Why I Wrote That Really Transphobic Blog Post and How I Changed My Mind

Why I Wrote That Really Transphobic Blog Post and How I Changed My Mind

The best deconversion stories involve shedding more than religion. I’ve talked before about how harmful beliefs like misogyny and being anti-abortion lingered with me long after my belief in God left. What I didn’t realize was that my transphobic views were the hardest to shake.

A post I wrote in April 2019 is a good snapshot of some of my work-in-progress stances on social justice issues. I admitted that I was still slowly coming around to the idea of being pro-choice, but more interesting to me is that when discussing my “thoughts on LGBTQ+ issues,” I said only,

I don’t think there are really any secular arguments, or any good arguments at all, against LGBTQ+ rights. To me, homophobia is no different from racism. Just don’t judge people or try to take away their rights based on qualities that are out of their control and that don’t affect your life. How hard is that?

What I believe as an Atheist

I cringe at the lack of real-world complexity when I go back and read that now, but I need to remind myself that this was almost four years ago, and it’s all about taking baby steps. It’s not wrong, just overly rational and not very compassionate. What I find more telling, though, is that I made no mention at all in defense of trans identities, rights, or liberation, decrying only homophobia.

My transphobic blog post

Maybe that’s for the best, however, because I decided to expand on my “thoughts on gender” four months later, and those thoughts were… pretty bad. (Read at your own discretion. The password is “yikes”.)

The general theme was that it was pretty transphobic. (Trigger warning!)

Some of the highlights included:

  • “I haven’t said before what my views on gender are. How many are there? Does gender work differently than sex? Can you pick either one?”
  • “Some people are just female, some are just male, and some used to be one but are now the other (although in that case, they would still have the sex chromosomes of the former; that’s something they cannot change even with hormones and surgery).”
  • “The deviation goes further: maybe you’re transgender and you identify as one gender but have the body of the other. Maybe you were born ambiguous of sex. Maybe you identify as neither, or both, or something on some days and something else on other days. Does this mean that there are more than two genders?”

Even more alarming than these (although it explains why I would say abhorrent things like that) is what I ended with:

Personally, I am a huge fan of transgender woman Blaire White and her YouTube channel, and watching her was the inspiration for writing this post. If you don’t know who she is, she is actually conservative in her views, and she never hesitates to criticize those with outlandish views on gender who can make the whole lot of them look crazy. I highly recommend her YouTube channel if you want to hear about these topics from someone more informed than I am and be entertained at the same time.

My Thoughts on Gender

Yeah, it was absolutely awful. Interestingly, I was pretty transparent through the whole thing that I had no idea what I was talking about: “Also, you may have noticed that there weren’t any citations in this post; that’s because I’m just musing and writing down my thoughts on this topic for fun.” But I have to ask my 2019 self, why say anything at all? Why was I talking just to hear my own voice? To be sure, this is one of the problems with telling myself I have to write something every single week even when I have nothing good to say. This “blog hustle mentality” has created all of my worst posts.

In this post, that you’re reading right now, I want to show you what led me to believe these transphobic things, and why. Maybe this can help us all understand what causes people to be transphobic today and how we can combat those beliefs.

Blaire White

If you don’t know her, Blaire White is basically what conservative (or “centrist”) cisgender people wish all trans people were. She passes, she’s pretty, she’s white, she thinks nonbinary people and their pronouns are invalid, and she loves to make fun of any trans person who she perceives as “weird.” She’s the transphobe’s trans.

I remember that virtually everything I said in that post was taken straight from Blaire’s ideas. I loved her videos. I trusted her because she was giving an Official Trans Opinion on Trans Issues and therefore could not be transphobic, or so I thought. She was also (and I believe still is) friends with Jaclyn Glenn, one of the first atheist influencers I ever followed.

An Instagram post by Jaclyn Glenn from October 11th, 2021. Jaclyn and Blaire White pose with Jaclyn's newborn baby.

J.K Rowling

I was completely unprepared for J.K. Rowling’s first viral transphobic tweet in December 2019.

A transphobic tweet from J.K. Rowling on December 19th, 2019 which reads:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. 
Live your best life in peace and security. 
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? 
(hashtag) IStandWithMaya (hashtag) ThisIsNotADrill

This tweet made complete sense to me. She was being totally reasonable, even saying to live your life however you please. It couldn’t have been transphobic to say that “sex was real.” Of course, I had no idea who Maya was, but after a quick search, I determined that her beliefs were not transphobic. (They were violently transphobic.) I appreciate the way this NBC News article about Maya Forstater ends:

So, J.K. Rowling: Write whatever you please. Call yourself “gender critical,” if you like. Support any transphobic adult who’ll discriminate with you. Live your best life with your piles of Muggle money. But force cis, trans or intersex women to live with hostile work environments because of the fairytales that transphobes tell themselves? No. [hashtag]TransRightsAreHumanRights [hashtag]WhatDrillAreYouTalkingAbout

Dr. Veronica Ivy, NBC News

A few days later, I was listening to Hemant Mehta and Jessica Bluemke discussing this on the Friendly Atheist Podcast, and I was starting to get mad. I remember that they were calling Rowling so transphobic, and I thought they were crazy. I agreed with these people about everything else, but they couldn’t get this right. It wasn’t just them, it was everyone. Everyone was calling Rowling transphobic, and I felt like no one was getting it. Except one person: Blaire White.

It seemed like Blaire White was the only person on the planet that saw this the way I did. She was the only one that knew Rowling and Forstater were not transphobic just for believing in immutable biological sex. Besides, there were heated accusations from conservatives at the time that “the left says they’re so dedicated to science and reason, but not when it comes to gender.” It was a total gotcha. I couldn’t argue with it, and thanks to Blaire, I didn’t have to.

I knew it wouldn’t end well for me to publicly tweet out, “I agree with Blaire White, J.K. Rowling, and Maya Forstater! They believe in the science of biological sex!” Not because I thought I was wrong, but because everybody else was crazy and I didn’t want to get yelled at. Instead, I told the only person who would understand me.

A Twitter DM I sent to Blaire White on January 7th, 2020. It reads, Hi Blaire! I just want to say I really love your YouTube channel and getting your take on different gender issues. I feel like no one really agrees with me on the type of things you talk about, until I see one of your videos and I feel like I'm not crazy! (smiling emoji, peace emoji) keep it up!
There is no response.

Blaire did not respond.

Jessica Bluemke

I didn’t like it that no one saw it my way, or that I didn’t see it their way—especially Jessica Bluemke, the Friendly Atheist Podcast co-host. Someone had to budge. I would change my mind if someone could just explain it to me. Ideally, however, I’d love it if people like Jessica could just see reason.

Instead of tweeting out to the world, I tagged Jessica in a comment on a now-deleted tweet from Blaire announcing a new video a few months into the Rowling controversy.

A screenshot via Internet Archive of a transphobic now-deleted tweet from Blaire White from June 19th, 2020 that reads, NEW VIDEO: Biological sex is real. There are differences between trans and biological women. Being a science denier is not being a trans ally. I'm watching the world try to destroy @jk_rowling for an objectively true opinion, and I am disgusted. There is a link to and thumbnail of a video which shows Blaire's and Rowling's faces overlaid over some of Rowling's tweets. The capture was taken early enough that you can see that Blaire liked her own tweet.

(I’ll recall the best I can without the tweet replies to refer to.) After watching the video and agreeing with Blaire’s points, I commented on Blaire’s tweet, “@blueburie, I was wondering what your thoughts were on this.” Jessica wrote back, and I believe she said, quote, “Fuck this transphobic bullshit.” I was appalled. Someone I had admired, and that I agreed with on nearly everything, just aggressively shut down an opportunity at conversation and diminished the chances that I would ever see it her way. I was stunned. I replied, “How? Blaire’s trans herself.”

I feel torn when I think about this exchange now. If I was in Jessica’s position today, I would have responded the same way. (Honestly. Fuck that.) The problem was, I had been genuinely asking. I didn’t know that much about the nuances of gender, and if there was something I was missing, I really wanted to know. If Jessica had refuted Blaire’s points to me, I probably would have begun to change my mind about Blaire.

I know why she didn’t, but I wish Jessica had taken the time to tell me, or at least told me to do my research (even though neither was her job). She could have won a convert that day. Eventually, I did figure it out, and I am on her side now, but I would have figured it out a lot sooner if she could have somehow read my mind and known that I was asking earnestly.

Blaire White, again

A couple of months went by of me watching Blaire and making a point not to listen to the Friendly Atheist Podcast. This was the height of the pandemic, and seeing everyone spreading the virus was driving me crazy. I didn’t expect Blaire to respond to an irritated comment on her Instagram story of a group dinner at a restaurant in September 2020, just as she hadn’t responded to my praise on Twitter in January. But I did get the honor of receiving a response from Blaire White.

I include the original screenshot that I took immediately (before deleting the conversation and blocking her) as well as a screenshot of it within my photo gallery to show that it is from September 8th, 2020, since the original screenshot doesn’t show the date.

So yeah. After years of seeing and thinking nothing of her transphobic gatekeeping, transmedicalism, and bigotry, it literally took Blaire telling me to go fuck myself for me to actually stop watching her. The irony wasn’t lost on me that the first time an influencer had said something similar to me only four months earlier was when I was defending Blaire. That was the last time I would ever do that, and I’m proud to report that no influencer has told me to fuck myself since.

The floodgates open

Journeys away from harmful ideas or groups, which for me included a bigoted religion and colorblind racism as well as this transphobia, begin with less of an epiphany—”Blaire White is transphobic!”—as it did a snapping-out-of-it moment—”Blaire White is a pretty mean person and doesn’t care about the people who support her. What else does she have wrong?” It didn’t happen all at once, but when the floodgates opened, I could never see Blaire as an honest or kind person again.

That was when I started to really listen to more trans influencers, and to listen to my gut and educate myself when someone says something that feels wrong. I learned that I always need more than one perspective on every issue. I was able to appreciate and learn from other creator’s videos about why Blaire White does not and never has spoken for the trans community, finally seeing her clearly for who she was (and starting to feel very concerned regarding why Jaclyn Glenn was friends with her). As for J.K. Rowling, her transphobic vitriol and direct harm to the trans community has become more and more openly violent over time. Before long, it was pretty easy to see through the façade of “I just think sex is real.”

A long journey

A journey away from transphobia, just like any other journey, isn’t one where you “arrive” one day. I can’t tell you that I’ve taken intentional steps in a linear direction to try to become a real trans ally or accomplice. It’s been messy, and that’s the only way forward.

A transphobic tweet from Richard Dawkins on April 10, 2021 which reads, In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

My next post that focused largely on trans rights was The Dawkins Problem in April 2021. Believe me when I tell you I really thought this was the greatest post I had ever written. I had really tried, and I think you can tell when reading it. The only way I knew how to refute this transphobic and racist tweet was to use transmedicalism. I wrote,

. . . I’d like to emphasize that while yes, both gender and race are social constructs, they are not the same thing. They are both linked to physical phenomena which are not really similar in any way. To be transgender is to have gender dysphoria when presenting as the gender you were assigned at birth, because it is not consistent with the gender that best aligns with your identity. To be clear, transitioning does not make a person transgender. Transitioning makes an already transgender person more comfortable in their own skin because it is their only way to truly be themselves. And no, Richard, your gender identity (and experiencing gender dysphoria) is not a choice.

The Dawkins Problem

And that’s not even what it originally said. Originally, it had included the line, “To be transgender is to suffer from gender dysphoria.” To be transgender is to suffer, I had said. When I edited that post a year later, I was shocked at how I could have actually typed that and not realized how cruel it sounded.

However, I knew I probably wasn’t entirely right, because I still didn’t know much about trans issues. I had followed that section with, “Please be patient with me as I continue to educate myself on the scientific and cultural meaning of both race and gender, and feel free to kindly correct me if I am wrong.” But I also knew that Dawkins was wrong, that what he said was transphobic and repulsive, and I didn’t want to have to wait to become an expert on transphobia before using my blog to call out bigotry in the atheist community. Fortunately, I had some commenters who helped me understand that being trans does not always have to be a result of clinically diagnosed gender dysphoria, and does not always have to be solved by medically transitioning.

Forging ahead

By February 2022, I think I was starting to get it. I wrote in a post,

Creating a world that does not cater primarily to wealthy, able-bodied cis straight white men requires compassion even more than it requires reason. There is nuance in this life. Issues especially pertaining to trans identities are hard for many of us to grasp logically, but fortunately we don’t need to. Not everything has to make perfect sense. New or non-Western ways of making sense of the world don’t fit perfectly into this system that was built by and for white men.

Opponents of trans liberation, spokespeople for the gender binary, fight against gender-affirming pronouns on the basis that “you don’t get your own pronouns.” They’re frustrated that nonbinary and other queer identities seem to defy logic and are new, unfamiliar, and frankly scary.

(They’re not. Queer figures and stories—or the queerness of otherwise straight-presenting people—have just been intentionally erased from Western history. Indigenous and other non-Western cultures have done a much better job of including gender non-conforming people in their societies for millennia.)

But to those people, here’s my counterargument: Who cares? Most people don’t choose pronouns just to be logical, they do it to feel at home in their bodies and identities. Not to mention that the concept of gender is entirely made up and never in history has it accounted for the immeasurably complex human experience.

How Atheists Can Fight for Social Justice

It’s not perfect. The post I’m writing now isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. But I am making progress.

Reading that, I realize that in 2019 I thought that “nonbinary and other queer identities” defied logic and were new, unfamiliar, and scary. I knew in my heart that it didn’t matter whether or not I understood why someone might identify as nonbinary, that I should support them regardless. But it bugged me.

I felt justified by Blaire, who didn’t see trans nonbinary people as valid. I was dead serious when I asked Jessica, “How could someone who’s trans be transphobic?” I didn’t know. I see now that it’s a red flag that I followed and listened to only one trans person, who passed and who spent her time and energy bullying those who didn’t.

How not to take criticism

While I wasn’t questioning Blaire at the beginning, I was always questioning myself. In my original transphobic post, I had written, “Gender is far from my area of expertise, but I think it’s definitely something to be aware of and sensitive to.” My heart was in the right place. I was just so unfamiliar with the territory that I didn’t know how to identify transphobia when I saw it and repeated it.

It’s interesting to me now that at the end of that post, I wrote, “I’m definitely not the authority on gender, so feel free to correct anything that I may have gotten wrong.”

If I really meant that, why did I feel so defensive and not engage with this comment?

I couldn’t disagree with you more. And recommending Blair White as an educational resource is just abhorrent! She speaks with such visceral rhetoric that is not only disagreeable but nasty and mean spirited.

As a transgender woman and philosopher I welcome you to my page to look up some arguments and scientific resources on the subject.

Jubilee Nunnallee on “My Thoughts on Gender”

And why did I delete this next comment, only to find and restore it today, when this trans nonbinary person took the time to spell it out for me? I want to share it in its fullness because it’s spent the last four years in my trash bin.

Everybody here seems to be a non-expert on gender, so I am not sure why you think your opinion about this matters, but I will try to educate you without being bitchy. I will probably fail. But here are all the problems I have with this article as a graygender person who identifies under the trans and non binary umbrellas and has to constantly defend their identity:

First of all, you say that you think there are only two sexes but also acknowledge the existence of intersex people. Around 2% of people are interex, which means they have sex characteristics that don’t fit neatly into the male/female binary, such as genitelia that is something between a penis and a labia or XXX chromosomes. So there are more than two sexes.

Not all genders can be related back to the female/male binary. There is a gender identity that falls under the non binary umbrella and is called maverique. It means that you have a sense of gender but your gender is completely outside the male/female binary. If you don’t understand this concept you should research maverique gender. Maverique people are valid whether you understand their genser or not, so shut up about things you know nothing about and do your fucking research (I am so sorry, I said I won’t be bitchy, but ignorant people just piss me off).

There are a ton of non binary genders and saying that you can have one, two, or zero genders is an oversimplification. Do your research.

While some trans people’s gender changed at some point in their life, they weren’t “born in the wrong body” or “used to be the other gender”. Since there are more than two genders you shouldn’t say ” the opposite/other gender” because that erases the existence of non binary people. Trans people were not born in the wrong body, somebody looked at their body and wrongly assigned them a gender. I don’t have the body of a woman, I have the body of a graygender person because I am graygender.

Even if you don’t understand how a person can identify as a thousand different genders at once you should still respect them and research their gender identity, or ask them if they give you permission. What you understand doesn’t matter, they will still be valid, and the least you can do is respect them.

While I never watched her videos I heard bad things about Blaire White. Here are some other resources I recommend:

Some awesome trans YouTubers are Riley J. Dennis and Kat Blaque (trans women), Vasper @ QueerAsCat, Ash Hardell, Celeste M. and Luxander (non binary people), and Ty Turner, Jackson Bird, and Aaron Ansuini (trans guys). Everyday Feminism is an awesome website and most of these YouTubers are on Instagram and Twitter as well as a lot of other trans people.

Untitledollover on “My Thoughts on Gender”

I’m going to try and find these two commenters and apologize to them, but I don’t deserve their forgiveness.

A colonialist construct

The important thing here is that trans people do not have time for us to take years to shed our transphobia. They are being harassed, threatened, and murdered every day just for being who they are. Gender is a colonialist construct, invented so that men and women would be seen as eternally distinct, with men always in control. (This goes hand in hand with the invention of race, but this post is already really long. Read White Tears/Brown Scars.)

Gender was never supposed to make sense in the first place. It is cultural—colonialist—not scientific. To see gender identity only through a medicalist lens is to not see it. My post was an attempt to fit gender expansive people into a gender binary that they were never supposed to fit into. It literally doesn’t matter if cis people don’t understand it. We’re the ones that made this mess, these arbitrary categories so that we could keep people in tiny, tidy, organized compartments.

Humanity is not a science. To be trans is to listen to what your body and mind are telling you, to use what you know and feel to become your whole, true self. It is to know yourself, and to know your lived experience, better than anybody knows you. And it is to not listen to cis people like me who think we know better.

18 thoughts on “Why I Wrote That Really Transphobic Blog Post and How I Changed My Mind

  • February 19, 2023 at 8:49 am
    Permalink

    Just for the record (since we are on this topic already), I was born intersex. The doctors literally wrote the word, “hermaphrodite” on my birth records because my chromosomes are XX, and my body is fully female in every way, except that I was born with male genitals. My father tried to raise me as a boy, and told everyone I was his son, though I’ve lived my entire life as a girl, and everyone has always known me as a girl named Thomas.

    The doctors assume I’m transgender, as they often refuse to allow the biological distinction between a transgender person and someone who was assigned intersex at birth. My primary care doctor has noted that I am a, “cisgender female” in my medical record, and all of my official documentation and records state that I was born female.

    I wrote an article on my blog which describes my experience living with what doctors refer to as, “female pseudohermaphroditism”. Basically, I am a fully-functioning female with male genitals and nobody knows why. Literally ask me anything. 🙂

    Reply
  • February 19, 2023 at 10:32 am
    Permalink

    Can we ever be up-to-date? This is what sends me in a spin. To genuine explore entails making blunders. What sources can you genuinely trust for information and implications, in such a charged atmosphere?
    Jubilee Nunnallee is the only one you cite who has really been any help.
    Should we pilloried (the online equivalents) for genuinely wanting to understand?

    Reply
    • February 19, 2023 at 12:30 pm
      Permalink

      What’s fascinating is that you missed the forest for all the trees. You write early on in this post about feeling the need to post weekly, had a special name for that even. You could have “put down the pen” at that point to not accidentally write on things that you personally do not experience. But…Then you bring up your back and forth on the topics surrounding the various trans* communities that at first you weren’t supportive of. Then 5 minutes after you decided you were a trans “ally,” you wrote THAT perspective about being one. Then, even in this piece, toward the end of it, you started writing about the intersection of racism and transphobia but only linked to a different article because “this one is getting too long” and not because you have no lived experience to talk about the subject and should have stated as much.

      I’d highly suggest getting deep into the research portion of the assignment and stop writing think pieces on topics that are not of your lived experience as though you now have authority because you just found yourself not being [enter ‘ism here] anymore. It’s really helpful to watch and read all the insights that were listed by the trans people featured here. And then sit with it, process it, and aside from telling other transphobes to “fuck off” as you were once told, just be silent yourself and make space for people with real lived experiences to be seen and heard.

      Reply
      • February 19, 2023 at 6:25 pm
        Permalink

        A H, I want to push back against your comment somewhat. Speaking is part of listening. Articulating is part of learning. Yes, make space for people with lived experience (noting that each person’s story is unique), but our growth will be stunted if we think that means only watch from afar and say nothing. It is also healthy for fellow travellers to be able to see where others have been and how they got to where they are. Rebekah’s post does not come across as claiming authority on anything other than her own journey.

        It is important to reflect on and seek a good balance between silence and speaking up, and insofar as that’s what you are saying I certainly endorse that. But let’s not be simplistic about where that balance lies.

        Reply
    • February 19, 2023 at 5:50 pm
      Permalink

      Why is it so important to be “up to date”? You don’t need to understand everything, everywhere, all at once. If you come across something you don’t understand, but genuinely want to, then you can do research or just ask someone.

      If someone says something you don’t understand, instead of getting upset and reacting “ugh it’s all so crazy and keeps changing,” just ask them “hey, can you explain what that means?”

      It’s that easy. All anyone is asking is for you to be compassionate.

      Reply
      • February 20, 2023 at 1:46 pm
        Permalink

        It’s not that easy. How do you know/can you read, another person’s signs? Especially someone you have never met, and has maybe had to mask to get by all their life.

        Reply
    • February 20, 2023 at 3:42 am
      Permalink

      @michael9murray “Should we pilloried (the online equivalents) for genuinely wanting to understand?”

      No. You shouldn’t be. But if you do get pilloried, try to put it down to human failing (often very understandable human failing) rather than assuming, as many conservatives do, that you’re being pilloried because the people doing the pillorying adhere to an ideology that pillorying is good actually. Hopefully we can all find enough people who are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and have patience for our blunders.

      Reply
  • February 20, 2023 at 1:02 pm
    Permalink

    In the spirit of learning that you’re embracing here, can you help me understand why you’re describing your earlier posts as ‘transphobic’? I know [fill-in-the-blank]phobic/a has become a common way to classify certain views, but it seems to have moved beyond the literal “fear of” definition while retaining the negative stigma that the ‘phobic’ suffix brings. What do you mean when you use it? I would’ve thought that the better description in your case would have been ‘misinformed’, ‘underinformed’, or even ‘naive’.

    Reply
    • February 20, 2023 at 2:39 pm
      Permalink

      You’re right, it has mostly moved past “fear of” to include pretty much anything anti-trans, like harassment, misgendering, bullying, gatekeeping, etc. But I think most of these things still are born out of fear. In many ways, cis people, mostly white men, might subconsciously fear queer identities because it shows that the world is moving past the invented hierarchies that guaranteed them a place at the top. I could say I feared queer identities because I didn’t understand them and therefore they made me uncomfortable. Maybe my post wasn’t violently transphobic like many things out there are (it certainly wasn’t meant to be, not that that matters), but it was extremely ignorant and it’s not right to try to categorize and medicalize trans identities in the way that I did. At the very least it was very stupid. It trivialized trans people’s identities and existence as trans by trying to basically use math to determine “what” exactly they were, when they don’t need this superficial classification to be valid as people. Their humanity comes first. That’s why I think it was transphobic.

      Reply
      • February 20, 2023 at 3:11 pm
        Permalink

        I see. The internet sure is expediting the mutation of language. I suspect that’s a substantial contributor to people talking past each other. If you’re not immersed in the online culture around a topic then it’s easy to misinterpret what people are saying. That said, I advise being cautious when speculating about people’s subconscious. That can certainly be a source of conflict (to be clear, I’m not offended as a cis white man – just offering general advice).

        Reply
      • October 10, 2023 at 1:34 am
        Permalink

        Hi Rebekah,
        I came across this while curious about Blaire White’s transitioning story. Leaving that aside, I’m gonna be very honest with you. It seems like you have fallen in a hole of living for people’s validation. You used to be on the side that licked Blaire’s boots without questioning the hipocrisy of her rhetoric. However, now you seem to be living for the validation of the “gender” pros who also have plenty of inconsistencies in their arguments. I might be wrong and it sounds judgemental, but that is the impression I had while reading your post from beginning to end. I just wanted to tell you that it’s ok to not cater to either side. You don’t need the love from some far right wingnuts nor blinded liberals.

        Now, regarding the why I was trying to learn about Blaire’s story? Well Blaire has this discourse of what a woman should look like or be like because that’s what she does to be considered “passing.” This aligns with many of the stories by people who talk about the defining things that made them discover they were trans. Trans woman who talk about enjoying to play with dolls, makeup, dresses, etc when they were young boys. Trans men who talk about enjoying playing with balls, rough play, boys clothes, etc. However, most if not all of this behavior is influenced by the process of socialization. Women don’t have a makeup gene in ther dna. Nor men for sports and skulls. This behavior is taught to children. And boys and girls are almost forced to enjoy those things based on their sex. This is gender socialization, the one that has caused a lot of harm to men and women. The one that leads people to be wrongly shamed for not “acting” like their sex. Unless you believe people’s sense of gender is also influenced by testosterone and estrogen, we know that gender for the most part is a social construct. How can people feel dysphoric over something that is not real? Isn’t recognizing the existence of nonbinary or other genders accepting that male and female are real when in fact they are pretty much made up? Isn’t some of the ways trans people present themselves reinforcing wrong stereotypes about men and women? Isn’t ignoring the biology of trans people harmful to other groups (female sports for instance)?
        At the end this is a problem that would be resolved for most people if society wasn’t forcing children to fit in the made up and harmful categories of femininity and masculinity. And sadly, it’s not only redneck consevatives pushing this, but liberals and the trans movement too. This is not a partisan problem, is a problem from all of society.

        Reply
  • February 20, 2023 at 1:42 pm
    Permalink

    If you’re up for it, could you also clarify what you mean by saying that gender is a colonial construct? Searching on those terms yields discussions about a strict gender binary being a colonial construct, which I can understand to some extent, but I struggle to understand the concept of gender as a whole being a colonial construct. There’s a lot of non-colonial history which includes concepts in line with what we are calling gender (i.e. the cultural norms, roles, and relationships of and between sexes).

    Reply
    • February 20, 2023 at 2:46 pm
      Permalink

      I think what you found, the strict binary being colonialist, is pretty in line with what I mean. There have obviously been gender roles in Native (so definitionally non-colonial) communities so the “entire” concept can’t be entirely made up. But to that end, they also don’t have the rigid immutable two-gender system which is a colonialist invention. (Think of two-spirit people for example)

      To be honest, this is new to me too. I’m still learning. So that might not have been a perfect answer but I wanted to try and help you understand why I said that. The most detailed description I’ve seen of it as a colonialist and racist invention is in Ruby Hamad’s book White Tears/Brown Scars in chapter 2, in which she mostly cites Kyla Schuller’s The Biopolitics of Feeling which honestly looks like it would be above my comprehension level. But if you want to learn from someone with a lived experience as a person of color, who knows more than I do, I’d check Hamad’s book out.

      Reply
  • February 21, 2023 at 4:57 pm
    Permalink

    As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have struggled with all of this. The only thing I will say for sure is that I hope that butch lesbians kids are not being encouraged (by parents or others) to transition because of homophobia. I worry there are some people that so don’t want to be lesbians that it might seem easier to be a male. It appears to me to actually be harder today to be a non-feminine girl as it was when I was young. It seems to be that only feminine lesbians are accepted today and that makes me sad. I am not sure what choices I would have made as a kid if I had the option to transition and I am personally very happy that I didn’t. That is all I know for sure, my own truth.

    Reply
    • February 23, 2023 at 1:20 am
      Permalink

      Sharon, you seem oblivious to all the violent and dehumanizing hatred targeting specifically trans people. The idea that gay people transition to escape homophobia is a common transphobic talking point and it’s not true at all seeing how transitioning only leaves people vulnerable to even more virulent transphobia. If you want a real example of this, just look at Elliot Page and the amount of abuse and ridicule about him ever since his transition. You should also look at your own experience and see how transition is not a one-and-done decision, it’s a whole process and commitment to living as your gender that takes constant work. The path of least resistance is always to NOT transition and that’s as true today as it was in your youth.

      It’s very disappointing that as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, the only thing you could say “for sure” is some mediocre transphobic talking point. Maybe take a look at what is happening in the media and politics TODAY. Trans people are under attack from all sides and it feels like a complete betrayal from the LGB especially. I really don’t believe in the LGBTQ+ community anymore, or cis allies. The past months of anti-trans bills, hatecrimes, and more and more transphobic articles going unquestioned by cis people makes it clear that as trans people we are on our own and cannot rely on anyone else’s empathy.

      Reply
  • January 12, 2024 at 2:11 am
    Permalink

    Delusional. Utterly delusional. You got butthurt that someone you admired was offended by your attempt to police their behaviour and it turned you off logic and common sense seemingly permanently. That’s an emotional reaction, not one based in logic. I’m looking forward to the day you realise going as hard and as far as you could in the other direction was just that – a reaction, nothing more.

    Reply

What do you think?