Happy International Trans Day of Visibility!

Since 2009, March 31 has been the International Trans Day of Visibility.  In 2021, Biden appointed March 31 as the Trans Day of Visibility here in the USA. 

The day was created in 2009 to make the point that not everything that happened to trans people was tragic, and that trans people have an identity beyond being oppressed. This day exists to celebrate trans people and their accomplishments.

Not every trans person can be visible, even now, sadly enough. Too many have to hide their essential selves, at least for large portions of their life. 

This day exists, in part, to hope for the day when all our trans friends, colleagues, and loved ones can live visibly, without having to worry about backlash, bigotry, or violence.

My own kid is out to everyone in his life, but he's told me that he's glad he can pass as a cis man to strangers. Here's hoping a time will come, and soon, when such a sad commentary on our country and its communities will long be extinct.

Reposting on Trans and LGBTQ and Gender

 I wrote this post in 2019, but as the situation has not only continued but grown even worse, I'm reposting it: Trans, Bi, Genderfluid, Cis, Gay, Lesbian

Interestingly, on Twitter recently a TERF insisted I had to be trans, after I pointed out her arguments about trans people were 100% incorrect. I said I wasn't trans, I just thought people should have equal rights. She said I was a man, and therefore I should shut up about this, since I had no idea what women were worried about. Then she blocked me.

Anyway, the above is a lengthy read, I know.

Here's an excerpt:

Why are TERFs and transphobes so bothered by the existence of trans people and LGB people? Why do they get so rage-filled and out of control when facts and evidence are presented to them?

There's a certain sort of person, usually an authoritarian-raised person, who clings to boundaries and rules. (The authoritarian person "categorizes the world with the simplicity and rigidity of a five year old child.") Any violation of these rules, however minor, terrifies them. We see this with people who call for draconian punishments for minor crimes: if someone can run a stop sign with impunity, these people claim, or use illegal drugs and not suffer for it, then our culture (nay, our world) is doomed. (Thus the authoritarians who embrace of leaders such as Roberto Duerte, for instance, who summarily executes drug addicts on the street.)

For these people, gender rules must be strictly enforced. If a young boy can wear nail polish with impunity, then our entire culture is at risk. 

Transphobes See Children as Possessions

I think almost everyone has read this appalling essay by Tess Morgan, whose life was apparently ruined because her adult son got a tattoo. (Or, as she put it, had his "precious skin" inked like a "pig carcass.")

Reading the essay, most people can't help feeling that Tess has some very clear issues. Her son -- her adult son -- is not a person to her. He's a possession, a perfect object that she's spent time creating and polishing, like a fine cherrywood desk. How dare that desk have an image engraved on it against her will? How dare this creature -- her possession -- act as though he's a creature with autonomy?

This is the same reaction we see from certain parents who find out that their children are trans. They describe themselves -- as Morgan did in her essay about her son's tattoo -- as heart-broken, as crushed, as unable to sleep or eat. They say they have "lost" their children. They say their lives are now "horror films." They describe their children as "mutilated," as "damaged forever," as "contaminated."

They speak of ROGD -- rapid onset gender dysphoria, an entirely fictional "disorder" not recognized by any reputable clinician, and claim their children are trans because their teachers or peers or "the media" brainwashed them.

They are supported in these delusional beliefs even by people who claim to be trans-supporting. (That link is to one advice site, but I could give you dozens of other so-called progressive advice columnists who say similar things.)

Almost all of them also claim that their children "never" showed any sign of being trans or unhappy before this sudden announcement. As the parent of a trans child, and as someone who knows many trans people, I entirely understand how someone could convince themselves that this is true. My kid was happy, if anxious, before he hit puberty. If I was someone who wanted my possession child to remain the cherrywood desk that I had ordered and polished for years, maybe I too would insist that this (imagined) three-year-old was the "real" child.

Here's how I did react, when my kid told me he thought he was trans: I was interested, and I was cautiously pleased. 

Because no, being trans does not come out of nowhere. Nor does it have a "rapid onset," no matter what some parents are telling themselves. My kid was unhappy from puberty on. His misery increased, almost daily. He would cry in his room every single night. He was suicidal. All of this, even though he had parents who loved him and therapy and everything else we could think to try.

Once he knew he was trans, and once we found a therapist that would work with him on how to understand what trans meant -- and especially once he began taking T-shots twice a month -- all of that went away. Though he still has some anxiety, and some bad days, he is so much happier, and so much better, emotionally, socially, and physically.

So I was and am pleased. My kid is no longer being tormented daily. My kid is able to be who he is. My kid is becoming his best self. Why would I not be pleased?

Yet many parents aren't. When their kids finally come out to them, when they finally say, hey, here's the truth about me, these parents react very badly indeed.

Many of them speak of "losing" their son or "losing" their daughter -- as if their child had died. As if a trans child is not the same child they always were.

Many of them insist that their children are "mutilating" themselves, by taking HRT or by getting surgery. "My beautiful daughter chopped off her breasts!" they wail. (Have a look at that verb. That verb -- like so many of the violent and inaccurate verbs many of them use -- is not an accident.) "My son is destroying his fertility!" they insist. And of course so long as a child is in their power, they will refuse that child treatment, even at the expense of the child's life. Like the anti-vaxxers, they'd rather have a dead child than the poodle child they didn't order.

None of this is new, of course. This is how parents reacted thirty years ago to children who came out as Lesbian or gay. Their children were sick, they insisted. They were delusional. What about my grandchildren? they cried.

Notice that all of them locate the problem in their children. It is the children who are at fault; the children who had misbehaved and done horrible things, even though the parent didn't say they could do it.

*** *** ***

What about their claim that their children "never" showed any signs of being unhappy with their assigned gender before "suddenly" declaring that they were trans?

I don't believe them. I don't believe them because that is not how it happens. 

I don't believe them because so many of my kid's trans friends will write about how they wish they could tell their parents the truth, but they know their parents would reject them, would kick them out of the house, would refuse to believe them.

I don't believe them because being trans never comes out of nowhere. Looking back, I can see all sorts of signals I should have recognized, ways my kid was broadcasting that he was trans. I missed them or I assumed they were just signals that he was genderqueer, or that he just liked dressing like that or wearing his hair like that. I am 110% trans-supporting and I missed those signals. A parent who thinks being trans is a sin, or a disease, or a mutilation -- do you think they will see what their kid is showing them? 

Or will they deny everything they don't want to see?

*** *** ***

As with Tess Morgan, these are parents who have control issues. (Very often they will describe a doctor or other professional gently advising them to get therapeutic help, and they explode in fury -- because there is nothing wrong with them, they insist. It is that very bad child who should be made to understand how evil and wrong they are!) 

These parents frequently control how their children dress, and what they eat, and what they read, who they talk to, what emotions they can show. (No lie, one kid I know is not allowed by their parents to show unhappiness, or anger, or even boredom. Only happy, contented emotions can be expressed. Anything else, and the child is punished.) They punish and beat children who don't comply. (Gee, why would children hide the truth from such parents?) 

These parents lack the ability to understand that their children are not possessions. They are not toys. They are not objects to be shaped into whatever form the parent desires. 

These parents can't accept their children as human beings, with all the rights to self-determination that any human being has.

My kid is not a possession. Nor did he become some "new" child because he transitioned, or because he changed his name. (You would not believe how many of these people are furious because "their" child choose a new name.) He's still the kid I raised, the one I loved then and love now. And he was always trans, though for years he didn't understand that, and neither did I.

You can read more here.

Pride 2019 and Local Xtians

The kid says there were no "Christians" haranguing the people at Pride this year (though there are always churches who march in the parade itself), but this made me smile anyway:

Last year there was a "Christian" dragging a cross on little wheels, you know, like Jesus did, and screeching at all the people and families there about how they would burn in hell and so on.

People surrounded him and chanted LGBT slogans until he fled in a sulk.

Free speech in action.

Also, one of the kid's friends is featured in this article.

PSA

If your "hot take" on trans kids is that your kid wanted to be a puppy when they were three, maybe shut up and sit down.

Sure, kids pretend. My kid had this little routine he would do every morning, between the ages of about fifteen months and three years old. "Ask me what I am today!" he would order.

"What are you today?" I would reply. (It was like a little liturgy.)

"I'm a wolf!" he would declare.

Or: "I'm a kitty!"

And then for the rest of the day, intermittently, he howled or mewed or (when he was a lemur) leaped about the room.

Do I need to explain how this is different from being trans?

Because I will.

One is a game. The kid is playing, and you are playing, and we all know it's a game.

A game doesn't cause your child pain. My kid never suffered depression because he wasn't a kitty. He didn't need therapy to understand why he persistently mourned the absence of his kitty body. He didn't require medication because not having a kitty body made him so miserable. He didn't feel, persistently and endlessly and for years, that he was a cat, that this human body was not his own, that this human body was trying to kill him.

Trans is not a kid getting up one morning and deciding they're an attack helicopter, or whatever ever so funny joke you've decided to make about my child.

Trans is the persistent conviction that your body is the wrong gender, often accompanied by crippling dysphoria, or to the point that your life is misery.

If you can't -- or won't -- understand what that is like, then do us all a favor, and keep your bigoted, ugly, ignorant, hate-filled opinion to yourself.

Please.

(Also, just FYI, since some of you are apparently unable to do even the most basic research, no one is giving a three year old surgery -- "cutting off [her] dick," as I saw one charming loser put it -- or HRT, or whatever. When we accept our small child's gender, we're talking social acceptance.: social transition. We use the right pronouns. We help them negotiate the world. We don't try to force them to be what they are not, and we certainly don't do that because we have some conviction of what they "really" are.)

My Kid and HRT

So the kid has been on T for just over a month now.

All y'all who have been reading me for awhile know the kid has had issues with anxiety, depression, self-loathing, and worse for years -- since hitting puberty, in fact. (Which in retrospect should have been a clue.)

After one month on T, these symptoms have vanished. He sent me a message today saying, "WTF? I'm happy because I get to be alive. I'm HAPPY. Is this how cis people feel all the time?"

So yeah. If you're one of those ignorant potatoes who think trans people should have, I don't know what the fuck, more and more and yet more therapy to convince them they are actually cis people, you can fuck right off.

And when you get there, fuck off again.

I'm trying to get the kid to write something about this, and if he does, I'll post it here. But he's an art student, as he points out to me all the time, so maybe not.

My Kid Pre-Puberty -- That's some of his early art behind him

Monday Links

How long is it until Spring Break? (Too long.)

Though I have a wonderful schedule this semester, thanks to my wonderful Chair, all I really want to do is hunker down and write. I really hope I get that sabbatical.

Meanwhile, have some links!

The economy is broken

SO broken

Very broken

But hey, so long as "people like us" benefit, amirite?

Trans people

More on trans people

Middlemarch is one of my favorite books, as you know, but I would read this.

I'm just saying

This is very cool

Just once

I love Pop Culture Detective:

Links for your Thursday

I'm writing and writing right now, so light posting ahead.

Have some links!

I'm considering a new page for my bibliography -- what do all y'all think about this one?

In case you missed this: A Poem for academics

And in case you missed this, an amazing short story from Naomi Kritzer

Where your taxes go

I'd love this even if I didn't love bagels

Science says this

From Daniel Ortberg, who is a national treasure

A follow up to the previous, due to all the online harassment Ortberg got for his essay

Women in science

The quintiles, in case anyone is confused about the state of American wealth and poverty

What the above translates into

On the other hand...

This one is just funny

Also funny

Your Questions about Trans People Answered

I've seen a number of people ask what may or be good faith questions about trans people, or make claims that they may actually believe about trans people (claims I know to be untrue). Sometimes I have attempted to educate these people; often I have walked away, knowing the attempt to be useless.

Anyway!

Here's an excellent resource, to anyone who is interested in learning.

Seven Troubling Questions About Transgender Theories, Answered