But are there really?
I don’t think this claim is true:
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis has spoken out against violence against trans people in a revealing interview with Spain’s Cadena SER radio network. The 63-year-old performer explained how her trans daughter receives death threats, and expressed alarm about the “terrifying” rise in transphobia.
“I have a trans daughter. There are threats against her life just [for] her existence as a human being,” she told Cadena SER on Tuesday. “There are people that want to annihilate her and people like her. The level of hatred… [It’s] as if we haven’t learned from fascism, [as if] we haven’t learned what the result of that is: the extermination of human beings. That is terrifying.”
I don’t believe her. I think she’s doing what it’s become second nature to do for so many zealots: translating refusal to believe magical claims about the self into threats of annihilation. I think she’s translating disbelief in a category into a desire to kill the people who claim to be in the category.
I suppose it’s possible that an offspring of a movie actor gets attention from weirdos, including weirdos who threaten people like movie actors and their offspring. But systematic threats to kill Curtis’s offspring for being trans? I don’t believe it.
The interview was shared on Twitter by trans activist Carla Antonelli, who was the first trans member of parliament in Spanish history. In the tweet, Antonelli asked: “Is someone going to stop this hate and injustice. Or only when it’s too late?”
The first trans member of parliament in Spanish history, but of course far from the first male member of parliament in Spanish history. I wonder if there could possibly be a motivation to call oneself trans other than the overpowering feeling of being “in the wrong body”…
Politics by hyperbole. What if the people claiming this actually did screenshots of the ‘threats’, like GC women do? We demonstrate our threats – we put them out there for people to judge whether they are threats. Trans activists just say “oooh, threats! Genocide! Murder! Holocaust!”. They never show us what the threats are. If they were really receiving death threats, I suspect they would be plastered all over Twitter, TikTok, Instragram, Facebook, and anyplace else they could plaster them.
It reminds me of a column I wrote once about the need to reduce our birth rate in order to reduce the overpopulation that is destroying us. One of my readers complained that I was saying we should kill people. WTF? More politics by hyperbole! (Of course, he was mad at me because I wrote a piece that dismantled his conspiracy theory about the Masons using logic and empirical evidence.)
One of the few popular pieces of “evidence” for GC plans of genocide was a snippet of a Helen Joyce interview which was bandied about among the hyperventilating TRA crowd. In it, she & the interviewer said something to the effect that they’d one day like to eliminate trans people. That is, they hoped that people who might have identified as trans and considered themselves the opposite sex/gender would instead be given ways to live happy lives as their true GNC selves comfortable in their bodies. That’s how I understood the quote.
Needless to say this was instead interpreted as Nazi-style death-camp fascism right out in the open saying the quiet part out loud OMG OMG! Because if you can’t wrap your head around what your opponent actually believes then the only way to eliminate trans people is to kill actual people.
Unfortunately, I do believe Ms. Curtis. I don’t think there’s any serious contingent of GCFs hurling those death-threats, mind you. But it’s pretty clear that transwomen, specifically, are subject to a bizarre mix of homophobia and misogyny (based on how well they ‘pass’) that is really repugnant from socio-religious conservatives and the bloviating shitlords that urge them on.
The three-way nature of this fight often obscures everyone’s perspectives. If a parent is being harangued by some Tuck-head who salivates over the idea of doing them (or their kid) harm, it becomes a little easier to see how they might end up seeing everything as an attack.
In this regard, I’d say transphobia is a bit like Islamophobia. It’s a real, and dangerous, phenomenon, but it absolutely cannot be allowed to cut down on legitimate criticism.
Public figures are magnets for stalking. Homophobic Xtian (or Muslim I suppose) crazies are certainly violent.
This is another reason that the constant trans-martyrdom pose is so maddening.
@2 another one I remember is when a feminist speaker pointed out that the ‘T’ movement is parasitic on the ‘LGB’ movement–appropriating the good will and influence earned by the hard work and just arguments of the latter for its own ends, to the detriment of the LGB; the trans activists howled that she’d called trans people ‘parasites’, and that was just like what the Nazis called the Jews.