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Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”
Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.
Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!
For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.
For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.
Drag =/= transgender. Not even close.
It’s kind of interesting the extent to which trans and drag get lumped together.
Not by social conservatives- ‘it’s gay and super weird and a hot topic for no apparent reason’ is kind of our dominant thought process about both things, and it makes a lot of sense that we’d get confused between the two. But progressives seem like they should know better- to my understanding most drag queens are cis gay men, and progressives at least claim that is a very different thing from trans.
Maybe it's just that they share the same type of aesthetic unpleasantness for what would appear to be the same reasons? The vast majority of obvious MtFs are (trivially) either not trying to pass or stuck in the uncanny valley, and they know it. The unshaved body hair does it every time.
The ones that can reliably pull off
acting whitethe appearance of the opposite gender, or just don't do it in public, have a higher chance of not being seen as a problem... or at least, that's my read on how "yes, I'm different, but from my appearance and mannerisms I'm also not going out of my way to intentionally alienate you" goes over.I accept the claim that was made here some time ago that they're both womanface; it's just that one's a caricature of the appearance and the other's a caricature of the social role too. (The denial of a gender binary yet acceptance of transgender as a concept is not something I've ever seen a convincing answer for.) Forcing either at gunpoint is bad faith.
But at the end of the day, it's "I'm trying to have you believe that dressing in a way suggestive of forcing everyone else around me to make accommodations for me and my special brand of ugliness, and that ugliness shall not be questioned ever", or to be a bit plainer, "in the Prisoner's Dilemma, I come with the Defect button already pushed and am of the faction that wants to force you at gunpoint to hit Co-operate".
And... that's why I'm leery of this faction's weirdness. It's definitely benign on an object level/in a vacuum, but at the subject level it's a weapon, and the fact that it's a weapon is intentionally ignored by the people using it as one kind of makes me sympathetic to the side that will come and take their gun away, so to speak. Guess I'm not that great of a liberal, but the best weapon against liberals thought is the Paradox of Tolerance.
There are many genders and a person can transition from their gender assigned at birth to any of them? I don't see any internal contradiction.
My own extremely fringe position that alienates every side in this discussion is that there are two genders and a person can transition from one to the other.
I believe the term you are looking for is "meta level".
Trans is very specifically about claiming one's gender is directly opposite other biological sex; gender dysphoria isn't (yet) claimed to people becoming intersex even though that's the practical result of the hormone therapies.
I'll do you one better: the genders are "capital" (value-by-existence) and "labor" (value-by-doing). Men-presenting-as-woman are transcapital, so they're distrusted by both genders (as they're assuming privileges not provided by their biology); woman-presenting-as-man are translabor, so they're generally accepted (as they're ditching those privileges to compete against those that are biologically predisposed to succeed in labor).
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