This is gonna start off sounding weird but stay with me for a second:
We really need to move on from the current performative culture of “no terfs allowed” and “reblog to make a terf angry”
Because that’s not a valuable solution to the underlying problem.
You know what would really bother trans exclusionary/exterminatory radical ‘feminists’? IRRELEVANCE. They’re just like the Alt-Right; their worst enemy is an audience that isn’t receptive to their message of hate and won’t give them a voice to keep spreading it. Instead of giving them a free pass to go back to their echo chambers and prey on young wlw that they can indoctrinate and radicalize into their transphobic cult, make it so that their voices don’t actually reach anyone in the first place. Deny them stable footing to build a platform on.
You know how you do that?
Build an alternative culture of radical acceptance and validation for trans women in women’s spaces and especially wlw safe spaces.
Don’t just toss out a “fuck terfs” every once in a while and think your job is done. If you actually want to be an ally to trans women, BE AN ALLY TO TRANS WOMEN. Make your spaces a safer place for us, and be VOCAL about it. Be consistent, persistent, and insistent on defining us authentically as women and make it obvious that we’re accepted and welcomed as such. And make sure you are boosting the voices of trans women in queer and women’s spaces if there’s any doubt that you don’t have the best information to hand out on trans issues, because misinformation about us is the best weapon terfs have. START DENYING THEM THAT WEAPON BY ACTIVELY PRESENTING A TRUTHFUL NARRATIVE ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE INSTEAD.
This exposes new generations to the reality of trans women’s lives and identities instead of letting terfs pick off and cultivate the vulnerable ones who don’t know any better and using the dismissive nature of performative allyship to convince these young wlw that there’s some gender conspiracy that’s letting men invade women’s spaces.
(Which is obviously insane just on face value. Can you honestly even imagine a cis man having to face the reality of womanhood for an extended period of time? It’d be a trainwreck. The whole basis of their philosophy falls apart in SECONDS when you just represent the lived experiences of trans women in an honest way. No cis man could live a day in a trans woman’s shoes.)
If you don’t have the energy to deal with these people personally, by all means care for yourself by keeping them at a distance. But NEVER believe that slapping a “twerfs can choke” in your bio is by itself enough to deal with the source of the problem, which is terfs preying on vulnerable young wlw by feeding them misinformation about trans women.
If you really want to be an ally to trans women you HAVE to present an alternate narrative of truthful information so these younger generations won’t be swayed by the false narratives that terfs are currently selling them.
Deny them their recruiting grounds by ACCEPTING AND VALIDATING AND WELCOMING TRANS WOMEN IN WOMEN’S AND WLW SAFE SPACES, STAND UP FOR US WHEN YOU CAN, AND NEVER LET TERFS CONTROL THE NARRATIVE ABOUT US. Make their voices irrelevant by exposing them for what they are: predatory radicals that use the same isolation and misinformation tactics as the Far Right to cultivate new generations of twisted, vile rhetoric and a philosophy of violence and hatred.
Don’t just “reblog to make a terf angry”. They take out that anger on US while you remain safe in the ‘terf-free zone’ you want your blogs to be.
Instead build an authentic culture of love and support for trans women and spread visibility for the truth of our womanhood so terfs can’t keep selling their snake oil to new generations of vulnerable young wlw who end up making comics about literally boiling us alive.
Reblog to start building that culture of trans positivity and make the world a safer place for us to live.
Reblog to validate a trans woman.
Talking about one’s trauma can be cathartic, if it is done on one’s own terms.
However, when the only opportunities you offer trans people revolve around hosting workshops, panels, and sensitivity trainings, you have to realize that what you are doing is tokenizing and ableist.
You are taking people who may very well have experienced public humiliation in the past and doing crash-course exposure therapy without acknowledging how draining this can be, or how it is inevitably turning people away who cannot handle speaking in front of a crowd of strangers about the worst events of their lives.
It also feels awful because our skills and talents in other areas get ignored. We have more to offer the world than constant, ongoing Trans 101s.
Another thing about this is that cis people want to be the ones doing the art projects on trans people, like we’re not already making our own art. They want to ‘facilitate finding our voices’ when we are already talking. They want to ‘elevate’ us and help us ‘find our voice’, but they don’t promote trans people who are already going around doing public speaking on their own.
Cis people want trans voices on cis terms, with cis people in charge. They want to curate it so it fits their picture of what being trans is like and so that the project makes them feel better about helping downtrodden people. So if you have any skills or talents or interests or complications in your life beyond being trans, no, you’re just a downtrodden trans person for the purposes of the project. If you are reluctant to participate because you have PTSD or something, you’re just ‘shy’ and need the nice cis person to help you find your voice.
The Importance of Subtlety as a Trans Ally
PREFACE: I AM A TRANS WOMAN, THIS IS ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHO WOULD CONSIDER THEMSELVES TRANS ALLIES
i was talking about this to my girlfriend just a few minutes ago and she said that it would be good to share this on tumblr, so i will. i will also do my best to make this post as legible and accessible as possible
the situation we were talking about is a personal example, when i was dating a trans man. i would talk about him a lot to my grandma, and she didn’t like the way he was treating me and would often misgender him just to make a point.
now, i tried reacting to that by explaining to her that just because someone has done bad things, that’s no excuse to misgender them. my grandmother reacted defensively, which is a common issue when correcting someone who has misgendered another person.
later on, i decided to try a more subtle approach. instead of correcting her every time she misgendered him, i would just unwaveringly refer to him by his appropriate pronouns and eventually out of context she would cease to misgender him to keep things from becoming confusing.
a bigger example than that is at my job. many of my coworkers do not misgender me, at least enough such that i could work an entire shift a few days a week with only the people who will not misgender me. i was told back in 2013 that i was not allowed to correct customers on my pronouns, by the way.
so this put me in a predicament. my coworkers who had supported me from the jump all would insist upon referring to me by my appropriate pronouns, such as,
CUSTOMER: "excuse me sir i wanted to get a passport photo"
ASSOCIATE: “oh sure just step right over there and isel, she’ll help you”
CUSTOMER: (now done with order) Oh yeah he was a great help.
ASSOCIATE: “yes, she’s very good at passport photos”at that juncture, the misgendering usually stops, because most people are either too afraid, too busy, or too apathetic to cause a scene when they are one against many others.
here, here’s another example
NEW PERSON AT FRIEND PARTY: Oh yeah, hey dude what’s your name?
TRANS WOMAN: (feeling very awkward) Uh, (gives name)
NEW PERSON: (turns to trans woman’s friends) He’s pretty cool!
FRIEND: (turns to trans woman) Yes, I love (name), SHE’S my best friend
OTHER FRIEND: Yeah we hang out with HER all the time.so as a corollary to the whole, “just because trans people don’t correct someone on their pronouns doesn’t mean they werent misgendered” notion, if you see that happening, as an ally, step in and do your part following the examples i gave in a way that wont make the trans person feel like a spectacle.
like i said, subtlety. treat it as entirely normal; do not get angry, do not change your tone of voice. i italicized and capitalized corrections in here just for a visual aid, but do not change your tone that much.
tl;dr if you’re an ally and your trans friend is being misgendered, most people will react defensively if you stop conversation to correct them, so if you feel that that is likely to happen, choose subtlety and just construct sentences in which you can use the person’s correct pronouns demonstratively.
NOTE: this is by no means a catch-all statement. there are many exceptions, but i beg of you please have the good sense to know when to and when not to use this approach. it can do more harm than good in a situation where the person doing the misgendering can become more violent beyond that, and subtlety in such a case would not be appropriate.
this is really good advice!! people I work who are good trans allies tend to emphasize pronouns when they’re introducing me and do this kind of thing when I get misgendered its really nice :3
when writing transgender 101 guides directed towards cis people, please consider:
- NOT including intimate details of physical transition (including surgical and hormonal treatments, presentation techniques and devices used by some trans people to manage the appearance of their physical sex characteristics).
- Cis people are already obsessed with our bodies in a really unhealthy way that often comes out in fetishization, repulsion, tokenization or general inappropriate fascination. It’s not helping trans people’s interests to make one of the first things you tell cis people about us be all the gritty details about our physical bodies, when so much of transgender identity is already medicalized, pathologized and seen as a strictly physical thing.
- Also it’s none of their goddamn business what trans people do with their bodies. It’s not like you’re providing this information as a resource to people who will benefit from it, you’re literally just sating their curiosity and by extension alienating the group you’re attempting to speak for.
- It gives cis people a sense of knowledge of trans bodies, which reinforces their entitlement to demand intimate information from usabout our medical histories. (because they “get it”).
- It creates the expectation in cis people’s minds that transness is defined by these physical steps you’re describing, and delegitimizes the identities of trans people who make not take some or any of those steps.
- If you’re going to provide this information (which, to be entirely honest I can’t think of a legitimate reason why you would need to provide in-depth information about trans bodies to cis people who were not serving a health/care-providing roll to trans people) at least Do Not put it in the 101 “basic information” package. Because it is not 101, the information you provide will invariably be oversimplified and misguiding, it is not important to developing a basic understanding of trans people and issues, and if you’ve gotten to the point of describing the ins and outs of trans medical treatment within your first few sections than i guarantee you there’s probably a dozen more important and more relevant topics you haven’t covered.
I’m not saying avoid these topics all together if you want to talk about dysphoria and how some people get surgeries and/or take hormones and/or change their physical presentation to feel more comfortable.
I’m saying you don’t need to provide detailed, in-depth descriptions of trans medical treatment and the ways in which trans people relate to their physical bodies, because it’s not relevant, it’s none of their damn business, and we don’t need to have cis people any more fixated on trans people’s bodies and medical decisions than they already are.
New comic!
I remember that I was doing this exact thing, I was asking for explanations and definitions in a conversation about disability, and I just wanted to help, and I thought if they just could explain this concept to me that I hadn’t heard before, then I could help more. I remember my friend turning to me and saying, not unkindly, ‘I bet, if you tried, you’d find some really excellent blog posts about this’. I’m fortunate that I got the implied ‘shut up’ there.And she was right.
I’ve seen people online react really badly when someone gives them a link and says ‘I think you’ll have a better idea of what we’re talking about if you look this over’. We’re expected to slow down, be patient, be kind, be clear, we’re expected to be knowledgeable and articulate and calm and accommodating. We’re expected to do this for free, as a basic part of our identities, the constant willingness to educate. Often we’re expected to do this in order to receive ‘support’ from people.
It would just be really wonderful to be able to talk about gender without constantly landing back into 101.
The “I’m scared” at the end really drives it home.
Such a good comic!!
7 Ways to Lovingly Support Your Gender Non-Binary Partner
#1 is especially powerful
Remember: This is your partner’s lived experience. And living as non-binary and coming out are often difficult experiences.So telling your partner that their gender isn’t real, that it sounds absurd, or that you don’t believe what they’re saying are all offensive and awful responses. Your partner’s gender identity is for them to declare – and not for you to interrogate.If your partner is coming out, believe them. If they are sharing something they have lived through, believe them.
How parental support can make a world of difference for a trans* youth. Learn more. Retweet. Share on Facebook.
It shouldn’t even be a question if parental support is a factor in the health and wellbeing of trans youth.
Parents, PLEASE pay attention to this.
When Gender Norms Didn't Work For My Kid
Instead of trotting out the same old stereotypes about what girls and boys are like, we could talk about what our children do; how they move through the world. We could talk about all the ways they are human, and how great it is just to be a part of …
SO YOUR CHILD IS NONBINARY: A Guide For Parents
