TW: RACISM, TRANSFOBIA, RAPE
spoiler
I used to have a gay friend. From what I was feeling he didn’t care about pronouns, but I feel like he would like to transition. Anyway we were hanging out with him and couple other friends, and talking about stuff. The friend told about how in his queer discord group chat someone was telling that they are not feeling safe around black people and was calling them n-word.
It feels so weird to me. Like, queer people know what’s the oppression should feel like. And that slurs are bad. At first it was really surprising that a minority of one group would use the slur on another.
And the other one is even more depressing. I have a female friend. And she was grouped by a black man. And she also feels okay to use n-word as a way to guard herself or something. And she also was raped by my non binary friend. We are not friends anymore. But I still respect their pronouns. Female friend used to use wrong pronouns on them. Honestly everything after that was a mess. She turned hostile to enby friend and their friends. I thought it was all jokes, but it is so har to read tones in text. Only later, after I found out, it was not jokes. They now don’t talk. Enby friend didn’t apologize according to her. And from what I heard from enby friend it seems like they actually forgot to do it. She is now blocked by them cuz she would send toxic messages to them. Fast forward two years and she tells me she doesn’t believe in “gender theory” and thinks it should be treated like mentall illness. And she says that if she finds good resources, she can change her mind. But fuck. She is bisexual. Shouldn’t she also know about struggle of trans people??? Maybe with good persuasion I could change her mind. But like… I am so tired. It feels like we are in the same group, no? lgBTq stands even together. What I am trying to say is that there are bigots, shouldn’t we stand together against bigotry?
What I am trying to say is that I am just confused. Opression is bad, shouldn’t we satnd together against it? It feels so confusing when we don’t.
Idk. Sorry can’t find the right words to end this. Did anyone met something similar?
Yeah unfortunately bigotry exists everywhere. In general I meet less LGBT people who are bigoted, but they definitely exist. The short answer for how they can hold these contradictory beliefs is, they think of themselves as different in some fundamental way.
In the case of transphobia among gay lesbian and bisexual people, often they believe that transphobic people accept them. They believe that transphobic people are not also homophobic, and that if they themselves express transphobia than transphobic people will accept them even more. Its an attempt to appeal to straight people along the lines of “I’m not like them, I hate them, I’m one of the good ones so you shouldn’t discriminate against me”. Sadly (for them), they are wrong in this regard. From the perspective of a transphobic straight cisgender person I am not a trans woman - they instead see me as a gay man. And they seek equally to discriminate against me, and do so by repurposing old homophobia from the 80s against me and people like me.
Transphobic queer people have at some stage either bought into the propaganda of conservative homophobia and believe it should solely be weaponized on trans people, or else they think that appealing to transphobic people will protect them from discrimination.
Theres not much you can do unfortunately. Studies show consistently that attempting to deradicalize hatred is nearly impossible. It takes them breaking down their own hatred through introspection and self awareness. Its like asking for a miraculous change of heart, you sadly can’t make it happen. No amount of educating them generally works, no amount of deconstructing their beliefs helps. Its like the adage says “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”.