#johnthecuncan

[weiszklee]

Recently watched this JohntheDuncan video, and it gives some great insights into what I too see as a very real and very worrying trend, of queerphobia in general and lately transphobia specifically acting as a sort of uniting cause for many rightwing groups, from neo-Nazis to Evangelicals to radfems to zionists to garden-variety conservatives to liberal capitalist institutions.

And I too don't think this uneasy alliance is a coincidence, and I too don't think it's just strategic either. All these groups really do pursue transphobia for its own merits, so to say. Transphobia is right at home in all these disparate ideologies. And it's easy to find examples of people migrating from one of these to the other, already made acquainted via transphobia.

But I don't think Duncan's ultimate thesis here is correct, that all these different ideologies are mere offshoots of some nebulous but all-encompassing historical force of white-supremacist cishet-patriarchal colonialist capitalism. I just don't think reality works like that. If you widen your view that much, all you're left with being able to say is either untrue or trivial. The goals and the role that transphobia plays in these groups is just too different, and you lose all this important specificity if you try to paint such a huge universal throughline for all of them.

Different groups adopting similar narratives just doesn't actually tell you all that much about these groups. Some narratives are just so convincing or so present within wider society for random reasons, that it's easy to land on them independently. So I can't give too much credence to Duncan's presented evidence of the presence of narratives around infiltrators and so on.

Trans people themselves are very capable of producing these very narratives as well, see for example transmedicalists and queer inclusionists accusing each other of being infiltrating agents of the patriarchy. And no, I don't think these accusations are expressions of white-supremacist colonialist capitalist brainwashing or whatever. It's just a pattern of thought people tend to fall into sometimes, especially under stress. And it's a pattern often fostered and exploited in the process of radicalisation, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it so prominently and loudly repeated over and over by so many different groups. It doesn't mean much. It especially doesn't mean that all these groups grow from the same root.