someone sent me a question a while back about the arguments around including the asterisk after trans and for some reason tumblr won’t let me answer it so
- some non-binary people feel like it clarifies that they are being included
but
- it apparently emerged from an attempt to compromise with hbsers; ie, there are REAL transgender people, and then there’s the “trans* umbrella”, which is often defined so broadly that it includes cis crossdressers alongside non-binary trans people. afaik hbsers aren’t happy with this anyway but i have definitely seen the argument that “well, it’s okay to call yourself trans*, just don’t call yourself transgender” before
- some people feel like it force-teams a really broad group to the detriment of trans women (i’ve seen varying opinions on this so i don’t want to make a definitive statement as a dfab person, but generally the asterisk does seem much more popular with dfab people to the point of kind of being associated with a particularly dfab notion of non-binariness, possibly because a lot of non-binary dmab people also claim trans women identities? i’m a bad person to ask on this point but there were a couple excellent posts about this by trans women circulating recently)
- like i said above, it’s often used to include people who… aren’t trans, which renders it pretty meaningless in terms of talking about trans experiences
- cis people and dfab trans people sometimes use it inappropriately in a way that has the potential to degender trans women, eg trans*women, trans*misogyny, transwomen* (no, really)
- cis people will often actually CORRECT trans people who don’t use the asterisk as a way to show how gender-savvy they are, which is hilarious
- clueless cis people use “trans*” to be exactly as exclusive of non-binary people as “trans”; eg, i recently got a message asking me if i was “a mtf or ftm trans*”
- just generally it seems to be mostly superfluous at best and transmisogynist at worst and the fact that it has become such prominent feature in discourse about gender when most of the people who use it don’t actually know why they’re using it is suspect to me
- eta: a good post by biyuti on this
- eta again: i should clarify here that i think the asterisk itself probably came into existence to replace the gender/sexual after trans, but that “trans” alone achieves that same ambiguity and that the current conception of “trans*” as a separate and more inclusive term is what i’m talking about here
- eta for a third time: also it was popularized by straight cis dude sam killermann, the culprit behind “it’s pronounced metrosexual” whose other claims to fame include stealing the idea of the genderbread person from trans people and then copyrighting it and using it for his own profit
Wario has received a few questions about why Wario doesn’t use/stopped using the asterisk, hopefully this offers some clarification.
(Source: bufotoxin-blog)
