Why are Trans Rights Advocates suddenly repeating "It costs you nothing" as if they're reading it off a script?

[Durgasarrow]

Just that. I have been finding this phrase increasingly irritating. After it was used twice in another thread, I wrote,

"It costs you nothing" is an incredibly insulting and demeaning phrase. It devalues the opinions and feelings of the person to whom it is spoken. It is a chiding, superior, condescending turn of speech used to invalidate and dismiss another person's reality. It is also a phrase that is a dead giveaway that a trans rights advocate wants to tell women what they need to do and how they need to be controlled."

After that, two TRAS still used it in posts! Poster Erishkegalangcleg's brilliant riposte? "Is "it doesn't cost you anything" the new TWAW?"

Women are always the ones who pay.

”Well I'm still not buying it".

Liking that one.

I was just Googling around to see if I could find examples of where this obnoxious phrase came from. Here are some examples:

www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a24109933/transgender-women-are-women-transgender-men-are-men/

medium.com/gender-inclusivit/why-i-put-pronouns-on-my-email-signature-and-linkedin-profile-and-you-should-too-d3dc942c8743

www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-you-can-face-legal-consequences-for-not-using-a-transgender-person-s-pronouns

It's so robotic! All of these feel as if they're been written by the same Central Committee!

Communique from Gender Central? Whoever is writing these doesn't have the best propaganda skillz.

I have used this phrase with my daughter when I or others ask her if she wants something and she says "Nah, I'm good" and I ask her to add "But thank you for asking", I've said it doesn't cost her anything to use some manners. Am I guilty of asking her to 'be nice'?
It feels like the TRAs are so adept at turning the language of social norms to suit their own agenda. It is so clever.

My rights are not nothing.

It is a standard phrase in questionable marketing as well as popular with con artists and grifters since the early 1800s.

Here are some more examples:
twitter.com/dylanmarron/status/1054152078195453952?lang=en

Dylan Marron
@dylanmarron
Hello fellow cis (non-trans) people. Important reminder that no one is asking for you to be trans, but simply for you to accept that some folks are. And that costs you literally nothing.
7:26 PM · Oct 21, 2018·Twitter for iPhone
15.4K
Retweets
64.4K
Likes

twitter.com/kiwinerd/status/1187876133091577857

Be good to trans people. It costs you nothing. And it might make the difference between us being able to survive or not, or thrive or not.
😌
7:38 PM · Oct 25, 2019

And here's one where Ricky Gervais got in trouble because he didn't cost Jessica Yaniv nothing when Jessica said Jessica wanted to go to the gyno!
vt.co/entertainment/celebrity/ricky-gervais-slams-trans-woman-after-she-was-denied-service-at-a-gynecologist/

"It costs you nothing"

Still a ripoff.

IIRC it has cost some women everything they had, including their lives.

It costs me truth and personal integrity.

I have always valued those more than money.

Interesting that A Man For All Seasons is being quoted. Until a couple of years ago, I found it very difficult to comprehend why people at that time were prepared to die for their beliefs. I always thought, why didn’t you just tell them what they needed to hear to leave you alone, and quietly believe what you believed? But now I get it. I’m not attempting to say I’d be able to face up to being tortured on a rack over TWANW, but I have a better understanding of why they did what they did back then.

Good point doobigetta. Like you, I’m not sure I would be brave enough to publicly cleave to my beliefs at any cost, but I have huge admiration for those who do.

It also struck me while typing the first sentence that the costs - to me - of speaking out, are high because I have children to consider and need my job.

Costs are always higher for people who put their families first, and that’s usually women.

Re: the Dylan tweet above, they may not be asking me to be trans, but they are asking me to have a gender, something I utterly reject as an enforced concept. Being made to have a gender is enforced femininity, and all its associated oppressions. Something that feminism is constantly pushing back against. Having to be recognised by gender instead of sex costs me all my rights and fundamental ontology as a woman.

@BahHumbygge

In a nutshell 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Quite happy to be kind an accept that some people are trans
Quite happy to help them live full happy supported lives

Not actually sure that they don't actually have a hidden sublist of things that we must accept as a direct result of that statement though!

Is this the new MANtra?

I saw A.Challenor on Newsnight and Challenor said "Some people are trans, get over it."
We cringed.

The old adage that if you say something enough then people believe it is very 1984.

However, reciting slogans and hashtags won't brainwash us. It won't change material reality or force people to believe.

"Jesus walked on water" (oh, OK then, must be true as it's written in a book and everything)

"The Earth is flat" (well they killed Galileo for knowing the Earth rotated around the Sun, so this must chime true)

TWAW #NoDebate

Challenor said "Some people are trans, get over it."

Half the human race is female, get over it.

Female people have sex based rights, get over it.

Lesbians are homosexual women, get over it.

It's offensive to appropriate gay slogans and mis-use them trying to ride on their coattails, get over it.

No one has the faintest problem with anyone being trans; it's the reconstructing dodgy reality, shitting all over female people's rights and appropriating all their provisions, excluding some females from society altogether, loosening safeguarding protections on women and children for the benefit of males, and the totalitarian privilege being enforced in law over anyone not holding these interesting faith based beliefs that's the issue.

Some people are totalitarian nutcases and have stolen your rights and right to protest; get over it..... not really going to win hearts and minds, is it?

I don't have the faintest problem with anyone calling themselves "trans" as long as it doesn't affect anyone else negatively - but I do think that is you do not think that TWAW and TMAM, which I don't, then the concept of "trans" itself needs to be questioned.

I don't want trans people "not to exist" but I do think that it makes no sense for the concept of "trans" to exist. Some detransitioners have pointed this out too.

If you can't change sex, then what is the "trans", what is transformed or transitioned? The only thing that's changing is "gender" and gender is a fluid concept anyway that changes through time and space and everyone does in their own way anyway. I believe everyone male and female should be able to wear whatever they like and present however they like (within bounds of decency and law) without their sex having to come into question (like we did in the 80s).

There is nothing "trans" about that, any more than you are "transmusical" for liking music some other group of people typically like, or "transgastronimcal" for liking thai food when you are a black ugandan or something. "Transgender" only exists because of an idiotic misinterpretation of gender as fixed categories - something feminists have been pointing out isn't true for decades.

The only exception is the old fashioned transexual who has transformed all their body parts. I still don't think it makes them the opposite sex but it could be called "transexual".

I do understand people want to call themselves trans but I can't see how it makes any sense. If/when society ever fully gets rid of gender, except as a cultural selection box that's available to everyone, no one would need to be transgender.

sorry misspelled transsexual...

It doesn’t cost you anything.
How do you know that?

It costs you nothing.
It has an impact on the sex pay gap statistics so it does actually cost me something. Representation.

I don't understand why this would be difficult to respond to.

What is at stake is women's rights. What could be more important? How can women's rights be regarded as 'nothing'?

It says a lot about the speaker if they view women's rights as 'nothing'. Either that, or they are new to the debate and unaware of the clash of trans rights with pre-existing women's rights, in which case they shouldn't be talking.

If they want to see examples of people whose standing up for women's rights have clearly cost them a lot, tell them to read Glinner's pieces today in the Times and the Mail, and look at the cases of Maya Forstater, Harry Miller etc.

The idea that women - and those who support women's rights - have 'nothing' to lose in all this is ludicrous.