A-Infos (en) UK, AFED, Organise Magazine: THE TROUBLE WITH "ANY OTHER MINORITY" (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It's a common refrain when a public figure makes a transphobic 
statement; "They wouldn't say that about any other minority." It often 
comes from a well meaning place, the people are outraged by bigotry and 
since they could not imagine knowingly engaging in it they assume that 
somebody engaging in one sort of bigotry would see that it was wrong if 
they could only see it as bigotry. The reality is somewhat different. 
---- In this post, I'm going to show a number of examples of the "any 
other minority" argument and demonstrate why the claims made are untrue. 
Where the examples are from individuals I will be anonymising them.
* * * * *
The liberal pressure group Stop Funding Hate, who seek to "mak[e]hate 
unprofitable by persuading advertisers to pull their support from 
publications that spread hate and division" are a repeat offender on 
Twitter, with a search finding multiple examples over the last few years.

We are led to suppose, by implication, that scaremongering about "any 
other minority group" would be remarkable from the Mail On Sunday. A 
quick glance at the "Migrant Crisis" section on the Mail's website 
should be sufficient to show that this is simply not true. The Mail is 
notorious as a clearing house for the acceptable fringe of all kinds of 
bigotry.

How the Mail talks about migrants; scare stories and implications of 
impropriety and incest
Last month Laura Pascal, a Labour candidate in the Cazenove ward council 
elections, was the subject of controversy after she was found to have 
liked transphobic posts on Twitter. Pascal was briefly suspended before 
being reinstated. One trans Labour member took to Twitter to opine that 
had she expressed bigotry against any other minority group "she would be 
expelled."

The first thing that should be made clear is that at least one of the 
posts liked by Pascal (comparing trans woman Dylan Mulvaney to a 
blackface performer) is straightforwardly racist. As Gemma Stone says in 
her piece for Trans Writes on Pascal:

Not only is this obviously and horrifically transphobic - as intended. 
But its also deeply racist too. Its invoking the spectre of Black 
people's suffering and oppression as a tool to attack something they 
don't like.

In addition to this, there are multiple examples of clear bigotry from 
Labour politicians not leading to expulsion or, in fact, any official 
sanction whatsoever.

In August 2016, Labour MP Sarah Champion published an opinion piece in 
The Sun tabloid under the headline "British Pakistani men ARE raping and 
exploiting white girls ... and it's time we faced up to it." While 
Champion claimed that the article had been "stripped of nuance" by The 
Sun, editors claimed that she had approved the piece. While Champion 
faced criticism for this racist article, she remains a Labour MP to this 
day.

In April 2021, the Labour MP Charlotte Nichols handed out local election 
leaflets promising "dealing with traveller incursions." Nichols 
eventually apologised after criticism on social media, claiming to not 
have been aware of the negative connotations of promising to expel an 
ethnic minority from the area, and the leaflets were destroyed, but no 
Labour member was suspended or expelled.
* * * * *
Most recently, Rishi Sunak has come under fire for transphobic comments 
made during Prime Minister's Questions on a day when the mother of 
murdered trans girl Brianna Ghey was attending as a member of the 
public, resulting in Brianna's father calling for Sunak to apologise for 
his "dehumanising" remark. One cis ally on Twitter with a large 
following claimed that "if this was any other minority, the PM would be 
resigning in disgrace."

Sunak has quite publicly attacked a number of minority groups, including 
Albanian asylum seekers, travelers and disabled people. It's simply 
absurd on the face of it to treat his transphobia, specifically as 
exceptional.
* * * * *
So why does any of this matter? It might seem churlish or petty to pick 
on a particular turn of phrase used by people trying to challenge 
transphobia but the reality of claiming that transphobia is less 
punished, less socially acceptable than other forms of bigotry like 
racism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, etc. is that you are implicitly 
denying just how common, everyday and officially sanctioned these 
various forms of oppression are. This denial undermines solidarity and 
risks pushing trans people who aren't white and able-bodied out of trans 
liberation movement spaces. A majority of trans people in the UK are not 
white British, if you're a white trans person or cis ally, consider how 
it would feel to share space with people who continually denied how 
pervasive and damaging transphobia is.

https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2024/02/16/the-trouble-with-any-other-minority-opinion/
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