Month: April 2014

It does not matter if biology claims trans women are males. Biology is not concerned with the violence done to people. Biology is not a shield to do violence to people, and indeed, the admittedly flawed models of colloquial biology often cited against trans women have also been used to justify and make excuses for violence against minority populations in oppressive systems.

Violence is still violence. It is still immoral, still unethical, and defending it is immoral and unethical.

Psychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology, medicine — these sciences have all proven that calling a trans woman a man is violence.

So it doesn’t matter if biology says male when biology, itself, is being violent, according to other sciences.

Because that violence is still violence.

Violence is not limited to broken bones and bruised flesh and physical damage visible to the seeing (an ableist concept itself, so compounding the violence there).

It is words. Ask those fleeing persecution, read history, talk to survivors of child abuse and domestic violence and prison violence.

Words are just as physically damaging – and according to many measures more so, since the brain treats those words no differently than it treats the body blows.

It sends the chemicals out to the flesh and the organs and it sears synapses and it lasts long after the bruises and the broken bones have mended.

Calling trans women men is violence. It has physical, measurable consequence, and it endures and we know that this applies even when it is strangers.

The science establishes it.

This is fact. Not opinion.

Calling a trans woman a man is an act of violence, an assault, and those who do so are being violent, are being immoral, are being unethical.

Silence in the face of violence is complicity, especially when that violence is social. Defense of calling a trans woman a man is defending violence.

Liking it, re blogging it without calling it out, these are forms of complicity.

If you can tolerate violence against a woman, what sort of a person does this make you? What sorts of lessons are you teaching?

Name it what it is. Don’t dress it up, don’t reduce it, it is violence. It is unethical. It is immoral.

Shame those who do it, teach them it is wrong.

Because not doing so means you are complicit, means you are supporting, means you are not trying to stop violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even straight people.

It means you are not trying to stop violence against people of color, against immigrants, against the disabled, against the poor.

It means you are standing by watching as someone does violence to another person.

And that is immoral, unethical, and shameful.