I was vocal and terrified about climate change in the 90s (although I didn't do a whole lot). I was super active in the anti war stuff during the war on terror. I said repeatedly that Iraq had no WMDs and that Afghanistan wouldn't go well. I was sorta active during Occupy. I was telling everyone not to buy crypto years ago. And I've been very COVID outspoken from day one.
This post is not to brag about how based I am. I was very slow to get on the correct side of trans issues, and I've said/done enough borderline racist and misogynistic shit. I have enough cringe memories of me being a lib. I've also just been really lazy and selfish.
Anyhow, I had hoped that the right would be so wrong, so badly, that people would wake up and warm to our side. I used to actually do organised debates with different groups at uni. I even sent a few a FB message years after Iraq went to shit (ya I'm petty). None have been like "oh fuck, you were so right want the WMDs". When I'm battling friends over COVID issues or the newest bullshit trans conspiracy theory, THEY FUCKING KNOW I was right about crypto and Elon Musk. It's like, all the Ls that the right had taken are in the memory hole and we're onto the next bullshit idea. I'm still the lone crank that's warning about war with Russia and China and telling everyone to mask when my mates were smoking weed through every horrible murderous mistake the West made.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm whinging for my own sake. I get that the right is very well funded, and that is no individual's fault. I'm just very aware that people around me find me to be a tedious crank, but they're all fucking liberals who've been eating out of the trashcan of ideology their whole lives.
As a trans woman, i'm actually glad when people are honest about this. Back when i was younger and in hardcore denial mode, i've said some really vile transphobic things myself, it's sadly normal in a society that is structurally exterminating us. Western society is built to break and brainwash anybody who falls outside of cisnormativity to this day, legal and healthcare systems are actively set up to torture us, ultra-transphobic shlock like Silence of the Lambs and Psycho that is honestly on par with nazi propaganda films like Jud Süß in how viciously and completely it demonizes its subjects is regarded as classic kino to this day, it's not surprising at all that people had to work through a ton of brainworks during the last years and that many still aren't fully there.
Edit: What i'm getting at is, i vastly prefer that honesty over the liberal hypocrisy of painting themselves as those big LGBT rights advocates when their support is still worth fucking nothing when push comes to shove.
We want people to learn and change and recognize when they were shitty in the past. You don't want to be too credulous, but you also want there to be a path where people can do better and their past shortcomings aren't held against them in perpetuity.
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I have to hard disagree here and i'd also like to mention (without accusing you of anything, ofc) that transphobes routinely use "the killer isn't actually trans, it says so right in the film" as an excuse to shield these films from accusations of transphobia and to engage with the harmful, actively damaging concepts they've inject into the public subconscious over the decades. I see Psycho as clearly transphobic even if we view Bates as a cismale crossdresser. I don't share that view, we almost exclusively see the character from the perspective of an outside observer, narrated in a way that is oblivious to authentic trans experiences and it's impossible to judge against that background if the story is about a man wearing drag or about an egg confining her true self to crossdressing episodes that she can seperate from her everyday male gender performance to maintain a self image compatible with Amerikan mid-century society. But that is irrelevant to the films transphobia. What makes Psycho so dangerously transphobic is how it deals with the validity of trans identities: Having a psychiatrist barge in at the end and declare that the murderer was "not a REAL transsexual" without ever having talked to Bates is purest transmedicalism and standard for films centered around killers violating gender norms. You see the exact same "not a REAL transsexual" expert statement in Silence of the Lambs and in Dressed to Kill (i think the Cormoran novels by J.K. Rowling do the same with their killers, but i'll never read anything of that madwoman's drivel again). And it is the very core of these works' transphobia to deny the identity of the killers. I don't care if a film portrays a trans woman as a serial killer if she's an authentic portrayal of a heckin valid trans girl doing trans things, except she just happens to have a basement full of terf meat she serves as a caterer at Republican party conventions. Honestly, i'd watch the shit out of that if it was narrated from a trans perspective. Being accepted means we do not need to be exempted from being the villains in movies, everybody loves a good villain. No, what makes me view these films as the prime example of trans-exterminatory propaganda is that we get gender-nonconforming killers and they are always framed as being "not actually trans" because to the transphobe, trans people aren't real. The killers are therefore misgendered and deadnamed throughout the film to the point that we do not even get to learn their chosen names, or get to know anything about their gender identity from their own perspective. We only see through the eyes of Buffalo Deadname when she has her nightvision goggles on and tries to murder Agent Starling or when she threatens to use the hose again. We only see through the eyes of Bates when Bates is using the peepholes and stabbing the victim. Their own perspectives are used exclusively for vojeuristic violence against cis women. Anything else about their entire existence is reduced to the outside perspective, which is a cissie imagination of what it's like when somebody "is faking transness". How can anything be more transphobic than that?
I am so, so down for trans sweney todd.
I didn't view Silence as transphobic, not because the movie isn't transphobic, but because i had so little concept of transgender identities the last time i saw it that i never made the connection until you brought it up. It seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time i was just too ignorant to even realize that Buffalo Bill was supposed to slander a whole class of people.
I didn't notice it back then, either, but i'm fairly sure that seeing movies like that as a kid played at least some part in my repressing my transness for decades.
¿Por qué no los dos? Would the audience have been as unsettled, or seen the killer as quite so transgressive, if the Mother character had instead been a Father? Even if the film isn't explicitly anti–trans, it still relies on transphobia brought to the film by the audience for at least some of its shock value.
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