Its just so exhausting and upsetting.
excerpt from a conversation from yesterday (CW transphobia)
Transphobe 1: its too tall!
Transphobe 2: what is?
Transphobe 1 gestures at me
Transphobe 1: that thing
The conversation continued with additional transphobia.
And like i get it okay, im not a person, not even a human, but can we just skip the whole conversation? Or is the whole dehumanization and inflicting pain thing the enjoyable part?
I guess a positive is that it shows who the fake and fairweather allies are, like i was surrounded by people i thought were allies but no one said a damn thing. It was transphobe 2 that actually called out his friend cause ‘you just cant say that stuff anymore’ 🙄. Transphobe 1 proceeded to try and defend his actions by claiming he was using gender neutral language cause he didnt know how to gender me. Like, no motherfucker you fucking werent! Gender neutral language isnt dehumanizing language! Now i get to go organize an event with these same “allies” who said nothing. I demand that you shoot me now, so i dont have to do this.
Im not sure why im so upset about this. Its not that bad, really just par for the course. Not like he was beating me or anything. And allies should be assumed to be false unless otherwise proven. Its just so tiring. So damn exhausting.
Thanks for listening to me
One of my gfs uses it/its for very similar reasons to why I use ze/hir. There’s a school of thought I don’t 100% subscribe to but I am sympathetic to (in part because it matches my own feelings for my gender, personally) that Man and Woman are hegemonic concepts oriented primarily around a very specific view of social and biological reproduction, and that even cis queers aren’t really men and women in that sense. Using it/its (and to a lesser degree ze/hir) is kind of like saying “you know what, you’re right, I’m not actually a woman by your definition, and that’s a good thing.” Bigots love to degender as a way to dehumanize (in the way that they will call us men but clearly don’t actually think of us as men or women), and we lean in and say “this is better actually”.
Tbc I think “no fuck you I am actually a woman and every time you complain I become 10% more woman” is also a totally valid response to that degendering and dehumanization, this isn’t a grand statement so much as what some of us vibe with personally