Gaiman occupies an unusual place, to me. He’s a middle-aged white British celebrity, which these days puts him in a demographic practically guaranteed to be hostile, but by all accounts he’s a good guy. Like, properly a good guy, of the understands-his-privilege and now supports the liberation of all minorities…

Of course he fooled me. I’m pretty sure he fooled virtually everyone who wasn’t in the actual circles in which he traveled (eg. high up in the convention circuit), and a pretty good chunk of the ones who were. It’s been months since this all started coming out, and former fans are still trying to figure out how to deal with it; the new even more horrifying exposé that came out today has touched off a new round of soul-searching and cynicism, so let’s talk about the two questions I encountered today that seem to sum it up.

Do Only Bad People Make Good Art?

On Bluesky, user @kvoxsky.bsky.app posted:

The thing that troubles me is it seems that only bad people – and not just bad, but monumentally awful, complete monsters – can make good art

(… which ironically echoes one of Gaiman’s most famous bite-sized works, the ‘Make Good Art’ speech.)

This is not even a little bit true… but I can see how you get to this opinion, because it looks that way. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s basically a sort of availability bias.

We can only judge the art we see, by definition. So barring a few acquaintances or niche things, we’re talking not just about art that was made, but art that was published. In the mainstream. Whatever else art needs to be published, it needs to be greenlit by publishers and producers.
‪
That means every bit of art we get to see, has passed through that process… which means it was championed by someone capable of schmoozing, networking, making contacts… and who, statistically speaking, probably started from a pretty privileged place to even start that process. Add on top of that that once art has had any sort of mainstream success – once we’re seeing someone’s second or third TV show, or their tenth bestseller, or what-have-you – at least a good chunk of the proceeds from that have come back to the champion, who might not be the artist, but often is.
‪
Thus, the more successful an artist is, the more likely they are, statistically, to be wealthy and influential and privileged. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in this hellscape, it’s that people who are wealthy and influential and privileged (and especially the men) are exactly the people most likely to feel superior to others and entitled to be served, with their time, their work, and their bodies.

So there is no correlation between good art and entitled, monstrous behavior… but there is a hell of a correlation between successful art and entitled, monstrous behavior.

Who Are You If You Loved A Predator’s Work?

And on another, currently more horrible and getting worse, social media site, user @canadiancontent (the BC-based writer Ian Boothby) wrote a post that said in part:

People like the art and it seems unbelievable that someone with that much empathy and heart in their work that connects so directly to them could do something like that. How could you connect to the work of a predator? What does it say about you?

… which is exactly what’s hurting all of us who tried sincerely to be decent but had Gaiman’s work, or Whedon’s, or any of the painfully many other examples, in our heads as inspiration. In our souls*. And what it says about you is: you believed they were who they claimed to be.

A lot of people will call that gullible. I understand that framing, and the impulse to use it, but I reject it. It’s easy to make people believe something they want to believe, and in this case that means believing that someone who creates good art – inspiring art – is a good person. It means believing that someone will do or say the right thing because it is the right thing, not merely as a shield to hide bad behavior.

It means, in short, being willing to believe the best of someone.

Do. Not. Lose. That.

That is a kindness.

We have to be willing to believe the best of others, to give them a chance, or else we’re sunk. We’ll have nothing to build any sort of community or world on, and the very people who are TELLING us ‘all virtue is virtue signalling’, who would mock us for gullibility, are the ones who are eating the supports out from under the world right now.

So what it says about you is you were willing to believe someone was good, that you connected to the fictional non-predatory version of themselves they portrayed in public. But that’s okay, isn’t it? We all connect to fiction; that’s what starts all of this – and we can’t not. As an even more beloved British writer said, “Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”**. One of those fantasies is that we can be… better. Take your inspiration for that wherever you can, and if that source turned out to be a lie… well, fiction is inspiring too.

So divest yourself of them if you can, but don’t feel guilty. In fact, the opposite: if you can, it’s time to step up and try to follow the example of the version of them that didn’t really exist, but was what you really aspired to in the first place. Keep being willing to believe the best of others and keep trying to be the best version of you because we didn’t and never will get the best version of them.

* Don’t make a thing of it, skeptics. I’m being poetic.

** Terry Pratchett, “Hogfather”

It’s been two years since my last post here, which shocks me. Time doesn’t seem to work right any more. But one of the main reasons was how bit by bit what I sort of thought of as “my beat” stopped making sense. Because it was hope.

That was the point, why else bother to write, really? You have to have meaning in your message, otherwise you’re just “bumbling away like some sort of muzak” (as Rumpole of the Bailey says). And I’m not really satisfied with meaning that serves no purpose, or could make things worse. So in the wake of the last couple of years, with the vices clamping harder on everyone and, just… everything… I haven’t had much to say beyond cynical jokes better delivered in another medium. And then a month ago things went from the frying pan into unmitigated hellfire.

Evil – staunch, fascist, sadistic evil – is winning. The American Experiment has failed. The Paris Accords are failing. And yet… and yet…

What is their endgame? Not the slogans; those rarely mean anything substantive, they’re just team chants. What would have to happen to change ‘winning’ into ‘won’?

Eradication, that’s what. Power and control forever. LGBTQ+ people destroyed. A return to the divine right of kings, and the final erasure of empathy and kindness from society.

But that’s impossible.

Queer people aren’t a political movement. We’re a natural variant of humanity. More than humanity, even; queer creatures are a natural variant of animals in general. It is possible to commit genocide on us, but it is not possible to complete it.

They can kill us in a way that matters, but not in a way that works.

Empathy and kindness are also inherent to humanity. In fact, we are a highly pro-social species. If the hard right’s notions of strong-man social Darwinism as the basis of society were true, we would never have been able to form a society in the first place! There would have been no drive to create medicine, or communities, or even families as we know them. It is not possible to destroy these either.

This is a dire, shriveled hope. But it is still hope. And nobody worth listening to says we should roll over and take it.

Evil is winning. But they cannot win. It’s a double-edged knife, but there’s always tomorrow. Fascism inevitably, eventually, eats itself. There aren’t any pharaohs around any more, are there?

What we do in the meantime… is exactly what they want gone. We survive. We find each other. We survive. We create points of light and joy in the darkness. We survive.

We will laugh and love and create and share and above all, as a people, survive.

They’re really going to hate that.

for Julia Serano’s blogger Day of Action

I mean the dudebro insecurity apocalypse, which has become increasingly hard to ignore, no matter how much the particular dudebros wish it could be and tell their cult-flavored followings it isn’t happening.

Consider, if you will, such a dudebro. Let’s call him (and somehow it really is always ‘him’) Mister. He’d like that. When you’re this big they call you Mister and all that.

Mister is, by all common standards, wealthy and powerful. He’s not a good guy. That’s almost tautological: the kind of wealth and power Mister has amassed do not come from doing good things. They come from an inheritance (that he does not like to talk about, since it impugns his image as an entirely Self-Made Man), from one or two pieces of extraordinary right-place-right-time luck, from an admittedly dab hand at propaganda, and from an absolute cutthroat ruthlessness. That last gives him some difficulties, in that he’s trying to simultaneously look good to the world at large who do not think crushing any obstacle with blood-spattering veins-in-your-teeth callousness is anything positive, and his base of supporters who absolutely DO value that and in fact tend to worship him in a concerningly culty way largely because they love their strong enemy-squishing daddy.

They’d never admit this is why, though. Especially not to themselves. The faithful who love Mister for his strength and apparent acumen in his chosen field are completely soaked in the most toxic kinds of masculinity. Never surrender, never compromise, never admit weakness, never admit you love being subordinate. No matter how very very very much they do, with their authoritarian mindset. Flippant terms like ‘daddy’ aside, this is seriously the thing: they worship what they perceive as strength, and believe that attaching their own identities to that of what looks to them like the strongest guy around as an idol to support and emulate makes them strong too. They imagine he has their backs.

Of course, he doesn’t. He never has, in a way that’s obvious to anyone not among the faithful. He’s got a long history of one-way loyalty, demanding it but not giving it in return. Demanding praise but only giving abuse. The faithful, behaving to a man (though they are not all men; they are mostly men, but not sadly somehow not all) like the victim of an abusive relationship, invariably imagine each time that they would be some how different, that Mister would never abandon the true faithful, that somehow every single one of the tire-tread-covered bodies behind Mister’s bus were an isolated incident or a moment of justice.

Mister’s faithful tend to be pretty plugged-in online, too, though they are stuck in something of an information silo. Mister tells them not to trust the ‘haters’, so they don’t, but ‘hater’ means any source of information critical of Mister. They do tend to be aware of other Misters and be fans of them, though only one is going to be Their Guy.

Recently, however, things have not gone so well for Mister. He’s a terribly insecure man, always was, which has led him to use his wealth and power to surround himself with yes-men. If you respond to the presentation of valid criticism or even negative news about your situation by killing the messenger, you’re going to run out of messengers pretty damn quick. Mister’s gone and locked himself in an information silo too. He is and was cynical enough not to think very highly of his faithful or of the propagandists he uses to send his message out there… but he’s been doing that for a long while now and whittled away his sources of contradictions. He’s left with nothing but his own bullshit as the way to see the world. And he’s acting on it.

Believing his decisions infallible, his resources insurmountable, and his faithful innumerable, Mister has made what he cannot admit is a very very big mistake. There was… something, let’s call it the Problem… that niggled at him. It has for a long time; the Problem was full of the not faithful, the ones who said everything he didn’t want to hear. The Problem did not revere him, did not pay him the adulation he so obviously deserved. The Problem was not his, and it was too big and visible to ignore. In his eyes, it lent faith and comfort to the enemy. So he set out to solve the Problem.

He made a bid for control. The Problem was not his, but by God it was going to be. He threw monstrous resources at it. Far far more than he believed it would take, in fact, but… he can’t admit that, either. You can’t say “yikes, that was too expensive” if you’re trying to live up to an image of infinite resources and infallible decisions, so he’s stuck in it until the bitter end now, no matter what. But the Problem is not going to come quietly. The Problem is resiting him. It’s full of people pointing out his failures, full of people who will not bend the knee. He can’t have that. He mobilizes the faithful and begins a purge! Now that the Problem is under his control at least partway, he can get rid of the infidels – by any means necessary. Out they go, on the toe of his jackboot and amid a wave of how much he’s making everything better, how the Problem could be saved, how only Mister can make the Problem great again.

It’s not working, though. This is creating more resistance. It’s making the part of the Problem that he controls less and less valuable and lending more weight to his detractors. And it’s getting more and more and more expensive, but… he can’t stop. He can never stop. The faithful are waning, there is dissention in his own ranks, but he CAN’T. EVER. STOP.

The dumpsters are on fire now. Nobody but the most absolutely cultified tattooed-his-face-on-their chest Most Faithful could possibly look around now and see anything but the blatantly obvious fact that Mister has made an absolute unmitigated seven-layer disaster out of the Problem, and it is reverberating back through everything else now, too. The things Mister has been able to claim as successes until now are under scrutiny. They’re looking more and more like paper tigers and hollow chocolate bunnies. If it weren’t for his ego, for the yawning bloody hole where Mister’s sense of self should have been that no amount of money and power can fill, he could have made it out of this, could have followed an exit strategy a while back or maybe even now, and salvaged something. Maybe or maybe not a legacy; certainly salvaged his previous successes; absolutely been able to retire to a life of luxury un-dreamt-of  by any normal person. He might even have been able to turn it around and made the Problem… not one of his successes, but a footnote that didn’t matter any more.

But he can’t. He can’t ever stop. He’s placing himself in the path of a failure so harsh and unavoidable, so monumental, that it will very possibly crack even his own narcissistic shield, and force him to face the fact that for all his money and power, for all he managed to build… he sucks. The people who loved him were wrong because he couldn’t live up to it; and the people who hate him – who then outnumber the remaining faithful by at least an order of magnitude – were right. He is, despite everything… a loser.

What will he do then?

This is the pattern we’re seeing play out right now in real-time, the pattern that isn’t really new in any way but it is extreme how much it’s being made blatant throughout current affairs at the moment.

For Mister Donald Trump, the Problem is US politics. For Mister Vladimir Putin, the Problem is Ukraine. For Mister Elon Musk, the Problem is Twitter. And they are all in the Unmitigated Dumpster Fire portion of the story. They’re going to keep pushing until they break themselves, and I don’t know what will happen then. It could be hilarious; it could be incredibly ugly; and I’d be looking forward to it except I can’t stop thinking of all the lives they’ve ruined along the way.

Why do we let people like this have any power at all??

Tonight, my housemates and I watched the 1990 horror cult classic Nightbreed.

Have you seen this one? Pretty good FX for the time, spectacular makeup, and strangely Canadian – being set in, and partly filmed in, Alberta. I was probably techincally too young the first time I saw it, but liked it even then.

Filmed in 1989 as it was, it was one of the last of the ’80s horror’ subgenre, but an unusual one. There’s a sleepy little town and outside it a necropolis of a graveyard; there’s a whole underground warren of monsters and a beleaguered population in fear of their lives; there’s a psychiatrist and a serial killer – except all of these common enough tropes were turned on their heads. The monsters lived in the graveyard, yes, but they are the beleaguered population; the serial killer is the psychiatrist who manipulates his disturbed patient into believing he, the patient, committed the crimes; and the ‘monsters’ aren’t the ones dealing out violence at their whim – that’s the police and the townspeople, at the behest of the soft-spoken well-dressed murderer with a doctorate.

As metaphors go, it’s not subtle – there’s a visible Star of David on a few of the prominent set pieces and props, for example, and they even called themselves the Lost Tribes at one point – but it works, and it doesn’t just work for that most obvious comparison. Even when I watched it when I was too young, I didn’t just feel for the ‘monsters’, the Midianites, I felt like one of them. Never quite part of the world, always treated like something they wanted to get rid of… and now?

Now that impression is all too real. Every single day I am exposed to message after message in the right-wing, right-leaning, and even centrist media, calling for people like me to be at best carefully managed and kept at arm’s length from society, or at worst outright exterminated. Within the last couple of weeks the Federalist even posted an op-ed literally using the phrase “the transgender question” to mean exactly what it sounds like, the dogwhistles so loud that wineglasses were shattering for miles around. We’ve seen cops who were quite a lot more politically extreme and trigger-happy than the ones in Nightbreed giving interviews about the precincts they run, and the ones in the movie reminded me deeply of the guys I see proudly bloviating online about what damage they’ll do to us if they catch us daring to use public facilities, sometimes in excruciating detail. The metaphor rings very true; we are what we are by accident of birth, not choice; we don’t want to hurt anyone; we look strange or uncanny, except (even more terrifying to those who hate us) those of us who can appear ‘normal’; and we are absolutely, utterly, not wanted by society.

This is not a deep cut. The metaphors here are subtle as a sledgehammer. The point here isn’t my amazing insight as a media critic, but rather how personal it feels now. This is a movie about monsters being murdered, and I see myself and my demographic in it, because the public calls us monsters and wants to murder us.

And while I know I’m not who the metaphor was intended to be about originally, Hebrew symbology aside, I’m pretty sure I’m not so very far off it. Nightbreed (and the novella it was based on) was written and directed by Clive Barker – a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic, who had just lived through the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.

I think perhaps he knew a thing or two about being treated like an underground monster deserving of death.

I’m not referring to the oft-misued MLK quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Unfortunately (at least, taken like this in its stripped-down version), that’s nonsense. Rather it’s what “Beau of the Fifth Column” said: to change the law, first you change thought.

Here’s Beau in one of the many videos in which he said this and its related argument:

Regarding the latest rush of SCOTUS insanity, these fucked-up rulings and their enabled fucked-up laws are popular among assholes currently in power, but they are overwhelmingly unpopular country-… culture-… wide.

The minds have been changed. There is backsliding, but that trend remains overall in the right direction.

The unexpected (to me) reaction, is that small and mid-size corporations are starting to nail their colors and their money to the mast in favor of reproductive and queer rights. This is the biggest indicator of minds changing.

Corporations have no souls, no conscience; they do what they believe will make their brands popular and palatable to the most customers. Nothing else. So if corps are trending progressive, even if it’s pink- and rainbow-washing… that’s the bellwether that the people have gone hard far more progressive than that. In the longest run, the laws must follow the people, or the people will no longer consent to those laws.

What’s not always made clear is: it’s literally, deliberately, traumatizing. Cop behavior is weaponized PTSD. Below, a video with an ex-cop talking about what it did to him:

They don’t serve and protect, because they have been trained to believe that service is weakness and protection… is impossible.

The TERFs have started saying their last quiet part out loud.

From https://twitter.com/ai_bi_li/status/1461595516400066563

From here comes the entire edifice of hate they have to build to explain us.

The uncontested facts are these: Kyle Rittenhouse, at age 17, brought a rifle designed entirely for killing humans to a protest he knew would be heated. There, he killed two people and wounded a third. This action has now been deemed lawful, and there will be no government-sanctioned consequences for him to face.

He’s a kid. He’s a kid with terrible judgement, and evidently a strong willingness to imagine himself as the Good Guy With A Gun hero figure. He’s also definitely a kid who had a firm belief in his own immunity from consequences, because while the trial was ongoing, he went to a bar with his Proud Boys buddies and flashed white power symbols. That feeling of immunity has been seriously confirmed, in a verdict that is going to have far-reaching consequences on the definition of self defense in the state of Wisconsin. In the eyes of his white supremacist friends, and 1/3 of the USA, he’s been confirmed to be the hero, the Good Guy With A Gun forming the thin white line between good honest commerce and horrible uppity lefties.

So… what do you think is going to happen the next time there’s a civil rights protest anywhere near him?

I’ll lay good money he’ll be locking and loading and rolling out. This is who he is now. He’s the hero! The Main Character! He’s the one who can blow away the Bad Guys and not even spend a minute in prison. Like John McClane! It works for the guys in the movies! And it’s fun!

What do you suppose will happen then, though? If he is very very lucky, nothing. But if he’s not very very lucky…

He’s infamous now. There won’t be a single left-leaning pro-social-justice activist in the country who does not know who Kyle Rittenhouse is, nor that what he’s known for is killing them, while the police and the justice system pointedly look the other way. This whole debacle started because he chose to be in a situation where he was rightly viewed as a threat. Now he’s a much bigger threat, a known killer who cannot be brought down by legal means, and who is specifically known to kill anyone who tries to stop him using non-lethal force.

Which means what, exactly, is going to be the only other option for stopping his next killing spree?

Similarly, there’s a lot of people who are agnostics or just secular in their daily lives to the point that even if they have a faith it doesn’t really have anything to do with them except the occasional big holiday observances or family functions. These people aren’t atheist per se atheist, but are still passively steeped in a Chritianity-saturated environment.

There are effects of this. It affects our values and our language – and with them, our marketing. It tells us what a hero is, and thereby what to do to look like one. It tells us that being the underdog looks good, that fighting an inhuman – dare I say, demonic – enemy looks good, and that the ultimate image to make people love you is to become a martyr. It tells us, in point of fact, what “cancel culture” really is.

My fellow lefties, we have been snowed, once again. Hoodwinked, bamboozled, and taken for a ride, because we engaged in good faith. That’s a horrible place to start when addressing what political commentators, be they right-wing or what passes for centrist around these parts, like to say about us, because that is almost never done in good faith. We talk and write about how ‘cancel culture’ isn’t really a thing, because it’s consequence culture, it’s people finally being held accountable and not liking it. Or, we talk about how a lot of left-leaning people – reacting to how often they’ve been hurt in the past – can react with snap judgements sometimes, especially in social media environments carefully tuned to spin anger into clicks. These happen, yes, and there’s a worthy discussion to be had about the latter especially, but these aren’t “cancel culture”.

“Cancel culture” – the “cancel” part of this having been stolen originally from Black performers and Black pop culture, as so tiringly many things are – was a term that only gained currency in the last years of the Trump presidency, because it was a useful talking point for both deliberately and accidentally right-wing pundits. It was promoted for two reasons: to delegitimize all forms of public calling to account, and to foment the reaction to that. Pushing ‘cancel culture’, just like ‘political correctness’ long before it and others, was always nothing more than a way to create a bloc of people who believe that there is a huge monolithic Left, being both pitiful and powerful, that it is heroic to stand up against and oppose. An easy job, since ‘mock the Other’ has never been a hard sell, and these are right-leaning or further audiences anyway.

And of course, the reason to create this bloc is to make the road to media stardom a short easy one for anyone willing to tread it without empathy.

To the cynical and powerful, this is nothing but an opportunity. They’re not really afraid of being “canceled” because they know damn well that for anyone with privilege, the consequences of that are little to nothing. They also know that it makes damn good press: it’s an opportunity to be a martyr, which unlike traditional martyrdom comes with the convenience of still being alive to enjoy it.

That’s worth doing because, according to our Christian traditions, you are at your holiest and most worthy of worship when there are some assholes in leather skirts nailing you to a cross.

Look at the calculations Dave Chappelle has made throughout his career, how strongly he considers what he is and isn’t willing to do and how these things will affect his bottom line… then consider what cynical calculation he must have made to deliberately foment and surf the criticism he knew would accompany ‘The Closer’, how he talks about all of this on TV. “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it,” he said. Verbatim.

Look at Richard Dawkins, who apparently is now kicking off some new media round of Victorian Science Man daddy-knows-best nonsense, and starting it with images meant to evoke himself as a crucified Jesus figure!

Look at every hate-speech advocate who posed with duct tape on their mouth, or every edgy-wedgy comedian promoting his (and it is almost always ‘his’) dull establishment-prejudice-riddled set with images of himself as a ‘public enemy’ or even literally posing like he’s on a cross.

It’s sickening. It’s immature. It’s disgusting. And it is undeniably effective.

That’s all we are to them now. It’s why there’s no point engaging in good faith: they’re not listening. We’re not an opponent, we’re a fantasy, a marketing gimmick, a convenient fake enemy they can claim affixed them to their comfortable styrofoam cross with Nerf nails in all the media tours that ignore all of our actual voices.

It’s nothing but manipulation. Bread and circuses, and we’re just the yeast.

She’s one of those people who is obsessed with “civility” and responds to criticism mostly with tone policing. Wishy-washy right-leaning centrist style behavior, though she claims to be a longtime queer rights activist and hard leftist. She says a lot of TERF-flavored things that she claims to be unaware are, or claims they are not, TERF-flavored things. But, one thing she did that is very different from TERFs proper, notably including the late lamented one of this network, is she was willing to state outright that trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are valid. Except… only in the interest of adding a self-righteous challenge to it:

Abbey, without using those precise words, I’ve already said, multiple times, that trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are valid. I’ve now said it again. So cut the crap that I’m a TERF. This goes back to something I said earlier, which is that the bar for being called a transphobe has been set so ridiculously low that basically any disagreement on anything at all is enough to be called a transphobe. So now your turn: Can you give me an example of any issue at all on which it is possible to diverge from trans orthodoxy without being considered a transphobe? Anything at all? I’d love to be proven wrong, but I suspect you won’t be able to come up with anything.

This is a pretty good example of her to-date nonsense. This challenge does not actually make any sense unless you implicitly agree that there is such a thing as “trans orthodoxy”. There isn’t, not beyond the very thing she said here and claims to believe in the first sentence. Because, consider all the “reasonable disagreements” these people want to have, what are the questions being debated?

• “Is it safe to allow trans women in women’s bathrooms?”
• “Is it safe to allow trans women in women’s prisons?”
• “Is it fair to allow trans women in women’s sports?”
• “Is it appropriate to provide medical transition to trans youth?”

… and what happens to them if you really believe trans people are real?

• “Is it safe to allow trans women in women’s bathrooms?”
  • It must be, because trans women are women, therefore they are in the group intended to be in that environment.
• “Is it safe to allow trans women in women’s prisons?”
  • It must be, because trans women are women, therefore they are in the group intended to be in that environment.
• “Is it fair to allow trans women in women’s sports?”
  • It must be, because trans women are women, therefore they are in the group intended to be in that environment. Are you detecting a pattern?
• “Is it appropriate to provide medical transition care to trans youth?”
  • It must be, because trans girls are girls who without it will suffer masculinization as the result of a birth defect, and trans boys are boys who without it will suffer feminization as the result of a birth defect.

Barring the one about youth medical care, which is still addressed by this but not in the simplistic pattern, every single thing the transphobes complain about, and the un-self-aware transphobes imagine they are “asking reasonable questions” about, takes the form of “Is it safe/fair to allow trans women in women’s X?” or more rarely (since they know who they like to paint as a threat) “Is it safe/fair to allow trans men in men’s X?”. These questions make absolutely no sense to ask if you really accept that trans women are women and trans men are men. (They basically never think to ask questions about nonbinary people, for a variety of not particularly respectful reasons.)

There are trans people who are bad actors. Of course. A few outright predators, no doubt. But that’s true of every single broad demographic, and pointing out the existence of those bad actors in an attempt to imply that all of the demographic is like them, or conversely that they are somehow worse because of being members of a particular demographic, are bigotry. I’m prepared to believe, for example, that there might be a few specific trans women who probably shouldn’t be loose in a women’s prison population. But that’s damn well true of some specific cis women too, and I’d lay good odds a solid hundred times more of them. It doesn’t say anything useful about the broad category.

Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary people are valid and real. There is no “trans orthodoxy” beyond that, and if you really believe this, you don’t have those questions to “just ask”.

UPDATE: I’m going to highlight the latest part of that exchange. The commenter made a reply that certainly shows what she’s struggling with and it’s a legitimate, serious, awful thing…

In addition to being a lesbian, I am also a rape victim. I never want to see male genitalia. Ever. And I shouldn’t have to explain why. So if we’re talking about clothing-optional female spaces, I think I’m entitled to a safe space where I’m not going to be triggered. It’s not that the trans woman changing clothes next to me isn’t a real woman; of course she’s a real woman. It’s the presence of male genitalia, regardless of the gender of the person it’s attached to, that’s the issue. And, so you see me as a vile transphobe, while I, on the other hand, am positively appalled at the lack of empathy for rape victims and others who’ve suffered sexual abuse that frankly borders on misogyny when it doesn’t actually cross the line.

I also understand that trans women have needs too. The problem is, though, that anytime someone tries to work out a compromise that allows her access to a changing area without causing me emotional pain, that person gets shouted down as a vile transphobe and I get told to just suck it up. This has happened with schools that have offered to provide trans-only changing areas, and women’s bath houses that have offered either trans nights or trans-only changing areas.

And here’s how it appears to me: There are two extremist positions. You’ve got actual transphobes on the one hand who think that trans people are simply delusional and society should not promote their delusions. You’ve got the other extremist view that ignores the needs of women like me who need lives that don’t include male genitalia. And in between, you’ve got people like me who are generally trans supportive but who recognize that cis women have needs as well.

But, this is a privileged, bigoted thing to say. In a way that, yes, I can easily see that someone with PTSD from something this horrible could not realize is a bigoted thing to want. But it is. (Most of) my reply in that thread:

Here’s the harsh fact: nobody in the world, under any circumstances is ENTITLED to freedom from the simple presence of a demographic they find distasteful. What happened to you was awful, but it does not in any way entitle you to disenfranchise a marginalized group.

I’ll cite the usual example, which remains quite apt for all of its usual-ness. Suppose some unfortunate white woman had been assaulted by a Black man. She could legitimately suffer the same ‘that’s a threat’ involuntary trigger by the presence of any Black man, or any Black person. Would she be therefore entitled to any public-facing space guaranteed to be free of Black people so she would not be triggered into a panic attack by their presence?

Obviously not. This is a situation where she will ahve to protect herself as best she can, and should be granted all the inviolate private space she needs, but demanding a publicly-accessible space where a demographic cannot be present for her comfort – to avoid her quite legitimate extreme discomfort – would be obviously wrong and a palpably racist thing to demand.

Note that I have said nothing about this hypothetical person being generally racist or bigoted. This could be someone who marches with Black Lives Matter, donates to the NAACP, anything. But trying to carve out a piece of the public square excluding someone for her comfort remains wrong.

What she must do in this situation is work on her issues. That’s a long hard horrible road, and I should know. But, it’s the only thing she could reasonably do because it is not the fault of the people she is excluding that she is suffering.

The same applies to you, and I note there might be an extra piece of you managing to somehow view a trans woman as a woman “except that male piece right there”. I presume as well you have never been in this situation, because it doesn’t take long into transition for a trans woman’s genitals to not much resemble a cis man’s.

You come off as a transphobe when you are trying to “work out a compromise”, because you are putting your comfort over the rights of a whole class of people. That is a bigotry. You’re acting like you expect that any trans woman in your space is going to intently involve you with their genitals, which is a hard thing to believe if you really view them as women.

There are two extremist positions. You’ve got actual transphobes on the one hand who think that trans people are simply delusional and society should not promote their delusions. You’ve got the other extremist view that ignores the needs of women like me who need lives that don’t include male genitalia.

Here we have you asserting that, for your comfort, there are ways that trans women should not be fully treated as women. Not many ways, but still, ways… and you call that an “extremist” position. Meanwhile, the position you are asking for here is the exact one that gets trans women chased out of bathrooms and changing rooms all over the place by people screaming for the police that there’s a man in there.

You have approached this as though your requirement is Obviously Resonable and anything arguing with it is extremist. This is not so. It’s time for you to examine just what demands you feel entitled to make of entire populations of people.