No, Vlad, defending trans people does not weaken pro-climate policies

Vlad Vexler, who is normally known as a well informed and sensible political commenter, now wants to sacrifice  the defense of trans people to save the climate movement. A nonexistent problem becomes trans erasure in a new video.

Vlad Vexler is a Russian born British philosopher, political analyst and YouTube essayist, best known for his commentary on  Putinism, democracy, populism, authoritarianism, political philosophy and culture. In the video he is talking to Rupert Read, a British philosopher, environmental campaigner and public intellectual. [Update: The video has been taken down].

Are trans people scaring good people away?

It is a bit disturbing to see two cis white men talk intellectually about sacrificing Black and trans people on the altar of  climate change victory, as if these were somehow completely different topics, and not the end result of a coherent and systemic world view that makes the exploitation of both nature and people seem natural and benign.  

In an article over at Resilience, an environmental and social-change publication run by the Post Carbon Institute, the two of them put it this way:

'Second, calls to “center the Global South” translated into expectations that Western participants should express collective guilt, defer to non-Western voices and adopt hyper-‘progressive’ immigration positions that command relatively little civic support across the West. Third, a similar dynamic emerged over trans rights, with members often expected to affirm contentious claims – for instance, that trans women are indistinguishable from biological women across all contexts, including sport, prisons and debates about male-on-female violence. As a result, even those broadly supportive of racial justice, global justice and trans rights could feel excluded unless they endorsed the approved formulation.'

No one says that trans women are indistinguishable from "biological women" (which is a dubious and unscientific term in itself).  What trans activists and their supporters are saying is that trans women are women and that they should be given the same human rights protection as everyone else. They should have the same right as everyone to live their lives in peace and with the same liberties as everyone else.

Indeed, given that trans people represents a small marginalized group targeted by fascists and fundamentalists, pro-democracy humanists have to pay special attention to their needs. What extremists  do to their favorite scapegoats, tell us  a lot about their overall strategy for achieving hegemony. 

Every argument made in this paragraph reflects the anti-trans movement's attempt to dehumanize and scapegoat trans people.  None of the "problems" presented in the article reflect serious, real, on the ground challenges for the climate crisis movement, as I see it.

Vlad even plays the "I like trans people, but...." card in this video, promising to defend trans people in the future. He would have had more credibility if he had made a knowledge based, compassionate, defense of trans people first. 

Vlad Vexler and Rupert Read

Supporting trans people does not undermine  support for green politics

The MAGA regime is not persecuting trans people because it makes them popular. 

The fact is that the great majority of Americans sympathize with trans people, even though some disagree with some policies. (Nor do they like the extreme violence against immigrants.) 

What Pakistan's LGBTQ community can teach us about destructive trans separatism

Pride Pakistan points to the way transgender separatists have caused immense harm to other trans and queer people. We see the same phenomenon in Western countries.

I believe we need to include all of the world in the transgender conversation, which is why I have tried to share stories from Asia, Africa and Latin-America  in my social media channels (which are - let us admit it - dominated by people from North America and Europe).

In a recent article Pride Pakistan discusses more recent event in Pakistan's LGBTQ community, with a focus on what I would call transgender separatism.

Facing extreme transphobia from religious fundamentalist authorities some trans activists try to distance themselves from the rest of the queer community in two ways:

1. Transmedicalism. They argue that true trans people are some kind of intersex, and that all policies had to be based on "biological sex" (which, in their minds it seems, seems to include themselves, but not any other trans people).

2. Homophobia: “Being transgender is a medical condition recognized by Islam, but being gay is a sin prohibited by the Quran.”

Are you a man or a woman?

Someone says to a transgender person "but you were born a man!" and my head wants to explode. No one is born a man or a woman, but instead male or female with the added non-negligible array of intersex conditions and ambiguous genitalia which leaves us unable to instantly pick a binary designation at birth. All this because nature abhors uniformity. 

Guest post by Joanna Santos

It turns out the perfect binary never truly existed but the idea was created and maintained to suppress any natural human gradations found everywhere else in biological processes. 

If we base ourselves exclusively on science this perfect binary isn't real. It was a cultural artifact where religious leaders and the ruling class could have the predictability they needed, and for most people it worked if imperfectly. 

Tolerance or intolerance?

Many native cultures have tolerated and even embraced those who exhibited gender variance. Others, more steeped in orthodoxy, fought it vigorously as it contradicted dogma that couldn't contain flexibility. 

People in those latter cultures with the most need to transition, were obliged as much as possible into stealth. Even variations of expression were discouraged to the point of physical arrest and incarceration well into the 20th century. 

From “Ideology” to “Mutilization”: Trump’s War on Trans People

 Donald Trump is now using the made-up word "mutilization" to generate support for his transphobic policies. The real reason is not any threat from trans people.

Photo: Getty

Does this Trumpian nonsense matter? It does. The point is to repeatedly associate the term transgender with "transgender ideology" and now "mutilization" (or "mutilation", which is proper English and at term used by the Attorney General), and do this to the point were weak minds immediately make the same association every time the topic of transgender rights comes up.

A related catchphrase is "Transgender for Everybody":

“They’re fighting for men in women’s sports. They’re fighting for transgender for everybody,” Trump has said. “Everybody go out, get your kid a nice operation, and change the sex of your kid.”

Trump is not very smart, but he is good at one thing: bullying. He knows exactly what buttons to push in order to mobilize the hatred of the masses in such a way that their feelings forward his interests.

The main objective here is not to harm trans people per se. Trump was not a rabid anti-trans activist before he decided to become a fascist dictator. The goal is to use transphobia to distract Americans from the Epstein files, the tanking economy and the Iran war.

There seems to be one thing most Americans do agree on: You should not abuse children.

Sure, a lot of right wingers traumatize their queer children all the time, but in their twisted minds this is not abuse, but protection. But you must, as an American politician, never be seen as someone who harms kids.

Trauma and self realization among older transgender people

Older transgender people can suffer from trauma and suppressed anger issues stemming from needing to hide and face rejection from family, friends and society as a whole. The roots of this trauma can sometimes date back to very early in childhood. 

Guest Post by Joanna Santos

Having grown up under a rigid binary where their identity was forced underground often meant dealing with internalized transphobia while trying to adapt within the framework of a society that didn't suit them. 

This trauma can be insidious and is often forced into hiding under layers of life distractions which can mask it. The underlying turmoil can then surface with a vengeance later on in life which is often referred to as the "cracking of our egg". Even someone who may have achieved a certain level of early self-acceptance still faced huge challenges attaining a peaceful and harmonious existence. 

Dealing with this underlying trauma can be delayed but not indefinitely and once major life distractions fall away with age there is no place to hide from it. 

Avoidance and reflection

We human beings have immense talent for deflecting and avoiding hard questions dealing with their psychological obstacles. We use methods which can work for a time such as plunging into career, focus on raising children. Sometimes we aid the subterfuge by indulging substance abuse habits, overeating, or some other method of distraction. 

Metacognition is the exercise of thinking about our thinking. It is about focusing on our beliefs and placing them under a microscope to check their veracity. We examine preconceived notions about our own natures to hopefully reveal some inner truth which may have been masked via our early indoctrination. 

On the nonbinary God, politics and culture war

Texas State Representative James Talarico (D), who is now hoping to become a blue senator from a very red state, is doubling down on his support for transgender people.

“We are all focused on the wrong 1%,” he recently told MS NOW. “Trans people aren’t taking away our healthcare. Undocumented people aren’t defunding our schools… It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians. And so we need not only the media, but all of us, to focus on the real problem at hand.”

So what has this to do with the gender of God? Well, Talarico has been very good at making viral videos, and the Republicans are now digging up old videos they think will harm him. In one of these videos he says - in defense of nonbinary and trans people - that God is nonbinary.

The political connotations of the term "nonbinary" aside, I know of no serious religious scholars or theologians - being those Christian, Muslim or Jewish - who would argue that God is male only. To the extent the creator of the universe has a gender aspect, that would include all genders, for sure. 

(The exception from this rule is found among the Mormons or Latter Day Saints, who argue that "the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s," but I neither have the time nor the patience to go into that here.)