The right kind of trans person

If I'm made to think of myself as inferior, I might cover it up by adopting a belief system that makes me feel correct. I might not be "traumatized," but I would have been taught to think of something about myself as inferior, unless I adopted a certain correct belief system. If this happened, I wouldn't feel safe in that part of myself, forever. I would never have proof that some other people could accept a flawed version of me, because I would have tried to be at all times correct. I would not return to an equilibrium of reality, a baseline in which things are just things and people are just here, and we are all just around each other. As long as we are doing this kind of armoring of ourselves, and doing it all the time – baseline things about reality are going to feel especially morally charged, personal, unsolvable, and stressful.

I believe humans view anything that keeps us safe as a moral good. I don't think any of us are smarter than this, and I think it's a bad idea to believe you are exempt.

We don't handle fear well. Although I've had many cushy advantages (loving grandparents, college, etc.), I've also lived in a rural Republican area that was hostile to trans people. That was a period in which I was putting a hundred percent of my income toward rent. I was eating a lot of rice, basically. That period was filled with a lot of people trying to feel safe, and viewing anything that made them feel safe as a moral good which shouldn't be questioned. Given how often I've heard trans people scoff that TERFs need to get over themselves, that collective good is more than just individuals getting to feel safe all the time, I find it funny how often we have the same ethos when engaging with each other.

My issue is not our collective thorniness. It's not really an issue to me if people who keep having their lives threatened are a little mean about it. My issue is the knee-jerk, vitriolic, because I feel unsafe, anything goes mentality. I just don't think any of us are inherently smarter than our predecessors, and some of us are going to be parents, aunts, uncles, and community educators someday. We need to be able to stop for a moment and go Is this really an emergency? Is this an actual, literal threat? And Twitter certainly isn't the place to practice doing so.

My guess is TERFs were feminists who had already long been in the practice of moralizing any sense of threat to safety. Trans people who do similar rhetorical moves in the name of their own perceived safety should take note. I've seen other white people who view themselves as God's gift to anti-racism, people who believe they espouse all the right things and believe all the right things, be disturbingly quick to judge who can be socially disposed of. And all of this is often in the name of being the right kind of person, the good kind of person, the progressive kind of activist and leftist and gay person and trans person. Like the effort to be the good kind of woman (whatever that means in your social circle), it has a built-in assumption that there is a bad one, and it's this that is the trapdoor to bigotry.