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Personally I have a temperamental attraction to conciliation and respectability politics, but I transitioned recently and generally defer to my elders. When I talk to the trans women who transitioned over a decade ago about politics the general response I get is that the animus against us is so great there's no return on respectability politics, trans people cannot make themselves respectable so why bother trying. I think this is kind of outdated and the animus has lessened to the point where it might be worthwhile but it's hard to change that perception.
As to confronting the bad faith actors in our camp, let me try to make an analogy. If the American right stood up and said "the liberals are right, there really are a bunch of racist fascists among us, let's work really hard to kick them all out, then the liberals will definitely stop calling us racist fascists" how do you think that would work out for the right? Perhaps it would improve the general popularity of the conservative movement if it could iterate exactly once and excommunicate the most racist 1% of RW media figures as adjudicated by the New York Times. But if you accept their premise that there's a bunch of fascists in your midst and accept their authority to name who is a fascist you lock in a dynamic that will iterate towards an outcome you'd likely find unacceptable.
I think that's basically the intuition behind trans people not wanting to give cis people any say in who is really trans even if this sometimes has pretty ridiculous results. Personally I think this stand is misguided and won't hold up, a group that's 1% of the population has to make more concessions to outside opinions than a group that's 40% of the population. In the long run some sort of compromise will have to be made.
We're also in an era of decentralized viral communication, movement's have much less power to pick their spokespeople than before. The liberal media will boost right wing guys who says provocative things that most right wingers don't believe, because that's an attention getting story. Similarly I think there's always going to be a demand for stories about non passing trans women behaving outrageously and the community doesn't really have the ability to decide who becomes highly visible and who doesn't.
I do think there are the beginning of some changes that might lead to something different in the long run. There's a growing hostility between "everybody's valid" queer people and "I desperately want to change my body and will pay immense costs to do so" trans people. The political right forcing all AMAB people into men's spaces has different consequences for queer AMAB people who want to wear women's clothes sometimes and trans women who have taken hormones and developed breasts and a feminine body fat distribution. I think in time there may be a defensive move towards a framework that's based more around the ways in which people have changed their body than an internal psychological identity but who knows, intracoalitional queer politics are weird and I don't fully understand them.
The difference, as you touch on, is that there is no majority which thinks GOP voters are all perverts who deserve whatever consequences. Sure, there's people that believe that. But a substantial percentage of people would react to 'transwomen using the mens locker room is a safety issue' with some variant of 'they deserve it for being perverts'. You kinda can't afford to not police your own.
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