Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

I honestly kinda hate how the big mantra people tend to chant is just "trans rights are human rights."

That statement doesn't say anything at all about the speaker wanting to fight for trans people, or even suggests they have the first clue what rights are being denied to us.

It's just... acknowledging that issues exist in the abstract, and it usually only comes out in response to bigots making baffling declarations about how trans people just existing causes them some form of metaphysical harm.

Rather than just shout "trans rights!" let's drill down

1. Trans people deserve the right to transition.
Kind of a big one here! What makes a person trans is having their gender incorrectly assigned at birth, usually due to some atypical physical development for their gender, which is a side effect of some pretty damn awful endocrine

disorder that needs to be fixed as a real serious medical concern, and which causes a lot of other traumatizing issues which need to be fixed to avoid a life of pain and stress. We also tend to end up with names that are gender-inappropriate, and a lifetime of other headaches, so

there's just this whole host of legal paperwork changes, and most likely a number of major medical procedures needed to just catch up to a baseline of health and dignity everyone else has by default. The legal issues are frequently blocked by specifically transphobic policies to

call for repeals for, and the medical issues are blocked by a severe lack of doctors specializing in the relevant fields, prohibitive costs, arbitrary gate-keeping of patients, and medical coverage providers classifying vital stuff as "cosmetic surgery" and denying coverage.

2. Trans people deserve the right to medical care.
Please note that this is a separate issue from the transition one. Denying basic everyday and emergency medical care to trans people, like EMTs taking injured or ill trans people to hospitals, doctors treating those injuries, or

writing prescriptions, or say, performing appendectomies, are all things that people simply refuse to do when the patient is trans, and in many places, their right to do so is explicitly enshrined in law. And don't get me started on medical diagnoses dismissing all manner of real

issues as "probably a side effect of HRT." Like, again, the pain reported from a broken arm kind of stuff.

3. Trans people deserve the right to privacy.
Words cannot convey the degree to which trans people, especially women, are maliciously stalked, just across the board. Bigots

not even just for special occasions, as just a regular routine procedure, seek out every trans person they can find, and for each, spend utterly absurd amounts of time seeking out and archiving literally every single speck of information they can find on us and anyone interacting

with us in any way, anyone talking about us, employing us, going to school with us, working alongside us, etc. Did you come out as trans last week? That geocities page you had back in the '90s is fully mirrored in these repositories, along with a full mirror of any message board

you may have posted to, in its entirety, and any chat logs you might be mentioned in in any capacity that can be acquired anywhere. This information is of course used in various malicious ways (mention that a pet is sick and needs taking to the vet? That vet's phone is going to

start ringing all day as bigots DDoS their office, etc.) but even if it weren't, just the act of gathering all that information is inherently threatening, and the archiving of it is innately harmful. For instance, I design games and write articles under the name Violet Hargrave.

Go ahead and pretend you're someone thinking of commissioning me, put that into the search engine of your choice, and try to find some examples of my past work. While you're in there, maybe report all the twitter accounts that come up for impersonation, too. There's quite a lot.

4. Trans people deserve the rights of basic human dignity, courtesy, and social acceptance.
The other big slogan (trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are nonbinary) at least somewhat covers this, in drawing attention to the rather unique and strange issue

of trans people (along with a good number of cis people who do the bare minimum of asserting our basic humanity, and a shocking number of cis women with short hair) constantly having to deal with bigotsbending over backwards to refer to us with the wrong pronouns and refusing to

ever call us by name (substituting masculinized versions of feminine names, researching the histories of name changes, or just arbitrarily picking random alternate names from a hat). Beyond that extremity though, people, even people who pride themselves on trans allyship, have a

weird habit of perpetually forgetting we exist. Laws and policies get written with regards to reproductive health and rights in such a way that trans people for whom they are relevant are left out, and even when this is the result of carelessness rather than malice, this matters.

For instance if you have a law stating that companies must grant paid parental leave to all women from month X of pregnancy to month Y after giving birth, there will absolutely be pregnant men and non-binary people being told that any time off they need as a result is a sick day.

Much less formally I couldn't count the number of times I've somehow failed to be included on, say, lists of women working in X field, or for Y organization, or to this networking meet-and-greet as a subset of this event, or when someone decides the best way to address a powerful

man within a given circle being sexually predatory is to quietly set up a whisper network to tip off "every woman" in that circle. It's not even just gendered things, either. Personally speaking, I can honestly say I have never been invited to a social function. Of any sort. Look

at this here empty hand containing every invitation I have ever received to someone's wedding, birthday party, premiere party, concert, seeing a movie, etc. It's real common for people to simply just not see trans people as actual people when making their plans, or to avoid ever

being in public with us because "someone" might be uncomfortable in our presence in a public setting. Special mention really needs voicing too of the specific subset of how absolutely no one but bigots can ever seem to keep it in their head that trans women are a subset of women

who are unable to bear children (at least barring surgical procedures which are only just entering testing and won't be readily available to all relevant parties) and WOW does that lead to some awful crap being carelessly said to our faces more often than you'd think.

5. Trans people deserve the right to speak for ourselves, both collectively and individually.
This one is generally a cornerstone for any sort of rights movement, but damn if it isn't ever especially egregious an issue here. One must of course first observe the sick joke of how

there is literally a thriving cottage industry of transphobes who earn a very healthy living exclusively through a constant stream of propagandist articles for major publications and TV appearances who also have the audacity to frequently begin such tirades by indignantly stating

that they are "being silenced." And meanwhile of course I can't name a single trans person working as a newscaster, a salaried reporter, a talkshow host, a sports announcer, and... I was going to say radio DJ, but fact checking myself on that there apparently is exactly one such,

having held the position while in the closet and somehow only briefly losing her job upon transitioning. Good for her. More to the point though, WELL past the point in history where people will look back at a movie like, as a random example, Breakfast at Tiffany's, in horror and

disgust, but it is still EXCEPTIONALLY rare to ever see a trans woman on film who is portrayed by a trans actress. Or even by an actress at all. Hell, most people's ENTIRE notion of what a trans woman even is comes exclusively from seeing a bunch of movies where some guy walks

around in comical drag with a bad falsetto. Trans men respectively are also nearly never portrayed by men nor by people who are trans, and nonbinary characters actually are more typically than not played by nonbinary actors on screen, but only because such characters were almost

unheard of until just a few years ago, and any list of nonbinary characters in fiction has a depressing quality of being loaded with explicitly non-human characters. Pushing aside mass media representation entirely though, perhaps the biggest lie screeched by bigots about trans

people, or at least the loudest, is that being trans is a form of mental illness, with the strong implication that, specifically, being trans somehow prevents a person from observing an accurate version of ourselves or the world around us, and this lie is, in fact, pervasive and

compelling enough that even people who would swear to know better tend to subconsciously dismiss any issue or citation raised by a trans person as delusions, and completely denying all credentials and relevant experience one of us might possess. Trans women, in particular, suffer

additional subconscious biases as a result of similar endless streams of bigoted propaganda portraying us as shifty deceivious tricksters, and as humorless oversensitive bitches who cry transphobia at everything we don't like, which carries a multiplicative effect there. As does

the lack of perceived credibility that just comes from being a woman, and glancing at the replies already coming into this thead, let me note that "joking" about trans women being on equal footing with cis women when it comes to being dismissed by men is an excellent example of

that phenomenon I brought up in point 4 of this thread where people just perpetually forget trans people are in the room, metaphorically or otherwise. I am a woman. When people see me, they see a woman and whatever misogyny they hold, be it overt, subconscious, internalized, etc.

comes to bear. If I specifically make it a point to state that I am trans, or I am listing off prescriptions I am taking to a doctor who is capable of putting 2 and 2 together on why anyone would ever be put on 3 mg of estradiol and 400 mg of progesterone a day, there is a whole

extra shovel-full of BS and bias they unload onto me. N+X is not equal to N, but greater. Which nicely segues us to...

6. Trans people deserve all the various rights other marginalized people seek.
Hiring discrimination, wage inequality, police brutality, rape, social exclusion,

random acts of violence and vandalism, housing discrimination, appearance policing, weird double standards, etc. etc. I'm lumping all this together because hopefully this is all ground well-trod enough to need no extra explanation, but while we're here, please look at this map.

https://twitter.com/autisticb4mmr/status/1271002510065459200

Good to know. If I recall, the ENTIRE map was pink as recently as like, 6 or 7 years ago. Hopefully it will continue to grow more outdated.

7. Trans people deserve the right to not be treated as the living embodiment of sexual fetishes.
This one covers a

whole hell of a lot. Perhaps the most telling point is that you can upload the same exact video to youtube twice, with and without including the world "trans" in the description, and the former will trip a demonitization flag for inappropriate sexual content. You will also see

actual porn sites list "trans" and various variations thereof, pretty consistently at the top of search term rankings, even when splitting up various euphemisms like various slurs or "futa." Chasers are a thing. I don't have the energy tonight to explain what chasers are, so let

me toss a link out there: slate.com/human-interest… There is a twitter account there which exists solely to shamefully review all the dick pics people send to its creator, and it is the furthest thing from a surprise to me that said creator is a trans woman. Those pour in. Not an

insignificant percentage of my follower count seems to be comprised of porn aggregators term-searching "trans" and adding me. It is a ubiquitous assumption that any and all trans women existing on the planet are sex workers, to such a degree that overreaching policies to arrest

women on the vaguest suspicion of engaging in prostitution are referred to as "walking while trans laws." And I don't mean trans people call them that, I mean I see that in Associated Press headlines. People constantly feel entitled to ask for very specific details of what trans

people's genitals look like usually asking bluntly the very first instant they learn that a person is trans or have a chance to speak to someone they were already aware was trans. And that's not even getting into the bigots. So many of the biggest most obvious hatemongers nakedly

fetishize trans women (hell, Graham Linehan's personal obsession with me prior to his big heel turn has grown so obvious to so many people I've spent the last year having to shut down rumors that I used to date him and/or angered him by refusing to sleep with him). So many hives

of anti-trans terrorists are full of efforts to find or fake sexually explicit images of their targets, and long discussions of all the hardcore trans porn they're watching for "research." And SO much weird sexual fan fiction and roleplaying about actual people. Accusations we're

sleeping with anyone showing basic respect to us. Absolutely wild speculations about what transitioning entails. Covertly filming 14 year old girls from the bushes as they walk to school and going through the footage frame by frame looking for ones where the lighting and angles

let them imagine her having some two-foot erection. Fantasizing about catching us naked in the bathroom. Trying to actualize those fantasies by barging into random bathroom stalls with video cameras. Plastering the mirrors with the rolls of stickers they carry around with crudely

drawn penises printed in batches of several thousand at a time while they're in there, then book head to head debates with trans women on live TV and literally just start chanting the word "penis" at the top of their lungs. It's all just so disgusting and vile and for the rest of

the population even 1% of what any given one of us has to endure on a given day would lead to a career ending sexual harassment suit for the offending party. I feel like vomiting just thinking about it all enough to type this.

But I still have to close on the right I've seen us

collectively pine for more than anything else.

8. Trans people deserve the right to go swimming in public.