Thursday, May 30, 2019

On AEW and Rejecting Transphobia

Rose's opportunity has given transphobic ninnies conniptions
Photo via All Elite Wrestling
All Elite Wrestling signed Nyla Rose to compete in its women's division. For those who don't know, Rose is a trans woman, in that she was born with male genitals but her brain was wired to identify female. At this point, the trans/cis boundary is accepted science. Some people are born with the parts they were supposed to come with; others were not. This should not bring pause to cis people, because gender is perhaps the most personal thing about a given person. A person is male, female, or some other gender in between on a wide-ranging spectrum that is about as infinite as the numbers after the decimal point in pi. However, some people have made it their mission in life to torment trans people for the audacity to notice that their own bodies may not reflect who they really are.

One of those people was in attendance at Double or Nothing this past Saturday. That person made gross transphobic remarks at Rose and possibly other wrestlers whom he didn't feel "passed" enough as their stated gender. Thankfully, the person sitting next to this douchebag yelled at him to stop. The person who yelled to stop is actually the brother of Wrestling Twitter's own @repalec, so big ups to him for standing up where many other people have remained seated. Anyway, back to the transphobic idiot, he was so mad that he was told to shut it that he went on Twitter and whined about it.


I thought these morons were supposed to be alpha? But I digress. He made a big deal out of being told to stop being a transphobe that it ended up trickling up the line. Matt Jackson of the Young Bucks found out about it and promptly banned him from future AEW events.
In a rare moment of proaction, Gabe Sapolsky, functionally a WWE employee nowadays, banned him from future WWNLive (EVOLVE, etc) events.
Surprisingly, rejecting vocal transphobia has brought AEW and WWE-adjacency together. Who knew?

Now, I haven't even finished writing this post, and I sense some grumbling from prospective readers. Aren't these bans cynical in that they're done to protect revenue influx and not because it's the right thing to do? Well, in some respects, it probably is. It is right and good to mistrust those in capital, even if part of that capital is part of the workforce. That being said, if the edict came down from Tony Khan, I might be more cynical than I am. Khan and his father, Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC owner Shahid, gave $1M to Donald Trump's campaign and only started "regretting" it publicly after he was elected and started being the rancidly bigoted doofus everyone who didn't vote for him knew he was going to be. They have a Stephanie McMahon "woke capitalist" strain to them, and it causes me not to give them the benefit of any doubts whatsoever.

The Young Bucks and even Cody Rhodes feel different to me, if just slightly. They are on the ground floor, listening to fans, talking to them (and to be fair, that aren't talking to them but mentioning their names in not so positive lights). They're cultivating a fanbase that they want, and judging by them siding with @repalec's brother over the dickhead yelling slurs at Rose, they are saying they want an inclusive fanbase. Hell, the act of SIGNING Rose is a huge step, seeing as WWE, Impact, World Championship Wrestling, Extreme Championship Wrestling, or whatever other nationally televised wrestling program in history has failed to bring an out trans wrestler aboard. Now, a young trans person can have a greater hope that they can work in a major promotion in the States (Yosuke Santa-Maria and the non-KANA wrestler named ASUKA broke that barrier in Japan) without remaining in the closet. That's huge.

I know that a lot of people, myself included, want things done for the right reasons, but at this point, perhaps accepting that things might be done in order to sell tickets is a compromise all should be willing to take. It got Rose's foot in the door in a company that seems to appreciate her for what she can do in the ring, not for the state of her gender. It is showing that people who spew vile hatred at folks for the unchangeable reason of who they are have not place in their crowd. Even if it was done for capitalistic reasons, well, I'm not going to complain about it. Then again, transphobia appears to be one of the last "acceptable" bigotries left standing, especially since people who claim to be liberals or leftists go after trans people under the false pretense that they're "helping women." These trans-exclusionary reactionary feminists, or TERFs1 as they're called by shorthand, make it dangerous to maneuver in life from the "left" as it is from the right. So maybe, just maybe, the Bucks and Rhodes really do believe in their hearts that this is the right thing to do. I don't know.

1 - I know from experience; don't use the term TERF on Twitter if you don't want to get banned. Those assholes are ruthless.
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