The Big, Bad Tranny with the Well-Researched, Unpopular Opinions

I’m uncertain about a lot. The more I learn, the more I realize I’m uncertain about and the more I learn I don’t know. However, when I’m certain there are folks who know less than I do about certain areas in certain topics, and I try to give them some breadcrumbs along a trail to help them gain a deeper understanding of an issue that they’re posting about on social media with pithy quips, and they simply… don’t even stop to question what erroneous ideas they’re simultaneously absorbing and perpetuating? That there may be a need to dig deeper and question their understanding? That maybe their experience or something they have shared from a blue checkmark isn’t as universal as it is claimed?

When I was reading Corretta Scott King’s autobio, one thing I was struck by was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s consistent check-ins with Corretta concerning his moral state. “Are we sure we’re not like the KKK?” he would ask (paraphrased) many times early in their activist work. Then, on the eve of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he made plain over television and radio broadcast broadcast as well as to the 5,000 people present that theirs was a non-violent movement. That no white folks would be taken from their homes, that no crosses would be burned at white churches or on white folks’ lawns, and that white folks would not be beaten for the cause of justice. That it was a movement of love and justice, justice being “love in calculation.”

Not gonna lie, I need to get better at the “mathematics of love”, and keep discussions about the nature of reality (what am I even doing here???) off social media. However, white folks need to stop acting like our idea of truth is the only idea of truth. Even one of “our” own “great” thinkers, David Hume, wrote about how when we blink, we can’t even be certain if we are experiencing the same reality when when open our eyes as when we closed them. That just because B follows A, that doesn’t necessarily mean A and B are always connected. That just because the sun has always set in the west and risen in the east from our vantage point as monkeys on this ball of dirt and water hurling through space forever falling toward but always missing a giant fucking fusion reactor, itself held sway by the gravity of (ever falling toward but always missing) a super massive black hole at the center of our (probable) spiral galaxy, that doesn’t mean we won’t all wake-up one morning with the sun rising in the west…

All of the previous paragraph to say: quantum uncertainty principle.

We’ve evolved to seek out patterns as a matter of survival. This manifests in many as an innate fear of spiders and snakes (that can be unlearned), reflexes to avoid being struck by a blow we know is coming (that can be trained around), or watching weather patterns to predict favorable conditions. However, most of us white folks don’t take time to realize that the patterns we’ve been taught (traumatized) to recognize are designed to inflict harm. We aren’t taught to see the patterns of white nationalist thinking as such. We’re taught to see them as universal, God-given objective moral truths. They are as invisible to us as the green in the grass or the blue in the sky on a clear sunny day. Thus we don’t even begin to recognize our horrific capacity for harm until they are pointed out to us. Patterns like the enforced template of the nuclear/bourgeois family. Monogamist supremacy. Reproduction being the only “use” that a “woman” has (child-bearing, child-rearing, and home-making are all included in this). Defining people by their reproductive anatomy, and then restricting their autonomy based on it. The messed up thing is: I haven’t even gotten to anything related to human trafficking/murder/rape based on melanin content (commonly referred to as the “Trans Atlantic Slave Trade”; also – most of the founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson were rapists who wanted kidnapped Africans in chains for as long as they could be kept there), financial capital, (dis)ability, national origin, or religious dynamics. Much of the above are things I’ve seen more than a few white trans women recently accept as normal in one form or another both online and in meat space. And when I’ve attempted to question it, I was viewed as an aggressor. Conflict avoidance and right to comfort come into play. I’ve seen all of it from white cis women more than I care to admit over the years. I’ve heard these things discussed as not just normal in some cases, but laudable. Attempting to present any kind of counter narrative or even asking questions or stating that the absolutes set forth in a given message about how some “universal truth” about humanity doesn’t apply to me or many people I know and love is seen as a seen as an attack on one’s very sense of self.

I’ve been told by several white women that they admire me. This frightens me, now. It’s almost never an admiration of me in the fullness of my being. It seems to usually be an admiration of an effigy of me with shades of truth concocted in their minds on a backdrop of white feminism. When the real me shows up in full dimensions… it almost never goes well. One white woman recently said to me, “You’ve obviously done a lot of research, but I disagree with some of your conclusions.” I really wish she would have been more specific about which conclusions of mine she perceives as incorrect and how I could be more correct. After all, I’m not saying this stuff for my health. In fact, writing what I have these past months has been detrimental to my physical health if anything, but so mentally and emotionally liberating.

BUT NOW I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT MEN. Give the Good White Christian Women a break (don’t worry, you atheists, I’m gonna come back around to you in a bit).

There’s two guys I had over who were VERY interesting. Both of them named James. Both of them white. I invited them over for reading and fucking. Both of them amenable to my simple guideline for reading together: don’t debate people who face oppressions you do not about the oppressions they face.

I gave James #1 the option between “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano and “The Disordered Cosmos” by Chadra Prescod-Weinstein. He chose the latter, saying that he was much more interested in a science book than a feminist one. Oh, deary me, what a treat, I thought to myself. We sat on my couch reading the intro to “The Disordered Cosmos” out loud. He came in two minutes after we moved to my bed and started fucking. It would have been pathetic if it weren’t so hilarious. He asked me what Prescod-Weinstein’s “agenda” was. I could tell by his line of questioning this was a man used to seeing material that was trying to tell him specifically what he should think. “You could get a copy of the book yourself and find out. Personally,” I explained, “I think she just wants to spark a renewed interest in science, especially in black and brown youth. Further, I think she wants us all to view the world and each other in more interesting and complex ways.”

He sat naked on my bed with his fist under his chin pondering what I had said, and the text we had gone over much like The Thinker by Auguste Rodin and simply said “Huh,” before getting up to gather his clothes, seemingly stumped by the idea. “I mean, we started having sex and I just couldn’t get some of the stuff she said out of my head!”

The OTHER James who visited read the introductory chapter of “All About Love: New Visions” by bell hooks with me. I didn’t give him a choice. I figured that this book is important and should be read by everyone. He said that a lot of it resonated with him. Especially the introductory quote by Jack Kornfield:

My sex with him took a lot more time. And I was and am glad for it. Unfortunately, when I said I wanted him to take me out, he was… lackluster in his response. We’ll see how things go, though.

There have been OTHER men, though. Less honest men. I try to create a space where people can explore parts of themselves they’ve been neglecting. However, when they are dishonest, I’m never sure how to respond. There was one man I had over whose wife called me two weeks later. They both turned out to be virulent racists. Violent as hell in their proclamations. And… for all the white trans women out there who ask me why I have such a hard time surviving in the straight world, here’s why:

I CHALLENGE WHITENESS

IN WAYS THAT MATTER

I uncover peoples’ load-bearing illusions and mess with them. I used to do this without realizing this because that’s just one of the ways my neurodivergence presents itself, near as I can surmise. Now that I know about it, I’m far more careful in how I do this (not interrogating what people believe about the world is masking on my part and it takes A TON of work for me not to do), and there’s a whole consent process most of the time.

I say “most of the time” because I’ve started noticing the weaving of a tapestry from a lot of disparate threads, and the final thread was a married Catholic man in my Grindr inbox tryin’ to tap this bomb-ass pussy. That’s when I came to the conclusion that all hetero men are tranny chasers. Hetero men: NONE OF YOU ARE FREE FROM SIN! You may hate me because I speak the truth, but that will not stop me from speaking the truth. However, I digress. These threads seem disparate and date back hundreds of years (the tapestry has many threads, I may miss some, feel free to leave your own that you see in the comments), but I assure you they are all interconnected. They include…

• The Catholic sex abuse scandal, first reported on in my living memory in 2002 by the Boston Globe, which dates back to the 1500s (anyone who does a little scratching into the history and beyond the opacity of the HRCC should be TERRIFIED by this organization and its practices)
• The destruction of varying gender systems across the globe as a result of colonization
• The current attempts at the genocide of trans youth
• The myths coming from transphobes that trans folks are “grooming kids” to be trans (recycled homophobia; see “Irreversable Damage” by Abigail Shrier as an example of a distillation of these claims)
• The myths about trans women attacking cis women and cis girls in public toilets and locker rooms (once again, recycled homophobia about gay and bi men going after hetero men and boys and lesbian and bi women going after hetero women; see you really don’t have to look hard for this, just look up anything related to a bathroom bill or a sports ban on social media and read the comments)
• Forced sterilization at ICE detention facilities, which is an act of genocide
• Family separation at ICE detention facilities, with possible placement in foster care of the children, ALSO an act of genocide (the NPR article mentions a worker at a facility who quit after being told to stop a pair of siblings from hugging)
• JUST HOW FUCKING WILD MARRIAGE LAWS ACTUALLY ARE…???

• SCOTUS will be ruling on an abortion case soon regarding whether or not Roe v. Wade will still be the law of the land, which will cause A BUNCH of states’ trigger laws to go into effect (there are still options, but I’m not suggesting anyone break the law, because that would be incredibly naughty)
• A vote on August 2nd in Kansas regarding the constitutionality of abortion VOTE NO! VOTE NO! VOTE NO! FOR FUCK’S SAKE VOTE NO!

The tapestry that I am seeing is simple: control. A maintenance of white hegemonic power over children, and then women. They realized they couldn’t say the quiet parts of white nationalism out loud anymore, such as the Great Replacement myths, so they are opting for more subtle means. Now, if people understand that gender is fake, and that they are not bound to their biology, they will realize they are more than their reproductive organs. If they realize they are more than their reproductive organs they might realize there is more to life than labor, reproductive or otherwise. There is love. Joy. Happiness. Sex for the fun of it. Music. Art. If they realize all that, they might realize that the borders on the map they’ve been taught to value so much are fake, too, and the white folks might start to see their black and brown and immigrant and indigenous neighbors all as fully realized humans with their own intellects and hopes and dreams and loves and desires and impulses and survival instincts and histories. We might stop seeing each other as means to ends and ends in and of each other. We might start trying to make the world a better place for the sake of it. Not just for ourselves but for each other, and for people we may never even meet. Just because it’s the right thing to do. Maybe I’m getting all hopped up on my pie-in-the-sky anarchist dreamboat bullshit here, but maybe lots of other people are stuck trudging through the dreary dull work days of capitalist hellscape in their own repetitious fictions, ever hurrying to the next thing, never taking time to learn about the world around them, thus never taking the time to examine the hurt in the world to even take a guess at how to heal it. To even imagine what could be if they let go of what they’re holding on to and reached for what they truly desired. What is now and what has been isn’t what has to always be. We can change it. We can write a better fiction if we work together. We just have to try.