BLODA stands for Blog Lots of Days in April, because I've reached the conclusion that trying to blog every day in April is going to mean I post a lot of unreadable crap. So let's try and avoid that.
So let's get some define some things first: "trans*" is an umbrella term for everyone who's gender identity differs from the gender they were assigned at birth. This includes women who were born in a male body, men who were born in a female body, and people who identify as both genders or a third gender or no gender at all. It also encompasses people who identify with their assigned gender but engage in cross-gender activity, such as crossdressing. The asterix refers to the multitude of suffixes people can attach to the trans- prefix to describe how they identify.
Also, the word for people who identify with their assigned gender at birth is "cisgender". So when you come across this word, it just means everyone born with a female body who identifies as a woman, and everyone born with a male body who identifies as a man; the majority of the population.
Let's also state at the outset that "tranny" and "shemale" are slurs, in the same vein as "faggot", and using them in polite conversation makes you an assbutt. Similarly, "transsexual" is an adjective, not a noun, and calling someone "a transsexual" is dehumanising.
So now lets talk about how everyone apparently hates trans* people and society is basically just okay with it.
Let's start with the Daily Mail, the third most widely-read newspaper in the UK, which retains it's readership by demonising as many people and minority groups as possible to get self-righteous middle-class white Brits furiously screaming about how hard their lives are.
According to the Daily Mail, it's worthy of the national news when a primary school teacher is openly transgender and undergoing a transition from male to female. In fact, it's worth a main-space article and piece from a regular columnist just to emphasise how immoral it is to let trans* people near kids.
But when that transgender teacher commits fucking suicide because she can no longer face the endless press harassment the Mail has a hand in causing, it's apparently far less newsworthy than the fact she existed in the first place. The BBC considers it a matter for local Lancashire news, despite having implications for the nationwide LGBT community. The Mail mentions that she died an "unsuspicious" death, but of course says nothing about press harassment or even the fact it was a suicide. Worst of all, Richard Littlejohn, the columnist who called for her resignation, has not in any way been held accountable. There is a petition to remove him which has spread mostly through LGBT-specific social media, but has little support from mainstream organisations or news sources; neither Littlejohn or any or his employers have talked about the death, nor has anyone with any mainstream influence demanded so much as an apology.
So the moral of the story is that it's basically okay to spread fear and hate against trans* people, even when it results in those people's death. Brilliant.
But surely this is an isolated incident? I mean, we are talking about the infamously right-wing Mail here. Surely most of the media is more enlightened? Not really.
Let's look at the mentions of trans* people in Britain's most popular newspaper: The Sun. At the time of writing, all the search results for "transsexual" in the Sun website are, in order:
-The use of the presence of a transsexual porn star to emphasise just how filthy the porn someone inside the Vatican was downloading; because sex being had by trans* people is just inherently more "dirty" than sex being had by cisgender people
-A priest incorrectly identified as transssexual selling crystal meth
-A transgender woman (called a "pre-op transsexual", a label which itself is problematic) accused of violently raping a woman; a story which reinforces the idea that transgender women are just men trying to pretend to be women, and who could take advantage of the "real" woman around them at any time
-"The world's first ever transsexual caught on tape", an article which is so othering and dehumanising ("look, a transsexual! Get a good picture!) that I can't even.
-A transsexual prostitute being murdered after blackmailing celebrities
-A transgender woman undergoing surgery pegged as world's tallest transsexual!!! -see "did you get a good picture" comment above. Also, the woman in question is depicted in a leather corset with a whip, not that they're making her very existence inherently sexual or anything.
-An article trying to poke a cisgender female actor into feeling offended about being cast as a trans woman
Can you see the link, kids?!
In the vast majority of Sun depictions, trans* people are associated with crime and scandal and extreme abnormality, codified as a type of "other" which exists in shadows and brothels waiting to lure us all into depravity. Even when trans* subjects exist outside of this world, they are still dehumanised as a glorified funfair attraction. So for the tabloid press, the rule is apparently to only mention trans* people when you can pass them off as a sub-human other.
It goes without saying, I think, that if even one Sun article today conveyed the same attitude towards black people, gay people, Muslims, or virtually any other minority group, there would quite rightly be a massive scandal. But when it comes to transphobia, no-one objects. Article comments, where they exist, are just as if not more prejudiced than the article. When it comes to transphobic attitudes in the media, readers accept it as the norm.
And so we come to the crux of the matter. The general public accept that trans* people are to be treated as not-quite-human.
It's perfectly fine to dismiss transgender men as "not real men", and transgender women as "not real women". In fact this has been the result of probably two in three face-to-face mentions of trans* people that I've personally experienced. Even perfectly nice and clever people don't see anything wrong with painting transgender and transsexual people as "fakes", and assuming that they themselves know more about what sort of person the trans* individual is than the trans individual does.
It's perfectly fine to characterise trans* people as weird or disgusting, and express the desire that they either not exist or stay far away from you. Because obviously, the discomfort you get from being in the physical presence of a trans* person once in a blue moon is a far more important issue than a trans* person's experience of being ostracised, isolated and dehumanised their entire fucking lives.
It's perfectly fine to go to great lengths to hide the fact that trans* people exist from children, assume that such knowledge is inherently corrupting to young innocence, and liken the fact that trans* people exist to descriptions of sex acts.
It's perfectly fine to use the idea of resembling a trans* person as an insult or use the fact of a trans* person's existence as the punchline to a joke.
It's perfectly fine to discuss a person's trans* status in public with people they barely know, and openly speculate about personal information regarding their body.
Except, it's not.
Transgender women, transgender men, people who crossdress, people who don't fit with the "man" or "woman2 label they were given at birth in any number of ways, are all real, living, breathing, hoping, hurting, human beings.
Oh, I'm stating the obvious? So start acting like you've internalised that fact.
You wouldn't ask a cisgender woman for descriptions of her vagina, so don't act like which genitals a trans* person has is any of your business.
You realise it's dickish to tell someone "you're not really a Christian", "you're not really British", so don't tell anyone "you're not really a man/woman".
The reason trans* people suffer so much from violation of privacy, violence, homelessness, social ostracisation, endless attempts to regulate their identity, etc, etc, is that the media and general public refuse to acknowledge them as fully human. If you have regard a trans* men as less of a man than a cisgender man, if you have ever asked a trans person "so do you still have a penis?", if you use the word "tranny" in public, if you make jokes where the punchline is "she was a he!!", then you are part of that problem.
So start giving trans* people the respect they deserve.
So let's get some define some things first: "trans*" is an umbrella term for everyone who's gender identity differs from the gender they were assigned at birth. This includes women who were born in a male body, men who were born in a female body, and people who identify as both genders or a third gender or no gender at all. It also encompasses people who identify with their assigned gender but engage in cross-gender activity, such as crossdressing. The asterix refers to the multitude of suffixes people can attach to the trans- prefix to describe how they identify.
Also, the word for people who identify with their assigned gender at birth is "cisgender". So when you come across this word, it just means everyone born with a female body who identifies as a woman, and everyone born with a male body who identifies as a man; the majority of the population.
Let's also state at the outset that "tranny" and "shemale" are slurs, in the same vein as "faggot", and using them in polite conversation makes you an assbutt. Similarly, "transsexual" is an adjective, not a noun, and calling someone "a transsexual" is dehumanising.
So now lets talk about how everyone apparently hates trans* people and society is basically just okay with it.
Let's start with the Daily Mail, the third most widely-read newspaper in the UK, which retains it's readership by demonising as many people and minority groups as possible to get self-righteous middle-class white Brits furiously screaming about how hard their lives are.
According to the Daily Mail, it's worthy of the national news when a primary school teacher is openly transgender and undergoing a transition from male to female. In fact, it's worth a main-space article and piece from a regular columnist just to emphasise how immoral it is to let trans* people near kids.
But when that transgender teacher commits fucking suicide because she can no longer face the endless press harassment the Mail has a hand in causing, it's apparently far less newsworthy than the fact she existed in the first place. The BBC considers it a matter for local Lancashire news, despite having implications for the nationwide LGBT community. The Mail mentions that she died an "unsuspicious" death, but of course says nothing about press harassment or even the fact it was a suicide. Worst of all, Richard Littlejohn, the columnist who called for her resignation, has not in any way been held accountable. There is a petition to remove him which has spread mostly through LGBT-specific social media, but has little support from mainstream organisations or news sources; neither Littlejohn or any or his employers have talked about the death, nor has anyone with any mainstream influence demanded so much as an apology.
So the moral of the story is that it's basically okay to spread fear and hate against trans* people, even when it results in those people's death. Brilliant.
But surely this is an isolated incident? I mean, we are talking about the infamously right-wing Mail here. Surely most of the media is more enlightened? Not really.
Let's look at the mentions of trans* people in Britain's most popular newspaper: The Sun. At the time of writing, all the search results for "transsexual" in the Sun website are, in order:
-The use of the presence of a transsexual porn star to emphasise just how filthy the porn someone inside the Vatican was downloading; because sex being had by trans* people is just inherently more "dirty" than sex being had by cisgender people
-A priest incorrectly identified as transssexual selling crystal meth
-A transgender woman (called a "pre-op transsexual", a label which itself is problematic) accused of violently raping a woman; a story which reinforces the idea that transgender women are just men trying to pretend to be women, and who could take advantage of the "real" woman around them at any time
-"The world's first ever transsexual caught on tape", an article which is so othering and dehumanising ("look, a transsexual! Get a good picture!) that I can't even.
-A transsexual prostitute being murdered after blackmailing celebrities
-A transgender woman undergoing surgery pegged as world's tallest transsexual!!! -see "did you get a good picture" comment above. Also, the woman in question is depicted in a leather corset with a whip, not that they're making her very existence inherently sexual or anything.
-An article trying to poke a cisgender female actor into feeling offended about being cast as a trans woman
Can you see the link, kids?!
In the vast majority of Sun depictions, trans* people are associated with crime and scandal and extreme abnormality, codified as a type of "other" which exists in shadows and brothels waiting to lure us all into depravity. Even when trans* subjects exist outside of this world, they are still dehumanised as a glorified funfair attraction. So for the tabloid press, the rule is apparently to only mention trans* people when you can pass them off as a sub-human other.
It goes without saying, I think, that if even one Sun article today conveyed the same attitude towards black people, gay people, Muslims, or virtually any other minority group, there would quite rightly be a massive scandal. But when it comes to transphobia, no-one objects. Article comments, where they exist, are just as if not more prejudiced than the article. When it comes to transphobic attitudes in the media, readers accept it as the norm.
And so we come to the crux of the matter. The general public accept that trans* people are to be treated as not-quite-human.
It's perfectly fine to dismiss transgender men as "not real men", and transgender women as "not real women". In fact this has been the result of probably two in three face-to-face mentions of trans* people that I've personally experienced. Even perfectly nice and clever people don't see anything wrong with painting transgender and transsexual people as "fakes", and assuming that they themselves know more about what sort of person the trans* individual is than the trans individual does.
It's perfectly fine to characterise trans* people as weird or disgusting, and express the desire that they either not exist or stay far away from you. Because obviously, the discomfort you get from being in the physical presence of a trans* person once in a blue moon is a far more important issue than a trans* person's experience of being ostracised, isolated and dehumanised their entire fucking lives.
It's perfectly fine to go to great lengths to hide the fact that trans* people exist from children, assume that such knowledge is inherently corrupting to young innocence, and liken the fact that trans* people exist to descriptions of sex acts.
It's perfectly fine to use the idea of resembling a trans* person as an insult or use the fact of a trans* person's existence as the punchline to a joke.
It's perfectly fine to discuss a person's trans* status in public with people they barely know, and openly speculate about personal information regarding their body.
Except, it's not.
Transgender women, transgender men, people who crossdress, people who don't fit with the "man" or "woman2 label they were given at birth in any number of ways, are all real, living, breathing, hoping, hurting, human beings.
Oh, I'm stating the obvious? So start acting like you've internalised that fact.
You wouldn't ask a cisgender woman for descriptions of her vagina, so don't act like which genitals a trans* person has is any of your business.
You realise it's dickish to tell someone "you're not really a Christian", "you're not really British", so don't tell anyone "you're not really a man/woman".
The reason trans* people suffer so much from violation of privacy, violence, homelessness, social ostracisation, endless attempts to regulate their identity, etc, etc, is that the media and general public refuse to acknowledge them as fully human. If you have regard a trans* men as less of a man than a cisgender man, if you have ever asked a trans person "so do you still have a penis?", if you use the word "tranny" in public, if you make jokes where the punchline is "she was a he!!", then you are part of that problem.
So start giving trans* people the respect they deserve.
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