The Pacific Standard published an article about guns owners that was mind boggling.
THE TRANS WOMEN TURNING TO FIREARMS FOR SURVIVAL
Okay…? More gays bought guns after Orlando. Gun ownership among women and minorities is going up too. Self defense is in. I guess the trans community wants in on this too.
More trans women are taking up arms than before to protect themselves.
Like I said
-But even the simple act of self-preservation can be deemed aggression to conservatives.
The fuck?
On November 7th, a progressive flood at the polls gave some on the political left hope for 2018: Communities across the nation elected trans women, refugees, immigrants, and others who have historically been shut out of the political process. But not all marginalized communities are hopeful, and even among those who are, survival is still imperative. Some progressive communities have responded to worries about their safety with a tactic that some on the left might find surprising, perhaps even counterproductive: They’re taking up arms.
At least they admit that Left leaning liberals are the ones that side balks at self defense.
Trans women are one such community. For some trans guns rights activists, arming trans women is a moral imperative in a society that routinely fails to protect them from systemic violence.
While I’m on the side of self defense, can we knock this “systematic violence” bullshit off. I covered this before with data from 2014. I now have 2016 numbers. The PS article links to this from The Human Rights Campaign, which said that there were 23 murders of trans women in 2016. The FBI estimates there were 17,250 homicides in the US in 2016. That means that 0.133% of homicides were of trans women. About 0.58% of the nation identifies as trans. If you assume that trans splits evenly on gender lines, that means that roughly 0.29% of the population is trans women. The numbers show that they are under represented in homicide statistics. There is no “systematic violence” that I can find.
Being transgender can be extremely dangerous, and trans people don’t view the social structures ostensibly intended to defend people from harm as safe for them—law enforcement, for example, has a record of abusing trans women and disbelieving trans women when they report crimes. This is particularly true for trans women of color, who are made doubly vulnerable by society, especially those in the sex industry.
This sounds a lot like the same anti-police social justice I hear from BLM. What concerns me the most about this paragraph is that it suggest that trans women, especially trans women of color, are disproportionately represented in the sex industry, which sounds a lot like a euphemism for prostitutes. That does not bode well for them for a lot of reasons. Generally when I think of mentally stable, law abiding citizens, I don’t think of hookers.
“I was so traumatized by guns by my 30s that it took three very patient queer gun instructors in a private living room to coach me through my first firearms training,” says Scout Tran-Caffee, a non-binary trans woman and multidisciplinary artist from Northern California.
I don’t want this person to have a gun. Sorry. Call me a monster, but “it took three very patient queer gun instructors in a private living room” is a sign that this person has some deep seeded problems.
Kayla Harris, an Oakland-based woman who started out with LGBT gun rights organization Pink Pistols before splitting away to form the Rouge Rifles with a colleague, has been a gun owner for a very long time. But it wasn’t until the election that she started exploring the possibility of supporting fellow LGBT people who wanted to learn more about guns. “After the [Pulse] shooting and after the election, I knew tons of people who were suddenly interested in guns who never had been before,” Harris says.
Like I said, more gays were buying guns after Orlando. Lets remember, for the sake of honesty, that Orlando was carried out by a radicalized Muslim inspired by ISIS. By the way, his wife knew about the attack beforehand.
Harris carried her interest in firearms through transition, and is a certified firearms instructor—one reason she pursued and maintained her certification was a desire to give back to her community. “Gun owners shouldn’t just default to the white guy who lives in Wisconsin or whatever,” she says. “That’s not the only person who should own guns. For disadvantaged and marginalized people, it equalizes force.”
Absolutely, yes. Also, Democrats take note.
Though Harris supports gun education and ownership for trans women who feel it’s a good fit for their needs, she does have a word of caution.
“If I as a trans woman ever shoot a right-wing fascist, the law is almost definitely not going to be on our side,” she comments, noting that law enforcement agencies have a long history of prosecuting marginalized people who fight back. While stand-your-ground laws may be a defense for white cis men, a fatal encounter could go very differently for a trans woman, and Harris has no illusions about the implications.
“When I teach a defense class, the point of the class is to kill someone,” Harris says. “If you’re a trans woman, the person you’re killing is likely to be someone society values more than you.”
God-fucking-damnit! I was liking Harris. Then she has to go all fucking Social Justice on us. Fist of all, “right wing fascist?” I really can’t find any news stories on Google about good, Christian, conservatives who go out and stomp trans people. The alt-right (which I’d argue aren’t really right wing, but I don’t want to get into a “no true Scotsman” debate right now), are not on anybody’s hit parade. So either Harris believes that all conservatives are fascist or the police and society side with the Charlottesville neo-Nazis.
Whether the National Rifle Association would step up in defense of a trans woman—especially a trans woman of color—who shoots and kills in self defense is an open question. When 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed by law enforcement in Minnesota, the NRA failed to condemn the incident, despite the fact that Castile had a conceal carry permit, something critics said may have played a role in his death.
Ah this again, the accusation that the NRA didn’t speak up about Castille case because he was black. The Washington Examiner reported that the NRA didn’t speak up on behalf of Castile because he was in possession of marijuana and wasn’t fully law abiding at the time, despite his CCW permit.
So would the NRA back a trans women who shot a white guy? I guess the answer is “it depends.” Are we talking about a law abiding trans women with a CCW who shoots somebody for trying to beat her up for being trans? Probably. If she is a trans hooker who shoots someone while walking the street, than probably not.
“I dream of how trans peoples’ daily lives could change if all our bullies came to assume that we were all jiu jitsu blackbelts or else had concealed carry licenses,” says Tran-Caffee, who also participates in martial arts training at Oakland’s Four Elements Fitness, where she’s worked to make the gym more LGBT-friendly.
I agree with the sentiment, but I am still concerned about her mental instability that required three coaches to overcome.
In the face of people who are afraid to leave their homes and be themselves because they fear physical assault that might be difficult to stop with the use of non-lethal means, the fight over gun control gets much more complicated, and perhaps it should. The lack of nuance in conversations about what form gun control should take, and what the founders intended with the Second Amendment, may do a disservice to both sides.
What the fuck does that mean? Trans people fear violence for who they are, so they want to carry guns. Welcome to the club. I agree that less lethal force has its limits, which is why guns are king (I seem to remember a quote about Sam Colt making them equal). Then this pivots to “more nuanced conversation about gun control.” Control for who? Seems to me this article is a complete justification for California relaxing its concealed carry restrictions. Let more people carry. I’m pretty sure that is what the founders indented with the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” And both sides of what? I still saw no evidence, other than (maybe) Harris’ progressive prejudice that conservatives have a problem with this.
I will not refer to Tran-Caffee as Xir or Xer or Mx because that’s some New Speak bullshit, but that doesn’t mean that I think trans people should be barred the use of arms.
That is the thing about putting identity politics over principles, you assume everyone else does to. Most conservatives that I know put principles over identity politics. The Second Amendment belongs to all law abiding people.
The Pacific Standard doesn’t seem t get that.
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