I have a mean test I sometimes do where, when the context is already established as talking about transness and trans people, I start dropping the "trans" and just say men and women

lynn / clarissa

it's enlightening how fast people get confused when you do that!

lynn / clarissa

the frustration is that as much as people will say "trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are valid" they don't actually internalize transness as an equal thing

in practice: women are cis women, men are cis men, people are binary

Fiadh (she/fae/it)

@left_adjoint This is what we meant about the transmost edge of the Overton window getting folded over to the TERFmost edge and glued to it with a thesaurus and a book of etiquette to create the fiction of widespread trans acceptance / make joining Team Trans popular and easy.

And it's what we mean when we say that TERFs are the ones who take us seriously when, e.g., I claim to be a woman, and recognize that rejecting that claim makes them my mortal enemy, while "allies" pretty much only accomplish not being TERFs by dismissing the claim as so obviously contrary to reality that I can't mean it seriously if they're supposed to accept it, and feel entitled to demand I thank them, it's all I ever dreamed of, for "accepting" me as a man who identifies as a woman.

We're still angry about all those profiles of Lynn Conway that so supportively said she had to fear people discovering her "gender identity" when she was stealth. You know, discovering she wasn't really a woman, that was just her gender identity as a transgender-identifying male.

Pretty much only Nice TERFs and Mean TERFs bickering over precisely how cruel to be about it, precisely how far it too far, and precisely how many trans kids to keep abusing to death to enforce the cis binary. It's completely impossible to claim more than 10% of the US are exceptions to that based on opinion polls (and it's been consistently around 10-12% upper limit since before we got our Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis)

We're so tired.

[email protected]

@[email protected] @[email protected] Wow, that is really well-articulated. I think that also explains how there are so many "liberals"/"leftists" who purport to totally 100% believe trans women are women and trans men are men but they just have reasonable concerns about sports.

[email protected]

@[email protected] I support the rights of cis people and people.

lynn / clarissa

@183231bcb I believe my cisters who identify as women

[email protected]

@[email protected] I plan on seeing the Wicked movies, because Cynthia Erivo identifies as starring in them and I've been a fan of her ever since I saw her identify as starring in the revival of The Color Purple. Ariana Grande, who identifies as a woman and identifies as 31 years old, also identifies as starring in the Wicked movie.

Fiadh (she/fae/it)

@183231bcb We're inclined to put 5k characters more thoughts about this in your mentions, but maybe simplest to simply point to one of our "favorite" (thanks, we hate it) pieces of illuminating evidence these days (with oh no 5k of thoughts anyway):

Tons of trans people keep pointing to this LA Times poll (questions asked in late January this year) as encouraging evidence that most people support us and anti-trans policies are unpopular. They keep doing that because Erin in the Morn lied and told them that's what it says, as she's been doing more and more flagrantly with polls to prop up the fiction of widespread trans acceptance and anti-trans policies being unpopular as anti-trans sentiment grows. She lied to them based on three numbers from it:

77% of respondents (US) say politicians are using trans issues as a distraction from more important issues
67% approve of trans people living our lives as we wish
68% support laws banning discrimination against trans people

Sounds good… if you subscribe to Kathy Stonks' radical intentionalism and believe that if a cis person says they're not transphobic then they can't be transphobic. Let's start with the first:

There were only two options to choose from to pick the one closest to their view. The one other option? "Trans issues are an important priority." This is, once again, trans people celebrating cis people rolling their eyes at anyone caring about pronouns as a pro-trans position, and implicitly saying that thinking our lives are important entails a desire to end them. (They mostly never looked at the poll, they just trusted Erin.) Of course, by design it mixes up soft pro-trans with soft anti-trans and hard anti-trans with hard pro-trans, it's an intentionally worthless question that exists only for transphobic liberals (many of them trans) to play with.

Now let's consider the second and third. They also asked specific policy questions, not just liberal push-button "are you a good tolerant person or are you a bigot" questions. Some illuminating ones:

54% support state laws preventing trans minors from accessing transition care even when their parents and doctors approve
85% support excluding trans women from women's sports
80% support excluding trans boys from boys' sports (fairness concerns my ass, it's that all of these people understand well that gender is a social construct, and they have always used sports as a deliberate vector of enforcing it, which is why sports are such a big Title IX issue, and they would all rather die in a fascist death camp than stop using sports to enforce the cis binary)

What's happened is what was deliberately pursued: a situation where almost everyone is transphobic as fuck, but most of them are convinced they're not at all transphobic and will agree they're pro-trans when directly asked.

Other polling we don't care to dig for a link to at the moment:

Data for Progress found shortly before the election that 75% of Democrats want their party to stop talking about trans issues and for the whole thing to go away
Democrats' polling has consistently found for years that Republican anti-trans ads are basically a wash on votes in the most immediate election but highly effective at increasing anti-trans sentiment across all demographics and partisan affiliations

The pretty clear goal for all of this decade has been to extricate themselves from this ill-advised trend, not just Democrats, but cis people in general. A lot of trans people have been happy to play along, e.g., Erin in the Morn getting more and more dishonest with polls like this to keep propping up the fiction of widespread acceptance and little public support for anti-trans policies as the reality gets worse and worse.

And also pretending that wanting this whole issue to go away and never be mentioned again is wanting only good things for trans people, maybe on a nice farm upstate, with the Transgender Question solved and no need to mention or think about us again. It is, of course, overwhelming desire among cis "allies" for the fascists to ride them of us already so they can go back to before this trend, when the cis lesbians were proud of how cruel they could be to Past Fiadh for wishing she was one, and when all the feminists were proud of mocking the notion trans men are men, and none of them had to worry someone would call them a bigot for using the wrong words.

@left_adjoint

[email protected]

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I recall a poll a few years ago (I don't remember the source) that said
* 80% of Republicans wanted trans teenage girls banned from school sports, but
* Only 20% of Republicans thought there should be a law about it.

A few pundits pulled out the 20% number without reporting the first question to make it look like Republican voters actually accepted trans people.