One of the things I see constantly is our opponents, be they foaming at the mouth fundies, radical feminist haters, selfish cisprivileged lesbian and gay people, or bigoted transphobes are always running off at the mouth with long held inaccurate stereotypes about transpeople that they pimp as the gospel truth about us.
The interesting thing is that when we transpeople challenge them to debates about us, they run like Usain Bolt away from those confrontations.
We in Houston have recently had an example of that. In the early days of the publicity over the Araguz case Fox 26 set up a debate with local hater Dave Welch and Cristan Williams in which Cristan (not surprisingly) pwned his behind.
Ever since then, he's been ducking and dodging having to debate an actual transperson. The right wing opponents want to continue to bear false witness against us all day long and are used to doing that with impunity.
Kinda hard to lie about a group when there's an articulate representative of said group there to instantly rebut everything negative thing you say about them and make you look stupid in the process..
So is that playing a role in why Dave Welch and other haters are giving off the distinct odor of Southern fried chicken when we ask for one on one debates ?
Probably so. They know that as long as there isn't a transperson standing there to defend themselves, they have free reign to say anything they want and have that impression stick in the minds of people who are persuadable about our issues.
We then have to work twice as hard and expend a lot of energy to debunk that lie that has acquired a veneer of plausibility because it went unchallenged before we can even get our information and story out there.
We have evidence of that in term of the scurrilous lies and disinformation that radical feminists have scrreched about us since the disco era and are still regurgitating in this century.
Because many of our peeps were in stealth mode in the 70's and early 80's, those rad fem lies about transwomen went unchallenged until the out and proud generation of activists and transpeople began to hit back in the late 80's-90's . .
Now every time a rad fem posts that hate on transpeople BS online or in print, she's confronted and refuted by an avalanche of information from transpeople and our allies that make her look like the bigoted transmisogynist she is.
So trans haters, why don't y'all man and woman up and actually debate the people you wish to tear down for your own nefarious political agendas?
Or are you too 'scurred' to do so?