By the admittedly-low standards that apply to the transsexuals, I lead a terribly privileged life. Which is to say I have gainful employment, and I do not live in the United States or the United Kingdom, two countries that Australians have historically looked up to but both of which seem to have decided that cruelty to the transgender population is a fun political passtime. For this small mercy I am grateful, but nevertheless I still have to endure the horror of watching online as progressive cisgender people in those two countries berate and belittle their transgender compatriots for not voting the way that said cisgender people think they should be.
I have opinions on this topic, and most of those opinions boil down to one very simple message:
Cisgender people need to learn to shut the fuck up, mind their own business, and refrain from telling the considerably more oppressed transgender population how they should be allocating their votes.
I mean... not wanting to be too much of a bitch about this but for fucks sake, what in the everliving fuck is wrong with you fucking people???? And on the off chance that you are unable to grasp on the face of it why it is a stunningly unwise thing for cisgender progressives to do, dear reader, allow me to unpack this blindingly obvious point a little further...
Voting in a civilised country
Because this post is directed at cisgender people living in the US and the UK, two countries that are both notorious for knowing fuck all about the world beyond their borders, I'm going to talk about a voting system that -- while entirely batshit in the very special way that Australians have a talent for -- is considerably better than the fucked up one that applies to both of your cursed nations. Although I am never particularly inclined to defend Australia, our elections have two rather lovely properties that (for the most part) are missing in your countries:
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Voting is compulsory: Everyone aged 18 or over is required by law to show up at a polling booth, buy a democracy sausage if they want, and shove a piece of paper into a box. Technically speaking you're not actually required to fill out the piece of paper, but hey, if you're already there eating a sausage you might as well vote too?
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Voting is preferential: When you vote, you do not pick a single candidate. Instead, you rank them in order of how much you hate them. Ideally, you start with the least detestable politician on the list, and then number all the boxes until you end up with the most loathsome dickhead on the form, but I suppose other ways of doing it are possible.
From my perspective as a single-issue voter (i.e., my single issue is that I don't fucking want to be tossed into a concentration camp, and this is sufficient to dominate every other issue under discussion in the Australian polity), this leads to a rank ordering of the four currently-popular parties: Greens (almost never transphobic), Labor (sometimes transphobic), Liberal (often transphobic), and then a very fucking long way down One Nation (would happily toss the trannies into a death camp).
My preferences often do not align with my less single-minded cisgender friends. It is quite common for them to rank Labor above the Greens, for example. We do not see eye to eye on this matter, and political discussions between us can indeed be rather heated. Nevertheless, all of us on the "not actually a fascist" side of politics generally agree that One Nation goes last on the ballot, always.
There is a kind of solidarity to this, especially because we are also united by the compulsory democracy sausage aspect to this. No matter how irritated I become at "The Rusties" (our term for the group of left-of-center moderates that Americans would call the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" crowd), we both understand that neither of us are going to skip out on the vote, and both of us understand that when the other one shows up, One Nation goes last.
It is, quite frankly, rather nice.
Surviving a batshit voting system
Unfortunately for those of you who live in the US or UK, you do not have a functioning voting system. You have no democracy sausage, and you don't get the visceral satisfaction of literally listing every single person on the form higher than the open fascist lunatic. You have my sincere sympathies, because this situation suuuuuuucks. You only get to tick one box.
Naturally, I am not telling you anything you don't already know. But there's a side-effect to this absurd "optional first-past-the-post" voting system that is very obvious from afar, and perhaps not as easy to see when you're in the middle of it: it pits people with similar politics against one another. There is nothing I have seen on the internet that is more vicious than a political argument between an American leftist and an American liberal. Both groups agree that "oh fuck yeah the fascists are unbearably evil", but the strategic voting calculus is different for these two groups in a way that has no amicable resolution.
To a progressive cisgender voter in the US or UK, there is a very clear difference between the milquetoast centrist part (Democrats, or UK Labour) and the monstrous alternative (Republicans, or Tories/Reform). To you, it is as plain as day: one of these two options is openly, horrifically evil. The other is... ugh, maaaybe okay? I guess? Given the options available to you, it is pretty obvious that you hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil. You do that even if there's a better candidate on the ballot from a minor party -- strategic voting for you means that you pick the least-worst candidate that might actually win.
I mean... duh.
Unfortunately what those same progressive cisgender voters fail to notice is that the strategic calculation for a transgender person is very different. I love cisgender people, really I do. My children are cis. My friends are all cis. The man I have a certain attachment to is cis also. Nevertheless you have a blind spot, namely...
Nobody votes for a politican who openly despises them
In every country, in every time and place where people are given the democratic right to collectively decide who governs them, there is an enduring truth. Nobody is willing to vote for a politican who openly promises to hurt them. If Alice says she'll punch all the transsexuals in the face once if she's elected, and Bernard says he'll do it twice, honestly... I'm not getting out of bed on election day. Nobody does that. At a visceral, emotional, personal level, it is simply unrealistic to expect anyone to do that. If both candidates are promising to punch me in the face and they are not threatening to punch you in the face, there is absoutely no fucking chance in hell that you can convince me to get the fuck out of bed to vote for Alice. Fuck that bitch. Yelling at me on the internet about how she's "the lesser evil" will simply not work.
This particular phenomenon emerges not because because transgender people are different to you, but because we are the same as you. You can pretend all you like that you would be totes happy to stand in the rain on election day in order to get a punch in the face from an elected official, but you are lying to yourself. You wouldn't. You won't. This is human nature.
Why the fuck would you think trans people are nobler than you would be in our position? We're not self-sacrificing martyrs eager to throw ourselves on the pyre so that we can be the first witch to get burned. I mean, for fucks sake.
Noting that this is part and parcel of being human, let's turn to the strategic interest that transgender people have in not voting for the lesser transphobe...
Transgender people have good reason to abstain
At some level, I'd like to imagine that my hypothetical cisgender reader can already see why many transgender people will choose not to vote in an electoral contest between a transphobe and an even worse transphobe. At a purely emotional, personal level, you should be able to understand this. But... I've been on the internet before. I know for a fact that you will still persist with this bizarre idea that trans people have a moral or strategic obligation to show up and vote for the lesser transphobe.
Even at a purely strategic level, though, this is not in our interests.
Considered in simple numerical terms, transgender people have almost no political power in an election. We are a tiny minority, and we tend to live in places where our vote will have no influence anyway (e.g., even if every trans person in California abstains from voting, those electoral college votes ain't going to the Republicans). We are simply too small a demographic for our collective voting power to make much of a difference on the outcome. Aaaaaaaand...
...politicians know this. The reason why tranny-bashing is such an attractive option for politicans of all stripes is that we have no power to punish them directly for their behaviour. Vote or don't vote, we don't matter enough in demographic terms for our direct actions to make a big difference. That's why they target us more openly than they do for larger demographics who actually do have numeric power.
So now think about this from our perspective. Whenever a politician on the nominal-left (Democrats, Australian Labor, UK Labor) chooses to flirt with anti-trans policies, they do so in full knowledge that they are sacrificing the transgender vote (maybe 1%) in the hope of gaining a slice of the swinging bigot vote (idk, let's say 2%, who cares?) If we -- the transgender people they've decided to target -- allow you (a not-transphobic progressive) to convince us to give that politician our vote anyway, we've now allowed them to gain that 2% of the vote via their transphobia at no cost, rather than the 1% they would get if we petulantly vote for the greater evil or the 1.5% or whatever that they'd get under the infinitely more plausible scenario where we choose not to vote.
In other words, if we let you convince us to vote Democrat/Labour/Labor, we are directly rewarding moderates for their cynical decision to be publicly transphobic. This is not in our interest. The one place where we have even the tiniest bit of leverage to pursue our interests rather than yours is in the possibility of persuading exactly those milquetoast moderates not to be fucking transphobes. Abstaining from voting is a way to make transphobia less attractive to moderates.
In that sense, abstaining from the vote is in our strategic interest. If we merely pretend to be angry at one-punch-Alice and then vote for her anyway, the only lesson Alice and her ilk learn is that there is no political cost to transphobia. So... we don't do that, even if it means that our tiny vote share creates an infinitesmally larger chance that two-punch-Bernard ends up winning.
This is the thing that cisgender progressives miss: our voting interests are different to yours, and we act accordingly. Our leverage -- tiny though it may be -- exists at a different point in the political process. You are a large enough demographic that you might win an election based on your actual votes; we aren't.
It is not merely that voting for the lesser transphobe is viscerally intolerable to trans people, it is also a losing strategy for us. We'll vote for Alice when she stops threatening to punch us, not before.
And so we come to the final point...
Berating us on the internet will not change our behaviour
The voting calculus (both emotional and strategic) that applies to a transgender person trapped in a shitty non-compulsory FPTP voting system is deeply obvious to every transgender person who spends more than 20 seconds thinking about our own lives and our own needs. It is obvious to us in a way that is not obvious to you. It's so obvious that even someone like me who has the good fortune to live in a country with a proper voting system knows it just as well as my siblings overseas who are forced into this fucked up choice. It is a truth we feel it in our bones.
Because we know this as deeply as we do, some loudmouth cisgender dickhead yelling at us on the internet and telling us we're stupid and selfish for not voting the way you want us to won't change a goddamn thing. You are wasting your limited time and energy. Go spend that energy arguing with someone else. Find a persuadable swing voter. Talk to your apathetic half-brother if you like. Talk to some bloke at the pub.
That's a much better use of your time than yelling at us.