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So the anti-GC/Terf/Transphobe movement is about as organized and organizational as antifa. It's made up of independent actors who to some extent coordinate with each other and share information, but there's no official group or hierarchy.
Many choose to use pseudonyms and otherwise remain anonymous because of the risk of being doxed, having their livelihood or health care threatened. Or even their lives. One prominent terf gave a teenaged trans girl's address to the Pacific Justice Institute several years ago
and said trans girl was on suicide watch after the extreme harassment that ensued, as this particular hate group passed along the dox. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pacific-justice-institute
And of course these days there are even more virulent bad actors working to invade our personal lives and destroy our ability to function safely online. Anonymity is vital for those who need it and even if they want it.
When we're at our best we operate by way of mutual aid and otherwise doing our best. No one's ever really made a full career of it, although many have patreons, gofundmes, etc to help pay expenses, medical treatment, and so on.
I started doing some of this work in 2007. At the time, I had read Whipping Girl and had over the previous three years or so been watching online terf activity, starting with the Ms Magazine Forum where white terfs dominated the discourse and harassed trans women and women of
color off the forum via report abuse. I'd come across various websites, although one particular run by Lisa Winters called "Questioning Transgender Politics," which was a collection of essays and articles written by terfs dating back to the 90s. So in October 2007, I started my
blog: Questioning Transphobia. Initially I did my best to offer trans people explanations as to why those articles were wrong about trans people, offering a space where this stuff could be picked apart and seen for the nonsense bigotry it was. I and many others both cis and trans
also worked on making the feminist blogosphere in general less friendly to terfs, as they would habitually drop into comments and JAQ off and sea lion even on posts that weren't about trans people. Some had so many usernames across so many blogs it was kind of incredible they
had the time. In one instance, a terf who left a death threat on my blog in 2010 turned out to have commented on my blog under at least six different names since I'd started it. And she was active on multiple other sites such as Feministing, Feministe, and the F Word. In fact
she'd written a completely sensible article in The F Word's early days under her real name.
My point here is to say we never had leaders, and we never needed followers. We did what we could do with what we had. We don't always agree on everything, and sometimes friendships are
My point here is to say we never had leaders, and we never needed followers. We did what we could do with what we had. We don't always agree on everything, and sometimes friendships are
broken for any number of reasons. But we're not like the groups who have organized against us. We don't have big platforms or the ability to establish group after group after group or put up fundraisers that are guaranteed to attract far right Christian money to fund our activism
I effectively stopped blogging by 2012, after I'd worked on getting more co-bloggers and inviting people to guest blog. I could also crowdfund help for trans people fairly easily as I had a lot of regular readers. Losing that platform hurt, although it was not the most important
by any means. And there likely never will be, as long as we're kept out of the same media outlets and other platforms that transphobes are relatively freely given every day.
Please understand the fact that many of us have been working at this for years or even decades and we have reasons for our choices.
Further I'll add that trans needs are fairly substantial: Access to housing, food, employment, the ability to change documents to reflect who we are. We need safety from abusive family and partners. It's important to ensure that the truth is out there, but that's just one part of
a greater whole that many have also been fighting for over decades. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 to help street youth and especially transgender street youth at the time.
We recently lost one of the staunchest defenders of trans people's rights and needs, esp Black trans people and trans people of color, Monica Roberts. We have a history. We have people who transitioned in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and who have fought for trans people.
There's no single right way to do this, there's no one true path to victory. This is a constant, endless struggle for the recognition of our own humanity, especially now in the face of a multi-year backlash against trans rights fueled by the UK's transphobic yellow journalism.
I feel relatively privileged to live where I do - in the greater Seattle area in Washington state, where attempts to remove our rights failed at least three times now, where insurance coverage of some surgeries is mandatory, and honestly where transphobia is not as virulent as
I've experienced elsewhere. Despite that, one of the founders of Hands Across the Aisle, Kaeley Triller-Haver is here, and was involved in two attempts to get a ballot measure to remove our rights.
I don't want to attack anyone here, but I want it to be clear that we're not an organization; we're a movement with many disparate parts. The one thing we all have in common is that we want things to be better for trans people and LGBT people in general.
Perhaps we could organize better, and perhaps we should, in the fact of the virulent libelous, slanderous opposition we face, but ordering people to get in line isn't going to get us there.
I should add the reason for the gofundmes, the paypals, the patreons, is that 30% of trans people are in poverty, that we struggle to meet our needs, and there's a joke that trans people keep donating the same $20 around over and over. Labeling someone as homophobic and
transphobic has the potential to damage their income and really should be saved for actual transphobes and homophobes, not people who are trying to do their best with what they have to survive and fight.
Forgot to say this: https://twitter.com/AnonTransHoe/status/1340912647772852224
Also, trans people don't need to be in poverty to be unable to access HRT and surgery. If they're on their parents' insurance their parents may simply drop them if they try to get any covered treatments. Or worse. Being trans is precarious.
