We think of history as a series of actions
deemed important enough to put into writing. On the surface, this makes sense: most of history
took place when few people could read or write, so if something was recorded,
it was probably important. Fortunately, this means we have a good idea
of the big-picture stuff: international trade, the battles and wars, the
emperors and their empires. But a sad consequence of this approach is that the
little details of human lives largely disappear. Minutiae that reveal the complexity in all
of us, and draw a throughline from past to present... mostly end up lost to time,
because nobody bothered writing them down. Or so the story goes. You can’t blame people for believing
that anything we didn’t lose, anything that made it through the
Great Filter of human history, must be meaningful, if only
by process of elimination. It’s a nice thought, but kind of naive. It
places humans at the centre of the universe, and insists everything sits
around us by the hand of fate. It ignores that many histories have been erased
on purpose, not by the simple passage of time. This understanding of history
as “whatever records survived” fails us now more than ever, in the 21st century, Because in the information
age, we have a record of almost everything… but most
of it is entirely worthless. Every thought I’ve expressed on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook lives on in the
cloud, long after its deletion. Every ad I’ve opened on every device
I’ve owned, every website I’ve visited, every person I’ve messaged, and every website
they’ve visited; thoroughly documented. Information you or I have no use for,
but that is very handy for advertisers. You can actually request a report
on all this info from Google. Mine takes up a little over 10 gigabytes. And setting aside data harvesting,
the internet is inconceivably massive. The WayBack Machine is a
service that archives web pages. It currently has 514 billion pages archived. How many of them are valuable?
We literally can't know. In the time it takes to read a single
page, a quarter million more get added. So we find ourselves, once
again, at odds with history, but for the opposite reason as before.
So much of our times get recorded that we can’t hope to filter through and
keep track of everything valuable. Inevitably, almost all of the
internet will fade into obscurity; never to be read or referenced again. No corner of the internet
exemplifies this better than MOGAI. Thousands of blogs, HTML’d with care and
updated diligently, then left to gather dust. Tens of millions of posts outlining bright new
ideas that surely felt vital to their authors, never spoken of - or even thought of - again. If
any corner of the modern internet will be lost, it’ll probably be ones like this -
abandoned even as they were being created. I think that’s a real shame. I’m here to make a
case that this largely dismissed online movement, known mainly as a laughing stock,
deserves a critical second look. It might not look the part, but I think
MOGAI stands to teach us a lot about how queer people find each other; how young
people interact differently with culture; how online communities form and thrive
and then parasitize one another. To let it fade into that error 404, domain
expired, goodnight, would be a waste. So let’s talk about MOGAI. MOGAI is a social movement that
originated on Tumblr around 2013. Its name stands for “Marginalized
Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex”. If you think that sounds like the same
thing as LGBTQ+, you’re not wrong. The MOGAI scene emerged as a response to a
perceived problem - that, try as we might, the LGBT community can never
be perfectly inclusive, because there are only so many
letters you can fit in the acronym. The idea is that having only Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual and Transgender in the name implicitly devalues anyone in the
“plus”: non-binary, pansexual, and so on. But since adding a letter for every
identity becomes untenable quickly, a truly inclusive community should
do away with the acronym altogether. “Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments,
and Intersex” intentionally casts a wide net, without centering any one
group. Right from the start, the movement was heavily focused on language. And while they took it a lot further
than most, it’s not exceptional that a queer community would form around
shared language. Let’s look back in time, and learn how things were before
the cursed internet came into play. Historically, labels often become popular when
they describe a group’s lived experience better than the existing language. Often, a label is
adopted when a group of people recognize what they have in common, and aim to organize around it.
The word “bisexual" is a great modern example. Up until the 1970s, what we now know as the LGBT
community was mainly called the Gay and Lesbian community, because language and activism around
gay men and lesbians was the most developed. That doesn’t mean there weren’t bisexuals or
trans people in the gay community - there were, many of whom were very influential - but no
label to describe them was commonplace yet. But while bisexuals and gays share lots of
common ground, being bisexual also comes with unique experiences and challenges. It became
clear that closing that lexical gap and affirming bisexuality as its own orientation would make
it easier to tackle the issues bisexuals face. When the label “bisexual”
picked up steam in the 1970s, there was an explosion of bisexual
advocacy, a swell of grassroots support, and tons of people began
announcing themselves to the world. Even some famous men who did awful
things to women! That's cool! The newly organized bisexual community
made it easier than ever for people with shared struggles to find each other,
and work together for a better future. Shared language and self-image are a
great foundation to build a community. So it's really no wonder that MOGAI did the same. But where labels like “bisexual”, “lesbian”, or “non-binary” describe the way a
group of people already relates to the world, MOGAI seemed to take it in the opposite direction, instead describing ways one could theoretically
relate to the world, whether or not anyone did. Where for the bisexual community, language
was the first step to achieving their goals, it seems that in the MOGAI
community, language was the goal. A vocabulary for every possible
experience of the self or the world. Real or not, marginalized or not. In pursuit of this lofty goal, new gender and
sexuality labels are coined online every single day - but basically none ever see widespread use.
Most fizzle out just as they’re born, never being much help to anyone. Since anyone can coin one of
these new labels, we'll never know how many there are - but that’s not for lack of trying. A handful
of blogs maintain glossaries of all the terms they’ve come across. I figured if a term found its
way into one of these glossaries, it was probably known enough to see at least some level of use,
and potentially fill some important lexical gap. To test my theory, I downloaded one of
these glossaries off Tumblr. Originally, I wanted to scan through the whole thing, but I
quickly realized it is 72 freaking pages long. So I resigned myself to the first four hundred
terms. I looked each one up on Google and Tumblr, to see how many of them had been used
at least once following their coinage. There’s some degree of subjectivity in
deciding what counts as a term getting “used”. I didn’t count posts where someone created a pride
flag for a new identity, since practically every new identity has one, even the ones that never get
used. There are also these posts that list dozens of obscure identities and name them all as “valid”
- this isn’t a discussion by any means, and I doubt the authors of these posts could even define
all of them, so I’m not counting these either. Other than that, I was pretty permissive with my
methodology. If anyone had made fan art about a label or its flag, I counted the label as
being used. If someone created a headcanon of a fictional character that included a label, I
counted that too. Hell, if I could find even one person identifying with a given label, I counted
it. I wasn’t looking to see how many of the 400 words had caught on in the mainstream - it was
quickly clear none had - but instead, how many were used in a way that made me think they were
useful, even a little bit, even to one person. Once I had finished, here’s what I found. Of the 400 terms I looked at, only 130 had been
used following their coinage, or about 32 percent. That’s more than two thirds of these supposedly
necessary labels that not a single person ever discussed or publicly identified with.
You have to wonder how useful a label is, if even its creator never once speaks of it again!
So why did so many terms coined in the MOGAI community fizzle out? Well, I noticed a
couple trends that could explain this. First off, many labels are defined in super
abstract ways that make them almost impossible to nail down. For example, Coigender is defined
as “a gender that feels as if it is on mute". What does that mean, exactly? How do
I know if that describes me? I have a million ideas for what a “muted gender”
could be, and it's potentially interesting, but if a person sees this in their feed, they're
not gonna know whether it describes them. I also notice that over the years, multiple labels
have been coined to describe the exact same thing. Since a new MOGAI label rarely picks up steam,
nobody learns it, and it dies out. Then, somewhere down the line, someone is looking to
describe the same feeling, and coins their own term, since they don’t know the existing one.
That one dies out too, rinse, wash, repeat. It's unfortunate, because it means that
potentially useful ideas - ones described independently by many people - become fragmented
beyond repair. When someone goes searching for a label to describe themselves, they sometimes
find three or four words that mean the exact same thing - which is just confusing, and kills
the chance of a coherent community emerging. And even more confusing, I found MOGAI labels that
mean the same thing as words we already had. The word “comgender” is described as something that
possesses a gender, so the opposite of “agender”. but we already have a word for that - it’s
“gendered”. It's not a new word. And to my eye, the terms "maloi", “wergender” and “mingender”
all just mean “male” or “male-aligned”, with no asterisk. Perfect synonyms for well-established
language. Why they thought it necessary to do this; your guess is as good as mine.
It’s normal for online communities to be decentralized, but rarely have I
come across one that’s so disorganized. The whole community was built on validating every
member’s thoughts and feelings equally, so they wound up with no standards across the board, no
common goals. Anything is valid, anything goes. On the surface, that sounds
egalitarian and welcoming. But I wonder if that kind of environment
can't come with a certain risk? To reiterate the usefulness of labels: they serve
as assertions of identity. When I call myself a lesbian, I’m saying I don’t have to date men to
have value. When I call myself a trans woman, I’m saying it’s possible for me to be a woman,
despite having been assigned male at birth. And as I’ve shown you, MOGAI
has words for practically every conceivable experience of gender and sexuality. Is it possible, then, that labelling
everything also tacitly VALIDATES… everything? I'm not saying we should tell people their
genders are stupid and fake. What I'm saying is that growing up queer or trans entails a lot
of confusion, repression, denial. Digging through all that to unearth your true feelings is a
journey that often takes years - I know mine did. it’s only natural that when you’re beginning
to question your gender or sexuality, what you’re feeling often isn’t quite right, because you’re missing information. You’ve
just started learning about yourself. I think giving a name to a feeling someone has
at the very beginning of that journey is risky. Let’s take, for example, this
Tumblr post dated to October 2017. “I am AFAB, and I definitely feel like my
gender is female, but I don't think I'm cis. I feel dysphoria like I'm
supposed to have an AMAB body, yet I want to present as a female. What is this?”
Here, we see an anonymous user express what I think is pretty clear gender dysphoria, cloaked
beneath a couple layers of confusion. And when you’re just starting to figure yourself out, it’s
normal for your feelings to contradict like this. This post could be a jumping-off
point for tons of good questions to help this person figure themselves out:
“what about my current body is bothering me?”, or “what appeals to me about having a male body?”. But the blogger doesn’t encourage anon to ask
these questions, or any other questions for that matter. Instead, they tell anon that
it’s problematic to desire an “AMAB body”, and then offer fourteen different
gender labels as alternatives. Most of these gender labels are vague and
basically describe an experience of gender that’s confusing, or contradictory. And
I’m just wondering… who does this help? To slap a label on your confusion and resolve not
to dig deeper. For a community that supposedly values self-discovery, MOGAI strikes me as
uniquely incurious about what lies beneath. I find this post especially troubling because,
years ago, this easily could’ve been me! I spent months thinking I didn’t “deserve” to be a
girl, trying to settle somewhere in the middle, even though I knew it wasn’t quite right.
Accepting yourself as trans is complicated, and lengthy, and terrifying. It can upend your whole
life. But I mean, I also think it's worth it, so I’m glad nobody validated the dread I felt in
those early stages. If someone had told me back then, “Oh, you're kind of a boy, but kind of
miserable as a boy? You’re just skoliogender!” I might have believed them. It could’ve lead me
down entirely the wrong path. And this isn’t a question of binary trans people versus non-binary
people, this approach hurts people of all genders, because it encourages us to stick a name on our
confusion instead of trying to work through it. I found tons of other terms like this:
“Coexta”, a person who has an inconsistent relationship with gender, and
can’t describe their gender. “Blurifluid”, a gender that is
so vague you can’t figure it out. “Shellgender”, a gender that is hollow and unfelt. I think if a gender is hollow and unfelt to you, it’s probably just not your gender.
And that’s fine! You’re allowed! Each and every one of these is
a valid experience of gender… but none of them are, in themselves, a gender.
I think they’re just different ways to say you’re working through your shit, and
looking for language to describe yourself. And since the internet loves nothing more than
assuming the worst of "binary trans women" - You see my hair! Come on! I want to be really clear here: I think
the people who describe themselves this way are telling the truth about themselves,
or at least trying to. This isn’t a question of people clinging onto queer labels for
attention, or to be trendy. I think they’re just looking to understand themselves,
maybe for the first time in their lives. I think there’s another reason such
hyper-specific labelling often fails. It assumes it’s possible to break ourselves
down into clearly delineated and infinitely specific categories, in a way
that just doesn’t work offline. Take, for instance, “Juxera: a gender
that is strongly connected to femininity, but in a different way than women are connected
to femininity.” This identity implies that women are connected to femininity in one,
singular way that’s essential to womanhood, but I don’t think that even exists. Being
a woman means hundreds of different things, depending who you ask, and two people can
be women without having anything in common. I feel like I’m hitting a wall. Honestly,
I may be asking the wrong questions here. Sure, their framework doesn’t hold up in real
life, but is it even trying to? Maybe not. The MOGAI world is largely
disinterested with meatspace, because most of the MOGAI community
doesn’t navigate queer life offline. And that's for one very good reason. The MOGAI community always skewed very young.
I spoke to a friend who told me she got involved at age twelve, and that seems pretty
average - I’m sure some got in even younger. MOGAI was a movement composed mostly of
teenagers, and it’s not hard to tell. What can its demographics tell us about the
community’s structure and its goals, though? First off, I think it explains the heavy emphasis
on validation. Most young queer people have yet to deal with structural oppression like housing
and employment discrimination, but chances are, they have dealt with invalidation and shame on a
personal level. Invalidation starts early in life, and it’s easier to spot than the structural stuff,
so it forms many young people’s conception of what discrimination is. I think that’s why so
much MOGAI discourse is about how identities are valid, and not about the various challenges
of actually living with those identities. Most people in the MOGAI community have relatively
little lived experience as openly queer. This also reflects in the endless churning
of the discourse machine. Constant infighting about issues that seem simple on paper, or
in posts. The same arguments happen over and over - “are asexuals part of the community?”
“who gets to call themselves a lesbian?” No progress is ever made,
no consensus ever reached. Spending time in offline communities, especially among people who came out years or
decades before you, you realize these issues are much more nuanced than you thought - well,
that, or you realize they don’t matter at all. With lived experience comes the lesson that life
is frequently complicated and tough to pin down. But for many young people, pinning yourself
down is a necessary first step, just to get a handle on your feelings. It’s unsurprising, then,
that the MOGAI world widely understands gender and sexuality as innate, essential to one’s
being, as opposed to social or performative. I forgot to finish this thought, so I'll do
it now. Since gender is understood as innate, any questioning of someone's gender label is seen
as an attack on their very selves. I think that's why it's so gauche to criticize MOGAI labels,
even the ones that don't make much sense. Of course you’re not gonna think gender is
performative if you haven’t had the chance to perform yours yet! I mean, I had to accept that I
was a woman well before I started doing womanhood every day. That moment of contradiction
is a necessary first step. And we need spaces like this, for figuring out your gender
abstractly, before you go forth and embody it. I think it’s inevitable that spaces like
these will be a little immaterial sometimes. Hopefully, I’ve established that the MOGAI
movement was led by confused young people, looking to understand themselves in a way
that felt easily conceivable and safe, if extremely online. Focused less on material
gains, or legibility to a non-queer public, and more on creating a validating
community for themselves. The question that arises then is…
why was everyone so angry at them? KALVIN GARRAH: So today, we're going to
be taking to Tumblr, and we're gonna be exploring the world of lots of
cool genders that I'm sure all of us will never fucking identify
as, because we're not crazy people. STORM RYAN: If you've never heard of
MOGAI, you're in for a fucking treat. BLAIRE WHITE: So today, we are
reacting to cringey trans TikToks. Now, I just downloaded TikTok. There's a lot
of cringe on this app - specifically LGBT, trans cringe. Like, it's on a whole other level. We should acknowledge the elephant in the
room here. MOGAI-inspired cringe content is, and always has been, bigger than the MOGAI
movement itself. In fact, without cringe content coming to the forefront this decade, I think
MOGAI would’ve lived and died in obscurity. Instead, thanks to a new
generation of YouTube grifters, it’s now socially acceptable to point and laugh
whenever a young person is proudly queer online. Which is really just great.
This shit is everywhere. If you're not familiar with anti-trans cringe,
keep it that way. You will watch it and leave a less compassionate person. Instead, let me give
you the rundown. We start with some queer person, who's usually young, passionately
expressing themselves, taking up space. TIKTOKER: Well, I am one hundred percent man!
And this man has got something to say to you... If they're embarrassing, it's in the same way
as old Facebook statuses from high school: very sincere, not so self-aware, ultimately
kind of endearing. These moments are common in early transition regardless of age;
they call it "second puberty" for a reason. Once we've seen enough, the host - who
is most likely also trans - will rip in, claiming "people like this" are
what's wrong with the queer community. STORM RYAN: You literally are making real trans
people and real fucking gay people - real queer people in general - look fucking nuts.
You MOGAI motherfuckers are fucking weird. Conveniently ignoring the
fact that "people like this" are young, and without any power to speak of. STORM RYAN (reading): "No discourse on this
post please, I am a minor and panic easily." Then don't say stupid shit online! They'll argue that vocally trans
people who reject assimilation are making us normal trans people look
bad. How do they make us look bad? Well, the host theorizes that these
people are acting out for attention: BLAIRE WHITE: They don't feel dysphoria, but they want to be included in the
trans community, and they want all the attention, and what they perceive as the
positive things of being in the community. That some of them want to be
trans because it's trendy, or because it's a sexual fantasy of theirs. KALVIN GARRAH: That's a fetish. That's a fetish! These videos exist to conceive of an other:
the trans people unwilling or unable to conform to gender roles, those deemed too unsightly to
deserve respect or healthcare. These arguments are not good faith, and their goal isn't to improve
the LGBT community - if it was, you'd see a lot more videos like this one, trying to understand
where the other side is coming from, and maybe push back on their faulty reasoning. Nobody has
made that video yet, which is why I'm here today. But no. Instead, they work in pursuit
of some assimilationist pipe dream. Trying to win acceptance for some trans
people by disavowing the rest of us. BLAIRE WHITE: Is this what LGBT
is to the rest of the world? I feel like I'm looking at
this through the eyes of general society, how they view all of us. Yeah,
no wonder everyone thinks we're fucking annoying. This is nothing new; we’ve been hearing these same
arguments for at least 40 years. Anti-MOGAI cringe content is just the latest repackaging of LGBT
respectability politics. The acceptably trans “us” vs the disgusting, unworthy “them” is an easily
digestible narrative. It allows the cis viewer to accept some trans people, and feel good about
that, without challenging any of their baseline ideas on gender - after all, these YouTubers
argue that being trans is a medical condition to be cured, not accommodated! It gives the viewer
permission to make fun of queer people without shame - which is apparently something a lot of
people still want to do. Which is great. This anti-PC veneer has helped respectability politics
spread far and wide, to the point where anti-MOGAI content is basically MOGAI’s whole legacy. If
your average person knows anything about, say, neopronouns, it's almost certainly what they
heard from Kalvin Garrah or someone like him. If anything in this video has stakes,
it’s these grifters and their constant pushing of transmedicalism: the idea that
every trans person has gender dysphoria, that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and
that anyone who claims to be trans without it is either lying or delusional. Transmedicalism isn't
one of those frivolous online discourse terms; it predates social media and has very real
consequences. Its ends are to demonize non-binary people and anyone who doesn’t take hormones,
to make medical transition much more difficult, and to make social transition more restrictive.
Unlike MOGAI, it's not a movement without goals. Transmedicalists consider themselves the arbiters
of who is and isn't a trans person, a distinction that is easy to draw on paper, - especially if
you're willing to lie - but impossible to draw in real life. So when anti-MOGAI types are
confronted with the messy reality of gender, who does and doesn't count as a real trans person
can change at a moment’s notice. Therefore, calling them “anti-MOGAI” is incomplete.
Sure, that's their jumping-off point, and that's what gets them a lot of attention.
But what they really oppose is unashamed expression of queerness. They will come
down on any trans person they can depict as too brash, or too open-minded,
or too legibly trans. Whether their target experiences gender dysphoria or seeks
medical transition is entirely irrelevant. BLAIRE WHITE: When I asked people to call me she, I made sure I didn't have facial
hair. I made sure I shaved my face. KALVIN GARRAH: I personally,
in my heart of hearts, can't look at that and be like, "that's a woman"! My next guest knows that all too well. Though they
weren't part of the MOGAI scene on Tumblr - in fact, they asked me what exactly it was -
they've become the posterchild for everything that's supposedly wrong with the trans community.
YouTubers have targeted them for years with bad faith arguments about their gender expression, and
their ideas about not treating trans identity as a problem to be fixed. because they have so
much first-hand experience here, I thought they could offer a helpful perspective on where
this trend began, and where we can go from here. MILO STEWART: Hello! Thanks for having me! LILY: Thank you for doing this!
Would you mind introducing yourself, and a little bit about what you do? MILO: Yeah, oh my gosh. My name is
Milo Stewart, I use they/them pronouns. I don't know, I'm a YouTuber TM. LILY: I'm expecting most of my audience will
recognize you already - be it through the overlap in our audiences, or you being a
fairly visible trans person on the internet. MILO: That's one way to put it. LILY: Can I ask you how that came
to be? How you kind of became such a visible representative of the
trans community this past decade? MILO: Yeah! I really don't like saying
"representative", because I think people who find me online sometimes have a visceral reaction,
thinking of me as their representative, when they don't think I match up with their experiences.
I've just always been this queer person online, but didn't really have a lot of viewership until
I was in a video with Ash Hardell when I was 15. When I was kind of - you know, in the point of my
life where I was on Tumblr, and I was a teenager coming into my political views. So I thought just
having opinions was the most radical thing. So then I got well-known for a couple videos in 2016,
one in which I poorly explained implicit biases and called all white people racist. And I
think that's how most people came to see me. Originally, my videos were just responded
to by... I don't know, like, some teenage boy with the same amount of subscribers as me,
being like "feminists bad!" I was like, a nobody on YouTube before that happened. One person
responded to me, and then it just went on, that got recommended further and further to
the right. Videos that are very transphobic. There's still videos that are public on
YouTube that are telling me to kill myself! LILY: Oh, you're fucking kidding me. MILO: we went from, like - I don't know, a
PG-13 kind of offensive video to, like, that. LILY: Why do you think people
have taken you, specifically, as a representative of the whole community?
Why do you think they use you as their person? MILO: Ugh, yeah. I wish it was easier to
understand that perspective, because I really don't think it's a super logical thing. The
people who are our representation, I think still have a lot of pressure on them because there's so
few of us. But I think it's like, very strange, the difference between celebrities or actors
- who are going out there specifically because they're seeking a very public career -
that was very different from my experience, being a teenager who was making videos that
would get viewed by, you know, a couple thousand people. I get comments that are like,
"If you're a public figure who's trans, you have to represent the community, and you
have a responsibility to put out a good image". LILY: That feels kind of silly, because you didn't ask to become a public figure. That
just happened, if I'm not mistaken. MILO: Yeah. Yeah! And it's kind of, like, circular
that that upset - people being mad at the fact that I'm creating that representation is
kind of what's given me representation. Or given me a platform. LILY: I notice that a lot of the people
vocally disavowing certain facets of the trans community - like people who may be gender
non-conforming or non-binary - I notice a lot of those people are, themselves, trans. And
there's this attempt to distance themselves from the rest of the community. What do
you think they hope to gain from that? MILO: I think there's a pretty big
distinction between the needs of people who are wanting to medically transition, and the
needs of people who - not that they don't want to medically transition, but that isn't as much of a
goal for them. It's kind of a historical pattern in the trans community that trans people
who are wanting to medically transition have given into cis narratives of trans people
in order to access transition. That then, we haven't ever vocally created narratives
for ourselves. So many of the ideas we have, in the mainstream media, of what it means
to be trans come out of this really old, inaccurate narrative. We haven't ever really
vocally challenged that narrative in psychology, in a way that really significantly changes
the structure of how trans bodies, and trans identities, are perceived. Trans depathologization
is saying, "being trans is not a mental illness". LILY: I obviously don't buy the narrative that
I'm trans because I was born in the wrong body, or there's something wrong with my
brain. But when someone asks me, "Why are you a woman?" I have no idea. I don't
know how to begin to answer that question. MILO: Yeah! Yeah. I don't know either. I mean, I
guess that's why I'm non-binary, cause I'm like, "You know what? I don't fucking get it,
so I'm just gonna say I don't give a shit. But also, I want a body that
looks like this, this, and that". LILY: I think it's so silly
when people come for, like, a 13 year-old calling themselves "stargender"
or whatever. Like, that is a literal child. MILO: Yeah. LILY: And they're gonna figure it out!
It's all good. I just feel like any risk that could possibly pose is so outweighed by
calling those people out and mocking them. MILO: That can be an extremely taxing experience,
but also, it could make someone go back into the closet, or change how someone relates
to the community! I'm just like - really, could we just be having different conversations
about this? Or having it in a more respectful, conversational manner? I don't know. LILY: Absolutely. How do you think - this is
a big one - how do you think we can build, from there, a community that is more
accepting, and more inclusive to everyone? MILO: Yeah, that's big. I don't think
I have the answer to that, because I think we need more than one person's voice, we
need a collective community response to determine what that alternative to pathologization
is. I guess I can only say what has been really revelatory to me is, like, just doing the
research and figuring out, "why is it that we have this narrative?" Psychology kind of recreates
this divide that exists in the trans community. You know, if we identify that institution as the
cause of that rift, we can see there's reason for us to come together in opposition to that. And to
work for access and care for the entire community. LILY: Thanks again! MILO: Yeah! Have a nice rest of your day. LILY: You too. See ya! This talk with Milo really helped
me put things into perspective. Even if we’ve always been here, the
foundation for the Western LGBT community has only really been laid in the past 50
years. The trans community, especially, is still forming. Openly trans people skew young,
which has made the shape of trans space itself kind of adolescent. But thankfully, this means
all of us get a say in what it’ll grow into. We have a long way to go, and I don’t think
any of our current methods are really equipped for the fight ahead - not the MOGAI approach and
certainly not the assimilationist one. We’ll need perspectives from trans people of all walks of
life, not just young people with internet access. For what it’s worth, my take is that we
should look to the queer people before us, and take notes from their struggle, instead
of trying to invent a whole new approach from scratch - maybe MOGAI’s single biggest mistake.
I mean, generations of queer people have fought tooth and nail to be considered on their own
terms, to be documented, to be remembered. Do we think we don't have to do the same thing?
Are we really that arrogant? History doesn't just fall into place, it's not just an honest
documentation of everything that happened. It has to be written, and we should be involved in
that process. If we want a hand in writing our own history, it’ll take a lot more than these
insular communities uninterested in practical change, it’ll take ground game. The new generation
of openly LGBT people is the largest the world has ever seen, and we have a lot of power we
can harness. Personally, I'd like to see that power go to food programs, housing programs,
clinics and event spaces. I mean, really, the possibilities are endless. These resources already
exist in many cities, but more participation would definitely help. I think it would help us move
past the nebulous goal of “validation” and onto some more practical solutions. It would also help
us collectively log off a bit. And on that note - I’m not here to knock the internet, right?.
Without it, I don't know where I would be. So many of us would be confused,
and isolated from our people. But I wish we’d stop treating it like
it’s everything; posts are just words, they’re not action. And maybe they are the first
step in today’s fight for liberation, but they’re not the only step or the most important one.
I'm feeling a little stupid, just sitting here. My point is: with the internet
as impossibly vast as it is, almost any post you make will eventually be
forgotten. Any notion you have of making a change - making a mark - is hopeless if it’s not
grounded in action, in demands, in solidarity. So, for everyone who considers themselves
socially conscious - myself included - I have a question. If the internet were to just
disappear tomorrow, and never come back... What would you have to show for
all your work? Who did you help? Cause you can name millions of
new genders. You can imagine new and ideal worlds from the comfort of
your apartment. And that’s all fun and good. But when people forget - and
they will - will it still matter?
Nice video. It is important that people in the MOGAI community were mostly young; people have been too harsh on them considering that (and too harsh period).
I want to make a point, though, that you can be a transmedicalist inclusive of nonbinary people. I consider myself a nonbinary transmedicalist. I think that keeping transgender identities medicalized gives people an ethical incentive to respect them. People need to understand that these feelings are involuntary so they'll want to accomodate trans people. People should be free to reject strange opinions; when transgenderness isn't associated with involuntary feelings, it looks like a radical social movement trying to force weird opinions on others.
Hey OP, sorry the response here was so shitty. I really enjoyed your video and it gave me a much-needed new perspective on the mid-2010s Tumblr scene. Seeing the way the rest of this sub responded, I've concluded it's time for me to remove this one from my subscriptions.
I hope you have a lovely day!