trans homelessness is bad but you know what really matters is whether other trans people are allowed to say "transsexual" or "assigned gender at birth"
if you come at me with that attitude like what actually matters amounts to internet arguments, i'm going to write you off completely
you should know that a lot of the language has complicated historical context and intentions, and frankly I've concluded you don't want to know
it's okay for these conversations to happen in terms of general rhetoric, like, in situations far removed from action and need
but jesus christ the trans movement is not internet drama. i swear to god i hear some people and it's like, they're so not ready for adversity. They're complacent and comfortable in their marginalization as a personal brand without real world consequence
i mean you look at tumblr, you'll see tons of trans people who keep yo-yoing towards genuine disaster and don't seem to register that on any level.
i blame the AIDS crisis wiping out a queer generation and the lack of curiosity about that from the younger ones. You'd think from some of us that being trans was invented in 2015, and from others that it was always exactly like this
@heatherhorns_lite it's not even that people don't listen to queer elders, I think... it's that they don't know any. Not on a personal level, not on a "yeah that's Steven, he's the gay uncle of the Wine Mom Social Club that used to be our girl scout troop" kinda level
IMO the message of "listen to queer elders" doesn't work for a very simple and sad reason, and that's because the message we need to be broadcasting is "YOU HAVE QUEER ELDERS"
@heatherhorns_lite From what I've seen, the early 2000s push for visibility reframed the discourse so hard for people who weren't already trans that it's kinda hard for those of us who developed our identities in the following decades have a hard time "getting it"
Like, ok, the terms at the top of the thread. Trans people fought tooth and nail to get away from those, to spread a more accurate and useful model of gender and sexuality, and now some of us are lucky enough to have grown up with that! We now exist in an era where Sane People agree: gender is not sex, "sex" is not sexual, and being trans is not some kind of strange fetish...
...and I think some people don't get that it hasn't been the mainstream view for very long. This isn't something that happened Back Then, it isn't even from before we were born, it just happened before we were old enough to watch it live on cable news.
@xelle erin reed wrote a fantastic article lately that touches on this!
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-was-always-going-to-be-a-generational
it blew my mind a little bit to be reminded of obama talking about traditional marriage and all that.
@heatherhorns_lite see, this is exactly the thing... in 2004, I wasn't watching the news. I was 3.
When Lynn Conway passed away and people posted about her, that's when I learned she'd existed. Her entire career as an advocate is... my childhood, effectively. She was there, this was happening, and I didn't notice because I was growing up in the middle of it.
People who are currently old enough to drink do not remember the 2000s, not the way everyone else means it, and I am one of them. It scares me too.
@xelle @heatherhorns_lite Increasingly, I notice those of us in our mere 30s, sometimes generously 40s, are functionally "the queer elders" of our community. I'm sure as hell not ready and yet I find more than I'd like that I'm approached for advice...sometimes I have it. Sometimes I just have to offer a virtual hug, and say "I don't know. But I'll try to think about it and give you my thoughts when I find them".
I worry heavily about leading people astray the way I was left floundering and isolated.
@FurryThrowPillows yeah it really is. it really really is.
it's really hard not to draw a line between whiteness and this sort of assuming attitude that everything's going to be okay. you can yell and argue and then turn off your computer and tuck into your bed, completely safe from all the bad things
@heatherhorns_lite I mean, the thing is that... Yeah.
Like, we don't try to stay conscious of the shit happening to people of color for our own health. We could save ourselves a buttload of stress by just not giving a shit and burying our head in the sand, and all odds point in favor of that never biting us in the ass. We could go off and spout a load of racist shit (and we can; it doesn't matter how little we believe in it ourselves, we've been inundated with that shit our entire lives and we know what it looks like) right now and barely face any consequence for it.
A lot can be said about how taking such an easy road is no fucking excuse for such shittiness, but there's no denying that the road is easy. Shit in this world has been paved out smooth for white people to make total fucking asses of themselves. It's still no excuse for it, but neither is it any surprise that people keep playing into it.
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