imi's thoughts

ok, so like i get the rhetorical power of saying something like “oh this will effect you too, you're not just fucking with trans people”, because making something personal to someone helps break down barriers and get them to care, but also, cis people should be able to have that empathy for us even without making it personal, and we shouldn't have to make ourselves smaller in these instances and relate it to cis people for our arguments of discrimination to be salient,,

it feels like there's two competing things here, right? like,, we need cis people to care about us, and some cis people will not care about things until it effects them, yet, we shouldn't be making ourselves smaller in these debates that are literally about our rights and literally directly targeting us! the first response to some bathroom bill or some other bill/executive explicitly enables discrimination against trans people, our first response and argument shouldn't be “oh well this will effect cis people too!!” our first response should be like,, hey, this is fucking effecting trans people in real and explicit ways, like of course the fascist policing of gender will have spillover and the fascists welcome that, but the explicit targets should be thought of first,?