I don't understand why anyone thinks they have an automatic right to take my or others rights away when it doesn't affect them
I think that's what many trans people have been saying with regard to Bindel for years! It's she who's argued in public that trans people should be denied surgery. No one asked her to.
You're right that the interests of L, G, B and T are not the same, but surely they overlap to a greater extent than you're suggesting here. For one thing, many trans people (a far higher proportion than the general public) are gay or lesbian. But also, both suffer prejudice from a heterosexist society that tends not to make the same distinctions between them that you or I might. (Many's the trans child who's been beaten up by homophobic bullies as a 'fag'.) And finally, when someone like Bindel calls for reparative therapy for transsexuals, as she did last year, or expresses disgust at the "odd" sexual practices of bisexuals, as she did today, she is simply providing ammunition that will be fired right back at her by, for example, the Christian right, who have used exactly the same arguments with respect to the lesbian and gay community. Own goal or what?
I'm not one of those, by the way, who thinks that only transsexuals should be able to talk about transsexuality. Bindel picked one unrepresentative comment out of a very lengthy Facebook group discussion that she was trolling at the time, and used it to tar all transsexual people with the same brush. Standard practice, really.
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Date: 2008-11-08 06:41 pm (UTC)I think that's what many trans people have been saying with regard to Bindel for years! It's she who's argued in public that trans people should be denied surgery. No one asked her to.
You're right that the interests of L, G, B and T are not the same, but surely they overlap to a greater extent than you're suggesting here. For one thing, many trans people (a far higher proportion than the general public) are gay or lesbian. But also, both suffer prejudice from a heterosexist society that tends not to make the same distinctions between them that you or I might. (Many's the trans child who's been beaten up by homophobic bullies as a 'fag'.) And finally, when someone like Bindel calls for reparative therapy for transsexuals, as she did last year, or expresses disgust at the "odd" sexual practices of bisexuals, as she did today, she is simply providing ammunition that will be fired right back at her by, for example, the Christian right, who have used exactly the same arguments with respect to the lesbian and gay community. Own goal or what?
I'm not one of those, by the way, who thinks that only transsexuals should be able to talk about transsexuality. Bindel picked one unrepresentative comment out of a very lengthy Facebook group discussion that she was trolling at the time, and used it to tar all transsexual people with the same brush. Standard practice, really.