I support her being trans, that’s separate from her being a bad person. Tangential (not aimed at you!): there’s this thing where “allies” suddenly think it’s okay to be transphobic against a bad person and you find out they have a whole arsenal of remarks they’d been dying to use
A tangential phrase that comes to mind is “I support women’s wrongs as well as women’s rights”. Well supporting trans wrongs as a subset of supporting trans rights means understanding that trans folk have the right to be assholes, and everyone has the right to challenge them on that, independent of their transness.
Even when the brand of assholery is specifically linked to them leveraging their trans identity to do harm to the trans community (Caitlyn Jenner has done some of this, but Blair White comes to mind as a better example of this), we can still attack them for this without attacking their transness
Because the thing is about rights is that they’re meant to be inalienable. If someone says they support trans people’s right to not be misgendered, but then they misgender a trans person they consider to be bad, then they’re treating basic human respect as a privilege that can be given and taken away at will — that is, they’re not actually treating this as a right
I support her being trans, that’s separate from her being a bad person. Tangential (not aimed at you!): there’s this thing where “allies” suddenly think it’s okay to be transphobic against a bad person and you find out they have a whole arsenal of remarks they’d been dying to use
Yeah, this is a big problem that I see a lot.
A tangential phrase that comes to mind is “I support women’s wrongs as well as women’s rights”. Well supporting trans wrongs as a subset of supporting trans rights means understanding that trans folk have the right to be assholes, and everyone has the right to challenge them on that, independent of their transness.
Even when the brand of assholery is specifically linked to them leveraging their trans identity to do harm to the trans community (Caitlyn Jenner has done some of this, but Blair White comes to mind as a better example of this), we can still attack them for this without attacking their transness
Because the thing is about rights is that they’re meant to be inalienable. If someone says they support trans people’s right to not be misgendered, but then they misgender a trans person they consider to be bad, then they’re treating basic human respect as a privilege that can be given and taken away at will — that is, they’re not actually treating this as a right