Response to Matt Taibbi's "Thanksgiving is Awesome"

Literally the response I wrote in the comments today, plus more

I thought it was good enough to repost here, with just a single minor correction and some notes on my reasons for writing parts of it.

But in order to understand what I’m talking about, you should read Matt’s article first.

Once you’ve read that, you’ll be ready to read what’s coming up. Strap yourselves in, everybody! Here it is:

Even after I heard what Columbus actually did, I didn't start to hate Thanksgiving or see it as a celebration of genocide. I asked myself "Did I do any of that? No. Did anyone at this table do any of that? No. Is this food good? Yes, turns out it is. I'm gonna eat it and maybe talk about stuff I'm thankful for later."

Another example of the pendulum swinging too far in the one direction first and then swinging too far in the opposite direction later. *Sometimes*, not regarding every last thing in the world but just sometimes, it's best to strike a balance.

And speaking of that, when I read "...he or she is able to write..." I had the same reaction I always have when I read "he or she" these days, which is that I brace myself for people going in on the writer and saying "Are you saying there are only two genders?!!! How dare you, you fucking TRANSPHOBE! Diiiieeee!" To be fair, I haven't ever seen anyone react this way to "he or she", but it's not hard to imagine the overly woke crowd taking it as an implication that there are only shes and hes in the world and flipping their shit, as they're known to do.

Finally, Vonnegut's "Breakfast Of Champions" (where the "sea pirate" line comes from) is still a very good book IMHO. I don't know how it compares to Zinn's book, but when I read Kurt's description of the country and how it came to be, it didn't make me feel guilty. Rather I thought "Oh yeah, what they did to Native Americans was horrible, and we're still divided into haves and have-nots, and we're still an imperialistic nation that kills people, and so on..." (That's a Vonnegut-ism I find myself using: "...and so on.") "...but my hands have no blood on them, I'm not taking money out of anyone's pocket, and I want the people who do the bad things to stop."

If anything, I would say that Vonnegut made me feel more like the kind of person you describe in "Hate, Inc", Matt. I.e., not like "I'm a horrible person because I'm possibly descended from horrible people who did horrible things" but more like "Damn, all these horrible things people did, and do! Good thing I'm not one of them, that instead I'm one of the good ones."

Kind of like how mainstream media writes stuff in the vein of "Evil People Did A Bad Thing. Reactions From Sensible Readers Like You."

I know that taking pride in simply not being a war criminal or anything is kind of silly since it requires so little effort to not be one, and I don't think Kurt intended to puff up anyone's ego or get people excessively outraged for personal gain the way mainstream media does. But that was indeed how reading it made me feel.

(That’s the end of the comment. And now it’s time for me to add the “more” mentioned in the title…)

I want to talk some more about how I kind of expect certain trans people—not all of them or most, but a certain subset of trans people that includes those who seem unable to ever just chill and assume no insult or other type of harm was intended—to react to “he and she.” There are at least two trans people who are mutuals of mine on Twitter and I don’t want them to feel like I’m talking about them here.

I doubt that one of them particularly minds the phrase, and I’m certain the other one doesn’t. And I’m sure people like Lilith Lovett (Twitter-famous trans woman who’s not only not overly woke, but she’s actually to the right of me on social issues from what I’ve seen, to the point where sometimes I’ve been mad at her) don’t care.

But I can easily see others taking that phrase as an implication that there are just the two genders mentioned, that it’s intentionally excluding non-binary people and…okay, I can’t think of a fourth gender, unless there are a lot of different degrees of non-binary. I’m sorry, I’m not an expert on this stuff.

Well anyway, back when I still had faith in Bernie and he said “he and she” or “him or her” or something like that in a speech, I was ready for trans Twitter to go in on him for it. I didn’t see any signs of that, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Because no matter how much my opinion of Bernie Sanders diminishes, I will never believe that he was thinking “Heh heh heh, I love saying things like that to troll those stupid trans jerkasses.”

That wasn’t what Bernie wanted to do, and it’s not what most people who grew up saying “he or she” want to do.

So the next question that perhaps should be asked, I suppose, is whether saying “she and he” is a bad habit people should get out of.

I don’t think it is, at least not yet, and to explain why I would like to pose this question to anybody who is trans and also has been alive for a couple of decades at least:

“Did you all grow up hearing people say ‘he and she’, get used to hearing it, say it yourself either before you figured out you were trans or afterward? Or have you known you were trans since you were able to understand spoken language and, because of that knowledge, has it grated on you every time you’ve heard ‘she and he’ or ‘his and hers’ or whatever? Did you always think ‘They’re saying there are only those two genders and I HATE that, but I’m going to bite my tongue because I don’t want to make a scene or have people think I’m weird’ whenever you heard somebody say that?”

Any answers I may get may prove the following guess wrong. But here’s my guess: the vast majority of people who are trans or non-binary have gotten used to hearing it and don’t mind it.

And if most people don’t mind it, there’s no reason to change it.

Now, you might have noticed that I said I didn’t think it was a habit that needed to be broken “yet”, so I’ll elaborate on that…

Today, unless I’ve missed that guess above, most trans people couldn’t care less.

But a couple of decades from now, who knows? Maybe at that point the next generation of people (if the race lasts that long) will have grown up being taught that there are multiple genders, asking why anybody still says “she and he”, and a majority will demand that it stop.

Similar to how in the 1960s the word “negro” was so common that everybody, of all races, was used to it. To the point that Martin Luther King of all people said “…But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…” As you can see by reading both of those sentences, he wasn’t using it in a way intended to tear down his own race. He was using it to refer to his own race, because the term “African-American” hadn’t been invented yet.

Or how people used to say “Oriental” without them or anybody who heard it batting an eye, including Asians, but later that word became unacceptable as well and was replaced by “Asian.”

Those adjustments weren’t much trouble for me to make; I may not be a spring chicken, but I’m still young enough that I never got into the habit of saying “Negro” or “Oriental”, and so when I first heard “we’re saying ‘African-American’ and ‘Asian’ now” I was like “Oh, okay.” It was like if I’d had a bicycle that I’d never ridden before or developed any attachment to, and one day it was given away and replaced by a different bike. I wouldn’t miss the old one, and I’d be fine with the new one if I ever felt like going for a ride.

“He and she” is a bike I’ve logged many, many miles on, though. I would prefer it if I weren’t expected to keep on correcting myself to say “she and he and they” in years to come. But if not doing that is going to make people upset and if saying two more little words keeps them from getting upset, then I guess I can do it. Just so long as additional pronouns don’t keep getting added until it’s impossible to say all of it without stopping to take a breath.