They want people to think of them all the time, and would be outraged if we didn’t.
There is no one thing I think about 99.99% of the time. I have much too diverse a range of interests for that. At this moment, I am thinking about trans because I am reading this article. Three minutes ago, I was thinking about ozone. Three minutes before that, I was thinking about volcanoes. This morning, I was thinking about the Kingdom Animalia. I almost always have much better things to think about than trans, and if they would quit trying to take away my rights to spaces where men are not allowed, I probably wouldn’t waste my time on thinking about them.
The only people I know who think about trans 99.99% of the time is…trans. And their allies. I don’t spend anywhere near that amount of time thinking about myself; if I did, I would never get anything done.
WHAT?! You’re not a tulip??
Well, we’re going to have to tell the city of Mt. Vernon to discard those “Bravo, Ophelia!” signs that they had prepared for the 2023 Tulip Festival.
(snerk :) )
Don’t you know it takes a lot of bravery to come out as a tulip? And all the cis-tulips that claim you’re not a real tulip, well, that’s just heart breaking.