Nov 17, 2022
How to Make the Trans Community Respected Again
We need to turn things around quickly.
I have been worried about the way trans acceptance is going nowadays. I felt more accepted back in 2007 compared to now, so you know how bad it is! And it’s sad because, you know, everything I do here, I’m doing for the trans community, my fellow trans people. It feels weird that I even have to say this, but nowadays, everyone seems to be using the trans community for some kind of agenda, and it leaves us with the consequences. Indeed, I think it’s akin to a moral crime to use such a misunderstood minority for your own political agenda.
My point is, if you don’t really want to help with the practical improvement of trans lives, please don’t pretend to be an ally and use us for your political program. To all you people using trans lives to promote your talking points of deconstruction, Foucauldian postmodernism, the Macusean Great Refusal, the 1960s style revolution and so on. As a trans person suffering the consequences, I’ve really had enough of it!
I think there’s still time to regain that respect, to avoid the spiral downwards. It all starts with the trans community itself. Many well meaning trans people have tried to get rid of the bad faith actors, to get the trans conversation back on track. However, this is where bad faith actors use cancel culture to silent critics and forcibly shape the agenda. Anything any well meaning trans people say, any well meaning criticism to get the community back on track, the bad faith actors will try to cancel us for this or that. You either get with their program, or they cancel you. Again, everything I say and do, I do it for the benefit of everyday trans people. But I still have to live in fear of the cancel culture mob. It’s sad, but it’s true.
So, where do we go now? I guess we need to do two things. Firstly, let’s have a trans rights agenda that is focused on the needs of everyday trans people. I really don’t care too much for the trans actors, athletes, models, and so on. Not when we don’t even have equality in employment and housing. Forget about all that glitz and glamor, that don’t help us too much. And even forget about the pronoun wars, because that’s only a dead end. The day we get equality in employment and housing is the day we get dignity as a community. Therefore, I think the trans conversation should be centered around what reforms can be done, to improve the situation with employment and housing. And then we need to win over hearts and minds to achieve those reforms, like the gay marriage and gay adoption movements did.
The other thing is, we need to promote another trans narrative. You know, one that is not automatically combative, one that does not automatically assume bad faith in people who disagree with us. The more extreme activist circle has an advantage here, because they shout the loudest. But if we could, in some ways, add our voices to the conversation, real voices of real trans people, then we could change the tone of the conversation. That’s why I keep providing my point of view, in the hope that it will give confidence to more people to speak up over time.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who recently published her autobiography The TaraElla Story, in which she described the events that inspired her writing.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory.
