All the best,
Morgan

Between the Reddit comment and the copy edited posting here, I conferred first with Cleopatra Jones, a co-contributor here at Cisnormativity (and writing her premier piece as we speak, soon to be posted). Cleopatra is black. As a peer, I listen to what she speaks, and she has taught me a great deal in the time I’ve come to know her. She is also where I first heard the anlaogy under question here.

I encourage her to drop in a comment here if she has time to do so. But my recollection of our discussion about this Reddit posting was that that analogy (through simile):

“In the same breath, trans people would like to thank biologically deterministic cis lesbian separatists for invalidating the legitimacy of trans men even as they spoke crudely of trans women like their negroes on the plantation.”

. . . was, in her mind, not out of line. The remark also does not, as you noted, draw a comparison between “lesbians ostracizing trans women to the enslavement of Black people.” What it does not do is address the condition — the how, the why — of enslavement in the Americas. The remark, however, does address a chronic, systemic social power order in which those with the precept of an in-born right or instrument of control can talk down to others lacking that perceived in-born right, do so derisively, and by so doing, deterministically reduce the humanity of their target without the target being given a feasible option to challenge it, stand up to it, or walk away from it. In other words, the analogy drew a relationship between an abusive social hegemony in place now to one past abusive social hegemony in place within the context of a very different regime: the act of enslavement, which Eric Williams (1944, 5) noted was “an economic institution of the first importance [. . .] it forms a part of that general picture of the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympathetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was” using human life as a monetized labour commodity to increase the output of other monetized commodities.

I was mindful of this when I wrote what I did, and I do not use such analogies lightly or often (if ever, come to think of it). I hope this clarifies your concern. Thank you for raising it.

Patience
Editor, Cisnormativity

citation:
William, Eric Eustace. 1944. Capitalism and slavery. Chapel Hill (NC): UNC Press.

One thing that you might want to look at in your article though is the comparison of cis lesbians ostracizing trans women to the enslavement of Black people. While both are an egregious examples of oppression and the marginalization of oppressed communities, the enslavement of Black people is in a class of its own and one cannot compare it to, really, anything else except the genocide of Native people. Moreover, to do so is to diminish (and sometimes even erase) the history, gravity and horror of that act because in order to compare something, both things need to be on similar levels. It is similar to that foolishness that “gay is the new Black”. The oppression that Black people experience is in many, many cases today much more desperate then many white cis gay people (because the tacit assumption there is that all gay people are white).

That being said, I would absolutely love to write a piece for y’all that analyzes the intersection of cisnormativity, racism and the vital need for trans feminine POC spaces. Let me know if you are interested!

En la Lucha,
Morgan Robyn