But nobody asks “how do we combat the evil cis people?”
disclaimer
I missed the last sentence, the problem, in the post above before I typed this out. But it’s the rule of cool: I think it’s funny enough to keep. I was like, “what’s got her upset?” Well articulated and noted on the Jewish banker comparison
Eh, i did go in hard there. But honestly, the prevalence of that line of thinking means there is so much to unpack in hexbear discourse. And i just start spitting very fast. And i have reasons for that. So i’m gonna go off. I just feel like it after i got told onnhexbear today that it’s kinda gay when a guy sucks girldick. So here’s a couple examples of things we do not think about hard enough:
Why do we take pinkwashing, homonationalism and similar forms of PR at face value? Why do we buy into them in the first place? Why would we assume that Israel is trans friendly because they have sent a trans woman to Eurovision once? I have looked at how gender affirming care and gender recognition work in that regime, let me tell you they are awful at that.
Even if we don’t fall for that, why is the next step to blame the object of the propaganda and not the propagandist? Why is there a collective guilt of trans people when an overwhelmingly cis organization abuses us as a pink, white and blue shield to appear friendlier and less problematic? It’s not as if we can stop Lochheed Martin from making merch with the progress pride flag on it.
Speaking of which, why is it always, literally every single time, trans people in particular who take the blame for that? Last time i was at a corporate pride parade and looked at the most reactionary sponsors, their float was packed full of white cis dudes and literally nobody else, and when i looked up who they were afterwards, the most prominent one with the highest position in that org’s hierarchy was a straight guy from that party that was at the parade entirely for pinkwashing reasons and had said something absurdly transphobic just two weeks earlier and the only trans people far and wide were the counter protestors marching in front of the float to protest that these fucks had been invited to the parade in the first place.
It would already distort actual opinion outside of mainstream media if we pretended that white cis gay men are disproportionately problematic, as most of them are at least slightly less problematic than white cis straight men, which admittedly is a very low bar to clear. But being gay at least loosely correlates with being a tiny bit less shit in your opinions than being straight. Still mostly bad, but less so. And lesbians are in turn less likely to have bad takes than then gay men, and queers of color as well, and trans people are on average the least problematic part of the entire queer community. That still means the average trans lesbian is a lib, that’s just how public opinion in the imperial cores is. That sucks, but it’s really not our fault and a trans lesbian is much more likely to be a comrade than a straight dude. Much more likely still means something like, idk, 25%. That’s absurdly high, but it doesn’t matter because we always have to be one of the good ones and if we aren’t, it’s somehow always because we are trans and never because we are white westerners. Funny how that works. But put a little progress pride flag anywhere near a rocket aimed at the global south and the question is NEVER who put it there, but why trans women are so fucking evil and imperialist. People fall for it every single time. Just having that pink white and blue chevron there means that somehow, magically, trans people and particularly trans women are part of whatever atrocity is committed in proximity to that flag. You do not even need actual trans people there, it’s sufficient to mention us. Neat, huh? Are you begining to see why that particular kind of pinkwashing was so common up until January 2025?
Now, i’m not saying that no trans woman has ever worked for the MIC, that would obviously be BS. So let’s talk about why that happens. Why does hexbear struggle so much with unpacking the most obvious problems trans people face in the material reality of the US? I am not American, i can get food on the table sorta-kinda ok in spite of being unemployed, i was able to get bottom surgery in spite of that, i can comfortably scoff at the very idea of signing up for the Bundeswehr or Rheinmetall or Thyssen-Krupp. Now i gotta be precise here, the following is not meant as an endorsement of anything or as an excuse of individual failure and guilt, but as a descriptor of systemic factors. It does not make working for the MIC ok, but it explains why it happens in the first place that people serve a system that gatekeeps, exposes and opresses them constantly. With that said, it’s a fact of life that trans people, especially trans women not capable of stealthing for whatever reason, are in an extremely precarious employment situation. Nobody fucking hires us. HR clocks us, HR says “nooooope, i’m not having an argument about which bathroom that person can use or if it’s ok to not use their preferred pronouns, i’m just gonna pretend we hired somebody else even if we didn’t.” It happens all the time, even in the more inclusive fields like tech, public infrastructure etc. That is the average trans employment situation, not working for Raytheon or the CIA. But it’s never “why are so many trans people unemployed?”, it’s always “why are they all in the MIC” because it’s easier to be transphobic when that’s the question.
Which means that the few employers that would even hire us in the first place hold disproportionate bargaining power over us. And the ways out of that for many trans people require gender affirming care that is unaffordable without a particularly well-paying job. That makes every “trans inclusive” employer a potential trans extortionist employer, as they know their trans employees have less options to be hired elsewhere than their cis coworkers. Hexbear almost never talks about that, all i see is “trans drone pilot this, trans psyop from Langley that” over and over again or people share the edited image of the trans colored anti homeless spikes again and it gets 70 upvotes.
That’s just really fucked, you know? Even before yet another person with uninvestigated transphobic brainworms crawls out of the woodwork and argues with me why their openly transphobic opinion about trans women is actually totally ok and i’m the bad faith actor for interpreting them wrongly, it makes it hard to engage with people in this space in good faith when i’m not in the trans mega. We have somebody being shitty to trans people at least every week, and when it’s an established hexbear user that routinely has no consequences besides them getting their post removed and i am supposed to be fine with that because it’s even worse on other instances.
So me being kinda in favor of killing all cis people or at leat forcefemming all cis men just to see what happens is obviously a joke, but could you blame me if i was serious?
Honestly, i was really scared that i was barking up the wrong tree or overreacting or whatever. I’m glad to hear this gave you something to think about.
not overacting no. not even the last part. we face annihilation and i never trusted the ghouls that ape our persecution to pass themselves off as moral and infallible. the lockheed martin example for example, i know they’re lying not queer people. i knew that on instinct years ago, then i read about empire. i’m not going to instruct you on how to feel about cis people any more than i would to a non-westerner about the west.
Some people in the system understand, correctly, that othered people are vulnerable to promises of acceptance, whatever purpose that acceptance might be serving. There are then those whose pragmatism doesn’t survive their prejudice and hand the othered people to the others. There isn’t a clean cut line of that across political sides either.
Yeah i get that, and that’s a conversation worth having. I don’t want to come off as dismissing critiques of homonationalism, respectability politics, tokenism etc. and i hope it goes without saying that i stand firm in my stance against imperialism, western chauvinism, and militarism. I’m just arguing for putting all of that in a proper context and to not let pinkwashing do what it is intended to do, achieve an identification of imperialism with queer rights that does not hold up to reality.
If nothing else, the current US government and the general liberal establishment showed that none of that was sincere at any level, not only were the liberals quick to abandon trans people, they were quick to do so with few notable exceptions. It’s still then hard to distinguish and discern those whose care is genuine and whose pragmatism is stronger than their prejudice. It feels like whomever was writing the article in the OP was one of the true believers in the mandate of heaven, it has been lost.
Yeah the way trans rights are negotiated now has been a game for the political class and we’re not players on team lib, we’re the ball. I was planning my name change when my government contorted itself into a pretzel over a new self ID law, i applied for coverage of my bottom surgery when our courts ruled that there’s no actual legal obligation to cover it, i’m used to getting stabbed in the back by libs.
Exactly, that’s why I didn’t intend to push you into a corner of defending what’s going on with pinkwashing or homonationalism or whatever else, that’s not a side you are picking. Rather, it is still important to realize that there are people who are very aware of those same dynamics you have listed and they are utilizing that proactively to conscript people to their ideologies. It is most important to realize this for anyone who is vulnerable for acceptance so that their vulnerability isn’t a mechanism to draft them towards ends unwittingly. It wasn’t long ago that the line in the OP actually worked to a degree and was even adopted as an aesthetic by some circles in wide variety of topics from Middle-east to Ukraine to even electoral politics. One only benefits from concessions given my the establishment if they have leverage against any of those concessions being withdrawn once given. Opposite is true for especially trans people who rely on state to provide them health care, where disempowering is trivial and it is only, at its best, a feel good campaign for some parts of the electorate who have qualms about everything else. I say this as someone who puts primary importance to queer liberation in politics, possibly to a degree that could come off as callous.
disclaimer
I missed the last sentence, the problem, in the post above before I typed this out. But it’s the rule of cool: I think it’s funny enough to keep. I was like, “what’s got her upset?” Well articulated and noted on the Jewish banker comparison
Eh, i did go in hard there. But honestly, the prevalence of that line of thinking means there is so much to unpack in hexbear discourse. And i just start spitting very fast. And i have reasons for that. So i’m gonna go off. I just feel like it after i got told onnhexbear today that it’s kinda gay when a guy sucks girldick. So here’s a couple examples of things we do not think about hard enough:
Why do we take pinkwashing, homonationalism and similar forms of PR at face value? Why do we buy into them in the first place? Why would we assume that Israel is trans friendly because they have sent a trans woman to Eurovision once? I have looked at how gender affirming care and gender recognition work in that regime, let me tell you they are awful at that.
Even if we don’t fall for that, why is the next step to blame the object of the propaganda and not the propagandist? Why is there a collective guilt of trans people when an overwhelmingly cis organization abuses us as a pink, white and blue shield to appear friendlier and less problematic? It’s not as if we can stop Lochheed Martin from making merch with the progress pride flag on it.
Speaking of which, why is it always, literally every single time, trans people in particular who take the blame for that? Last time i was at a corporate pride parade and looked at the most reactionary sponsors, their float was packed full of white cis dudes and literally nobody else, and when i looked up who they were afterwards, the most prominent one with the highest position in that org’s hierarchy was a straight guy from that party that was at the parade entirely for pinkwashing reasons and had said something absurdly transphobic just two weeks earlier and the only trans people far and wide were the counter protestors marching in front of the float to protest that these fucks had been invited to the parade in the first place.
It would already distort actual opinion outside of mainstream media if we pretended that white cis gay men are disproportionately problematic, as most of them are at least slightly less problematic than white cis straight men, which admittedly is a very low bar to clear. But being gay at least loosely correlates with being a tiny bit less shit in your opinions than being straight. Still mostly bad, but less so. And lesbians are in turn less likely to have bad takes than then gay men, and queers of color as well, and trans people are on average the least problematic part of the entire queer community. That still means the average trans lesbian is a lib, that’s just how public opinion in the imperial cores is. That sucks, but it’s really not our fault and a trans lesbian is much more likely to be a comrade than a straight dude. Much more likely still means something like, idk, 25%. That’s absurdly high, but it doesn’t matter because we always have to be one of the good ones and if we aren’t, it’s somehow always because we are trans and never because we are white westerners. Funny how that works. But put a little progress pride flag anywhere near a rocket aimed at the global south and the question is NEVER who put it there, but why trans women are so fucking evil and imperialist. People fall for it every single time. Just having that pink white and blue chevron there means that somehow, magically, trans people and particularly trans women are part of whatever atrocity is committed in proximity to that flag. You do not even need actual trans people there, it’s sufficient to mention us. Neat, huh? Are you begining to see why that particular kind of pinkwashing was so common up until January 2025?
Now, i’m not saying that no trans woman has ever worked for the MIC, that would obviously be BS. So let’s talk about why that happens. Why does hexbear struggle so much with unpacking the most obvious problems trans people face in the material reality of the US? I am not American, i can get food on the table sorta-kinda ok in spite of being unemployed, i was able to get bottom surgery in spite of that, i can comfortably scoff at the very idea of signing up for the Bundeswehr or Rheinmetall or Thyssen-Krupp. Now i gotta be precise here, the following is not meant as an endorsement of anything or as an excuse of individual failure and guilt, but as a descriptor of systemic factors. It does not make working for the MIC ok, but it explains why it happens in the first place that people serve a system that gatekeeps, exposes and opresses them constantly. With that said, it’s a fact of life that trans people, especially trans women not capable of stealthing for whatever reason, are in an extremely precarious employment situation. Nobody fucking hires us. HR clocks us, HR says “nooooope, i’m not having an argument about which bathroom that person can use or if it’s ok to not use their preferred pronouns, i’m just gonna pretend we hired somebody else even if we didn’t.” It happens all the time, even in the more inclusive fields like tech, public infrastructure etc. That is the average trans employment situation, not working for Raytheon or the CIA. But it’s never “why are so many trans people unemployed?”, it’s always “why are they all in the MIC” because it’s easier to be transphobic when that’s the question.
Which means that the few employers that would even hire us in the first place hold disproportionate bargaining power over us. And the ways out of that for many trans people require gender affirming care that is unaffordable without a particularly well-paying job. That makes every “trans inclusive” employer a potential trans extortionist employer, as they know their trans employees have less options to be hired elsewhere than their cis coworkers. Hexbear almost never talks about that, all i see is “trans drone pilot this, trans psyop from Langley that” over and over again or people share the edited image of the trans colored anti homeless spikes again and it gets 70 upvotes.
That’s just really fucked, you know? Even before yet another person with uninvestigated transphobic brainworms crawls out of the woodwork and argues with me why their openly transphobic opinion about trans women is actually totally ok and i’m the bad faith actor for interpreting them wrongly, it makes it hard to engage with people in this space in good faith when i’m not in the trans mega. We have somebody being shitty to trans people at least every week, and when it’s an established hexbear user that routinely has no consequences besides them getting their post removed and i am supposed to be fine with that because it’s even worse on other instances.
So me being kinda in favor of killing all cis people or at leat forcefemming all cis men just to see what happens is obviously a joke, but could you blame me if i was serious?
i think i owe you an apology. you gave me all this to think about and my intention was never to demonize trans people. i’m grateful for this material.
Honestly, i was really scared that i was barking up the wrong tree or overreacting or whatever. I’m glad to hear this gave you something to think about.
not overacting no. not even the last part. we face annihilation and i never trusted the ghouls that ape our persecution to pass themselves off as moral and infallible. the lockheed martin example for example, i know they’re lying not queer people. i knew that on instinct years ago, then i read about empire. i’m not going to instruct you on how to feel about cis people any more than i would to a non-westerner about the west.
Some people in the system understand, correctly, that othered people are vulnerable to promises of acceptance, whatever purpose that acceptance might be serving. There are then those whose pragmatism doesn’t survive their prejudice and hand the othered people to the others. There isn’t a clean cut line of that across political sides either.
Yeah i get that, and that’s a conversation worth having. I don’t want to come off as dismissing critiques of homonationalism, respectability politics, tokenism etc. and i hope it goes without saying that i stand firm in my stance against imperialism, western chauvinism, and militarism. I’m just arguing for putting all of that in a proper context and to not let pinkwashing do what it is intended to do, achieve an identification of imperialism with queer rights that does not hold up to reality.
If nothing else, the current US government and the general liberal establishment showed that none of that was sincere at any level, not only were the liberals quick to abandon trans people, they were quick to do so with few notable exceptions. It’s still then hard to distinguish and discern those whose care is genuine and whose pragmatism is stronger than their prejudice. It feels like whomever was writing the article in the OP was one of the true believers in the mandate of heaven, it has been lost.
Yeah the way trans rights are negotiated now has been a game for the political class and we’re not players on team lib, we’re the ball. I was planning my name change when my government contorted itself into a pretzel over a new self ID law, i applied for coverage of my bottom surgery when our courts ruled that there’s no actual legal obligation to cover it, i’m used to getting stabbed in the back by libs.
Exactly, that’s why I didn’t intend to push you into a corner of defending what’s going on with pinkwashing or homonationalism or whatever else, that’s not a side you are picking. Rather, it is still important to realize that there are people who are very aware of those same dynamics you have listed and they are utilizing that proactively to conscript people to their ideologies. It is most important to realize this for anyone who is vulnerable for acceptance so that their vulnerability isn’t a mechanism to draft them towards ends unwittingly. It wasn’t long ago that the line in the OP actually worked to a degree and was even adopted as an aesthetic by some circles in wide variety of topics from Middle-east to Ukraine to even electoral politics. One only benefits from concessions given my the establishment if they have leverage against any of those concessions being withdrawn once given. Opposite is true for especially trans people who rely on state to provide them health care, where disempowering is trivial and it is only, at its best, a feel good campaign for some parts of the electorate who have qualms about everything else. I say this as someone who puts primary importance to queer liberation in politics, possibly to a degree that could come off as callous.