Trans Informed - Blog Posts
"if you want a HP shirt/necklace/earrings/whatever, make your own!!" except if you wear it in public, you're still promoting jkr
"if you want to read the books, just get them from your library!" except libraries pay attention to what people take out, and you are still supporting an author if you library their books
"just play the games!" money goes to her for that
"well, just stream the movies!" she gets money for that
"well, you can always only tell your friend group about HP--" your friends are people! you are promoting HP to other people!
JKR is transphobic. She hates trans people. Just the other day she tweeted something transphobic--specifically, transmisogynistic. In the past she's been transphobic to all types of trans people. She's also bigoted in many other ways.
There are better series. There are other series. Stop coming up with ways to keep the books and fandom alive.
Trans lives are more important than harry potter.
there is no medical component to a trans kid transitioning
if a little trans boy comes out to his parents & is like 4 all youd do for his transition is cut his hair, buy a new wardrobe, & switch pronouns & possibly change names
no one is gonna put a little 4 year old on testosterone OR puberty blockers until theyre actually about to start puberty & then they give them a few years to really decide if they want to start hormones
a trans kid existing isnt “child abuse.” child abuse is refusing to let your kid live their lives as they truly are & forcing them to present as a gender they arent
Trans history: whatever happened to the other T?
I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.
Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.
People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).
Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:
Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.
Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.
Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.
And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.
So where are we now, in 2018?
The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.
But then theres the question of recognizing our legacy. I don’t think a lot of these young people realise that, had they been born 20 years earlier, many of them would probably have found a home in the transvestite community. I don’t think a lot of young transgender people recognize older transvestites as their elders, who paved the way for them. I often get the impression that they view the dwindling groups of 50+, 60+, 70+ transvestites with an element of disdain, as people who held on to a regressive binary identity, instead of as like - their badass grandfather-mothers who build parts of trans history.
how many times do we have to say “you will never ever be able to tell with 100% certainty who is and isn’t trans in any given group of people unless they all individually want to tell you and policy based around the assumption that you can will fail terribly” before cis people start taking it seriously. just wondering