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UPDATE: The transphobe Ada has been defending says they misgender all trans women/NBs on Blahaj who are strangers - Blåhaj Lemmy
lemmy.blahaj.zoneFurther information on the situation with the transphobia: Abigail has
repeatedly misgendered me and defended her choice by saying she chooses to refer
to all people of unknown gender as male. > Hey, Abigail here. I just want people
to know the reason this person got banned is likely because of a deleted comment
not included in that thread. OP called me ~~autistic ~~ mentally unwell for not
liking politics. THAT kind of behavior is not acceptable on lemmy.blahaj.zone,
so I reported the comment and let Ada handle it. Ada tried in good faith to
reason with OP but it was clear they just wanted to fight. So yeah, they got
banned. Ada’s a fantastic lady who’s been great at keeping the trolls at bay. >
Edit: and the bit about me misgendering them is also wrong. Gender didn’t come
into play until after I had left the conversation. English default on the
internet is male for strangers. Source:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669] WRT the statement that I accused
them of autism for not liking politics, further info is available here:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2320815
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2320815]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2321026
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2321026]
i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.
I can’t agree with this at all, as an ethnic minority I have seen way too many reactionaries among those who have been oppressed their entire lives.
Being a minority and having direct experience of discrimination do increase one’s revolutionary potential, but class also plays a substantial role (I’d argue an even larger one just from personal experience) as well as the ideological superstructures being imposed upon us.
Ultimately there are a lot of collaborationists across every segment of minorities, both within the imperial core and in the global south.
racism and trans stuff are similar in some ways but different in others, i think its not really right to equate them, very different experiences. the basic rub of it is there is a nonstop media campaign targeting trans people with blatant lies, the history of our community is largely embedded in socialist movements in america, there are inherent medical costs to most transitions, there are inherent painful and traumatizing sensations that you can open yourself to if you seek surgery, a possibility of familial ostracization, there is often a whiplash where you go from not being discriminated to discriminated (or vice versa, or discriminated on a new and different basis), and of course its likely that people have been physically and emotionally aggressive with you no matter what community youre in.
and then there are discriminatory acts in healthcare and so on, but these forms of discrimination can manifest in different and similar ways for poc, so a little complex there.
its still my experience that the vast majority of trans people are socialist and people become more active with socialist orgs the longer theyve been transitioned. i also think the fact that our community spans multiple ethnicities also has a factor in this rate of socialism, we all experience similar pains and have many things that unify us. and of course there are some shitty trans people out there, not saying there arent, but i feel like people are greatly overstating how many people are shitty in this thread.
I remember when I was still relatively fresh in my transition being introduced to another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been “out” for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn’t even have my name change done because I didn’t have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright “oh I’m a communist.” Was a bit of a major moment for me. I had a lot of seeds planted over the years between Occupy and just the financial crash but was still very much a lib. As time went on and suddenly the word socialism became less toxic it was a relatively quick shift to make, suddenly all those seeds ended up sprouting and it all just clicked together finally. Having more lived experience as trans and having come across a few people online and IRL that helped demystify it all really did help and I think that’s also a relatively big portion of it. We’re pushed towards the contradictions with our lived experiences while a solid portion of the community is already there able to explain the contradictions and demystify leftism.
I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had. Completely exiled myself from trans discussions and attempted to never even mention it in any contexts. Finding /r/traaa was an opportunity to actually see more of the trans community and be happy with being trans and ended up kinda just being fine with being visibly trans, though it still sucks that people are shit. I do think the communities we build and the attitudes we allow are just as important as the lived experiences lest you have libs come in and try to paint it over leaving you wanting to just disconnect entirely because their answers suck.
lmao was it me?
yeah i remember thinking similar, but you should also take some of the stuff on reddit with a grain of salt, liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly. really amplifies what is really a minority opinion among the larger trans community. you can tell by how many comments have a socialist bent but all the upvotes go to the one liberal opinion
oh fuck i can just see this in my mind
fucking gross
I hope you are correct but my
side can’t ignore the sheer amount of dickheads I’ve met and felt they were a lost cause which I try not to do as that feels scummy.
I think I’m just in my sad tankie phase when it comes to class consciousness and my own communities politics atm irl (anyway)
gotta remember that generally people tune out of trans spaces the longer theyve been on hrt. so a lot of trans communities are new transitioners and the long-transitioned and few ‘moms, dads, and vague parental figures’ that guide them to resources and pool the knowledge.
I’m still only a year in so would you say I’m in my leaving the nest phase?
still young, id say 4-5ish years on is when most people begin to radicalize a lot. though most are some sort of socialist anyways, they just become more serious about it
I think for me what I found difficult was that you could tell who was progressive/leftist/social justice advocate pre transition and who offers it lip service post transition when it benefits their specific personal needs but defends the status quo still and I found myself unable to tolerate the second group.
As someone who would be categorised as the first group (I hope) I tried to educate and engage but after getting dogpilled by lib rage, ostracised for being a tankie, seeing the shittest takes time and time again and watching these people destroying groups that would benefit trans people irl I grew exhausted and left.
I think I mentioned it in one of my first comments on here which is why after seeing that same energy in blahaj.zone i came here.
That feeling of frustration and powerlessness even around your own peeps just feels so isolating.
yeah i remember one time where a girl came in and thanked me a lot, saying i changed her life by helping her with her meds and stuff and gave me a big hug. and then some time later she flew into a fit of rage and said she’d never come back to the lgbt center after learning i was a communist, and she never did. i was very bewildered at that. i did go out of the way and even got her an uber to her first HRT appointment and helped her schedule it, which is no big deal for me but i know its a big deal for a lot of people who are anxious to start HRT. she claims she was a socialist. sometimes wonder what shes up to 🤔 strange what propaganda can cook up in people’s heads.
The anti-communism of the western left is at critical mass these days 😮💨
it was a strange conversation. i kinda mentioned it offhand to someone (sometimes people say, wow youre so generous! when i offer to help them with something and i just shrug and say im a commie) and i guess they mentioned it to her. she then began asking me stuff about xinjiang very angrily and i just said that im not really here to get into debates with people, im just the trans resource lady and want to help out. then she stormed off as i said.
pls god no i don’t want to become an ultra
sorry i dont make the rules, you will be shipped off to peru soon
lmao I radicalized the day I came out to myself. I was on multiple tabs of lsd so “I’m lying to myself about gender” and “I’m lying to myself about liberalism” were the same realization.
Speedrun time 🤔
the online trans space to living your life pipeline
The sad tankie phase is completely avoidable. Most of the ones you encounter online lack praxis. Active socialist practice in your community is inherently rewarding.
Class consciousness might not exist in our local communities in the way we would want to see it, but it is there.
In my experience this depends on stealth vs not-stealth. The stealth people wanting to blend and capable of it tend to deradicalise because they can fit into existing society, those that can not tend to hyper-radicalise because they need society to change for them.
maybe. i pass and i gotta tell you im never forgetting how people treated me in vulnerable moments
also there are plenty of times where im forced to out myself, particularly when dealing with insurance and medical, and i pretty much always get a sour and many times visceral reception because people feel ‘tricked’. i had a nurse very unprofessionally yell ‘WHAT’ at the top of her lungs when i was explaining i was trans and my basic medical history
I’m in a similar place currently, kinda, maybe, not really, i dunno.
I’ve had trans friends literally project their self hatred onto me because they resent that I “pass” (like i fucking do) and tell me bogus shit like I can’t get oestrogen because of x and y which lead me to sob to my doctor in a place of genuine suicidal intent because of what I’d been led to believe.
Lmao turns out it was bollocks what they said and here I am a year later happy af.
Problem is i’m still riddled with a lot of the misogynistic self hatred that my ex friend filled my head with like this feature is too masculine etc. I know she was wrong and why its all wrong but a year of shit like that and comments like “well you’re lucky your short unlike the rest of us” has made me feel super isolated and kinda low Key assimilatey when I’m around cis people.
Like I’m loud and proud and always ready to defend my community but if I’m genuinely passing I can’t help but enjoy it and soak it up like its validating the broken part of my self confidence issues or something.
I dunno, I still hear her voice in my head when I hate my reflection because I hyper focus on the things she did and its so hard so when I do pass I do stealth it and really enjoy it.
Does that make me a bad trans person?
Either way i wouldn’t ever defend assimilators and resent the idea that I would be one but at the same time I enjoy not having to be trans and that leaves me feeling kinda guilty.
That sort of stuff literally breaks my brain atm it’s so hard.
When people keep telling you that you pass, you most likely do, and you’re most likely hella cute as well, because people conflate high passing and being conventionally attractive a lot. And some people, including a lot of trans women, just can’t handle that. Our society teaches women to constantly monitor each others beauty and put each other down both when we’re not pretty enough and too pretty, we’re forced to constantly square the circle, to navigate this ridiculously narrow corridor between supposedly being an unsightly mess and supposedly being a shallow skank. And like most of mysogyny, that gets amplified further when you’re trans. I keep hearing stories like yours and they’re always from really beautiful trans girls who are resented for looking conventionally hotter or more cis-like than the person putting them down. Like, i just met this super cute trans girl and took her to a local meetup because she was afraid to go alone after some other trans woman had trash talked her for not doing enough about her voice at another get-together years ago - not only is that a horrible demand in general, voice work is hard and not everybody has the talent or the ressources or the time or the lack of voice dysphoria to pull through with it, no, she actually has a lovely voice, low-pitched but very smooth and feminine, a voice i could listen to all evening. But that other woman saw her and probably felt threatened and had to lash out. I had to think of that when you wrote about your ex.
And no, you’re absolutely not a bad trans person for stealthing once in a while. It’s a scary time we live in, and while it’s important that we’re visible and outspoken and let people know we’re actual human beings they know and not just some abstract “gender ideology”, it’s hard to be visible 24/7. When you put yourself out there most of the time, and when you reflect the way you do when you do that, and give people the opportunity to learn, that’s more than enough. From each according to their abilities also goes for activism, and there’s no shame in not wanting to be in the trenches permanently. Our survival and continued existence in itself constitutes a revolutionary act. Reaction wants us dead and being alive as a trans person and living your best life in itself defies the necropolitics of today’s fossil capitalism. Being able to take a break from the struggle is a form of privilege, as is being able to transition at all, or having enough money to pay out of pocket for surgeries, or living in a place with easier access to public trans health care, or being educated and able to articulate your existence in a convincing way, or being binary trans, or having had a supportive home and being able to accept yourself in ways other people can’t because their parents didn’t give them the love they would’ve deserved, or being a white trans person, or living in an area that makes it easier to access queer networks, but none of these are things you shouldn’t use as tools for your survival if you’re lucky enough to have them at your disposal. Cisfascism wants all of us dead, and we have a right to fight bacvk against it with anything we have at our hands, we should just be aware of and mindful towards people who don’t share some of our privilege instead of throwing them under the bus like the actual assimilationists do.
Thank you this means so much to hear and is very validating because I’ve really felt isolated as a result of it and I feel my mental health deteriorating because of the dysphoria I have but also told I’m not allowed to be dysphoric.
Thank you so much 🫂
Edit: genuinely so much I feel so accepted, also yes to everyone who saw us butt heads yesterday we are now friends again lmao
There are entirely too many fascists trans people for me to accept this argument.
fascist trans people are an extreme minority. ive only met 1 irl and we booted them from our local org, what was strange is they were also a finnish immigrant. ive interacted with 1000+ trans people in a fairly large city at this point. something around 90% are socialist, but most are not acting on that and are unorganized. i run an informal survey on a lot of things so we know how to help people more at our trans resources booth.
Oh no I’m not saying they’re anything but a minority. But they exist, and there’s too many of them. (Although tbh 1 would be too many in a general sense)
it is pretty weird. the only reason we caught on that she was fascist is she started harping on jewish people after someone mentioned they were jewish
Do Nazis not realize how bizarre blatant antisemitism is to most people?
really seems like they dont get it.
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what? its common practice that most trans spaces have a pronoun sticker printer for neopronouns
That doesn’t mean anybody has to respect them
i mean… yeah it does. if trans spaces near you are this shit fam you really need to move, its not anywhere close to the norm
Actually, the nearby communities in meatspace are slightly better than international communities. Not by much, though
if someone doesn’t respect them here, they’re getting an inbox full of PPB and getting banned, in that order.
no more half measures walter
Parts per billion?
pig poop balls - image of a pig taking a shit that landed om it’s oversized balls. I can link if you’re still curious. it’s how we deal with reactionaries.