I don’t think the person on the left’s a transphobe, but I also don’t think they understand the scale of the harassment trans people face on a daily basis. Like it’s so bad the users would rather just have potential trolls ignored and downvoted than to see well meaning cis people come in and do vigilante justice using the same tactics of abuse trans people go through every day.
That empathetic disconnect looks like transphobia to some users. I don’t know that the users are right, but I understand how you reached that conclusion, especially with the person on the left’s days-long soapbox crashout about how despotic Ada is.
I’d say anybody who is gender-nonconforming, non-binary, etc, is trans.
They may not always suffer from the same level of transphobia as MtFs or FtMs, but they are no longer identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth. That makes them trans, imo.
That’s surprising. But this feels like a nice way to frame it, if so:
The other commenter mentioned this might be casting too wide a net, and I lean towards the “abolish gender” team, myself, so I’d be curious to hear what others think about it, especially MtF, FtM and similar(?) people.
I’m FtM and have the same mindset of the above poster regarding the definition of “trans” but if a non binary person asks me to not refer to them as trans, then I’ll certainly respect that.
I feel like that could be casting too wide a net, though. Gender isn’t an on or off, it’s a series of gradients with no clear dividers.
For instance, what is considered gender nonconforming? Is it failing to meet the platonic gendered archetype of one’s biological sex? I’d be willing to bet more people fall into that camp than not, especially among the cis-queer community.
I guess it depends on how they identify themself. If they consider themselves cis, then they almost certainly are cis? So the trans label does not apply. If they don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, then they are not cis. Therefore they are trans. No?
I’m not sure that “casting a net” of any size matters. Sure, you can say that there is a spectrum or gradient of gender. But I don’t see how that changes anything. Being trans isn’t a gender. It means that you no longer identify with the gender you were assigned at birth.
Of course, there might be some social stigma associated with being trans that may encourage some people to be offended by this take? Like if you’re a non-binary person you might not really think of yourself as trans due to preconceived ideas and internalized transphobia. Of course I’m not going to go around calling someone trans if they don’t identify themselves as trans anyway, but in my mind I was more answering the question in an attempt to be inclusionary towards people who may want to claim the label but aren’t sure if they fit it.