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what questions do you have but don't feel you can ask trans people? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 week ago by dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Politeness norms seem to keep a lot of folks from discussing or asking their trans friends questions they have, I figured at the very least I could help try to fill the gap. Lemmy has a decent trans population who might be able to provide their perspectives, as well.

Mostly I'm interested in what people are holding back.

The questions I've been asked IRL:

why / how did you pick your name?
how long have you known?
how long before you are done transitioning?
how long do you have to be on HRT?
is transgender like being transracial?
what do the surgeries involve?

For the most part, though, I get silence - people don't want to talk about it, or are afraid to. A lot of times the anxiety is in not knowing how to behave or what would be offensive or not. Some people have been relieved when they learned all they needed to do is see me as my gender, since that became very simple and easy for them.

If there are trans people you know IRL, do you feel you can talk to them about it? Not everyone is as open about it as I am, and questions can be feel rude, so I understand why people would feel hesitant to talk to me, but even when I open the door, people rarely take the opportunity.

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[–] CanadaPlus 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Community, status and not being economically punished are way bigger motivators than being abstractly correct, right? Nobody really goes looking for inconvenient truths. Unless those naturally nice, understanding conservatives start meeting a lot of very different people, like if they move, the worldview will probably stay put.

To be a little more doomer than you, I'd actually say there's lots of people that go the other way as well, and go looking for a cult to join as an outlet for whatever nastiness is inside of them. Consider that in the grand scheme of things, monotheism and racism are both new.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Community, status and not being economically punished are way bigger motivators than being abstractly correct, right? Nobody really goes looking for inconvenient truths.

I do think being autistic might correlate with prioritizing abstract truths over social statuses that might be harder to understand or grasp the consequences of going against. It's not uncommon for people with ASD to also be strongly invested in social justice, and I think these might be connected.

Unless those naturally nice, understanding conservatives start meeting a lot of very different people, like if they move, the worldview will probably stay put.

I think even meeting new people, they will usually just find some way to rationalize and maintain their current status while granting exceptions to those local to their life. My conservative friends are sorry that I have to flee a state for its transphobic views, but they personally endorse those views and also vote and donate money to further anti-trans movements. How they reconcile these views is a matter of rationalization, but they hold both that I am precious to them, and that trans people should be rotting in prisons and denied care.

To be a little more doomer than you, I’d actually say there’s lots of people that go the other way as well, and go looking for a cult to join as an outlet for whatever nastiness is inside of them. Consider that in the grand scheme of things, monotheism and racism are both new.

I very much doubt racism is new, I think tribalism is probably on some level a biological instinct: those closer to you have more moral status than strangers, and especially the people we can't speak the same language as, etc. Taken to further extremes of "stranger", we can see this tendency in our speciesism (the tendency to see humans as the only animals with moral status).

That said, monotheism does seem to be "newer", at least its absolute dominance and spread can be traced back a few thousand years compared to what as far as we can tell is a much longer period before of at the very least an absence of monolithic culture and religion, usually animism was polytheistic it seems.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Tribalism is ancient for sure. As is cultural bigotry. Hating people primarily do to skin colour and related features is a thing that specifically developed 1500-1700, as the trans-Atlantic slave trade got going (and needed to be rationalised).

When the Romans or Mesopotamians hated on their neighbors, it was over food preferences, language and customs. If they ascribed anything biological to it, the prevailing theory was more about response to the local climate than heredity. Then, once monotheism got going deviation from religious orthodoxy became the most popular way to hate. It's not a coincidence that "Slav" and "slave" sound similar, because pagan Slavic people were a major source of slave labour in medieval Europe. It drove the crusades, and it had a role in the early stages of expansion into the new world.

The first slave ship came to English North America in 1619, but the passengers were treated as normal indentures, and at least some became free later on. They kept coming, though, and by 1700 or so black people had to be slaves and that was pretty much it. (Colonial Spain had their own, somewhat divergent system a bit earlier)

The Romans had emperors drawn from Africa and the Middle East, and had conflict with Germanic and Celtic people that could easily have been Latin by appearance. The first sub-Saharan African in Japan was made a Samurai, and now there's a videogame about it. That's not to say the difference in appearance wasn't noticed or remarked upon (they tried to wash the dark off of Yasuke, and Heterodotus makes special note of the woolly hair and stature of the distant Africans) but in every pre-modern story I can think of it was gotten over quickly compared to other, behavioral things.

Anyway, I guess the point is just that there's been steps backwards as well. There would have to be, otherwise ignorance would have gone extinct over the millennia, right? Maybe it still will; we live in a totally transformed world now, but it's going to require continuous effort. Hate is always shifting and changing and evolving from things that might even have started off as harmless or positive (Jesus is less controversial than later Christians).