Do not misgender a trans person even if its someone you detest

People don’t seem to be able to get a basic here – that it is not OK to misgender a trans person because you don’t like them or you don’t like something they’ve said or done.

BetteMidler’s gaffe is typical in this regard. She noted that a lot of people don’t like Jenner and decided to put the boot in. this is the tactic of a bully – rallying all the cool kids round them while they pick on the least popular kid.

Regardless of what Jenner has said and done, her gender identity is not something that you can start ripping into. Why? Because once that has been established all of us then have a conditional identity. Which means we may be fine right up until someone doesn’t like us and then when we say the wrong thing – blammo! We get punished in a way that only trans people can.

It’s important because unless you’ve experienced it you might not understand – but fear of being the subject of a transphobic attack is something that silences trans people. And it goes wider than politics. If I intervened in a neighbour dispute because the neighbour needed help then I might find that instead of the issue remaining as it was it would suddenly become about my gender and my transness. Same anywhere really – on the bus I once defended using the disabled seat because I am disabled (I have good days and bad days and this was a bad day) against a woman with a push chair who wanted to sit there (I wasn’t in the way of the push chair and she appeared to be able bodied - didn’t claim otherwise either and much younger than me so I stayed on the seat – if the bus has been less crowded I’d have gone to sit elsewhere but it wasn’t and I didn’t feel able to stand) anyway when she saw how the argument was going, first of all she tried all sorts of different ways to shame me to get up – including mocking my claim to be autistic – finally she resorted to misgendering me and that worked. After outing me to the whole bus, loudly, I got up and got off the bus and waited for the next one, shaking uncontrollably.

As a tactic it works very well at silencing trans people and that’s why we can’t tolerate it, even for people we don’t like very much. I don’t understand why Bette Midler didn’t get that.

Transgender isn’t alone in this respect. No-one says its OK to be misogynist against women we don’t like (though it happens plenty, I've not seen anyone defending it) and no-one says its OK to be ableist against disabled people we don’t like (it happens plenty, but again, I've yet to see anyone argue that some disabled people just deserve it). But I have argued and argued with people who consider themselves to be trans allies who maintained that horrible people lose their rights, and that trans women who go to prison deserve nothing better than to be sent to a men's prison to experience abuse and rape. 

 Some trans women end up in prison and quite often are stripped of their gender and forcibly de-transitioned as if an extra level of punishment is required for trans people. We don’t, eg, send cis women to men’s prisons. People tend to be sympathetic to trans women who have committed minor crimes or may have been subject to a miscarriage of justice, but to any trans woman found guilty of a more serious crime then a ‘throw away the key’ attitude becomes prevalent as if rotting in a men’s prison (and being abused and raped or locked up in solitary) is all they deserve. Funny that this attitude doesn’t carry over to cis women convicted of serious crimes, no one suggests that they should go to a men’s prison if they commit a serious crime. It’s a discriminatory view held by far too many people.

I’ve also been very concerned with trans women who are homeless, because then you become at the mercy of everyone’s trans misogyny. Even services in place to help or rescue them will often amount to abuse or extreme discrimination as trans women will be more likely to be treated as a man, being refused access towomen’s spaces, protection against rape, women’s clothes; even if free servicesare offered they will often not be gender appropriate. It’s difficult to talk about this stuff because everyone has a fixed idea of how homeless people should be treated and that when you’re homeless you shouldn’t expect more than the basic services on offer, or the view: ‘why should trans people get special treatment?’ But I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m asking for trans women to be treated as women and not ignored or abused for asking to be treated as women. I’ve heard horror stories of homeless trans women having already lost their home and presumably any treatment they were undergoing, have been denied access to gender appropriate clothing, the means to shave, or even abused for persisting in identifying as a woman. With such organisations as the salvation army involved in ‘helping’ homeless people I’m really not at all surprised that such abuse goes on.

Another example of where trans people get treated appallingly is among refugees. But this is a subject for another blog. Refugees have always been treated as a lower class of people in many ways and most people seem happy to turn a blind eye to this.

Ultimately, a right is only a right if it applies to the most hated, the most impoverished and the most mocked of all people. If you can be stripped of your gender for being wrong in an argument, being found guilty of a crime or becoming ill or homeless then gender is no longer a right – it remains a privilege that can be stripped from you at the whim of others. But only for trans people. Cis people don’t have this. Cis people don’t lose their gender identity because they’re homeless, because they’re in prison or because they are ill. Cis people do not get misgendered when they have arguments with people. Cis people don’t suddenly have scrutiny directed at their identity and their gender by people they disagree with. This is discrimination and when you do it to wealthy, unpleasant Republicans then you do it to all of us. You make what we consider to be a right conditional, conditional on not annoying other people or finding our lives suddenly in ruins.