Dyssonance

There are a great many of these that many people have on a daily basis. Myself included, and for me, personally, the key is that I sometimes need to be reminded of them.

There are people who believe that if the whole world were to become socialist, that everyone would be happy.  THere are others who believe that if the whole world were capitalist, then everyone would be happy.

Neither are right.

There are some gals who believe that all transsexuals should be left out of some mythical umbrella. THe are some who believe that all transsexuals should be under the same mythical umbrella.

Neither are right.

There are some folks who think that only transsexuals seek surgical intervention, and some that believe that only transsexuals have a strong urge.  They are wrong.

All of which is to show that unreasonable expectations are something we in the trans community face a lot of the time.

I am a person who is unreasonably bothered by unreasonable expectations.

THe one that this article is about, in particular, is about the unreasonable expectation of trans folk that spaces operated by cis folk are always going to be safe and friendly and respectful and aware of fine nuance within the enormous variety of Trans experience.

What gets me is that in so doing they use generally exclusionary arguments, and they forget that those people really do give a damn about us, and that when people are attacked as a general rule of thumb they will get defensive.

So you end up with trans folk, who have are keenly aware and very sensitive to trans issues interacting with people who are literally blind, and they do their best but they are human beings and flawed ones.  And that means they are going to make mistakes.

Now, when you make a mistake with trans stuff and you are an ally, you generally get a bigger ration of crap — unless you are trans yourself, in which case you get a lesser ration of crap and then generally ignored or painted as some sort of psycho monster from hell.

Even if they are a psycho monster from hell.

I’m not going to focus on the psycho monsters, though, I want to look at the way the trans community as a whole responds to online issues, because its also a reflection of how they respond to offline issues as a whole.

Reflections are not perfect, and they can be subtly altered, but the image is still there and recognizable, and that’s why I say refelction.

What we do, all too often, is withdraw.

We have our huge dogpile (and we aren’t much different there from any other group, as they all dogpile , its kinda the way the internet works) and we righteously rip the crap out of the site in question and then we go behind the scenes and we tell everyone how terrible that place is and how it works against trans folk and then we slowly but surely start the process of making anyone who does still go to those places look bad.

God forbid if they actually defend the location.  Then they become a psycho monster from hell.

This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

That’s an old phrase that people often forget has a very specific meaning.  But its important to stop from time to time and look at what it means.

In this case, it means tossing the good out with the bad,  Getting rid of something valuable just because it sits in something without value.

And I say this because it has even more measure.

Babies are annoying as all hell at times.

Yes, really.  They are fussy, they like things their way, they demand your attention, they do stuff like pull on your hair or grab your lip, they smell something fierce if you can’t get their diaper changed.

ANd babies get into trouble.  They do things that can make you wonder why in all the universe did you ever consider having this inconsolable lead weight around your neck.

I happen to like babies.  Even better when they belong to someone else. I may not be looking forward to babies in my future (and thankfully so), but I’ve had babies in my past. Lots of them. Not all my babies, thankfully, but still lots of them.

But that liking them doesn’t mean I’m not aware that even the most wonderful soul in the world has times when they want to be as far away from babies as possible.

These websites, they are like babies.  All of them.  And, like babies, they are growing.  Some of them, the biggest, may have been around for 1o years.  Most haven’t even gotten past the 6 year mark. Here’s a scary yardstick for you:  I’m just going to run rampant and say that one year is about one month in terms of babies for websites.

So those oldest blogs are about the age of a 10 month old baby in this measure.

And the yardstick is trans awareness.

Now, I’m not saying that’s right.  I’m saying that’s what it is.  Its a really rough measure, but even if you assign a one year to one year correlation, then they are even worse — the oldest one’s are at best 10 and most of them are preschool age toddlers, and you think babies are bad, holy shit…

And they have a lot of learning to do. Lots and Lots of learning.  And they are not trans, so they don’t already have years of learning behind them, and sometimes the poor things literally cannot understand what it is like being trans.

Now, what happens when a parent gets mad at a child and leaves that child?

All kinds of things, right?  Often, we tend to think of bad things, right?

Well, when we abandon a particular site, that’s what we are doing, as we are indeed the people who are babysitting them when it comes to trans stuff.

Its always kinda funny to me when the psycho monsters see the value of these sites more clearly than the trans community as a whole does.

Its this stuff that led me to note, for example, that both PHB and Bilerico suck.  Because when it comes to trans stuff, they both do. I’m willing to say Bilerico is a tad bit better at it, but then they have more trans folk there as primaries than PHB does (seeing as how it really only has Autumn).

The same applies for other sites.

Now, I say this, and yet I’m glad that for the last year or so many sites have come under scrutiny for doing some really dumb things. But to take them off your list is take them off the education list as well — so they won’t get better.

ZThis is one of those damned if you do damned if you don’t situations. Education is good for the community, but it places the indiviudal at risk, and therefore isn’t really all that good for the individual.

Nobody *has* to educate, but someone does. Hopefully that someone doing it has an idea and is reasonably versed in trans stuff — but if there are no trans people there to make it clear, then there will not be any education there will not be any improvement, and finally it will be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

On the other hand, if we just keep going and speaking out, consistently, then we will have a far greater impact than if we go when they are just being toads.

Because they will always be toads.  The key is to make them the sort that turn into princes and princesses.

Or, more fittingly, to raise them the way we hopefully raise our children: with a little more compassion and understanding, instead of abandonment.

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