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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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This is not a good simile, regardless of whether one is on the "trans women are real women, bigots!" side of the fence or the opposite one.

To equate step-parents with trans persons, the more relevant comparison would be someone who lives three doors down from you declaring that they are the step-parent of your kids, and anyone who objects on the grounds of "you're not the biological parent" is a -phobe and an -ist. "Legally you're not the parent" "Well if it's just about a piece of paper I can always apply to adopt them!" "You're not my partner, you have nothing to do with this family!" "This is discrimination and exclusion, I'm a parent if I feel like a parent and I have always longed to be a parent and identified as a parent! I've taken parenting classes! I've read books about parenting!"

Why are you trying to stop me running in this race belonging to this family, you bigot?

Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people? While I admit to having limited first-hand experience, that limited experience is with people who made a sincere effort to transition across both cultural dimensions as well as physically. They don't go around shrieking at people, they actually don't seem to have interactions that involve anyone suggesting anything about their gender because they (mostly) look the part of their transition (notably, these are F->M, which does generally seem more physically convincing). When someone meets Mike, Mike doesn't have to insist up and down that they're totally a guy and explain their pronouns, because Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps. Whatever the philosophical position might be on Mike's sex at birth, Mike really doesn't have to yell at people about the matter or make claims that seem completely misaligned with other people's observed reality.

Of course, I'm well aware of the public examples of histrionics, and the evident madness of quite a few non-passing trans people does complicate the conversation, but I think people like Mike are actually pretty analogous to stepmoms.

Mike is small and unthreatening. No one looks to "clock" a transman because he's not winning Man of the Year Awards, male olympic medals, or scaring anyone with his genitals in a bathroom. It's not that somehow Mike just is a man, its mostly that people don't care because his identity doesn't revolve around forcing other people to acknowledge and validate his fetish.

Until it is, and then people are just as angry at Mike as Dylan. When Mike yells at gay men on twitter or tries to cancel them because they say no to vaginas, or where Mike's family finds the idea of calling their daughter "he" ridiculous, the screeching is just as loud.

Exactly. Transmen pass a lot easier since nobody's taking huge efforts to tell the difference between petite, scrawny (or frankly in a lot of cases, rubenesque-but-short) guys and girls if they're signaling to the world they're a male through outfit or grooming choices.

It's not that somehow Mike just is a man, its mostly that people don't care because his identity doesn't revolve around forcing other people to acknowledge and validate his fetish.

I think another factor that plays into this is that physical instrumentality is an extremely important element/contributing factor towards positioning in male status hierarchies. Trans men, by virtue of the same physiological differences that leave trans women demolishing their cis competitors, almost universally end up on the bottom of these hierarchies as a result. And what happens to men on the bottom of those hierarchies? They largely become invisible. Nobody pays attention to the modal trans man because as a man he is a loser in so many different categories, and people largely don't pay attention to male losers(and get annoyed when they have to), nor do they offer them much sympathy.

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