On Christmas, the Telegraph posted an article with a startling headline: “Lesbians facing ‘extinction’ as transgenderism becomes pervasive, campaigners warn.”
In the article, Kate Harris, co-founder of the transphobic LGB Alliance lamented the supposed loss of lesbians to “transgenderism” as more women identifying as lesbians come out as trans men. “Is lesbianism going to become extinct?” the Telegraph quotes her as saying.
Yes. It’s deeply uncool. At school, in university, it is so uncommon, it is the bottom of the heap. Becoming trans is now considered the brave option.
When I read this, all I could think of was the far-right obsession with the “white genocide” conspiracy theory. White supremacists worry that their race is declining because white women aren’t pumping out white babies as quickly as the supremacists want them to.
Many white supremacists, like Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, argue that white women are essentially little more than walking wombs who shouldn’t have control over their own bodies; to paraphrase an old meme, all their wombs are belong to white men. And he’s applied that argument to trans men as well, recently declaring that “F to M transgenderism is a plot to exterminate the White race by neutralizing our breeding vessels.”
White supremacists are also worried about white women having babies with men of color, and lose their shit every time they see an interracial couple in a TV show or newspaper ad. In their minds, white women belong to white men and shouldn’t ever be “stolen” by men of another color.
The attitude of the transphobes towards lesbians-turned-trans-men is strikingly similar — and just as possessive. The transphobes believe that young lesbians are being, in effect, seduced by “transgenderism” into becoming trans men — in effect, stolen from the cis lesbian community that considered them to be their property. All of this brings us ever closer to “lesbian extinction,” the transphobes claim.
(In case you’re wondering, the existence of trans lesbians doesn’t make the transphobes worrying about lesbian extinction any happier, since they don’t consider trans women to be women.)
Here’s a simple rule: any time you find yourself talking about other people’s bodies as if they belong to you, it means you’ve internalized Nazi rhetoric as your own. White supremacists and transphobic “campaigners” may have radically different goals, but in some crucial ways they think very much alike.
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A wild transphobe appears!
@kfreed
Nice ableism.
Oddly, public acceptance of trans and gay people is much higher now than in the past. Apparently only bigots feel that they’ve “had enough.”
You also reveal your true colors when you think gay people are an issue.
Hello, I’m also an “actual” woman, and I’m telling you to go elsewhere if you’re a transphobe. You appear to be the toxic and ignorant one here.
We see this divide and conquer bullshit you’re trying to pull on the queer community. It won’t work here. I will never stop supporting trans people because someone who hates all of us tells me to.
@kfreed – the plot of what? Since when is it toxic ignorance to be fair to people?
I have a recollection of a nasty encounter with a kfreed on Disqus back in the Pandagon days.
I’m pretty sure this asshat has been from the site before. Probably a few years ago now.
I recognise the name, so probably from the archives here.
Just searched the archives and found a bunch of comments from kfreed. I didn’t find anything this openly transphobic, but I did find ableism and doubling down after WWTH called them out (example). Another commenter adds below that they were banned from Raw Story for making threats.
EDIT: Oh, and this garbage.
So…trans-men don’t count as women, but neither do trans-women? I’m not entirely sure how that works. If they considered both to be something entirely “other”, that might compute, but that’s unlikely given all their insistence in calling trans-women “TIMs”, indicating that they consider trans-women to be feminine men, so theyre clinging to the “assigned at birth cannot be denied” of any common gender bigot. Yet they clearly consider trans-men to be men, which blows away their insistence on “assigned at birth cannot be denied” because if they were consistent, trans-men would just be tomboys the way they seem to regard trans-women as feminine males. If you cant override your birth assignment, trans-men are still women,however ungirly they may choose to be, so they have nothing to complain about. Which shows they clearly haven’t actually thought through any of this and are basing their facts on emotional ick factors applied on a case by case basis.
Bigotry is no excuse for sloppy thinking! To quote Marge Simpson “Geez Louise, you don’t even know what you’re scared of anymore!”
@Demonhype
Most of the time they see all trans men as teenagers that are being tricked into cutting off their breast and taking medications. They never see a trans man as an adult so they probably wouldn’t see them as women either, but confused little girls that are being converted. You know, the way conservatives see young lesbians.
@Demonhype
This is basically what happened in the US a few years ago when legislators in a bunch of states made laws restricting trans people to the bathrooms of their assigned sex at birth. A large number of trans men circulated selfies of themselves in women’s bathrooms, and many people pointed out that if the goal was to keep cis men out of women’s toilets, this law did the opposite, as presumably any cis man if questioned could claim to be a trans man.
One minor thing, going forward could you write trans men and trans women with spaces?
Of all the strange things to happen in the last two decades, I think one of the most utterly bizarre is that a non-negligible number of people decided to adopt almost all of Phyllis Schlafly’s talking points while calling themselves “radical feminists.” Schlafly’s core argument was that legally-enforced discrimination on the basis of sex was allegedly good for cis women. She pointed out, correctly, that sex-segregated bathrooms were inherently discriminatory on the basis of sex, for the exact same reasons that race-segregated bathrooms are discriminatory on the basis of race. She then did a bunch of mental gymnastics to argue that sex discrimination was somehow good for cis women, even though segregated bathrooms were created for the sole purpose of excluding cis women from society. Schlafly listed a bunch of other examples of sex-discrimination that the ERA would have struck down. Each discriminatory policy was created to deny equal rights to cis women, but in each case Schlafly spit out a bunch of BS about how that was actually good for women.
And now, we have “radical feminists” like this kfreed person who’s been posting in this thread, repeating the exact arguments Schlafly made to claim that we need sex discrimination to “protect women.”
It’s hilarious how kfreed ended with the “live and let live” line, after assaulting us trans folk’s very existence. That kind of lack of self awareness is legitimately comedy gold for the Self Aware Wolves subreddit. I was initially exceptionally angered, but the reread and the lack of basic self awareness just made me laugh a few seconds later.
For anyone reading this who might feel sympathy for kfreed’s position: If don’t support all of the GSRM community, then you are not an ally of any GSRM person. You’re actively working against the community, by trying to divide us. If your acceptance of ANYONE in the GSRM community is that conditional? Then you are not now an ally, never were an ally, and cannot be an ally until you grow up and let go of that bigotry. Full stop.
(Note: GSRM stands for Gender, Sexuality, and Sexuality Minorities.)
@Demonhype
I get what you’re saying here, but I think part of how they’re defining lesbian is “woman willing to date transphobic lesbians,” so trans men wouldn’t qualify even if the transphobes do consider them women because why would a trans guy want to date someone who insists he’s a woman and probably does a whole lot of other really awful stuff.
@Demonhype:
This appears to be true of conservatives in general, when they pontificate on anything at all.
@bcb
I think for the most part it ties back to Janice Raymond, a former Catholic nun who then branded herself a radical feminist while continuing to espouse conservative views on women. Her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire lays out the thesis that cis women are biologically inferior and therefore must be protected from the threat of trans women, who will replace them and be superior. According to her, there is no liberation or equality for women because biology, and the options are either to try to strike a deal with patriarchy or for women to be full separatists and form convents outside of society. It’s all very misogynistic and from this well spring people like kfreed.
Apologies for the delay; got distracted by RL for a bit. Yes, do ask your spouse if he knows a good site for appraisals, or just their opinion in general on whether there’s even a minor market for pulp books anyplace. And yeah, the ones I’ve seen in this bunch so far are all books, though I haven’t checked yet to see when any of them were published. I’m located in the US, out here in the wilds of Indiana.
My thanks in advance for any help you can give me here.
@ Naglfar
“Her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire lays out the thesis that cis women are biologically inferior and therefore must be protected from the threat of trans women, who will replace them and be superior.”
The only “superior” male to female trans person I ever heard of was someone a few years back that, after transitioning, crushed several female weight lifting records. Dunno how true it was to be honest, but felt like it was something of an outlier, as I’ve also heard many trans athletes are shocked at how quickly their body and subsequent performance changes due to hormone therapy.
Related to that, I also kind of thought that the big flap about trans women in the UFC a few years back was funny. I mean to say, that, early on they loudly talked about how women would never compete, but see what happened there? Figured after Ronda Rousy publicly said she would never get in the ring with a trans woman, a few years later she would do exactly that. But her career went a little south anywho. Can’t say that broke my heart.
@Naglfar
No problem, I’ll keep that in mind in the future.
What do these people think about trans men that are gay–never mind, I don’t want to know. What I do know is trying to control people and guilt them is the opposite of feminist.
@Redsilkphoenix:
So, just to clarify, they’re the pocket-size paperback books? Can you look for the names of the publishers as well as the dates? How yellow/cream-coloured are the pages? (Pix would also help)
ETA — Dave, I can move this to the open thread if you wish.
Hm
I actually agree with you on this somewhat, as well…