from Wikipedia’s entry on Stockholm syndrome:
“In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.”
too often as trans people we mistake a lack of abuse, generally a lack of abuse towards one’s own self, for kindness. the problem, of course, is that a lack of abuse is not kindness, even by the most passive-aggressive measure, and that different people are often in fact treated radically differently. just because Person A felt that there was a lack of abuse in their interactions doesn’t mean that Person B felt an identical lack of abuse in a wholly different situation. what then happens is that when Person B raises their concerns about the problematic (doctor, support group, whatever) then Person A defends the (doctor, support group, whatever) through the lens of solely their experiences rather than listening to the merits of Person B’s complaint or considering that Person B is not the same person they are and may be being treated differently because of various characteristics that have little to nothing to do with their worth as a person.
and that sounded way more academic than i really want to, but the problem is that Person A unwittingly has considered dodging the bullet from the oppressive institution as a sign that the institution is not oppressive and thus furthers the oppression in silencing Person B or claiming that they’re “bitter and angry” or some similar dismissive language designed to paint Person B and not the oppressive institution as the problem. well, at least i hope it’s unwittingly, if someone is knowingly defending an oppressive institution then chances are they’ve already made their deal with the proverbial devil. by engaging in silencing Person B unwittingly (or because they’re too scared to challenge the oppressive institution), person A is embodying the idea of Stockholm syndrome, even if it’s a little less dramatic than a bank robbery and gentleman thief who walks around singing “Killing Me Softly.” (yes, that’s actually what one of the Kreditbanken robbers sang. his sentence was overturned on appeal…)
what’s the cause of this? well, i think it’s usually fear. as i mentioned in my post about transfundamentalism, it can be hard to stand up to a zealous support group if they approve of you enough to let you be there, and i can tell you firsthand how hard it is to stand up to a doctor’s bad behavior if that person is your lifeline for getting hormones. fortunately, the one time i did stand up to such a doctor, who summarily told me i wasn’t going to be getting hormones from him anymore, i had the (fantastic, wonderful) Mazzoni Center right across the bridge. the Mazzoni Center is a fine example of an institution that works as hard as it can to not be oppressive and to center the needs of all queer people, not just some queer people. i suspect it’s just the same with the support group structure in places where the support group holds a lot of social power and keeps all their information close to the vest. i have no clue since despite my being decently accepted by the outside world, no support group has ever let me in, so i’m taking a stab at why people are so fearful. i don’t think Person A really intends to be a tool of the oppressive institution, because i think Person A just doesn’t actually see the nature of the oppression or alternately believes that they have to accept that some trans people are disposable because they’ve been told they have to, not because they actually think that.
erica admits her personal investment herein: i confess that i am frustrated because almost all of the local “trans community”, which i would like to participate and be more active in, uses the support group as its hub, and i don’t really see any way that i’m not going to get shouted out of there since i’m, like, 3 for 3 with that happening and at no time did i start the shouting or even raise my voice. i’m sorry, getting called “it” and told how bog-ugly you are by a facilitator is not okay, and i don’t give a shit what the excuse is supposed to be, because there isn’t a valid one. an attempt to open dialogue with the support group in question’s leaders has failed, since i could supposedly “contact them through Facebook”…i was given three names, two of which didn’t come up with any results when searched and one person with a public Facebook profile never answered a message asking if we could talk about how to make the group more inclusive. conveniently, this woman is the one who called me “it” and went on for two minutes about how ugly i am after i asked her politely to stop. hilariously, the only way i can get called “she” is to show up in boy drag…so this institution’s not broken again how? end personal investment.
let’s talk about how all the community can benefit, though, since the rest of y’all are all way more important than i am really, because if we’re whole maybe behaviors like these will go away. we have become conditioned to accept being treated worse because we are trans people, especially trans women, and we need to stop accepting being treated poorly because of what and who we are. we can do better than this and we ARE better than this, but we have to stand up to our potential first. part of that is questioning why othering and exclusionary behavior has been accepted as okay…but the problem here is that the people being kept out and kept silent can’t be the ones to question that because we’re being ignored and we will be ignored by people who cling like a tree sloth to the idea that they have some right to decide who is and is not “trans enough” in the name of keeping the trans community as monolithic as humanly possible rather than recognizing that we come in all shapes, sorts, colors, and sizes. these people who do actively oppress need to hear it from the people they believe will never question them. if your doctor treats trans men but not trans women, ask why. if your support group is not welcoming to all trans people, not just some trans people who may well be the majority of trans people, ask why.
it’s time, my Stockholmies, to rise up, to start asking questions, to start questioning the uncomfortable things, and to quit believing that we should accept “not being abused” as good enough because we’re trans. we deserve fairness, inclusion, and dignity…you deserve better, i deserve better, and we all deserve better.
There is way too much of that shit going on by ‘successful (read: conventionally attractive by cis standards, of typical cis morphology, typically androphillic, and post-operative) transitioners.’
I didn’t think this would be a thing, that one of the biggest opponents to the whole community standing on its hind legs and fighting for Exogenous Endocrine Intervention on an on-demand basis would be other trans people.
oh, i’ve known it was a thing for a very, very long time. the trick was that i always had an end run around it so i’d be able to not have to deal with the HBSers/True Transsexuals. i just got to a point not too long ago where my safe local source for hormones closed up shop and i needed to find a new doctor, which puts you at the mercy of the support group locally, as they do not share their information at all with outsiders. i haven’t had run-ins with the “Successful transitioners” as you put it (at least in the support group milieu…they seem to be all over online, though) but i imagine they’d be as hard to deal with. i always thought those people ran as far and as fast as they could away from the trans community once they had whatever they wanted; i know that it’s what we were encouraged to do back in the day, and i often wonder how much of that bad wisdom lives on.
as for your second paragraph, the problem is that whole transfundamentalism thing…people really believe they have it in the best interest of “the community” to decide who is and is not good enough and some people really stick to that shit like there’s no tomorrow because they’re afraid their meaning is somehow diminished if someone they don’t like is allowed to be trans. i don’t expect to be friends with someone who thinks you can’t be butch and/or disabled and trans…i don’t. but they need to get out of the way and stop policing who is and isn’t allowed out of some fictitious concern for “purity” as they’ve gotten to the point where they’re obstructing the lives of real people out of their zealotry for “purity.”
This is what I call top down oppression, and it really started with feminists, and filtered down as trans visibility became more “real”. It’s like an “oppression food chain” of sorts. Cisgender people at the top oppressing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people; then gay and lesbian oppress bisexual and transgender people; then bisexual people oppress transgender people. We are at the bottom of the food chain, and due to oppression we are expected to “eat the scraps under the table and like it”. “Thank you, sir… May I have another”, as the saying might go. I don’t know how or when I grew out of that, but everytime some pushes me I want to be that much bolder in my protest.
Trans people are broken up in a tier system like that. It is all quite ludicrous, indeed. But that is what we see from top down oppression… it gets bigger the further down the pile/intersectionalities you go. You can either be oppressed covertly by cooperating with these “tropes”, or overtly by trying to stand up to them. The people who are oppressed covertly, the conformists, are usually the ones who are intentionally or unintentionally supporting the oppressive institutions, groups, or environment. “Don’t rock the boat” they say, and here you got me standing their with a jack hammer against the boats hull (I don’t want to rock it… I want to sink it).
That is the problem with people who uphold oppression is that they will fight to save it like it was their first born child. They don’t like you poking holes in the dogmas their happy little platform of false peace is based on, whether they be religious zealots, trans people, your father, or your neighbor. The more you poke holes in the boats of these intellectually/morally bankrupt ideas, or expose their fallacy, the more viciously they fight back however the boat is still sinking. Certainly anyone who feels strongly for something will fight for it, and I am no exception. What’s ironic is how sometimes when you expose the error they become more devout to them, and that is a problem.
People should stand up for things they feel are important, but have the intellectual integrity to realize when they are wrong. I hold myself to that standard, not to the standard of just being “unshaken before adversity”, “faithful”, or “dogmatic”. Example: the marriage equality backlash from the right. I for one say, “FUCK THEIR BOATS”, and I invite others do to likewise. Remember, rats always flee a sinking ship though their captains will hold out till the bitter end. “Going down with the ship” of morally bankrupt ideas just proves how morally bankrupt they are, not how righteous they are. Once credulity is lost it’s hard to recover, especially when one clings to a lifeless vessel at the bottom of the sea.
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