Good article. Whatever.

Let me add some perspective. I really can’t count how many white and Western middle-class raised trans women have a blog and don’t make any impact with it. This is also about myself, since I have been tempted to start one myself. But to what end?

It is a staple of nerds, who are abundant in this particular demographic, that they can make the world better by explaining it to others. But this is a game we have collectively lost. Do you even know what a think tank is, how behavioral advertisement algorithms work, and what amount of media ownership and political lobbying has gone into moving this agenda forward in the time span between 2015 and now?

For each and every English-speaking country in the world, by deploying a mind-boggling amount of resources the right has shifted the discussion from a plane where people were transphobic because they were ignorant, to one where people are transphobic because they have been conditioned with uniform disinformation on selected key topics (such as trans athletes and gender affirming care for minors).

Ever since this has been happening, we were inadequate as a movement to respond to these attacks. I have tons of folders with gotcha videos, blogposts, screenshots, books. It makes no difference.

Some things I want to talk about:

Actual demographics instead of online echo chambers. Everywhere I read more closely, I realize that transphobes are a relative minority. Online is a different story. We might even feed the outrage beast ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely worried. There are Nazis and christofascists out there who are keen on annihilating us. Rich influencers in the Press business and established media outlets, they are out to get us. But there is a critical mass of people who are accepting and tolerant. If it wasn’t for those people, they wouldn’t be spending that much on manufacturing of consent in favor of our annihilation.

Things are bad with GenZ, report after report shows that GenZ men are the most welcoming to this discourse. I am not gonna define it, you know the one. This is the Generation that grew up with meme culture and the endless scroll, and probably reached adulthood during or shortly after COVID, a time during which most of our life became even more digitized and put even more control in the hands of tech billionaires.

The article feels tired. Understandable. Who can recite all the studies and links and arguments they have repeatedly posted over a whole decade. You can see this in real life and online with individual trans activists, who don’t utter the arguments any more, they gloss over them. They are hand-waving them at this point because they already have hundred’s and thousands of times, to no avail.

Even trans people who are not activists, at first we might be lenient with our friends, sharing personal details, forgiving misgendering, accepting the burden of educating them. Year by year we become bitter, angry, impatient. I have seen this with older trans women and sex workers. A kind of …spite. After being treated as the butt of society for multiple years, by the same people who secretly pay to get it up theirs by the very same women they spit on in bright daylight, they have developed a character, which is more or less summarized as “you think you are better than me, I know your ugliness, and my ugly, rotten, transness is hollier than yours”.

Articles like this are the extremely online and middle class equivalents of this trajectory. She will now not bother to collect her thoughts and provide counterarguments. The quotations of the transphobes seem, even by skimming the article, as more organized, refreshed, and robust. And they are, while we have been played for absolute fools.

Because the billionaires backing Project 2025 and Alliance Against Freedom, they have employed hundreds or thousands of people, paying them full time, to develop and promote these ideas. Testing them first with fringe christian fanatics, then on online far-right and conspiracy communities, then lobbying to seed them into mainstream news and media outlets, as well as Democrat/Labor politics.

No blogger can beat that. Nor a legion of bloggers can. Unless understood as a channel to financially support creators. But don’t fool yourself with this. It is no different than knitting nerdy socks and selling them over Etsy. It does not change US, let alone global, politics.

One thing that this article gets right is this. We trans people failed to organize, and failed to make political alliances surpassing the class and race barriers. Heck, anglosaxon middle class trans women can hardly be bothered about trans politics on an international level. Taking self-id driving licenses, insurance-covered HRT, and workplace anti-discrimination laws for granted is extremely privileged. Don’t be mad at the average person who finds the ongoing trans persecution too complex and sad to engage. American trans women have been doing the exact same for trans people in the Global South.

No matter how hard trans civil rights were earned in the US, they are an exception internationally. And now also an exception within the States. Because we wrote blogs, made video essays, wanted to coil back to our Discord servers to mew because reality was too depressing to bear. Because it was valid to not having to be an activist just to live authentically as your true gender. And it was one’s own privilege to focus on strictly individualist strategies to get to be passing, attractive, and go stealth, in order to be assimilated into an unforgiving world.

And now somehow the world has become even more unforgiving. Anti-trans politics has become the chariot of international far-right reprise, and we blame cis-normative people, the ones who always have been shielding our rights, that they continue life as normal when a trans genocide is happening, and say that their withdrawal from public engagement is cowardice and complicity.

We were the first to do this and be blamed for this.