Thank you.

I invite you also to take a look at Danny Whidbee’s comments to me on this thread. In contrast to your reaction, he called my argument a “pathetic excuse” (or was he calling me a pathetic excuse for a person?). He said that trans people (because of our gender) can only ever be noteworthy for being trans (and can never contribute anything of value to the world?), i.e., he reduces me to this one gendered label that happens to be an accurate descriptor but is not, in my estimation, the sum total of who I am. Having thus spoken dehumanizing words about me, he taunted me — in a separate comment — by asking whether I imagine that I’ve been made “yet again — a victim.” He did not engage with any specific thing I said.

I do try to write intelligently and respectfully, but no matter what I write, it will attract comments from a stranger calling me pathetic and valueless and stuck in my own sense of victimhood. I don’t control these responses. Sometimes these comments are left by bots rather than actual people, though I may not have the time to determine which it is.

You don’t have to referee. I’d just like you to see that this is a condition of sticking out my neck to identify myself as trans on the internet.

It’s related to my original point. Some people are seen as existing in a “default state” (not being trans), while others are “marked” as being different (trans). The latter are often told (c.f. Whidbee) that we’re a waste of oxygen simply because of our gender (obviously a type of sexism). In my view, this is in part an outcome of language by which some people are labeled “trans” but others are not equivalently labeled “cis.” A parallel situation might arise if women were called female people but there were no word for “man” or “male” so men were just called people.

Many people are eager to explicitly question the human worth of a trans person on the basis that we have this label “trans” attached to us (which is often understood to mean artificial, fraudulent, norm-shattering, illegal, not good enough, absurd, pathetic, etc. and to somehow invite skepticism of our bodies, legal statuses, and relationships), while others are not asked a parallel question about being not-trans, as their status operates more invisibly as long as it isn’t labeled. When people are willing to take on a descriptor like “cis,” it equalizes a certain power dynamic in language. To me, the word “cis” makes sentences read in this tone: “Some of us aren’t trans, but so what if we were? It is what it is.” Apart from just shifting tone, it opens possibilities for discussing different sorts of facts in new kinds of logical structures. And that shift reduces openings for strangers on the internet to make nonsense aggressive comments about trans people.