The “Drop the T” petition that I mentioned yesterday, which seeks to dissociate LGB people from those awful, disgusting trans folk, is causing quite a stir. Pink News had to disable comments on their report because of the level of anti-trans hate speech being posted there. If you feel that your brain needs a wash with bile there are screen grabs in Sarah Brown’s Twitter feed. It is good to know that there are plenty of people out there who are certain that I “claim to be transgender” in order to go into women’s toilets and rape lesbians. And yes, those comments are primarily from gay men.
Of course having a petition to throw trans people out of the LGBT community isn’t censorship. Petitions are only censorship when someone uses them to object to transphobic hate speech.
Some of the various campaigning LGBT organizations appealed to by the petition have come out strongly against it. The Human Rights Campaign described the petition as “unequivocally wrong” while GLAAD said that it “stands firmly with the transgender community”.
Meanwhile a counter-petition has been launched stating:
We find the petition by ‘Drop the T’ to be insulting, inaccurate and transphobic and we want to make it clear that this narrow group of people do not speak for the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
I am, of course, expecting a counter-counter-petition from groups who feel that they are excluded by the LGBTQ+ term.
Currently the Drop the T petition has 1192 supporters while the counter petition has 458, though the former has been online a lot longer.
If you are wondering what sparked this sudden flurry of community in-fighting, it is probably the decision by voters in Houston to scrap equal rights protections for LGBT people, mainly because of a successful campaign by right-wingers who painted the law as allowing male sexual predators (that is, trans women) to enter women’s toilets and rape people. Some LGB people are reacting to this by desperately trying to dissociate themselves from trans folk because they regard us as a liability. Charming.
However, before we get all outraged about this, let’s remember that it works both ways. In looking for news reports about the petition I quickly found a fairly recent piece in Metro by a trans guy who wants to dissociate himself from all this pervy sexuality stuff.
Humans. Sigh.
Nothing changes. This sort of stuff was going around both ways more than twenty years ago … except that, in those days, both sides were erased from the press and it just took place in our mailboxes. I’ve said it many times. Most people learn nothing whatsoever from the experience of their own oppression, except how to kick down when they get the slightest opportunity. The real problem is the whole idea of inviting the public to vote on someone else’s rights. It’s an invitation to demonstrate power. Ballot provisions only work because the majority can muster the kind of votes that minorities could never hope to raise. It leverages privilege and power and uses them to further entrench privilege and power. What do the authors and supports of the “dump the T” faction imagine would happen if they succeeded in splitting the LGBT alliance for the haters? The next ballot motion would seek to kill LGB-friendly legislation by picking a different lie. What Houston teaches is that there are too many trans allies who (for some stupid reason) feel incapable of rising to the challenge of defeating the lies at the heart of bathroom panic.
You didn’t give a link to the counter-petition. I found it, though – and it’s already larger than the “Drop the T”, yay…