I’ve been a bit quiet lately because, quite frankly, my mental health is a mess and my day job is absolutely kicking the shit out of me. But, with the anti-trans goings-on of the last few days, I feel the need to speak out. Cuz this is some bullshit, y’all. [Thread]

I’ve been a trans woman in media spaces for over 6 years now. I’ve written about a whole lot of things in a whole lot of places. I’m not going to take apart Rowling’s or Harper’s bullshit here, bc if you wanna see me do that work, you gotta pay me.

But, stuff needs addressing.

There’e a pattern to this bullshit. A specific, calculated pattern. It’s all essentially the same argument that anti-trans people have been making for MANY years, and it’s ALL BEEN THOROUGHLY DEBUNKED. But every time we make a little progress, they find a new way to package it.

They know they’ve largely lost the battle over adult trans folks, so they’ve packaged it up as an age-old panic button: “Protecting The Children!”.

The dominant culture’s social morality has a particular fetishization for “dangers to children” that’s been weaponized over & over

In particular, they’ve weaponized that fear against anything perceived of as “sexual deviance”. In the past, that’s included things like masturbation, safer sex, birth control, HPV vaccines, and [most famously] LGB identities.

Whole papers can (and have) been written on this.

In a way, it’s weirdly ironic to see “protecting young queer people” used as a cudgel against trans folks, since arguments for protecting kids FROM queerness are still prevalent.

But, the fact is that’s still a tool of enforcing social controls/conformity through morality panic

Here’s the really exhausting part:

The strategy is basically to force trans people into CONSTANTLY defending the most basic tenets of our existence. And trans youth are a particular potent area to push on because WE know how vulnerable they are, because WE were trans youth once

By constantly framing our existence & legitimacy as a subject for debate, they force us to clash with them (what choice do we have?!), and when our hurt, exhausted, incredibly vulnerable communities cries out in frustration/anger, they point and say “Look how unhinged they are!”

If you’ve not spent your entire life being hated, denigrated, gaslit, and forced to justify your existence, you cannot understand what it takes out of you. Expecting us to politely engage in “debates” until every human on earth is safely convinced is ludicrous.

And as I said, trans youth are a very hot button topic for us because WE know how vulnerable they are. WE know how little agency they have to argue for themselves against these forces. And we know many parents WON’T go to bat for them.

And the antis know this, too.

And if all of this were coming from the spiteful group of abusive t*rfs from 5-6 years ago, we could probably just ignore it. But when people with enormous platforms start pushing this garbage, we can’t just turn a blind eye because it’s affecting POLICY now.

Worse yet...it’s A WEDGE. The anti-trans forces know if they can successfully convince people that transness is a danger to youth, then they can use that to keep us marginalized. Then any discussion of or information about transness becomes essentially 18+ only and gains a taboo.

It’s exactly identical to how LGB topics were handled. It will allow them to codify transness as something you *choose*, not something you *are*...placing us in a perpetual state of marginalia. It will also force LGB folks to choose whether to side with “deviance” or assimilation

LGB folks are the only somewhat solid allies we have, and if they successfully sever us (like they’ve been trying to do for YEARS), trans people are absolutely hosed.

They basically already did the same thing to sex workers.

So yeah, this is all SCARY AND EXHAUSTING.

Also, I’m happy to work with editors interested in a deep dive into this, but it likely won’t happen.

But there are all kinds of folks making a killing at the cottage industry of mercilessly attacking trans people for the sake of “debate”.

To piggyback onto this for a minute...I don’t *want* to be talking about this. I didn’t really get into writing to do trans political commentary, trans policy wonk stuff, etc. I’m really a queer culture and humor writer at my core.

My interests are in how we tell good authentic queer & trans stories in media, the interesting quirks of life in the LGBTQ community, queer history, etc.

But trans writers have little choice but to engage in the defense of our community, and it feels like all I get to do.