re: #93 The Ghost of a Flea

Emphasis on arbitrary.

They’re transphobes, but transphobia is also a gateway to inhibiting free social expression in general. It’s not going to be just about clocking actual trans persons, it’s going to be…what can you get away with, who can you control and degrdde by wrapping it up in a concern about trans-ness. Much like the Satanic panic or the panic about Islam, the bailey justifies the motte: to target “the real problem” requires an entire pseudointellectual factory process inventing precursor signs and “symptoms” that have to be policed as well.

It’s so much of the same battles that were fought before too. It’s almost a straight line connection to gay panics of years before, which have almost always been about enforcement of rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity and the lionizing of the former, demonization of the latter.