I used to be a fan of the webcomic "sinfest." Since I'm something of a radical feminist, I kind of enjoyed the comic's potshots against Teh Patriarchy, exploitation of women, militaristic nationalism, etc.
Then the creator of the webcomic posted that he (pronoun IMHO significant) was creating a forum for people to discuss radical feminism, and I thought, oh boy, a place to talk about it. I registered and started looking at discussion threads. One of the first ones I looked at was, in short, pretty TERFy, and it looked like the comic creator was good with that. He also said that anyone who wasn't solidly "anti-porn and anti-prostitution" was unwelcome there. It was pretty clear that any trans people, especially trans women, who tried to participate would be treated like a skunk at the garden party, so I left.
That got me to thinking. In my travels around the Web, I've read articles by "sex workers," as they prefer to be called, and they have all kinds of horror stories about how "anti-prostitution" activities end up making life a lot worse for them, without making any difference in the conditions that led them to go into prostitution. The discussions about prostitution completely ignore any input from them or what their real needs are and simply focus on what their "saviors" want to believe they need. To use a buzzword, they deny them agency.
That made me look at the webcomic differently.
I realized that the characters -- both the exploited women and the men who exploited them -- weren't being seen as people. The women were helpless victims, cardboard cutouts with no will of their own and requiring some superhero to rescue them into, well, it wasn't clear into what. And the men were equally one-dimensional (or less): slavering zombies or evil seducers. It's kind of a Victorian era morality tale, with the people involved being reduced to charicatures, stick figures. It reminded me a lot of the TERFy tropes I ran into in that forum and that I've seen quoted elsewhere. (I have no intention of reading Janice Raymond or Sheila Jeffreys, but I'm told that their depiction of trans women is also equally dehumanized.)
And I can't make myself read the comic any more.
I see enough dehumanization of people in what passes for "public discourse" these days, and I see where it leads. As the blogger Siobhan writes in her post What Trans People Mean When We Say "Misgendering is Violence" , this is the first level in the pyramid of violence, the top of which is genocide.
What does this have to do with being transgender?
Only that it is another reminder that it is most important to remember that people are people and not theoretical constructs. And when we ignore the complexity and totality of who people are, we will end up violating them, no matter how good our intentions may be. Trans people are people. As are cis people. As are, for that matter, transphobes. We forget that at our peril.
