Should Transgender Community Be Concerned With Elon Musk Owning Twitter?
Elon
Musk is certainly getting a lot of attention with the tweets he's been
making since acquiring Twitter. He's raising allegations that Twitter
played a part in the political cycle by censoring Republicans, and he's
also citing evidence to support what he says. Furthermore, he's been
attacking Dr Fauci on his stance during the pandemic.
I'm
going to avoid those two topics and talk about the concern I'm hearing from
the transgender community. There are those within this community who
feel like Musk will give license to the people who attack the trans
community to continue to do so. I was just reading one of his comments
to his initial attack on Fauci, and I found this part very concerning .
Forcing
your pronouns upon others when they didn't ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don't, is neither good nor kind to anyone. Original Tweet Link HERE
I'm
not exactly sure why he used a tweet about Fucci to punch down on the
trans community, but yet here we are. People who feel as if Elon is
attacking this community have reason to be concerned. I must admit, I'm
concerned.
I heard people talking about
supposedly being attacked by the trans community for not putting their
pronouns in their profiles. Nobody that I know, however, has told me of
any such issues. What are pronouns doing in people's profiles? It's
simple. This is a way to support the transgender community and accept
them, nothing more.
As a transgender woman,
I've been on the receiving end of what I felt was negative
attention from people. It manifested in the form of presenting as
female and having people intently call me sir. This is because I'm not
"passable" by their standards. I may be wearing a dress and makeup, and
yet they're not seeing my female presentation. Some gleefully took
delight in calling me sir. Others were more confused than doing it with negative intent.
I even had an
occasion at a $0.99 Only Store to be attacked by an employee. We'd
had a run in before, and this person expressly sought me out the next
time to come after me. Among the hateful things he said, he misgendered me. I apologized for anything I may have offended him by saying, and I
requested that he apologize to me for referring to me in what I felt
was a transphobic term. Rather than apologize, he made
excuses for why he said it.
Some people will
just choose to hate. It's in their hearts to hate, and that's their
choice. Nobody is being forced at gunpoint to put pronouns in their Twitter bios.
Nobody is being forced to promote and love the transgender community.
All they're being asked to do is be respectful and understand that there
are certain things that are deemed hateful within the community.
Some
people refer to this as a "transgender agenda", and that may be because they're not so confident in their own gender
identity. They are threatened by the existence of the transgender
community. I don't know, and I choose not to analyze these people. When
they throw hate my way, that's when it becomes an issue to me.
Most
transgender people simply want to live their lives and just be. They want a
fair chance like anybody else to have a job, and they want a fair
opportunity to have a home. However, because of their
gender identity, some of these things aren't as easy for them to come by. Even in 2022 going on 2023, they face hate.
Elon has been saying problematic things to the transgender community. He has a
right to his opinion, but where it becomes a problem is he owns one of
the biggest social media platform's on the internet. When he tweets
things like the above, he's telling people who hate the transgender
community that they should hate as freely as they want.
It's
alarming because he initially tweeted about Dr Fauci and the pandemic.
The tweet should have had nothing to do with the trans community, and yet
he found a way to take a shot at them too. I'm alarmed by this, and
I have to ask the question. Is Elon's behavior going to give license to
people who hate the transgender community to just keep hating?
The
problem is some people aren't comfortable going out in public or
they're not even out yet due to their very real fears of being physically attacked. They get on sites like Twitter to feel
comfortable and get the confidence to go out. When Elon gives license to
hate on Twitter, the hate mongers seek these people out and do real damage to them. This negatively impacts the lives of the transgender community. I wish that Elon would think before
he tweets on this topic, but the he probably won't.
