Anthropology Pronouns Or Else

New Niche Indignation

May 30, 2023 by David 169 Comments

Come, let us dip a toe in the world of transgender Reddit – specifically, rFTMOver30 – where the sexually dysmorphic hunt for slips-ups, pronoun blunders, and tiny acts of transgression. As you might imagine, things can get quite competitive.

First, a little background on the author of this particular woe:

About six months into dating, I went back on [testosterone] and have been on it for about 14 months. Aside from my voice not being deep enough for my liking, I pass 90-100% of the time in person, 50/50 over the phone. I changed my pronouns to he/him a few months ago and now identify as a binary trans man. [My cis female partner] has always been incredibly supportive of my transition, took care of me during top surgery, and largely has been my biggest ally, but at the moment I’m struggling.

The struggle involves a devilish innovation in the world of “transphobia”:

Last night, we had some of her friends over. Two cis het women and one of their husbands… So, we’re all hanging out, having a good time, and the single friend (we’ll call her Alison) makes a comment about women being afraid when walking to their cars at night, etc., and turns to the cis guy (“John”) and says, “You know, men, John!” – making a joke, because apparently John is the only man in the room!!!

This inadvertent favouring of factual accuracy is, it turns out, only the appetiser. The main basis for umbrage is about to become clear.

I get it. I too was afraid of men walking to my car when I was identifying as a woman (I came out as trans at 33. I’m almost 36 now). So I can understand on some level acknowledging the cis man who didn’t have those experiences, but it totally invalidates me for obvious reasons.

And so,

While I may not be cis, to exclude me from potentially being a danger to women… is transphobic.

There we go. New ground broken. Drinks all round.

After the gathering, when the guests had left, apologies were of course extracted from the author’s partner, along with confessions of wrongdoing, for daring to suggest that no harm was intended. Needless to say, and despite the lengthy confession and profuse apologies, and despite promises to “sit down” with Alison and correct her, the author of the piece is, we’re told, “having trouble moving on.”

You see, if friends come over for a pleasant evening and they don’t immediately consider you a potential mugger of women, or rapist of women, this is oppressive, “invalidating,” and “transphobic.” Such that it feels like “a punch in the gut.” It’s perhaps not the most obvious basis for invoking the unfairness of the world and one’s own endless suffering, but hey. In this competition, contrivance equals bonus points.

Quite what the author’s partner makes of this news – that in order to avoid being “transphobic,” she must consider her transgender lover a potential rapist – is, alas, not divulged.

Readers are invited to ponder the prospect of a dinner party at which, in order to be polite and suitably affirming, you’re obliged to insinuate that the host is rapist material. And to do it convincingly. Rather than, say, compliment the cooking or the décor.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Via Eliza Mondegreen.

Update, via the comments:

Several commenters note the implied, rather unhappy, domestic dynamic, in which the role of the author’s partner is seemingly to be scolded and deferential, forever affirming, regardless of how bizarre the situation becomes. Such that, a failure by one’s friends to regard one’s own lover as a potential mugger and rapist results in said lover becoming “hurt and surprised” and “pretty upset,” and subsequently demanding apologies.

Regarding the author’s annoyance at not being considered a danger to women in darkened car parks – by her own houseguests – Steve E adds,

I don’t know, someone crazy enough to cut their tits off, slice flesh off their body, roll it into roulade and sew it onto their crotch scares the hell out of me.

An irony being that, as a group, the sexually dysmorphic, and certainly dysmorphic men, are much more likely than the wider population to be sex offenders. So, our indignant author may have a basis for feeling excluded. Though perhaps not quite for the reasons she had in mind.

Commenter Cheeflo observes that trans activists complain of “being erased, misgendered, or otherwise triggered,” but are not discernibly concerned by “the insult and humiliation imposed on the rest of us when they demand we deny reality to assuage their feelings.”

And regarding such demands, Abby adds,

When you can get the other side to walk on eggshells about questioning your (very questionable) premises, when the other side is more comfortable discussing implementation details, then you’ve already won and it’s just a mopping up operation.

Indeed. And when you defer to the pretence, complications will likely ensue, along with quite a lot of dark farce. Best, I think, not to give away the store in the first place. To defer to the premise, if only to seem nice or polite, is to risk being fundamentally compromised, robbed of probity, and to be left in a very weak position, or no position at all, to resist further demands for distortion and unrealism – and demands that one participate in someone else’s psychodrama.

As noted here before:

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically.

Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Update 2:

“The paradox of the transphobe.”

So ladies, how about letting him into your intimate spaces?




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