I’ve not written about former Sad Puppy Sarah Hoyt’s blog for a long time. These post have for some years now been a mix of connecting personal mental states with childhood events in Portugal to illustrate either why the evil-liberal-Marxists are coming to destroy everything or why now is not quite the time to panic about evil-liberal-Marxists are coming to destroy everything because right-thinking Americans can still stop them with the power of defiance. I don’t know, these posts mainly make me feel sad reading them because there is such a mix of ideas here and clearly somebody working through personal issues with health both physical and mental but they always turn around to the point of either justifying cruelty and bigotry towards various targets or feeding into a catastrophising view of the world.
The post I’m linking to here isn’t any different from that template. This time it is an attempt to rationalise transphobia. Beyond that I’m not going to say much more other than it struck me as interesting https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/06/27/betwix-and-between/
28 responses to “(Unintentionally) interesting post”
I honestly don’t know what to think about that blog post, Cam. In some ways, it’s not at all different than how I feel. That said, I think presentation matters much more than she says because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been called ‘sir’ at a checkout or been identified as my sister’s brother. I still have all the bog standard parts, but I wear baggy clothes and a baseball cap.
TBH, I’m surprised I haven’t gotten more than the occasional dirty look when I’ve gone in the girl’s room to go pee.
But I just feel more sad for her than anything else. I mean, yeah, in the grand scheme of things, gender might not be the first choice about what to change about my body. I see her point. But for god’s sake, if this is how you feel, then maybe you should fight the gender norms that mean girls have to play with dolls and wear pink and be feminine to be a “girl”. And I don’t think she wants to do that either.
Betwixt and between, indeed.
(Do not read the comments, they are a wretched hive of scum and villainy.)
When I was skinny, I was called “sir” so many times. Because I was always a tomboy, and the last time I wore a dress was Mom’s funeral. Now that I have adipose in the usual female pattern (damn you menopause) it doesn’t happen unless I’ve just had a haircut and someone only sees me from the back in winter clothes.
It happened several times just a couple weekends ago when we were in Reno for the local (drag) Imperial Court’s Coronation events (and on the drive there and back). I was *not* in drag; I was in fact in masculine-tailored styles quite deliberately.
When I was younger, this drove me mad; now I just sigh internally.
It’s a bit baffling, actually; perhaps it happens now because my husband is almost a foot taller and bearded, so there’s a careless assumption that the shorter person with the rainbow mohawk must be his wife.
You’d think the rainbow part would be a better clue.
I found the story depicted an extremely sad one. It shows again, supressing your feelings doesn’t lead to nice things and places. Be what you want to be, change things including yourself if you will, and no one should judge you harshly for it.
So many contradictions. Is variation from the norm to be accepted as fact, or not? That’s a big chunk of the problem right there – reflexive intolerance for anyone just a smidgen different from Average Joe or Average Jo. Are people of legal age free to seek treatment and pursue their goals as they see fit, or not?
No sensible person would argue that the healthcare system gets it right every time. It’s not who’s in greatest need, it’s who’s got the biggest budget. If people suffering from dysmorphia, and those advocating on their behalf, are prepared to throw money at the problem, there will be competent medical practitioners – and doubtless a few snake-oil vendors – ready to accept it.
As for interventions involving minor children? Consider Autism Speaks and its disgusting history of campaigning for a cure, and its stupid puzzle-piece logo. It is to shudder. That’s a good model of how not to do things.
We’d do well to remember why the word “placebo” exists in our vocabulary. An ethical medical practitioner will seek the patient’s informed consent, and refrain from bullshit and raising of false hopes.
As the parent of a trans kid, I can add that Hoyt clearly knows nothing about trans people, or their families. Every trans family I know, even in the benighted conservative cesspool that is currently Arkansas, loves and accepts their trans kids, siblings, and so on. And she’s got plenty of other errors (strawmen, lies) in there too.
But I suspect that she has to believe these things, if you see what I mean. Sunk cost fallacy.
I’ve often heard my father talking to someone on the phone mention that “the boys” are here when both my brother and I are AARP material and have no Vought superpowers.
That hit home, too. The assumption, bone deep, that “If you transition, your family Will hate you.”
It’s true more often than I like, but… my Grandma was deeply small-c conservative, had racist attitudes, struggled with the idea of gay people (Four Weddings and a Funeral apparently put a crack in that, and even her racism was much more complex than “First Nations bad, White good”). But when one of her grandkids transitioned, love won out, and she couldn’t see why she couldn’t love the same person with a different gender. it wasn’t much of a struggle.
Hoyt’s claim that people who have transitioned are different people — i.e. “not knowing how to relate to someone who frankly is no longer your friend but is also not a stranger” is also not true. People who transition are the same people they were before the transition, just usually happier.
Obviously she’s never met an actual trans person, just her straw-man/woman imaginary versions.
I have a few trans friends, met both before and after. My best one went from being a slightly uptight lesbian to a laid-back straight guy. He’s so much happier and more relaxed than the friend I met originally.
I love him even more now. His relatives were fine with it too. His stepmom appreciated having a stronger man around to lift things. 🙂 Besides being happier and more relaxed, the big thing he noticed was a change from liking butts to liking boobs after he asked all his cis-men buddies to recommend their favorite porn. Definitely a guy!
My pal in Darkest Texas (who I’d fallen out of touch with for some years) told me the boy I’d known as a kid was now a college graduate woman. I was all, OK, what’s her name now? and sent a few FB messages to her, telling tales of the 6 year old her. Her mom was surprised I was all “whatevs” and I pointed out that I live in the Bay Area, not the hellhole that is Texas. (One year at our Friendsgiving there were 7 attendees and 2 were trans.) But the family still loves the kid just as much.
Ms Hoyt may have gleaned her claim that “There is one — note ONE — case of an xy developing as a normal woman and becoming a mother.” That description approximately corresponds to one of the (many) failures of Olympics sex-testing, the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games’ cheek-swab test of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska for a “Barr body”, that I mentioned in my “Kudzu and the California Marriage Act” (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html) essay. The Barr body check is an indirect test for inactivated-X, which is what happens normally in XX.
The 1968 committee inferred XY in disqualifying Ms. Kłobukowska, and (some guesswork being necessary because of lost evidence), but almost certainly in partial error: She was probably (specifically) XXY with XX cellular mosaicism, and in any event did indeed go on to bear children — making apparent the 1968 committee’s ghastly error.
I certainly did not claim only one case has ever been confirmed of an XY person bearing children. There doubtless have been others, if only because cellular mosaicism is quite rare but not unique to just Ms Kłobukowska. The fact is, few folks have motivation to have their genes tested, let alone precisely. ISTR that, for example, when 23andMe told this adoptee about his distant genetic forebears, all they did in calling me XY was look for an SRY block on a Y chromosome only, the very same second-effort test that got the IOC into further and deeper trouble (detailed in my essay).
And, speaking as the adoptive son of Arthur and Faye Moen (who had been sadly unable to conceive), I find regrettable Ms. Hoyt’s assumption that bearing a child is what makes one a “normal woman”. Mom certainly was one, even though never pregnant.
Biology has a habit of defying simple categories. One of the points of my essay.
Anyway, I am deeply sorry to hear of Ms. Hoyt’s ongoing sense of displaced identity, and hope she has success in, as she aptly phrases it, being herself as hard as she can.
“Transition is impossible [‘for me’ optional] and even if I tried I’d be a terrible failure and everyone would hate me” is classic internalised transphobia of a particular kind. Not common, but familiar if you move in online trans communities. But equally, “trans people aren’t _really_ the gender they say they are and even getting to that partial state is terrifically hard and dangerous and cuts them off from normal society” is the myth cis people like to repeat – with varying degrees of subtlety – when thinking about gender makes them uncomfortable. It’s where the internalised transphobia comes from in the first place. And of course cis people can have complicated feelings about gender too, especially when gender norms are very strictly enforced. So “interesting” is as far as I’d go
Though for the avoidance of doubt, and for anyone reading who needs to hear it:
You can just be a girl if you want. It’s okay. Or a boy, or something else, or no gender at all. It’s okay. It’s not always easy but it’s much simpler and safer than you think, and it’s so very much worth it. Find the joy and follow it. You’re not too old, or too young, or too much, or not enough, or trespassing, or appropriating, or causing trouble. Really.
Hoyt’s problem is that she’s still stuck in the mindset of her early extremely patriarchal/misogynist childhood culture, and then the culture she’s self-sorted into. She’s never internalized the concept of “strong yet female ciswoman” or was able to grow up as a tomboy like I did, despite being extremely straight.
So she’s still stuck in the “men=heroic” “women=girly” binary.
She has literally made herself unhappy and self-hating all of her life. I do believe that people in her reactionary milieu and family would hate her if she transitioned — but despite her whining, she’s 100% female in body and mind, so she doesn’t need to! She didn’t really want to be a boy, she wanted to be a human being with self-determination — and those were by definition in her birth and adopted culture, men. She loved being pregnant and nursing, which is pretty darn girly.
The only thing that needs changing in her is her mindset, but since she’s chosen to live in the patriarchal/misogynistic parts of society (who also abjure psychiatry and self-knowledge), this option is unavailable for her.
She has quite literally trapped herself in a prison of her own making.
Doubly ironic in that her fellow married Baen author Esther Friesner edited several volumes of “Chicks in Chainmail”, in which women go into battle swinging swords and carrying babies (but then, Friesner, like Le Guin — also a wife and mother, had the advantage of going to Vassar).
Triply ironic in that her hero RAH had mothers helping conquer the galaxy, plus at least one trans character (Andrew/Elizabeth Libby). Leaving aside the glaring fact that she’s missed the point and parallel of “If This Goes On–” since she’s joined the bad side of that one.
You may well be right – you very likely are right – but “you don’t hate being a girl; you’re just damaged by patriarchy” is the standard TERF line on trans men and afab non-binary people and needs to be deployed with caution.
Oh, Sarah. How hard is it to just accept people for who they are?
My wife and I have more or less fallen into the honorary grandparent role for the kids of a friend of ours. One of the kids has very clearly not identified with the gender role assigned to her for as long as I’ve known her.
And you know what? That’s fine. It’s who she is. And if it proves to be fluid–she’s only seven now–that’s also fine.
On a different note, I was in Portugal in January and we stayed at an inn run by an American woman with a Portuguese husband. They had a big picture of Salazar in the front as you came in.
Yeah, Hoyt and her family still feel Portugal started going downhill when Salazar died. Oh noes, no longer a repressive authoritarian dictatorship with secret police assassinating people! No more ruinous wars against people they colonized!
(Related: his pal Generalissimo Francisco Franco is STILL dead.)
I’m trying to figure out how this illuminates her “feminazi codes of conduct are ruining cons” piece from a few years ago when she told a story of going into a party room in a con, having the men in the room worried because they were watching porn and then relaxing because “It’s just Sarah. She won’t complain.” And her summation IIRC was those porn actresses were underfed and didn’t appeal to her and she wasn’t bothered by it. So basically, if she can take it, why are you women complaining about sexual harassment? Just man up.
And I just now realized the implication is that if the actresses were of a different body type that may have appealed to her, she would have been bothered by it.
I’ve never met Sarah Hoyt, I hope to never meet her, but I’ve got to say that I actually feel quite sorry for her. She just seems to have little empathy for people who don’t fit into her apparently quite limited worldview. I don’t know how old her kids are, but my two (26 and 21) both have friends who have transitioned or who are non-binary or are otherwise on the LGBTQUIA spectrum. So her kids probably either know or are completely avoiding folks in that community. I hope it’s the former, and that her attitudes haven’t affected them.
I’m not going to her blog to read nothing. If someone quotes stuff from it, fine, but I don’t need to read bigotry and ignorance of folk who desperately feel they need to dominate, marginalize and suppress others into outcasts to feel secure and special in their identities and reassured they’ll get all the good stuff.
I have trans friends, including one who transitioned very late in life. I have three friends who’ve had trans kids, all happy adults now. My trans nephew is currently transitioning, having followed an Elliot Page sort of path of self-acceptance. It’s great fun getting to see him fully himself. My elderly mom doesn’t get it but the rest of us are celebrating his new name choice. My kid’s main partner is trans non-binary, she’s had non-binary roommates and dated trans folk. She’s active in the drag scene and has friends who are involved with drag since college and work for drag queens. (Drag isn’t TNBI, though they participate, but since the autocrats dragged drag folk into it as part of twisting back around to attack LGB cis people too in their trans moral panic, I bring it up.)
Outside of the ones who are sadly raised on white supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and other autocracies, the young folk under 35 seldom have issues with TNBI people or GNC and gender fluid cis people — they’re all one community together. LGBTQA are a big piece of the population and they believe in equal civil rights. But they don’t control the global corporations run by weirdos or the money or the governments. Certainly not the cops. The older adults who are bewildered less by fluid identities than by not being as repressively powerful and kowtowed to as they used to be (“respect”) are the problem. The science info is freely available to them as well; they just desperately want it to go away and try to squelch it in legal and public policy.
I hate that the change is so slow and blocked by horrible violence, even as I watch it happening. I hate watching repressive laws and legal judgements be jammed into the society because a small percentage find it profitable to exploit bigotry. I hate that I have to watch the same movie over and over again every decade as folk like Hoyt wrap themselves up in bigoted myths even they don’t like or understand. Slowly many of them adjust or let go of those myths. But they do it to fit into a changing overall society. They cling to pocket communities where they’ll be ostracized, even harmed, if they stray from the bigoted autocratic line, but eventually either those communities fall apart or they realize they could actually have a decent life outside them. Or we plunge into an autocratic period for a decade where they have the stranglehold on the government and the kids have to keep protesting and challenging it, losing too many of them along the way.
Hoyt doesn’t have to believe the crap she believes. She doesn’t have to stick with the patriarchy and its binary gender roles. It’s been her choice her whole life. She’s a threat to my kid, my relatives, my friends. She’s just a stone in the road and that’s really what she’s bitter about.
As almost always, IAWKG. But this sentence “Or we plunge into an autocratic period for a decade where they have the stranglehold on the government and the kids have to keep protesting and challenging it, losing too many of them along the way…” is what keeps me up at night. Given the realities of a life-long chronic condition, if I’m lucky I’ll live another 10 years. And particularly right now the possibility of another Trump presidency scares the fuck out of me.
The state I live in just passed a bill which would require not only elementary and high school students (bad enough!) but college students as well to only use bathrooms designated for the sex they were assigned at birth. To me, this is just cruelty beyond and above the norm. And the Republican party just keeps coming up with more ways to be cruel, to LGBT folk, to women, to various minority groups, to almost everyone.
The cruelty seems to be the sole point, both on the national and local levels, and it sickens me.
Sorry. I may have diverged too far from Cam’s original post, but Kat’s well-written screed touched something deep within. I guess I’m already echoing points made above. Sarah H seems to be a walking exemplar of the current right-wing’s (internalized self-)hate, misogyny and bigotry and I’m saddened almost to tears by it.
The cruelty is the sole point: what unites the right is their enjoyment of the misery they inflict on people they hate and fear. (Adam Serwer should have put that slogan on a t-shirt.)
Florida governor and complete meathead Ron DeSantis just axed basically the state’s entire (already meager) budget for arts and culture, more than $32 million, on the basis of less than $7400 that went to a pair of popular fringe festivals. This was funding that was not only passed by DeSantis’s pet legislature, all of the arts funding was approved by DeSantis’s hand-picked advisory council. When asked for an explanation for the veto, which took even his allies by surprise, DeSantis’s office just uttered some unspecific anti-trans hate. But the message is clear: “Ostracize everyone we hate, or you’ll be punished.”
Camestros Felapton 
28 responses to “(Unintentionally) interesting post”
I honestly don’t know what to think about that blog post, Cam. In some ways, it’s not at all different than how I feel. That said, I think presentation matters much more than she says because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been called ‘sir’ at a checkout or been identified as my sister’s brother. I still have all the bog standard parts, but I wear baggy clothes and a baseball cap.
TBH, I’m surprised I haven’t gotten more than the occasional dirty look when I’ve gone in the girl’s room to go pee.
But I just feel more sad for her than anything else. I mean, yeah, in the grand scheme of things, gender might not be the first choice about what to change about my body. I see her point. But for god’s sake, if this is how you feel, then maybe you should fight the gender norms that mean girls have to play with dolls and wear pink and be feminine to be a “girl”. And I don’t think she wants to do that either.
Betwixt and between, indeed.
(Do not read the comments, they are a wretched hive of scum and villainy.)
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Yes – I meant to say don’t read the comments.
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When I was skinny, I was called “sir” so many times. Because I was always a tomboy, and the last time I wore a dress was Mom’s funeral. Now that I have adipose in the usual female pattern (damn you menopause) it doesn’t happen unless I’ve just had a haircut and someone only sees me from the back in winter clothes.
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(just checked the closet — I don’t even OWN any dresses or skirts now!)
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I *still* not infrequently get “ma’am”ed.
It happened several times just a couple weekends ago when we were in Reno for the local (drag) Imperial Court’s Coronation events (and on the drive there and back). I was *not* in drag; I was in fact in masculine-tailored styles quite deliberately.
When I was younger, this drove me mad; now I just sigh internally.
It’s a bit baffling, actually; perhaps it happens now because my husband is almost a foot taller and bearded, so there’s a careless assumption that the shorter person with the rainbow mohawk must be his wife.
You’d think the rainbow part would be a better clue.
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I found the story depicted an extremely sad one. It shows again, supressing your feelings doesn’t lead to nice things and places. Be what you want to be, change things including yourself if you will, and no one should judge you harshly for it.
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That is indeed sad. Doesn’t make Hoyt’s views less malevolent, but still. As Willa Cather said, even the wicked suffer more than they deserve.
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Yes, that about sums it up.
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So many contradictions. Is variation from the norm to be accepted as fact, or not? That’s a big chunk of the problem right there – reflexive intolerance for anyone just a smidgen different from Average Joe or Average Jo. Are people of legal age free to seek treatment and pursue their goals as they see fit, or not?
No sensible person would argue that the healthcare system gets it right every time. It’s not who’s in greatest need, it’s who’s got the biggest budget. If people suffering from dysmorphia, and those advocating on their behalf, are prepared to throw money at the problem, there will be competent medical practitioners – and doubtless a few snake-oil vendors – ready to accept it.
As for interventions involving minor children? Consider Autism Speaks and its disgusting history of campaigning for a cure, and its stupid puzzle-piece logo. It is to shudder. That’s a good model of how not to do things.
We’d do well to remember why the word “placebo” exists in our vocabulary. An ethical medical practitioner will seek the patient’s informed consent, and refrain from bullshit and raising of false hopes.
/soapbox 🙂
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As the parent of a trans kid, I can add that Hoyt clearly knows nothing about trans people, or their families. Every trans family I know, even in the benighted conservative cesspool that is currently Arkansas, loves and accepts their trans kids, siblings, and so on. And she’s got plenty of other errors (strawmen, lies) in there too.
But I suspect that she has to believe these things, if you see what I mean. Sunk cost fallacy.
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I guess he’s a trans adult now — he turned 26 this year.
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I was pushing 50 and my husband past it when Mom died, and she called us “the kids” till the end.
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I’ve often heard my father talking to someone on the phone mention that “the boys” are here when both my brother and I are AARP material and have no Vought superpowers.
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That hit home, too. The assumption, bone deep, that “If you transition, your family Will hate you.”
It’s true more often than I like, but… my Grandma was deeply small-c conservative, had racist attitudes, struggled with the idea of gay people (Four Weddings and a Funeral apparently put a crack in that, and even her racism was much more complex than “First Nations bad, White good”). But when one of her grandkids transitioned, love won out, and she couldn’t see why she couldn’t love the same person with a different gender. it wasn’t much of a struggle.
For me it wasn’t a struggle at all.
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Hoyt’s claim that people who have transitioned are different people — i.e. “not knowing how to relate to someone who frankly is no longer your friend but is also not a stranger” is also not true. People who transition are the same people they were before the transition, just usually happier.
Bah.
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Obviously she’s never met an actual trans person, just her straw-man/woman imaginary versions.
I have a few trans friends, met both before and after. My best one went from being a slightly uptight lesbian to a laid-back straight guy. He’s so much happier and more relaxed than the friend I met originally.
I love him even more now. His relatives were fine with it too. His stepmom appreciated having a stronger man around to lift things. 🙂 Besides being happier and more relaxed, the big thing he noticed was a change from liking butts to liking boobs after he asked all his cis-men buddies to recommend their favorite porn. Definitely a guy!
My pal in Darkest Texas (who I’d fallen out of touch with for some years) told me the boy I’d known as a kid was now a college graduate woman. I was all, OK, what’s her name now? and sent a few FB messages to her, telling tales of the 6 year old her. Her mom was surprised I was all “whatevs” and I pointed out that I live in the Bay Area, not the hellhole that is Texas. (One year at our Friendsgiving there were 7 attendees and 2 were trans.) But the family still loves the kid just as much.
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Ms Hoyt may have gleaned her claim that “There is one — note ONE — case of an xy developing as a normal woman and becoming a mother.” That description approximately corresponds to one of the (many) failures of Olympics sex-testing, the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games’ cheek-swab test of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska for a “Barr body”, that I mentioned in my “Kudzu and the California Marriage Act” (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html) essay. The Barr body check is an indirect test for inactivated-X, which is what happens normally in XX.
The 1968 committee inferred XY in disqualifying Ms. Kłobukowska, and (some guesswork being necessary because of lost evidence), but almost certainly in partial error: She was probably (specifically) XXY with XX cellular mosaicism, and in any event did indeed go on to bear children — making apparent the 1968 committee’s ghastly error.
I certainly did not claim only one case has ever been confirmed of an XY person bearing children. There doubtless have been others, if only because cellular mosaicism is quite rare but not unique to just Ms Kłobukowska. The fact is, few folks have motivation to have their genes tested, let alone precisely. ISTR that, for example, when 23andMe told this adoptee about his distant genetic forebears, all they did in calling me XY was look for an SRY block on a Y chromosome only, the very same second-effort test that got the IOC into further and deeper trouble (detailed in my essay).
And, speaking as the adoptive son of Arthur and Faye Moen (who had been sadly unable to conceive), I find regrettable Ms. Hoyt’s assumption that bearing a child is what makes one a “normal woman”. Mom certainly was one, even though never pregnant.
Biology has a habit of defying simple categories. One of the points of my essay.
Anyway, I am deeply sorry to hear of Ms. Hoyt’s ongoing sense of displaced identity, and hope she has success in, as she aptly phrases it, being herself as hard as she can.
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Sorry about the edit errors. The browser blew up in mid-composition, and I didn’t fix everything.
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“Transition is impossible [‘for me’ optional] and even if I tried I’d be a terrible failure and everyone would hate me” is classic internalised transphobia of a particular kind. Not common, but familiar if you move in online trans communities. But equally, “trans people aren’t _really_ the gender they say they are and even getting to that partial state is terrifically hard and dangerous and cuts them off from normal society” is the myth cis people like to repeat – with varying degrees of subtlety – when thinking about gender makes them uncomfortable. It’s where the internalised transphobia comes from in the first place. And of course cis people can have complicated feelings about gender too, especially when gender norms are very strictly enforced. So “interesting” is as far as I’d go
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Though for the avoidance of doubt, and for anyone reading who needs to hear it:
You can just be a girl if you want. It’s okay. Or a boy, or something else, or no gender at all. It’s okay. It’s not always easy but it’s much simpler and safer than you think, and it’s so very much worth it. Find the joy and follow it. You’re not too old, or too young, or too much, or not enough, or trespassing, or appropriating, or causing trouble. Really.
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Hoyt’s problem is that she’s still stuck in the mindset of her early extremely patriarchal/misogynist childhood culture, and then the culture she’s self-sorted into. She’s never internalized the concept of “strong yet female ciswoman” or was able to grow up as a tomboy like I did, despite being extremely straight.
So she’s still stuck in the “men=heroic” “women=girly” binary.
She has literally made herself unhappy and self-hating all of her life. I do believe that people in her reactionary milieu and family would hate her if she transitioned — but despite her whining, she’s 100% female in body and mind, so she doesn’t need to! She didn’t really want to be a boy, she wanted to be a human being with self-determination — and those were by definition in her birth and adopted culture, men. She loved being pregnant and nursing, which is pretty darn girly.
The only thing that needs changing in her is her mindset, but since she’s chosen to live in the patriarchal/misogynistic parts of society (who also abjure psychiatry and self-knowledge), this option is unavailable for her.
She has quite literally trapped herself in a prison of her own making.
Doubly ironic in that her fellow married Baen author Esther Friesner edited several volumes of “Chicks in Chainmail”, in which women go into battle swinging swords and carrying babies (but then, Friesner, like Le Guin — also a wife and mother, had the advantage of going to Vassar).
Triply ironic in that her hero RAH had mothers helping conquer the galaxy, plus at least one trans character (Andrew/Elizabeth Libby). Leaving aside the glaring fact that she’s missed the point and parallel of “If This Goes On–” since she’s joined the bad side of that one.
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You may well be right – you very likely are right – but “you don’t hate being a girl; you’re just damaged by patriarchy” is the standard TERF line on trans men and afab non-binary people and needs to be deployed with caution.
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Oh, Sarah. How hard is it to just accept people for who they are?
My wife and I have more or less fallen into the honorary grandparent role for the kids of a friend of ours. One of the kids has very clearly not identified with the gender role assigned to her for as long as I’ve known her.
And you know what? That’s fine. It’s who she is. And if it proves to be fluid–she’s only seven now–that’s also fine.
On a different note, I was in Portugal in January and we stayed at an inn run by an American woman with a Portuguese husband. They had a big picture of Salazar in the front as you came in.
We did not talk politics.
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Yeah, Hoyt and her family still feel Portugal started going downhill when Salazar died. Oh noes, no longer a repressive authoritarian dictatorship with secret police assassinating people! No more ruinous wars against people they colonized!
(Related: his pal Generalissimo Francisco Franco is STILL dead.)
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I’m trying to figure out how this illuminates her “feminazi codes of conduct are ruining cons” piece from a few years ago when she told a story of going into a party room in a con, having the men in the room worried because they were watching porn and then relaxing because “It’s just Sarah. She won’t complain.” And her summation IIRC was those porn actresses were underfed and didn’t appeal to her and she wasn’t bothered by it. So basically, if she can take it, why are you women complaining about sexual harassment? Just man up.
And I just now realized the implication is that if the actresses were of a different body type that may have appealed to her, she would have been bothered by it.
I’ve never met Sarah Hoyt, I hope to never meet her, but I’ve got to say that I actually feel quite sorry for her. She just seems to have little empathy for people who don’t fit into her apparently quite limited worldview. I don’t know how old her kids are, but my two (26 and 21) both have friends who have transitioned or who are non-binary or are otherwise on the LGBTQUIA spectrum. So her kids probably either know or are completely avoiding folks in that community. I hope it’s the former, and that her attitudes haven’t affected them.
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I’m not going to her blog to read nothing. If someone quotes stuff from it, fine, but I don’t need to read bigotry and ignorance of folk who desperately feel they need to dominate, marginalize and suppress others into outcasts to feel secure and special in their identities and reassured they’ll get all the good stuff.
I have trans friends, including one who transitioned very late in life. I have three friends who’ve had trans kids, all happy adults now. My trans nephew is currently transitioning, having followed an Elliot Page sort of path of self-acceptance. It’s great fun getting to see him fully himself. My elderly mom doesn’t get it but the rest of us are celebrating his new name choice. My kid’s main partner is trans non-binary, she’s had non-binary roommates and dated trans folk. She’s active in the drag scene and has friends who are involved with drag since college and work for drag queens. (Drag isn’t TNBI, though they participate, but since the autocrats dragged drag folk into it as part of twisting back around to attack LGB cis people too in their trans moral panic, I bring it up.)
Outside of the ones who are sadly raised on white supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and other autocracies, the young folk under 35 seldom have issues with TNBI people or GNC and gender fluid cis people — they’re all one community together. LGBTQA are a big piece of the population and they believe in equal civil rights. But they don’t control the global corporations run by weirdos or the money or the governments. Certainly not the cops. The older adults who are bewildered less by fluid identities than by not being as repressively powerful and kowtowed to as they used to be (“respect”) are the problem. The science info is freely available to them as well; they just desperately want it to go away and try to squelch it in legal and public policy.
I hate that the change is so slow and blocked by horrible violence, even as I watch it happening. I hate watching repressive laws and legal judgements be jammed into the society because a small percentage find it profitable to exploit bigotry. I hate that I have to watch the same movie over and over again every decade as folk like Hoyt wrap themselves up in bigoted myths even they don’t like or understand. Slowly many of them adjust or let go of those myths. But they do it to fit into a changing overall society. They cling to pocket communities where they’ll be ostracized, even harmed, if they stray from the bigoted autocratic line, but eventually either those communities fall apart or they realize they could actually have a decent life outside them. Or we plunge into an autocratic period for a decade where they have the stranglehold on the government and the kids have to keep protesting and challenging it, losing too many of them along the way.
Hoyt doesn’t have to believe the crap she believes. She doesn’t have to stick with the patriarchy and its binary gender roles. It’s been her choice her whole life. She’s a threat to my kid, my relatives, my friends. She’s just a stone in the road and that’s really what she’s bitter about.
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As almost always, IAWKG. But this sentence “Or we plunge into an autocratic period for a decade where they have the stranglehold on the government and the kids have to keep protesting and challenging it, losing too many of them along the way…” is what keeps me up at night. Given the realities of a life-long chronic condition, if I’m lucky I’ll live another 10 years. And particularly right now the possibility of another Trump presidency scares the fuck out of me.
The state I live in just passed a bill which would require not only elementary and high school students (bad enough!) but college students as well to only use bathrooms designated for the sex they were assigned at birth. To me, this is just cruelty beyond and above the norm. And the Republican party just keeps coming up with more ways to be cruel, to LGBT folk, to women, to various minority groups, to almost everyone.
The cruelty seems to be the sole point, both on the national and local levels, and it sickens me.
Sorry. I may have diverged too far from Cam’s original post, but Kat’s well-written screed touched something deep within. I guess I’m already echoing points made above. Sarah H seems to be a walking exemplar of the current right-wing’s (internalized self-)hate, misogyny and bigotry and I’m saddened almost to tears by it.
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The cruelty is the sole point: what unites the right is their enjoyment of the misery they inflict on people they hate and fear. (Adam Serwer should have put that slogan on a t-shirt.)
Florida governor and complete meathead Ron DeSantis just axed basically the state’s entire (already meager) budget for arts and culture, more than $32 million, on the basis of less than $7400 that went to a pair of popular fringe festivals. This was funding that was not only passed by DeSantis’s pet legislature, all of the arts funding was approved by DeSantis’s hand-picked advisory council. When asked for an explanation for the veto, which took even his allies by surprise, DeSantis’s office just uttered some unspecific anti-trans hate. But the message is clear: “Ostracize everyone we hate, or you’ll be punished.”
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