A nationally recognized expert
Chase Strangio is a staffer at the ACLU:
Chase Strangio is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights.
Strangio is also a trans man.
Strangio makes a melodramatic claim:
We die because we are told we can’t live. We die because people oppose the premise of our existence. We die because you want us to. Call me dramatic. Mock me. Threaten me but I am going to fight for my people to live. NO matter what you do.
Obligingly, I did call that claim melodramatic. That’s because it is. Trans people don’t flop over and die because people tell them things, and they are not told they “can’t live.” This is just a variation on the “you’re denying our existence” nonsense that we hear constantly, and it’s just as fatuous. Saying people can’t magically turn themselves into something they’re not by saying some words is not saying the people who attempt it don’t exist. Being wrong about oneself is not the same thing as not existing, or for that matter as sudden death.
Nobody “opposes the premise of their existence.” That’s more word-magic. What I for one oppose is not their private ideas about themselves but their bullying efforts to force everyone else to agree with them. That’s it. That’s all it is. We just are not obliged to endorse other people’s fantasies. We’re not obliged to, and being bullied for refusing is itself an injustice.
Chase Strangio of course is all for the “right” of boys to identify as girls and then compete against girls in sport and snap up all the prizes. What about those girls? What about the premise of their existence? Why is Strangio so indifferent to them?
Whew. I was worried for a minute. If it was sudden death, I know I would have died many times over.
I mean, seriously, who isn’t wrong about themselves at least some of the time? And who says that this one thing, this gender identity thing, is the one thing no one is ever wrong about?
Someone replied to that “we die because we are told we can’t live” tweet with “ there are people who would love to see us die rather than transition.”
I’m not sure who is being referred to here. I can imagine distraught parents saying that — the same sort of parents who’d also tell a son or daughter they’d rather see them dead than gay, or atheist, or covered with tattoos. And it’s not a stretch to believe that there are either extreme religious believers or hardcore internet trolls who view everything in terms of a winner-take-all cosmic culture battle between Good and Evil. But that’s about it.
Unless that’s how adolescents talk to each other. I don’t know. Maybe they’re hearing it somewhere.
Strange that a movement that used to chant “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” is now going with the approach of “we’re trans! Validate us or we’ll curl up and die!”
It’s the glorification of fragility.
And what happens to the entire project if the claims about the levels of violence committed against trans people and the rate of suicide among trans people are exaggerated?
They scream louder, and make sure that the people who gather the statistics are labeled transphobes and not allowed to publish/speak/hold a job/have a Twitter account.
In other words what happens then is precisely what is happening. I think we might possibly have a feedback loop here. Call me crazy, but that’s what I think.
Trans people die for the same reasons all people die – because we are animals with limited lifespans. Sort of sad/funny that Chase claims to be a man while being quite the Drama Queen.
Feedback loops everywhere you look. If the climate change doesn’t get us, the woke will.
How anyone takes this histrionic horseshit seriously is beyond me.
Ophelia,
And Sastra,
Those people do exist; they are the rabidly conservative section of the population. Lumping gender critical feminism in with them is the big lie. On the one hand, we are people who disagree with, as Ophelia puts it, people declaring themselves to be something they’re not, along with the bullying demands for accepting that premise. On the other, rabid conservatives are the ones declaring all trans people unnatural freaks, sinners, abominations etc. etc. and carrying out the assaults on that basis.
Putting those two camps with their totally opposed motivations, rhetoric, and methods together under one heading is of course dishonest. But it is also a tell: any disagreement, however narrow and nuanced, will be inflated; and the sayer of that narrow and nuanced disagreement will be ejected from the left.
Every time a child says “I don’t believe in trans people” there is a little trans person somewhere that falls down dead. No wait, that’s fairies. I always get the two mixed up.
Borderline Personality Disorder. Deranged, impossible to work with, and damaging to everyone and everything they touch.
Holms, and the crucial point is that we disagree with the extreme conservative position that would deny trans people their rights or their dignity; we may agree with them on some points, such as there is no such thing as a male lesbian or a girl dick, but we do insist that trans people receive the same rights as everyone else, and reject the conservative position (the most extreme form of it implied rather than stated) that rights are meant for wealthy white men, and the rest are practicing identity politics.