Hey guys, it's Kat.
And I'm back with a new video with the same old topics, Tik, TOK, and transphobia.
And also my favorite subject of all time, heterosexual men, it seems like we can't escape
them.
I am hungering for a time when we can talk about trans women existing without talking
about whether or not straight men want to them.
So Kita Rose is a TikToker with almost a million followers.
And honestly, I really, really like her content.
I love her cadence.
She says some things that are unpopular, but I love the way that she says them unapologetically.
And I really appreciate a lot of the content that she makes.
But recently she made some videos that veered off into transphobia, and I thought that we
would have a conversation about them.
So let's start with the video that started at all.
Oh quick.
What's an opinion you have that, you know, you'll get canceled for, but it's okay because
you're not a celebrity.
I'll go first.
Transgender people should definitely tell the people that they were dating.
That they're transgender.
The whole point of the LGBT community is I like who I like.
I am who I am.
And I want to be with who I want to be with.
Please respect that and accept that.
But when a straight person says that they don't want to be with somebody that was assigned
the same sexism, it's somehow homophobic and wrong.
What, first of all, our relationship isn't.
If you can't start it off with honesty, secondly, is that person really four of you.
If you have to trick them into with you, everybody deserves respect, but everybody should respect
what everyone likes bragging about tricking a man or a woman.
Isn't cute.
Okay.
Happy Saturday.
So there's a lot of things to unpack about this video.
I've seen some trans women make content like this, where it's like, they're bragging about
straight men being attracted to them, which like baby girl, find your standards.
That's all I have to say.
I think a lot of the girls who post this, I tricked a straight guy kind of content post
it because they haven't quite figured out that like a straight man being attracted to
you, doesn't make you a special person.
It's not, it's honestly not that impressive.
So I'm not going to say that she's reacting to nothing.
But what I will say is that most transgender people do agree that you should be honest
and open about being transgender when you're getting into a relationship.
So I don't know how this is going to sound, but I think that a lot of CIS people don't
understand that the transgender people that you see on the internet are the transgender
people who often want to be seen on the internet.
Most trans people are never going to be able to be in a situation where they are read as
CIS enough to trick a straight man.
That's not something that's tangible or possible for the vast majority of transgender people.
Personally, I've always really resented this idea that transgender people need to trick
heterosexual men into their bedrooms because girl, they manage to find their way they're
on their own.
All of my dating profiles say right up front that I am a proud trans woman because I am,
when I was younger, I was definitely a little slower to have that conversation.
But at this big age of 30 y'all I just don't have the time or patience nor do I want to
frame my transness as this sort of flaw about me, that a man needs to come to accept.
Honestly, my standard for talking to men about me being transgender is frankly mutual interest.
Not every single man who talks to me is a man that I'm interested in.
So I don't really believe that every single man I talk to needs to know that I'm transgender.
But I do personally believe that the men that I'm interested in, who I plan on being intimate
with do need to have that information so that they can make the decision for themselves.
I healthiest and most egalitarian relationships have started with men who knew that I was
transgender.
If you guys haven't watched my video about the whole super straight tick talk thing,
I don't think that rejecting a transgender person makes you a trans folk.
I just don't.
However, oftentimes transphobia is very present in the way that people express their rejection
of a transgender person.
When the guy who created the term super straight said that he was super straight.
He said that he was only attracted to real women, which of course suggests that transgender
women are not real.
Women are not actual women.
And you can feel that way.
I'm just saying that it's transphobic.
And honestly, here's the thing that really gets to me about this whole conversation.
I think that if you're not attracted to transgender people, or you don't think that you're attracted
to transgender people, because let's be honest, most of the time these conversations are happening
because there are people who are actively attracted to transgender people, but cannot
accept that they're transgender.
We won't get into that.
That's another whole video.
But I think that the problem that I have with most of these conversations is that they're
very rarely being had with a transgender person who has approached this person for romance,
right?
I think it's totally reasonable to have a conversation with a trans person who's hitting
on you about how you're not attracted to trans people.
I think that that's when that conversation should come up, but I always think that it's
really arrogant.
And honestly, it comes off as very antagonistic.
When you just sit online and just sort of say that you would never a trans person.
It's one thing.
If you've been in a situation where a trans person has hit on you and you want to express
your discomfort with their body, it's another thing to advertise to everybody around you,
that you would never a trans person.
I think these things are a little bit different.
A lot of it different.
Let's be honest.
So as you can imagine, this video caused quite a bit of controversy.
And there were a lot of people on Tik TOK who had something to say about it.
And she made a series of videos, responding to comments and other tick talkers who were
responding to this video.
Let's watch another one.
So a lot of people were upset at the fact that I said that trans people should let people
that they're dating know that they're trans.
A lot of comments were like, but trans women are women and trans men are men.
So it doesn't matter.
Right?
But not everybody thinks that way.
So to be respectful, you should tell them then some comments were like, but it's very,
very dangerous.
Okay?
If you meet somebody in person and you get the contact information, wait till you to
a safe place and then tell them, if you meet somebody on an app before you give them your
contact information or your address, or before you meet up with them, you should probably
tell them if you think it's dangerous to tell somebody that you're trans, imagine how dangerous
it would be.
If you were dating somebody and they weren't into that.
And then they found out, somebody said, trans people don't owe you.
And you're right.
You don't know me a thing, but you all the person you're in a relationship with honesty.
Everybody deserves honesty.
So who cares?
The LGBT community takes their sexuality very seriously as they should.
But so to straight people, especially men.
So a lot of people care, Lots of things to say about this.
And I think that what people don't get as well.
So people can sort of sit here and debate about this and have all these conversations
about what's right.
And what's not right.
We actually have to live with this.
And I know that I've been in several situations where I know that telling somebody immediately
could actually be more dangerous for me.
I just want for the CIS women in the audience to think about the amount of times they've
been in situations where men express attraction to them, and how many situations you've been
in, where you want it to sort of say no, or to sort of weasel out of the situation.
But you knew that if you said something to this man that that person could potentially
hurt you.
I think that a lot of people think that telling a guy that you're transgender is going to
be the thing that immediately gets them to leave you alone.
That they're going to be like, Whoa, I was going to assault you.
But now that I know that you're trans, I'm not going to do that anymore, but that's just
not always how it works.
Often.
It doesn't sometimes what happens is a man will come and very openly express attraction
to you.
And you telling him that you're transgender after he's done that, especially if he's done
it in front of a lot of other people can often make him feel so embarrassed by what he did,
that he will attack you.
And a lot of transgender people are attacked in this way.
There are several situations where trans women have just been existing in public, a man expressed,
attracted to them very, very loudly.
Somebody yelled that's a mat or something along those lines.
And then he had to go and physically beat this person up because she was a trans woman
who he publicly expressed attraction to.
I really do want for CIS women who sort of feel this way to think a little bit about
these dynamics, because it's not like these men are not approaching trans women.
They absolutely are.
And in so many situations, it's a lot safer to not mention that you're trans and to just
kind of get out of the situation and not engage, or sort of maybe engaged for a bit so that
you, you know, that you're safe and you can get away and then get away.
That's that's reality.
I actually really do like her advice about sending a guy, a text message.
I remember the first time that I recognized that I was passing, um, this guy had asked
me out on a date and I thought that he knew, I genuinely thought that he knew that I trans
and I didn't know that he didn't know until he tried to finger me.
Um, and I remember that in that situation, um, I felt like I needed to get out of that
sort of intimate space and go home before I had the conversation, because this guy was
like a big biker dude, because my college tastes were very questionable, but he was
a big biker dude.
And I knew that if I talked to him about this, it could potentially, and in him physically
attacking me.
And so for that reason, I want it to be safe and make sure that I could have that conversation
in a way where I wouldn't be hurt.
And so I went home and I text messaged him.
And of course he responded with, if I ever see you again, I'm going to you up.
Also, here's something important about having this conversation.
Sometimes it's not really about that specific guy.
It's about all of the people around him, right?
Sometimes you probably could have a conversation with this one person about you being trans
and maybe that will be okay and safe or whatever, but you can't always trust that that conversation
will be only heard by you.
You can't trust that, that guy, isn't going to go and tell everyone around you.
And I've definitely been in situations where it was safer for me to be closeted.
It was safer for me to be stealth.
Um, and so I was, and whether or not this person wanted to me was pretty irrelevant
because I needed to be safe.
Now she very vaguely references violence.
And I felt like this was a really important time to mention that so many transgender women
were actually killed by their intimate partners.
Every single time a trans woman dies.
People assume that it was because she tricked a heterosexual man into being less than heterosexual.
But so frequently transgender women are killed by their intimate partners.
In 2019, Tracy Williams was killed by her boyfriend in 2020 Yuni Carrie was killed by
her husband, a man that she was married to and Yasmine Vash Payne was killed in 2015
by her boyfriend.
I remember when all of these stories came into my feed and you would read the comments
and all the comments were basically saying that this is what transgender women get for
tricking men, not even recognizing that these men were actively involved, oftentimes actively
in love with these trans women and killed them sometimes in crimes of passion.
And oftentimes because they were afraid of other people, knowing that they were transgender,
transgender women experienced intimate partner violence, like a lot of women.
And it's unfortunate that it's so common for people to just dismiss all of these murders
as the consequence of a transgender woman, existing and a heterosexual man being attracted
to her.
Yes, there are still several situations where transgender women are killed after they reveal
that they're transgender, but even those women don't deserve to die.
They're not responsible for their own deaths.
The men who killed them are.
So the last video that I wanted to watch was a response by another TikToker, As a cis woman,
I don't think it's appropriate for you to be spoken about this issue and so loudly at
that.
It's not your place.
Oh, that's really sad because I liked the whole clacking thing, but let's clack back
to her fiction.
Some people in the trans community, they says people, facts, fact, or fiction.
Some CIS men are really angry when they find out facts, you had a woman that you could've
used to explain to me why it wasn't so cut and dry, but instead you say, get out the
business, which people usually say when they don't know what else to say, people are dying.
So when you open up a dialogue, you help people that don't understand, empathize, understand,
and become allies.
So when we see ignorant people, we can educate them, but you spend part one and part two
saying exactly what I said.
Some trans women try to look as this gender possible.
Should we tell them to stay out of our business?
No.
Cause that's hateful and hate fighting hate doesn't solve anything.
And just to let you know when you're, well-versed in a subject, but you don't know how to communicate
it.
So you say things like mind your business.
That to me means anal backs walk.
That's what that means.
There's no backtalk.
You didn't say.
So obviously it's a little rude to tell somebody to mind their own business and to not talk
about a certain subject.
But I will say that transgender people are so frequently living under the thumb of CIS
people.
We are so frequently having to live and experience all the negative things that come with ignorance
that is related to our own experiences, stuff like this is a great example.
I don't have to trick men into being attracted to me.
I don't have to trick heterosexual men into being attracted to me.
This narrative that I do means that if I were ever in a situation where an intimate partner
decided to kill me, that instead of looking at this for what it was a situation of an
intimate partner, being violent towards their own intimate partner, that people are going
to be quicker to buy into the idea that I was deceptive and that I lived to be deceptive
than they ever would be to buying into the idea that I was killed by my intimate partner,
the way that so many women are in this last video, Kita talked about having a dialogue
with transgender people.
And I think that one of the things that makes the dialogue so hard is that so frequently
people are way more willing to believe the misunderstandings about trans life than they
ever will be to just listening to a trans person, talk about their life.
It's been maddening to me that I've been on here for so long, creating so much content
about my own trans experiences and watched several people who are also doing the same
talk intimately and openly about their transgender experiences.
And since people still act like the information isn't out there since people still act like
they just don't know any better.
And it's sad because so many people like myself have created content with the interest of
helping people grow and helping people see outside of themselves.
And it seems like time and time again, what we're directed to pay attention to are these
sorts of misunderstandings about who transgender people are.
And that is very, very frustrating because again, we often live under the thumb of people.
A lot of CIS people are quicker to dismiss all transgender people as delusional than
they are to ever buy into the idea that maybe we understand ourselves.
Maybe we live intimately within ourselves.
Maybe we should be allowed to talk about ourselves and be believed and be listened to, even though
some of the things that she expressed in these videos were a little ignorant.
I do think that Kita is open to learning and growing the fact that she really consistently
used the term.
CIS, I think says a lot.
Like I said, she is killing it on Tik TOK and I love seeing black women win.
And I really do hope that she continues to grow in her understanding of transgender people.
Anyway, that's what I had to say.
Let me know what you guys have to say about these videos and the comment box below Tik
TOK is interesting.
Y'all I'm still sort of customizing my feed.
I'm really enjoying, um, a lot of TikTok content right now.
I still haven't quite found the bearded side of Tiktok yet.
And I'm going to need some ads.
If you have those for me anyway, if you've made it through this entire video, please
put this emoji in the comment box below the emojis, but all the cool kids do all the cool
kids are putting emojis in the comment section below everybody who was cool on Tik TOK.
Um, put some emojis in the comment section.
It just is what it is.
If you want to be like trending on the, for you page, like Whoa, hitting that Naynay and
the Renegade, um, With the bus.
It that's what you mean.
That's what you would do.
You want to be trending?
Put the emoji in the comment section below.
I, you know, I may or may not have some connections at Tik TOK HQ.
You don't know.
You don't know what's true.
You don't know.
So I'll see you guys next time.
Bye.