OOTMMM
Are they though?
Are trans people really “one of the most marginalized minorities”? We’re certainly constantly told they are, but what are the criteria? Who is keeping track? Where are their findings?
Are they as marginalized as homeless people with mental health and/or drug and/or alcohol issues? Are they as marginalized as very poor people who are too poor to do the things it takes to get out of poverty? Are they as marginalized as refugees and immigrants who don’t speak the local language and have no local friends or relations? Are they as marginalized as abused women? Are they as marginalized as children of fanatically religious parents?
I could go on. There are a lot of very marginalized people in the world, and they’re marginalized for much more material and obvious and intractable reasons than a feeling that one is the sex that one’s body is not.
I wonder if it’s not so much that they’re marginalized as it is that they are setting themselves up for a drastically limited pool of sexual and romantic partners, to say nothing of the complications if they want to have children. I can easily nod in agreement if the Owen Joneses say trans people have trouble finding a love interest, but I don’t nod in agreement that that’s being “marginalized.” Becoming a niche item, sexually speaking, just goes with the territory if you’re trans. That’s one reason it’s not an unmistakably brilliant idea to tell all kids who even pick up a toy meant for “the other gender” that they’re trans.
Meanwhile spare a thought for farm workers. Now they’re marginalized six ways from Sunday, I tell you what.
Somewhere hidden in a place where if you file a FOIA request, the ACLU will find out about it and go on the attack.
As for most marginalized, it looks to me that what we have here are middle-class to wealthy white males who decide they are females; the culture shock of moving from the single most privileged class out there to a truly marginalized (though not the most marginalized) class must stagger their mind. And they decide all the crap they get is the “trans” part, not the “woman” part. And because they didn’t see any crap happening to other people while living as a white man, and for the most part they are still living in relative privilege and still don’t see it, they believe that they are more marginalized than other groups because it feels that way to them.
People who are used to getting their own way all the time feel like they are being mistreated when someone else gets something. It’s the same phenomenon as when women enter a workforce that was previously all male. The first one is a joke, a token, but the second one? All of a sudden, it’s all women, from top to bottom, they are taking over, the men are being pushed out…and they are unable to see that everything is still run by men even though there are a couple of women in the boardroom.
Ah yes. I hadn’t thought of the going from most privileged to not so much aspect. Makes a lot of sense.
I’d not heard of Jesse Thorn until today. First mention was here, on Le Canard Noir’s twitter stream:
https://mobile.twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1382366261791834118
Thorn was inteviewing some British comedy duo, and brought up a retweet by one of them about a Times article critical of Mermaids UK. After saying he’d rather not dive into the topic at all, Thorn continues, adding the context that the subject is scary for him because he’d relied on an organization akin to Mermaids having two gender non-conforming kids, one of whom is trans, the oldest of the two being the trans one, coming out at kindergarten age. Thorn continued to persist, even after the interviewee said he did not want to delve into that subject. There is no “crumbling,” just akward silence when the bait is not taken. At the end, Thorn uses the postscript of the interview to state that all American medical associations recommend “gender affirming” care.
Interview here; relevent section begins at about 42:00
Kindergarten. Holy shit. Thorn thinks he’s the good guy. This is child abuse.
…and that is why thinking *you* are the “good guy” is such a dangerous thing.
The irony being, of course, that the people being interviewed are Mitchell and Webb, of the Are We the Baddies sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
They also understand a thing or two about the construction of male privilege:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85HT4Om6JT4
But the ‘official oppressed trans’ narrative is about non-white teenagers ejected from their families, homeless, and subsisting by sex work.
Pay no attention to the middle-aged bearded misogynist behind the curtain.
God that was an emetic listen.
I’d say they probably do experience social rejection. The rejection could be viewed as “because they are trans,” because transgenderism is the drum they are banging on at the moment. If they were carpenter unionists, they would be discriminated against, or rejected, or disliked “because they are unionists,” because that’s the context in which they are being annoying, narcissistic blowhards. Any “marginalization” would probably happen, trans or not, because they are obnoxious timewasters. When trans employees get fired, I’d bet it’s not “because they are trans,” but because they are not good employees. The personality is disordered and toxic.
Yes that’s a confounder in this whole issue. How many people who say they are trans were drawn to the whole idea for reasons that are inextricable from being an abrasive attention-grabbing self-centered asshole? What if the ideology and the “movement” are just catnip to unpleasant people? I mean the “movement” might as well have hung out a sign saying “Join us because we are angry frothing bullies who love to spend our time making everyone else submit to us!!”.
@10 I think this is so dead on. I would only add that they must either be in, or have been raised in, situations where this behavior was either indulged or ignored, and is largely a stereotypically first world problem. Poor little spoiled assholes, we need to be more understanding. :P
@9 maddog, I sure appreciate the cynicism, yet it’s completely justified based on my considerable experience in the world of employment. People who aren’t catered to in they way they would like to be, or are not interested in actually doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay are so fucking intolerable. Not to mention how incompetent they are on top of their lethargy.
I’m not much of a joiner, but you nearly had me there! Let’s hope we don’t lose you to the TA’s PR department. They could use some logical consistency. And, you know, honesty.
My impression is that people are attracted to the movement by good old fashioned righteousness. Nobody wants to be cruel to the marginalised, everyone wants to champion the underdog, especially if they don’t really have to do anything to achieve it. It doesn’t matter whether the object is actually marginalised or underdoggy as long as enough people apply both carrot and stick in the saying of the creed. In fact, if you weight the ponzi scheme so that small actions like pronouns in the profile get you a disproportionate number of brownie points, then you end up with a benignly supportive majority caste and a lean, hungry warrior underclass. And then people like David Paisley and Owen Jones are, oh I don’t know, the fucking Sardaukar or something and Grace Lavery is a Reverend Mother of the Sayyadina, which makes us the Fremen. I might have got carried away with my own analogy, there. Did I say something about logical consistency?
Theists often talk about a religion-shaped hole that atheists secretly yearn to fill and I’m very much afraid this is it.
latsot #13
Or at least that’s how they started out. But once the (Tavris/Aronson-style) justification spiral got started it became more about preserving self-image, not admitting error, not appearing inconsistent or hypocritical etc. than actual “good old fashioned righteousness”. So while I don’t doubt that many of these people got on the TRA bandwagon for reasons that seemed both noble and worthy at the time, It’s far from obvious to me that there’s anything particularly noble or worthy about their motives today. Sometimes “good old fashioned righteousness” requires the willingness to take a hit, to admit mistakes, to say “I was wrong”, even if it means being accused of inconsistency and hypocrisy, making oneself unpopular and losing lots of friends.
Bjarte,
I didn’t mean to suggest that righteousness – especially the old-fashioned kind – is a virtue. Very much the reverse, I think.
We’re in agreement: righteousness is not worthiness and it definitely doesn’t help anyone except by mistake.
That a righteousness-shaped hole might exist in atheists and skeptics is a thing of horror but is demonstrably true.
latsot #15
My mistake. I still think that many of them started out with good intentions, but over time other, far less noble, motives came to overshadow and eventually supplant whatever good motives they started out with. As I have written many times, I think cognitive dissonance had a lot to do with it, but also just tons of sloppy, bad thinking and a failure to make even the most basic distinctions (respecting people’s rights / equality / dignity / basic humanity vs. agreeing with their claims, what things that are called vs. what they are etc.)
agreed.
The sentiment sometimes phrased “rights are not pie” I think is partly to blame. There are people who simply cannot conceive of “rights” being in conflict.
Sackbut, I agree: 1) Some people cannot imagine rights in conflict, and 2) You called “rights are not pie” a sentiment.
At the end of Caddyshack, Rodney Dangerfield says, Hey, everybody — We’re all gonna get laid! Here in the US, the Equality Act is promoted with a similar sentiment — We’re all gonna get more rights! — as if only a conservative could disagree with that happy ending.
I imagine Oprah Winfrey telling her studio audience, instead of getting new cars, YOU get more rights. YOU get more rights. YOU get more rights. EVERY-BODY gets more rights!
Not that she’s involved, I’m just expressing the sentiment.