Dropping the 'T' in LGBT (user search)
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  Dropping the 'T' in LGBT (search mode)
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Author Topic: Dropping the 'T' in LGBT  (Read 3582 times)
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« on: November 07, 2015, 02:26:51 PM »

I have to admit that I can sort of understand the desire to disassociate oneself from trans politics and trans talking points. And I say that as a trans person. But basically just throwing people to the wolves doesn't strike me as a substantive solution.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2015, 05:15:05 PM »

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.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2015, 09:52:24 PM »
« Edited: November 18, 2015, 05:04:52 PM by 秋と修羅 »

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.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2015, 05:07:44 PM »

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.
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