12:52pm July 28, 2014

Things no transphobic parent has ever said to their trans kid before kicking them out onto the streets for being trans.

“Are you binary or nonbinary? Because nonbinary isn’t really trans and you can stay with us if you’re nonbinary.”
“Do you have body dysphoria? If you don’t, you’re not trans and you can stay with us.”
“Is your body dysphoria limited to secondary sex characteristics, or is it primary ones as well? If it’s just secondary sex characteristics, it’s not real body dysphoria, and you’re not trans, so you can stay with us.”
“Are you genderless? Genderlessness isn’t being trans, it’s not even a real thing, so you can stay with us.”
“Are you genderfluid? That’s not even a real thing, so you’re not trans and you can stay with us.”

And yet these are questions that are used to shut people out of some parts of the trans community. The trans community that needs to be there for those kids who get thrown out on the street for being trans, who can’t get jobs because they’re trans, who face every aspect of transphobia (and in many cases also transmisogyny) but in some people’s eyes haven’t earned the right to call themselves trans.

These are the people I think about, when I see selfish assholes splitting hairs to decide who belongs or not. I think about the people who will die on the streets when the trans community could’ve reached out to them. I think about the people who will die of poverty and starvation who won’t approach the trans community for fear of being rebuffed. I think of the people who will commit suicide because they have no community anymore. And I think of all the people who won’t die, but will certainly suffer, for lack of having a community to help them along.

And all because there are people who care more about who to exclude from their communities, than they care about having actual compassion for other human beings.

I’m writing this about the trans community because I keep seeing people posting ridiculous criteria for who counts as trans. (The one about primary vs. secondary sex characteristics determining what counts as body dysphoria was a new one on me. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.) And they post it in tags used by people who are quite vulnerable to exclusion and ridicule already, and who are also quite vulnerable to just about every possible level of transphobic oppression. They do it to antagonize people, they don’t do it to help anyone.

But this applies to any community that has a vocal segment that is determined to shut out many of its members. The lesbian community and how it treats trans women who are lesbians especially, but also, sometimes, how it treats nonbinary and genderless and genderfluid people who try to find a place in that community. The autistic community and its continual hair-splitting of who counts as Real Autistic People, and also the whole self-diagnosis thing. Lots of communities do equivalent things and it’s always bad.

It’s always bad because there’s always more harm in excluding people who need a community, than including people who may not need it. It’s always bad because people suffer and people die when they can’t connect to their communities. These communities aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for some people they are a lifeline. And to deny that lifeline to anyone is just cruel heartless asshole behavior. You can pretend there’s some noble cause behind shutting people out, but it’s really just about people’s egos. And you can pretend that the people you’re shutting out don’t have real problems, but a lot of the time they’re suffering and even dying.

The reason I started with that list of things no transphobic parent has ever said to their kid, was to make the point that oppression doesn’t pass people over just because someone’s hairsplitting makes them think they don’t belong in a particular oppressed community. Trans kids who are being thrown out on the streets by their parents – and there was always a steady stream of homeless and starving trans teens at the LGBT community center I used to go to – come from every possible group of trans people. Because transphobic people don’t go “Are you binary or nonbinary? Oh if you’re nonbinary then I won’t oppress you because you’re not trans anymore!” They just don’t. In some cases they’ll treat you even worse for being nonbinary. And anyone facing oppression needs the option of a community to turn to. Many people facing oppression can only hold on, emotionally and physically, because they have that one community they can come to who understand what they’re going through and can help them through their problems. And shutting them out of that community is an extreme act of selfishness and cruelty. There is no excuse good enough.

Somehow, too, reality always gets turned upside-down. People who are facing deadly levels of oppression will be told they don’t have real problems and are just claiming an identity to be cool. Groups of people who are extremely likely to face deadly levels of oppression will be told they’re not really oppressed at all, or not enough to count, or not as much as some other related group of people, so their oppression doesn’t matter. I guess that helps the people who ostracize them sleep at night. I guess?

And as I said, this applies to all oppressed communities where this kind of hair-splitting happens. Most oppressed groups really have multiple communities, and some of those communities are better at including a diverse range of people than others. The ones I’m mad at are the people who try to make some of these communities as homogenous as possible. I don’t care what their reasons or what they call themselves or which communities they are a part of, or how proud they are to be assholes. All I care about is the people who are suffering and dying because they don’t have access to communities that could help them. Nobody in these communities generally has to watch them suffer and die, so it’s out of sight, out of mind. And that’s horrible. Those of us who have to pick up the pieces of the wreckage left behind by this kind of social ostracism have a much different take on it than those who think it’s mostly harmless or “just a matter of opinion”.

I’ve said this before in other contexts, but it’s important, so I’ll say it again: One day you’ll have to face up to yourself and the consequences of your actions. You can’t hide from yourself forever. And when you do have to face up to yourself, and what you have done, it’s a really good idea to have tried to practice compassion as much as you possibly could, rather than having to look at the way your actions contributed to suffering and death. You can delude yourself, right now, into thinking you have a good reason for doing what you’re doing. But at some point your self-delusion will fall apart and you’ll have to see what you were really doing. Try to be someone who can live with yourself when that happens.