While it is true that activists piss on each other all the time, the modern LGBT movement has pissed on trans women from the very beginning. My point is that the LGBT movement was primarily started by NYC trans women (mainly black & Latino women at that) in order to fight against people murdering them day in/day out and somehow they found themselves driven out of their own movement, left behind while cisgender gay men commandeered their movement in order to break down the one barrier than prevented them from assimilation: same-sex marriage. It's no secret that the LGB community has left the T out of the acronym for decades, spitting on them and leaving them to the wolves while their movement was used to further their own cause.
Although there has been a popular resurgence of trans liberation in the last three or so years, my big fear is that since marriage equality has been achieved in America, the LGBT movement will die down and once again leave behind those who started it in the first place.
dude though
the problem here is that transgender advocates can be complete douchebags themselves. not always but they have a tendency to outperform a lot of other activists in this regard
if you think about it transgender people are really quite different from lgb. lgb are basicaly attracted to a kind of person that isnt the opposite sex. being transgender is an entire identity mismatch. i mean a huge difference is that many transgender people recieve treatment for there problem but lgb doesnt, outside of therapy, because its not actually hurting them from the inside (of course outside of them fighting against the outside world)
theres also what the public sees. the lgb is much easier to swallow because the idea of simply wanting to be with who you love without people destroying your life is something that is fairly easy for most people to understand. gender dysphoria is a completely different beast - its a feeling that most people can never experience because they simply arent transgender. this means that to the public, transgender people are more unusual and difficult to understand - roadblocks for activism.
thus, lgb is already less likely to really accept t to beging with because t is fundementally quite different than lgb. of course that doesnt mean that they dont deserve the rights they need but their issues are quite a different ballgame
this means that much of the lgb is seperate from the T in terms of activism simply because they have different problems. of course that doesnt excuse lgb's anti-T behaviour but thats what happens when everyone is racing to try to get their rights at the same time
however the t themselves arent entirely innocent. the t advocates against claiming that being transgender its disorder, instead prefering to call it "gender dysphoria". while this seems small its odd that anyone who goes to get treament or even get major surgery to be suffering from anything but a disorder. the disorder is that their brain doesnt match their body and you fix that by fixing the body. if anything "gender dysphoria" is a symptom, not a dx.
this is completely pointless, serves only a way to feel more comfortable with the title and not scientific purpose from everything ive seen and actually ends up harming other people
in addition as i pointed out earlier, the t tries to avoid links to other identity disorders, especially biid, presumably because "there too crazy". while i get saying that something like that is crazy, the same thing is said to transgender people by transphobes. for example the transgedder document i linked above featured many arguments that are also made against transgender people by transphobes, while the other post is attempted dissociation. this, along with other factors, has gotten out of control to the point where biid has not even made it into the dsm-v despite several unis studying it while gid is renamed "gender dysphoria" and is avoiding any reference to "disorder". a major problem with biid as well is that patiente will do whatever it takes to get rid of that limb or whatever and many die in the process - blocking off these individuals access to dx could lead to their deaths.
some scientists studying biid think there may truly be a connection - if that makes transgender people related to "freaks", so what, we cant change reality. it is what it is. so if it turns out they work on a similar mechanism, all that destructive attitude would be for nothing and it would just hurt people who have a serious issue. maybe you should try removing the "freak" label from biid patients yourself and maybe we can have the world understand our issues together. but the T is usually not interested
obviously the issue here is that people cant get dx'd they cant get the help they need. if they have some sort of episode due to there disorder there basically fucked, because there probably going to be mis-dx'd with schizophrenia or bpd and possible make the problem worse
now im going to come completely out and say it - i have a form of biid and ive been working with said scientists to try to reverse this trend through promoting research, which is why i know so much about this. seriously research is so scant that they only have data on one kind of the disorder. but seeing posts like i linked on forums, blogs, ect is worrisome. now what strikes me as odd is this - why would these people want to deny something that scientists are investigating? dysphoria in your penis and dysphoria/dysmorphia in your leg or eyes arent exactly completely different. what purpose does it serve to get in the way of pure science that may help us recieve treatment?
this leads to me to my next point, some transgender activists misrepresent the science status of the T or they completely lie about it. i am personally not too familiar with this because i am reading a handful of articles on my shit and there are literally thousands of articles on the T, so i cant keep up with everything. however a friend of mine who has a bachelors in psychology points out that there is still dispute within a respectably large following on whether being transgender is completely neurological. this is often misrepresented by saying that transgender people are "born that way", and people saying that those who dont agree are undermining transgender people but this isnt really a fair way to look at it. it is, for example, entirely possible that transgedner people are cause not just by neurological differences, but a "trigger" that sets it off, as well as positive experiences with the desired form. this is the current theory for biid, and if they are similar this may be a more similar case.
now you may think, "well that gives us justification to deny treatment".
except science has shown very clearly that transitioning is the only treatment that seems to do anything to help the patient. forcing a transsexual through therapy would be like giving antibiotics for the flu - its not going to do anything but make the situation worse. just because some idiot wants to believe otherwise doesn't mean that it will fit their will. not to mention that a likely trigger is someone of the opposite sex - this means that transgedner people will very quickly be exposed to that trigger in most situations and develop around it earlier, thus making a time of onset difficult to pinpoint, effectively making it "inborn". so why dispute the possibility?
this is not to mention how some Ts act around people who are cisgender. i have mild autism and it makes it difficult sometimes to get pronouns gender or name right, it happens a lot. yes im definitely not transgender but im also trying my best to respect you, it takes longer and i dont deserve to get screamed at for a mistake that happens to a lot of people, including cisgender people. i understand that being transgender is difficult but this stuff really undermines everything they have ever worked for
this further drives t into the ground. I really dont understand why they continue to allow this sort of stuff, i know its not like, a single leader or anything but its weird to see this behaviour go on like this. of course not all transgender people are like this, there are some amazing transgender people out there, but the people who are shitholes are completely destroying that movement from the ground up
its very hypocritical to cry about others kciking sand in your face and then kick sand in others. not you specifically but the trans community in general. i honestly believe that working together on these issues will help both science and social, but this whiny petty bullshit needs to stop
maybe im looking through a weirdly tinted lens here because of my own issues but this is pretty confusing.
ultimately the t does have to address these issues because lgb, the public, the government ect. will have literally 0 interest in helping people who act like complete fucking idiots and treat others like shit. the lgb does not have this problem at the scale i see it at, there needs to be some regulation.
on lgbt losing momentum, it will of course lose momentum, this is probably one of the most well know of lgbt issues, however the movement will likely still have momentum for the lgb at least because of issues with firing lgbt employees
thanks for the interesting talking points btw kinda weird how i got here from gay marriage but whatev, and sorry if this is a mouthful, ive smoked a bit