Centering Cis Allies over Trans Women again
The last few days there’s been a controversy on Twitter that brings up an issue in the trans community. How do we view our allies?
The controversy centered around author Amanda Jette Knox, who has written about her trans family, and maintained a large Twitter following while combating people’s transphobia relating to her child’s transition.
It’s a touchy topic. By all accounts Jette Knox is loud and proud but at what point does that voice drown out the community that she supports?
It reminded me of a time when I was in improv class at iO and one of my classmates told a story of how their sibling transitioned. It was met with support from classmates. Going forward after that I told a story about how I set off the body scanner at the TSA because my body isn’t cis. I was met with silence.
When Gwen Benaway, a trans author, gave her criticism about this a flood of harassment happened from people that followed Jette Knox, which is weird but not unsurprising. Sometimes despite their best efforts cis allies look at us as a pet cause instead of dynamic human beings. When we respond back the mask comes off.
It’s a conditional love, these people will come into our community and love us because “we need it” but then when we try to help them they get upset. When we try to raise ourselves past being the “pity case” they were attracted to they get upset.
We need allies for sure but we also need those allies to listen. We need those allies to know that our lives are more about us surviving than whether they love us or not.
This happens often. This was at the center of Transparent. One of my biggest critiques of the first season was that it was more about how the transition took a toll on the family than about the trans character itself.
We live in a world where we’re constantly reminded of how our existence is negatively impacting the cis. I mean when I came out to my family it was far more about that than it was about me.
Going forward I hope a balance can be reached but it’s going to take some work from some allies to actually listen.