Okay, friends, let’s talk about going to protests and weaponizing our whiteness, if in fact we are white.
You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.
This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.
I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.
Fuck yes I will weaponize the fact that I look like a white soccer mom. And you should do this too if you can. Weaponize the fuck out of your whiteness. If you are disabled and comfortable with doing so, turn ableism on its head and weaponize it. Make it so that the cameras that WILL be pointed at you see your whiteness, see your status as a parent, see your status as a community member. See you in your wheelchair or with your cane. If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.
Tag: important things
It’s deeply concerning to me that the majority of TERFs I run into now haven’t even reached voting age.
Exclusionist ideology have become so prevalent that an alarming number of Gay and Lesbian kids that I’ve seen believe that the community begins and ends with them. They want any queer people that don’t fall strictly into their groups to get lost. They don’t like Asexuals, they really don’t like Bisexuals, and God help you if you’ve committed the unforgivable sin of being trans.
Sure it’s easy to just hit the block button or try to shut our doors whenever we have to deal with exclusionists, but these kids are going to come of age soon and if we ignore the problem of more and more kids buying into that ideology it will come back to harm the rest of the queer community.
This is why putting things in your blog description like “terfs don’t interact” or “terfs can choke” feels so performative and useless as a gesture of trans inclusivity, especially when it’s done by people who also uncritically slap Ru Paul’s Drag Race reaction gifs onto everything. It’s also why the pushback against using “queer” instead of variants of LGBT is largely a TERF tactic – it encourages us to separate into groups based on which letter we fall under, which makes it easier to divide the community over infighting about who “belongs” in the community in the first place.
There are a couple of problems brewing that will need to be addressed.
1. Not everyone who’s transphobic is a TERF. TERFs have an ideology that, in their minds, qualifies as some form of feminism, and includes defending women against trans women who, according to them, are just men trying to infiltrate wlw spaces and force lesbians to have sex with them. Picture the stereotypical white male Republican of your choice. That person is transphobic, but they’re definitely not a TERF, because they do not identify with the same political ideology and see no meaningful difference in the perceived depravity of cis lesbians or trans women. Transphobia comes in forms OTHER than cis queer women trying to associate us with predatory men in an effort to literally exterminate us from women’s spaces (and in the case of a certain Fake Goth terf activist and any who model their behavior after her, sometimes literally doxxing and harassing us with the intent to have us run out of our jobs and homes, and possibly targeted by direct physical violence).
2. Not everyone who isn’t a TERF isn’t transphobic. This is largely more emphasis on the first point, but the point is important enough to be phrased both ways. A lot of cis gay men love drag queens more than they like actual women. There are all kinds of problems with (especially white) cis gay men which would never, NEVER lead you to giving them a label that even pretends to be feminist. Modern drag culture in particular is a toxic, festering wasteland of performative cattiness and flamboyant misogyny, with a particularly nasty trend towards transmisogyny. The historical roots of drag have nothing to do with this modern corruption. Drag is not trans positive anymore. It’s the transgender equivalent of blackface. It’s a viciously transphobic caricature of womanhood performed mostly by cis gay men for entertainment or profit, and frankly it is more directly harmful to trans women than TERFs, because it is by far the most significant contributor to the “trans women are men in dresses” belief that directly leads to real trans women being persecuted and killed, and it does this while being celebrated publicly within the queer community, and sometimes even by cis/straight people. TERFs have the obstacle of also being largely women who claim the banner of “feminism,” which makes it harder for them to work with the only people who are politically viable allies for them (the far right). Drag queens are more popular and beloved among the queer community than actual trans women, and even some cis, straight people love them. Some prominent drag queens are literally personal friends of major TERF activists. Drag is not a form of transgender representation and trans women are not full time drag queens. In the historical roots of the “drag queen” label, that was just the best term anyone had at the time to describe what a trangender woman was. Modern drag queens are largely cis gay men playing a character for fun or money under the belief that doing so allows them to use as many transphobic slurs as they want, and being more or less the “face of the trans community” while blatantly misrepresenting our lived experiences, which they share precisely none of the moment they take off their stereotypical misogynist costumes. They play wildly inappropriate, misogynist caricatures of womanhood while in character and want nothing to do with actually addressing the issues faced by real trans women out of character – more often than not they are actually contributing directly to those issues. For the love of god if you claim to be a trans ally please stop supporting RPDR and stop using drag race reaction gifs on everything.
3. Performative exclusion of transmisogynists is not the same as being genuinely inclusive of trans women. This is a big problem. This is slapping a “fuck terfs” into your blog description but doing nothing to make it a safe space for trans women. It’s good that we’ve recognized TERFs as a problem in the queer community, but it’s bad that we’re not addressing the problem in meaningful or productive ways. In some ways this push is doing more harm than good because it’s selling TERFs’ message for them: that trans activists and trans allies are betraying queer women and trying to force them to accept penises in their love lives. Without actually having any conversation with younger wlw who are preyed on by TERF ideology, they get a blanket exclusion from trans-positive spaces and are left vulnerable for TERFs to give them the explanation for why that happened, which they are all too happy to do as it gives them a brand new generation of TERFs to bring into their extremist ideology.
I’ve rarely, if ever, seen a popular post on the topic of transmisogyny actually address the fact that many trans women (I have no statistical data to prove it, but it definitely seems like most) have had or plan to seek surgical correction of their genitalia. There is a significant percentage of trans women with vaginas that are anatomically indistinguishable from those of cis women (and a significant percentage who want to pursue that surgical option, but cannot do so yet due to either the significant financial constraints or the wonderful time-locked restrictions artificially imposed on us by the great joy that is the WPATH Standards of Care). They aren’t quite as stretchy and have less natural lubrication than a cis woman’s vagina, but otherwise, most of the time you’d never notice a difference unless you were looking for it. Trans women’s vaginas are fully functional, completely sensitive, and include both anatomically correct clitorises and naturally occurring G-Spots (due to estrogen’s effects on the former prostate). As the surgical field has developed over time, the results are getting better and leaving behind fewer noticeable scars. Apart from not having a uterus to bleed from during their periods (oh yes, trans women can experience hormonal cycles that can produce any and all other symptoms of a menstrual cycle), there is biologically no meaningful difference, at all, between a cisgender woman and a trans woman who has had bottom surgery.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a trans woman genuinely expect, or try to coerce, any penis-repulsed lesbian to have sex with them before surgery. Many trans women don’t even want to have sex at all before surgery because their bodies are such an overwhelming source of anxiety and dysphoria. Due to the effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy, many trans women couldn’t have penis-in-vagina sex if they DID want to. Part of trans inclusivity needs to be acknowledging these facts. When engaging with young wlw who might be vulnerable to TERF ideology, failing to make this point to them (by letting TERFs be the only ones who talk to them) is something that needs to be corrected.
We can refuse to engage with older TERFs who don’t want to mind their own damn business. But refusing to be open in explaining the transgender experience to young wlw only serves the purpose of letting TERFs decide what they end up learning and thinking about trans women, and that does not work to the benefit of anyone who would call themselves a trans ally.
Don’t block people from a healthy dialogue where one might be productive. Bring more trans positivity and inclusivity into queer women’s spaces and make sure younger wlw are seeing an authentic picture of what being transgender means, so they can be exposed to more than whatever warped caricature of trans women that TERFs are showing them (which, in all likelihood, is a bunch of drag queens like Ru Paul who make public statements about the only difference between drag queens and trans women being money and a surgeon).
Don’t let TERFs be the only people who talk to them. That’s not helping.
Thank you. You put it into the words I could not find.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 