Transphobia

ThoughtStorms Wiki

(ReadWith) TransExclusionaryRadicalFeminist, IdentityPoliticsIsKryptoniteToTheLeft

Issues heavily hyped by BotFarms : https://www.newstatesman.com/internet-social-media/2022/01/gender-critical-feminism-is-not-as-popular-as-its-supporters-may-want-you-to-believe

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/17/womens-equality-party-runs-consultation-on-self-identification-for-trans-people

Why is the UK press so transphobic? : https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/05/stonewall-trans-debate-toxic-gender-identity

This is getting so fucking ugly: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/09/trans-charity-mermaids-appeal-lgb-alliance-status

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/06/22/dead-cats-and-transphobic-lies/

I wrote this in a discussion with someone. Never sent it, but it's another good summary of the points I want to make

That's a complicated question, which is almost impossible to do justice to on Twitter.
I believe what I wrote here: ThePyramidOfHate that one of our problems is we know the "big evils" are made of lots of "little evils" but we don't know how to deal with that.
So we end up where words like "racism" or "transphobia" have a kind of dual use: to talk about the low-level "little evils" that permeate society AND a "big evil".
The activists, rightly in my opinion, want to fix the little evils. But don't have a way to do that except by building them up to sound like the "big evils". And that puts everyone else's backs up.
So there are a lot of people who are not "big evil" trans-phobes, and don't feel any great animosity towards trans-people, who nevertheless still have a world-view which sees trans-people and their activities as an abnormal or degenerate case.
This is literally "transphobia" in the sense that if you start to enforce these ideas in rules, it makes the trans-people second-class citizens.
But we don't have a way to talk about this, or ask people to change their position, that doesn't end up sounding like finger-wagging accusation
I think, because we don't have a good theory of, or language to talk about, the "Mereology" of big evils being made from small evils.
If we did have such a vocabulary, it would be easy to use it to make finer grained distinctions and agree on proportionality in our critiques of things like racism and transphobia. Without it, all attempts to address small evils get escalated into things that look like huge fights.