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Title: Egg Cracking Culture Subtitle: An exploration of the transgender phenomenon and it’s inherently radical nature that calls into question whether cis people even cis in the first place. Date: Oct 21, 2021 Source: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ohxkh_oJk][youtube.com/watch?v=V3ohxkh_oJk]] Notes: This is a transcript of a YouTube video from a channel with modern Anarchist theory. Authors: Valium Sadfemme McGirlBoss Topics: anarcho-communism, anarcha-feminism, feminism, transgender, queer anarchism, lgbtq, gay rights, lgbt, queer rights, trans rights, pink anarchism, transgender gender abolition Published: 2022-04-03 07:43:14Z
This writing is more opinion than highly researched fact. I’m just some person on the internet stating things as I see them. Don’t trust those who don’t want you to think critically, or who want only to affirm your beliefs for money.
Basic Definition time.
Cisgender Person: A person who identifies with the gender assigned to them at birth, which is assumed based on their outwards appearance of sex.
Transgender Person: A person who does not identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. May go through many changes to bring their social life and body into alignment with the gender they feel.
The concept of “Eggs”, in transgender spaces, are people who do not know they are transgender yet, and may go through a process of “cracking”, and find out they are. This can happen through any number of experiences which make them aware that being transgender is possible, and relevant to them. Something which obviously would not have to happen in a world where it is a commonly taught and known idea what transgender people are, and that you could be one.
Some times you will find people who complain about a supposed group of transgender people, who apparently go around trying to crack people’s eggs, and according to them, are pretentious and annoying, or end up cracking eggs where there weren’t any.
When right wing type people talk about this, it’s probably because they, or someone they know, had a kid that was made aware that being transgender is possible, and is now making changes to themselves. Such an adult would prefer for that child not to be trans, because they are worried for the child and what they might experience, or a bigot. Often times both. People who are bad tend to rationalize everything to themselves and never see themselves as motivated by prejudice.
When progressive type people talk about this, it’s because they have an understanding of transgenderism, that it is a rare unique condition among a minority, which is largely tragic and somewhat worth avoiding, and that some people can be falsely made to think they are transgender by undue prompting from bad actors, and this might cause such untold harms as transition regret, or unnecessary bullying.
I often make jokes about how I’m turning my audience transgender, or that trans people will outbreed cis people, because I’m trying to challenge people to think about gender norms, and out of pride for being a girl with a dinghy, because most of the time otherwise, talk about us is very negative. I am overcompensating for a deficiency in humanization.
Some people read these jokes as serious. I don’t think they’re acting in good faith.
As to the people who condemn a so called, overactive egg breaking culture, it’s hard to know quite what all their varying motives are.
Some of them might characterize trans people who try to “crack eggs” as people who pathologically infect everyone with the trans disease, who try to make trans-ness where none exists, and confuse and harm perfectly happy “cis” normal children.
Some of them might assert that transgender people present a false answer to natural gender deviance, and that medical treatment is regrettable and something to be avoided.
Let us examine some of the assumptions that might be at the core of such thinking.
1. Our sex is purely a physical biological distinction, divergence from that is undesirable.
2. Our societal ideas of gender represent some innate truth about our biology.
3. Transgenderism is a rare, regrettable thing, that should be avoided.
4. Transness, or questioning gender, is like a disease, that can be spread to others, particularly children, so it’s best to make them avoid it.
5. Transgender people are predators who want to trans your children.
6. That transgender people are sick, and project their problems onto normal healthy people.
I think such views are ignorant, wrong, harmful, and motivated by underlying transphobia.
Do you disagree? Have you had a trans person be too imposing on you? Have you heard about or seen it happening to someone else?
Well, first of all, I’m sorry that happened to you, or your friend. but you need to consider that you or your friend can easily disregard the opinions of people whose insights don’t apply to you. Life is full of people with too much zeal, it has little to do with transgender people specifically. Consider turning that angst, into compassion, for someone who is clearly suffering identity issues, after a lifetime of abuse, or neglect.
The truth is. and I’m sorry to have to break it to you like this. This isn’t a problem in the real world. You’re over applying some personal experience, from one place and time, to a world of 8 billion people.
What is incredible here is. well, the zeal with which people will express the completely average transphobic views that surround them, as if they’re doing something brave and controversial, but also, the projection on full display here. Trans people are supposedly spreading around our illness, when in reality, a society of cis people have silently collaborated to erase and repress us for a long time.
What do I mean by that?
What is actually going on in this world?
Sorry to go all trans 101 for those who already know.
When you are born, you are labelled a boy or girl, by the doctors and your family, based on your genitals. Your genes probably aren’t checked for intersex conditions.
1 in 100 people are born intersex, with chromosomes, hormones and genitals which may be different from expectation, and yet, taking a look at the genitals is considered scientifically and socially adequate for your future health, despite intersex conditions being relevant to many medical treatments. You could be intersex right now, and not even know it.
Continuing on, If you are visibly intersex, with visibly deviant genital formations, your doctors or parents may insist your genitals be “corrected” with surgery, to look more normative. By this they mean, more like the cisgender ideal. Side note. Some small percentage of these surgeries are performed mostly for restoring function. and they likely will choose one of two binaristic genders to raise you as. Intersex or not, you will be raised as this gender you’ve been assigned, while you were a potato, until you come to consciousness, having lived in a bubble of information and experiences that shaped you into what they want you to be for them, you will be kept ignorant of the possibility of being trans by exclusion of any reference to it, or purposeful suppression of such informations, or through the experience of watching the idea of being a different gender being mocked and demeaned in every conversation and media you see growing up, or stories of LGBT bashings, until a fear of expressing yourself, or coming out, develops. When and if you rebel against your gender, or come out as transgender, you might live a life of a freak and a pariah, enduring the lamentations of the cis people around you, as well as the secretive fetishizing by those who understand you only through porn, or having to be a secret for those too scared to openly love you, and you may experience violence, either way you will have to recover and stumble through a harsh life just for being born. Every incentive of your life will be pushing you to conform, and you will have to be braver than most just to survive it.
At least, this was a common experience of transgender women of my area, and time, and still largely continues to be, in many places, all the while were being told how much better things are getting, by those whose allyship often consists only of saying those words. Who seem to externalize the problem, onto some imagined archetype of an ignorant conservative, instead of examining their own complicity and responsibility. It’s sad, how many transgender people all over the world, can relate to these experiences. It’s sad how many will continue to endure such things as we wait for the world to see us as people.
This is fucked up. Under these conditions it is not deviant, and it is not Transgender to question what is happening, it is normal to question what is happening. It is normal to feel that the gender boy or man is too restrictive and repressive on you, it is normal to reject supremacy over women, it is normal to reject inferiority under men, it is normal to reject typical masculine methods of conflict resolution, it is normal to reject taking on all the unpaid childcare and housekeeping duties as a woman. It is normal that you yearn to be free of it, that you want to find who you really are, under the cultural impositions, that you want to show others what you have learned. You are not Cis. You are the unique gender you were born with, combined with what your life experiences did to you, and what you decide to do with that. Even if you are a man, or a woman, you are at least Woman#5896876759. Nobody else has lived your exact life, in your culture.
We transgender people are told that it is us who push our values on people. No. It is the so called “cis” people, victims of the same system of gendered imposition and reductionism we are, who construct and maintain a system of their supremacy, to get what little benefits they can, in a world which divides us and pits us up against each other.
Sorry, it’s kind of hard to say these things without getting a little complicated.
It is sad to say that “cis” women, who benefit very little from this gendered imposition, are still some of its most ardent defenders and perpetrators.
The “Cis” people who do this, on some level they know about the transphobia and homophobia baked into every facet of their society. They live in the same world you do. Don’t entertain their obliviousness. Some of them are secretly happy it’s there, but would never own it, because such sentiments are unpopular, or would get them labelled bigot. Most of them benefit from this arrangement, as under the existing economic order, people held under foot translate to more height for yourself. It’s simpler to blame transgender people for their lot in life than to examine abstract structures of oppression. Some can live in denial and not think about it to some extent, but they are probably complicit, which is why this arrangement continues.
Cis people. I know it’s hard to accept, but you have been abused, and you are oppressed. and I know it’s cliché, but you have been brainwashed. You’ve been told that what you went through was normal, you feel fine mostly, but you have no idea who you would have been if your society encouraged you to find yourself, didn’t impose any ideals and norms on you. You deserved support in becoming a human being, not a man or a woman in the current order.
Let me state this clearly. Nobody was, “cis”, in the first place, its a social construct.
What does it mean for something to be a social construct? It means that the only thing keeping it real is our collective belief in it, or our actions to sustain it, because it is not present in the world without us. This means it can be questioned, and it can be changed.
Men now, have little to do with men before, that’s because men now, have known, and have lived different lives from men before. Same with women. Same with location, and culture. Our gender is unique, and its shifts through out our lives.
This is the reality that is being obscured when people understand the issue as, “You’re either normal, and so you’re cisgender, or you’re abnormal, and so you are trans.”
The problem with “egg cracking culture”, is not that people obsess over their experiences becoming aware they were trans, or try to help others realize they are trans, no, the problem is that a core assumption of it, is that you’re either cis, or you’re a rare egg that will be cracked. If anything, so called cis people need to be cracked too, but in a different way, they should be brought to question the restrictive and reductive gender roles they do not realize are hurting them, and that they have been mindlessly enforcing onto others.
Some times transgender people do not share this view, and hold various kinds of ignorant or transphobic opinions. I don’t feel comfortable citing specific examples of such people. Why does this happen?
Like all of us, these trans people have grown up in a profoundly transphobic culture, have endured the condemning and skeptical opinions of cisgender people in their lives, in isolation, often from those they depend on for safety and support. They may have been forced by circumstance to make recompense with abusive transphobic people in their life, isolated as they often are in highly right wing countries where standing out or standing up for yourself can more readily lead to deprival and death. An alliance may form, where these cis people will not treat them too horribly, so long as they don’t make a stink about their rights, or challenge them too much.
In an environment like this, where on the one hand they are being lied too, that this oppressive situation is because they are loved or cared for, and on the other, the reality of that experience as oppressive and hurtful, some transgender people form a kind of double consciousness, where they are forced to dedicate a part of their brain to intimately understanding the inferior way cis people look at them, and people like them. Such thinking can invade your internal peace, and overwrite your better judgment. If they had the support and perspective to make sense of what is happening to them, they would know that they deserve better, and demand it from the world, but a lifetime of abuse can cause a sense of lernd helplessness. So some of these trans people take a kind of sick refuge in the kinds of dehumanizing views of their abusers, supporting or advocating for views similar to them, as a way to justify to themselves that how they’re being treated must make sense somehow, because otherwise they would have to face the reality that this world is harsh to people who don’t deserve it, and that the world is a cruel and arbitrary place.
Also, having been mistreated their whole lives, some of them had no choice but to put an inordinate effort into fitting in, and universalize their success as a possibility for all trans people, mocking or blaming other trans people for not bending to transphobic societal norms, clinging to whatever sense of superiority they can find, to bolster their wounded and paining self esteem. They may get affirmations from their abusers when they spout transphobic views, and their environment may become safer. They may also wish for a sense of superiority for themselves, and so bully some of the only people they can, other worse off trans people.
It’s sad. Some of them live well at the behest of a cis person who would hurt them if they challenged their world view, so they cater their behavior to that, to manage their abusers emotions for them, rather than enduring the harsh long term process of demanding better from them.
Many of these people will change when they get away from their abusers and meet a person or community that doesn’t treat them like shit, or just over time, but some times in the case of a transphobic transgender YouTuber, it’s particularly bad because they have stumbled upon an arrangement where they are being monetarily rewarded for that abused mindset .
You can make more money playing pretend for cis people, hungry for an excuse to go back asleep, that transphobia has some hidden ancient wisdom in it, than you can “sucking a few dicks”, or working at McDonalds, and if you’re pretty, and you pass, that shit you’re talking might not seem to affect you.
We must also consider what many transgender people endure trying to get treatment, such as hormones or surgeries, to have their body be more in alignment with themselves.
Depending on where you live, you may find no assistance available, information may not be easily available, you may have to educate your doctors, may be put on long waiting lists where nobody wants to take you on. You may have to reduce your complex gender history, to a simplistic binary one, for institutions with standards so high, they seem designed to discourage medical treatment all together. Your medicine or surgeries may not be covered, even in the case when that thing might be covered for “cis people” for different reasons. You may be treated as an abnormal person with an illness to be cured. So many issues will arise.
When a transgender person endures this unnecessary abuse of an oppressive society, they can either accept that they were born into a cruel empty world that needs progress, change feeling too big a prospect for an individual, or they can rationalize that this process must make sense somehow. This is why you get transgender people defending this arrangement. I sympathize with some doctors, as they are often following really shitty legalistic state guideline, and would otherwise compromise their whole careers, but it’s still wrong, and blatantly transphobic.
Often we are framed as tragic miserable individuals, who hate our body and ourselves. The truth is. the primary sad thing about being trans, is the garbage way you’re treated, by others, and medical professionals. Yes, feeling that your physical body is out of alignment with who you are, or were meant to be, is awful, but such feelings would be avoided in a culture that did not enforce rigid harmful gender binaries on everyone, that accommodated children’s full range of expression, and reserved medical treatment for the few that want it.
I wish I had inherited a world where transgender people were normal and visible, where I was told I would be loved and accepted no matter what, and that estrogen treatment was waiting for me. Instead, I have been forced to be the archetype of the suffering dysphoric being that cis people so readily understand us as. My body is out of alignment with my internal self, I feel hopeless to ever be seen as a normal girl as I am. This misery does not have to continue. This ignorance about transgender people will end, and we will look back on our history rightly with shame.
Some times trans people internalize this medicalized idea of the cis / trans dichotomy, because they’ve had to fight all their life against the invalidation and doubt of cis people, to be recognized as a legitimate thing, not “crazy”. And part of how we’ve achieved that, is by following the rules written for us, by “cis people” who don’t want to be challenged too much. In any system of oppression, some peoples feelings and experiences are valued, where others are not, and this is treated as natural. To these trans people, if the rules were actually a bunch of bullshit the whole time, then we’ve been, and are being oppressed and abused, and acceptance from cis people doesn’t mean you’re real, it just means you figured out how to jump through hoops for them, that’s a hard reality to face.
It is easier for most, to try to find a place of normalcy and stability, than to make this world their enemy, as you should, especially when you think, often rightly, that you rely on fitting into this society, to live.
People are mostly what the incentive structures in their lives teach them.
It is a conservative and fearful trans position, but it’s also a profoundly human one. It cannot be solved through vitriol, only solidarity, only fixing the material situation.
Its survivorship bias also. Lots of radical trans people who make a stink about all this, are blamed for the discord they cause, and left to rot, or die. What’s left after that process plays itself out all over the world, are the so called “good ones”, who played along and achieved the base material wealth to have the technology, energy and time, to put their opinions on the internet. The same is true with those who could blend with cis people through expensive surgeries that most can’t afford.
Every incentive in my life is telling me, any more deviance, and you will probably die. That will modify any ones behavior over time.
I can’t get over the fact that all this shit I’ve been through, has been my experience in supposedly one of the safest places for LGBT people in the world. I can hardly comprehend what it must be like to be transgender in a country that has been kept in a state of repressed ignorant slavery for the benefit of countries like mine.
Going back to the more conservative types who have a problem with “egg cracking”.
I suspect that conservative types think egg cracking is bad because they can’t accept their kid is just gay, or trans, and it’s easier to blame their friends for “influencing” them. What’s more likely, a parent with bigoted normal views wasn’t paying attention to their child, or transgenderism spreads like a virus?
Its also tied in with reductive ideas and fears about transition in general, that children can’t be trusted to decide their gender, or hormone treatments are dangerous, or society pushes transgender treatment on people.
All of these prejudicial beliefs are founded in ideology, and not reflected at all in the real world.
In the real world, people who think like them, occupy most of the positions of power and influence that transgender people will encounter on their way to medical treatment. We already endure great barriers to being treated like human beings, and getting the treatments which are shown to be beneficial to us by every study.
I personally fought with energy I didn’t have, against great resistance, for assistance with my transition, because in this society, cisgender is assumed to be the default, that must be defended, and we should only “allow” people to transition, once they’ve gone through hell to make cis people happy.
I want to emphasize that the people who do this, on some, subconscious, unexamined level, don’t think transitioning is good, but they can’t say that out-right, without being called a bigot, so they express, “concerns” TM.
There’s also this idea that people are Detransitioning, en masse. An absurd myth, peddled by powerful transphobic organizations, elevating a minority of voices, shared around by people who don’t know any better.
In reality, deetransition rates are severely low, and a lot of deetransition takes place because the person wasn’t accepted after their transition, not due to regret. Either way, the majority of trans people don’t deserve to suffer because a minority of a minority made brash regrettable decisions, and institutions failed to catch or respond to their hesitancy. It’s a tragedy, but not one that has any relevance to most transgender peoples lives or treatment.
The people complaining about this are mad that trans people are even allowed to exist or get treatment, but they cant say that, so they point to 2% of 2% of people to spark fear. Stop listening to them.
My best advice to newly transgender people is to go to an informed consent clinic if you can, if not, just go in with a good understanding, prepared to be your own best advocate. If your country is particularly backwards, just pretend to have a normie binary trans person back story. Otherwise, there’s always the bitcoin bathtub hormones route.
In the midst of all this bullshit, you may find yourself wondering: Why are people dedicating actual minutes, in the one and only life they’ve got, to spreading this nonsense? Not only are they wrong, but there are a thousand things more worthy of our time and attention.
There are a few reasons, and for these I may have to get a bit more complex in my political analysis.
For one, Liberal Capitalism can’t survive if all working people are aiming at the same target.
For those who don’t know, capitalism is an economic system where individuals can own workplace or rental property to make passive income by exploiting others, liberalism is the government that violently protects that arrangement.
It helps to think of this system as having a mind of it’s own, as doing whatever it can, to perpetuate its own existence and power. And so it reacts to social forces that rise against it by changing shape to redirect hatred away from those actually responsible for societies ills, and towards scapegoatable minorities. This manifests in societal ideology which normalizes and privileges people who are in line with it’s interests. The people who think it’s important to challenge transgender acceptance do not realize they are pawns of a system. Everything I’ve just said is extremely abstract, I’m going to try to flesh it out so you can understand better.
Here is a simple example many will be familiar with. In Germany, when the Nazis took power, they blamed and persecuted every minority group except those who were actually responsible for their societies ills. The capitalists.
For two, on the internet, you’re seeing the highly idiosyncratic views of individuals, expressed with the emphasis that they are widely valid, relevant concerns and facts about society, as most of us overestimate the importance of our personal concerns for society in general. In this flurry of hot takes, from people whose unique pathologies, eccentricities and lives cannot be seen as easily as their typed words, it can be hard to make sense of the noise, and discern an accurate picture of reality.
It helps to know that the internet skews towards strong or extreme opinions. Not only do the apathetic, tired and moderate not feel strongly enough to say something, the rejects in society flock to a space like the internet, where they can be anonymous, or indulge in fantasies of being cool or powerful. People of any measured emotion or opinion withdraw from “Online Discourse”, whose character then reflects the endless dance of half informed people, living with unchecked liberal biases, from which the public of newly blossoming leftists draw mediocre conclusions on every matter.
Unfortunately, online discourse is largely just the loud bickering of those on the upward climb of the Dunning Kruger Effect, and the bigoted opinions in these discourses are continuously uplifted and supported because controversy earns engagement on social media, and many cis people are looking for comforting re assurance in their ignorance and bigotry, because it’s easier then realizing their whole life is a lie. That’s a guilty and existential thought process, humans aren’t so good at facing those, especially when liberal capitalism provides us with so many products and media experiences to avoid facing our demons.
Thirdly, all of us are processing our ignorance’s and prejudices in real time, and with the internet, for the first time in history, we are able to peer into the ignorant and confused minds of millions of people coming into self awareness. How we react to them, and their fucking arrogant stupid takes, hopefully with the patience and kindness they’ll never show us, is what determines if they will choose the road to enlightenment, or fascist woo. Unfortunately, capitalist social media are designed to promote conflict and division, but I also think that these conflicts can influence and change people once they re calibrate their brains and adapt them for online life.
And lastly, our brains have been poisoned by living illusory lives of peace and stability, built on the wealth extracted from the global poor by our local empires, so our sense of reality, and our sense of priority, what it is we should be doing at any given moment, has been severely warped by our socialization under liberalism. For most of us that “means” mindlessly following the path of least resistance that has been constructed for us, by the powerful people at the top, who think very little of us.
Unfortunately, it gets worse, as that living thing that is the system, acts by deploying state violence to stamp out most resistance before it can even achieve anything, through surveillance, infiltration, imprisonment and brutalization of activists. Resistance is harder now to start than ever before, but the whole machine is a paper tiger, my words in this page are more powerful than it, it’s a matter of getting this voice on the air.
So why is all this happening? Who does this arrangement serve? Certainly not you. Certainly not most people.
If you have not heard this before, I’m afraid it may be difficult to hear, and difficult to accept.
The construct of the normative man and woman, of heterosexuality being the norm, of you “staying healthy” and making children, of the family structure, it was created and maintained, and is enforced socially, through lies and subtle violence’s, so that you will do your part in keeping the machine going, to have your 2.5 worker or soldier children “for the empire”, to be sacrificed upon the wheels of it’s mismanaged economy, and fight the wars created by it’s excesses. This system runs on blood. You need to wake the fuck up, and see what is happening, you need to do what you can, from your position, to organize your local people to sabotage this machine, or really bad things are going to continue to happen.
Society should be structured on the basis of sharing and cooperation, not private property, which is a tool the rich use to ensure that they stay rich, even if it means millions must endure poverty. Of course no society will be perfect, but we can do better than this. Clarification: Private property does not include a home, car, personal computer, toothbrush, it encompasses workplace or rental property.
You have been born into a system that doesn’t care about you at all, and I know that is scary, disempowering, but you need to stop retreating into virtual worlds, darling. Nothing on here is real, except what I am saying to you right now. It is up to you, and me, only we can find answers to our questions, no matter how painful, only we can say no, and make our stand against our empires.
Transgender people are fighting one part of the battle to free humanity from their rule, we are questioning the foundations of their machine, we are deviating from standard function, that is why they demonize us, that’s why they make up shit about us, that is why they rally sentiment against us to get us killed. We are the enemy of empire.
A lot of the shit I’ve talked about today is completely unimportant, at least when compared directly to our task of overthrowing the rich. Most of this stuff, and my video responding to it, is just the sort of toothless liberal identity politics that garners attention right now, because under liberalism, discussion of class politics is erased or discouraged. This video was my attempt to meld together Identity Politics and Class politics. A long tradition of Anarchists.
You may be tempted to say, “We can care about many things”. And yes, care, we can care about many things, but we cannot, within the physical limitations of this world and our limited mental energy, do something about all things, at once. We have to choose a focus, and so I put my time and energy largely into liberating the working class of material exploitation and poverty, while incidentally informing them about gender.
I am not interested in a stable normal life under liberalism, I reject my countries below bare necessity accommodations of trans people. I reject their propaganda that they are so enlightened and accepting, it is a smokescreen for LGBT citizens, to hide from them what really sustains this empire. Homophobia and transphobia are both illnesses, produced and maintained by empire, to protect the order that enriches a few into inordinate power. I demand more, and I hope you will too.
I’m sorry this awful world is our burden together. You will recover, and you will do amazing things with your life.
I love you.
So, now that you’ve listened to my highly idiosyncratic, highly online, niche opinions, if you liked them, please consider checking out my YouTube channel where you can get more stuff like this and also laugh at absurd ironic memes. Byeee!