Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 5)
An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.
Hey, you! Yes, you. Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those mean-old transes coming for your women and children.
Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? This topic is loud, it’s confusing and you probably feel like if you ask for more information you’ll get yelled at.
Well, I’m here to help, best beloved.
I’d like to show you how people talk about me and those like me, what it means and where we are now.
Entries
Glossary entries
- Gender Identity
- GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
- Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
- Autogynephilia
The Arguments
- Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall) (this part!)
“What about the minority who are dangerous?”
“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
“I’m just asking questions…”
“I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
“We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
Some variation on “men”… - Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
Falling back on accusations of perversion
Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
Likening trans people to a contagion - Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
- Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
- Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
- Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
Appealing to protecting women and girls - Arguments 4 (Part 8 overall)
An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have - More soon!
The Arguments
Ok, best beloved, you’ve eaten your veggies and now you know all the terms you need to know. Isn’t being an ally fun? Sincerely, though, thank you for reading this. Even if you don’t take it all in or agree with it, at least we are closer to a shared understanding of reality.
There’s a reason, you see, that the least resistance to immigration comes from areas with high immigration — and it’s because the humans involved have mixed, met, worked together, had coffee, formed friendships and made relationships. They’re not resistant to one another because now they know that they’re basically all OK.
That’s why a shared understanding of where we all are is important.
What we’re going to do now is to start with the arguments anti-trans campaigners use. We’ll look at where they come from, how they’re deployed and we shall hold them to a good level of scrutiny. We must agree that a concept needs to hold up to investigation, after all.
Hang tight. Here’s the first argument:
“Maybe most trans people are OK, but what about the minority who ARE perverts?”
This is known, informally, as The Klan Fallacy. It refers to the reasoning the Ku Klux Klan used in their persecution, murder and mass violence against Black Americans, which could be summarised like this:
“Sure, most Black people are law abiding… but what about the ones that aren’t, eh? Do you want your wife and kids at risk of that, eh? Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Even if a few law-abiding Black people are swept up in it, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?”
I’ll briefly observe that I am not equating the mass murder and abuse of Black Americans with the struggles faced by the trans community, although I will obviously defer to the superior wisdom of Black trans people in this matter. It seems to me, simply, that the flaws in the arguments made by the Klan then can be directly applied to the anti-trans arguments now.
A person might be bad, therefore we must criminalise them all, eg Karen White is a Bad Trans, therefore we must stigmatise All Transes.
Let’s apply this argument in a different context: “because Myra Hindley was a child murderer, All Women should be kept away from kids”. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, no? If not, why not? Most perpetrators of sexual assault are 85% of the time either partners or friends, usually white and usually with pre-existing criminal records… so what does trans-ness have to do with it?
In fact, in the UK, there were 230 trans prisoners in 2022 out of a prison population of 79,800 (0.0029%). Those 230 prisoners represent about 0.068% of the trans population of the UK (assuming 0.5% of the UK’s 67,326,569, about 336,633 people). By contrast, those 79,570 other prisoners represent 1.18% of the total population. Seems like we’re less likely to be crime-y, doesn’t it? Also, there were 4,732 hate crimes against trans people in 2023.
Even if we were more represented in prison statistics, this would still be a rotten argument founded on prejudice. As it is, this argument doesn’t even have that straw man to fall on.
To detour for a moment onto the subject of Karen White: yes, she should be in a women’s prison. No, she should not be in general-population: she is a high-risk inmate and should not have any unsupervised time with any other inmates. There are already provisions for this in law and it is the standard way that high-risk prisoners are managed. What happened here is that the prison screwed up and then tried to deflect blame by going “oh, but she was trans so we got confused.” There are plenty of dangerous and abusive cisgender women in prison and they are managed in this way. Prison cannot be a wedge-in-the-door for doubting trans identities.
“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
This is what’s known as an appeal to moderation, also called “Tone Policing”. This is when someone attacks how you are saying something, rather than what you are saying. Whomever loses their temper first is the loser, whoever remains cool is the winner.
It’s based on a mental shortcut most people have: we naturally like people who are moderate and reasonable. This rhetorical technique short-circuits that shortcut to imply we should not like the other person because they are unreasonable.
Tone Policing gets double points if the target doesn’t even get agitated, let alone unreasonable. It works even if the target is just accused of it. Then, the provocateur can decry the uselessness of further discussion with such a hysterical, unreasonable person and claim the intellectual and moral high ground.
You can see this when people like Helen Joyce say that the “existence of trans people is a huge problem in a sane world” (an actual quote she said with her actual mouth). She got an immediate response, reasonable and rational response from many trans people: “lady, you sound like you’re advocating murder… what the fuck?!”
Enter, then, the tone police. Those responses were the usual loony suspects, blowing everything out of proportion and screaming at anyone who disagrees with them, you see. Of course nobody was calling for murder, Joyce was just saying there shouldn’t be any trans people in the world. Why are you so unreasonable? Honestly, you can’t talk to the transes about anything…
Rowling is also very good at this — walking right up to the line of encouraging stochastic violence, by claiming women and kids are in terrible danger from an evil trans ideology, and then clutching her pearls at the hysterical, unhinged, horrible response she gets! How dare people be cross with her, just because she says awful things?
You see, how someone says something doesn’t affect the veracity of what they say. If I do a stupid hick voice and say “duuuh 2 + 2 = 4 duuuuh” the basic truth of Maths is unaffacted. By the same reasoning, even if someone is a complete and utter buttmunch… they can still be right about what they’re saying — it doesn’t make them a nice person but that’s not the same thing as being incorrect.
To that point, the Internet is, unfortunately, a place where all of us — and especially minorities — are treated to some shockingly bad behaviour. By the same reasoning, those people aren’t automatically wrong just because they’re lousy people. If a trans person tells Rowling to choke on a cock, that doesn’t mean Rowling must be right. It doesn’t mean that the person telling her to choke on a cock must be wrong.
Consider, someone could write a very long, thoughtful and researched article and then conclude with “Rowling should choke on a cock”. That doesn’t mean the rest of the article is bad, wrong or inaccurate.
I’m just asking questions…
Naturally, we should talk about things and discuss them… that’s only reasonable and logical, best beloved. You ask things, I ask things and that’s how we find stuff out. We also test things — poke at them, metaphorically, to see if they hold up to scrutiny.
But… pretend, best beloved, that perhaps if we wanted to stall something, what we could do is keep on asking questions regardless of the answers. We would be asking questions in bad faith because the responses don’t interest us — what we want to do is to tie up whatever is being discussed so it never moves any closer to being actionable.
Consider: if a person is arguing against doing A Thing, then they don’t actually need to convince anyone that this Thing shouldn’t happen. All they need to do is keep the argument going, because all the time it keeps going The Thing will not get done.
Such an unscrupulous person now has secured themselves several avenues to get their own way: they can either win through a strong argument, they can just keep on asking new questions, or they can keep asking the same questions.
Their opponent, who believes that something should be done, will now likely be permanently stymied: their only avenue to move forward is to somehow win through strength of argument.
This is heavily linked to an online trolling technique dubbed “sealioning”, whereby some jackass just keeps derailing a discussion with endless demands for proof and evidence in bad faith. The fact they are acting in bad faith is crucial: they have no interest in the evidence, they just want to waste everyone’s time.
The one who is asking for more discussion can also easily play to tone policing — look how reasonable I am, trying to discuss and work this through! The fact that they have no intention of moving the debate on is then lost in the noise.
…It’s also interesting how few years it can take for “just asking questions” to mutate into “just passing legislation”…
“I’m not transphobic, I’m just against the extremists”
This is an exercise in trying to redefine a bigotry to exclude the bigot’s behaviour, thus exonerating them from accusations of bigotry.
Anti-trans campaigners will do this by dismissing the notion of changing gender. That is to say, they do not believe it is possible to be transgender: to change from one gender to another. You can only be the gender you were born as plus a mental illness.
At this point, they have what passes for a logical defence in their minds: I support these poor, confused creatures being treated and helped. Therefore I am not transphobic. I am just against the extremists who actually believe they’re now another gender!
This reasoning also permits them to think that trans people shouldn’t be treated according to their gender identity. They don’t need to respect names or pronouns. They can deadname murdered trans schoolsgirls as much as they like without being transphobic. After all, they are right to keep kids away from us. It is proper and correct to deny medical treatment that indulges these delusions. The only permissable treatment is to treat the mental illness… with conversion therapy.
Anti-trans campaigners embed that position in these terms:
- Male-to-trans / Female-to-trans
- Trans Identifying Male / Trans Identifying Female
Look closely, and you’ll see that none of these terms acknowledge change of gender. Only that a person was whatever gender they were, and now can have applied to them the adjective ‘trans’.
In short, if you deny transgender people exist and are, in fact, just mentally ill… then you cannot be transphobic! How can you be a bigot if the thing you’re bigotting against isn’t a real thing? It’d be like accusing someone of being racist against Elves!
Isn’t it amazing what bigots can achieve when bigots choose what specific words mean?
Firstly: this is based on misunderstanding that gender dysphoria, the unhappiness associated with one’s gender presentation matching their gender identity, is a DSM-5 mental illness. It is treated by letting that person present their gender in a way that matches their gender identity. DUH.
Secondly: minority groups tell us what discrimination is, based on their experiences — White people cannot determine what constitutes racism, that is for Black people to say.
Thirdly: it is an appeal to conversion therapy and the unspoken idea that people must not be queer or trans unless it is literally the only alternative left. Everything should be done to dissuade them because it is not OK.
Fourthly: it is an appeal to biological essentialism, believing that humans are nothing more than a collection of chromosomes following a prewritten program. “We only are and do what our genetics tell us”, which is not consistent with modern thinking on human will and emergent consciousness as a property of our brains, let alone an accurate statement of how human beings behave.
We just have concerns but the transes silenced us!
This is the Endless Debate tactic, popped onto a new plate and given three minutes in the microwave to warm it over. Trans people have been talking, discussing and debating our existence and civil rights for literally decades.
The increased visibility in trans people in public life has led to a greater discussion about us. In the UK, this was mostly spurred by proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018.
This prompted concerns about transing children, men ‘self-identifying’ as women to abuse them and allowing trans people into women’s spaces and sports. Best beloved, you might not be in a place to hear this now… but all of those concerns have case studies and evidence that very strongly implies they are unfounded — we’ll get to those in a later part of this series. Suffice to say: we in the community started to cite and reference that evidence.
I was there for a lot of these online discussions, I saw people engaging in good-faith discussions and citing evidence and research. Now, obviously, I can’t speak for every trans person ever. I’m sure some of us are jerks and probably said some nasty stuff. Most of us aren’t and we engaged properly.
But every time a good-faith discussion was settled… it mysteriously popped up again. And we engaged again. And again. And again. Then, as the months turned into years… we got, rightfully, pissed off. It turned out the discussion was not in “good faith”.
“Concerns” are all we’ve heard about for years. For from being silenced, the concerns now drown out the actual evidence on the subject.
Some Variation on ‘Men’
Most anti-trans arguments take these as axioms:
- Transgender/transsexual means trans woman
- Trans women are men
- Men are gross
This is directly connected to the biological essentialism argument. It is, additionally, wrong because trans men and non-binary people exist. It is furthermore wrong because trans women are women, just women born with the wrong junk. It is additionally and furthermore wrong because “men” are not inherently gross — some men are gross and some political and societal structures are patriarchal and gross.
This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.
Oh, and: Rowling should choke on a cock.
