🦌 Purple numbers popping up over our head as we read over and over

here's my important anti-fascist take

substack link

🦌 A lot of people who damn well know they're guilty avoided voting on this or lied about their position, because we have seen most trans people, and "allies" supported by trans people in these takes, consistently take positions incompatible with the first option, positions that can only justify letting trans people change our identity documents (e.g., birth certificate) on the basis of options 2 or 3, or else they take position 4 and pretend documents like that all say gender when they all say sex.

🪽 Gonna say upfront: My point here is that you need to look at reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be, to be effective. If you're counting on support that's not there, things will go very badly. But if you have a reality-based appraisal of the situation, you can at least have a fighting chance.

These numbers have only shifted 5–10 points over the past 3 years, it's been bleak for quite some time and we've been trying to raise the alarm but no one wanted us to spoil their happy fantasy that everyone already supports us and only extremist losers no one likes and a few rich elites support anti-trans policy. Bracketed numbers added by us from the linked data.

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of U.S. adults favor or strongly favor laws and policies that:

Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth (66%) [49% strongly favor, 7% oppose, 8% strongly oppose]
Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (56%) [42% strongly favor, 12% oppose, 14% strongly oppose]

The survey also finds that more Americans support than oppose laws and policies that:

Require trans people to use public bathrooms that match their sex at birth, rather than the gender they identify with (49% favor or strongly favor, 26% oppose or strongly oppose) [36% strongly favor, 14% strongly oppose]
Make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (47% favor or strongly favor, 34% oppose or strongly oppose) [35% strongly favor, 20% strongly oppose]

In turn, adults are much more likely to oppose than favor policies requiring health insurance companies to cover medical care for gender transitions (53% vs. 22%). [36% strongly oppose, 10% strongly favor]

Notice the consistent pattern that people strongly against us outnumber people on our side to any degree. It wasn't quite that bad 3 years ago, but public opinion was already heavily tilted against us on these tangible questions. Support has only looked high if you ask "are you a tolerant person? y/n" rather than anything tangible, or pretended "I want trans people to go away as an issue and never have to hear about them again" is a pro-trans position.

Also: Teenagers are more transphobic than adults now, and both are overwhelmingly transphobic:

• Adults: 33% say you can be a different gender from your assigned sex vs. 65% say you are your assigned sex/gender always and forever
• Teens: 30% say you can be a different gender from your assigned sex vs. 69% say we're all fake (49% vs. 50% among teens who support the Democratic Party)

Also note that 48% of teens and 45% of adults say they're comfortable using gender-neutral pronouns for people, so great work by everyone on team "you should call people what they want," you got exactly what you wanted: a third of supposed allies who will just call you what you want to be nice are steadfast that all trans people are fake.

We're going into this with very little real support, because most trans people preferred to just imagine they're already popular and almost no one opposes us, propping up that fiction by certifying every transphobe totally not transphobic if they're just willing to be a two-faced glad-hand who will tell you whatever you want to hear when prompted. Also by pretending apathy is support, but apathy works both ways.

Finally, we can't think of any other demographic so self-destructive that they look at a poll that asks whether they're important for politicians to care about or a distraction from more important things and decides the former is against them and the latter supports them. 21% vs. 77% in this poll Erin Reed told y'all shows 77% on our side against anti-trans laws. Please do read that poll and compare responses on tangible policy and treatment of their kids to the 67% who say they support trans people living as we wish, it is bleak and you should calibrate your perception of professed allies accordingly. Anything past 33% is the minimum number of professed allies taking that anti-trans position. You will see a pattern emerge that about a third of professed allies are outright enemies. A similar fraction are somewhat hostile, but willing to let us have some concessions, or just plain don't care and simply want the whole issue of trans people existing to go away.

Plan accordingly.

🦅 The Texas "gender identity fraud" bill says that I'm using "gender identity" as an excuse to factually misrepresent my sex (not gender), e.g., by having an ID that says I'm female, or by claiming to be a woman without disclaiming that I'm actually just a biological male who identifies as a woman.

What is your actual position on that bill?

🦌 Getting upset with people willfully misunderstanding the very short and straightforward anti-trans bill making it a felony to knowingly tell (or give the misleading impression to) the Texas government or an employer, in a written or verbal statement, that someone is "the opposite" biological sex from the one they were assigned at birth. ("sex: X" exempt, I guess?)

Some people are pretending this is about gender presentation or adhering to gender roles, when it has absolutely nothing to do with that by any stretch of the imagination.

It is entirely about making false (or misleading) statements about someone's biological sex, and explicitly defining sex assigned at birth as the standard of truth for that. Which means it applies to basically all identification documents of legal relevance to the government or employers. "Misleading" is presumably intended to cover, e.g., saying I'm a woman without disclaiming that I'm a biological male who merely identifies as a woman.

It's called "gender identity fraud" because the logic is that trans people are using "gender identity" as an excuse to lie about our sex. It's not fraud about your gender identity, it's that your gender identity is fraud.

Notice how it's built in the negative space of mainstream, cis-friendly, thought-terminating trans talking points? Everyone who played the "sex and gender are different" game built the mold that they poured their metal into to cast this.

Anyway, the basic opposing positions that are possible are:

People should be clear with themselves about which of those positions they hold, and own that and all the implications that follow from it.

You're welcome for spending 3 hours editing this down from our original outrage.

Bill here if you want to follow it: https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=HB3817

* Let me tell you a secret: No cis person has any evidence whatsoever to back up their claim that they're the gender or sex they say they are. They only have their assertion of identity. The only reason anyone believes otherwise is that they agree with TERFs about the whole big gamete babby-maker vs. small gamete bepis-haver thing. Self-definition is the only legitimate basis of truth for this, and anything else makes trans people fake. All taxonomies are socially constructed, so this is not a dispute over empirical facts, it's a dispute over ideology: the ideology of self-definition vs. the ideology of the cis binary, which assert entirely different bases of truth on this question.

🌟 Oh hey, we always forget about Bandcamp Friday until it's too late. Still 4 hours left.

We're bad at writing promos, but we've been thoroughly enjoying @YKantRachelRead's most recent album (The Ghost Fetish), it's good for when we want to float in an auditory sea.

https://rachelunderspoon.bandcamp.com/