• kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

      I can’t agree with this at all, as an ethnic minority I have seen way too many reactionaries among those who have been oppressed their entire lives.

      Being a minority and having direct experience of discrimination do increase one’s revolutionary potential, but class also plays a substantial role (I’d argue an even larger one just from personal experience) as well as the ideological superstructures being imposed upon us.

      Ultimately there are a lot of collaborationists across every segment of minorities, both within the imperial core and in the global south.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        racism and trans stuff are similar in some ways but different in others, i think its not really right to equate them, very different experiences. the basic rub of it is there is a nonstop media campaign targeting trans people with blatant lies, the history of our community is largely embedded in socialist movements in america, there are inherent medical costs to most transitions, there are inherent painful and traumatizing sensations that you can open yourself to if you seek surgery, a possibility of familial ostracization, there is often a whiplash where you go from not being discriminated to discriminated (or vice versa, or discriminated on a new and different basis), and of course its likely that people have been physically and emotionally aggressive with you no matter what community youre in.

        and then there are discriminatory acts in healthcare and so on, but these forms of discrimination can manifest in different and similar ways for poc, so a little complex there.

        its still my experience that the vast majority of trans people are socialist and people become more active with socialist orgs the longer theyve been transitioned. i also think the fact that our community spans multiple ethnicities also has a factor in this rate of socialism, we all experience similar pains and have many things that unify us. and of course there are some shitty trans people out there, not saying there arent, but i feel like people are greatly overstating how many people are shitty in this thread.

        • charly4994 [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I remember when I was still relatively fresh in my transition being introduced to another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been “out” for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn’t even have my name change done because I didn’t have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright “oh I’m a communist.” Was a bit of a major moment for me. I had a lot of seeds planted over the years between Occupy and just the financial crash but was still very much a lib. As time went on and suddenly the word socialism became less toxic it was a relatively quick shift to make, suddenly all those seeds ended up sprouting and it all just clicked together finally. Having more lived experience as trans and having come across a few people online and IRL that helped demystify it all really did help and I think that’s also a relatively big portion of it. We’re pushed towards the contradictions with our lived experiences while a solid portion of the community is already there able to explain the contradictions and demystify leftism.

          I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had. Completely exiled myself from trans discussions and attempted to never even mention it in any contexts. Finding /r/traaa was an opportunity to actually see more of the trans community and be happy with being trans and ended up kinda just being fine with being visibly trans, though it still sucks that people are shit. I do think the communities we build and the attitudes we allow are just as important as the lived experiences lest you have libs come in and try to paint it over leaving you wanting to just disconnect entirely because their answers suck.

          • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been “out” for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn’t even have my name change done because I didn’t have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright “oh I’m a communist.”

            lmao was it me?

            I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had.

            yeah i remember thinking similar, but you should also take some of the stuff on reddit with a grain of salt, liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly. really amplifies what is really a minority opinion among the larger trans community. you can tell by how many comments have a socialist bent but all the upvotes go to the one liberal opinion

            • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly

              oh fuck i can just see this in my mind

              Well, time to go save these damn transgenders from themselves again. I’m such a good person.

              fucking gross

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        gotta remember that generally people tune out of trans spaces the longer theyve been on hrt. so a lot of trans communities are new transitioners and the long-transitioned and few ‘moms, dads, and vague parental figures’ that guide them to resources and pool the knowledge.

          • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            still young, id say 4-5ish years on is when most people begin to radicalize a lot. though most are some sort of socialist anyways, they just become more serious about it

              • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                yeah i remember one time where a girl came in and thanked me a lot, saying i changed her life by helping her with her meds and stuff and gave me a big hug. and then some time later she flew into a fit of rage and said she’d never come back to the lgbt center after learning i was a communist, and she never did. i was very bewildered at that. i did go out of the way and even got her an uber to her first HRT appointment and helped her schedule it, which is no big deal for me but i know its a big deal for a lot of people who are anxious to start HRT. she claims she was a socialist. sometimes wonder what shes up to 🤔 strange what propaganda can cook up in people’s heads.

                  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    it was a strange conversation. i kinda mentioned it offhand to someone (sometimes people say, wow youre so generous! when i offer to help them with something and i just shrug and say im a commie) and i guess they mentioned it to her. she then began asking me stuff about xinjiang very angrily and i just said that im not really here to get into debates with people, im just the trans resource lady and want to help out. then she stormed off as i said.

            • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              lmao I radicalized the day I came out to myself. I was on multiple tabs of lsd so “I’m lying to myself about gender” and “I’m lying to myself about liberalism” were the same realization.

      • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        The sad tankie phase is completely avoidable. Most of the ones you encounter online lack praxis. Active socialist practice in your community is inherently rewarding.

        Class consciousness might not exist in our local communities in the way we would want to see it, but it is there.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

      In my experience this depends on stealth vs not-stealth. The stealth people wanting to blend and capable of it tend to deradicalise because they can fit into existing society, those that can not tend to hyper-radicalise because they need society to change for them.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        maybe. i pass and i gotta tell you im never forgetting how people treated me in vulnerable moments knifecat

        also there are plenty of times where im forced to out myself, particularly when dealing with insurance and medical, and i pretty much always get a sour and many times visceral reception because people feel ‘tricked’. i had a nurse very unprofessionally yell ‘WHAT’ at the top of her lungs when i was explaining i was trans and my basic medical history

          • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            cat-trans yeah people fucking with you over whether you pass or not sucks. i had a family member claim i dont even though i havent been misgendered by randoms in like 8 years. pretty sure they were just being a spiteful asshole, they couldnt point out why

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            When people keep telling you that you pass, you most likely do, and you’re most likely hella cute as well, because people conflate high passing and being conventionally attractive a lot. And some people, including a lot of trans women, just can’t handle that. Our society teaches women to constantly monitor each others beauty and put each other down both when we’re not pretty enough and too pretty, we’re forced to constantly square the circle, to navigate this ridiculously narrow corridor between supposedly being an unsightly mess and supposedly being a shallow skank. And like most of mysogyny, that gets amplified further when you’re trans. I keep hearing stories like yours and they’re always from really beautiful trans girls who are resented for looking conventionally hotter or more cis-like than the person putting them down. Like, i just met this super cute trans girl and took her to a local meetup because she was afraid to go alone after some other trans woman had trash talked her for not doing enough about her voice at another get-together years ago - not only is that a horrible demand in general, voice work is hard and not everybody has the talent or the ressources or the time or the lack of voice dysphoria to pull through with it, no, she actually has a lovely voice, low-pitched but very smooth and feminine, a voice i could listen to all evening. But that other woman saw her and probably felt threatened and had to lash out. I had to think of that when you wrote about your ex.

            And no, you’re absolutely not a bad trans person for stealthing once in a while. It’s a scary time we live in, and while it’s important that we’re visible and outspoken and let people know we’re actual human beings they know and not just some abstract “gender ideology”, it’s hard to be visible 24/7. When you put yourself out there most of the time, and when you reflect the way you do when you do that, and give people the opportunity to learn, that’s more than enough. From each according to their abilities also goes for activism, and there’s no shame in not wanting to be in the trenches permanently. Our survival and continued existence in itself constitutes a revolutionary act. Reaction wants us dead and being alive as a trans person and living your best life in itself defies the necropolitics of today’s fossil capitalism. Being able to take a break from the struggle is a form of privilege, as is being able to transition at all, or having enough money to pay out of pocket for surgeries, or living in a place with easier access to public trans health care, or being educated and able to articulate your existence in a convincing way, or being binary trans, or having had a supportive home and being able to accept yourself in ways other people can’t because their parents didn’t give them the love they would’ve deserved, or being a white trans person, or living in an area that makes it easier to access queer networks, but none of these are things you shouldn’t use as tools for your survival if you’re lucky enough to have them at your disposal. Cisfascism wants all of us dead, and we have a right to fight bacvk against it with anything we have at our hands, we should just be aware of and mindful towards people who don’t share some of our privilege instead of throwing them under the bus like the actual assimilationists do.