snark, pol, birdsite, discourse, hatred, cancellation, mushrooms on pizzas, and all the other terrible things on earth
*blocks someone RT'ed on Birdsite, for being rabidly cisphobic with a passion that even transcends my lax moral boundaries, and sings all 57 verses of the "I Don't Like My Friends' Friends" song*
snark, pol, birdsite, discourse, hatred, cancellation, mushrooms on pizzas, and all the other terrible things on earth
dgmw, I block people over there who even slightly annoy me and I’m all in favor of blocking as liberally as necessary to make that awful site even a little bit usable, but worrying about ‘cisphobia’ when one of the world’s most influential gazillionaire authors just came out on the side of the terfs, the UK in general seems to be succumbing to some kind of terf brain parasite, trump AND bj are world leaders, every trans person I know is worried and the ones in the UK are downright terrified right now, seems… nngh.
the oppressed becoming the oppressors can be a real concern, but I’m pretty damn confident that institutional cisphobia is never ever going to be a thing. there are just too few of us and we’re mostly broke and depressed.
but seriously, I empathize with feeling frustrated by people like that. I had a trans guy coworker at my last real job; he was about 10 years younger than me, so about 18 at the time, and going through a real bitey phase. he had a messenger bag embroidered with something like “call me ‘she’ again and I’ll claw your fucking eyes out” in flowery cursive. he’d take me aside and mutter “god I hate cis people” when our coworkers said or did something shitty. (which in fairness, they did. a lot. that place sucked.)
I liked the kid but I couldn’t stand the aggression. we hung out a few times outside of work and he was fun as hell when he wasn’t being like that, but ultimately I just couldn’t handle it. he tried to stay in touch after I left that job but I kinda ghosted him. I feel a little bad about it because he seemed like he could really use a chill mentor, but I just wasn’t equipped to be that person.
I guess one way to characterize that story would be “I couldn’t be his friend because he was too cisphobic,” but… I don’t know. that seems to miss the point somehow. I’m not even convinced his anger was the wrong response to some of the shit that happened there – and he was way better at correcting people who misgendered me than I ever was at speaking up on my own behalf.
in that way he was way braver than me. I never did get better at correcting people. I still kinda feel like I took the coward’s way out by just waiting for testosterone to do all the work, something usually only trans guys have the luxury of (since HRT deepens our voices, makes us grow beards and so on, but doesn’t do the opposite for trans women; testosterone is kind of a one-way street in a lot of ways).
I’m not totally sure where I’m going with this. partly that a lot of these people are just kids, and I hope the broader trans community will do a better job shepherding them than I did for my coworker. partly that their anger can be really effective, and I don't think it's necessarily the right move for Mr. Rogers-types like me to shun them, morally or tactically – but I also don't think I had much choice at the time, and I'm not sure how to reconcile that. I think the real Mr. Rogers would have stayed in touch with that kid, but Mr. Rogers wasn't also a disadvantaged trans person with touch-and-go mental health.
just, I dunno. I'm gonna err on the side of cutting a mile of slack for any trans person saying “fuck the cis” in times like these, even if I’m not personally equipped to be buddies with people like that and think that there are more useful ways to channel that anger. (and, as well, more useful ways to channel the anger one might feel when a trans person in pain says "fuck the cis.")
re: snark, pol, birdsite, discourse, hatred, cancellation, mushrooms on pizzas, and all the other terrible things on earth
@sig Quicky reply since it's a busy workday and I gotta bunch of packing and chore for my holiday trip...
Yeah, you basically got it with your description of the coworker. Once upon a time I might have been enough of a centrist jerkass to actually _engage_ someone like that, but today it's more like... I just don't want that energy right now.
I think it's another one of those things left over from the whole process of building up an immunity to Christianity and conservatism when I was a teenager. I mostly agree with you about the social power argument—transphobia is a MUCH MUCH MUCH more realistic problem than cisphobia—I think I'm always going to be wary of people who are really comfortable about making broad judgements about who's worth "canceling" (their term, and I kinda hate it?) based purely on an accident of demographics.
I would've been 120% OK with it and probably leaping in on their side if they'd said "all transphobes are hereby canceled forever." But I just know too damn many cispeople—includng, um, arguably me?—who would lay down their lives for the transpeople in their circles.
And I'm always a little skeptical of the "prejudice only matters if it's along dominant lines of social power" argument—'cause the political is still personal, and watching someone torch a whole group of people purely over demographics kinda sucks regardless of the power imbalance between them.
Still, I agree with what you said about these folks mostly being scared trans kids with a lot to be afraid of right now. I've gotten better at blowing that stuff off and chalking it up to a very valid need to blow off steam—the same way I'll talk very loosely about conservatives and Christians, even though I KNOW there are exceptions. Because, like this poor kid on Twitter probably is, I'm real tired atm of waiting for them to actually *appear*.
But this kid was talking in terms that negated the humanity of... a whole lot of people, and that's always gonna raise warning flags for me. Just... bad energy, you know?
They seemed so damn confident that they'd drawn the dividing lines exactly right and anybody who believed otherwise could fuck off—and like I said recently, I'm just getting real tired of people who are that confident they're not committing the same old cognitive sins. I just don't have time for people who don't show ANY self-awareness or humility when they go off and make a dictum at the world like that. Historically, I don't think people like that have brought much joy to the world. :|
But yeah. My honest hope for them is that the world gets better for transfolk and the pressure is taken off of them. It's the thought process, at worst, that I see as evil—not the kid in question, who's basically just a host. As are we all. :<
Anyhow, thanks as usual for standing up to me and keeping me honest. :D Hope you're having a good week!
