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.
hegatherhohrnws
pandabutter [I have moved]