> It is not just "unfortunate", it betrays their actual views, which is that we should be ready to sacrifice people's lives on the altar of patriarchal gender norms.
Helen is hardly gender role essentialist and in fact quite substantially non-conforming to many female gender norms and visibly proud to be her.
To assume that her failure (as of the time of writing, at least) to comprehend non-binary identities "betrays" anything except a lack of comprehension is ... unfounded, at best.
The entire idea of "transtrenders" is a made up one designed to perpetuate oppressive gender roles and work against solidarity within the trans community. The fact that she takes it seriously is pretty goddamn founded, as far as evidence goes.
Not precisely true. IIRC it first came about during one of the iterations of the tumblr trans wars to describe people who identified as things like "AFAB demigirl" and kept claiming that people who wanted to medically transition "just wanted to be able to pretend they were cis" and therefore "weren't really trans", which understandably went down about as well as a shart in a spacesuit with the people with severe physical dysphoria.
There was a stupendous amount of circular firing squad style stupidity to go around back in those days.
Despite the bad ideas of a subset of trans people (morphological liberation is very important to me), the idea of "transtrenders" is bogus and oppressive.
My point is that it's entirely possible to encounter the term in a context where the people being described by the term were being bogus and oppressive, so it's impossible to know a priori whether somebody using that term is an enemy or merely an imperfect ally.
Successful activism generally requires forming as large a coalition as possible, and insta dismissing somebody as a bigot for not getting everything right first time is not an effective way to do that.
"Rather than coming off as a legitimate attempt to help legitimate problems, then, this form of gender activism appears to many like an unappealing combination of ideologizing and attention-seeking and raises the question of whether everybody who says they are trans is sincere or correct. It seems likely that some people have jumped on the train due to an ideological commitment to gender non-conformity and many trans people themselves have complained of this and coined the term “transtrender” to describe it."
This is pretty clearly "gender-conforming trans good, icky weird attention-seeking trans bad". The thing about "many trans people" is mentioned without any evidence and probably refers to people like Debbie Hayton and Buck Angel.
My demigirl friend microdoses on testosterone for the facial hair and voice deepening effects, though she would rather be read as a woman than a man. I know cis men who take the standard spironolactone and estradiol HRT combination.
Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
> This is pretty clearly "gender-conforming trans good, icky weird attention-seeking trans bad".
That's a reductive view and doesn't fit with my understanding of their position.
> Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
I'm the one suggesting unity and solidarity here.
You're the one suggesting dividing people based on your guesses as to their motivations.
But, whatever. I'm going to keep working towards a world where "trans people choosing bathrooms most suitable for the gender they are commonly perceived to be and everybody else accepting that trans people just need to pee" is just an obvious and comfortable thing and nobody gets beaten up for doing that.
You keep doing ... whatever it is you're doing. If you ever decide that trans people not getting the shit kicked out of them matters more to you than ideological purity, we can pick the conversation up again then, I guess.
Helen is hardly gender role essentialist and in fact quite substantially non-conforming to many female gender norms and visibly proud to be her.
To assume that her failure (as of the time of writing, at least) to comprehend non-binary identities "betrays" anything except a lack of comprehension is ... unfounded, at best.