#lord knows the usamerican queer community could use a hell of a lot more actual radicalism on many different fronts

[perpetual-oratorio]

Earlier today I came across a tiktok of a queer cis woman responding to a transphobic and interphobic asshole. I'm debating whether or not I should link the tiktok in a reblog- I think it would help illustrate my point, but I'm also not trying to put her specifically on blast, this is about a dynamic I see all over.

The guy was doing a lot of the standard "everyone's cool with LGB people, but why are you associating with trans or intersex people, this is just making you look bad" concern trolling. The response tiktok was clearly meant for a general (us american and british, given the specific context) audience and has a lot of the pitfalls you would expect. Like, it was a mistake to teach cis people the idea that "sex and gender are two separate things" because they then can use that to further enshrine sex as simple and unchangeable, you all have seen the posts talking about this dynamic, that's unfortunately totally expected for this kind of video by cis queers for a presumed cishet auduence, this is not a novel observation I'm making.

But something else grabbed my attention also, especially in light of that other post that's been going around on here about appeals to tradition in the lesbian community. When this guy was making the case that cis LGBs and trans people have totally different struggles and are just entirely different from one another, and so shouldn't be grouped together, her only response was to point to history. You see, many of the people at Stonewall were black trans women, and Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were instrumental in the early usamerican queer liberation movement, and trans people have always been here. All of that is true, of course, if a bit revisionist about how accepted trans people were in those communities.

But that was the entire argument she had for trans inclusion- trans people were there and are therefore grandfathered in, which is very much the standard script cis people follow for answering this question. The thing that struck me and motivated me to make this post is how it feels like cis LGBs can get by without understanding the basis of their own oppression. It feels like usamerican conservatives handwringing about gay people "destroying the nuclear family" should have given the game away for the actual anxieties underlying homophobia in the same way as conservative handwringing about how transition can harm reproductive capacity does for transphobia. The fact that that is the same anxiety, the same desire for control of (social and biological) reproduction, should be the clearest sign that we are (ostensibly) part of the same community not because cis queers feel they should be nice to us, but because we are on some level the same thing in terms of the societal transgression our open and proud existence represents. It's frustrating how often it feels like the best we can expect from cis people, queer or not, is a surface level appeal for diversity and not a deeper understanding of the shared basis of our oppression.