Liberty Hub

I use capitalised pronouns, please refer to Me with My preferred pronouns.

I frequently go to spaces that are made for and by trans people, where we avoid politics deliberately. Because we want to talk about other things, we want to talk about our lives, our own personal struggles. And not politics.

I recommend you check out My other article on this subject, There is no such thing as “apolitical”, and claiming otherwise is dangerous. The TLDR is that the statement you just made is an act of violence. It's a transphobic dogwhistle. There is no non-politics. The ideology of "Apoliticism" is deeply political, and deeply dangerous. The online spaces you describe where people "avoid politics", they don't. What they do is platform a specific set of non-controversial politics, and claim these politics are not politics. This dishonest course of action provides short term gratification, but in the long term it contributes to transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and ableism.

My purpose in creating the post here is to call for the destruction of such spaces. All queer spaces should be explicitly political at all times. And that is because the only alternative to explicit politics is implicit, unspoken, unconscious politics. Secret rules, self-contradictory aims, transphobic dogwhistles.

For example, suppose a nonbinary person like Myself joins an "apolitical" safe space for queer people, a Discord which is full of trans girls who like to play War Thunder together. I, a new War Thunder player looking for friends and a queer person, join the community. My capitalised pronouns are respected by about 50% of the Discord regulars, but one trans girl in particular objects to My neopronouns and says I'm oppressing her by asking her to respect preferred pronouns. The rules of the server prohibit politics.

If I or anyone else argues in favour of respecting trans people's preferred pronouns, I am in violation of the rules, and can fairly be banned. Now, so is the person kicking up an enbyphobic fuss, but you have to take human psychology into account. Moderators will think "Everything was fine before Grail arrived. We're only having this awful political conversation because of Them." If the moderators enforced the rules fairly, they'd ban everyone for every post they ever made, because everything is political. Since the mods believe in such a thing as apolitics, their impartiality is already compromised. They are already lying about the rules and enforcing them selectively according to personal bias. You cannot expect such people to make correct decisions about how to enforce the rules.

Most people only change enough to accept themselves. Nobody is a perfect leftist. If I were to believe in apolitics, I would probably end up acting racist, because I am not a person of colour and I have all kinds of blind spots from My lack of lived experience on the subject. I have a duty to constantly challenge Myself on racial issues so that I don't fall into the trap of only changing enough to accept Myself. Everyone does. Most people are racist when they believe in apolitics. Most people, including most trans people, are transphobic when they believe in apolitics. An "apolitical" space can only ever be a huge trap for these kinds of attitudes to fester and become normalised.

There are ways to have safe spaces that do not trigger or exhaust queer people, but they are not "apolitical" spaces, they are spaces which are fiercely political and fiercely allied with queer justice. The apolitical spaces are not safe for every queer person. They are only safe for white people with normal pronouns and mild or no disabilities.