infinite-resignation:

Man, tripping over a bystander is completely different from being barred from travel. And you know what, if someone trips me every single day and many of them are unapologetic about it I am going to start thinking something’s up and getting hostile about it.

But the transportation ministry hasn’t been doing things like this every day.  The government as a whole, maybe, but that’s no reason to assume that one part of it obviously has it out for you.

Er, this entire thing is about cis privilege. The people responsible for this bill and you are obviously steeped in it.

Because I’m not treating this like a willful crime?

Okay fine, we don’t need to be explicitly calling out Canadian politicians on privilege specifically, but what I’m trying to get at here is I don’t get why you and others feel the need to say things like “hey transpeople don’t be so rude to people fucking up your life, please consider their intentions”. Oh but you’re not arguing for niceness, although you were saying earlier people were wrong to be using rude image macros, it’s just about considering their intentions. So basically do what you were doing before. I don’t know what you’re trying to go for here. This is the most useless thing I’ve done tonight.

I’m going for acknowledging that people make mistakes and not treating everything as a deliberately hostile act.  If someone is actually, deliberately harming people, then sure, they’re jerks, tell them to go fuck themselves, protest in the streets, be “rude”.  But if you do that to someone who might have been inclined to try to get over themselves and help you, they’re going  to be alienated, and less likely to do so.  So, yes, basically I think that it’s important to consider the intentions of whomever is harming you, and react to stop it appropriately.

I don’t buy it at all that the people responsible for this situation are totally unaware of trans* issues. I checked the link about the transgender protection bill and the issue was spoken about openly in the parliament.

Which link?  And besides that these regulations don’t pass through parliament, I don’t mean that they’re totally unaware of problems, just that they don’t always think about them.  Which is, again, bad, but not evil.

Your fake letter’s fine and all, I’m sure they’ve received plenty like it already. People yelling about it on Tumblr isn’t going to hurt the cause. I doubt people yelling at them through phone or email or protest or whatever would hurt the cause either.

My problem is that it reflects an attitude that seems pretty unhelpful.

So what the hell are we disagreeing over?

I think that talking and writing about problems like this shouldn’t be inflammatory and angry.  You don’t.  It’s kind of bullshit, but clear thinking is important to me.  Hysteria and jumping to conclusions are major factors in poor thinking like racism/sexism/whatever, and I don’t want to see the same mistakes in people who actually have a point.

Okay man, I wasn’t going to press that last part, but protection for trans* people is related to fuckin everything trans* people are involved in.

Related in that they’re both part of a general pervasive ignorance of or hostility to trans* (and other related) issues.  What I meant was, not related causally or part of a deliberate coordination on the part of government officials, which is what the article seems to imply.  Sorry for the confusion.