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.”

The Trans Separatist Betrayal Lives on in a New Form

Blair White is one of the most aggressive
trans separatists today, and she is actively
making fun of trans women who do not
live up to her conservative standards.

Those who have followed my blogs for a while, will know that I have argued against transgender separatism, people who think they are so much more trans than other transgender people that they have the right to decide who is in and who is out.

These "Harry Benjamin Sydrome supporters" and, more lately,  "truscum" or "transmedicalists", have all bought into the extreme gender binary and hate the idea that "normal people" should think of them as anything but a 100 percent man or woman.

(As if any cis man or woman is 100 percent male or female...)

Quite a few of them (but not all, I am glad to say) then  throw all other trans people under the bus, using a lot of traditional transphobic arguments in the process, the most obvious being that (”false”) trans women are scary, sexual, predators.

These two videos by karviday give a very good, although depressing, view into the world of transgender panics and how transphobic bullying tacts  are used by younger transgender separatists. None of this is OK.