The new sign outside Wee Mexico on Nethergate in the Scottish city of Dundee reads: “We’re back! Please do not enter if you have symptoms of Covid-19, racism, homophobia [or] transphobia.”
This is a great idea. I suggest that restaurants put up bigotry boxes outside their entrance, asking potential customers to leave their racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia behind before entering.
You could tell them that they could pick their prejudices up again on the way out. The best option would be, however, for the box to completely pulverize their hatred and turn it into fertilizer. I am sure that kind of sh*t would make ecological grown potatoes thrive!
I see that some seem to dismiss “intersectionality” as a politically correct “fad”. It isn’t. Many of us are living in societies where being a white. straight, male represents the good norm, and where people of color, women, gay men and lesbian women and trans people are understood as inferior in one way or the other.
People may not be consciously aware of these hierarchies, but they are there.
Ceval Omar, a Norwegian Black transgender woman, puts it this way:
– There are many countries in the world where being gay, trans or Black is sufficient cause for getting killed. I feel privileged for being able to walk down the street without being afraid.
In spite of this, she sees a lot of racism, misogyny and transphobia, also in Norway. She comes from an African-Norwegian family and recalls a lot of harassment and backbiting in school. Still, she had a strong self-confidence, although she admit that might have been a defense mechanism at first:
– I walked through the corridors as if it was the catwalk, she says.
These days she is working as a model for companies in Oslo, Paris og New York.
– I celebrate Pride every day, all year round, she says. – Pride is not about being queer and party for a week. Pride is about living your own truth.
Top photo: Olav Olsen, Bottom photo: Women360
Anonymous asked
Bruh, you’re straight up racist if you thing separating things based on sex is as bad as segregation.
crossdreamers answered
No, comparing racism and transphobia does not make you a racist.
1.Stigmatize the oppressed, by making rest of society believe that these people are not to be considered regular citizens.
2. Scare the oppressed, by making them feel inferior and in that way stop them from fighting back.
In both cases the policies are put in place to visibly exclude and persecute people that do not live up to the standards of the ruling elite. The bathroom laws are instruments of power, meant to deny the “Others” access to public spaces.
I doubt that drawing attention to white supremacists’ aggressive ways of controlling and invalidating people of color is what makes me a racist in the eyes of this commenter.
The problem is clearly that I am comparing policies targeting trans women with policies targeting black people. In other words: It is the association with trans people that she finds offensive.
It is the oppressors that are alike, not the oppressed
Now, you could argue that I am saying that the suffering of trans women these days is the same as the one of black South Africans during Apartheid and African-Americans during Jim Crow. That might be seen as a way of appropriating the suffering of black people in order to mobilize support for trans women.
But that is not what I am saying. I am not saying that the suffering of trans women is the same as the one of those oppressed through Jim Crow or Apartheid.
There is so much variation here – as regards social, political and cultural contexts – that these experiences will have to be different, even if there is some overlap (as in black transgender women feeling the force of racism on a daily basis).
What I am comparing are the mentalities and tactics used by the white supremacist oppressors against black people in South Africa and the American South with the ones of those who are now using bathroom laws to persecute trans women. They are both using the same rhetoric and the same political strategies to achieve similar objectives.
Both racists and transphobes are deliberately using people’s fear of the unknown to mobilize support for racist/transphobic policies. For example: In both cases the oppressors try to associate their victims with sexualized violence. Black men were presented as mentally weak and sexually aggressive predators. Ditto for trans women today.
My guess is that the one making this comment is a supporter of anti-trans bathroom laws and she now feels extremely uncomfortable when I point out that she is, in fact, no better than the racists.
She is now trying to get me to shut up, by calling me a racist. It is a way of deflecting, I suppose. But it does not work.
I am going to write about it anyway, because it so clearly documents what kind of tradition the trans-exclusionary radical feminists belong to.
To those of you who think that the current UK debate on trans people is about freedom of speech and “good people on both sides”, this is your wake-up call.
Here’s the drill used by racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes all over the world:
1. Stick to stereotypes.
This is the “All Jews are greedy and have big noses” strategy.
The South African racists developed the pencil test. Put a pencil in someone’s hair. If it falls out, the person is white and can use the bathrooms of white people. If it stays, the person is black and unwanted.
According to many TERFs all trans women look like men. (And if they don’t, they are reinforcing the sexist stereotypes of the Patriarchy. Damned if you do…)
2. If someone belongs to an unwanted category, anything bad anyone in that category does applies to all members of that category.
If a black man commits a crime, all black men are criminals. If a white man commits a crime, he is a criminal, mad, or in any case some kind of exception to the general rule of white male goodness.
In the same vein: If a gay man seduces a minor, all gay men are pedophiles. If a straight man sexually abuses a minor, he is mentally ill.
The TERF approach to trans women is simple: They are all men, and all men are rapists.
Yep. Cis women are diverse as heck!
Oh Right! Trans women too!
Proclaiming “BIOLOGY!” to invalidate trans women invalidates you to anyone with the wherewithal to actually attempt a basic understanding of trans women.
Trans people in general arise because of the complex biological interface we interact with physical reality through.
Trans women are adult human females. Sometimes in nature and biology, bodies don’t match the evolutionary human template honed over hundreds of thousands of years.
Being trans is merely one of the MANY ways.
We are stardust, yes.
Some stardust is trans stardust.//
What is truly amazing here, is that the author of the original tumblr post feels the need to create such a check list in the first place. You see, the traditional TERF approach to cis/trans lesbian relationships is that lesbian women are not attracted to lesbian trans women, because lesbian trans women are, according to them, straight men. They will know right away that the person they meet is trans.
But think about it, if they need to see the anus hair of a woman to determine if she is acceptable, they have already felt a strong sexual attraction to that woman. They have read that person as female and reacted to that person as if she is a woman. In other words: She is indistinguishable from other women they are attracted to. This means that the very existence of this trans woman falsifies the idea that lists like this one can be used to invalidate trans women.
So we are back to the racist research of the 1930s, when bigots measured sculls and noses to determined what people should be allowed into good society and who should be sent to labor camps.
I am interested in how hate groups try to construct imaginary threats to create fear that may strengthen their cause. In the US racists, for instance, will argue that immigrants are more likely to be criminals, and that this is why you need a wall to protect white Americans. (Immigrants and their descendants are actually less likely to be criminals.)
During the apartheid era in South Africa the white rulers created separate bath rooms for “colored people”, creating the impression that black men and women were a threat to white women and children, and that white people would somehow be sullied if they shared a bathroom with a black person.
The trick is to present outsiders as the alien and dirty “Other”, projecting people’s fears upon them. In this way the oppressors try to legitimize persecution and mobilize the masses for the party or the cause. The Nazis, for instance, presented Jews as dirty and infectious rats that had to be removed from Aryan society. We know how that ended.
Trans women as “the dirty Other”
TERFs or trans-exclusionary radical feminists are casting trans women in the role of the “Unclean Other”, partly by presenting them as sexually perverted men (”autogynephilia!”) and partly by arguing that an acceptance of trans women will open the restroom doors to other violent men.
Again: This has nothing to do with reality. I have so far (with some doubt) managed to find one possible potential case of a trans woman frightening cis women in a public bathroom, but given that 99.9999% percent of trans women go to the bath room to do their thing, and nothing more, and that cis women may also become aggressive in bath rooms, it makes no sense to punish all trans women for this deed. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that creepy cis men will be stopped by bath room apartheid laws if they want to attack women in women’s restrooms.
The reason both racists and transphobes have focused on bathrooms, is the bathrooms give a visible and clear social signal as to who are accepted and who are to be cast out of decent society.
Gender-neutral bathrooms represent no threat
Which leads me up to the article about gender neutral bathrooms: This article proves that it is possible to think about bathrooms in a completely different way, and where the hypothetical threat of violence is not considered at all.
As noted, I live in a country where gender neutral bathrooms are becoming more and more common, in restaurants and workplaces, and where the concept of threatening transgender women is a non-issue. It turns out you do not need separate bathrooms for men and women. The only ones who have been threatened so far are trans women – by TERFs.
This proves, as I see it, that the TERF and religious conservative bathroom crusade is just a ruse aimed at upholding the gender binary, because their world view requires this dichotomy. And that is why I tagged the post with “TERF”.
TERFs and other transphobes are trying to reduce the identities of trans people to “fetishes”. Research shows, however, that the sexual fantasies of trans people are not that different from the ones of those who are not transgender.
A common trick used by bigots is to sexualize marginalized people. So they do, for instance, present black men and jews as sexual predators, independent women as “nymphomaniacs”, homosexual men as child molesters and trans women as perverted men.
If a cis woman has a kink, it is because she is sexually liberated. If a lesbian woman or trans woman has a kink, she is that kink.
Note that transphobic narratives like “autogynephilia” and “rapid onset gender dysphoria” rest on the idea that the sexualities of transgender people are fundamentally different from the ones of cis people.
Well, they are not!
New research on the sexual fantasies of cis men and women show that they share many of the scenarios imagined by trans women and trans men.
One survey indicates, for instance, that as many as one third of cisgender people, men and women, have had cross-gender crossdreaming fantasies (as in dressing up as the “opposite gender” or having the body of the “opposite sex”).
Ray Blanchard (the man behind the “autogynephilia” theory) has made a big point out of trans women dreaming about having sex with “faceless men”, arguing that this proves that they were not real women. It turns out many cis women have the exact same fantasies.
Note also that cis people are as likely as trans people to have submission or domination fantasies.
Many cis women fantasize about being an attractive and sexy woman desired by others, so it should come as no surprise that trans women do so too. And yes, cis people may, like some trans people, fetishize clothes, objects and body parts. This is what many people do.
The more we learn about human sexuality, the more we realize that nearly everyone has kinky fantasies. This applies to cis people and trans people alike.
