I've ended up in a few conversations recently where someone has basically said to me "I don't mind trans people I just don't get it." My response is along the line of "the body fucks up and has birth defects all the time, some people are born with a cleft lip or an extra finger or shrunken limb and some people are born with the wrong genitals and hormones. Theres no real difference and you certainly would support a blind person getting their eyes fixed so of course you should support transpeople getting their genitals fixed." So far for most of the people I've talked too this has been like a light bulb going on.
However I don't currently have any irl trans friends to bounce this off of and I want to make sure I'm not being an idiot and framing it in an offensive way or missing something I should really be adding to the conversation.
I've tried to been real careful to avoid this, basically if she says she's a woman she's a woman no matter what ended up between her legs. How she chooses to deal the "problem" has no bearing on who/what she is .
Yeah, but if she's a woman with a penis and perfectly fine with that, you're still framing her genitals as a birth defect, which is incredibly insulting and just plain wrong. The assumption of "being born in the wrong body" on its own automatically leads to the whole nine yards of transmedicalist bs because on its own, it automatically operates within a coercive, inherently violent gender binary. Transmedicalism is a dead end, you're shortcutting the conversation that actually needs to happen, which is that gender identity is completely independent of both biology and gender as a social construct and that people should have autonomy over their own bodies that is not dictated by a medical establishment. There is no actual acceptance of trans people until that happens, you're just shifting our opression from outright rejection to pathologization, gatekeeping and belittlement, and as somebody who has had to and still has to endure a massively transmedicalist healthcare and legal system, i can absolutely assure you that this is still coercive, transphobic and inhumane.
It's honestly worrying how many people itt are totally incapable of critically engaging with and refuting inherently transmedicalist ideas. It doesn't really surprise me, the trans inclusivity of hexbear has very clear limits that you see every time the subject goes beyond the most liberal, harmless, status quo affirming discussion of gender, but still, i hadn't assumed it's this bad.