10:32pm August 16, 2014

toplioncub-sadyanovels-trans-boys-why-are

toplioncub:

sadyanovels:

trans boys: why are you this

who the fuck ACTIVELY TRIES to be more like white cis men

incredible

As a black trans man, explain to me how I’m trying to be like white cis men?

People like you are so pretentious, giving each other slaps on the backs for…

Ah, social justice communities, where people spend half their time saying “don’t question how anyone identifies, call them what they want to be called and accept who they are” and the other half of their time bitching and moaning about other peoples’ identities. (“So and so is a special snowflake because they use x label” is the one I see most often. Like even if they are, what business is it of yours?). So it’s nice to see someone—someone decidedly not privileged, may I add—calling one of these people out on their BS.

I actually saw someone today call people with anxiety and depression “the trans men of neurodivergence”, implying that trans men really don’t have a lot of problems to deal with (and neither do people with anxiety and depression) yet pretend they do, or some shit like that. That made me want to smash my head on something. I understand the point the person was trying to make, but they could’ve made it without the extra slam on trans men or the implication that people with anxiety and depression have “mental illness lite” and don’t face real ableism. The person even had a cutesy euphemism for them which I promptly forgot because I don’t let that kind of language pollute my brain waves.

Also exceedingly obnoxious because a lot of the time “trans men” and “DFAB trans people” are used interchangeably, when there are plenty of DFAB trans people who are not men, who are not masculine, who never will be men or masculine, and who are not exactly the most privileged group of trans people out there despite our benefiting from transmisogyny. I wish it were simply possible to say “As a DFAB genderless person who doesn’t pass unambiguously as female or male, my privilege situation within the trans community is complicated and can’t be reduced to a soundbite.” But nobody wants to hear that. They want soundbites, and they want soundbites that are little weapons they can throw that tear flesh when they make contact, potentially breaking our hearts.

I can say I am lucky my family is accepting of my lack of gender identity. We’ve had some minor problems with acceptance on the way, but they fully accept me now. But even so, they are also accepting because they have never thrown me out on the street, they have never become abusive, I have a lot to be grateful for.

But I know that if they were to throw me out on the street, which happens to lots of trans teens, they would not first ask me if genderlessness was trans enough to count. They would not ask me if I was nonbinary. They would not ask exactly what kind of body dysphoria I had. They would not ask whether I benefited from transmisogyny. And I would be out on the street even if they had asked these questions, regardless of what my answers were. Because facing transphobic violence of that sort doesn’t discriminate along the lines the trans community is learning to discriminate.

And many of the people mentioned – genderless, nonbinary – are in some cases more vulnerable than more traditionally binary trans people. In some cases we’re not. But in some we are. Nobody acknowledges that, especially if we’re DFAB. Because DFAB trans automatically means privilege (which I won’t argue with), so it can’t automatically mean a loss of privilege in other areas (which I would argue with – it can mean that and it does, in some circumstances).

Things are complicated. Nobody wants complexity. They want to know who is good, who is bad, who is in, who is out, who has privilege, who is oppressed… and in the trans community you can’t find that so readily because any two trans people are meeting each other across several varieties of trans-related privilege and oppression. And nobody wants to acknowledge that. People are too busy figuring out who to point fingers at, not busy enough figuring out who to lift up and how to do that.

Notes: