Dear Cisters: Why does everyone keep telling me to stop JAQing off?
I’m just asking questions!
Welcome to Dear Cisters, the column that’s more like Dear Abby than the Savage Lovecast. I’m your host Stephenie Magister, transgender writer/nerd/editor for award-winning and best-selling books.
Today’s question is an expansion of an excerpt from TEN TRANS QUESTIONS
WHY AM I NOT ALLOWED TO JUST ASK QUESTIONS?
No one has ever heard this question before, so let’s work through the analogies together.
Let’s assume you asked this question because you found an intelligent woman with trans experiences who can FINALLY help you answer those hard-hitting questions everyone else tells you sound at least a little transphobic…
THE BIG FINISH
If I join a debate on police shootings and the first thing I do is bring up justified shootings, how would you feel?
Now consider that for the analogy to be fair, you’d have to tweak it a little.
When you leap to bring up justified shootings, you make it more likely someone at that very meeting is going to get shot WITHOUT justification.
That’s what it’s like for trans people everywhere we go. It’s a dynamic that requires all of us — even those of us who share transgender experiences — to shut up and listen to the people affected. Just because it doesn’t affect you doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting someone else.
There are trans people, for example, in every online space you participate in. You should be posting with them in mind.
A THOUGHT EXERCISE
Imagine yourself sitting down with a ten-year-old girl so consumed with thoughts of suicide her entire life that she’s now ready to do it. She thought participating in activities with the other girls would help. Give her a sense of belonging and community. But you told her she has to play with the boys.
You worry letting her play sports with girls who haven’t had those experiences will hurt those girls. You worry that because the suicidal girl was born with body parts or a hormonal profile that reminds you of a boy, the cost of her playing with other girls is too high.
You accept that a trans kid begging for death isn’t desirable — but it’s acceptable if it hurts girls who haven’t felt suicidal for the same reasons.
You need to figure out how to explain your solution to those people. Watch one of them hold the knife, or the gun, or just a blank stare in their eyes.
Listen to that little trans girl beg just to play a game of soccer with the other girls.
Now tell her you just can’t let her. Even if it costs that girl her last breath.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Don’t ignore the Elephant in the room. The bad guys are in the middle of these debates trying to hurt trans people. Worse? They’re doing so in the name of protecting the women they consider more valuable.
Their claims that ALL lives matter is as thin a disguise as the beard I used to wear.
HATE THE BELIEF, NOT THE BELIEVER
But aren’t those bad-faith bigots the exceptions?
Aren’t most of the people hurting, abusing, and killing trans people actually good people just asking good questions? Probably!
But at some point, their intentions are irrelevant when the actions they take with a noble purpose have a consistently harmful, abusive, deadly impact toward people with transgender experiences.
BUT I HAVE A REALLY GOOD QUESTION
Medium tells me this is a 5 minute article. Since we’re almost at the end, I can say I’ve known you long enough to see you’re a good person.
It’s clear from your background (whoever you are) that you don’t do anything transphobic on purpose.
It’s also okay for people (not necessarily you) to admit they don’t have experience with trans people and they want to understand them more.
But you specifically?
As much as you might enjoy JAQing off, you are centering the wrong group of people in this discussion.
This line of questioning should only be in the context of centering trans rights. Placing the safety of cis women, for example, at the front of the conversation is the rhetorical version of punching down.
You can absolutely assert your questions and make your points on corner cases AFTER prioritizing their defense first (and if the audience seems receptive). But first?
Your job as an ally is to call out the bad guys and, well, to be a fucking ally.
Please.
There is no question whether you JAQing off has a harmful and often deadly impact toward trans people. I am telling you it did. I am telling you it does.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that we’re at the end of this article, the only question I care about before I let you go is whether each of us is willing to acknowledge and take responsibility for how our actions contribute to that harm.
It’s the only way to protect those who are most precious and yet most vulnerable among us.
THE END (DAMN GIRL, THAT’S DARK)
Hi, it’s Stephenie!
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