Anti-LGBTIQ literature in the Spanish language

There is a serious lack of online resources on anti-LGBTQ activism in the Spanish language. Queer and transgender people need to know who these people are, their way of thinking and their tactics if they want to stop them from doing more harm. 

The first post of our new Spanish language blog, Mundo LGBTIQ,  is therefore on "Anti-LGBTIQ literature written in Spanish". 

Here follows an English language translation of that post. The original can be found here.

By Amilka González

The Spanish language is the second most spoken language in the world by natives, with almost 500 million speakers.In recent years many Spanish-speaking groups have become increasingly committed to the dissemination of discourses that question the human rights of the LGBTIQ population, which raises the need to map both groups and discourses. This would be the starting point for analyzing transnational relations and alliances between Spanish-speaking anti-rights groups and Spanish speaking anti-rights group.

It can be said that dedicating the first article of our new Spanish language blog to anti-LGBTIQ rights literature is giving undeserved publicity to ideas that are harmful to society. However, if we want to understand how these ideas work and why they are shared by many people, we believe it is necessary to map these discourses.

This is not a novel idea. It is a strategy known to anti-racist organizations that for decades have monitored hate speech related to racial segregation and other types of discrimination. An example of this is the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in the US, which has been dedicated to this work, in addition to being known for its legal battles against supremacist groups.

Twitter has fallen. What's next for transgender debate and news sharing?

Since he took over Twitter Elon Musk has shown himself completely unable to preserve the social platform as an open and inclusive arena for information sharing and discussion. We look for alternatives.

By opening the door to trolls and embracing extremist bigots he has turned a platform that was already struggling with hate into a battlefield.

Now he has destroyed the only valuable thing left of twitter: Its extremely strong brand. We know of a lot of people who feel sick when seeing the new black and white X logo. It represents all that Musk stand for and all that has been lost during this process.

Elon Musk is a transphobe who is actively deadnaming his estranged transgender daughter. He recently declared that the term "cis" is a slur. No wonder that so many trans and queer people are moving away from twitter right now. 

The fact that some remain, though, tells us how important this platform has been for trans and gender variant people from all over the world. Some of the best trans activists, journalists, artists and scientist have shared their ideas on Twitter.

We have prepared ourselves for the fall of Twitter for quite some time now, and share transgender news and resources on these platforms:

• Mastodon

• Telegram

• Flipboard

• Tumblr

• Bluesky

We will continue sharing news and articles on eX-Twitter for the time being. Threads is not available in Europe and, yes, we are too old for TikTok!

As you can see, we are hedging our bets,  waiting to see what platform will become the new big arena for transgender discussions and news curation. The problem is that it takes a lot of time to build a following on any such platform, and it is very hard to track down your old followers on the new. We will do what we can, though.

Image: A team of three sculptors spent over two months creating the homage to the famous Norwegian Blue after the dead parrot was voted the nation’s favorite Monty Python sketch in a survey by the British Channel Gold in 2014. Photo by David Parry/PA.

UPDATE: Thanks to Julia for an invite to Bluesky!

Why is it so hard for a scientist like Richard Dawkins to understand the difference between sex and gender?

Richard Dawkins find it hard to grasp the difference between gender and biological sex, reducing gender identity to a matter of procreation in the process. No wonder he is loved by transphobic TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

Richard Dawkins is now actively helping anti-trans activists. How can such a renowned scientist end up in such a bad place?

Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Ray Blanchard all belong to what I would call a school of traditional gender role thinking masquerading as science based facts. 

If  you go through their arguments it soon becomes clear that the statement "gender is biological sex" is simply a rephrasing of the sentence "biological sex is biological sex and biological sex," which explains nothing. But this is clearly about reproduction. Gender is reduced to sperm and eggs. They cannot grasp reality of the concept of gender as something related to, but still different from, biological sex. 

Dawkins discusses trans people with a gender critical TERF

In the video below, where Dawkins discusses transgender identities with Helen Joyce,  Dawkins find it "distinctly weird that people can simply declare that 'I am a woman, though I have a penis'". He sees this as "a strange distortion of language."

There is no cure for crossdreaming, but there are ways of integrating it into your life.

Over at r/crossdreaming a crossdreamer posted an anxious presentation of the way erotic crossdreaming (referred to as "autogynephilia" by them) had come to dominate their life. They were clearly looking for a "cure". 

It is always hard to find a good way of answering such questions about cross-gender embodiment fantasies, given that I, at least, do not think that there is a cure for crossdreaming. It is part of our nature, with roots in biology and shaped by culture and personal experiences.

There were several responses. Here is mine:

Is America turning completely transphobic? Not really!

The current onslaught on transgender people in the US is extreme and destructive, and it is easy to get the impression that most Americans have become rabid transphobes. That is in no way the case, something trans people and their friends should keep in mind.

Fox News is in not a source of fact based balanced information. The fact that they finally have sacked Tucker Carlson does not change that. But the truth is that as far as opinion polls go, they are pretty reliable. 

On April 26 they published a poll that showed that for the most part the majority of Americans do not support the Republican "culture war."

When asked about  the most important issue facing the country today, only 1% answered "Wokeness/Transgender issues".  The fact that the survey saw wokeness and transgender issues as one and the same thing, says a lot about Fox, but the answer says even more about Americans.  Transgender people are not seen as a threat by most.

So what did Americans see as important? "Economy/Jobs" (24%),  obviously, followed by "Inflation/Cost of living" (16%) and "Gun control/Gun violence" (12%). 

As far as gun violence goes, this is not an answer in support of Republican politics. Far from it. American voters favor gun limits over arming citizens to reduce gun violence. 87% support requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers.

Many observers now argue that the Republican Party's obsession with "culture wars" will cost them dearly in the 2014 election. 

Targeting families with trans kids is seen as a major problem by Americans

60% of the respondents say that school boards banning books is a major problem. There is no call for censorship of LGBTQA books in schools.

Joanna's conclusion: Transgender people are who they are because nature made them possible.

Today we know very well that being trans isn't a sexually fueled mental illness, however we still need to understand how the nature of wanting to be the other sex encompasses elements of sexual energy. 

Guest post by Joanna Santos

Since all of the trans people I know trace their gender feelings to before puberty, it would be far too simplistic to try and reduce feelings of gender incongruence to sexual dysfunction. 

Blanchard reducing gender identity to misdirected sexuality

However the now infamous Ray Blanchard did his best to do so and by the late 1980's was simply dismissing testaments of early childhood gender dysphoria by his patients as lying (hardly a scientific method) so they could fit a narrative aimed at transition. 

He eventually concocted a theory that attributed that desire as either a misdirected sex drive or wanting to attract heterosexual men as partners (in the case of patients attracted to men). He called the made up disease that supposedly drove those of his patients who were attracted to women "autogynephilia."

At this point let us simply state that some forms of gender variance exist primarily for the achieving of sexual arousal, which only adds confusion to the mix. 

Interesting discussions about gender, sex and transgender lives from the Crossdream Life Forum

Selected discussions on gender variance and being various shades of trans from the Crossdream Life forum.

I have had the honor of being  co-funder and moderator of Crossdream Life, a discussion forum for all kinds of gender variance. There are a lot of insightful, clever and compassionate people over there.

I will use this post to draw your attention to some selected threads that bring up new and interesting perspectives on the many variations of transgender, nonbinary and queer existence, as well as on what we might call cigender gender variance.

Keep in mind that me linking to these discussions here is not an endorsement of everything that is said. This is the point of having a discussion forum like this: That members can, within reasonable limits, present ideas out of the ordinary.

A Transgender Typology and Unification Theory

Koloa has presented a very interesting alternative approach to talk about trangender identities and lives that avoid the kind of pathologization we find in many other models.

Are we just protecting cis people and the binary again?

A discussion about the gender binary, gender identity and gender expression.

Jemimah, the transgender Hemingway and more

A complex and multifaceted discussion about sex and gender, which also includes information about the transgender side of Ernest Hemingway.

Blanchard debunked: Surveys show that all kinds of people experience "autogynephilia"

 

Online surveys show that gender embodiment fantasies (called "autogynephilia" and "autoandrophilia" by transphobic researchers) are common among all groups of people: transgender and non-transgender, men, women and those nonbinary.

Anyone who follows the intense anti-trans propaganda of the day, will have made note of the way the "autogynephilia" theory is used to invalidate transgender women and other gender variant people. "Gender critical" TERFs love the theory, as it allows them to present trans women as perverted predators. 

The theory has been falsified and dismissed over and over again, both by scientists and those that truly know something about being trans: transgender people. The tactic of the theory's supporters is often to confuse and obfuscate, or they double down on the analytical basis for the theory, ignoring the fact that it is this world view that has been falsified. Moreover, there is always a small detail somewhere you can use to confuse readers that do not know the topic well, or you can simply lie. 

In this post I am going to present data from several online surveys, some of them quite extensive, that have not been part of the academic discussions about the "autogynephilia" concept, but which nevertheless provide a rich amount of data about gender, gender variance and sexualities.  

They document that erotic crossdreaming (as in imagining yourself being the "other" gender relative to the one assigned at birth) are quite common in all relevant groups of people, straight and gay, women and men, transgender and those that are not trans. The fact that such fantasies are so common, destroys the credibility of the "autogynephilia" theory, which states that only male assigned people who are attracted to women can have such fantasies.

And what is truly interesting is that these surveys look at erotic crossdreaming as part of a much broader phenomenon: Embodiment fantasies in general, where people get turned on by the idea of having a body of any gender, including the one they identify as. This proves that the erotic cross-gender fantasies found in some trans women and other MTF (male to female) gender variant people represent a subcategory of a common human trait.

From homosexuality to "autogynephilia": The American Psychiatric Association hasn't learned.

In an obituary about Charles Silverstein, Neil Genzlinger gives some interesting insight into how Silverstein helped remove homosexuality from the American psychiatric manual, the DSM,  back in 1973. 

Silverstein had pointed out how the  American Psychiatric Association had fallen into the trap of creating pseudo-scientific sounding terms for sexualities the psychiatrists did not understand. Yes, this is unfortunately relevant to the trans community community today.

I looked up the original interview from 2019. 

Silverstein was part of a delegation from the Gay Activists Alliance, and he said this about their meeting with the people behind the DSM:

Syphilophobia and other silly diagnoses

 "I wrote [my speech to the  Nomenclature Committee of the American Psychiatric Association]  the night before, after having studied diagnostic systems, other diagnostic systems. 

What I did was write a parody, a satire, of all the absurd things that the American Psychiatric Association had diagnosed, and some of them were embarrassing. There were silly things. [He mentioned illnesses like “syphilophobia” (irrational fear of syphilis).]

At the end, I said, "These are the mistakes that you made before. You're making the mistake. Now, correct it." It seemed to have impressed them, and this came back to us in a number of publications. That was in February. In December of that year, homosexuality, per se, was eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 

On our post on people's interest in transgender erotic content

Earlier this month we posted an article on the increasing interest in transgender "erotic entertainment".

This triggered Blogspot (on which platform this blog is published) to add a warning screen regarding problematic content. 

We suspect Google, who owns Blogger,  is not able to distinguish between pornographic content and articles about such content.

We take no chances regarding out search engine rankings and have therefore moved the article to another platform. 

You can read the article here.

While you are here, we will use this opportunity to remind you of our social transgender news curation channels. Get a daily dose of up to date transgender news via one of these accounts: Follow: Twitter | Telegram | Flipboard | Mastodon

Site map for Transgender World..Image by Midjourney

How trauma may affect the lives of LGBTQ+ people and what they can do about it

This post will look at how psychological distress may play out among queer and transgender people and give you an introduction to the concepts of trauma, PTSD and Complex PTSD (CPTSD) in an LGBTQ+ setting. I will point to some steps you could take to help yourself or a friend suffering from trauma related issues. 

By Sally Molay

If the headline above caught your attention, you might know someone who struggles with the effects of trauma. Or maybe you suspect that you yourself carry unresolved trauma and the time is right to look into that. In either case, welcome to this primer and good luck in your important work!

Please note: I am not a doctor or a psychologist. This is not medical advice. I am a queer person and a trans ally. I suffer from complex trauma from childhood emotional abuse. I am also a survivor of sexual assault. I have been fortunate enough to heal and learn through years of therapy. I am also a trained instructor of iRest, a research-based relaxation and meditation technique for healing trauma.

I would like to underline that being trans is not a mental illness. Having a sexual orientation different from the straight one is not a psychological disorder. The current medical manuals explicitly state that being trans is not a mental illness.  However, the ways a cis/hetero-normative world treat queer people can often cause trauma. Moreover, queer and trans people are people like other people, and as such they can face emotional challenges that are not directly linked to their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Which topics are covered?

This is a lengthy post. If this feels daunting, I have included this little menu that you can use to jump to the parts you want to investigate: 

• What to do if you are in distress right now
• Why write about trauma in an LGBTQ+ context?
• What is a trauma? 
• Flight, fight, freeze, fawn
• PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
• Complex PTSD
• Somatization (bodily expressions of trauma)
• The window of tolerance
• How to get help
• How to help yourself
• Resources