Blaire White is a 29 year old American transgender woman, YouTube personality and conservative political commentator.
With over one million subscribers on YouTube, collaborations with notable political pundits and figures such as Joe Rogan, Buck Angel and Alex Jones, Blaire has found a niche in her role as ‘one of the good ones’ in the eyes of her conservative, predominantly cisgender/heterosexual audience.
Given this demographic, it is reasonable to assume that White’s audience is not familiar with the intricacies of transgender life and the experience of being transgender in modern Western society. These are people that find transgender people unusual and hold more right-leaning transphobic opinions; opinions that, despite being openly trans herself, White proudly upholds and loudly expresses to her subscribers.
Blaire White came to prominence on the site in 2016, around the same time Donald Trump ran for and was elected President of the United States. During this time, conservative voices were growing louder and more prominent across America, White jumped on the train of right-wing content, expressing her views and opinions to an audience and algorithm that was pushing more content like hers to wider audiences.
In her 2017 video “This Is Why People Don’t Like Trans People” (previously titled “This Is Why People Don’t Like Trannies”), White says: “I’ve received thousands of emails, comments, messages from people saying that before finding my channel they had absolutely no understanding of trans people, and were shocked to find a trans person who was actually sane.”
To her conservative audience, White exemplifies the archetype of ‘one of the good ones’ – degrading the left-leaning trans community; which given the general history and current state of conservative political views on the ‘transgender issue’, is most trans people, myself included. By referring to herself as ‘sane’, she both implies and states directly to her audience that trans people who don’t hold views like hers are, by a process of elimination, the ‘insane’ ones – “The majority of ideas, policies and things that come out of the trans community, and the activists that they prop up to speak for them in the public sphere, are insane.”
Like many other right-wing pundits, White profits off of creating a direct dichotomy between the left and the right, and ensures that she is placed squarely on the right avoiding any sort of nuance or rationality in her words.
In a further attempt to appeal to her right-wing audiences, White loves to refer to the trans community that is not on her side as ‘trannies’; and not in the nice way that a lady in Newtown referred to me before telling me I was hot, but rather in the more direct slur kind of way, as a method of further denigrating those in her own community that don’t agree with her. She complains:“I feel like I’m drowning in this huge crowd of trannies who are screaming and crying about 97 genders.”
So why does Blaire White do this? Why does she market herself to a group of people that so openly hate the kind of person she is? Why does she allow herself to be marketed as ‘one of the good ones’? Why does she so blatantly alienate herself from her community and the people that could bring her so much joy?
It is this self-contradiction that confuses me so. Being openly trans has been such a beautiful experience, not just in finding and coming to love myself, but the community that I have found in my trans and queer peers. I have found comfort in that inherent sense of belonging and love that comes so simply from a shared experience and existence, the knowledge that, at some level, we have all experienced those feelings of confusion, loss, anger, frustration, jealousy, and so many more as we fought with ourselves and our identity. This is a battle that is still waged everyday, but it is one that allows us to be who we truly are. Sure, I may not get along with every queer person I meet simply because we share an identity, but there is always at the base level a mutual understanding and respect for who and what we are.
And for someone like Blaire White, while I can respect that we have a shared struggle, I can never respect what she has done with her position as a trans woman – bringing down her own community, her own people, for what? The money? The fame? I’m sure she receives enough of both to keep her happy enough to keep doing this shit, but what kind of fame and attention is she receiving? Looking at her comments and replies all you see are people propping her up for “one of the good ones,” their comments attacking the ‘other’ trans people – the ones that don’t conform to society’s standards, the ones that don’t ‘pass’ according to some arbitrary beauty standards, the ones that just don’t fade into the background and act ‘normal’.
Blaire White has turned her back on a community that accepts you for your flaws and inherently supports you, in favour of a rabid fanbase of bigots that don’t actually believe her identity, don’t agree with her existence, and are actively working to strip her and every other trans person of their rights and identity.
Community is one of the most important things you can have for your mental and overall health – studies have shown it can even increase your lifespan. To completely alienate yourself from that, in the name of money and fragmented bullshit beliefs that you only spout to fatten your wallet, is honestly deranged and sociopathic behaviour.
So despite the small fragments of empathy that I can garner from the depths of my psyche, ultimately Blaire has placed herself in this position. I cannot and will never have any respect for her or anyone else like her.
