On The Antioch Review’s Racist, Transphobic, Uninformed “defense” of trans people

Long title, but it covers the high points, and folks, you knew it was coming if I was back on the internet. As a note, this is a long post. I am working on a way to enable pdf downloading again.

So, first off, the source material about to be looked at. This is a link to that source material. Provided for reference.

So what is the Antioch Review, and why do they matter? This is an important question since if we are going to be dealing with the idea of this nasty drivel, we should look at who provided it.

Ever heard of the the phrase “self fulfilling prophecy”? If so, you have Antioch Review to thank, since they published Merton’s article in 1948 that gave us that phrase and its meaning.

It was established just as World War II became a thing, in Ohio — a bastion of middle American Heartland understanding. It is a publication of Antioch College — hence the name. As a college, Antioch promotes social justice efforts, and does so both directly through educational programming, and also through student body efforts.

It isn’t Ivy League, but it isn’t much more than a step down.  And the Review is a top tier publication of liberal and Literary power that is rare these days.

The editor is Robert S. Fogarty. He is aware of the particular problem his team has created. I know this because he has written and posted a piece on the website for the Review. You can read it here.

One of three excerpts of that piece:

The Review is a long-standing literary magazine—not a scholarly academic journal—that prints creative fiction, essays and poetry on a wide variety of topics.

The second of three excerpts from that piece:

Perhaps more importantly, I sincerely regret any pain and hurt that the publishing of this piece has caused to members of our own community, transgender people, the LGBTQ community, and their families and supporters.

The final Excerpt:

Over its 75-year history, the Review has published a number of essays on identity and controversial cultural and historical subjects. As a literary magazine the Review does not encourage readers to accept at face value the ideas and opinions of the pieces housed within it pages. Rather, it encourages critical debate and dialogue. The Review welcomes responses, critiques, and letters to the editor regarding the Daniel Harris piece.

Those can be sent to submissions@antiochreview.org. The Review will publish a selection of critiques on its website and in future issues of the magazine to encourage and further the discussion.

Now, The Author of the piece is Daniel Harris. He is a different story. The Antioch Review has n gone to lengths to disassociate itself from his rather, um, bothersome views.

He wrote this essay that has caused such a furor. My friend Brynn Tannehill wrote a piece about it and the deal with midwestern thinking.

One guy. One guy who is generally referred to as a “journalist” and “cultural critic”. Who wrote a book called “The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture”.

Which he describes thusly: “By focusing as a test case on the changes that have occurred in the gay community, I describe the gradual dissolution of the ethnic diversity of a country that demands from its minorities nothing less than a voluntary act of subcultural suicide.”

Pretty impressive for a white guy to take it on himself to describe something related to “Ethnic diversity”. Especially given the book is written as a reaction to the mainstreaming of gay culture into American Culture.

Especially so when you remember that a huge chunk of Gay culture comes from, well, Trans culture. IT gets even more intersting when you realize that this guy, faced withe the break up of his relationship, turned to Drag, and makes a point of noting his six foot seven height in the process. That experience also became a book.

Diary of  Drag Queen (Amazon Books link that I do not get money for referencing)

But not just *any* kind of drag queen. Nope, this is from the link above:

Then Harris discovered for the first time dozens of men of all ages and sizes online shopping for sex partners in cyberspace. But he soon found that more than just gay men trolled gay sex sites; plenty of “straight” guys sought male sex buddies online, too, but often with one proviso: their male partners had to dress in women’s clothing. Although Harris had never before done drag and had no prior interest in women’s accessories, he set to work learning the ropes of cross-dressing once easy access to this pool of handsome, desirable and frequently off-limit men was made available to him. Diary of a Drag Queen is a revealing, comic, and sexually charged chronicle of hundreds of one-night stands in high heels.

Well…

Ok, some of you may not know what I did for a long time.  Some of you probably have no clue that I spent a lot of time, energy and effort dealing with trans gals trying to make a living and get off the street at the same time, and many of them were gals who were new to or who had been doing for decades, what he describes.

He was a date thief.  For those of you who don’t know what that means, don’t stress it. For those of you that do, well, it gives you an idea of just how little this man knows about “ethnic diversity and minorities driven to suicide.”

This also goes a long way to explain many of his ideas that he speaks to in the article. His experience with our community is going to be colored by that experience of his, and his sense of entitlement and the way he tends to look down on “ethnic Minorities” also shows that he never really took the time to learn anything about us, or our struggles, or the lives we lead, other than in that tiny segment of a community where he was, essentially, pretending to be a trans woman.

I have no doubt that some of his gay companions in those romps were straight men who were actually seeking a trans woman. Frequently to top. But didn’t know how to express it.

I can say that because I know a lot of men like that. They annoy me, but I know them. I have spent many hours in conversation with them, with the gals they pursue, and I have a ton of notes on them that went into various studies and quite a lot of data on them that someday I will do something with.

Kirkus Review notes of the book: 

Harris is not a transvestite or a cross-dresser, just “a shameless opportunist indulging in a fantasy rampant among gay men”: that straight men are sexier than gay men—more robust, more macho—and that they make ideal mates. “When one is taught from birth that gay men are morally reprehensible, diseased pariahs, child molesters, one may not want to select one’s Prince Charming from abominations of the same ilk,” he explains.

I want you to think on this for a moment.

So we have a gay man who dresses up in women’s clothes to meet a fantasy of his and of other men — straight men — out of an opportunistic and base desire.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like the standard line that trans women are gay men too scared to be gay, or that they are “really gay”?

On Goodreads, we find these nuggets:

At the same time, the underlying story is a rather sad and depressing account of a man confronting the remorseless advance of time, the realization that his life has not exactly lived up to his own expectations, and a crushing sense of lonliness which he attempts to stave off through a series of one-night stands. – Rick

It was not what I expected at all and could never grow to like the author – Michelle

The narrator of this “diary” was unlikeable, condescending and FULL
of self-loathing. – Jason

Over on Amazon we have:

A fascinating memoir that describes, with great intelligence, self-awareness and self-deprecating humor, a creative response on the part of the author to the dilemma of the aging gay male (of which I am one), at the same time offering an interesting anthropological study of the behavior and motivations of the men whom the author meets in the process. -A

So, yeah, limited appeal, mostly to other older, white gay men going through a later life search for love.

Hey, I just lost my husband, and I’m starting to feel the lonely and I’m in my 50’s. I get it. Shit sucks. The idea of dating in a world where youth is everything has me stocking up on wrinkle reducers and thinking Botox.

And I look good for my age.

Now, he has written other books. But what I brought all of this up to point out, in my 1500 words thus far, is that this is an older, white, male, cis, gay man who is very much a product of everything from the 70’s through the 90’s in the gay scene.

A gay scene that includes that really incredibly common trope mentioned earlier. A gay community that wrote Trans people out of its history, that campaigned against trans rights, that refused to even acknowledge the effort of trans people during the AIDS crisis, and that still tries to claim some of our icons for themselves.  This is the period when a film about a relationship between a trans woman and a straight guy is turned into an appeal for kindness towards gay folks, people.

He comes from that, and this was his main experience, his great exposure?

Hell, no wonder he’s so damned wrong about us that in his uninformed mind, he’s being pretty decent when he says it is a mass delusion.

He isn’t saying anything new. Indeed, that’s the problem. All of the above is important to understand to put what he’s saying in context, and realize this is where this man is coming from.

He is not alone. Ok, yes, the Breitbart team is totally loving the whole idea of a gay man trashing trans people and then getting trashed in return (though they say it far less pleasantly), but those are the folks at Brietbart, who couldn’t recognize Truth and Honesty if they needed to save their own lives.

They actively seek the end of civil rights for other people — so not exactly decent sources.

But there are a lot of gay men who think exactly the same way. I can think of one who now seems to be saying the right things but still has a really slimy way about him when he does it that was recently featured on a popular comedy-opinion show hosted by someone who regularly makes “tranny” jokes about the third guest who was their so she could argue against us.

I have friends who think that way that are gay men. They won’t say it to my face like that, because they know I have better nails than they do. But I hear it from them still.

Even more critical, there are a lot of gay men who will not go up against someone popular or good looking who makes an error in their own community, because they happen to think the same way I do since the gay community got through eating its own during the aforementioned AIDS disaster.

That’s not even counting the straight guys and other liberals who think that way — and in no small part because of the mainstreaming of gay culture that our aforementioned author wrote about.

So now we have a stage set, a context with which to analyze and look at the target, and at least some insight into the basis from which the author operates.

All critical things to know when you are about to eviscerate someone’s work.

So now, we get to the brass tacks.

Those who choose to alter or even mask their gender merit full protection under the law merely because their decisions, while they may divest them of breasts and birth names, do not strip them of their humanity.

That is how he opens the piece. From the get go — the very first line — he already sounds like the current generation of 16 to 32 year old “TERFs” who are trying really hard to deal with social media while hlding views that trans women are pretend, faking it, and generally trying to be horrible people.

He says “alter or even mask”.  Trans women are not altering or even masking. Trans men are not altering or masking. Genderqueer, gender fluid, androgyne, the rest are not masking or altering.

We are, factually, revealing. Every single study done in the last 16 years shows that. An enormous number of those done prior to that do the same. You have to go back to the 1980’s to find some that show otherwise, and they are all discredited now.

The first line — not even the first sentence as a whole — reveals that he does not understand or know even the slightest bit about current understanding of trans people. He is, literally, talking without doing what a journalist is generally expected to do.

I don’t think journalist is a good term for him, though. I think essayist is. Essayists aren’t held to the same rigorous standard for researching what they say. They get to have opinions.

Opinions which are based on falsehoods — such as his — are worthless and without merit.

Opinions which are based on falsehoods are worthless and without merit.

Now, I have an admittedly low tolerance for outright falsehoods. I can handle spin, I can handle elaboration and exaggeration, I can even take a little bit of the ole namby pamby sidestepping.

So I will keep going.

The rest of the sentence lays out his opinion that we should still have the full protection of the law.  The basis for that statement is that our decisions do not strip us of our humanity.

Gonna parapharse this somewhat:

Gay people deserve rights because choosing to be gay doesn’t strip them of their humanity.

Wait, no, I mean, Trans people deserve rights because chopping off their dicks doesn’t make them less than human.

Damn, sounds so much less shitty the way he says it. Spin is an amazing thing.

Well, no fuckin shit, sherlock.  The problem there, though, ‘that you think we deserve rights despite being a bunch of fucked up people. The problem is that you think we are a bunch of fucked up people.

Something I would think someone who studied gay culture enough to be able to write a book talking about its mainstreaming while ignoring the fact that gay culture is not a homogeneous whole but a fractured and segmented system divided by class, race, wealth, and — hold on to your horses — gender.

Some folks would say sex, not gender, but since this is something that takes place in the social sphere, we are going to call it what it is in order to avoid confusion among those who actually know what the fuck they are talking about.

And if I seem a bit arrogant and entitled myself there, well, hell, that’s because I am arrogant and I earned the knowledge the hard way. Then I wrote it into an easier to digest form and posted it here under “On fundamentals’ — go read.

He could have just written this sentence:

Those who are transgender merit full protection under the law merely because of their humanity.

He chose not to, though. He is an essayist. Since, well, really, this blog is the work of an essayist, I can tell you that when I say things like “No fuckin shit, sherlock” I do it for a very specific reason.  Essayists are folks that use words to stir thought and inspire or make you think or give you something they hope will be useful to you or to make you laugh.

Words do not just fall willy nilly to the page without thought — if they do, you are a piss poor essayist. He is not. He is an award winning essayist.

SO he chose those words. Intentionally. Willingly, demonstrably wanting to carry an idea forward and since this is the start of an essay, he did so with the goal of calling back to it, since he has a better and stronger grasp of form than I do.

I am a very wordy long form writer getting around to hacking up a piece that a lot of people knew I was going to have to say something about. That I do other things like work with actual real life trans people who are going through the worst stuff of their lives and are measurably harmed by this sort of contrived crap of his doesn’t matter.

What matters is the essay. And if you missed the joke here, wow, did you catch the others earlier? Humor is essential when doing this kind of thing. Alcohol is optional.

TGs face violence, murder, mass unemployment, homelessness, poverty, rampant HIV infection, inadequate healthcare, depression, and, at alarmingly high rates, suicide.

This is one of the giveaways about his experiences, combined with evidence that he at least pays some attention to the major organizations and their publications.

I really hope that he attends a Creating Change when I do and we can sit down and have a chat.

“TG” is a fairly innocuous term, though many in the community have returned to TS when abbreviating in that manner but, for the most part, the bulk of the community uses “trans”.

Transgender is what is used when you are dealing with uneducated cis folk. But not TG. TG is what is used on dating sites, sex work, Craigslist and support forums and fiction websites. Areas which many in the more wealthy background part of the trans community would prefer be ignored, but which people like me recognize as really kinda every day and proof in the pudding.

Indeed, you have to be pretty out of it to use TG, or — more accurately I suspect in this case — used to a certain area of interaction.

But he does get the rest right. Indeed, he pretty much uses the order of the injustice at every turn survey.

But ok.

Many commentators have singled out tolerance for this most vulnerable part of the population as the final frontier of civil rights, a new contest against bigotry and homophobia, one it would be irresponsible for both politicians and everyday citizens not to address.

This is true. Many commentators have said this.

Notably, I disagree with them, and therefore, with it.  I do not see it as a final frontier, and I do not see it as a new contest against homophobia.

But let’s look at that use of the concept of Homophobia instead of Transphobia.

Remember, essayists use specific words for a purpose. So why would he use Homophobia when the issue is transphobia?

Oh, we answered that already, when we looked into his background, didn’t we?

This gay man, who dressed up and had sex as a woman, thinks that trans people are gay men, who dress up as women (ostensibly, and one is going out on a limb to presume he thinks it though it is statistically likely, for sex).

So, since he thinks that we are, basically, just really, really flaming gay people, to him, it is about Homosexuality. About the aversion to, the anxiety about, and the intense dislike of Homosexuals and Homosexuality.

How predictable.

Meanwhile, it tells us that he is utterly missing the point and proceeds not to understand or see what is right before him because he only has his own, personal, limited understanding of situation.

Which he is sharing in a publication that defended him getting through their vetting process (which obviously was blind to trans issues) and let it loose, thereby tarnishing its reputations and making him the rightful laughingstock he is.

Brothers, sisters, and siblings, I give you a man who does not realize that trans people are not distinct from gay people, and that, on learning they are, will likely become a drop the T sort because of the backlash that he is receiving.

He will, for example, not understand why I said brothers, sisters, and siblings. Something I tell other people to say all the time.

That’s kinda sad. FOr him. FOr us it is just another in a hundred year old fight to get gay men to see us as something that pale imitations of them.

A fight, I note, we won in the places that matter, but he didn’t get that memo. Which makes me wonder that if he wasn’t in the places that matter, just where was he?

Oh, wait.  Yeah. That book he wrote.

Ok, maybe I am being a little too hard on him. Perhaps a touch harsh.  I am sure that if he finds it so and it matters enough to him, he will let me know.

Though, given how little trouble he went to learn anything about us before screwing up this badly (and keep in mind, we are just finishing with the first paragraph and he’s already demonstrated this much malfeasance to us, the rest gets worse), I doubt he will give a damn about what I say enough to comment.

Besides, if he does, he’s got some cisplainin to do.

Moving on to the second paragraph…

And yet just as the issue has come to the fore of public awareness, TGs have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty.

One sentence, and he manages to lie, mislead, defame, reframe, restructure, demonize, and attack an entire class of people.

People different from himself. Part of that diversity of minority populations.

What do we learn…

We learn that the proper use of pronouns in the English language is a triviality to him, despite it being something we have to learn at a very young age and that is taught to us.

I suppose she’s right.  It isn’t like pronouns are something essential for us to understand him. They could have a point there, if ze wasn’t so damned thickheaded, defensive, and outright lazy about it.

Oh, look, most common pronouns, used and all referring to him. Wasn’t hard at all. But it does make it difficult to understand who is being referenced, since gender is such a deep and critical part of our culture.

So let’s look, shall we? He is a man. A gay man That’s how he describes himself. Those of you who are long time readers will know that I don’t use “identify”.  I use describe.

It matters, and like everything else, eventually people will get it and catch up.

That means that using pronouns other than he, him, his would be the thing to do.

Doing a quick google search on images of him, he definitely presents as a guy.

So we now know his pronouns. Someone we haven’t encountered and that isn’t a trans person in the public eye.

Hey — that wasn’t Byzantine (neither the “overly complex” reference nor the traditional Byzantine empire in nature, since, well, they didn’t use English). It does not appear to have much to do — either metaphorically as he suggests or in the more literal sense — with Royalty titles.

As a result, we can say, firmly, he lied about how the protocol is as byzantine as royal titles.

But he also said patronizing.

You know what is patronizing? A dude that writes book length essays saying that being bothered enough to use women’s pronouns for women is too complicated.

Because, and guys, sorry for this, he — like nearly all of them — is not talking about trans men when it comes to such things. He is talking about my siblings – those who are both men and women, neither men nor women, and assorted variations thereby.

But what he is thinking about when he writes that is trans women. We know because of all that crap we went through above.

Like nearly every person who has an issue with trans people, his issue can be boiled down to the idea that trans women are men.

You know what promoting that idea is? Violence. Which means that his entire piece, which starts with the description of us deserving protection under the law (and I will get to that in my response to him on Wednesday), is an act of violence.

Now we, have shown that he lies about it being complicated, we know that he lies about it being patronizing, but what else did he say there?

Ambushed. Debate. Entangled. Snare.

What, we jumped out and surprised them while they debated our ability to exist and we tied them up and then tricked them into having sex with us — that last because, sorry, but this is so much a dogwhistle for the trope of “Its A Trap” that I am actually laughing about it because if he wasn’t being a dick about it it would be genuinely funny.

Creatively funny.

So let’s unpack those bits.

We didn’t “ambush” anyone. Trans people have been saying they deserve human, civil, and civic rights since the mid 1800’s in the modern western European sense, and pretty much as long as there have been people.

No, what we did was step up to the mic when it was finally offered after different individuals sent their lives in pursuit of their fields to get into a place where they could be offered that microphone.

So he lied about that.

Debate. We jumped into a debate about us. What, we are supposed to sit back and let other people argue about wether we should be allowed to exist or not?  Did gay folks “ambush the debate” about themselves? Did people of color such as myself Ambush the debate about us?

Succinctly: fuck you and your patronizing bullshit. You do not have the right to debate my existence or the existence of my brothers, sisters, and siblings without us at the table.

So kiss my ass. This isn’t an issue of free speech — you have the right to say and write what you want, even this, but that right does not give you free ride to do so without folks climbing up your bunghole for being a twit.

That Debate was about us. People. part of that Diverse Minority — and that includes that ethnic minority bit where you so cunningly equated gay stuff with the struggles of black people and spoke about how gay culture is being erased even though Trans and Black gay people basically created the very culture you were whining about going away and you sure as fuck don’t seem to mind it, you racist turd.

Oops.  It got away from me there.

Or, given my earlier speaking about essayists, did it?

It is patronizing to talk about a class of persons and debate the value of their existence without knowing a fucking thing that is true about them.

We didn’t ambush anyone — we stepped up and called you the liars that you are and that hurt your little feefees and made you defensive about it and so you kept trying to argue with the folks who don’t hate us a little like you do but who hate us a whole lot using the same lies and half truths and misinformation and outright bullshit, making it a turkeyshoot on both sides.

It’s the OK Corral — a bunch of assholes with guns shootin at each other until someone’s left.

Not decent people having a reasoned, informed debate.

Do not fool yourself. You cannot have honest debate without honesty, and honesty requires at least truth, and if you do not know what you are talking about — and while I get that you think you do, factually, you do not — then you are not being honest and you are not having a debate.

“entangled” and “snared” — the only tangles are the lies you have been weaving n your own, and the only snares are the ones you set yourself. Because you don’t know what you are talking about but think you do.

That’s not just you, personally, either — that’s the collective “cis” world. If they are not trans people standing up there, then they fall into that unless they have taken the time themselves.

To learn about us. All the messy, ugly, happy, wonderful, terrible, sad, exciting, amazing things about us. We are not a singularity in your space; we are, by ourselves, amazingly diverse in a way that you cannot understand because your ability to reflect the world is too limited.

They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically, our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their sex.

Cisness is the state of awareness or condition in society of someone who does conform in a majority of aspects to the way their society or culture sees them as behaving and living in relation to their culture’s social construction of physiological sex, usually due to an absence of variance between their physical sex and one or both of their social sex identity and/or internal sex identity. It exists at the same level as awareness of self, and it is, itself, an awareness, but because it is not at variance, is often unnoticed and unremarked.

A cisgender person is a person for whom cisness is the state of awareness.

It has NOTHING to do with questioning or not. With acceptance or not.

So, right off the bat, you lied yet again.  This is a habit with you. Lying.

Cisgender is not a pejorative — unless you are a balls out transphobe who doesn’t know what it means.

oh, wait…

Cis is not about gay people, by the way.

Cis is not about your oppression. It is not about how women have it hard or men have it easy. It is not about your race’s struggle to be treated as human. It is not about misogyny or ableism.

It is about how people treat trans people, and you may not try to change that into something else.

You likely buy into the current thing of calling white girls “becky” as “racist” — because its just as damn fool a thing to do and just as ignorant.

If you are insulted by it, then I certainly hope you will defend those who are insulted by being called straight.
Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders

we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas, decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness, or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful) illusion as narrow‑mindedness.

Just going to point out that right here is where things go so far off the rails that getting the train back is going to require five years of apologies.

“Curiosity about their bodies as prurience”.

Unless you are in a relationship with a trans person, their body is none of your fucking business. The idea that it might not be prurience is seriously troubling; it is intensely frightening that you feel that entitled, that you think you deserve to know simply because of your curiosity, what our bodies look like.

Guess what?  My body look like every other human being’s body on this planet. So do all the other trans people’s bodies.

You know why?

Because they are fucking people, not zooology experiments.

“illusion”?

What illusion? You think I am not a woman? You think I am some man pretending?

You think I am like you?

Come on over for tea, daring. We’ll have a fabulous time. Three hours with me and you’ll realize I am Nothing Like You.

I am, at this point, beginning to question your humanity, because, like you, I have successfully written an essay that strips your humanity from you.

So I’m not even sure we can start there on the things in common chart.

I am a woman. I am female. You, personally, do not have the authority, the power, the right, the place, the skill, the knowledge, the most meager of modicums of ability to change that.

It isn’t illusion. It is fact.

I do not care if you want to accept that fact or not. Truly, I don’t. What I care about is that you do not get to use that disbelief as grounds to be a violent fuckwit.

When you talk about illusions, they are yours.

No matter how much you think you can argue that they belong to me, I promise you that I can not only undo it, I can do so while proving how indecent a human being you are in the process.

That is what an expert can do. That is what happens when you know what you are talking about.

Now your next bit goes into the Piers Morgan thing.

A case in point is the now infamous episode of Pierce Morgan Live in which transgender activist Janet Mock objected to the headline that appeared at the bottom of the screen, “Was a boy until 18”— a fact that, while incontrovertible, was apparently tactless and naïve, the correct caption being that she had always been a woman and had been born, not a boy, but “a baby.” Mock organized a kind of witch hunt in which she accused the liberal and tolerant Pierce Morgan of having, in her words, “misgendered” her merely because he had questioned her about her past and leapt to the conclusion—medical records would surely bear this out—that she had in her youth changed her gender.

So you are referencing that time when Pierce Morgan Live intentionally called her a man, even though doing so is an act of violence, and she didn’t find out about until after the show was done.

As a note, you lied again. She did not organize any witch hunt. Also, Morgan is neither tolerant nor liberal. He is a performer. Who tries to upset people so they will watch him. We call that “shock jock” journalism in the US, and it does quite well as TMZ has proven. You, as well — I mean, hey, look at all the attention you are getting now for opening your mouth and being a twit.

Morgan likes gay folks. He does not like trans people. He was transphobic before, which is part of why Janet Mock went on the show — to try and inform him so that he would stop being a twit.

You left that part out. Wonder why.

It wasn’t tactless and naive. It was violent and ignorant.

Words, again. They matter. A lot.

Such bullying interception of public debate should alarm anyone who seriously wants to understand the issues involved, which, while they may affect the transgender community most directly, are by no means their exclusive province, to be broached only by those on whom they most intimately impinge. TGs cannot expect to dictate to us the terms of the discussion, for we are thinking people, too, and nothing, notwithstanding many activists’ attempts to embarrass us into uncritical consensus, can stop us from thinking our thoughts.

I have to wonder how it was you managed to lift this off a teenaged radical feminist without her permission. I say that because it is precisely the kind of dogwhistle one encounters from these deeply misinformed and uninformed people.

So let me address the whole of your points here real quick.

There is no question that the issues affect a much broader swath of the population than transgender people. However, when one is talking about transgender rights, about the lives of transgender people, we are not speaking about those broader issues. We are speaking about trans people. And if you speak about a deeply oppressed minority population where folks say things like they live in an often unsuccessful illusion but suddenly, magically, want to make it about something bigger than them, well, you are being a creepy, dishonest dirtbag who probably should pull his head out of his ass in order to free his foot from his mouth.

You are thinking people, and, as such, one of the things thinking people when folks tell them about their lives and point out how those folks are wrong about something is go “hey, maybe, as a thinking person, I should reconsider my points and make sure I know what the hell I am talking about before some mixed race tranny tells me to pull my head out of my ass so i can free my foot from my mouth.”

At least, that’s my experience when it comes to thinking people. Now, emotional, highly manipulated people who aren’t thinking but reacting to things they have been told that are false are a different matter, and you didn’t bring them up, so we can skip them for now.

The problem here is you want the freedom to argue, passionately, for the harm and exclusion of trans people while being “supportive” of them. Something I am willing to bet is about to rear its ugly head.

We are trans people, not mind readers. We don’t go after your thoughts. We go after your actions. And, in my case, in the stuff that led you to those actions — because your actions reveal your thoughts.

THere is no such thng among thinking people s uncritical consensus except for those things that are part of the problem — social constructs. You are a product of and entrapped by them, and you don’t realize that I am not. Because, as a trans person, I exist outside those constructs and I challenge them.

So you want to have a real thinking persons debate on the topic it is going to start at a place you are not going to be comfortable in, and I suspect you are not going to go there. Because in ding so you are going to have to see just how much a shithead you have been.

I wonder if you have the strength to apologize for it. Over and over and over again. I don’t want you to regret having written it though — because I want it to be that point where you began to learn.

I do find it so absurd as to rate only a moment’s attention that you describe people defending themselves from social violence as “bullying”. But hey, you lie a lot, so another one isn’t that big a deal.

Now we get into your thoughts…

While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without fear of reprisal, I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion.

How wonderful for you that you choose your belief over facts, 100 years of science, and the lived lives of other people. I am so proud of you for rejecting thinking in favor of feeling and taking things on faith without need for proof or willingness to listen to actual truth and facts.

Oh, one thing though…

You just said you are a fucking lying hypocrite. Because you cannot support their rights — including the right to transition, which is a part of bodily autonomy — while thinking that they are not competent to do so, which is literally what you said.

Ok, time for a break, because I am about to get into the deeper more critical parts of your essay turned screed of filth.

So I will break this up into two parts as a result, since just getting here was 6700 words.