Dropping the 'T' in LGBT

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

let's not forget that transphobia in some lgb communities is a much bigger problem than the reverse.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Well if the politics and talking points of one subculture in the movement are destructive for the movement as a whole, you have little choice but saying; goodbye and thank you for the years together. In fact it may be healthy for the subculture as they may suddenly find out how self-destructive their behaviour are.

I think 秋と修羅 (how would you like to be addressed? I know people call you Madeleine but your username is Nathan so I'm unsure) actually agrees with this, the problem more being the tone of the petition rather than its content.

Madeleine. I'd change my username if it were possible.

I'm not sure whether or not I agree with the content of the petition. I don't know how the trans community can be induced to get its sh**t together. I really don't. Until I or somebody else figures out how, my friend group and the circles I run in are going to continue to consist primarily of non-trans lesbians and bisexual women.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Can we just get rid of Change.org?

[Phony Moderate]

Can we just get rid of Change.org?

Maybe start a petition on Change.org?

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Can we just get rid of Change.org?

Maybe start a petition on Change.org?

I would, but it would be buried under an avalanche of slackivist dribble. PETITION TO GET LIL WAYNE OUT OF JAIL-ONE MILLION NEEDED!!!!

[Thunderbird is the word]

what a stunningly stupid petition (if for no other reason: petitioning to change a word is not how it works at all)

breitbart.com editor Milo Yiannopoulos

hhhha well that would explain that

Yiannopoulos is basically the MRA equivalent of Andrea Dworkin.

[RINO Tom]

I thought the trend was adding even more letters?

[Crumpets]

I thought the trend was adding even more letters?

LGBTQIA+ FTW

[Ban my account ffs!]

There is a lot of tension bubbling up and an increasing amount of animosity on both sides.  I've seen bits of anti-gay sentiment among trans people.

Right now I think trans people have a place under the LGBT umbrella because we are allies and we all have a common struggle for equality.  But if the trans movement becomes anti-gay... I'd have to support parting ways and letting them struggle on their own.

[Kingpoleon]

Well, this is for L, G, B, and T individuals to decide on. I have always considered rather strange the combination of LGB on the one hand and T on the other hand, since there is a difference between one's sexual orientation and one's gender identity.

LGBA and T/other gender identities should be separate groups to be correct. Otherwise it would go on forever. Regardless, LTB and T people would both be protected but called separately.

It's always annoyed me that this was a mischaracterization of both groups.

[Figueira]

This idea seems pretty stupid to me.

[Lexii, harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy]

This idea seems pretty stupid to me.

[Figueira]

To elaborate, I think that it's useful for them to ally with each other because (1) they always have before so why stop, and (2) there is a significant amount of overlap between the groups.

Madeleine, I'm curious as to what your issues are with the trans community.

[Drew]

For one thing, it was two trans women that started the Stonewall Riots, yet it's the gay establishment that takes credit for it.  This is one reason why we need a greater awareness of LGBT history.

This idea of some gay people to 'drop the T' is not the answer.  Running away from trans issues rather than addressing them is exactly what HERO opponents want to see.

[Famous Mortimer]

Any gay group which sought to explicitly exclude transgendered people would become untouchable on the left. I suppose the Log Cabin Republicans could get away with it, but that's about it.

[afleitch]

For one thing, it was two trans women that started the Stonewall Riots, yet it's the gay establishment that takes credit for it.  This is one reason why we need a greater awareness of LGBT history.

This idea of some gay people to 'drop the T' is not the answer.  Running away from trans issues rather than addressing them is exactly what HERO opponents want to see.

The Stonewall Inn was a mafia run bar for white, male, generally middle class clientele. There is little evidence, other than from Rivera herself that she was there. The idea that it was a 'bunch of drag queens' is equally suspect based on who frequented the bar. The riots outside were more mixed but the riots inside the bar were fought by gay men. Trans activists are propogating a myth.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Madeleine, I'm curious as to what your issues are with the trans community.

Well, for one thing, there's this tendency to talk as if 'trans' is a category that includes or subsumes any kind of gender-nonconformity, which is cropping up more and more recently in, for instance, calls to put younger and younger children on hormone blockers, despite the fact that most gender-nonconforming children end up non-trans gay adults. You also get people insisting that butch lesbians MUST be trans men or that twinks (is that accepted nomenclature? I haven't heard an actual gay man use that word but that could just be due to lack of much socialization with non-woman LGBT people on my part) MUST be trans women, et cetera. This sort of stuff is insulting and, curiously, really sexist, and harmful to both trans and non-trans people. And then there's this idea that Anyone Can Be Trans if they're in any way unhappy with the social roles assigned to their sex, even if their sex isn't a source of any kind of physical/visceral or even intense emotional pain for them. I'm aware that this is technically an appeal to worse problems fallacy, but I find that insulting to those of us who die a little inside when people call us 'sir', or go on crying jags because we'll never be able to menstruate or give birth. I don't care if that makes me a 'transmedicalist' or 'truscum'. Whatever.

In the more 'classical' trans community I've run into problems of oversexualization and expectation of certain types of political and religious (or antireligious) views that I don't hold. This could just be bad luck on my part, I hope it is. But in particular I think that full-throated insistence on 'identity' as the crux and core concept of trans experience burns a lot of bridges and prevents us from having much chance of coming to a modus vivendi with belief systems and institutions with different views on ontology ('ontology' might not be quite the word I'm looking for but it's close enough). While it's true that, for those of us who religiously or culturally (more or less) traditional who aren't able or simply aren't willing to walk away from those spaces, it's mostly those spaces that are to blame for the lack of such a modus vivendi, I think this idea of 'identity' makes it a lot less likely for that to get resolved to anybody's satisfaction in the future.

tl;dr a lot of trans rhetoric is implicitly homophobic or sexist, I'm simply an extremely atypical trans person ideologically and lifestyle-wise and don't think that much space exists or is being made for that, and I don't think the idea of 'identity' or 'identifying' is useful here but the rest of the trans community seems really committed to it.

[Simfan34]

This is very interesting, but if it was supposed to be effective it should have taken place 20 years ago.

I'm glad that Maddy also sees something wrong with trying to declare prepubescent children transgendered, though.

[afleitch]

Well, for one thing, there's this tendency to talk as if 'trans' is a category that includes or subsumes any kind of gender-nonconformity, which is cropping up more and more recently in, for instance, calls to put younger and younger children on hormone blockers, despite the fact that most gender-nonconforming children end up non-trans gay adults. You also get people insisting that butch lesbians MUST be trans men or that twinks (is that accepted nomenclature? I haven't heard an actual gay man use that word but that could just be due to lack of much socialization with non-woman LGBT people on my part) MUST be trans women, et cetera. This sort of stuff is insulting and, curiously, really sexist, and harmful to both trans and non-trans people.

There is certainly a 'reappropriation' of how people express themselves or have expressed themselves in terms of transvestitism, butch, femme etc as 'oh well they are trans really'. That is bleeding into the past as well (see the Stonewall riots) and is 'a very bad thing' in that it is erasing people's identities that don't, as you say, fit into one or the other. Which is where as I've mentioned before some trans activists and anti LGBT traditionalists share a horrible common ground. Certainly there is undue pressure on teenagers in encouraging them to conform to a 'one or the other' identity and to seek medical intervention. Again, some dangerous common ground.

'Twink' has disappeared (outside of porn labelling...was it ever outside of it anyway?) because there's a crisis in masculinity amongst gay men. In part propagated by the 'oh you must be trans then' mindset from both sides. 'Flamboyancy' makes gay men uncomfortable because it's a stabbing stereotype and is in many ways seen as an offensive pastiche by some in the trans community. So they have silently disappeared/joined a gym.

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I think that (and I'm not speaking from experience here) is that those who are transgender traditionally often have to play the long game, in terms of spending an uncomfortable and difficult amount of time as physically in the wrong sex. However more recent activists are keen on quicker fixes (literally) and that in itself I think has led to trans identity bleeding into areas where it shouldn't. Gender re-assignment/hormone therapy etc is held up as being 'The Solution', when actually for many people with gender identity issues, it isn't.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

This is very interesting, but if it was supposed to be effective it should have taken place 20 years ago.

I'm glad that Maddy also sees something wrong with trying to declare prepubescent children transgendered, though.

I mean, sure, I personally would have found it helpful if I had been put on some sort of hormone blockers to see if there was any way to stop me from ending up six-foot-three with dark, fast-growing facial hair, but objectively speaking my mother and doctors definitely made the safer choice in not going there, even though as it happened I ended up one of the minority of children with that experience who actually face these problems as adults.

[afleitch]

This is very interesting, but if it was supposed to be effective it should have taken place 20 years ago.

I'm glad that Maddy also sees something wrong with trying to declare prepubescent children transgendered, though.

I mean, sure, I personally would have found it helpful if I had been put on some sort of hormone blockers to see if there was any way to stop me from ending up six-foot-three with dark, fast-growing facial hair, but objectively speaking my mother and doctors definitely made the safer choice in not going there, even though as it happened I ended up one of the minority of children with that experience who actually face these problems as adults.

http://www.nms.ac.uk/media/157646/blairs-memorial-portrait.jpg

Well 6 foot 1 according to contemporaries. But still.

[Figueira]

Madeleine, I'm curious as to what your issues are with the trans community.

Well, for one thing, there's this tendency to talk as if 'trans' is a category that includes or subsumes any kind of gender-nonconformity, which is cropping up more and more recently in, for instance, calls to put younger and younger children on hormone blockers, despite the fact that most gender-nonconforming children end up non-trans gay adults. You also get people insisting that butch lesbians MUST be trans men or that twinks (is that accepted nomenclature? I haven't heard an actual gay man use that word but that could just be due to lack of much socialization with non-woman LGBT people on my part) MUST be trans women, et cetera. This sort of stuff is insulting and, curiously, really sexist, and harmful to both trans and non-trans people. And then there's this idea that Anyone Can Be Trans if they're in any way unhappy with the social roles assigned to their sex, even if their sex isn't a source of any kind of physical/visceral or even intense emotional pain for them. I'm aware that this is technically an appeal to worse problems fallacy, but I find that insulting to those of us who die a little inside when people call us 'sir', or go on crying jags because we'll never be able to menstruate or give birth. I don't care if that makes me a 'transmedicalist' or 'truscum'. Whatever.

In the more 'classical' trans community I've run into problems of oversexualization and expectation of certain types of political and religious (or antireligious) views that I don't hold. This could just be bad luck on my part, I hope it is. But in particular I think that full-throated insistence on 'identity' as the crux and core concept of trans experience burns a lot of bridges and prevents us from having much chance of coming to a modus vivendi with belief systems and institutions with different views on ontology ('ontology' might not be quite the word I'm looking for but it's close enough). While it's true that, for those of us who religiously or culturally (more or less) traditional who aren't able or simply aren't willing to walk away from those spaces, it's mostly those spaces that are to blame for the lack of such a modus vivendi, I think this idea of 'identity' makes it a lot less likely for that to get resolved to anybody's satisfaction in the future.

tl;dr a lot of trans rhetoric is implicitly homophobic or sexist, I'm simply an extremely atypical trans person ideologically and lifestyle-wise and don't think that much space exists or is being made for that, and I don't think the idea of 'identity' or 'identifying' is useful here but the rest of the trans community seems really committed to it.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the response.