They're different concepts, even if it's very easy to cross them over in a Venn Diagram. In a genocidal program, you'd use both techniques, so I am not sure that the difference really matters, since it's the holistic effort that matters. Removing protections is the same thing as removing supports. Time with a doctor is the same governmental service as time with a police investigator, even though we tend to sort "vs hostile people" as a different category as "vs a hostile environment". The environment can hurt you just as much as people can hurt you, but we think of them differently.
They aren't different, and we ought push back against the impulse to think of them differently though, as I keep noting. The government is adopting policy designed to restrict our ability to be because they wish us not to exist. That is genocide. It is just that simple. People shy away from the direct language which describes accurately what is happening because it is painful to think about a Western liberal democracy doing such a thing, but they have and they are. Adopting weak language to spare yourself the pain of having to think about the depths of the depravity is deeply disturbing to me. As George Carlin noted, the purpose of weak language is to euphemize away our suffering so you can go about your day foot loose and fancy free as we continue to get our faces stomped into the pavement. Please do not forget about us. We are still here. The government is still trying to wipe us out.
As Schlau points out, similar treatments are still being provided when it's other conditions being presented. "Friendly" doctors will still exist, but a lot is being asked of them.
you can just call me sophie
Are trans people existing actually a social movement though? Yes, that's the genocide argument, the seeking to kill a social people, but are trans people actually created by a social construct? Like a culture, or a religion, or an education. I'm going to find the arguments I have offline much more difficult if the movement creates the people, rather than liberates the people who have already always been there*. That's just my observation from the problem population. Or whatever we are by birth over in that yonder CRT thread.
*But it'd be good to know if that's the currently accepted lens.
We're both. My transness is of course an innate component of who I am; I knew I was a girl long before I had any idea what transgender was. However, because of the nature of society, we are pushed out of "us" and constituted as a coherent body defined by its otherness. We are made into a social people because cis society defined us as such, and because our otherness drives us to seek one another for safety and companionship when nobody else would give us the time of day. And finally, because a social body, so constituted, is a more effective tool for political recognition and advocacy than as disconnected individuals.
In this sense we are no different than any other "social people." There is nothing intrinsically, essentially, unifying in gay, lesbian, bi, trans, intersex, asexual, pan, or poly people. And yet the ontologies of our patriarchal society classify our otherness as one queer people, which we in turn make our own. In much the same way that there is nothing inherently, physiologically, or even genetically, "one" in the various strands of the Jewish diaspora, and yet they are constituted by their otherness into a coherent people, a national identity. Or how Wampanoag, Cherokee, Seminole, Tlingit, Apache, and Ohlone are disparate peoples separated by language, geography, culture, and history, and yet are constituted by European society, and in turn constitute themselves as one single nation of nations, united in common struggle. Same with Pan-Africanism. Same with feminism. etc.
Right? If it's a choice, the argument made, then, particularly children, can be "convinced to be trans." So it wouldn't be sucking it up in that outlook, it would never have been being trans in the first place. Which was the last point as well. A situation where people would argue one never was in the first place either. If that makes sense?
This is literally what they believe. They think we are a "social contagion," i.e. we are delusional people who are deceiving impressionable children into unnecessarily mutilating their bodies (and also reducing our white birthing stock). It ties back into their historical narrative that in the past we were a moral nation, which has declined into degeneracy in the time since, diluted by atheism, by communism, by the blacks, the arabs, and the queers, and a great realignment (read: cleansing) is necessary to return us to our historical birthright.
Sound familiar?
