Learning how to be respectful of the transgender community and everyone in it was one of the first things I started learning on Tumblr (which isn’t to say I’m perfect now, or finished learning, just that it was a large area of personal ignorance at the time).

I learned that it was disrespectful and stupid to pretend I could tell how they felt better than they could- no one can say that “you don’t really feel like a man”, because no one knows how you feel! I learned that it was disrespectful to pretend that people with GID needed treatment beyond what they requested, that it was insulting and demeaning that doctors, not the patients, were allowed to say when they needed SRS and that too many of these doctors used their positions of power to exercise arbitrary authority over other people’s bodies. I learned that even socially aware groups like Feminists could be guilty of transmisogyny, disallowing transwomen from their spaces.

All this was (and is!) valuable information that drastically changed my perspective and how I want to approach life. It is this very lesson that leads me to question how individuals that self identify as transabled are being treated.

Isn’t it just as disrespectful to say, “you don’t really feel body dysphoria” as it is to say “you don’t really feel gender dysphoria”? Without knowing more about human nuerology, there’s no way to tell what and how other people feel- that’s why we have to rely on other people to communicate these things. Why would someone lie about body dysphoria? What motivation would they have for the desire to be disabled, if it wasn’t a neurological phenomena? Isn’t implying that they’re doing it to ‘be cool’ (or as tumblrs put it, to be “Attention whore[s]” just as insulting as it is when it’s directed at transgender individuals?

What’s the ethical difference between telling someone they are a psychopath in need of desperate psychological help because they want to restrict motion of their legs, and doing it because they’d like their penis surgically altered? I really don’t see one. Why is it appropriate to question the integrity of a doctor who is willing to perform the latter surgery, but inappropriate to question the integrity of a doctor who will perform the former? Why is it okay to tell people that “there is no obligation for me to entertain what is quite literally psychosis” with one group, but not the other?

Finally, we have a robust disabled community on Tumblr that I’d like to draw a parallel with transmysoginistic Feminists. We have plenty of people on tumblr giving the response, “Transabled? [I/someone I know] is disabled and this greatly offends me! How could someone without a disability want to give up their able bodied privilege?” This line of arguement would be much more convincing if it weren’t verbatim the second wave feminist arguement to defend transmisogyny.  ”Transgendered? I’m a woman, and this greatly offends me. How could someone on the oppressive side of the patriarchy want to give up their male privilege?” At best, accepting one and rejecting the other seems inconsistent. At worst, it seems like hypocrisy used to justify hate. 

I’m not claiming to know all the answers and I’ll keep learning, but it’s so extremely troubling to hear such hate filled responses from people that are normally supportive of other human beings.