To be trans is to be regularly pinched before dozens of bystanders who ignore it all until you respond.
People have been conditioned to ignore this harm. Not just from the normalized transphobia in comedies and podcasts and and the news and social media feeds; but from years of doing the same to cis women and unhoused individuals.
Consequently, they don’t react to abuse. What’s water to fish in an ocean. What isn’t normalized are trans people pushing back. Having discounted the instigating moment, our response is perceived as the source of negativity.
In online spaces, automated moderation substitutes for these offended bystanders. Transphobic remarks meet “community guidelines” while trans people quoting them get banned without recourse.
Summer Walk
I was on a nice summer walk with a pal when a pedestrian going the other way said that people like us should be eliminated. I made a quip about it to my friend as we kept walking.
These moments happen frequently enough that the man’s exact words aren’t seared in my memory. What I do remember is that it was roughly the same language that the White House used.
Sometimes pedestrians get more physical. Still bystanders never intervene and I’m forced to calculate whether saying anything is worth worse injury or death. I say worse injury because this does take a psychic toll. Pinch, pinch, pinch.
Establishment Too
These experiences are just constant enough to induce anxiety in public. Gendered spaces are the worst: washrooms, clothing stores, etc. I don’t even attempt to go to the gym anymore for fear of change rooms.
The perpetrators don’t look like what you see on television. They can be a well-to-do middle-age person. They’re not always alone either. They organize. Sometimes into mobs.
Sometimes they have the full power of the state. Provincial governments and one federal party package the same eliminationist desires in legalese.
They are joined by the platforms that monopolize online life. Here it’s not epithets or legalese, but weaponized terms of service and algorithmic opacity to undermine our presence.
YouTube has long banned and demonetized trans cultural production. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, explicitly allowed anti-trans hate speech to curry favour with the Trump administration. The takeover of Twitter was fueled by a desire to wield the platform to persecute trans people.
My Facebook feed now regularly peddles anti-trans content and affirming posts are inundated with abuse. I miss the old platform where my feed was friends sharing photos. X (formerly Twitter) banned my account. YouTube comments are a cesspool of hate.
Even this blog wasn’t safe; I needed to disable comments because it was getting overrun with transphobes.
Fighting Back in Kind
And so I experience pinch after pinch, outside the home and thanks to technology – inside it too. I isolate myself for my mental health but it remains unavoidable.
I’m older now. Exposure has desensitized me some. My own fights for familial acceptance and medical care have concluded. As my circle aged, they stopped overdosing or dying from the torment. Others coped by becoming abusive to everyone around them and I had to leave them behind. I made additional friends around interests like off-roading and Christianity and that helped build resilience too.
Yet after all this inflicted misery, I don’t wish to fight back in kind. I don’t want anyone eradicated like they do.
I just want to have a nice summer walk, ya know?