Ich bin ein Untermensch

A few days ago, someone pointed something profound out to me. That has resulted in this article. Today, we are going to discuss the view and language surrounding the idea that trans people are inferior to cis people. So join hands with me as we go diving headfirst into a pile of self loathing, feelings of inadequacy and supremacy.

Yay!

When I first came out, like a century ago. I remember it clearly it was early 2017, I realised I was trans and I came out to my family.

Spoiler alert, they are assholes. Anyhoos

I came out and one by one told them.

My elder sister’s reaction was interesting in that it profoundly summed up how a lot of trans people see themselves.

Concurrent to me coming out, my elder brother was in the midst of a difficult divorce. Once my sister and I had gotten past the formalities of coming out she had two messages she needed to make sure I absorbed. The first was that, in her words “not many people want to be with a person like that”. With “like That” meaning a trans person.

Later she said, in a group chat with the family, that our family needed to keep me being trans under wraps because if my brother’s soon to be ex wife were to hear about it she may be able to use it against him in the custody hearing.

We can first deal with the possibility of the ex using my gender against my brother in a custody hearing and my brother’s response to that.

Clearly my sister is of the opinion that trans people are of some sort of sexual deviancy. Now before you get fed up about that, let’s objectively look at it for a moment. My sister was able to go against direct knowledge she had of a sibling she has known her entire life and immediately assume that being trans was enough to be perceived as a sexual fiend. Or at least deviant enough to affect a custody hearing.

My brother’s response was also troubling. He told me that I shouldn’t worry, because if he suspected that his child was in danger near me, he would resort to violence.

The violence isn’t the issue.

The part where he felt he needed to reassure me that he didn’t view me as a threat is however a problem. The fact that he didn’t feel offended by the suggestion that his trans sister was a sex fiend is certainly a problem. The fact that he was not offended enough to openly state that my sister was in the wrong and that she had some really shitty transphobic ideas, was the problem.

The second issue my sister raised is “not many people want to be with a person like that”

Clearly she has never met a chaser.

All jokes aside, clearly she views trans people as a second class choice in relation to relationships. It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. While it’s very true many people do not want to be involved with trans people. Is that because they view trans people as second class or do they view us as second class because they don’t want to date trans people?

At which point does transphobia become a self fulfilling prophecy?

Unfortunately this is a very pervasive problem

When polled about her book “Detransition baby”, Torrey Peters famously said “Trans women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which trans women are fucked up and flawed”. On the surface of it, thats not a horrid thing to say at all.

But hold on, Torrey Peters wrote a very successful novel in which she illustrated how fucked up trans women are and how its fascinating to her.

Please humour me here.

“Black women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which black women are fucked up and flawed”

Or

“Norwegian women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which Norwegian women are fucked up and flawed”

One of those is racist, one is only tolerable because Norway is a rich country. What Torrey Peters and my sister have done is place trans women into a box, and used that box to assign a common and negative characteristic to trans women.

Both are transphobic.

Trans women only have one common characteristic, that is they are trans. As in, their gender does not match their gender assigned at birth. Any other commonality is imposed by a third party, when designed to denigrate the individual, that commonality becomes prejudice. There is a reason it’s regarded as acceptable to point out that systemic racism affects all black people in majority white societies while it’s racist to say black people commit more crimes than white people. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how cutesy you dress up the “Fucked up and flawed”. It’s no different from saying most trans women are sex workers ergo trans women are immoral. Sex work is not immoral and trans women suffer severe underemployment as a result of cis-supremacy. Saying “trans women are fucked up and flawed” or “not many people are interested in dating people like that” may be more subtle than “most trans women are prostitutes”. It is however no less transphobic.

But it is subtle, in fact it’s subtle in the same way that I switched the word “transphobic” with the phrase “cis-supremacy” in the paragraph above. Undoubtedly you read over that, understood its meaning and progressed. Cis-supremacy is less subtle than transphobic though. In fact they are related but not synonymous. Transphobic means “a fear of” or “a severe aversion or prejudice toward trans people”.

Cis-supremacy means a belief in the superiority of cis people in relation to trans people.

The innate belief that cis is better than trans,

that cis is the original that trans imitates.

Because as sick as it is, the term “passing” is short for “passing for cis”.

We regard white supremacists as ignorant and immoral. It’s not because we understand that black people are the same as white people that we regard white supremacy as a character flaw, It’s because we do not see white as the benchmark by which black must be measured to ascertain equality. We accept “human” as the benchmark and regard the devaluation of any human in relation to the imagined traits of a certain group as immoral. Or simply put, we regard the person who evaluates another on the basis of skin colour as an asshole.

White supremacy is not a problem with black people, it’s a white person problem. The problem resides squarely within the hearts and minds of the white supremacist. It is so with Transphobia. Unfortunately, the term “transphobia” and its derivatives centre the trans person in the problem while the trans person is not the problem. The problem is cis and trans people who regard trans people as lesser than cis people.

We are not lesser, and they are not greater.

I have said it before, cis people have no greater claim on gender than trans people. No woman is more woman than any other woman. No genital configuration is more valid or more authentic than that which any woman has between her legs. No shoulder width is more or less aesthetically feminine than the subjective mores of the individual observer.

It is then that we must now accept that my sister, Torrey Peters and my brother are in fact not transphobic, but they are certainly cis-supremecists. Not because they lack any degree of prejudice or a severe aversion toward trans people. But because they view cis people as superior to trans people. The prejudice lies within themselves, so much so you could say they are cis to the problem, You could even call it a character flaw and in this we have failed.

We have failed to centre correctly the terms used to define the prejudice that drives the underemployment,

the open denial of rights,

the denial of healthcare,

the accusations of deviancy and immorality.

We have not allowed racists to rebrand racism as “race realism”. We need to correctly label transphobia as cis-supremacy. We can no longer allow people with gender critical beliefs to dictate their label. For too long we have allowed them to win the war on trans people by humouring their euphemistic and technicality obscuring language.

For too long transphobia has been a big word, when its really a big character flaw.

Its Cis-Supremacy.