Quick Hit: Livejournal Fail
Posted on | April 19, 2010 | No Comments
Just because this sort of thing needs to be pointed out: Yesterday, on Sunday 18, the LJ “Writer’s Block” question was this piece of transphobic fail:
Regardless of your sexual identity/orientation, would you be upset if a long-term romantic partner neglected to tell you that s/he’d had a sex change operation before you met, and why?
Let us count the fail in this.
- “Neglected”. It is not any trans person’s duty to out themselves as trans.
- It’s called sex reassignment surgery. To call is “sex change” is suggesting that trans people’s gender identity is not valid without an operation; that a pre-op or non-op trans man, for example, is not “really” a man.
- The question is inviting cis people to engage in a moral discussion about trans people’s decisions and their gender validity, which is not theirs to define. Read: rag on about “deceitful” trans people. (It’s not even a moral question, it’s just about how much you hate trans people.)
- I know, tone argument, but the tone of the whole question seems to suggest it would be normal to react to transness negatively. You know how you get that “there’s nothing wrong with [less privileged group], they’re just people like us” speech from your parents and immediately know there must be something wrong with the [less privileged group]? Yeah.
Let me know if I missed any… I may have phrased my objections too softly, too. This question is really offensive.
But wait, there’s more! One can only assume someone complained, because soon enough it was changed into:
Would you be upset if a long-term partner confessed that s/he’d committed a serious crime before you met ? How do you think it would affect your relationship?
The threads for these two questions were not separated and cookies left the trans question visible to some people even after it was changed, leading to a confused thread of answers, some of which dealt with gender identity, others with crime.
The main fail of this was that LJ was thus conflating transness with crime.
To be fair, LJ did one thing right: take that original question down.
The fail continues in that LJ has so far not acknowledged or apologized for any of it.
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Post edited to add pictorial proof – beneath the cut.
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