Monica Roberts
Contributing Columnist
I read that “Planet Confusion” post from Leslie McMurray in the March 20 issue of Dallas Voice, and let me just say for starters, it was a hot mess.
You know it ain’t good and you have screwed up in TransWorld when our TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) enemies and the TS separatist useful fools are gleefully linking to it, disrespectfully misgendering you at the same time, and you are getting called out by your trans family for the problematic commentary in it.
And once again, we have another instance of a late-transitioning trans person saying some problematic crap.
The first problem with the post was using that Jackie Robinson analogy. It didn’t fit this situation, and you would have been better off leaving it out.
Also problematic is the conclusion jump made based on a cis-woman’s assertions that Carlotta Sklodowska, the trans woman in question, is a crossdresser. She’s not, and has stated that she is trans. So why would you do Yvette Cormier’s and the conservafools’ dirty work for them by not only continuing to erase her declared identity, but then going on an anti-crossdresser rant on top of it?
Sklodowska could have looked like Heidi Klum when she walked into that locker room to hang up her coat and purse and she still would have been unjustly misgendered.
I started my transition in 1994. I was wearing femme attire in public long before that. It is a cardinal rule in TransWorld that when out and using public restrooms that correspond with gender presentation, we always sit to pee. For you to insinuate we don’t reinforced the transphobic “men in dresses” trope.
It may be news to you, Leslie, but those of us who have been out and proud since before 2012 are a lot more politically and PR savvy than you give us credit for. Did it also not occur to you to ponder the point that Yvette Cormier may have had an agenda and may have been lying?
No police report, no arrest, no predator. Anyone who has been in TransWorld long enough to pay attention knows that far too many conservative white peeps have been crying wolf and white women’s tears over nonexistent trans predators. Now they and the anti-trans industry and their non-white sellouts are desperate to create some phantom predators to back up their transphobic lies and the unjust anti-trans bills popping up like kudzu.
I’m concerned about those unjust bills, too — so much so that I and a group of trans people in business attire and our allies took a day out of our busy lives to travel to Austin to fight them.
Because if they are enacted, they will disproportionately affect trans people of color.
In addition to the problematic anti-crossdresser rant, the column had the vanilla-centric privileged stench of trans identity politics that makes me sick. Not everyone in TransWorld can plunk down $20K and jet to Thailand to get sex reassignment surgery for various personal, fiscal and medical reasons, and you need to keep that fundamental point in mind in the future.
You also need to keep in mind there are many ways to present as female, and cis and trans women come in all shapes, sizes and genital configurations.
But the bottom line in this whole sorry mess is this: Yvette Cormier lost her membership for bullying and being a transphobic jerk, and now she has the audacity to want Planet Fitness to pay for her precious delicate nerves being disturbed by a trans woman merely existing.
Monica Roberts is an African-American transgender activist and blogger at TransGriot.blogspot.com who lives in Houston.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition March 27, 2015.