WHERE TRANS RIGHTS ARE ABOUT SIMPLE RESPECT.

Yesterday, I had cause to block somebody on Quora, who was making comments that were basically nonsense, claiming that trans people don’t have the right to tell people what to call them. Okay, you can’t control what other people say about you, but all you can really do is hope that they will respect what you tell them.

If you knew somebody at school, for instance, who transitioned in adulthood, and you didn’t know that they transitioned, you may refer to them by the name you knew them by, and if they say, “I used to be. I’m another name now,” you should respect them. After all, it’s no different to a woman who takes her husband’s surname or a woman who divorces and reverts to her birth surname. But if somebody you don’t know introduces themselves by a name, but their voice is deep, and you suspect that they’re trans, you don’t have the right, if they tell you that they’re a woman, to tell them that they’re a man.

I gave the analogy, when they mentioned a Christian, that say a fit, healthy 20-year-old Jehovah’s Witness is brought to hospital after being violently assaulted and has internal bleeding, a doctor may be mystified as to why they are declining a potentially lifesaving operation because they won’t have blood products, but it’s not the doctor’s right or role to convince them otherwise. They then replied that a conversation is not the same as an operation. Well, of course, but what I was trying to say is that just like a doctor may be mystified as to why a fit, healthy 20-year-old Jehovah’s Witness is unwilling to have that surgery, a person who meets a trans person for the first time may be mystified as to why they identify as trans or of the opposite sex, it’s not their place to contradict them to their face. And nor do they have the right to use violence or microaggressions towards them. After all, referring to a trans person by the sex they were assigned at birth or the sex that you believe them to be is a microaggression.

You are NOT feeding a delusion by referring to them that way. If a person tells you that they’re a prince and they drive a Maserati, but they’re not, and they don’t, that’s a delusion; a trans person is NOT living a delusion. You may be surprised if you, for instance, went to school with a person who was presumed male at birth and who captained the school rugby team, and was stereotypically male, who turned out to be trans, but for people who knew a trans person before they transitioned, who lived authentically, you would be least likely to be surprised. After all, I went to school with a guy who was gay, and when he came out, nobody was surprised as he had been pretty much his authentic self at school. But it must be remembered that a feminine gay man is NOT the same as a transwoman. And let’s also not forget that some gay men had girlfriends before they came out, and they admitted that they had to stop kidding themselves into believing that they could change from being gay. And there are trans people whose only delusion was that they were kidding themselves into believing that they could live inauthentically!

So respect trans people. After all, they might come out to you because they trust you.