My target audience are people "on the fence" of becoming transphobic, and people who cause harm to the trans community without knowing it by spreading misinformation (that they don't know is misinformation) and disrespecting trans people overall.
Right now, I just want a list of transphobic claims to debunk, and ideally sources to aid in debunking them.
While I won't be going through the list point-for-point in the video essay, I intend to slot them into relevant sections that I've already planned out.
Reliable experts to research for reference would also be very helpful.
My goal is to be as non-hostile as possible--extending the courtesy of respect, in the hopes that some of them will reciprocate that respect.
I don't expect civility from the entire group, but every new ally counts.
For the claim that being trans is a fad or something new or whatever, I think one of the best sources to debunk this is the poems of Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna, who lived around ~2300 BCE in the Akkadian Empire. She was the daughter of the world's first emperor, Sargon the Great of Akkad and appointed High Priestess. She is the first non-anonymous author in the entire historical record. Her poems explicitly mention and describe people who transition between genders and occupy genders that are neither male nor female, and also take up roles inside the cult of Inana (or Inanna) [Sumerian] / Ishtar [Akkadian], goddess of sexuality, love, war, and political power, and divine androgyne. In addition, she is even given the power of transitioning someone's gender in what was called the Head Overturning Rite. The poems were so influential they exalted Inanna above all the other gods and they were taught in scribal schools for around a millenia after her death, which is the reason we still have them, because we dug up the course work of scribes who lived thousands of years ago. These quotes come from Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna by Betty De Shong Meador, which is available on Anna's Archive.
In the myth of Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, the god of wisdom and sweet waters, Enki, creates from the dirt under his fingernails two ‘sexless’ creatures to rescue Inanna, the galaturra and the kurgarra.
The galaturra and kurgarra eventually became temple personel in other texts. From the poem Inanna and Ebih,
summon a kurgarra for holy office / bestow the sacred implements / hallowed mace and dagger / summon a gala, singer of lamentation / dispense the tools of office / kettle drum and hand drum / summon holy attendants / for ritual head-overturning / priest to become woman / priestess to become man”
The pili-pili and the kurgarra are effectively described as transitioning from one gender to another, via Inanna. From the poem Lady of Largest Heart,
Inanna / dressing a maiden / embraces with full heart / the young girl's handsome bearing
the maid a woman evilly spurned / taunted to her face / sways beneath the wrath / thrown on her everywhere / her only path a wanderer / in dim and lonely streets / her only rest a narrow spot / in the jostling market place / where from a nearby window / a mother holds a child / and stares
this dreadful state / the Lady would undo / take this scourge / from her burdened flesh
over the maiden's head / she makes a sign of prayer / hands then folded at her nose / she declares her manly-woman
in sacred rite / she takes the broach / which pins a woman’s robe / breaks the needle, silver thin / consecrates the maidens heart as male / gives her a mace / for this one dear to her / she shifts a god’s curse / a blight reversed / out of nothing shapes / what has never been / her sharp wit / splits the door / where cleverness resides / and there reveals / what lives inside
the unafraid / who shun her outstretched net / will slip and snag in its fine-eye mesh
a man / one who spurned her / she call by name / makes him join / woman / breaks his mace / gives to him the broach / which pins a woman's robe
these two SHE changed / renamed / reed-marsh woman reed-marsh man / ordained sacred attendants / of ectasy and trance / the head-overturned pili-pili / the chief hero kurgarra / enter estatic tranceLater on in the poem as Enheduanna is listing the powers, or me (pronounced 'may'), of Inanna, she very explicitly states,
to turn man into woman / woman into man / are yours Inanna
I'm obviously biased, but I feel like someone would have to do some pretty intense mental gymnastics to read all this and deny that the segment of humanity that today we in the West call "transgender" did not exist at least this far back and weren't the people Enheduanna is mentioning. Though our contemporay terms don't really work within this context, the kurgarra and gala could be very broadly described as transfem, and the pili-pili could be very broadly described as transmasc. The gala would sing in a dialect of Sumerian meant to render speech of female gods, and some also adopted feminine names.
There's dozens upon dozens of other instances of gender diversity across history and cultures if you go looking for it. Indigenous American cultures have a ton of different expressions of this, today broadly collected under the term two-spirit. In ancient Rome and Anatolia, there were the Galli priests of Cybele. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head, but there's an almost endless rabbit hole of examples, plus untold numbers that don't survive in the historical record.
For anything regarding the (usually extremely concern-trolly) issue of women's sports, this production has a lot of good resources.
https://www.tested-podcast.com/
Regret/dissatisfaction rate for gender affirming surgeries is close to 1%.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8099405/
This figure is much lower than the same metric for other surgeries.
https://theconversation.com/transgender-regret-research-challenges-narratives-about-gender-affirming-surgeries-220642 (contains several links to journal articles)
I've been following this research document for awhile as I watched nominal.naomi's videos
https://www.masterdoc.info/
and
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WZBpR9Ll3lNi7-ig8FvB2grMlhsmRZNa34cROGK2rEE
I wrote an essay drawing lines between modern christofascism, the Salem witch trials, and trans folks for a commie org last year. I'd be happy to proofread, edit, and offer suggestions!
And since you said it's a video, if you want any background music, you'd be welcome to use anything by my band - we do instrumental dark drone/doom stuff so might not be what the situation calls for, but offer is on the table!
Fantastic!! Can I actually get a link to your music to listen to while writing? It's unlikely to end up a central theme, but I do intend to have the fact that I used to be a genetics and genomics major back when I could afford college be a sort of "beat drop" at the relevant moment.
Before I deleted my Xitter account back in 2023, I ended up being blocked by a lot of transphobes after dropping my college transcript (doxxable info censored, of course) in response to being told that I "don't understand basic biology."
I'm hoping to get in contact with my professor from back when I was in college, Michael Turelli, to invite him to interview for the video, but he's likely busy.
After listening to a few different songs, I don't think they'd fit the tone of the video essay, BUT they'd work very well for a fiction series I've been hyperfixated on that I've been wanting to animate. For example, "Hastur" would work really well for a certain really tragic scene from book 1 I have in mind (I won't specify because it's a spoiler if you ever intend to read the series yourself).
OOH!! I just found "Crawling Chaos," that'd work perfectly for the battle early in book 1 against a hive mind leech monster summoned by a blood cult.