(nods) I haven’t read Sailer, but it’s not unlikely: lots of people do that.
Some years ago, I ran into someone at a party who was arguing essentially this position (that increased queer visibility/equality leads to increased straight anxiety which leads to increased violence and discrimination against queers, and therefore that working towards increased queer visibility/equality is a bad idea on the grounds that it makes things worse for queer people, and don’t we care about queer people?) and clearly getting off on the yummy contrarian goodness.
As I recall, I pointed out (calmly but loudly) that he was missing an opportunity to tailor his message to the group he was talking to, as this group was sufficiently accepting of trans folk that he could cause far more trouble more efficiently if he argued specifically that trans folk, as a more visible and vulnerable subset of the queer community, would receive the majority of the negative consequences of straight anxiety, and therefore queer equality was really just another way for gay folk to abuse and take advantage of trans folk. He could use the same strategy to divide gay men and lesbians and more generally to fragment the queer community to the point where we didn’t stand a chance of achieving our political goals.
It was kind of a funny moment, as I wasn’t following his script and he had to scramble a little to change tack.
I should have added, but didn’t, that it was important to get everyone upset enough in the process that nobody thought to ask why, if the only problem with queer equality was the threat posed by anxious straight folk, we shouldn’t deal with that by acting to minimize the power of anxious straight folk to hurt us.
(nods) I haven’t read Sailer, but it’s not unlikely: lots of people do that.
Some years ago, I ran into someone at a party who was arguing essentially this position (that increased queer visibility/equality leads to increased straight anxiety which leads to increased violence and discrimination against queers, and therefore that working towards increased queer visibility/equality is a bad idea on the grounds that it makes things worse for queer people, and don’t we care about queer people?) and clearly getting off on the yummy contrarian goodness.
As I recall, I pointed out (calmly but loudly) that he was missing an opportunity to tailor his message to the group he was talking to, as this group was sufficiently accepting of trans folk that he could cause far more trouble more efficiently if he argued specifically that trans folk, as a more visible and vulnerable subset of the queer community, would receive the majority of the negative consequences of straight anxiety, and therefore queer equality was really just another way for gay folk to abuse and take advantage of trans folk. He could use the same strategy to divide gay men and lesbians and more generally to fragment the queer community to the point where we didn’t stand a chance of achieving our political goals.
It was kind of a funny moment, as I wasn’t following his script and he had to scramble a little to change tack.
I should have added, but didn’t, that it was important to get everyone upset enough in the process that nobody thought to ask why, if the only problem with queer equality was the threat posed by anxious straight folk, we shouldn’t deal with that by acting to minimize the power of anxious straight folk to hurt us.
Heh.