Manufacturing a history of 'trans' oppression, as Alex does here, serves many purposes. Rampant historical revisionism camouflages what the trans movement actually is: a recent creation of medical technologies and queer theory.
Shamelessly piggybacking on the oppression and marginalization of other groups helps entrench a narrative of trans ‘victimhood.’ Insinuate ‘trans’ in the history of actual genocide and oppression, and you’ll avoid scrutiny and shut down criticism right now, in 2022.
The concepts through which trans activists now want everyone to interpret everything did not exist in 1930s Germany or anywhere else. There were men who wanted to live as women and underwent experimental surgeries, and vice versa, but they’d be baffled by the lingo of 21st-century activists. They did not see their lives in those terms because those terms did not exist, thus the kind of people trans activists desperately project on the past did not exist either.
This sounds pedantic and will surely be caricatured as splitting hairs while trans lives are at stake, but the distinction matters. When we rewrite the past to bring it into compliance with 21st-century ideologies, we’re creating something that never existed for our own purposes.
Rewriting the past is not the same thing as understanding the past. Using a heavily revised version of the past to fearmonger about the present and future is politics and propaganda, not learning from history.
To take a lighter example, there were sci-fi fans in the 1930s but there weren't Star Trek fans. People may well have made fun of sci-fi fans in the '30s (a temptation that's hard to resist in any era) but nobody was making fun of Trekkies because Star Trek didn't exist. If Trekkies, in an attempt to retrofit a history of vicious bullying and marginalization at the hands of people with social lives, said: “People in the 1930s mocked Trekkies!” this just wouldn't be true, no matter how sincerely modern-day Trekkies believe that 1930s sci-fi fans would have identified as Trekkies if only they'd been given the opportunity to watch the Wrath of Khan or whatever.
Gotta say, Eliza, your always clear, logical, cut-to-the-meat-of-it thinking and writing have become something I really look forward to finding in my in-box. It makes me feel better in moments of absolute despair to know that there really ARE still people out there who are capable of critical thought. Thank you for taking the time to create your substack, and for making the regular effort to feed it! :-)
“Trekkies” is Trek-phobic. Just saying.
But I agree with Pikay. Except I have Star Trek so I don’t despair. 😊