The most vulnerable people
Anthony Watson wrote an open letter:
Friends
My name is Anthony Watson – an entrepreneur, a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD(1), a Patron of Diversity Role Models(2), and a white, cis, gay man.
(“Entrepreneur”=rich dude.)
I am writing this letter alongside many other gay men of different privileges. Just as lesbians have shown their support through #LWithTheT we now stand in public solidarity with our trans siblings.
As gay men we have watched in horror at the cruelty inflicted upon the trans community. We are outraged. The most vulnerable people in our society are marginalised, scared and endangered. Trans communities, and in particular trans children, are under attack on a daily basis.
What? “The most vulnerable people in our society” – ? Who says? According to what metric? Are trans people more vulnerable than women? All of them? Really?
I don’t believe it. I think he’s making it up, and I think he’s ignoring the global and historical chronic vulnerability of women and girls to do so. I don’t think his cross-dressing friends are more vulnerable than menstruating girls in India or Nigeria. Not for a second.
What do trans people want? They want the right to live their lives in peace, to be free from violence and discrimination, and to enjoy equal protection under the law. What they want, in short, are the same basic protections and rights we as gay men enjoy.
Actually, no. The most “militant” among them want more than that: they want to be affirmed (constantly, endlessly affirmed) as the sex that doesn’t match their bodies, especially those of them who have male bodies. They want to be so constantly and warmly affirmed as women that they are entirely happy to shove women roughly out of the way.
The rest of it is just the usual vague meaningless bafflegab that ignores the real issues in favor of stating the obvious.
And because he’s not a man to do things by halves, he shoehorns in a Nazi Germany reference:
We are reminded of Martin Niemöller’s poem “First they came for the for the…”
In case any of his readers haven’t got the point yet, he pushes it home with a chilling warning:
Transphobic people aren’t just coming for trans rights; they’re coming for all of us.
So who are these dangerous, vindictive transphobic people — and, more importantly, how the hell can we stop them?
I know who they are.
They’re the women who have been abused or raped by men and are now terrified of being in close proximity to a male-bodied person.
They’re the young lesbians who don’t understand why they’re made to feel shame for excluding male-bodied people from their dating pool.
…
They’re the feminists who want to be able to describe their oppression as they choose to describe it, without having their terminology and their politics checked by woke men.
They’re the women who just want to call themselves women — and not bleeders, menstruators, cis, non-trans or any other term selected by others.
Or, for that matter, Nazis.
Team Trans claims the podium in both the Oppression Olympics and the Intersectional Hunger Games. They’re quite clearly the Most Vulnerable of everyone because of shut up.
He hasn’t been keeping up with the sports pages lately, either.
I don’t recall feminists banning transwomen from the military for some reason…
When stating simple reality becomes a subversive act…
Seth, throughout much of human history, stating reality has been a subversive act, especially in the eyes of those who benefit from others accepting the unreal as real.
Are women more vulnerable than men? All of them? Really?
I don’t believe it. I don’t think that your middle class female commenters, friends and readers are more vulnerable than homeless men in India or Nigeria. Not for a second.
\sarcasm
Do you really want to travel to the very end with this sort of argumentation? As an excercise, try to think of the standard feminist answer to the above (patriarchy, women as a class, Paris Hilton and the Queen of England as victims of oppression on some axis, blah blah blah, fuck the Nigerian dudes, WOMEN are the oppression olympics winners!) and try to rephrase it substituting trans people for women. You will succeed, I promise.The standard feminist answer is elastic and contentless enough for such manipulations to work.
But who knows, maybe you are questioning here the standard feminist answer? Wow and yay for you, then.