[CW: Mentions of Enbyphobia, Transmedicalism, Transphobia. Video links may contain very bigoted content.]
Trans-assimilationists, transmedicalists, enbyphobes, truscum, whatever you wanna call them have been a subject of trans "discourse" on my mind a lot as many of you may know. I let them have a lot of power. I let them live rent-free in my head and control my emotions by making me feel so disgusting that even transgender people don't think I deserve my humanity. For those of you who don't know, I'm a non-binary person who identifies as transfeminine as well. I am medically, socially, and legally transitioning to some sense of androgyny, and I use the term "transfeminine" to specify the "direction" of my transition, having been assigned male at birth and going through feminizing procedures.
I had some really fucking wild experiences with transmedicalists in the past, but nowadays, I feel as if they are so damn irrelevant, and here are a few things that changed for me:
- I started noticing that transmedicalist discourse has practically died out. No one cares about Blaire White as much anymore because the 2016 anti-SJW craze died out, and people have called out her bullshit excessively. She's been easily identified as a person with terrible research skills, argumentation, and demeanor who posts mind-numbing and low-effort predictable posts that transphobes eat up. Kalvin Garrah faded into obscurity a while ago. Any other niche truscum grifter who tried to cash in on what those two did? Well, you don't remember that they even existed.
- With a broader amount of transphobic legislation being pushed, which I definitely know of since I live in Florida, people have seemed more emphatic when it comes to unity. I think pointless arguing over whose gender identity is more comfortable for cis people or whether or not we should tailor ourselves to be comfortable for cis people at all is the true trans trend, and it's a trend that's seemingly dying. This has allowed trans people to unite and come together and educate one another.
- Expanding upon the last point, being a trans person in Florida, I started interacting with IRL trans people who not only have zero tolerance for exclusionary bullshit of any kind but are also networking with a ton of other queer organizations that are broadly inclusive. As a matter of fact, I can't say any queer group reasonably saying something like "You're the wrong kind of queer, so GTFO.". That's a very terminally online thing to do that doesn't apply to the real world at all.
- I always take time to remember how absurd transmedicalist arguments are. This older comment I made takes a lot of them down.
- My view is shifting from animosity towards transmeds to sympathy for them. This is a big plus because it shows that I'm now in a position where I kinda look down on them instead of them looking down on me.
There's a lot I can say to expand upon this as you can see, but I basically realized that enbyphobic trans people are a special case that is hard to make true sense of, but at the end of the day, I'm now wholeheartedly aware that it simply stems from major insecurities they push so hard that they have to resort to the most incoherent kind of respectability politics possible. With transphobia arguably being the most socially acceptable form of bigotry right now, it couldn't look more absurd to me to try and be "one of the good ones".
Also, this shit got better when I stayed on Hexbear for longer and stopped browsing Reddit and 4chan. I'm sure that's no coincidence!
