The Transphobes, Terfs and Assorted Anti-LGBTQ+ Sorts thread

[johnnyboy]

Just a side rant to add to the points about toilet policing and that the "you can just tell" lot always do my nut in.  My brother in law is a trans man whilst my daughter is an absolute unit (said with love) to the point that my daughter can look more "manly" than her uncle dependent on outfits and styling.

[Thunderplex]

Quote from a trans woman I used to work with.  “Yes, blokes have dressed as women so they can go into ladies toilets to have a wank.  Sadly as my cock was turned inside out, I can only just manage a piss.”

i do miss her, funny as hell.

[Tamura]

In wholly unexpected news, Ireland's second best known transphobe Enoch Burke is back in prison again, less than a week after being released to help him prepare for his legal case against the school where he used to work. Or the school where he still works, in the mind of Burke at least. The judge seems to have lost complete patience with Burke now, following up telling him he'd been dismissed from his job with “What part of that sentence do you not understand?”

[King Mal the Glorious]

I don't know if the prison system in Ireland is as stretched as it is over here, but what do you even do with someone like that? He's clearly going to keep turning up and a bit of jail time clearly isn't making a difference.

[Tamura]

16 hours ago, King Mal the Glorious said:

I don't know if the prison system in Ireland is as stretched as it is over here, but what do you even do with someone like that? He's clearly going to keep turning up and a bit of jail time clearly isn't making a difference.

I think the legal system around the world is becoming increasingly robust when dealing with the likes of Burke, sovereign citizens or freeman on the land. The Burkes have been disrupting court proceedings for quite a while, with chaotic results.

But the legal system is generally quick to react if there's ongoing disruption, and now the Burkes are swiftly removed from court if they cause any disturbances, and Enoch these days often appears via videolink from prison and is quickly muted if he starts carrying on and trying to rehash the same flawed arguments. Throughout the case the legal system has been willing to give him repeated chances, and he's ignored them all intent on continuing to attend his former workplace, with even a daily fine of €2,000 every time he turns up at the school not deterring him. The judge currently dealing with the case has been increasingly critical of Enoch, certainly compared to what was happening in the early days of the case. At the end of the day the rule of law has to be respected, and more importantly has to be seen to be respected. If someone repeatedly ignores a court order and all other solutions have been exhausted, then from the point of view of the legal system prison is the only option available. Enoch has always had the key to the prison though, all he has to do to secure his release is agree not to attend his former workplace. He doesn't have to accept transgender ideology in any way.
 

[BomberPat]

Presumably he's getting bankrolled by some shady American right-wing money to make it more worth his while too, given how often the story does the rounds on American social media, misrepresented as "this teacher is being indefinitely incarcerated for refusing to use pronouns"?

[SuperBacon]

His surname is very fitting. 

[Chili]

52 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Presumably he's getting bankrolled by some shady American right-wing money to make it more worth his while too, given how often the story does the rounds on American social media, misrepresented as "this teacher is being indefinitely incarcerated for refusing to use pronouns"?

I think about stuff like this and my brain always goes to a grim scenario but like, what's the intended endgame of all the anti-trans stuff. Looking at America, I'm assuming they like the idea of those alligator Alcatraz things, but just full of trans people. What do they actually really want to achieve or is it just bluster and they just want to be continuously angry about it until something else takes it's place of hate 

I know that sounds slightly silly but I mean, current world events render most insanity as the average day in 2026.

[westlondonmist]

17 hours ago, King Mal the Glorious said:

I don't know if the prison system in Ireland is as stretched as it is over here, but what do you even do with someone like that? He's clearly going to keep turning up and a bit of jail time clearly isn't making a difference.

I get the idea he needs psychiatric help. The level of obsession of going to the school is not healthy. 

[Chris B]

8 minutes ago, Chili said:

What do they actually really want to achieve or is it just bluster and they just want to be continuously angry about it until something else takes it's place of hate 

I know that sounds slightly silly but I mean, current world events render most insanity as the average day in 2026.

It's about attacking democracy. Really.

The Behind The Bastards episodes about Carl Schmitt (Nazi philospher) do a really good job of explaining this, but I'll try to summarise my understanding.

Effectively, if you want to destroy democracy, you start by attacking the weak points in the borders. In any society, no matter how liberal, we have borders - those who are part of it and those who aren't. So you find where the greyest areas are between those who are inside and those who are outside these borders (and they don't have to be geographic). 

So you get those who are part of how we do society and those who want to destroy society - and you find where people have doubts and push hard on those doubts, widening the definitions.

Quick example - we all agree that, no matter their culture or beliefs, as long as they're not actively harmful, anyone should be allowed to become a British citizen. But if terrorists are going to try and attack us, then terrorists can't be part of that society. And if we want to prevent terrorism, then people who share terrorist beliefs shouldn't be allowed to be. And if we can't tell what those beliefs are, then the net becomes wider. So, it's not going to be people of any particular religion, but only those who have extremist views.

And now we've moved from 'those who would do us harm' to talking about what defines extremist beliefs, which is now a much, much larger field and much more down to opinion. There's now more 'us' and 'them' rather than it mostly being us.

Same thing with trans people. It started out as very specific issues (the 'cotton ceiling' and trans women in lesbian porn) that were mostly hypothetical, but which hit an obvious button around consent (ignoring what the original conversation was around). This then became about separating out 'women's spaces' from trans women, and then slowly became about the 'definition of a woman'. And it was a very easy conversation for cis men to absent themselves from ('not our place to speak'), which cut out a lot of the population from defending trans people. And now, it's easy to portray anyone supporting trans women as being anti-women and pro-abuse. And which is why it's so easy to become 'blue haired liberal women' being portrayed as a problem and not worth listening to, and increasingly centring 'normal families' as the attacks start to open out to queer people more generally.

You find a small point where there's disagreement in liberal politics, then you wedge that open as much as possible - bringing more people onto either side, and more people feeling like it's 'us' and 'them'.

[The Gaffer]

I've seen a soft landing argument gain traction in that annoying Tom Holland/Bear Grylls 'open minded about Jesus' space where gender identity is posited as a sort of struggle for meaning amongst young people, the idea being that we've essentially lost our Judeo-Christian monomyth and that - as a result - people are scrambling to find their identity in something else.

It's an attempt to diminish lived experience to a sort of professed creed, codifying it into something easier to debase because creeds are really what they're all about. Only - in this instance - done through an irritable "They've fallen so far from the flock and just need purpose!" faux concern lens. 

 

 

 

[BomberPat]

Attacking democracy is a big part, but in American terms it's specifically a big wedge issue for the fundamentalist Christian wing of the far-right, and it's depressing seeing that replicated here. Policing gender conformity by attacking the most visible digression from the norm in trans people is the first step to then relitigating gay marriage, abortion, women's rights, anything that's moved away from a woman effectively being a man's property, whose only role is to produce children. It's grim, but no surprise that as transphobia has become more of a political issue in the US, there have been more people on the right openly talking about rolling back gay rights and women's rights, questioning whether women should have the right to vote, and really open attacks on reproductive rights and support for women's health and sexual health in general. 

Now, not everyone that's transphobic is coming at it from a fundamentalist Christian position, and plenty of them would be appalled at some of the other things that are happening on the far-right, but they're all common travellers in that direction, whether they like it or not. That's what makes the British brand of transphobia - where it most visibly comes from middle-class professional women, journalists, and people who are otherwise plausibly liberal - particularly frustrating, as it doesn't have the same underpinnings, and a lot of those underpinnings are things that we as a country should largely be immune to; we don't have the evangelical right-wing as a political force the way that America does, and as a result I tend to find that on issues of queer and trans rights history tends to have a more liberal curve, because they aren't political issues but immutable aspects of someone's being. That is to say, for all the great things achieved by queer liberationists over the decades, one of the depressing facts about gay rights is that the sign of it becoming socially acceptable to be gay is seeing more out gay Tories. There are queer people on the right, and there are trans people on the right, and the clearer that becomes over time, the more society will bend towards acceptance (note: not without hard work), without the fallback position of "but God wants X" to keep the issue alive the way that these things remain toxic in more overtly religious societies. And I mentioned British transphobia often coming from "otherwise plausibly liberal" positions, but it's worth noting that's often window dressing - the "liberal" position will be that they wrote for the Guardian, or were buddy-buddy with somebody who did it, or that they were pro-EU, and transphobia will generally be the issue that either leads to them starting to express some of their nastier ideas, or to be led down a rabbit hole that leads to them discovering those ideas. I've yet to see a bigot who was just transphobic, and didn't share other bigotries alongside it.

 

And these things, generally, are chosen - if they're chosen and not stumbled upon as political issues - because the majority of people have limited knowledge, limited interaction with trans people in their day-to-day life, and it touches buttons that will spark kneejerk reactions. "Do you want your daughter sharing a dressing room with a male rapist?", no, of course not. Do you think men are men and women and women? Sure, yeah, never had any reason to think otherwise about it. There's an old Stewart Lee routine about how his Nan mistakes political correctness for health and safety, that I actually find really instructive for understanding how large swathes of the public take this sort of thing. They don't realise that there's decades of experience, of research, of academic debate, of political battling back and forth, behind an issue, they just see it break into the headlines, and they half-remember something, and suddenly it's "you're not allowed to say or do X any more"; something they have said, done, or believed their whole lives without thinking about it, it feels like they're arbitrarily being told is "offensive" now, and it just feels like there's some opaque governing body picking random concepts and deciding their wrong. I think recognising that experience of the world explains a lot - it explains people voting to leave the EU because they think it would get rid of wet carrots in their supermarket, just as much as it explains people suddenly bewildered by gender politics they hadn't previously had reason to think about, just as much as it explains why people post "YOU COULDN'T GET AWAY WITH THIS ANY MORE, BECAUSE OF WOKE" in the comments of the most innocuous YouTube video of a 1980s sitcom joke, because they don't understand why they're being told something old isn't acceptable any more, they just think someone is going through the ITV archives with a red pen declaring all their old favourite telly shows "offensive" completely at random.

[Chili]

I do understand all this and they're fantastic reads and helping me understand the scope, and I'm sorry because I really do think my question is far too simple and thick but... Have any of these mad cunts mentioned what they actually WANT to happen at the end of it. Yeah, you banned trans people from toilets, then what.

Because I'm stupid, everything always leads me to thinking "they wanna do what you know who did in the WW2 don't they, but because they're the benchmark for modern historical evil, they'll frame it so 'Ohhhh, we're not like that' but do exactly that" 

[Devon Malcolm]

5 hours ago, Chili said:

I do understand all this and they're fantastic reads and helping me understand the scope, and I'm sorry because I really do think my question is far too simple and thick but... Have any of these mad cunts mentioned what they actually WANT to happen at the end of it. Yeah, you banned trans people from toilets, then what.

That's the beginning. It's not the end target. This is how fascism works. It worms its way into affecting a group of people and then spreads outwards until it's either eradicated or achieves its intended end result which is elimination.

[Chili]

Just now, Devon Malcolm said:

That's the beginning. It's not the end target. This is how fascism works. It worms its way into affecting a group of people and then spreads outwards until it's either eradicated or achieves its intended end result which is elimination.

I see. Look thanks everyone for pitching in to help me get my head round it. I think something I genuinely struggle with is understanding that people are absolutely horrid fuckers and how that behaviour doesn't absolutely ruin them emotionally.