Which vocal minority are we abusing and which are we flattering?
No you may NOT leave, the doors are all locked, the windows are barred, no one can hear your screams.
There is no LGB without the T. It’s deeply disappointing that a vocal minority has devoted its misguided energies to persecuting its vulnerable trans siblings instead of building a better world together. Transphobia is shameful and has no place in any progressive movement.
But there is LGB without the T, of course. How could there not be? They’re not the same thing, so why have people become so convinced so quickly that there is no one without the other? In one direction, that is – T is allowed to caucus by itself, but LGB is not. But why?
We got an answer of sorts. Alessandra Asteriti asked:
There was until 2015. Are you saying Stonewall was transphobic until 2015? Are you saying that while the T can have its own organisations, the LGB cannot? Are you even listening to your own little fascist homophobic voice?
LP answered:
1)a little bit, yes. They’re doing much better now! 2) There’s a difference when a group is organising specifically to exclude another marginalised group 3) don’t be silly
The answer is that LGB is not allowed to have its own organization because it’s doing so “specifically to exclude another marginalised group.”
That’s not a very compelling reason. The only reason it can even be said to be doing it to exclude another marge group is because T was arbitrarily and not very reasonably added to the LGB. If the T hadn’t been randomly tacked onto the LGB a few years ago there would be no need to pull the tacks out now.
And this word “exclude” is wildly overused, and unfair. “Exclusion” implies shutting people out who should be there – shutting them out for bad invidious reasons. Because it implies that, it should be used with care. I’m sitting here at my desk – just me. I’m not “excluding” the billions of people who aren’t sitting here at my desk too, I’m just not inviting them all in. I don’t have to invite them all in. Some facilities and organizations do have to let everyone in: specifically, public facilities like buses and schools and parks; that doesn’t mean they all do.
Activist groups can’t invite everyone in without instantly ceasing to be activist groups, because activism is about something, something specific, and so it “excludes” people who oppose that something, and it also “excludes” people who don’t oppose the something but do have a different something they are activist about. Feminist groups are not required to “include” environmentalists in their groups, even if they are environmentalists themselves. People are allowed to organize around their own concerns, and are not required to include people who want to organize around different concerns.
It’s pretty simple, and used to be taken for granted, but the Laurie Pennys and Owen Joneses are very invested in not seeing it.
What about poor “Q”? Did they get kicked out along with the “T”?
In this particular case, though, the LGB who are forming their own group do have a lot of problems with trans ideology. If they didn’t they’d put out some glowing puff about how they’re totally on board with trans gender theories and yes, ‘smash that cotton ceiling!’ — but they want to get together to talk about gay wedding planning and some personal care stuff that trans gender folks wouldn’t be interested in anyway.
Instead, the LGB Alliance was specifically formed to “counteract the confusion between sex and gender which is now widespread in the public sector and elsewhere,” help safeguard children transitioned unnecessarily or too soon, and otherwise deal with the mess that TGA has become. They’ve organized in order to attack trans gender ideology, thus excluding anyone in Stonewall who wants to promote it. Some of that excluding just falls out from the nature of the group, sure, but the nature of the group is hostile to the nature of the group it’s coming out of.
Which isn’t mean. It’s disagreement. Laurie Penny is trivializing the issue by making it sound like the mean kids are refusing to let special ed students eat at their lunch table.
Yes, that’s true…although it’s also true that not all trans people accept the current ideology.
But the conversation never seems to manage to reach that level of sophistication, does it – it’s all buzzwords about exclusion and transphobia, instead. All dissent from any bit of the ideology is labeled transphobia instantly and without redress – which is what happened when I had the unmitigated temerity to dissent from one small part of the ideology when I was at Freethought (I know, haha) Blogs.
Trivializing isn’t quite the right word for this move, even though it’s accurate. It’s got much more to do with bullying and silencing and terrorizing than with trivializing. You’re not allowed to talk about the ontology of gender and the punishment if you try is to be accused of horrible crimes.
Horrible crimes, yes. Willful ignorance, bullying, stupidity, cruelty, narrow-mindedness, naïveté, anti-science, arrogance, and a thirst for control, death, and genocide. They keep insisting that the same people who refuse to recognize that gender identity is innate are the same people who think homosexuality is an abomination of God — and for the same reasons.
How could they be the same reasons, the arguments sound nothing alike?
The arguments are a cover. See above re willful ignorance, bullying, stupidity, etc.
It comes down, then, to character: some people are just wicked. Which, ironically, is basically the same argument given by the people who think homosexuality is an abomination of God.
‘T’ was included to represent a body of people, who were lumped with LGB by hostile outside groups. This ought to have been simple enough. That ‘intersectionality’ thing at least. But who could have seen that ‘T’ would include a subset of violent misogynists? Or that that subgroup would wield the power of ‘wokitude’ to bludgeon public institutions to bend to their will?