Some people look closer to the caricature on the left (nix the cartoonishly creepy vibes) than they do to the one on the right and there's nothing wrong with that. I think the intention behind this comic is well-meaning but IMHO this is a harmful way of characterizing trans people.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Agreed, as if to imply that it's somehow bad to look more masculine than most women, or even be straight up visibly AMAB. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
Both characters should be able to use a public restroom without scrutiny at any rate.
So much of the Transgender Hate boils down to the fundamental belief "All women should be sexually attractive and available to me and my peers".
Left Image is intolerable because I can't get off to her. Right Image is intolerable because I'm afraid that if she was nude I would not be able to get off her.
Not coincidentally, a significant number of right-wing extremists (particularly those obsessed with clocking transgender people) will happily consume transgender pornography. North Carolina Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Robinson is just the latest example, as a guy whose Nude Africa account consisted of a litany of appreciative posts under transgender porn videos.
Well, I do have some questions about the "Candy for luring kids" bag.
I keep my drug paraphernalia in a bag labeled "evidence". Definitely don't trust it.
i fw the girl on the left
In most cases you won’t even know they are trans until the subject rises due to other factors. At least in NL (and in my circles) being trans isn’t something they tell others, because well it’s not important. Sometimes you can notice it when somebody is trans and other times it’s not.
I agree with the overall message but
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This is a weird and gross way to depict it, to the point where it might be doing more harm than good.
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Please do not drag this person's shitty comics onto Lemmy. They essentially killed the /r/comics community even before reddit shit the bed.
Even if you look like the image on the left, your gender is still valid. You shouldn't have to be "passing" to be allowed to be who you are.
and let's be clear, anti-trans activists hate passing trans people as much as non-passing trans people - they want to erase all of us
The end goal is to guarantee any transgender person can be clocked. That's why they fight so hard to prevent anyone from changing their gender markers on government issued IDs. Republicans won't be happy until we've gone full Scarlet Letters and concentration camp tattoos for every cracked egg.
I imagine they hate those who pass FAR more. They need everyone, especially those they hate, to fill obvious roles. A passing trans person is a violation of their 'natural order'.
Also makes their private regions all confused.
Honestly I think this is part of the motivation for the bathroom bills, if they can force people to out themselves it's more likely those people will avoid a public existence.
EDIT: also a major motivation for the anti-trans strategy being so focused on gender markers on IDs, since that is another way people are outed. Someone where I lived was outed when she went to the gym because her license didn't have an updated marker, and it resulted in a huge scandal after the gym harassed her and then kicked her out of the gym and refused to refund her membership.
Or use the 'forbidden' facilities and be hate crimed into hiding or worse.
I fucking hate this timeline.
It's bad, but reading Stone Butch Blues or reading about trans history will make you thankful for the contemporary situation anyway; cross-dressing laws have been repealed in most states, trans people aren't inherently criminal the way they were in the 1970s. The current U.S. administration wishes to bring us back to a time like that, but the fact that they're fighting to even stigmatize and criminalize trans people is a massive win for the gay rights / liberation movement compared to where things were at very recently.
It's all true and undoing decades of slow, grudging and downright painful progress is going to be a very large task for these monsters.
But, damned if they're not going to do their worst.
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As a trans person just one for one showing the exact depiction a conservative would use for us in your meme is not helpful and deeply offensive.
It's not yours but you're still accountable for promoting it by posting it here. It's ultimately up to you whether or not you personally find it offensive. However, I do think being open to community feedback and understanding why other people might be offended by it is important.
I don't care if they look like the person on the left. A person is a person, actions that affect others without their consent is inexcusable. That it includes a lack of acknowledgment because you don't "pass". All I'm saying is, please don't depict people who don't pass, as criminals. They suffer enough, as is. especially now.
Yeah i was gonna say, this is a weird way to be supportive of trans people. I have absolutely seen trans people looking like the left pic and this makes it seem like those would be untrustworthy or scary somehow.
It might've been a deeper comic if they used the person on the right for both panes .
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I mean we can take exception with someone holding a bag that is tagged, "candy for luring kids." I can't think of a time when that could be a good thing.
Is it telling about my childhood trauma that I immediately imagined a priest holding that bag?
I also think the point here is considerably more nuanced than non-passing=bad.
I read it as a critique of how trans people are stereotyped as non-passing. The fact of the matter is, a lot of us do pass and go about our daily lives, and the average cis person doesn't even realize. We assimilate more often than most would admit.
So while I don't think there should be moral value to passing per se, I also think it's pretty fucked up the way we're all sort of stereotyped as being the most visible until proven otherwise...
I don't know how to say this without sounding insane, but I've never met a trans person who didn't pass.
This isn't because they're all beautiful. It's because there's a wide variety of women in the world and I've said this before, and I'll say it again- I think there's a lot of internalized misogyny in trans spaces, where there's this idea that you have to conform to some idea of 'beauty' in order to be femme.
A lot of cis women are invisible. That's not because they 'pass'. It's because they aren't remarkable. One of my oldest friends, who passed away recently, was a woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome. It's a condition that tends to make women grow more hair than "average," it tends to be coupled with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which makes for a rounder body in some ways, and it's an extremely common condition. I'm not even 40 and I've had 5 different friends who all had it! It's super common! And there's this thing that cis women deal with which is, if you aren't pretty, you're straight up ignored.
So what I see, and I hope that this comes across as gender affirming, is that trans women are women, and they don't realize that they pass a lot easier than they think they do. Because you don't have to be like the woman on the right in the comic to be a woman. You can look like the person on the left, and still look like a woman, because there's lots of ciswomen who look imperfect in a lot of ways. It's just that trans women are harder on themselves than they should be, because they've been taught "women look like X and sound like Y and do like Z." And the truth is, we're half the damn population! We look like and sound like and do like everything! We just aren't on TV, on the radio, in the news.
I've said in the past that I have the bodytype of Danny Devito and it's true. And I definitely am not trying to downplay the extreme difficulty that trans women face, and there are some very obviously masculine things that concern them (such as facial hair, omg, the struggle) but my point is, it's easier to pass than most people think. Give me 12 hours with Danny Devito (and a talented cosmetologist to do something with his hair) and we can make him pass. He'd probably let us. He probably wouldn't even make a joke out of it, because he's a class act.
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How everybody sees everything they fear.
I see those stereotypes as convenient propaganda to easily turn the situation into an "us-vs-them" issue and radicalise people with less skin in the game. Whether transphobes actually believe in them is kinda beside the point. The real drive for transphobia imo is purely ideological where gender roles are governed by nature, families are nuclear, and patriarchy is normal and good (but dont call it that)!
The most effective way to combat this is to show examples of trans folks existing in society as healthy, productive people. Having families, not conforming to the stereotypes or giving ammunition to the zealots. I'm not saying everyone should be conforming! Just that we need to have counterexamples to show those who hold trans people up as the epitome of western decline.
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I'm real tempted, as a cis woman, to dress like a man and see if I can pick fights with people. Because I want people to be able to stand up say, "Well, yes, I'm trans," and then fistfight whoever jump them, but that sounds exhausting, and they shouldn't have to do it. At the same time, I'm worried these idiots would find out I was fighting them on purpose and then would try handwaving me as "not really trans so it doesn't count."
I already have the body-type of Danny Devito. May as well make use of it.
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