After yesterday, I feel more committed than ever to my opposition to the anti-"TERF" obsession/priority/"war" in trans-advocacy. It seems so internally destructive, so antithetical to where I feel our values and emphasis should be, seems indicative of numerous problems in how our priorities are distributed, and increasingly looks more and more to be motivated not simply by the misdirection of positive goals, but actually by creepy, gross biases in our own community (anti-feminist bias, misogynistic bias, etc.)



Yesterday, in response to me making another pathetic comment on how messed up this past month has been for me on a personal level, and how emotionally worn down I am, someone tweeted to me a link to "Pretendbians", one of Cathy Brennan's numerous transphobic trolling-blogs. I've asked REPEATEDLY for people to not link me to those things, since I find them triggering, I make an active effort to ignore them, I feel focusing our energies on them is bad for our community, and I feel manipulating us into focusing on them and getting angry/hurt is EXACTLY what trolls like Brennan want.



Their response to me reiterating that I don't want people to send me these links was admonishing me for being someone who isn't a REAL trans activist, who's turning her back on her "sisters", who should be able to deal with the "triggers" in order to fight the "war" against the "TERFs" who are "getting our sisters killed" and blahblahblah. A bunch of incredibly petty, manipulative, exploitative nonsense, designed to guilt me back into doing EXACTLY what she wanted me to do, and care about EXACTLY what she wants me to care about, EXACTLY when she wanted me to. Because I didn't share her precise priorities and didn't hop on board immediately upon her request, because I asserted my own sensibilities relative to her "war", I was a traitor to my sisters. Apparently.



Even leaving aside the larger questions and issues of the relative importance and motivations of transphobic feminism, why would I want to involve myself with factions of the trans community who use tactics like this for "recruitment"? Who frame things as "war" and lean WAY in to emotional manipulation (however exploitative, insensitive or callous) to achieve their aims? People who use those kinds of frames and tactics are NOT my sisters.



But the larger questions and issues are what's most important. I wrote, or instance, awhile back, a post about the problems with imagining that transphobic feminists are a primary "cause" of trans-misogynistic violence/harassment, relative to patriarchy. http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicity-vs-cause-in-trans-misogyny-and-violence/



I've also been thinking a GREAT deal about priorities lately. During the SCOTUS debate of Prop 8, the discourse in my social media feeds once again turned to marriage equality (or "same-sex marriage" / "gay marriage", terms I find harmful, cis-centric and limiting of the potential benefits). Along with this I noticed a number of things: certain issues being deprioritized (like the Arizona law demanding ID/dox to use gendered bathrooms), criticism of the over-emphasis on marriage as "The LGBT Issue", the usual unsubstantiated myth that marriage equality mostly benefits privileged queers, like cis gay middle-class white men (in fact, marriage equality would have the most substantial benefits for poor queer women, especially those with children, a disproportionate majority of whom are also women of colour), etc.



Also, in the debate about marriage being over-prioritized, I noted that certain specific trans issues would be put forth as the things getting neglected. And WHICH "trans issues" were forwarded as such itself reflected our OWN tendency towards privileging certain causes over others. For instance, the "trans issues" would be things like the DSM, gatekeeping, bullying, violence (with little consideration of the inequalities in its distribution), vague abstracted "risk", bathroom/fitting room access, visibility, insurance coverage, legislative protections and legal sex recognition, and media representation.



So the question of how the "LGBT community" over-priotizes the issue of marriage, we responded with our own narrow range of priorities (defined by the privileged in our community) and myths about who benefits from specific issues (demonstrating a lack of investment in really paying attention to exactly the marginalized communities we're POSING as representing and listening to and acting on behalf of).



At the same time, the Arizona law, and some difficulties of a friend in trying to secure legal sex recognition in Canada due to having been born in a nation that doesn't recognize legal change of sex at all, I was thinking a lot about immigration/trans intersectionality, and the necessity of building a more global consciousness in our approach... something I've been uneasy about for a long, long time has been the strong Americo-centrism of trans advocacy and trans rights/ trans-feminist discourse, which STRONGLY colours how certain questions (like the DSM debate, medical access, the conceptualizations of surgery, how class and economic status is considered relative to trans experiences, harassment and violence, employment discrimination, legalities and legislation, religious attitudes, racial intersectionality, etc.) get framed and discussed.



So all of this has had me VERY invested in the question of our priorities. Certain issues get very much neglected that very much need attention... HIV (IIRC, the currently fastest growing demographic for HIV diagnosis in the US is currently trans women), trans-educated/accessible addiction resources, trans-inclusive rape/abuse/assault resources (shelters, first response, recovery resources), trans-inclusive homeless shelters, homelessness in trans ppl (especially youth), police profiling, police abuse, widespread (and legitimate) distrust of police and healthcare resulting in self-selection out of accessing help even in emergencies, medical assault and abuse of trans patients by healthcare workers, lack of medical access for trans patients, doctors refusing to treat trans patients for even basic issues on the basis of "not knowing how to treat them", doctors MIStreating trans patients during in-patient care due to ignorance of our needs, lack of research or education in medicine concerning trans care that isn't "transition"-specific, safety issues of black market medication and cosmetic surgeries (related to inability to access conventional medical care, or self-selection away from conventional care due to gatekeeping, mistreatment, abuse, lack of understanding, prior negative experiences, etc) documentation and ID issues (especially setting up ID/documentation resources for trans ppl w/ immigrant or undocumented status), voting disenfranchisement (often deliberate), experiences and needs of trans sex workers, employment issues, trans-accessible/educated sexual health services, specific needs of trans youth (such as youth-specific support groups/organizations/resources to address the often hostile environment of adult support groups/orgs, "safety nets" to help prevent homelessness or poverty related to alienation from family, social workers trained in the specific needs of trans youth, job/education placement programs, systems in place to address issues like addiction, etc.) ... I could go on. Point being? There are a TON of very very important issues with very very immediate consequences for large demographics of trans people that don't get recognized or worked on in our activism, EVEN WHEN WE'RE SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT NOT OVER-PRIORITIZING PARTICULAR ISSUES.



So... in this context, with all this on my mind, to be told I'm letting down my sisters by not going to "war" with a petty internet troll like Cathy Brennan and the other "Pretendbians" people? For not having this little issue of what certain trolls from certain extreme fringes of a specific online sphere, who no one but trans people themselves even seems to KNOW EXIST, be what I consider the priority in my activism? Fuck off.



Given the ugliness here, the pettiness, the singular-mindedness... not of the "TERFs" but of their opponents within our own community... it makes me wonder about what drives that, where the motivations are coming from, why THIS is what people invest themselves in SO MUCH when there are SO MANY other things we should care about? Why is it that this ONE internet troll, this nasty little usury-defending lawyer from Maryland, who no one even really likes or takes seriously (EXCEPT for the trans women who've decided to "war" against her), why is it that she commands so much of our attention?



Partly, I'm sure, it's privileged myopia. If you're living in your insular bubble of RELATIVE freedom from real the brunt force of a trans-misogynistic, heartless, neo-liberal capitalist, white-supremacist, hetero-oppositional patriarchy, if your fights are all happening online and you're relatively unaware of... everything else... well, yeah, this could seem like a comparably big deal. If what you know is "trans 'people' are discriminated against and get killed", and the most hateful rhetoric YOU ever encounter in your relatively sheltered experience happens to come from these trolls, then maybe, sure, you could take that decontextualized version of the actual harm being done and look at your limited reference points and come to the conclusion that the "TERFs" and "radfems" are like the KKK or something and are actually who's committing and/or motivating the violence. But that's not the reality.



But I think it's more than that. I don't think any trans woman is THAT sheltered and THAT myopic that they'd really genuinely come to this kind of vehement obsession with this "war" SOLELY out of a lack of understanding of what's going on and lack of experience of other forms of trans-misogny or cissexism. You'd have to be REALLY fucking sheltered (or REALLY not get out much) to have your ENTIRE conceptualization of transphobia be what you see on tumblr.



I think that part of what informs this is probably just straight up anti-feminist, and misogynist, sentiment. That this is partly about what we were taught when we were "boys", and what we continue to hear and understand with patriarchy having its grip on the primary lens through which we view things. Our media is patriarchy, our books are patriarchy, patriarchy pervades our worldview and affects our lenses and our frames... it colours how we see things, and ultimately a little bit of how we see EVERYHING, even ourselves, is going to be tainted by that. We're PART of this culture even as we're marginalized and othered by it.



And the nasty feminist? The angry radical who "goes too far"? The shrieking harpy who doesn't know her place? We were trained to hate and fear that from DAY FUCKING ONE.



So the more I think, the more I experience... I can't help but feel like, yeah, for at least some of us, our bizarre and self-destructive and counter-productive obsession with transphobic feminism is being fueled by sublimated anti-feminist and misogynist sentiment. We get a version of feminists we have an excuse to hate, with that little part of us that lingers on as an echo of the patriarchy we were taught, that lingering sense that feminism and womens' anger is a threat, gets an outlet.



Of course Brennan and her ilk are awful people. But they're not much more than that. They're not a SYSTEM. They're not a STATE. And there is no fucking WAR here.

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