Thread by @MariBrighe

Alright, I’m late in getting to this, but since its #tdov, I want to talk about visibility in the trans community.

In particular, I want to talk about visibility as both praxis and goal, and why both of those things have largely been failures, particularly for trans women.

Historically, trans people have a fraught relationship with visibility. For decades, *Invisibility* was stressed to by those who controlled our ability to transition.

Meanwhile, we have also existed as objects of public fascination as far as back as the early 20th century.

Visibility as a political praxis, of course, draws from gay rights movement, and especially from the work of folks like Harvey Milk.

Because so much of the rhetoric around gay people had been so ludicrously sensationalized, visibility could quickly debunk those caricatures.

While a lot of other, more aggressively liberational forms of praxis be utilized over the years, especially during the AIDS crisis, the “coming out” and visibility forms were a huge part of the gay rights agenda all the way through Obergefell.

And by and large, it was successful

Visibility worked for cis gay folks because there were cis gays in almost every echelon of society, and they were particularly well represented in entertainment & media. They had the social and actual capital to leverage that visibility over time to guide public perception.

From a theory view, I think it’s also important to understand that— while the dominant public expressed disgust toward homosexuality— gay people do not inherently threaten a fundamental system of social control…especially as the gay rights movement shifted toward assimilationism

That brings us to trans people, & the trans rights movement. It’s logical that we’d look to the gay rights movement for templates, even as cis gay folk often tried to minimize our visibility throughout the history of the movement.

Further, visibility is often not optional for us

Life has always been hard for visibly trans folks, especially trans women. And trans women arguably suffered from even more ludicrously offensive stereotypes thanks to daytime talkshows and our status as a cultural meme.

That said, in many ways, that’s *all* we were.

There had never really been widespread public *anxiety* about trans people until this decade. For most people in the US, trans people were almost more urban myth. I dare say the average person forgot we existed until someone made a tranny joke.

That limits political animosity.

This has born out in numerous conversations I’ve had with trans women who transitioned around my time or before. People reactions often being more awkwardness, confusion, or curiosity…and many of us being the first trans person to come out in the spaces we inhabited.

And so, I think many of us believed that, as more people came to have a trans person in their life or see real trans people in media, we’d be able to follow the same path to rights and acceptance as cis gay people. We also anticipated support from the rest of the LGBTQ community

Unfortunately, as trans visibility started to nucleate and we hit the so-called “Trans Tipping Point”, the backlash started, and it was swift and ugly. It started with the bathroom panic and bloomed from there.

So, why has visibility politics been such a disaster for us?

First, I want to acknowledge that the increased visibility of the trans community hasn’t been completely without value. Young and newly-out trans people have role models & possibly models, & there are far more resources for/about transitioning than 10 years ago. That’s important.

I can point to three major reasons for the backfire.

•The relative lack of social, political, and economic capital of trans folks
•The profound way that transness threatens the structures of heteropatriarchal power
•The Right’s need for a new political boogeyman

First, lack of capital. For many years, transness was a poison pill to most careers if you were not stealth. Trans people have long tended to be underemployed & economically disadvantaged. Family estrangement was (and is) super common.

We are a community reliant on each other

Even within the LGBTQ community, we’ve long been pushed to the edges and/or erased (see: HRC’s history). This meant that we weren’t quietly living among cis folk in every corner of society, & there was no Hollywood glass closet for trans folks.

We also have much smaller numbers

So even as transness & trans people entered the public consciousness, we had little ability to shape perceptions about us.

Media about us was written, directed (and often starred in) by cis people, usually with minimal input from trans folks.

News media wasn’t much better.

In those early years of the new media boom, there were a few of us writing about trans issues and, but the pay was frequently terrible and there were no trans EDITORS, & we struggled against the more amplified voices of professional transphobes (which has only gotten worse).

And so, the world woke up to the existence of trans people among them (hence everyone thinking we didn’t exist before 2015), but most of them immediately had their heads filled with post-truth lies and other nonsense about us, stoking fear, anxiety, and panic.

Second, trans people represent a threat to one of our societies most important systems of social power & control: heteropatriarchy. While cis gay folks also do to an extent, most have gone out of their way to assuage those anxieties (“we’re just like you!”)

It’s different for us

I’ve done a longer theory dive into this before, but to summarize, we are perceived as a threat to the heteropatriachal system because (in their eyes) trans men are opting entirely out of their socially designated position, & trans women can revoke men’s heterosexuality.

Not to go all Foucault here, but trans people as a whole also directly undermine the biopower system that underpins capitalism by subverting the gender-sex-gamete inference that underpins the reproductive cycle driving biopower under heteropatriachy. (But that’s for another time)

Long and short is, trans people triggered existential anxiety in the wider public in part because we destabilized one of the structures they view as most critical for maintaining social order (the sex-gender system, and it’s associated signs/signifiers).

But wait, there’s more!

All of this happened at a time when the American Right was floundering in their culture wars.

Their decades of effort at attacking cis gay people only looked increasingly cartoonish as the tide of public opinion turned, and gay marriage was legalized.

They needed new fear.

GOP being the GOP, they threw a lot at the wall…and one of the things that stuck was us. We made fantastic boogeypeople to stoke the fears & anger of their base for the reasons I outlined above

And just as they did for gay folks, they labeled us a threat to kids for more effect

The end result of all this?

Visibility has just turned trans people into targets.

And now, not just us…but the parents of trans youth, doctors, teachers who support trans kids, etc.

And it’s disproportionately affecting the most marginalized people in our community

And now I’m going to begin the hard (and likely unpopular) part of this conversation.

At this juncture, we’ve entered into an era of pretty divergent goals and political interests within the trans community, some of which are almost directly contradictory.

That’s challenging.

The frank reality is…in our current environment, visibility praxis is most beneficial for, and most prioritized by, folks who are transmisogyny-exempt.

And those who are suffering the worst effects of this backlash are trans women and other transmisogyny-affected people.

I understand why this is the case, and I do not begrudge TME folks the affirmation they are seeking. But, I do see a lot of those affected by transmisogyny being shamed for their desire to blend and talked over in conversations about gender and womanhood in our community.

The most illustrative point of tension I can think of is over pronouns. As a trans woman, I very much *want* people to assume my pronouns. I want to be gendered correctly, preferably without being clocked. Because that represents the safest way for me to move through the world.

That’s the case for most of the trans women that I know (I won’t presume to speak for all trans women).

I have experienced many AFAB non-binary folks pushing very hard to norm always asking everyone for pronouns.

In most cases, if someone asks my pronouns, I panic.

It often feels like TME folks prioritize and value their own individual self-actualization over the safety/well-being of trans women, & the liberation of trans people as a whole

Don’t misunderstand, I don’t hate my transness. But for me, being recognized as trans is a liability

I’ve also experienced TME folks complaining or expressing jealousy/resentment at the hypervisibility of trans women, & equating it to power/privilege

Lemme tell you—if you’d like & be the one called a sexual predator & threatened with murder for using a bathroom…you can have it

To draw all of this to a close…we are in a situation where a lot of people are focused on trans visibility, but there’s not nearly enough work being done to make it safe for trans people (especially those affected by transmisogyny) to simply exist.

That *has* to change.

Transmisogynistic and bioessentialist talking points and rhetoric have become commonplace, and it’s often only trans women pushing against them with little amplification or support.

Being trans/nb does not absolve you of your complicity in transmisogyny.

Until we actually address the underlying hatred of trans women and other TMA folks and the structural violence toward us, visibility politics/praxis is little more than painting targets on our backs.

As always, if you find my words useful, tips are always appreciated.

I’ll link a couple other of my long threads below.

ko-fi.com/MariBrighe

A thread on why transphobes treat trans women so differently (hint: it’s transmisogyny).

https://twitter.com/maribrighe/status/1380585133556838401

A thread on why heteropatriarchy is so obsessed with the fertility of trans youth. (Another thread vaguely Foucauldian)

https://twitter.com/MariBrighe/status/1376961540532928526

The cruelty *is* the point with the Right and trans kids.

https://twitter.com/maribrighe/status/1496560627216703492