Today has been...

Today has been the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Likely not still that day here, by the time I finish writing this, but it will be elsewhere still. That day set aside for remembering all the people who over the past and previous years were murdered because of cissexist bigotry, for being trans.

The numbers for this year were a bit tricky to access, being in a Word document, but according to the website this year 101 163 people were killed for that particular who they are. If trend from past years hold true (and what I have read elsewhere indicates this is so), the majority of those murdered were trans women of colour. Not white trans women, and not trans men. A lot of the time trans people who are murdered are assumed and portrayed as having been sex workers, whether they were or not, and because of the widespread stigma applied to sex workers this provides cis authorities further disincentives to take these crimes seriously.

A lot of the time people guilty of these murders, if they are charged, use what is called the 'trans panic' defence. Rather than claiming innocence they instead claim the murder of trans people is justified because of how horrifying and disgusting they find it to be knowing a trans person. This gets accepted as valid in court far too readily, even though it is often untrue or very unlikely to be true that the murder was unaware of the person ey killed being trans prior to the act of killing. It tends, rather, to be that "I found out she was trans so I killed her[1]" is seen by many as a fair and logical train of thought. Even people who say the murder was wrong often say the murdered trans person was also wrong not to walk around wearing a sign saying "Trans", as if that would have made eir life so much easier to live, or would be a reasonable standard to require of someone so as not to be murdered.

[1] Actually they don't normally use gendered pronouns. Normally they describe the person they killed as 'it'.

I was thinking, for writing something for this day, about why these murders happen and why they are predominantly of women. The conclusion I came to was a combination of transphobia, homophobia and sexism.

The mere act of being visibly a woman, presenting as female, is seen by many men as a sexual act. An invitation. This is why a lot of men feel entitled to behave aggressively sexual toward women who are not welcoming of this behaviour - because being a woman is itself considered a sexual invitation or come-on.

It is because of transphobia that the genders of trans people are regarded as invalid where the genders of cis people are treated as real. Thus, trans women are considered 'really men' and trans men are considered 'really women'.

When we combine this with cultural homophobia and macho sexism that sees violence as a valid, even imperative means for men to enforce perceptions of their masculinity and 'defend' it from the threat supposedly posed by the existence of queer people and other ways of doing gender, well...

Because a woman in public is by default seen as engaging sexually with all the men around her, whether she wants to or not, and because a trans woman recognised as a trans woman is seen as being 'really a man', the mere existence of trans women is seen as a threat to the sexuality and identity of heterosexual cis men, one to which violence is often regarded as a justifiable or at least understandable response.

Of course this does not explain why white women are less likely to be murdered in this way than other women because my thought process did not include race until after the fact. I have seen however several other writers express that the lives of women of colour are regarded as less valuable than the lives of white women, just as the lives of trans women are regarded as less valuable than the lives of cis women which I can readily believe. It would make sense that the intersection of these two identities would combine to a far higher murder rate as people might believe either they could especially get away with the killing of a trans woman of colour, or that trans women of colour are especially unworthy of life.

Clearly, this needs to change.

I didn't think it would be this

Not the reason I expected to be a first or early prompt for writing a post linking to FWD/Forward but...

This post? It's wrong. Infuriatingly, enragingly wrong. I hope that's just for rhetorical purposes.

Not the bit saying it is hard to confront people on their use of language, and I wouldn't disagree about it being harder taking the extra step of opening oneself up to that defensive hostility which so often arises when people are called on the ways their unexamined habits perpetuate systems of abuse and oppression, but to say changing one's language use is easy in such a derisive mocking way?

Oh dear. No, no it isn't. For most people, particularly the abled, language is a deeply ingrained automatic part of themselves. These words they use, they don't think about them most of the time and attempting to make a shift in long established usage is a very difficult habit to change. Words that rise up unbidden as part of commonplace speech as natural as breathing, words that have a lifetime of casual use behind them, words which are used pervasively in the surrounding environment as if they are ordinary acceptable terms?

No, not easy. Simple maybe. As simple as 'just say no'. As simple as uninternalising the messages I have picked up and believing myself to be a person of worth. 'Just change your mind', 'I know they were wrong and hurtful, so I can stop believing what they said of me'. It is simple, but it is not easy, and mistaking conceptual simplicity for ease of action has tripped me up many times in trying to recover... so. It quite aggravates me to see someone saying that because the concept of checking and altering one's habits of thought and action is simple, the doing of it is correspondingly easy.

What it takes in my experience and observation is mindfulness and sustained effort. Not slipping up is difficult. Try removing religiously based language from your non-technical vocabulary because it isn't your belief system; I've been working to control my vocabulary since primary school and it is still difficult to remove compromise words like 'darn' and 'drat' and 'bloody'. I'm fortunate I suppose that I never picked up most (not all, definitely some slipped through) ablist and homophobic and sexist language and was committed from a young age to not doing so, but it doesn't actually get easier as life goes on. Those words are normalised as part of our social discourse, they still get embedded in our lives and presented as language for our brains to pick up on and parse and use.

Quitting isn't so easy, no, but I have no fondness for people saying it is too hard even to try. Not for something like this when the message is "Please try to be less hurtful and more respectful in what you say, please be more mindful of others". Not the easiest thing to do, fine, but I'd say it is less than the minimum required of trying to be an ally, and well worth doing in itself. Pfah.