How to think about trans people

I just posted in Trouble at the Kool-aid Point about some of the parallels between traditional TERF tactics and GamerGate tactics. The parallel might go some distance to making it clear why TERFs are so scary to trans people, if it wasn't already clear to you.

The CEO of the group, Linda Wall, has quite an interesting background. During the 70s she claims she was "seduced" into a lesbian relationship by an older woman and that "it was as if it was an instant addiction as to a drug and for ten years almost I wanted to get out of it and could not."

She also copped to having a sexual relationship with a student (who was a minor) when she was a PE teacher in the 70s during her run for state office a few years back.

But then she found Jesus and started working for Family Foundation, a conservative group in Virginia that pushes all the standard buttons: same sex marriage will destroy the state; all abortions should be illegal; parents should be able to send their kids to religious schools on the taxpayer's dime; Christians are persecuted because kids can't proselytize in schools; and, taxes are too high.

It's so very hard to think what can be done in those sorts of situations. State governments are very definitely *not* covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, so the EEOC couldn't go after the state government if she's fired over this. And when most of our states [em]don't[/em] forbid employment and housing discrimination against queer people? *sigh*

There's a heck of a lot of work to go for trans rights (and gay rights) in this country.

This kind of goes a different direction from usual postings in this thread, but here's a news story about how it's bad to conflate gender and sexual orientation.

The gay people pushed to change their gender
(Ali Hamedani, BBC, 2014-11-04)

Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery - and to avoid it many flee the country.

This is an especially interesting tragedy to look like, because Iran's traditions of what homosexuality and transgenderism mean are much more parallel with Euro-American traditions, but attitudes are very different. Most other places with dramatically different attitudes also have dramatically different traditions, and those differences can complicate comparison.

But although it's interesting to look at those differences, it is all around awful in every way.

This showed up in my FB Feed this morning.

What Genderqueer looks like

Some minor Dragon Age : Inquisition spoilers related to the topic at hand.

The Sun's Rod Liddle apologizes for managing to be both transphobic AND Ableist in a single sentence.

Here's an early Christmas gift for everyone - Rod Liddle has apologised for something!

The outspoken Sun columnist took his cues from medieval times by asking how a Labour candidate knew she was transgender if she was blind.

That makes Babby Jesus cry.

How “Batgirl #37″ Undid a Year and a Half of Positive Trans Representation in a Single Page
(Mey, Autostraddle, 2014-12-12)

This makes me very very sad. I don't know whether it's worse if they didn't know what they were doing or if they did. It kind of sounds like they had some idea it was problematic, but decided it wasn't that big a deal. Hint: If you, as a cis person, think something [em]might[/em] be a bit problematic for trans people? Yeah, it almost certainly is a pretty big problem.

This is just really sad. I don't know why someone thought that this scene, this line, was a good way to approach the problem.

I had thought maybe this was a good time to start reading comic books again. Guess not.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

This is just really sad. I don't know why someone thought that this scene, this line, was a good way to approach the problem.

I had thought maybe this was a good time to start reading comic books DC books again. Guess not. :(

So far as I know, Marvel and the indies are still generally doing a good job. Haven't heard any horror stories recently, anyhow.

Hypatian wrote:

How “Batgirl #37″ Undid a Year and a Half of Positive Trans Representation in a Single Page
(Mey, Autostraddle, 2014-12-12)

This makes me very very sad. I don't know whether it's worse if they didn't know what they were doing or if they did. It kind of sounds like they had some idea it was problematic, but decided it wasn't that big a deal. Hint: If you, as a cis person, think something [em]might[/em] be a bit problematic for trans people? Yeah, it almost certainly is a pretty big problem.

Wait, I'm confused. I'm looking at this panel and the explanation given is kind of sparse. So Barbara knows Dagger Type as a man, an artist... and she knew of an imposter Batgirl who's basically doing a kind of Robin Hood steal from the rich, give to the whoever... And rather than just an exclamation that Dagger is the person Barbara's been chasing... they go anti-trans with her reaction?

Am I understanding this right?

Demosthenes wrote:

Am I understanding this right?

More or less.

Spoiler:

Rather than going with a reaction of, "OMG! You're the fake Batgirl!", they went with, "OMG! You can't be the fake Batgirl because you're a guy!"

(Spoilered my response because this is a new release comic.)

pyxistyx wrote:

The Sun's Rod Liddle apologizes for managing to be both transphobic AND Ableist in a single sentence.

Here's an early Christmas gift for everyone - Rod Liddle has apologised for something!

The outspoken Sun columnist took his cues from medieval times by asking how a Labour candidate knew she was transgender if she was blind.

When my mate posted that on his facebook I assume it was a Littlejohn piece. I realised then that we have way too many hateful "writers" in some of our "newspapers"

Had to turn off the new Bill Burr special on Netflix after about 20 minutes when he started going off on transgender athletes.

Fantastic profile of Martine Rothblatt in the Washington Post Magazine, of all place. Great reading.

I have an original copy of Cards Against Humanity with the passable transvestite card. I haven't played the game in a long while so after the round was over, I asked for the card and tore it up in front of a dozen friends and explained why I did so.

Having never played I was curious to see the response the creators had to that card so I looked it up;

this[/url]]"I regret writing this card, it was a mean, cheap joke," Max Temkin wrote. "We took it out of the game a while ago."

"We were writing jokes for ourselves and we weren't really thinking about how it would affect other people," Temkin said to Fusion. "But when you have something that starts to be part of pop culture, you can't help but see how it makes people feel and feel some sense of responsibility for that."

While unfortunate that it ever made it in, I'm so glad they removed it rather than doubling down in some sort of "our game is supposed to be offensive!" stance.

The CAH people seem pretty decent. That game has a lot of stuff that's pretty problematic. But.. that one definitely was in a place where most people who encounter it would probably laugh at "a beautiful woman with a penis is horrible" and not at "telling jokes about trans people is horrible", IMO. I think there are probably other cards that go into the same territory (particularly some relating to sex workers), but I don't remember the mix of cards at that level versus cards that are more obviously directed at our culture's tropes about marginalized people without being directed entirely at the marginalized people themselves.

And you're pretty awesome for tearing that card up, Edwin. It's definitely something that would seriously upset a lot of trans women who came across it unaware. I'm really glad the copy of the game that I got for my sister didn't have that card in it, for example, because I hadn't heard about it before that, and it would have shaken me greatly. We did come across the replacement card while we were playing together.

I didn't know they replaced it. What is it?

I think the specific replacement for that one was "heteronormativity". There are some other social justice oriented cards in the main set that may have replaced other problematic cards, I'm not sure what was in the old decks.

Yeah, I have the heteronormativity card, but I have never seen the offensive card. I am glad they are learning though--these are complicated issues and rather than digging their heels in when they do something offensive, they apologize and do something equally funny and better.

I wish others could learn from this.

Instead, some others have occasionally been up in arms over the change, complaining that such an obviously offensive game should have to "bow to the PC police". (When, in fact, the creators happily made these changes when they noticed the problem—well before there was any uproar about it.)

Hypatian wrote:

Instead, some others have occasionally been up in arms over the change, complaining that such an obviously offensive game should have to "bow to the PC police". (When, in fact, the creators happily made these changes when they noticed the problem—well before there was any uproar about it.)

A huge number of people still don't understand the different between punching up and punching down, sadly.

So this is somewhat GG-related but I felt it was more relevant to this thread -

Trans GamerGate supporter criticizes a GG figure and reveals herself as trans. It does not go well. To their credit, there were a number of comments from GG folks that defended her and told everyone else to f off, but a lot of the really awful behavior discussed here is on wide display.

Bloo Driver wrote:

So this is somewhat GG-related but I felt it was more relevant to this thread -

Trans GamerGate supporter criticizes a GG figure and reveals herself as trans. It does not go well. To their credit, there were a number of comments from GG folks that defended her and told everyone else to f off, but a lot of the really awful behavior discussed here is on wide display.

Not the first time it's happened... it sounds like it went better this time, but last time, a different lady tried to call out Milo for his horrible trans* beliefs and GG basically shouted her down, doxxed her, and started the whole "shill" thing, all while telling her that her being trans* and Milo's trans* beliefs were irrelevant to the GG discussion... all while exposing other trans* people forcing them out and retweeting Milo's more toxic stuff on trans* folks.

Weird, I have the heteronormativity card but I don't know if it came in an expansion pack or with the base set. I'm not sure that replaced it honestly but it doesn't really matter anymore.

A more positive note:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/SVSu77x.jpg)

The last time I engaged Gaters on how they could reconcile claiming acceptance of trans folk with supporting Milo, their answer was effectively, 'He says nice things about us.'

I think that was the moment I gave up on any sort of intellectual honesty coming out of that cesspit of human garbage.