I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.
(CW: rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism)
I hate you. I do not regret my existence, but I hate you. I hate you with the fury of a thousand suns. I have never in my thirty-eight years met another human being as contemptible as you are.
Why, pray tell, do I hate you? Here are thirty-eight reasons why, one for each year of my life.
Continue reading(CW: rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism)
I know you’ll never see this letter. But I’ve got to write it anyway.
I have been deeply concerned about you since I left home nearly twenty years ago.
It’s about Dad. He has been the worst thing to happen to you in your sixty-two years of existence. You have thrown away your ambitions, your intellectual curiosity, your wit and humour, your very soul. You told me that you wanted to study forensic science, that you wanted to go into a law-focused undergraduate programme. Instead, you threw all that aside for Dad. Dad has brought pain, suffering, and alienation to the women in his life—and one man. My sister and I have pulled away from him, but you are still trapped in his net.
Continue readingI find it really fucking infuriating when highly intelligent autistic people attribute every single positive trait or ability of theirs to autism. Typically, these people are women or AFAB nonbinary, which gives it a weirdly sexist feel. (And most of them are white, too. It’s painful to see when you’re Black like me.) Admittedly, this fury is personal and is connected to old, deep trauma.
(I’ve been talking about myself a lot more lately, mostly because I’ve been processing over three decades’ worth of trauma, and it’s inextricably tied to my beliefs. I had dissociative retrograde amnesia for years, and only now am I remembering.)
Continue reading(These are old memories, once thought to be lost, but they’re back again. Trauma tends to do that to people.)
I’m a survivor of conversion therapy.
No, I wasn’t diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, but I did have a childhood diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), otherwise known as atypical autism. And it was the PDD-NOS diagnosis that my family used to suppress anything that was “abnormal,” including my gender dysphoria. They used Applied Behavioural Analysis, which uses operant conditioning (aka the methods used in dog training) to get people to conform to a particular behaviour pattern. If I did anything that was “for boys,” I’d be punished with an aversive stimulus, like having water sprayed in my face or forcing my hands to touch glue. (I’m transmasculine.) The goal was to get me to act traditionally feminine, even though I’d been androgynous or masculine before then. I’d never really liked dolls or anything like that before ABA. But after that, I was showered with doll after doll after doll on Christmas and birthdays. I did end up liking dolls after a while, but they were mostly characters for me to enact stories with, not a thing to enjoy in themselves. (I kept getting into trouble for giving them weird haircuts and drawing tattoos on them anyway.) If it wasn’t normative, if it wasn’t prissy, if it wasn’t cutesy, it had to be stamped out.
Everything was treated like a symptom, and therefore invalid and in need of cure. Of course, every single bit of the conversion therapy washed out. I was still masculine. I still preferred to play with other boys, since girls were socialised to be dainty and refuse to blow things up or get dirty. I still preferred to run out and play in the mud instead of have tea parties. When Mattel came out with Flying Hero Barbie, I was disappointed that she was rescuing cats from trees instead of beating up supervillains. (Not long before that, I’d drafted a letter to Mattel asking to create a superhero Barbie who defeated gun-toting evildoers. My mom confiscated it for her own amusement.) And whenever I imitated voices on TV, they were virtually always those of deep-voiced men. Of course, tomboys exist, but I wasn’t a tomboy. When I was much younger, I could tell that I wanted to be like the deep-voiced, flat-chested adults who were called “he.” Everything else matched that.
But nobody affirmed my gender identity and expression, and the only thing that changed when the conversion therapy wore off and I came out at 20 was that they were blaming Satan instead of autism, thanks to years of right-wing evangelical radicalisation. Regardless of whether it was Satan or autism, they saw it as a matter of behaviour that could be changed, not something integral to me and who I was. (Anti-gay conversion therapists think the same way. Virtually all sexists see gender nonconformity as correctable behaviour, not anything connected with a true self.)
I wasn’t even a person to them, just a flesh robot to be programmed. That’s what happens when you have a weird kid and want them to look normal and be compliant instead of wanting them to be happy. This is what happens when J.K. Rowling is connecting autism with trans self-discovery among youth. Leelah Alcorn’s suicide is what happens when you refuse to acknowledge who a trans youth is. And it’s what’s happening when Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene make trans youth a political football in the run-up to this year’s elections.
But there is a word for parents who don’t care about their child’s happiness. And that word is “abuser.”
Conversion therapy is abuse.
Fighting back against transphobes (as well as other sexists) is the right thing to do. But you need to do it strategically and make it clear for the average person to understand. Right now, the bigots have the upper hand because they can just raise common sense, even though the reality is more complicated for trans people. Unfortunately, a lot of trans people and allies are pulling out a bunch of 102-level postmodernist arguments that confuse Joe Schmo—and get conservatives, so-called rationalists, and TERFs to howl that because the pro-trans arguments are circuitous and incomprehensible, they must be right. And this leads to more bathroom bills, more athletics bans, and other attempts to enforce gender normativity by law or social custom.
Here are a few tips, for what they’re worth:
And for that reason, these prejudices are the height of stupidity. To be racist or sexist* is to dehumanise oneself, not just your victim. It is to pretend that penises and dark skin, or vulvas and light skin (none of which are the seat of cognition) trump (or Trump) the content of one’s thinking.
(*As always, “sexism” refers not just to misogyny, but homophobia and transphobia as well.)
Infants and toddlers observe the voices, secondary sex characteristics, mannerisms, and dress of adults around them. In languages with grammatical gender (whether that’s pronouns in English or past-tense verbs in Russian), they also notice these references. They map their self-perception based on the adults whose gender presentation resonates with them. They do not learn about the reproductive apparatus associated with their assigned sex until later.
For children, gender precedes sex. To put sex before gender is to put the cart before the horse and express a lack of empathy, curiosity, and imagination about trans people and their internal experiences. People notice social roles first. (An example of this is how Henry Darger drew girls–since he’d never seen AFAB anatomy close up, he drew girls with penises—he mapped his own bodily characteristics onto his subjects. He wasn’t trans, as far as I know, but the analogy still holds up.)
… as anyone who’s watching US news closely should know. A Florida state rep recently filed a bill that could target LGBTQ+ content as “grooming,” reminding one of Russia’s various “gay propaganda” bills filed over the past ten years or so. This isn’t to let Russia off the hook, of course, but this is a worldwide problem led by coordinated “anti-gender” actors, mostly extreme-right politicians (e.g., Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán) and conservative Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Christian groups, as well as their useful idiots: TERFs and members of centre-right parties like the British Conservatives. The anti-gender movement’s role is to enshrine rigid gender roles by pushing anti-LGBTQ+ policies, banning abortion, and encouraging women to stay home and have children.
According to Sonia Corrêa of CREA, a Global South–centric feminist NGO, the Vatican had a huge hand in establishing the anti-gender movement in the 1990s. Corrêa also goes on to say that the anti-gender movement is a reactionary backlash against the increased position of women and gender minorities in various societies. And in modern-day Europe, the biggest financial supporters of anti-gender political activism are European Catholic groups, US right-wing Christian organisations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Putin regime, and a few Russian oligarchs. The rise of Russian funding seems to be recent, but then again, Russia has redoubled its efforts to destabilise Western countries over the past decade.
TERFs are being taken for a ride by these fundamentalist nutjobs, but I don’t feel sympathy for any movement that is focused on restricting others’ rights. Also, the reactionaries behind the anti-gender movement know damn well what they’re doing. They want to disenfranchise women. It’s less about trans people on their own and more about their obsession with the patriarchy. TERFs’ “sex-based rights” bullshit is a one-way ticket to depriving women of the vote by claiming that it is men’s “sex-based right” to make political decisions and women’s “sex-based right” to be protected from predatory men by being excluded from the public sphere.
It is not just Russia and it will never be just Russia. Patriarchal oppression must be defeated, both there and everywhere else.
As much as I despise the cultish Christian-nationalist evangelical movement, at least they don’t claim to be feminists. They’re patriarchal and proud of it. The same goes for right-wing bloviators (or outright dictators) like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Rhonda Santis Ron DeSantis, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin.
The genteel transphobes, on the other hand, cloak their authoritarian gender normativity in rhetoric about feminism and “fair play for women.” They’re often in their forties or fifties, typically younger than the fulminating family-values crowd, but still old enough to have grown up in a society where gay sex was often illegal and trans people were nowhere to be seen outside parodic figures. And this is why they get so much traction, especially in the UK, where sticking out too much is Not The Done Thing, unless you’re doing it in a vaguely ironic way like a panto character. Even lefty, ostensibly progressive and socialist publications like The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Morning Star have a history of publishing transphobic content. The BBC constantly tries to play both sides, publishing both pro- and anti-trans content, as though opposition to a minority group’s rights is as valid as that minority group’s right to exist. (This also happens with homophobes and anti-abortion conservatives. Would they do this with antiracist activists and white nationalists? Sexism, including homophobia and transphobia, seems to slip through in ways that racism does not, at least in the respectable press.)
As bad as “TERF Island” is, it’s not the only source of virulent transphobia masquerading as concern for children or right-on feminism. The UK is arguably the birthplace of genteel transphobia, but it has become much more widespread in American discourse, too, especially in upmarket publications like the New York Times (home of the obsessive transphobe Pamela Paul) and The Atlantic (which often publishes Helen Lewis’s TERFy screeds). Anti-trans activists in red states aren’t pulling out the Jesus card any more, since they know it won’t work in 2023 the way it did twenty years ago. Instead, they’re referring to fairness in sports, equal chances for women, women’s safety, irreversible damage. Of course, many of those activists are evangelical conservatives. But they’ve honed their playbook over the years to try to pull moderates onto their side. And since trans people are a small and marginalised minority, it’s hard for them to fight back when they’re being portrayed as freaks and predators rather than normal people. (It probably doesn’t help that transphobic laws are being passed in the kinds of places that trans people leave after they come of age because they’re isolated and homogeneous. There are few or no people left who can push back, so the DeSantis types can push through all kinds of regressive legislation.)
Genteel transphobes’ prattle about “sex-based rights” is a smokescreen for the same regressive agenda that evangelicals promote. Unfortunately, many self-styled feminists believe it because they have been conditioned to see trans people as a threat for a variety of reasons—it could be because they simply don’t understand gender dysphoria and are susceptible to conservative arguments, they’ve had the fallacious “groomer” argument drummed into them (even if they know it’s bullshit for gay people, they’ve fallen for the same warmed-over propaganda about trans people), they have underlying patriarchal ideas that remain unquestioned, they have authoritarian-follower personality traits, or they are simply bigoted bullies. Or many other reasons, all of which are wrong because they rest on the idea that there are some people who aren’t real people worth listening to through no fault of their own.
Genteel transphobes are sneaky and dangerous. And I’ve had enough of them.
The world has seen an epidemic of throwaway politics over the past decade or so. What do I mean by “throwaway politics”? Throwaway politics is the practice of treating entire demographics as expendable, useless, superfluous. Throwaway people are second-class citizens, Others, subalterns. They are often ethnic, racial, religious, gender, or sexual minorities, but not always—for example, Black South Africans were throwaway majorities under apartheid.
Politicians and constituents who adopt throwaway politics are usually on the right, but the right doesn’t have a monopoly on the practice—consider left-wing Hamas supporters’ callous attitude towards Jews, or certain left-wing politicians, such as Sahra Wagenknecht, who vilify migrants to outflank their right-wing counterparts.
The demographic characteristics of throwaway residents may vary, but the underlying dynamics are the same: there are some people who are less equal than others. In Europe and European-influenced countries, typical throwaway people are often Muslims, immigrants from the “wrong” countries, refugees from the Middle East (who are typically Muslims), LGBTQ+ people, and occasionally Jews.
Once you’re a throwaway, nobody cares about your rights. You’re not worth listening to. You may as well not even exist. You are no longer deserving of empathy or consideration.
We know where this leads: the events of 1933–1945. Hitler’s primary target was Jewish people, but Jews were not the only throwaway Germans. Disabled people, dubbed “ballast existences,” were targeted through the Nazis’ Aktion T-4. So were the Roma. The Nazis didn’t care much for Russians, either. Queer and trans people were also fodder for Hitler’s hate machine.
Why the hell are exclusivist ideologies, or the remnants of exclusivist ideologies, given any credence in supposedly inclusive (most Western democracies) or anti-fascist (Russia) societies? We know where this can go. It’s not as though we’re in 1920 and had no record of an industrial-scale genocide. Hitler’s Germany is still in living memory. Why are TERFs’ arguments taken seriously, especially when their “sex-based rights” model is a few steps away from Kinder, Küche, Kirche? Why is the Russian government endlessly pursuing LGBTQ+ people and claiming to be “anti-fascist” when their attitudes towards the community are little different from those expressed by the Nazis? Why are Christian fundamentalists, whether American Protestant or Russian Orthodox, treated as a legitimate political constituency when the same liberal or progressive politicians see right through their Islamist counterparts? Why do American police officers disproportionately target Black people with violence? Why are US presidents calling neo-Nazis “very fine people” and calling for the “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Why is the new, modern, liberal, European government in Kiev treating ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers as fifth-column traitors, in a shadow of what the US government did and has done to Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and now the Hamas attacks? Why is the Israeli government bombing Gaza instead of trying to live alongside the Palestinians? And why are supposedly “woke,” enlightened people claiming that every Israeli Jew is a throwaway person blocking Palestinians from their freedom?
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