Good point! I’m not claiming to be an expert on anyone’s experience that is not my own (or for groups I am not a member). But I can say I am more aware of the problems one group faces relative to another group because I have more data points on the one group. My point being even the most well meaning CIS person is still pretty ignorant of the full range of issue faced by the trans community. For example I had no idea about this rift between a subset of lesbians and trans people. A case of the more you learn the more you realize you still don’t know.
tldr; Ignorant but empathetic and willing to learn to the best of my abilities.
I knew about a subset of lesbians hating trans women. I have heard from a lesbian friend that she feels (or felt?) that trans women don’t really identify as women but as a man’s idealization of what it is like to be a woman, and she implied that there are other lesbians who feel the same way about trans women but much more intensely. Including those who thought being trans was an anti-feminist statement I’m sure there are those who take it a step or two further and are outright violently hateful.
I have a lot of issues with the LGBT community, many on a personal level. I see a lot of infighting and not much acceptance of intersectionality. This mess that’s going on with the Jewish Pride marchers in Chicago isn’t helping matters any.
Absolutely. Besides the ongoing struggle for trans* acceptance, there’s a surprising amount of animosity towards bisexual people and, lately, asexual people. A friend of mine came out as asexual the other day on FB, and was immediately pillaged with arguments about asexuals “not counting” and not belonging as a part of Pride, since they “represented the absence of something”. I’m not at all interested in a Pride that excludes people. That’s the opposite of its point.
As soon as I read the screen shot above, the light bulb went on for me. I could see the physics of the needs/wants of the two groups colliding. But as an outsider that wishes nothing but happiness for both groups it’s frustrating to see the infighting when there are bigger dragons currently at the gate.
I only just read about the hate toward the Jewish pride flag people and was just floored. Our country is under assault from within and turning on each other is just doing the darkside’s work.
The first time I’d heard of it, I thought it was a joke. I heard someone say bisexual people were “greedy” for liking both genders, and then years later in a completely different location and context I heard the same thing again. I don’t get it. Is it because bisexual people allegedly compete for sexual partners with gay and straight people, or that they don’t just “pick a side”?* Then there are the people who say that bisexual men don’t exist because they’re really just closeted gay men or whatever, and that bisexual women don’t exist because they’re just doing it to get attention. This hostility toward bisexual people needs to be addressed, but I guess it’s just easier to pretend that bi people either don’t exist or else fall into some other bucket in the taxonomy.
*Implying that one side is boring whitebread suburban family life and the other side is the stereotypical 70’s gay scene, and there is nothing, literally nothing, in between.
Yep. The argument I get a lot is “nuh uh you’re not asexual you’re just a prude”. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not repulsed by sex, just… somewhere between confused and uninterested… but that’s just me personally. I also get told I must be repressing something from my childhood, which would be a good guess if they could think of something specific I was repressing, but really they’re just idly speculating.
Then there’s the whole low testosterone / intersex argument, which makes no sense because I’m over six feet tall, balding, and can grow a full beard in three days. I’m amused, for the lack of a better term, whenever I get told that I should be placed on hormones for this because I have a disease, and that I should have no say in it because not wanting to be put on hormones indicates that I have some form of mental illness. Especially when it’s a gay man who’s telling me this.
As far as asexuals “not counting”, I’m not sure what I would count as if I did count. I’m not sure if I’m gay and bad at it, or if I’m straight and bad at it. I’m sure asexual pride doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but we not only do we not fit into a heteronormative world, we don’t fit in with gay culture either. When I was younger, I went to gay bars and was as confused as I was in the titties-and-beer world of straight bars. So, if we don’t fit in anywhere, I see no harm in attending Pride and showing people that we exist, there’s nothing wrong with us, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
The history is nasty. Conflict peaked in 1981 when the US Government rescinded trans health care as medically necessary, directly on the recommendation of a lesbian radical feminist, Janice Raymond. That meant trans people could no longer use Medicare/Medicaid for transition care, as they had in the 70s, and private insurers followed suit in dropping trans coverage. It wasn’t reinstated until 2014.
It’s worth remembering that this was more a result of the Reagan administration playing divide-and-conquer by pitting extremists against each other than a fair representation of the radical feminist movement at the time, which contained many trans and pro-trans individuals. It’s hard though – one of my first thoughts when I meet a butch lesbian is, “I wonder if she hates me just for existing?” And that feeling just makes me want to drop a hint to the effect of “don’t worry, I’m straight,” which ironically is itself the use of a heteronormative privilege… which, yeah…
Access to different aspects of cisheteropatriarchy tends to be the stick even all us queer people beat each other with.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that there’s an active tendency in extremist circles to co-opt the language of the other side, in order to cheapen it and confuse communication. Like, forex, “politically correct”, which started off (according to one school of history) as a snarky, even self-deprecating term on the left, then got co-opted by the right as a stick to beat the left, then got into mainstream discourse as sometimes one thing and sometimes the other, but is now mostly accepted as a real thing that the left do, and the right never do.
And as a vague attempt towards balance, I could put “trickle-down economics” in the same category, which I learnt this weekend seems to have been coined in the early twentieth century as a mocking way to describe the opposite of Keynesian economics, bumped along for a few decades surfacing occasionally, finally breaching in the Reagan era as a term that everybody was using either mockingly or seriously as something that definitely would work, up to today when we get the right denying that anybody on the right had ever used it, and certainly not Reagan or Bush I (mostly as a way of deflecting attention from the fact that they’re still doing it, regardless of how they characterise it).
And so it could be with “gender critical”: wherever it starts, maybe the reactionary tendency pick it up from academe and snatch it away together with some half-understood theory and start using it as a term to bully with; or perhaps some academic hears a bit of conversation in which the phrase is uttered, they wonder what it could mean and realise it meshes with whatever they’re studying and start using it with an invented meaning and it gets repeated because it’s useful with that meaning; or maybe even it gets adopted by both the reactionaries and the academics by the same process of mashing-up other terms in vogue, and neither stream realises the use by the other. (My money’s on the first, btw.)
On a tangent, is there a term for the opposite of a dogwhistle, say a phrase that a group uses to signal covertly (they think) to each other, but actually everyone knows about so it instantly marks them as someone to avoid? Like anyone who uses “social justice warrior” unironically? Or someone who puts “88” in their username? A foghorn, maybe?
My very first email address was skeezix88. That was because I graduated high school in 1988. Wasn’t until a year or two ago that I learned the number had any meaning beyond piano keyboards.
I wonder if anyone ever thought I was some kinda nazi. Oh well. I quit using that address around 1999 or so. I guess I’ll never know.
I’ve never seen anyone do it, so it may have fallen out of fashion, but online here in China “88” means goodbye.
Here’s how it works:
This mean bye-bye, 拜拜. It’s basically pronounced, if you ignore the issue of tone, bye-bye. But, a homonym of this, again ignoring tone, is 白白, which somewhat resembles 88. It’s not an exact match, but definitely easier to quickly type.
By an odd coincidence, 白白 can also be translated as “very white.”
Not quite sure what the counterpoint (words they use that they think other people don’t know but which other people do know and judge them by) would be.
Mark Borchardt: It’s pronounced “COE-ven”, man. What else could it be pronounced?
Actor: “CUH-ven”. That’s the proper pronunciation.
Mark Borchardt: No, no, no. No, no…“CUH-ven” sounds like “oven”, man. And that’s just… it doesn’t work.
I was in a production of Lettice and Lovage in which, for a time, the director insisted that “lettice” was pronounced lett-eece simply because we just can’t have it pronounced the same as “lettuce.” He changed his mind once we started rehearsing the part of the play that directly mentioned that “lettice” and “lettuce” are pronounced the same.
A number used as a symbol by some fringe racist groups.
Today, I mostly associate it with the racist groups. I even feel weird when Chinese people use it, and that’s mostly whom I associated it with earlier. Then again, I also feel weird about the phrase “trump card” and about All Trumps flour.
I get the same thing from my endocrinologist (who I see for diabetes). I haven’t grown hair on top of my head since I was 19 but it comes shooting out of my chin, eyebrows and ears. But every visit she asks if I have kids, and follows that up with pressuring me to get my testosterone checked. Because… Catholic hospital system maybe? I don’t know.
I’ve even told her, twice, that my wife had endometrial cancer and a full hysterectomy. Her answer is vague mutterings about “having more energy” and then dropping the subject.
I first saw this attitude when working in San Francisco for a few months; sexual orientation was an essential part of everyone’s identity at the office, and declaring a ‘side’ was very important. As someone still uncertain about how they fit into things, I just sort of stayed quiet and did my work. After about a month there, the wonderfully flamboyant secretary, Charles, who’d taken a shine to me right away, flat-out asked me “honey, just say it. Gay or straight?”. When I said “gosh I dunno, bisexual?” his face fell, he rolled his eyes and said “whatever,” and never spoke to me again. If you weren’t on one side or the other, you couldn’t be trusted, I discovered.[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:25, topic:617”]
Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not repulsed by sex, just… somewhere between confused and uninterested… but that’s just me personally.
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My friend describes it as “I don’t think sex is icky or bad or wrong. But if I’m offered the choice of cake or sex, I’d choose cake.”[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:25, topic:617”]
/apologies for ranting
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Thank you for the awesome rant, I really appreciate you putting this out there. I’m seeing more and more Ace Pride sort of things. The more visibility it gets, the less it’s seen as an abnormality and just another way people are, and something to be celebrated.
In telegraph (Morse code) use, “73” was the abbreviation for “goodbye” or “regards”. “88” was the more intimate “love and kisses”. These are still used by ham operators.
I’m sure there are those who take it a step or two further and are outright violently hateful.
