Please, I’m Begging You, Can We Stop Comparing Trans Issues To Racial Issues?

In his 2021 Netflix special, The Closer, Dave Chappelle made the mistake of comparing the experience of LGBT people with the experience of black people while describing a near-fight-experience with a gay man:

I thought we were gonna come to blows, I was ready [...] and then, right when you'd think we would fight, guess what he did; he picked up his phone, and he called the police. 

And this, this thing I'm describing, is a major issue that I have with that community. Gay people are minorities. Until they need to be white again.

The backlash was swift:

“Dave Chappelle Makes Oppression A Competition,” said the Quinnipiac Chronicle. “[Dave Chappelle] perpetuates the idea that straight Black men have it worse than any other group,” claimed Vanity Fair. Broad Recognition highlighted “The Dangers of Chappelle’s Oppression Olympics.”

And quite right. 

Aside from the obvious fact that many LGBT people aren’t white, oppression is not a competition. I think we can all agree that comparing the struggles of black people and LGBT people doesn’t make much sense. 

Well, we can almost all agree. 

Whether it’s Lia Thomas self-identifying as the new Jackie Robinson, YouTube activists comparing black citizenship rights to the appropriation of womanhood, or Stonewall lawyers describing lesbians' aversion to penises to “sexual apartheid,” it seems that some people need help understanding why trans issues are nothing like black issues. 

Come to think of it, they're nothing like LGB issues either. But that's a topic for a different article. 

Perhaps the simplest way to talk about the difference between black civil rights and trans rights is to address one of the countless opinion pieces equating them. 

Like this piece from the American Bar Association entitled, Not Those People, they almost always include some version of the argument that because people have wrongly opposed certain forms of inclusion in the past, all opposition to any form of inclusion are wrong:

“Those people need to use a separate bathroom.” “I should not have to serve them.” “It says in the Bible that what the government wants me to do is wrong.” “You can’t expose those people to my children.” Do these justifications sound familiar? […]

All of those statements were previously used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to justify racial discrimination and segregation.

Let’s marvel for a moment at how stupid this is.