LogFAQs > #950538773

I respect BLM's cause. Black Americans live in a world where they're targeted by police more and tend to be thrown in jail on more minor infractions than other races, and this movement sprung out of recurring police killings of black men.

Anti-BLM types have made their case against Michael Brown. But I don't think you can weasel your way out of Eric Garner's death. I don't think you can justify the shooting if a 12 year old for holding a prop gun - Tamir Rice's death at the hands of police only gets more perverse and disturbing with people like Dylan Roof and Kyle Rittenhouse killing people and going on the run, only to get taken in alive by the police. But a 12 year old boy with a fake gun, who looked threatening to some but who was responsible for no physical harm, was shot and killed by police. George Floyd suffocated to death on the asphalt over some funny money. I personally don't think Michael Brown reached for an officer's gun, and nothing can justify the hours that his dead body spent baking on the hot street without any emergency services coming to claim the body or take control of the crime scene. It was Michael Brown's neglected corpse lying in the street for hours that radicalised Ferguson to take action and gave birth to the BLM movement.

BLM flare up and protest when black people are murdered in the street, or in their own homes. Their protests are met with mysterious pallets of bricks sitting in the street, or with law enforcement waiting with vans to abduct protestors and make them sign legal documents under duress. I support them 100%, because they react to injustice and they aim to hold murderers in power to account.

As for transgender people:

I know what it feels like to be ostracized for feelings out of my control, or beyond my own comprehension. As such, I tend to support groups who don't have much of a voice, or who face severe backlash for aspects of themselves that they can't control or even find the words for at first. While I support the wider LGBTQIA+ community, I gravitate towards bi, ace and trans people in particular because I've seen firsthand how harshly they're treated within that wider community of queer identities.

It isn't always so easy picking sides to support - I'm on board with "queer" as a reclaimed term, but as someone who particularly hates the f-slur, I understand how certain words can just make someone's skin crawl. For some people, that word is "queer", and there's a big backlash against it at the moment (headed in a lot of ways by exclusionists, but I don't begrudge people who legitimately have a bad history with it). So that's a thing I have to feel out ahead of time.

But I have no qualms standing up for bi, asexual and transgender people. I resent the cynicism of exclusionist discourse, saying that these groups are invaders who make LGBTQIA+ spaces less safe for "actual" LGBTQIA+ people. The discourse around trans people, the furore over bathrooms and dorms and shoes - the current narrative of AMAB individuals making women's spaces less safe for women - has roots in the community's rejection of bisexuality (they want to make us believe they're one thing, and then dump us for the other thing to traumatise us) and asexuality (they don't face any real discrimination compared to us, and they appropriate the spaces of people who do struggle with discrimination).

Transphobic rhetoric has existed for decades beforehand in similar and different forms, of course - this is just the latest backlash. The concerned leftist who supports the uplifting of all marginalised groups, who refuses to see trans people as a marginalised group and chooses to see them as disingenuous trolls destroying the sanctity of queer spaces through their "invasion". A victory for anti-LGBTQIA+ groups, turning progressive groups against each other.

But transgender people have a reduced quality of life if expected to perform as an identity they don't resonate with. They live each day at a time, accepting comments about themselves that they feel belong to a different person who isn't there. There's a disconnect between who they're recognised as, and who they feel they are. And they tend to thrive, to come into their own, when they can live freely as another gender.

Transgender people need all the support they can get, because they don't always get the same acceptance and happiness for them in queer communities as other, more "socially acceptable" identities. Which I believe is a perversion of what the LGBTQIA+ community is meant to stand for. And they're copping a flogging in hetero- and cis-normative spaces as well. They just want to live in accordance with their self-image, to find acceptance and solace in a picture of themselves that aligns with how they see themselves.

Gay people tend to be raised in a heteronormative environment. They tend to either discover and acknowledge their gayness early in their lives, hiding it from the world at large because they understand the negative connotations of it through family members, friends and the general atmosphere of the world they live in, or they live their lives internalizing those negative beliefs and not understanding why they aren't attracted to the opposite sex. Why they're sad all the time, and why they can't seem to achieve any sort of real catharsis. And then they realise that they're gay - and whether they're traumatized over their deep-seated internalised beliefs or relieved at receiving the catharsis they've been missing for so long - or both at the same time - is anyone's guess.

I believe that the experience of being transgender is comparable to that. Except with trans people, there's a push to recognise it as mental illness, to acknowledge it as a deeper level of deviacy from the other identities. For there to be a fundamentally more severe disconnect than with other queer identities.

Gay people were viewed as mentally ill too, though. They were subjected to corrective rape. They were institutionalised and lobotomized. They were sterilized, and lumped in with sex offenders and pedophiles. And through broader action by the LGBT community, they were finally accepted by society at large.

Trans people are still being subjected to conversion practices. They're still painted as mentally deficient or morally deviant compared to other queer identities. In countries like Australia, in order to be recognised as transgender on your official documents, you have to submit yourself to sterilization. And radfem groups are determined to paint them as dangerous rapists and degenerate invaders to women's spaces. AFAB trans people slip completely under the radar, which I'm guilty of perpetuating.

The only way trans people will be able to attain a quality of life they can work with is through broader action through the LGBTQIA+ community. And I will be a component of that through whatever means I can use.

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