If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice?
If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice?
Because the rainbow flag gang has been cheering for their enemies since Oct. 7. Killing off identified LGBTQ people has been a thing in Gaza for many years
The colorful folks who lose their minds when Republicans and conservative Christians enact anti-transgender laws give genocidal, homo-hating psychopaths a free pass because, I guess, at least Hamas hates Jews as much as the other unleashed bigots on the left.
If there’s one thing that doesn’t exist in the West today, it’s ‘trans genocide’. That’s a fantasy cooked up in brains housed in overprivileged, unmarginalized, mostly male bodies desperately seeking cultural relevance.
If anyone implemented an actual genocide campaign against the genderfluid set, evidence so far indicates it would miss their gaydar.
It’s true that transfolk are at higher risk of violence than other groups, but it hardly approaches the level of ‘genocide’, a very much-abused word that used to mean something super-serious, like the conscious attempt to exterminate a group of people based on certain characteristics. We’ve seen it in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Chinese Revolution, the 20th-century Russian attempt against Ukrainians in the ‘30s, and of course the ‘gold standard’ for the most systematic attempt ever to eliminate Others, Nazi Germany. Pre-Columbian Indigenous groups everywhere occasionally attempted genocide too; and it was a lot easier back then when tribes and bands were a few hundred members at most, rather than today’s cities, states and countries.
The most recent example of a limited attempt at genocide was Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel in October. It’s linked and locked to genocide because Hamas’s charter is quite explicit on their mandate to eliminate Judaism from all of what is now Israel. ‘From the river to the sea’, that’s what it means. Don’t let Hamas apologists tell you otherwise.
Hamas’s 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement is pretty plain-spoken:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
It quotes the Koran:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
There’s more anti-Semitic genocidal crapola, but let’s not get off on a tangent. In case you’re wondering if Israel’s uncomfortably disproportionate defensive response, which has killed a ton more Gazans than Israelis on Oct. 7 is ‘genocide’, as the Islamofascist cheerleaders on North American campuses insist, Time Magazine weighed in on the matter in November. Defining genocide gets very tricky without the evidence of a specific intention to destroy the group, it says, but notes, “That can be a high bar because very often people contribute to genocidal policies, even if that's not their direct intention.”
That renders allegations of Israeli genocide of Palestinians a little less abstractly. While Israel’s explicit purpose is to wipe out Hamas, they’re taking a helluva lot of civilians with them, and with the Gazan death toll now estimated around 20,000 since October 7th, the carnage can no longer be blamed solely on Hamas’s use of the civilian population as human shields. With a massive human rights crisis of displaced people and countless neighborhoods reduced to rubble, Israeli forces are squandering whatever moral righteousness for response they possessed for October 7.
When defining genoicide, most experts refer to the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which created the definition in 1948.
If the Israeli government has genocidal intent toward the Palestinians themselves, they’re less explicit than Hamas, or many other antisemitic genocidists of the Arab/Muslim world, for whom the elimination of Jews and ergo the State of Israel has been boldly stated for generations.
In North America, the last genuine genocide attempt was the centuries-long effort to eliminate ‘the Indian’ from what they called Turtle Island and what we call ‘the United States’ and ‘Canada’.
There have been no genuine genocide attempts here since, and the ‘trans genocide’ one sees repeated ad nauseum on social media is merely hypervole rooted in very few expressions of a few sick individuals who either genuinely would like to eliminate all trans people, or just crank them up. Either way, there’s no concerted effort to eliminate them, and the violence against them isn’t remarkable compared to many other groups.
The Human Rights Campaign notes that last year in the United States, 32 transgender people were murdered, 81% of them non-white, 59% of them black. They claim to have documented 302 violent deaths of transgender and ‘gender non-conforming people’ since 2013. Those numbers aren’t good, but they’re no evidence of genocide. A fair chunk of them may be genuine hate crimes (although there could be other reasons, like a john who doesn’t want to pay his transgender prostitute). Like so-called ‘hate crime’ hoaxes against black people, when you drill down to the meat of the story, you often find that there was less evidence of a hate crime than initially alleged in the legacy/social media.
Some transfolk are killed by police (go figger), some in prison, and a few in ICE detention centers. About 26% are killed by intimate partners. Welcome to WomanWorld, fellas. This is what you signed up for. Happy to join you in the fight against intimate partner violence, everyone has the right to not be murdered by a partner!
I can’t find statistics specifically for Canada on transgender murders.
The U.S. numbers do seem to be going up, but whether that’s a response juiced by ‘anti-trans’ information in the media, as transactivists allege, or other reasons (it’s hardly uncommon to get murdered by the police or in prison) is unclear. It could be that trans numbers grow every year as more jump on the Trans Train. I can’t help but wonder whether violent, aggressive transactivism has something to do with it.
“Can we just start stabbing transphobes?”
Transactivists are pretty famously aggressive and violent against women, particularly in Europe where they’ve been documented physically attacking feminists at public protests, in the time-honored tradition of men attempting to shut down women’s speech. La plus ça change, n’est-ce pas? Some things never change. Feminists were also violently attacked by transactivists and Antifa in Portland, Oregon in November.
But I suspect transactivist woman-haters have little to do with it. Partner violence, prison violence, sex worker violence - also, la plus ça change.
But the LGBTQ cheerleader section for Hamas makes me wonder if they’d even notice if anyone launched a genuine trans genocide. While even Gaza isn’t guilty of a concerted, systematic effort to eliminate transfolk or other LGBTQ people, they sure do love to push them off buildings when they identify someone who doesn’t adhere strictly to Islamic dictates about who and what to shag.
It’s a little better on the West Bank where homosexuality has been decriminalized since 1951 (yes really!). The status is far more confusing in Gaza, with a patchwork of laws covering who may do what with whom. Homosexuality is not specifically banned, but don’t expect any help from the police for homophobic or (genuine) transphobic violence in action. Prison is the customary punishment for gay activity, but can also include the very occasional flogging for ‘adultery’.
Not sure what you get when you murder gay or trans people in Gaza. High fives?
People do get killed there for partaking of Oscar Wilde-style love. This includes a Hamas commander executed for allegedly partaking in an act of ‘moral turpitude’ (their euphemism for gay sex) and theft, although some allege he was tortured into making a confession.
This sounds suspiciously like what happens in other parts of the Middle East all the time for women - ‘honor killings’ executed by family members, or stoned by the community, on rumors of alleged non-chaste behavior with a male, no evidence required. Wagging tongues get women killed all the time in the Middle East for such alleged sex crimes, just as they did in medieval Europe for alleged witchcraft.
Gay Palestinians can avoid getting murdered by turning informant for the authorities (including Israeli authorities who blackmail them to become Israeli collaborators). Still, Israel has actually become a bit of a gay retreat for Palestinians trying to escape Gazan homophobia, and is the only place in the Middle East where one will find Pride Parades.
If you’re going to be gay in the Middle East, Palestine is one of the worst places to do it.
And Israel is the best.
Even so, Palestinians aren’t attempting anything approaching ‘trans genocide’, or even ‘gay genocide’, but if it was to start anywhere Palestine would be in my top three guesses. And I wonder: Would Western transactivists even notice? And if they did, would they dare, with typical Regressive Left cowardice, to call out dark-skinned homophobes and transphobes? Would Western condemnation of Gazan homophobia be regarded with embarrassed looks as ‘cultural imperialism’?
If they can’t identify the rampant homophobia and genuine transphobia in Palestine, and they cheer for the equally homophobic Hamas, I’m not sure they’d recognize an actual genocide if fluorescent-dressed corpses started dropping on their heads.
It’s possible the rise in trans murders in the West is a consequence of rising violence and murders overall. The numbers may also be rising because more people are ‘going trans’, so there are simply more of them to run afoul of others, whether it’s due to transphobia, ‘trans panic’, or police arrest.
But it’s certain the West’s claims of ‘trans genocide’ is an effort to inflate the emotionalism of the debate, as so many movements are wont to do (including on the right).
We see the same inflation from the ‘antiracist’ set when they claim black deaths by police are ‘the new lynching’ or ‘genocide’ against blacks. Ironically, more trans people (and white people) are killed every year by the cops than black people. And interestingly, the Black Lives Matter website has fuck all to say about Israel, whereas on Glenn Loury’s Substack, they’ve discussed the anti-Semitism problem in the black community, not to mention in the DEI industry, where most DEI consultants are black women.
What’s worrying is how much violence against everybody is growing, not just transfolk. Whether they’re murdered for their lifestyle choice or for the common reasons so many others are murdered, it’s not okay. But it’s not genocide either.
And I’m not sure any of them would notice if it turned into one.
When I’m not wondering what the hell kind of crack Team Rainbow is smoking, I help women and others reclaim their power on my website Grow Some Labia.