diver elvis

let me explain. there are certain transfeminists who have resorted to, essentially, the insistence that trans women are the Most Oppressed group in every instance, that the further intersectional oppression some trans women face is the same oppression an otherwise more privileged trans women would face. The Trans Woman Is Basically The Black People Of The Trans Community. The Trans Woman Is Basically The Dalit Of The Trans Community.

and while this is very likely born from the sheer painful desperation and anger of the world simultaneously exerting and yet refusing to recognize transmisogyny, it is not correct. for instance, white trans women must uplift Black trans women and WOC but not appropriate their oppression to try and win themselves a free ticket out of thinking about what privilege they do have. (and this goes for trans men too -- like i keep saying, white trans men, you have to recognize your privilege comes first from your race).

but i am not going to talk about race. i am going to talk about caste, and remarks that are why although i agree with some swathes of this particular writer's published work on feminism, India and the positioning of the Hijra community, i really cannot give her additional credence as A Representative Voice Of Trans People From The Global South because her off the cuff posting is indicative she does not consider other intersections of oppression in the context of her own privileges -- except to position herself as always under siege and her critics as mere racists. i am laying this out because people like to tokenize her as the ultimate representative of trans voices from South Asia, and because academia and this site are very western-centric, they all miss the fact that while she can certainly speak to the oppression of trans women like herself, she is willfully blind to other intersections unless she can repurpose them for rhetorical advantage.

again, you are all very western. most of you do not understand what caste is apart from maybe "kind of like racism" and if you've heard the word Dalit you may think "ah, this means The Most Oppressed Person, surely I, a white trans person, can appropriate this word to center the conversation around myself!" (which i have, in fact, seen online.)

no. caste is an entrenched feudal system violently and viciously reinforced and justified in Hinduism (and has even bled into other religious communities in South Asia through pervasive contact). caste is a hierarchy in which the only possible mobility is downwards and never upwards. in the "ideal" execution of the caste system, all people Know Their Place even if that place is as literal beasts of burden, and all the other wealth and other privilege in the world cannot uplift a "lower" caste to have any kind of authority or power over an "upper" caste because there is no mobility, only what is in your blood, and if your blood is inherently impure then you cannot participate in society (though you grease its wheels) you cannot raise your voice (only seen and not heard) you cannot even participate in religion (but of course, "you should practice it, obviously, but you aren't allowed to say the same hymns as us!").

frankly i am more willing to forgive the non-Indians who muddle up the concept because yall rarely know any better. but from a south asian woman who knows perfectly well what caste is?

"transfeminized people are considered casteless, ie untouchable, ie the very lowest rung of society btw."

this is a misguided appropriation that allows people with significant notable privilege to claim the oppression of others just because they share a different axis of marginalization. or rather:

regardless of your positionality, you cannot be letting the savarna babies talk like that.

for full transparency, i am not Dalit and if i overstep and someone from that background wants to correct me, please do. i have no idea if this writer's name is a pen name or indicative of her caste background, and im not about to investigate that because that would be bizarrely creepy. however i personally am avarna, which is the word that literally (gasp!) means "casteless". as in "outside of (and therefore below) the system of the upper castes" (the upper castes being "savarna") and traditionally considered untouchable. in government terms i am OBC (other backwards caste) which is a widely varied category. my ancestors did have caste privilege over Dalit communities, while simultaneously also facing caste based oppression themselves as, actually, falling under the "untouchable" label.

i can see why the comparison to caste oppression was made, because there ARE several resemblances. there have been some reported cases of trans women in some Indian villages being denied drinking from the shared water supply, which is a very familiar form of discrimination to anyone who's read on caste oppression -- the "lower" castes are seen as dirty and polluting, thus people prevent them from coming into contact with literal food, water, persons, or even religious sites (hence the rhetoric that particularly stigmatized castes are "untouchable"). yearly there are hundreds of reports of literal schoolchildren abused and beaten to death for going to get water because they were thirsty. fun fact, if you look at an 1800s census for the part of India im from, there is vivid description of how caste was so rigorously enforced people of "lower" castes including mine had to stay a certain radius of distance from the oh so pure "upper" castes. even my great grandfather, who was wealthy in the early 1900s (wealth that was earned by exploiting the labor of people from castes even less privileged than his), was still considered "polluting" enough that he was not allowed to even walk past the entryway of a temple, because even economic privilege cannot override caste. until 90 years ago i would have been denied entry to major temples in my home state.

in another parallel to the exploitation of trans women, "lower" caste and especially Dalit women to this day are also frequently sexually abused while simultaneously being considered lesser. they are heavily stigmatized, and at the same time, the stigma both makes them ripe for fetishization as excitingly "taboo" while also marginalizing them to such a great extent that their brutal murders and rapes are often left unresolved and unattended by the justice system, as people who the system does not care about. hey fun fact, when the upper caste women in my part of India started wearing blouses and upper-clothes to cover their chests due to European influence, lower castes including mine were legally outlawed from doing the same -- not because they were Socially Enlightened and Sticking It To The Whites, but because in this newly imposed paradigm of body-based shame, they were to be always placed in a permanent position of humiliation.

there are resonances that ring familiarly indeed.

and these parallels should be a source of solidarity between people oppressed similarly. but a writer from a major Indian city with the privilege of significantly more access to resources, though still harmed by transmisogyny, should not be appropriating the terminology of Dalit struggles for the context of gender, or opening up this appropriation for others to weaponize rhetorically, whatever her caste positionality is.

gender does not work like race. gender does not work like caste. while all three are social constructs, the discrimination against the latter two compounds over generations, which a lot of yall do not seem to understand. if you are a "privileged" race or caste, you have more likely benefited from generational wealth, and if not wealth, the promise of mobility to "better" yourself. economic mobility, high education, hell even English language education, are all easier to access if upper caste. this is not to say if you are a trans woman in these more privileged groups you dont experience the terrifying and shocking stripping of other privileges, or that a visibly trans woman won't also struggle with social and economic mobility. but it is not the same because it is not accumulated and inherited over the lineage of your whole family. your fathers forefathers and children are not just as oppressed as you, though they may face some stigma for association with you.

racial and caste privilege does give you a much easier starting point than your siblings. you insult your sisters who do face the intersection of trans womanhood and dalit identity when you from your English-language, able-to-enter-academia, bolstered-by-family-mobility, less-encumbered-by-this- generational-trauma position, when you claim your other axis of oppression is equivalent to theirs.

It is frustrating because in the academic writing of the person im talking about, she calls out so-called feminist writers who try to deflect from their own privileges -- in one article, she very effectively dismantles the distorted stats published by an African writer in a feminist journal for eliding the fact that she is from an incredibly privileged family, and can access statistically far more rights than the average woman in her community. oh the irony! recognition of the other but no recognition of the self.

what's even more galling is that she is entirely aware of the exploitation and horrors of caste. the entire context of this post of hers claiming All Transfeminized People Are Basically Dalits was her responding to another trans person's criticism of her arguments about the position of the Hijra in Indian society. i am not remarking on the criticism itself, but the reaction to it: instead of countering that actual criticism, she latched onto the fact that that trans person was contemplating celebrating a Hindu observance and went on a long rant about how said trans person is specifically evil and appropriating for being a white person converting to Hinduism, and don't you know Hinduism has been used to endorse untold horrors?

girl. i agree with you. any hindu whether born into the religion or converting into it must be conscious of how it has been used as a cudgel against oppressed castes and other religions. i would also agree with you except for your little addendum at the end where you essentially position yourself as equivalent to the caste groups most brutalized by Hinduism simply via your gender and not your actual caste status, which serves to recontextualize your entire discussion of how Hinduism has done harm as a bad faith bid to position the other trans person as an aggressor: "see, my GENDER basically renders me into the 'untouchable' caste, so this Hindu convert is doing harm to me by existing!"

it turns out to be an entirely self serving analysis of caste rather than real intersectional discussion of privilege. it turns out to be a weaponization of Dalit and other caste-based oppression to win an unrelated argument while eliding her own positionality.

and to anyone who says "why are you bringing up caste, you may have been born there but live in the west, you're bringing up an irrelevant form of oppression just to rag on a trans woman," perhaps you need to learn how caste works, too. maybe look up the cisco caste discrimination suit that took place in California. if you grew up in a South Asian cultural context, you very much can still have casteist biases even if you're not hindu or presently in South Asia. no, you are not immune to exploiting and appropriating this oppression just because you call yourself an "apostate" of this religion. do we not agree an atheist who grew up in a culturally-Christian context of course has ingrained opinions they still need to unlearn? the blithe denial of this is what I am pointing out. there is plenty of literature on casteism seeping into other religions and communities in India and surrounding regions. paraphrasing ambedkar (father of the indian constitution/lawyer/major figure in the movement for dalit rights): everywhere the Indian goes, caste also goes.