GET THAT BITCH: on cancelling trans girls and feeling great about it

Trans women are people, and many people are kinda shitty actually and maybe that's okay

“OH MY GOD, did you hear about what Ethel Cain / TS Maddison / Contrapoints just said?! Isn’t it absolutely terrible!! Can you believe it?!”

Is there anything the internet likes more than a righteous excuse to bully a tranny?

The high-octane blood-pumping hairs on the back of your neck standing up excitement literally palpable in the thick air… like you’ve been waiting forever to say it:

“I just heard about what (insert trans woman) said, they really are a stupid vapid privileged liberal oh my god!!! I am genuinely DISGUSTED!”.

~ send tweet ~

What fascinates me about the spectacle of the fallen tranny, is how reliable it is. You can set your watch by it, the rise of a new trans woman into a platform, the first murmurs that she is ‘problematic’ from a certain crowd, then as soon as one thing is found that can be jumped on she is hounded, ripped apart like a chunk of meat by a pack of dogs, and utterly devoured. Like the virgin mary, held on a plinth, the perfect trans woman must be knowledgable, wise, pretty (but not too conventionally that she is to render herself unclockable), and endlessly educated so as to have perfect views that she is able to accurately recount as and when demanded of her.

As soon as this idealised trans girl she shows a fleck of humanity, that is a single flaw, she is dragged down from the plinth society put her on against her will, and forced to atone for her sins. Rarely, if ever, are these sins more ‘bad’ than anyone else who happens to not be a trans woman, but they are used time and time again as a tool for deploying righteous punishment on trans women. Punishment they deserve of course, because they have dared to be wrong, to be too pretty, to fuck the wrong person, or to have an impure acquaintance.

It is, therefore, not out of the scope of logic to assert that in the eyes of the contemporary commentariat (internet posters) the perfect transsexual, is a dead transsexual.

Think about the trans women heralded as icons, Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Venus Extravaganza. Trans women who didn’t live long enough to tweet whilst taking ketamine, too poor to afford FFS or a BBL, and extensively referential for all those who don’t dare to examine their lives beyond the surface. There is no room for the true mess their existence no doubt encompassed, mess that makes us dolls so joyfully fallible, wonderfully neurotic, and packed full of contradictions (all of which make us genuinely fantastic imo).

To paint a mural of one of our foremother’s faces on a shirt and say “trans power ⚧️`✊” is infinitely monetisable. You can plaster it on your Etsy store without the fear that tomorrow she will wake up and post something utterly disgusting like “Lol this is what Sock looks like when they are asked to do the dishes” with a picture of a person crying into a bottle of hair die threatening to kill themselves, or comment 3 exclamation marks under a post by Piggy Taiwan about the threats we face as trans women.

To view trans women as truly human, requires you to accept that we might not all be gods perfect transsexual. That our childhoods might not be clean from edgy tweets, that we might have been shitty as teenagers, that we might make bad-taste jokes, that we might not be perfectly educated on a topic, that some of us might grow up to be ‘small c’ conservative (cringe, but inevitable), or that some of us, dare I look in a mirror, might post “lol agp” memes on instagram. These behaviours, things which: cis people, heterosexual people, trans men, non-binary people, and your garden-variety homosexuals, are routinely afforded the dignity of, are rendered utterly immoral and worthy of extreme punishment when enacted by a trans woman.

The reasons for this, in my opinion, is twofold, one is that trans women are uniquely punishable, the other is that trans women are overwhelmingly viewed as revolting and deserving of abuse because of our revolting-ness.

We live in a society where justice is borderline impossible to acquire against people in positions of power, and where oppressed people are clamouring for the opportunity to feel that they are afforded any dignity or access to justice. When the people who are actively committing and signing off on harm are untouchable, infinitely re-elected into positions of power, surrounded by well paid lawyers, and often literal billionaires, you kinda don’t stand a chance. If you critique the nazi-loving owner of an electric car manufacturer you get an army of men telling you to kill yourself, if you critique a trans woman with a small platform you get an army of men lauding you as sticking it to someone who deserves it.

Another great thing about cancelling trans women, on top of the ease of getting traction, is trans women are routinely poor and often likely to have a history in sex work. This content if dug out from the depths of the internet is prime content to plaster over the internet in a ritual of shame, and to send to their employer or partnered brands if they’re an influencer to get their income severed. You can feel all the joy that comes with effectively de-platforming someone, get the full thrill of righteously exposing someone, and even get unanimous celebration for your work from people you are naturally allied with, and not.

None of this is to say that trans women are never wrong. Oh boy, so many trans women are wrong. Heck, I’m wrong and downright hideous sometimes! I’m not here to pretend that what (insert recently cancelled trans woman) said is actually right, and I’m not here to argue about the politics of it. My politics are inherently flawed, biased in favour of things which specifically impact me. I don’t pretend to be the arbiter of what is moral, but I will continue to defend my right to be both wrong and biased in favour of my own experience because that is something literally everyone else is afforded. Our unique abuse-ability is taken advantage of by everyone from doctors who can freely botch us without consequence, to employers who view us as easily fireable or men who view us as subhuman toys who can be mistreated without consequence. We are, in the eyes of society, perfect victims. And it appears that everyone, including ourselves, takes advantage of that.

We are literally replicating the way cis people mistreat us, time and time again. It’s gross that we do it with trans women who we view as having institutional power because they are musicians, tv personalities, youtubers, or whatever, but we also replicate these patterns in our own communities, hyperlocally. “Have you heard about (x) I heard that she’s a (insert hyper-right-on sounding critique)” is like, a literal soundbite you hear over and over again every time you try to catch up on your local trans community. Women who are a bit shitty sometimes, who fuck too many people, who have the wrong opinions, who said the wrong thing about someone, who are too pretty, who are too vain, who are too straight, who think too highly of themselves, who are too ambitious, who are too lazy, who don’t fuck enough people, who don’t fuck the right people. It’s a never ending cycle of perpetuating harm against each other because we feel helpless in the face of our own oppression. I’m guilty of it. I’m willing to bet that you’re guilty of it.

What’s the answer? Idk, I’m just a diva.

I’m famously a bitch, an alleged transmedicalist, ‘catty twink’, or whatever other homophobic / misogynistic slur I’m being called this week on reddit (hi r/4tran4 users). I’m just saying, it’s one thing to think a thing about a trans girl, fuck knows I hate most other trannies I meet. But it’s another to actively undermine their ability to access community, to tarnish their name in the pursuit of a purity that the accuser damn near never possesses.

All I’m saying is, and ironically this idea comes from an old gender critical friend when I was a teenager (shoutout to you babe hope ur alright etc) who said “women are people are some people are assholes”, that if we are going to begin at the absolute basic position of trans women are human beings, made we have to accept that we’re not going to be perfect.