there’s something truly miserable about JK Rowling being, at this point, the most prominent public figure associated with a hate movement but facing effectively no consequences for it because it’s an issue that only a small fraction of the population is passionate about.
Like it’s one thing if you have someone who’s said or done some “problematic” things in the past. It’s one thing for a media figure to be beloved by annoying MAGA chuds but despised by anyone even a hint left of center. It’s one thing to consume art from someone who was a monsterous bigot in their lifetime but has long since passed.
But with Harry Potter it’s just…. nothing. There’s not even a conversation to be had. Aside from people who are online enough to care, everyone else just carries on as before. There is no cancelation to come back from, there is no smaller audience the work is restricted to, there is nothing to contend with unless you’re friends with a specific kind of person. I still see people on dating apps who put BLM or ACAB or some other progressive slogan in their bios, but list Harry Potter as their favorite books. There is no shame in this. They see no contradiction because to them it is a non-issue.
Rowling is the face of a hate movement and most people who like her work don’t even realize it. They don’t have to realize it. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t understand why what she’s saying or doing is wrong.
I think about this every time I see new Harry Potter media coming out. Society does not care enough about people like me to even question if the people who hate us should face consequences for it.
the “transfems make better music” eliciting an extremely negative response from a lot of transmen just goes to show you you guys actually feel about transfems
you dont see them as your sisters in this community you dont see them as friends you see them as some other subset of person that is a threat to your space and visibility and lord we, and they, can tell. i will always encourage uplifting transfems in lgbt spaces since everyone tries so fucking hard to make them uncomfortable and something this simple having such backlash is so telling
you know what im getting for this? backlash calling this “hating transmen” and that is exactly what im talking about. i AM a trans man. pointing out that transfems have made significant contributions to music is not “hating transmen.” people saying that transfems make better music is not “hating transmen.” transfems are NOT a threat to you! transfems are not stealing opportunities from you! transfems are YOUR FRIENDS. they’re YOUR SISTERS. we are so so so similar and you fucking losers are taking a post telling you to acknowledge them as members of your communities as a threat. do you understand that? are you hearing yourselves?
it’s also an obvious joke? Even if it’s true that transfems have contributed a lot to music (idk our(!) history that well unfortunately), it’s like saying transfems are catgirls, or we like computer programming. it’s a community in-joke. calm down, fellas, we’re in this together.
i wouldn’t add on if op wasnt also tme but if anyone wants to know more about some significant transfem contributions to music, off the top of my head:
wendy carlos pioneered the use of the synthesizer! you might know her from the soundtracks to the shining and tron
SOPHIE was one of the most prominent artists at the forefront of the development of hyperpop. instead of using samples, she synthesized every sound (minus vocals) out of pure waveforms
laura les (alongside dylan brady) is arguably responsible for popularizing the hyperpop genre. you might know the two as 100 gecs!
i’d like to note that the pitched-up vocals at the heart of SOPHIE and laura les’s music exists because they’re transfem — it’s part of their gender presentation
one more you almost certainly know, though not by name, is odyssey eurobeat, though you would know her as the original creator of discord, the mlp fansong, released under her former pseudonym, eurobeat brony
“When you’re a trans woman you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody and if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you’re accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideas of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement. We trans women are made to teeter on this tightrope, not because we are transsexuals, but because we are women. This is the same double bind that forces teenage girls to negotiate their way between virgin and whore, that forces female politicians and business women to be agressive without being seen as a bitch, and to be feminine enough not to emasculate their alpha male colleagues, without being so girly as to undermine their own authority.”
— Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, p 28-9 (via goth-gallus)
So tired of people on the left, LGB people, and so-called feminists that either don’t care about trans people or actively work against us.
So tired of “anti-woke” class reductionists who think it’s okay to throw trans people under the bus to try to ally themselves with “right populists” like Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley.
So tired of centrist liberals that think they can just ignore trans rights because we’re “too controversial” right now and don’t want to alienate exurban voters that won’t even vote for them anyway.
So tired of my community, one that is extremely small - even with the supposed “social epidemic” of trans people coming out recently - being treated as the go to punching bag blamed for everything and used as a wedge issue and boggie man to scare white middle class suburbanites into voting for fascists.
I’m so tired of state after state treating us like inhuman monsters than need to be morally (and legally) mandated out of existence.
I’m. Just. So. Tired.
Being trans is emotionally exhausting and means living in near constantly stress and fear, even in supposedly safe and welcoming places. But people think we do this for fun or try to force it on kids? Fuck you.
Let’s address this tag real quick, because it’s an oversimplification and easy deflection that I’ve seen in the notes.
The girl was forced out of her in-person school into online classes by an unaccepting school faculty specifically because she is trans. They refused to accommodate her and give her a safe place to learn because she’s trans. She was struggling in online classes due to the lack resources she was being given (since most kids are back to in-person learning) and essentially gave up and stopped attending our of protest.
That’s the truancy that was an excuse for the cops to come in, break down her door, rough up this child, and then take her away from her home. The truancy is simply an excuse in the same way that the defendant in Lawrence v Texas was raided for owning an unregistered firearm but was only prosecuted for being gay (which was still illegal in 2002).
She was essentially left behind and intentionally marginalized by school staff because she is trans, she was set up for failure because she’s trans, and she was taken from her family because she’s trans.
a lot of young teen lesbians on tumblr r aligning with the terf ideology without knowing properly what it stands for. so as an Older Lesbian with some 6 years of Being Out Experience i wanna clarify some things for you.
nobody is forcing you to be attracted to anyone
nobody is saying that if you aren’t attracted to [insert a trans woman name], you’re automatically transphobic and a terf. nobody is saying you have to have sex with trans girls if you aren’t attracted to them. just as nobody is saying you have to be attracted to every cis woman. and nobody is saying you have to have sex with gay girls you aren’t attracted to.
we are only asking you to respect trans women as women
and that’s really the least you could do! trans women (trans lesbians and wlw in particular) are just other girls out here trying to survive in this hetero world. and it’s hard being a lesbian already - but being a trans lesbian is so much harder. don’t make these girls feel even more alienated, don’t contribute to the hate that is turned against them.
“but i don’t wanna have sex with someone with a penis”
if you end up never sleeping with anyone w a penis, that’s okay. being a lesbian isn’t just about who you have sex with. it’s also about who you love, who you’re attracted to and who you date. and one day you might find yourself falling in love with a trans girl.
if that happens, just like in any relationship, you can negotiate your limits in sex. there’s no point in saying “i am not attracted to trans women” - because it makes it seem like trans women are inherently so much different from cis women, makes you sound like you think all trans women look/are the same and like you think of women as walking genitals. which is pretty misogynist!
so please just don’t listen to terfs. protect your trans sisters because they need it and they will always be there to support you if you support them too.
Janet Mock: The deaths of 6 trans women in the U.S. in 2015 February 17, 2015
This morning I read about the murder of Bri Golec in Ohio. She was stabbed to death by her father. She was only 22 years old. Her death marks the sixth trans woman to be reported murdered in the U.S. in 2015. It’s not even March.
As the New York City Anti-Violence Project noted in their tweet about Golec’s murder, “This time in 2014 we knew of no homicides of Trans women in the US. As of now there are AT LEAST SIX.”
This time in 2014, just a year ago, Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera had publicly challenged Katie Couric; I sparred about language and identity on CNN; Cox’s Netflix series Orange Is the New Blackwas preparing for its second season; and my memoir had landed on the New York Times bestsellers list. This was the highest media saturation for trans women of color in U.S. history. As a writer and journalist, I had been forecasting the game-changing moment that was soon to come in May: Cox, a black trans woman from Mobile, Alabama, appearing on the cover of Time magazine.
After decades of erasure, trans women of color were finally garnering mainstream attention. Cox used her time in the pop cultural spotlight to not only advance her acting career, but to tell the stories of women like CeCe McDonald. We both stood behind Monica Jones as she resisted police profiling in Phoenix, Arizona, and trans Latina teen Jane Doe as she was unlawfully held in an adult prison.
Personally, I know that my visibility has to be more than just about my own pursuits. When I walk into a space, I am cognizant of the fact that I am bringing communities of people with me, communities that have historically been exiled and silenced. The weight of that responsibility never lightens, even as Inavigate uncharted terrain as a TV host. My show So POPular! explores the intersection of popular culture, representation, politics, identity and community. Though it doesn’t explicitly cover trans issues, it’s a space created and fronted by a trans woman of color, so the lens to which I explore topics on my show is that of a trans person, a black person, a woman of color. My goal is to take the focus away from myself as a subject, and instead be the person asking the questions, shaping the conversation.
I’ve seen folks juxtapose the recent media visibility of trans women of color and these recent murders. I’ve read sentences to the effect of: “At a time when trans women of color have visibility, we still see trans women murdered.” I find this logic to be quite basic.
Yes, trans women are being murdered. Yes, trans women of color have gained mainstream visibility. But trans women, particularly those of color, have always been targeted with violence. The differences now? There are some systems in place that better report violence and there is finally visibility of a select few that helps challenge the media’s framing of these women’s lives.
But cultural representation is just one piece of the social justice pie, and we must be clear about one thing: Trans women of color have had one year of visibility in the media, after decades of erasure (think about how many times historians, archivists, filmmakers or books mention the revolutionary work ofSylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson or Miss Major Griffin-Gracy). It’ll take more than a year of a few trans women in media to transform decades of structural oppression and violence, decades of misinformation, decades of exiling.
We are not existing in a fairytale where the very recent successes of a few individuals — whether that’s Laverne or Carmen or me — could quickly and radically transform the lives of our sisters who are resisting in already struggling communities, who are navigating poverty, homelessness, and joblessness while also facing high medical and educational costs, police profiling and incarceration as well as HIV/AIDS, the risks of underground economies as well as the looming threat and reminders of violence.
I nodded and responded: “So much of it is linked to the idea that women are not valued, people of color are not valued and trans people are often invalidated in our society. So when you throw that all into one person’s body, there’s a lot of targeting that comes into that space. We need to have a national outrage over these bodies that no one is protecting.”
Maher then said, “I thought, and maybe I’m wrong, that the violence came because the transgender person didn’t tell the guy about their past and then the guy kissed her or something and then found out. And he’s like, ‘Oh now, I’m a homo.”
I challenged Maher by telling him that trans women are not being targeted solely because men find themselves attracted to us. No woman deserves violence. Period. We do not exist to “trick” or “deceive” men into sleeping with us. Trans women are targeted because we exist at vulnerable intersections of race, gender and class. My sisters are vulnerable because no one movement has ever centered the bodies, lives and experiences of these women, except for the severely underfunded, largely volunteer-staffed work of organizations run by and for our communities (from TGIJP,Casa Ruby,TransLatina Coalition,Sylvia Rivera Law Project,TWOCC,TransJustice, to name a few).
Trans women of color dangerously fall in between the cracks of racial justice, feminist and LGbt movements.
Our visibility at this particular moment in culture is helping reshape the narrative of trans women’s lives, it’s helping those who may not know a trans person get familiar with the lives and struggles of trans people, it’s helping push media gatekeepers to report on our lives with a more just and true lens (though it still seems to be struggling when it comes to Bruce Jenner’s alleged transition). What we can’t expect this visibility to do is cure our society of its longstanding prejudice, miseducation and myths surrounding trans women.
Even on the most liberal shows, trans women are still often punch lines (see any lazy joke targeting Jenner’s femininity and body). Even in our moment in the media spotlight, one fallen white trans bodygarners mainstream headlines over the consistent murders of those that are black and brown. Even in movements organizing against violence against women or black and brown bodies, trans women of color’s bodies are not prone to mass mobilization and I watch as my sisters and siblings speak with one another about protecting trans bodies with hashtags #blacktranslivesmatterand#translivesmatter.
I point out these disparities in an effort to better frame this moment we’re existing in, as someone who has been privileged with access to visibility, as someone who grew up with little access to mirrors that represented me. I am humbled that I can be one such mirror for girls growing up like I did. Representation is an affirming start, but it’s not everything.
There’s much we should be applauding, yet as we applaud, we must also be aware of those women existing outside of the media’s narrow lens, the women organizing, the women on the streets hustling, the women rejected from shelters and improperly placed in men’s detention and prison facilities, the women volunteering their limited resources to support communities of trans folk who’ve been overwhelming neglected by movements.
The names of our sisters shouldn’t only make headlines when we walk a red carpet or lay in a casket. Our visibility shouldn’t be subject to such extreme circumstances. We’ve grown too accustomed, in the past year, to speaking the names of Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, and giving ourselves social justice cred for doing so. This is dangerously tokenizing and speaks to the hypervisibility of women of color who are expected to not only carry their dreams but the dreams of an entire race and people with them.
It’s part of the reason why I am weary of amplifying these women’s deaths because it often feels like these women’s names are only spoken by the majority of us when they can no longer respond. But I must speak their names and when I do, I am aware that my sisters do not need to be reminded of their vulnerability and the threat of violence that looms over their lives.
are you like, NOT aware of the 41% trans suicide rate? or how difficult it is to even get one small slice of gender-affirming medical care in quite literally any country?
of course most people aren’t gonna demand free, full access to everything at once, doing that would put us in an extremely negative light when the optics of trans activism are already devastatingly bleak.
“trans people wanting more than one reason to survive = moving the goalposts” my ass.
