Category: Trans Rights

Let’s be honest: for most workplaces diversity and inclusion is about checking a box. They value diversity in principle, just not enough to change anything.

I’ve worked in tech for eighteen years. One software company I worked at hired women based on hot they were. This was with HR’s blessing. They were 92% men but the business praised itself on diversity.

Most women and trans people I know have stories like that. DEI is almost always performative; something they can advertise.

Labour in the UK and Democrats in the US have embraced the anti-trans panic manufactured by their opponents to get votes. It won’t work.

I referenced this in a previous post, but one of my observations after years of transphobic harassment is how they’re always parroting someone else. The words are never their own.

After sixteen years of talking to everyday people who participate in organized bigotry – from tea party rallies to the convoy to anti-trans marches – I’ve learned one thing: they don’t believe what they’re saying.

They think they do but here’s the test:

• Would they have believed that in isolation
• Can they defend it using their own words
• Will they ditch it on a whim

And to the media and politicians that loves to platform them but a single test:

• Do they omit that individual’s other wild conspiracy theories

Let’s break it down.

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.