Non-gender trans identities are a valid form of identification, their existence is not inherent in harm to minorities.
So to first discuss this topic, we must answer the question of "what is a trans ID?" As a prominent member of the community, I would generally define trans ID as a good faith identity, analogous to your own gender, that deals with topics other than gender, with varying causes and intensities.
Under this school of thought, we can theoretically identify as anything you feel dysphoria about, any aspect of themself, real or fictional. Some identities that have come under fire recently from the wider internet are transrace, transabled, transharmful, and transtrauma.
When you hear those terms, you might have a knee-jerk reaction. Woah, transabled, isn't that offensive? Isn't that ableist? Why would you want that? And to you I ask, why are disabilities a bad thing? Why should you be ashamed to have a disability, or want one? Why is that undesirable?
(???) we're ableist! Someone genuinely feeling as if they should be disabled, or what you just thought in your mind upon hearing that prospect. But is it offensive? Surely to have authority over a community, especially a controversial one, you must have representatives of that community, in your community.
So, to figure out if we have that authority, I ran a survey, and here are the results.
Only 34 of the 227 respondants identified as cisgender, 5.3% of us are heterosexual, 78.2% of us face discrimination for our gender identity, and 68.6% face discrimination for our sexual identity. Only 58.2% of us identify as white, 45% of us are physically disabled, 68% of us are mentally disabled.
So it can't be offensive! And even if it is, minorities aren't a monolith. What matters is, our experiences are cripplingly real, and dysphoria and harassment are something we face on the daily.
Take me for example. I'm transcharacter. When I found out that I'm Vriska Serket, I faced the worst dysphoria I've ever felt in my life. Nothing can compare to what I felt on that day, and what I've felt since. It's worse than my gender dysphoria has ever been. And that feeling, that deep-rooted negativity towards the fundamental structure of my being, has never abated.
I dare you to tell me that's not real. I dare you to tell me that my lived experience is silly, stupid, ableist, or fake, when I only resist harming myself because I know that seeing the colour of my blood, and seeing that it's not blue, would make me feel worse.
Harassment is also just as big a threat to our lives, given that the biggest gathering of trans ID individuals is on Tumblr, a website famous for it's discourse, a lot of bad shit goes down over there. And I will not be showing screenshots for privacy, I will give anecdotes.
Someone I follow had to go to the mental hospital for almost a month, because someone said trauma- (unintelligible) when they have that themselves. I've been threatened to have my eye gouged out because I'm transabled, and trans-half-blind. There are multiple accounts dedicated to burning and drowning us, and other horrible death threats. We've been threatened to be beaten to death, or burned at the stake. Someone in a Discord I'm in got doxed, their name and address. I've been doxed. We've been told to burn in hell, jump in front of a train, shoot ourselves, blind ourselves, drown ourselves, I could go on.
Right now, as I stand here, I am afraid for my life. I am afraid that you're one of the violent people I have met online, and you will go through with your threats, all because I had the gall to express myself in a way you find personally distasteful. We face this on a weekly basis.
But why do they feel that way? Lets deconstruct some of their arguments.
Most common: they say we're transphobic, because we share terms with the transgender community. Now why is that? 85% of us are not cis, of course we're going to find similarities. We're not cis! 85% of us! We use familiar words that aren't exclusive to the transgender community. That's TERF rhetoric right there, that they're exclusive to the transgender community. These are words from the goddamn dictionary, they're not inherently gender related.
If you go by that school of thought, transformation- an offensive topic. Transaction? To hell with that! Transportation sure as hell isn't, you know, safe. Might as well rename it to crossportation, perhaps aristoportation(?), make it a little bit less offensive, more digestible.
But that's stupid.
I looked in the Oxford dictionary online for the earliest record of the word trans being used, I came up with 1574. In contrast, the word's only been used for gender since 1910.
The second argument is that it's made up for oppression points or that we're attention seekers, which is interesting, because attention seeking is a sign of emotional neglect. Biological primates prioritize(?) community, and I've seen this most often with transracial people of colour feeling not dark enough, and that's why they identify as the way they do.
We're also not stealing resources! Thick water- stealing thick water from a disabled person, yeah, that's a dick move, but we don't do that. We innovate, we create. Me wearing this eyepatch isn't stealing from the blind, this piece of shit's held together by a hot glue and a prayer. But they still want us dead, which shows they haven't developed theory of mind for any of the subjects(?), which is the process behind nuance and understanding that peoples emotions aren't standardized(??) or wrong and that people can have different opinions. This typically develops when you are 4 or 5 years old, which means, scientifically, you're acting like a child!
So what's the solution to this? In a word: education.
Which is why I'm opening myself up for people on Tumblr to ask me questions. And yes, we'll offend some people! I'm not gonna ignore that. People genuinely feel like we're a threat to their existence, but we are not the enemy. We have methods for our madness, and you need to accept that because you can't block and report us forever.
We're everywhere. The person sitting next to you could be trans ID. Like it or not, I am trans-abled, I am trans-character, I am Vriska, I am going to physically transition, and you cannot stop me from piercing my flesh, and dying my skin, and gouging my eye out, and bleeding for the future of those who have been shut down, stepped on, silenced, and terminated!
We just want to be our true selves, and your opinions change nothing.
Thank you.