Guest post: Cutesy pushy is still pushy

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

Another neighbourhood vignette. Trans bullshit makes me cranky. Maybe at this point I’m spending too much time looking for it, but its omnipresence makes it hard to avoid. Today’s encounter with it took place in a local store selling handicrafts. Right at the door was a little Pride Progress flag (complete with the Intersex yellowtiangle with purple circle). Beside it was a happy rainbow sticker assuring those in need of such reassurance that You Are Safe Here. Of course this wasn’t telling everyone entering the store that the building they were entering was up to code and therefore unlikely to burst into flame or collapse onto us during our shopping visit. No. This is a different kind of “safety” we’re talking about here, and this “safety” is reserved for Special People, as the sticker was gaudily announcing that the store was not just a retail establishment, but also a 2SLGBTQIA+ Safe Space. One wonders if there are any regulations or guidelines for that. Not just any old place can be a daycare centre, for example. Restaurants here are required to display the results of the latest health inspection. Somehow I doubt there is any such certification or registration needed, and that any store can simply “identify” as a safe space, with no need to fulfil any requirements other than a desire to advertise one’s piety and righteousness. You just slap on a sticker here and there and voila, you’re an Ally! And, despite the rest of the flag, I think at this point. these displays of obedience and loyalty are all about the Trans. If it was about gay rights, you’d just have the good, old fashion Pride Flag, except that it’s now insufficiently “inclusive”, and about as welcome as a Swastika flag, or the Confederate one, as it is verboten to have anything LGB without the T.

These stickers operate on several levels at once. However much of a “welcome” they might be for the target audience, they are also a warning. They mean, theoretically, that the staff will not only not challenge trans bullshit, but also defend and enforce it. I would expect any sticker-displaying establishment large enough to have separate male and female bathroom facilities would allow men-pretending-to-be-women to use what, until recently, would have been exclusively female spaces. If anyone questions their use of women’s spaces, staff will defend the intruder, rather than the intrudeed upon. So, not “safe” for women, then.

More insidiously, these stickers play into the trans victimization and fragility narrative. If the store is a “safe space,” then by implication everywhere else is hostile. THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUT TO GET YOU! COME INSIDE: YOU’LL BE SAFE HERE! As if hatred falls from the sky like rain, and stores with stickers are offering life-saving shelter from the storm. But there’s more than one storm brewing, as women well know, having had their own safety eroded in favour of the validation of delusional males.

Do trans activists really assume that any store without a sticker is “unsafe”? Is that even the actual point? Displaying such stickers advertises putative allyship, but it also shows surrender and obedience to gender ideology. It represents a promise to comply. This puts pressure on other shopkeepers to announce their own stores’ “safety”.

Most of the products were fairly typical craft items, mostly handmade. Felted, knitted, or crocheted animals, jewelery, candles, soaps. You get the picture. But one item was a “Rainbow Certified” tote bag emblazoned with the slogan “Support LGBTQ+”, with fluffy clouds, flowers, and a rainbow. (The company’s website informs me that Rainbow Certified is a queer owned small business who makes apparel & accessories for the LGBTQ+ community. I feel excluded already. Am I allowed to even look at this tote bag? Why yes, I am. Read on.) Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but notice that it’s not a simple statement in which the person carrying the bag is declaring “I support LGBTQ+”, but a demand that the viewer do so. It might be printed in a 60’s-esque flower-power kind of font, but it’s still a demand, and a forced-teaming one at that. Read and obey. Cutesy pushy is still pushy. Push someone else.

Shopping doesn’t usually make me this crotchety, but I get tired of all of this public display trans crap. It feels like swimming through a treacly sea of lies. Lies that I’m supposed to accept and believe. We’re supposed to be happy with our own coercion. All the rainbow colours and glitter hide an underlying malice and darkness that comes to the fore in accusations of bigotry and hatred. As I’ve commented before, the Progress Pride flag feels like the flag of a hostile, occupying force, passed off as the banner of a well-meaning, public-spirited campaign of kindness, compassion and concern. Look more closely, and the actual focus of that “compassion” and “concern” is very narrow. Its demands are enforced with very little kindness, and at a very steep cost to women and girls.

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