LogFAQs > #907414730

VerisimiIitude posted...

Because gay people arent infallible and can be as dismissive and nonempathetic as anyone else.

Yeah. And respectability politics married to internalized homophobia and self-loathing.

In the 80's some gay (mostly men) people saw transpeople as pushing things too far to the point that they were making it difficult for straight people to take them seriously. Nevermind that straight people never took them seriously and this was the height of the AIDS epidemic in a America. Basically these men internalized the homophobia they had experienced their whole life, wrongfully projected it on to transwomen, and then excluded them from what could be considered mainstream queer spaces like clubs and bars.

These ideas are still present among the older generations of gay men, and you could hear echoes of that idea in the responses to the protests that took place during 2017 Capital Pride and in LA. Older established middle class gay men who feel like there's nothing really left to advocate for and that the 2015 marriage equality ruling solved homophobia, so what's wrong with treating pride like a party. If it's not clear, I think these attitudes are a reeking shitstain of privilege, but I'll defer to cooler minds for that hot take.

There's also the cult of masculinity among gay men. A lot of us kind of idolize traditional representations of masculinity, and the knowledge that a man they might otherwise be attracted to is trans is a turn off for some dudes. I'm not going to say it's super common, but I'm surprised at how often I see it. I have a hard time understanding how growing up aware of other people's prejudices towards you wouldn't help you to empathize with other people dealing with similar negative attitudes, but gay people can be just as myopic, petty, and flawed as everyone else. Also, we have a tendency to hate ourselves and project that self-loathing on to other people, unless we make a concerted effort to stop modeling our self worth off the criticisms of the people who caused us pain in our youth.

So, I've been looking at this specifically from the perspectives of gay men, because those are the ones I've experienced and read about. I know very little of origins of transphobia among lesbians outside of the obvious Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist sympathizers. Someone else or other research will need to fill in the gaps there.

But really that's a lot of context for understanding a very simple message. Fuck respectability politics with something hard and sandpapery. You're not going to win mainstream approval by assimilation. I didn't work in the 70's during police raids, 80's during the AIDS crisis, and it's not going to work now. Never forget that they only played at giving us respect because we gave them bricks.
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Ignorance is a choice
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