I like transphobe, because i think they are often motivated by fear.
Dude. You’re the one who decided to come into a thread where people are calling out a hateful bigot and lecture us about how we need to be nicer. Of course you’re going to get pushback.
You seem to have fallen for a common tactic. Every pro-bigotry group will try this tactic, acting like the reason their so bigoted is that the anti-bigotry activists are just so mean to them. And it’s never been true. There is zero chance that using the whitewashed term “gender critical feminists” will convince a single TERF to not be a TERF. All it does is make their bigotry seem more legitimate.
It’s not like the word TERF gets thrown out at anyone. No one is calling you a TERF. The term is used when it is accurate. It is the term used for those who ostensibly are fighting for women’s rights while actually being trans exclusionary. And it is useful to talk about these people as a distinct group.
“Transphobe” and “trans haters” are nice, but they’re less specific. They also cover the people who think trans people are an abomination from God, the conservatives who wish to scapegoat them, the men who feel emasculated by them, and so on. TERF is specifically for those who push the “women’s rights” version.
It’s a useful term that TERFs are trying to eradicate as part of their attempts to make their TERFism seem more legitimate than it is. Just like when white supremacists objected to the word white supremacist. Or homophobes objected to the word homophobe.
Aspidistra is making TERF arguments. She is trying to push the idea that trans women are a threat to cisgender women. There were earlier attempts to explain why she was wrong more nicely (including in her previous attempt at this), but she won’t listen. So now people are pointing out how shitty she is being.
…here’s what has gone down recently in the world of transgender issues.
A few weeks ago a prominent transgender twitch streamer got swatted, arrested, had her computers confiscated, she fled to a hotel where they tracked her down, she fled to another country and they tracked her down and swatted her there as well.
The website that has been stalking, doxxing and trying to kill her is so notorious and so dangerous I don’t even dare name them here lest I attract their attention. Over the last nine years, they have done the same to pretty much every high-profile trans person out there. They had open threads on them, tracking and mocking every detail of their lives, doxxing them, and “Gender Critical Feminists” would hang out there to get “intelligence” on their enemies.
There is a Twitter account called “L#bs of TikTok.” They have been leading a campaign to harass hospitals that offer trans affirming care. Staff have been harassed, they have been threatened, last week they had to evacuate the hospital due to a bomb threat. Oh: and they are painting targets on things like “Drag Queen Story Time” so they get crashed by groups like the Proud Boys.
In Florida they are trying to ban ALL trans affirming care for youth. That includes social transition. Do you know what social transitioning is? It includes calling someone by their preferred pronouns.
This stopped being about “purity tests” a very long time ago. When white supremacists are brigading children’s story hours, when hospitals are being terrorized, when the state bans access to medical care, when people are being stalked, we are beyond “arguing for less nasty jargon” and on the brink of cultural genocide.
I can’t imagine anything more trivial right now than “designing our bathrooms in such a manner that they are accommodating for everybody.” The bathroom debate has ALWAYS been nothing more than disingenuous cover for people with irrational hate.
Things are worse now than they have been in a very long time. What you are imagining this is all about and what it actually is all about are two different things. Nobody is interested in re-litigating the bathroom debate or the sports debate or the pronoun debate. We just the hate and the bigotry to end.
Typing on this phone is hard just want to say ASL & Banquet Bear thumbs up you’re welcome at my place for beverages of your choosing
In all seriousness - yes, loads, the vast majority of them under twenty. This is what first clued me in that there was something seriously wrong in the culture - this is what got me reading the Shrier book and Lisa Littman’s research (which by the way is perfectly good research. People bag her for getting respondents from detransitioner sites but actually that’s a pretty good way for getting subjects if you’re researching the characteristics - not the prevalence - of kids who transition suddenly (and might therefore give it up more readily). Like nobody would mind if you got subjects for a research project on surfer culture by going down to the beach. No it’s not representative but it doesn’t have to be)
The two transpeople closest to me are:
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a late teen male-bodied person who hangs round in trackpants playing first-person shooters like the two older brothers and is slowly crawling through minimal higher-ed but probably quite at risk of being a dropout. All three of the kids in that family are smart, snarky geeks who have huge problems with anxiety and depression - the oldest self-medicated with a drug addiction for many years but is slowly getting his life back on the rails. We hope. Youngest used to have a crush on a classmate who transitioned ftm, and youngest’s transition was after that, and involved picking a name quite similar to ftm crush’s. Nothing about this person that’s stereoptypically girlish. Wore a dress once that I saw, at their 18th birthday, and doesn’t seem to have bothered with that since
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A mid-teen female-bodied person who adores fantasy fiction, used to cosplay quite a lot with bestie who’s non-binary, had massive problems in lockdown (to do with not being able to get out of bed/complete work and so on), loves art and wanted to grow up to be a primary teacher four years ago (now planning a career in graphic design). Admits to having a feminine personality but says “what does my personality have to do with being trans?” HAAAATES having (A cup) breasts.
The rest of the group aren’t quite so extremely WTF-ish but they don’t include anyone I would consider out there in terms of gender-nonconforming behaviour. My standards for gender-nonconforming are pretty high mind you - I remember the 80s, Boy George is well within my range of what a bloke is allowed to be like
Huh? No, is like getting subjects for a research project on surfer culture by going to support groups for recovering surfers, if those even exist. Good grief. Have you considered that you are looking at a really non-representative group of kinda trans adjacent people?
You only fear men pretending to be trans in order to assault women in rest rooms because the cis men you trust have told you this is the first thing they would do if they thought they could get away with it.
…NARRATOR: “there actually is nothing seriously wrong in the culture.”
Right. So your trans acquaintance is “representative” and my trans acquaintance is “non-representative” and just kinda some people I happen to know. Mmm. If only we had a term to distinguish these two groups. Something about their experiencing a fairly rapid onset of … no no, I have been assured that ROGD is completely made up and there is definitely no social influence on any young person to call themselves trans, even though Ollie Davies says he never even thought of it until his friends started suggesting it, and Chloe Cole says the messages were all over media she consumed and Garrett seems to have almost just fallen into it simply because he was gay and it was the sort of thing people round him were suggesting. And on and on and on.
If what I’m saying should happen to be true, how would you actually find out about it? When the media looks the other way, and individual examples get dismissed as “just anecdotes” and the sites that host them as “transphobic hate sites”?
If what about what you are saying is true?
That social influences affect whether people say they are trans? It’s blatantly obvious that’s true. You realize that works both ways? In a trans-friendly environment, some teens will experiment with socially transitioning who ultimately identify as non-binary, or as their sex assigned at birth. And also, in a trans-hostile environment only the most miserable and boldest will publicly transition, and others will live a life of repression or commit suicide instead. And if society becomes more trans-accepting, the rest of us will learn about more trans people. Kind of like how in the eighties, suddenly a lot of gays came out, and some bisexuals experimented with homosexuality in college and then paired off with a member of the opposite sex.
Yes, we are living in a period when people of all ages are coming out as trans. And yes, it’s easier for young adults, and a lot of the older trans people are still closeted.
But you claimed that looking for trans people among those who are trying to detransition is somehow a way to learn about the typical trans experience. Naw. You are wrong. Trans people trying to detransition are not typical of all trans people. I imagine population surveys might shed some light on relative frequencies if you need data. But you only need to know that there ARE a lot of persistently trans people to realize what a stupid strategy it is to only consider those who are detransitioning, or to assume those people are typical of the trans experience.
Fwiw, i know dozens and dozens of trans people. Most of them have identified as trans for years. Ranging in age from teens to sixties. Only two have detransitioned. One of those now identifies as non-binary, and the other basically gave up because they simply couldn’t pass as female, and it was less stressful to live as a gender-non-conforming man than to convince strangers to see them as a woman. Their wife thinks of them as female, though.
I’m a Coke Zero man.
Still on phone I left out Dibble sorry.
I am curious about The Librarian- TERF or just someone who fell for TERF propaganda?
I knew there was a reason I liked you.
And how are either of these people offensive to you? Asking you to call them by a different name and using different pronouns? BFD.
Neither of your examples show any harm to themselves, you or cisgendered folks in general. If that’s the best you’ve got you have nothing.
To get back to somehwere in the vicinity of the OP, pronouns do seem like a minor thing to get annoyed about.
Personally I refuse to get involved in it. If I were ever asked to declare my preferred pronouns I’d simply say “none”. It is the same answer I give (where possible) for any item of personal information that is none of anyone’s business. Ethnicity, sexuality, gender etc. I’ll decide if it is relevant and whether your reason for wanting to know is valid or not.
No one has ever asked me to use specific or special pronouns for them or pulled me up on the ones I have used so that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get to it.
So you’d lie?
It doesn’t matter much to me personally, I generally don’t correct salespeople etc. who call me sir, (they often realise and impose their embarrassment on me though as though I tricked them in to being offensive somehow). It does matter a whole lot to young David who told his parents very early that they were wrong when calling him a girl. He has never swayed from that and has been seen by child psychologists and the Gender Dysphoria Clinic. For his mental health and bureaucratic ease his birth certificate was recently amended. When puberty hits he will be given delaying hormones until he reaches adulthood and can decide about surgical options. Calling him “her” would be ludicrous and just nasty. Nothing is being done that can not be undone if he wants that.
OTOH I do find using “them” for a teen I know who is non binary hard but that’s just because it doesn’t sound right in my head. Not because I think of them as he or she, just linguistically. I try but slip now and then and am forgiven quickly as an old person.
Putting she/her on my Instagram profile normalises them putting their pronouns out in the world too. It is supportive, that’s all.
No, I don’t have a preference. To say I did would be a lie.
“I’m not touching you” should be renamed the Novelty Bubble.
What’s offensive is that the first of these is my actual goddamn nephew who is now sterile because of this bullshit. Nobody in the family thinks he “is” a girl. Nobody. I’m offended by the doctors who take advantage of vulnerable kids with psychological issues to sell them a bunch of bullshit which can never, never help them.
And I would VERY much like to have LEGAL PERMISSION to try to prevent the same thing happening with Person B.