I am interrupting my usual flow of pieces this week.
And there'll be no witty pop culture references. So if you've come to expect that, come to expect a light-hearted romp through Julie's Trans Life, you'll be disappointed.
I want to talk about this week.
I want to talk about my feelings about what happened this week.
I will likely alienate a lot of people with this.
I'm going to use really harsh language and potentially triggering words and slurs in here.
I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not.
It's all necessary.
Let's begin.
~~~//||\\~~~
In a series of three Tweets, and less than 420 characters, (chokes on the words) President Donald 'Cheeto Jesus' 'PINO Chitler' Trump made clear as policy that transgender members of the military would no longer be able to serve in any capacity. Not as front line soldiers. Not as pilots. Not as medical staff. Not in administration. In no way, shape or form.
I quote:
"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow......
....Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming.....
....victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you"
There's no lack of clarity there.
Of course, this has led to the kind of uproar you usually see reserved for...well...gorillas shot in zoos or every other crap thing that falls out of Trump's sphincteresque oral orifice. People have spent thousands of words on how this is really all about cost, how this is really all about team synergy, how this is really all about making sure men don't rape women or come on to other men.
So let me break these lies down for you.
The RAND corporation did a survey/study of the DoD budget in 2014. At that time, the DoD budget for health care was six billion dollars. That's a 6 with 9 zeros following it, in case you didn't know. At that time, there were 2,450 openly trans members of the armed forces, and of that number perhaps 29 to 129 of them would require transition related health care that impacted their ability to deploy.
The cost for health care for this 2,450 members of the military?
Between 2.9 and 8.4 million dollars per annum.
Want a percentage on how much that works out to as a portion of the DoD health care budget in toto?
Here it is.
0.14%
Let me repeat this, with words this time.
ZERO POINT ONE FOUR PERCENT.
Using the highest amount of the health care estimated range. Divide that number by 3 for the low end estimate.
Also keep THIS in mind: trans health care: it's not fucking surgeries. We aren't joining the military to get top surgery (trans men) or neovaginas (women). Some of us don't want that at all. Some of us can't have that for other reasons. Trans health care is literally health care for trans members of the military. And lest you think hormones are some exorbitant cost, consider this: I pay, out of pocket because my insurance doesn't cover it at all, about 10 bucks a month for estrogen. My spiro is covered because my freaking cardiologist prescribes it to me to aid with some circulatory issues I have. So, like, 120 bucks a year? Obviously breaking the bank, and keeping us from ordering yet another fighter jet that explodes if you look at it wrong, causes pilots to vomit on launch, and requires manual system reboots in mid air due to software failure.
But we are talking about a military complex that has no compunctions creating more fodder to grind up in the war mill, but won't take care of them once they're home and broken from what they've seen.
This is obviously NOT a budgetary concern.
This is not about team synergy. Countless enlisted troops have stepped forward and said they don't care who is fighting along side them so long as they are doing their job. Generals have stated that they were blindsided by this edict; in fact, many of them didn't know it was coming until the tweets came through. Apparently there was NO communication between the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DoD, and affected commanding officers and the Commander in Thief.
Somehow, given the tack of this administration, this comes as no shock.
This is not about concerns that a transgender member of the military will be a traitor.
This one comes from the transmisist fallacy that someone who is confused about their gender will end up confused over whose side they're on.
This one is obviously hateful bullshit.
Firstly, we're not confused about our gender. Many of us knew from the time we were able to actually form words that things were wrong. Some of use could have been diagnosed with depression when we entered kindergarten. Some of us attempted suicide after taking part in the one thing in high school that made us feel like ourselves because when it was over, that safe space was gone. Some of us tried repeatedly to get transition underway, only to be thwarted at every turn. And still we banged our head against the brick wall like a recalcitrant bull until either we broke or the wall broke.
I may or may not be speaking from experience.
The simple fact of the matter is this: we KNEW. We KNOW. We know who we are.
Did you know, for example, that roughly 1 in 5 trans people eligible for military service actually serve? Compare that to 1 in 10 of the rest of the populace. Some of this is because it's one of the few places we can actually GET a job, let alone health care and the like. Some of it is obviously for reasons of wanting to serve this country, even as it is a country that constantly reminds us how much less we are as human beings. Most of it is because we're brave enough to put our lives at risk to BE ourselves.
We're not confused about who we are.
It's not about men raping women.
There should be an uproar about men raping women. It's an endemic problem in and out of the military. Oddly it's never brought up when cisgender male members of the military rape women in the military. I guess it's because that never happens, it's only the degenerate and sub-human trans members of the military that rape women.
Oh wait.
1955 Yumiko-chan incident
1991 Tailhook scandal
1995 Okinawa rape incident
2002 Michael Brown incident
2006 Mahmudiyah killings
1996 Aberdeen scandal
2003 US Air Force sexual assault scandal
2012 US Air Force sexual assault scandal
Just off the top of my head.
But hey, gotta keep the trannies out.
Maybe we need to keep the cis men out.
Just a thought.
In the interim, we have all these people speaking out and speaking up about this discrimination. You'd think this is a good thing, that we'd be appreciative of this support. And maybe some/most/nearly all of us are.
I'm not.
You see, I'm sitting here, and I'm seeing this upswell of attention and anger.
And I wonder:
WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN BEFORE THIS?
It is in the same classroom as all the cis people who did stuff for Pride. Yay well and good you changed your profile pic to have a rainbow overlay and you used your pride reacts and you said all kinds of nice things.
And then Pride ended.
And you went silent.
I expect a spate of 'But I don't...' and 'But you know I...' and 'Not all people are like...'
And I shake my head, and say it's a shame.
Because if you read what I wrote, and your initial reaction is one of those, you ARE part of the problem, whether you want to admit it or not.
If you know you are putting in the work, you won't get upset, because you realise my words are NOT FOR YOU. You realise that you don't need to put in my face all the things you are doing. You are vocal all the time. You amplify and don't speak over. You look for trans voices to lift up about trans issues.
Here's the thing, cis people without a clue:
You see the rainbow alphabet soup community as one glorious melange of colours and cool clothes and awesome dance music and stuff.
You don't realise that the Bi connunity is erased and is sitting on the outside looking in.
You don't realise the L community is basically looked on as fodder for straight cis men to toss off over.
You don't realise that the T community is pushed so far out of the way that we're in a different club completely, and some of us are in a corner listening to Bathory and Septic Flesh because dance music makes us break out in hives.
Because that pretty community you love so much?
It's catered to young buff white cis male gays.
And everyone else gets to go pound sand.
Even within the trans community, we have the truscum trans people and the Caitlyns and the Indias and so on telling us what you really need to be to be trans. You have people like Riley Dennis getting dragged through the mud because she would neither confirm nor deny that she was on HRT, which of course meant she was a transtrender. You have people like Zinnia Jones who gets attacked at every turn because she has the guts to stand up against people like Laci Green and prove her wrong every damned time. You have people like Katelyn Burns and other trans journalists who writes deeply researched and documented pieces on the trans community and repeatedly has gotten passed over for some writing jobs for cis people to do the same thing from an uninformed standpoint.
Our own community wants to kick us out.
You have people like Phil Attey who tells us that if we want people to support us, we need to act a certain way, and not slur people by calling them cis. Phil Attey, who calls Repub gay men raggots, tells us how we should act and treat him if we want his table scraps.
Here is what we get 24/7/52/365, courtesy of my friend Mia Violet (another trans essayist you need to check out):
"Celebrities: Trans people, you are valid ❤
Trans people: Thanks, but um… Can you support us the rest of the year too?
Celebs: Byeee~"
Here are my thoughts on all of this in the most piquant, potentially offensive, punctilious manner available to me:
We see you.
We see your being offended that the President won't let us die for you.
We see you not care the rest of the time.
And we don't want that support.
We don't need that kind of support.
And if you're the kind of person who only speaks up when something like this happens, or something like Pride is happening...we don't want you.
Bad shit happens to us every damned day of our lives. We are constantly dehumanised, cast as monsters, cast as degenerate or mentally ill. We are routinely discriminated against, unhireable, discriminated against at the jobs we have (and oh sweet Artemis can I share from personal experience as well as stories from other trans people I know). We're seen simultaneously as freaks and fetishes, good enough to fuck but not worthy of relationships. We're constantly flooded with rafts of death threats AND dick pictures...often from the same person. For those of us with any connection whatsoever with the mostly indy trans erotica industry (a more than coincidental number of my closest friends on Twitter run their own studios, are producers, directors, cam girls, etc.) these things are doubled/trebled/et cetera.
We're gawked at and ridiculed.
We're treated as less than human but good enough to fuck.
And in the end, all we're good for us fertiliser for flowers.
Just ask Dee Whigham.
Except you can't, because she was stabbed in excess of 100 times by former Navy member Dwanya Hickerson.
To the best of my knowledge, with 5 months left in the year, we are at 15 trans women murdered in the US, the vast majority of which are trans women of colour.
Last year was 27.
Better than two per month.
We'll probably break that record this year.
Are you outraged enough yet?
Are you angry enough yet to speak up more than one month a year plus a few extra days here and there?
Cos if you're not...take your support elsewhere.
Cos I don't want it.
~~~//||\\~~~
I continually and constantly say I am not your Good Trans Friend.
I am angry.
I am acidic.
If you've ever seen this meme:
I never hit the first or the second.
I started immediately at number 3.
Maybe this is because I was out to the public for over two years before I was finally able to start HRT. Maybe it's because I'm an angry young woman in general. I don't know.
The pure and simple of this is this:
I don't trust you.
I'm being as honest as I can possibly be.
If you're cisgender, I don't trust you.
I can't.
Some people have proven worthy of me letting them in. But generally speaking, I can't and won't trust cis people. I don't trust that women want me there in their spaces, I can't trust that they'll fight for me with as much loudness as they will for AFAB women (ref: the Women's March, which felt like FAR from a safe space for me). I don't trust that men won't turn on me like they turn on women. If you're a gay man or lesbian woman, I don't trust you doubly because your community has done a yeoman's job making sure we know that we're guilty of gay genocide for wanting to be the gender we are.
I'd say I don't care if this causes me to lose people, and on one hand I really kinda don't care. I definitely don't care if this means that people say I'm building an echo chamber...because if I can't surround myself with people who understand me, and my life, and what I am going through...and do so with nothing but support and kindness...then what point is there?
There IS a war going on, and you may not like the analogy, it's true.
Let me leave you with this:
In may of 1935, Jewish people were not only forbidden to join the German armed forces, those currently serving were removed from the military.
Four months later, Jewish people in Germany were stripped of their citizenship.
And if you haven't seen ANY parallels with what this current administration is doing with the German government post-Weimar, you're willfully blind.
Julie out.
(This is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)
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