Questioning Transphobia

Bil Browning tweeted this today:

We know there’s a problem w/ Ronald’s post. Ed Team is deciding what to do about it now. Informal poll: What would you do in our shoes?

Take the post down. I’d seriously reconsider whether I’d want Ronald Gold to ever contribute again. Actually – no, I’d just boot him forever.

Oh, the post is: No to the Notion of “Transgender”

In this post, Ronald Gold reduces transgender to two concepts: drag caricatures and transsexual men and women. When he mentions transsexual men and women, he explicitly says that the “equipment” we’re born with belies (overrides) everything else about us.

He goes on to say that gender isn’t a part of personality, and thus people can’t really be transsexual or transgender. He further states

I hope I’ll be forgiven for rejecting as just plain silly the idea that some cosmic accident just turned these people into changelings. What happened, more than likely, is that, from an early age, when they discovered that their personalities didn’t jibe with what little boys and girls are supposed to want and do and feel, they just assumed they mustn’t be real little boys and girls.So, parents of such little boys and girls, do not take them to the psychiatrist and treat them like they’re suffering from some sort of illness. Explain to them that, whatever the other kids say, real little girls do like to play with trucks and wear grimy jeans, and real little boys like to prance around in dresses and play with dolls. And make sure the teachers are on the same page.

an incredibly stereotypical and ignorant set of assumptions as to why transsexual people transition.

I’m not linking this because I want to spend energy countering a cissexual, cisgender man who insists that all transsexual people have an imaginary condition foisted upon us by the medical profession, who argues that it’s necessary to stop the medical profession from allowing trans people to transition, and who thinks his ignorance about trans people and lives gives him a position of authority from which to condemn who and what we are and how we live our lives. Telling us to avoid the gatekeepers who give us access to the treatments we need because we should be perfectly happy with the sexes assigned to us at birth, thinking in his faux-benevolent trans-hating and erasing way, that he knows who we are better than we do.

I’m linking this because I want people to be aware of what was posted.

I also appreciate many of the responses to Ronald’s post, from cis and trans people alike.

Edit to add: An editor’s note was added to the top of the post.

Editors’ Note: All posts published on Bilerico Project do not reflect the opinions of nor any endorsement by the Editorial Team. Many Bilerico readers and contributors have found Ronald Gold’s op-ed offensive or needlessly coarse. The idea behind Bilerico Project is to encourage dialogue among different facets of the LGBT community that might normally never interact this intimately. We encourage all readers to continue responding to Mr. Gold in the same spirit his post was written – with positive intent while bluntly stating your own opinion and experiences.

So now hate speech is written with “positive intent?”

Number one is a post about allies by Gauge at Radical Masculinity. Ze makes some very good points I want to add to soon.

Number two is about how the standards of care basically abuse trans people, by Cedar at Taking Up Too Much Space.

Number three is about how stealth hasn’t helped the trans community – and more specifically, the African-American trans communityt – by Monica Roberts at TransGriot. I may write my own post on this soon.

And little light threw a nuclear ontological hand grenade today:

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

Go read the whole thing. Angels shed bloody tears for every one of you who doesn’t click that link.

One last thing.

Renegade Evolution has posted her perspective about all this stuff I’ve been posting about lately.

For those radical feminists who keep asking stuff like, “How can you call yourself a woman when women are telling you that you aren’t?” Aside from it not being a vote, other women acknowledge and respect my womanhood. If I have to pick someone to acknowledge or deny my identity, you’ll lose every time. Plus, I don’t have to.

And now, a few thoughts on this whole transgender thing that blew up while I was chillin’ in the sun…

I don’t get a lot of it. I don’t get a lot of folks objection to the term “cis”. I don’t get how folk who are so all about being women, yet warriors against gender-which yep, is largely constructed by society- but still, love their woman/female-ness and all, love, love, love it, get so riled up when some woman who might have been born with different parts, but felt that woman/female-ness all along just wants to be seen as who and what she is, and accepted as such. Then there are the lists of things that “real women/women born women” (puke) can do that those other women can’t…like have babies. Produce breast milk. Have periods. Except, you know, a lot of cis-women can’t do those things…they can’t have babies, or produce breast milk, and sooner or later they all stop having periods.

Does that make them “not women”? No one seems to want to answer that, but sometimes I feel like the answer out of some might be yes…

I also don’t get how some people who claim so much not to care about appearances get so angry at the appearances transwomen take on, be they gender ambigious or plain or “passing” or down-right girlie.

I don’t get how people who are so against gender turn around and attempt to enforce it themselves.

Read the whole thing!