I recently had a conversation with a friend who I really respect. It left me confused. He is cis, and he generally just says "everyone is valid and they are whoever they say they are" because he feels that as a cis man he isn't in a position to contradict what any trans person says on the topic. That part I understand. It makes him uncomfortable with having strong opinions about any minority group he's not in. He does appreciate my insight into trans topics, especially because my thoughts tend to be different than the others he has heard (mostly from tucutes, as far as I can tell). We tend to agree about many things.

The recent sticking point was when we were talking about the damage certain "types of trans people" are doing to the actual transsexual community. We talked about how people who identify as trans do damage to the transsexual community. Gender abolitionists, people with tucute ideology, "trans" people who intentionally present strongly as their AGAB, etc. I said that many of them do damage to the community despite not meaning to. He brought up an example of a person he knows who is a trans woman, but she has a full beard, is large and muscular, dresses in masculine clothes, etc. None of this is for lack of resources or needing to stay closeted. She tells people who she is friends with (and sometimes random acquaintances) that she's a woman. I told him that I can't psychoanalyze anyone but that gives me big red flags that this person is not trans. I believe him when he says that she is not intentionally doing harm, but I pointed out the various ways in which she is doing harm anyway (and might not be trans to begin with, but we agreed for sake of the conversation to put that aside). He saw some credence in what I was saying about how she and the other kinds of people I mentioned make us look bad and contribute to our rights being stripped. But he said that those without malicious intent are ultimately just existing as what they think is the truest version of themselves and are therefore not responsible at all for those effects. He said that, even though he understands why I'm seeing red flags, these people aren't actually "doing" anything to anyone.

I suppose it's a linguistic/conceptual conversation, really, but it bugged me that we could not find a middle place to at least understand each other as we usually do when there's a fundamental disagreement. And it being about a trans-related topic made it stick in my head.

He said that anyone who is just existing without intention to affect anyone is inherently not actually "doing anything" to anyone. I brought up a couple examples which might be easier to parse. For example, he is gay so I thought he'd understand that if your family and community express extreme bigotry towards gay people that "does something" to you and might greatly affect you to the point that you become homophobic too. He disagreed, saying that ultimately it's your choice to be homophobic, especially as an adult. I said okay, what if there was a town where almost everyone read books every day to the point where everywhere you go in public you see people reading books on benches, on the bus, in the line at the grocer, etc. That does something to you - you feel like it's normal to read a lot and you'd feel bad if you didn't like it. Those people reading on a bench are just existing and doing what they like, but you are affected. He argued that you are affected but the individuals are not actually doing something to you which they have any responsibility for. So I simplified it more. The Sun can't have any intention, of course. When you go outside and get sunburned, the Sun did something to you, right? He said no. The Sun just exist. You decided to go into the sunlight or not. Neither being burnt or not, hot or cool, is based on how you react to the existence to the Sun. The Sun's existence is just there. So I tried to bring it back around to human existence and intention by saying okay, but at this point we're all aware that there's a shit ton of discourse around transness these days that is ending in serious consequences for trans people throughout the US (and other countries, though I know less about that). Due to the prevalence of these issues, the vast majority o people who are doing us harm are intentionally choosing not to look internally to see how their actions affect other people. They're essentially saying fuck you, I'll do whatever I want, and giving no care to what that does to "fellow" trans people. He kept repeating that people simply existing as themselves cannot be construed as the individuals being at fault at all for all the things going on.

Eventually we kind of agreed to disagree, but I'm curious about what y'all think.