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enemyofperfectToday when I was looking for something else I accidentally stumbled upon some nasty transphobia in a fannish space, which for some reason I really wasn't expecting. I know fandom is far from perfect, but I guess somehow I'd thought that -- outside tumblr, anyway -- this was one issue I could more or less count on people to be decent about, or at least that other fans wouldn't be openly hostile towards trans people.
Anyway, to cheer me up from that unpleasant surprise, I'm posting about a really good[1] video made by YouTuber Shaun, which is titled Transphobia in the UK, but makes some points that seem very applicable in the US as well.
Now, Shaun is open about the fact that he's a cis guy, and I'm not of a transfeminine stripe myself[2], so he and I may each make some mistakes in discussing this, which I'd be happy to have pointed out should you notice any. But I liked a lot of what he has to say, and he says it in a pleasantly soothing manner, and I was especially impressed by something he had to say about trans women and women's bathrooms around 28 minutes in.
The thing I always struggled with when this quote-unquote debate came up is that while it obviously originates in offensive scaremongering, you can't really prove a negative, can you? Trans women are not an unusually dangerous segment of the human population, but trans women are human, so presumably there must be a handful who behave badly towards others at times. How can one prove absolutely that in those rare cases, the harmful actions taken by trans women are definitely not caused by their transness? It's a very effective way of derailing the conversation.
So it's incredibly refreshing to see it pointed out that the key question isn't whether we can be sure that letting trans women use bathrooms appropriate to their gender will never result in any harm -- it's whether we can reasonably suppose that it will result in less harm than forbidding them those spaces, which is to say, by requiring already marginalized women to either do without or, given the distressing scarcity of gender neutral places to pee, use the men's.
And that's such an easy question to answer! Of course the safest situation for everyone involved is to let trans women use the women's room, and more generally, to let all trans people go wherever they feel safest.
There, I feel better for writing that out.
1. And fully captioned! (back)
2. Being one of the other stripes of the trans flag instead. (back)
Anyway, to cheer me up from that unpleasant surprise, I'm posting about a really good[1] video made by YouTuber Shaun, which is titled Transphobia in the UK, but makes some points that seem very applicable in the US as well.
Now, Shaun is open about the fact that he's a cis guy, and I'm not of a transfeminine stripe myself[2], so he and I may each make some mistakes in discussing this, which I'd be happy to have pointed out should you notice any. But I liked a lot of what he has to say, and he says it in a pleasantly soothing manner, and I was especially impressed by something he had to say about trans women and women's bathrooms around 28 minutes in.
The thing I always struggled with when this quote-unquote debate came up is that while it obviously originates in offensive scaremongering, you can't really prove a negative, can you? Trans women are not an unusually dangerous segment of the human population, but trans women are human, so presumably there must be a handful who behave badly towards others at times. How can one prove absolutely that in those rare cases, the harmful actions taken by trans women are definitely not caused by their transness? It's a very effective way of derailing the conversation.
So it's incredibly refreshing to see it pointed out that the key question isn't whether we can be sure that letting trans women use bathrooms appropriate to their gender will never result in any harm -- it's whether we can reasonably suppose that it will result in less harm than forbidding them those spaces, which is to say, by requiring already marginalized women to either do without or, given the distressing scarcity of gender neutral places to pee, use the men's.
And that's such an easy question to answer! Of course the safest situation for everyone involved is to let trans women use the women's room, and more generally, to let all trans people go wherever they feel safest.
There, I feel better for writing that out.
1. And fully captioned! (back)
2. Being one of the other stripes of the trans flag instead. (back)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-08 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-08 10:22 pm (UTC)