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sarasade · 5 months

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One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".

Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.

That's the TL;DR version of this post.

ANYWAY here is the long version

Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".

One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.

Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.

It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.

This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.

People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.

I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.

Anyway if you want to read more:

- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info

-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos

-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.

-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa

- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.

-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge

#Also I don't mean that you can always tell if someone is a transphobe or a TERF based on a couple of things they have said.#My point is that sometimes ok people can have very regressive ideas too.#This is not a call out post about how we should go around accusing anti-fujoshi people #todd in the shadows #hbomberguy #sarasade text #even I've got those “Fandom is mostly straight women fetishizing gay men” comments once and it begins to sound kind of passive-aggressive #when you're a bi woman. Lot of fandom stats at AO3 show that fandoms are montly bi women. who are these people calling straight exactly hmm #also straight women are completely ok leave them alone. I know I know Yes I'm so brave for saying this #cw: transphobia

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autolenaphilia · 2 months

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It's interesting how intellectually inconsistent the arguments against "problematic" kinks like fauxcest, CNC and ageplay is. Like the anti-kink people get very heated about those kinks for "fetishizing/romanticizing" abuse. And the thing is, that's true for bdsm in general. It relies on roleplaying power inequalties, which would be very abusive if they were real.

That was in fact the argument of the 70s radfems who created the type of anti-kink discourse that relies on exploiting feminist concerns about abuse. They were against all forms of bdsm, including among (cis) lesbians. They used the same arguments we see against fauxcest and CNC today, for what is normal bdsm play.

And the radfems kinda lost this battle of the feminist sex wars, probably because it alienated a lot of the cis women they were recruiting from. Nowadays queer people of all genders do a lot of bdsm and anti-bdsm views don't get a lot of airtime.

Nowadays you see this anti-bdsm rhetoric mostly among proud terfs who use it to prove their hardcore bonafides. (Although I've seen some tenderqueers who admit that they think all bdsm is problematic too.)

And i think that's because the anti-kink people have decided to do a strategic retreat on this question. The radfems took a too extreme stance and alienated people who they otherwise could have recruited. So they have gone for easier targets. Kinks which are seen as extreme compared to "normal" bdsm, like fauxcest and CNC. And they target individual transfems accused of being into or even just "defending" these kinks with callouts and mobbing instead of condemning all the cis gays and lesbians into bdsm.

This leads to intellectual inconsistency. It's fine to play with whips in the bedroom,but doing CNC play is evil. One type of roleplaying abusive relationships is fine, but the other is bad. It's obvious hypocrisy to broaden the appeal of the message.

And of course, their transmisogynistic bias is obvious and I and others have noted this before. And even if the anti-kink people weren't transmisogynistic bigots, they will naturally target us for their moralistic crusade out of opportunism. We transfems are easy targets for callouts on these subjects, because transmisogyny primes people to easily view us as perverted sexual predators and those doing the callouts tend to have tme privilege over us.

And as I said before, the 70s radfems anti-bdsm position and their transmisogyny were intertwined. Janice Raymond literally diagnosed trans women in "The Transsexual Empire" with sadomasochism, something she views as inherently pathological.

And of course their arguments are bullshit anyway. Like sure a lot of kink fetishizes abuse, but I don't see that as a reason to condemn the people doing it. I don't see why I should care if someone gets off on a rape fantasy or CNC roleplay, because it's Not Real. I don't care about fictional murders for the same reason. Most arguments to the contrary tend to rely on the arch-reactionary concept of sexual degeneracy: "if you do enough fauxcest and CNC it will warp your mind and you'll eventually rape your relatives for real, or inspire someone to do so." It ignores the material societal conditions that lead to abuse in the real world.

#my writings #callout culture #kink discourse #purity culture

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baixueagain · 2 years

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Couldn’t help but notice this reblog in a certain recent “queer is a slur” discourse post.

Beyond being ahistorical, it is significant in its third paragraph, which is almost entirely made up with TERF and alt right dog whistles. For anyone who has even a basic idea of what to look for, this blogger has just outright shown their hand.

Let’s start from the beginning of the text I’ve marked in blue:

“a pedophilia and incest apologist”

This is a very handy tactic especially prevalent in alt-right rhetoric these days. It stigmatises anything it is attached to, in this case the person who coined the term “queer theory.” Topics like pedophilia and incest are extremely taboo and emotionally laden, and attaching them to a subject will cause many people to automatically distance themselves from that term out of a semi-instinctive desire to not associate themselves with such things. Spread this attachment widely enough, and you can push entire groups into abandoning terminology, praxis, and people.

For the record, I’m not sure of the source for this claim. The woman who coined the term “queer theory” was Teresa de Laurentis, and I’ve never seen anything by her which tries to excuse pedophilia or incest. She certainly wrote about the gendered nature of incest, but this was in no way laudatory. This may also be a reference to the work of Gloria Anzaldua, who helped further popularize the term. She spoke frankly and openly about her sexual fantasies, many of them of a taboo nature, because of her firm belief in de-stigmatizing discussions about human sexual behaviour. Not only are such fantasies extremely common, they are in no way apologetics for real life abuse, nor do they predict real life behaviour.

“a straight woman with a fetish for gay men”

We’ve gotten to the transphobic dogwhistle now. This is an accusation frequently used against trans men and nonbinary AFAB people, especially those who pursue relationships with men. With the current surge in transphobic public rhetoric, it has received a new breath of life, and trans mlm are currently facing a slew of accusations of being straight women/girls who have just fetishized gay men to the point that they’re trying to “become” gay men/boys themselves (CW: link leads to transphobic hate site genderhq.org). These accusations are even being used in queer circles--including by trans people--to gatekeep who “gets” to write fiction about mlm. Just a week ago, for example, queer writer Alex Marraccini accused indie trans mlm author Ana Mardoll of fetishizing mlm, claiming that Ana’s “fetishistic” writing isn’t nearly as groundbreaking or liberating as the work of real cis gay men.

I’m not sure who the blogger is referring to here as there’s no real consensus on who first used the term “queer studies.” However, I think they may be referring to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was most certainly not a straight woman. She was queer and came out as a trans man, though as far as I know continued to publicly prefer she/her pronouns (hence my own pronoun use here).

“use intentionally over academic language”

Ah, good old anti-intellectualism. If I can’t understand you, you must be using over-academic language just to confuse me on purpose. This dogwhistle not only gives people an excuse to dismiss anything they don’t understand straight away, it pushes the conspiracy theory that we academics are part of an ivory tower conspiracy to Queer Everything for...reasons (see below).

“to obfuscate that their founding texts and members are Marxists”

Aaaand here we are, the full show of the hand. This blogger is either alt-right or well down the pipeline to becoming one. The old chestnut that These Academics We Disagree With are all secret Marxists is one that is, you guessed it, strongly tied into antisemitism and Nazi conspiracies that push the belief that Karl Marx, Marxism, and Marxists are part of a global Jewish conspiracy that seeks to destroy the West.

And of course we have one more “incest and pedophilia” whistle to round things off, just to doubly ensure that people understandably disgusted by those things attach them to queer theorists.

Anyway, once again I beg the good people of Tumblr to please pay close attention to TERF rhetoric, where it comes from, how it’s used, and the other movements that it is tied to. I am not being a paranoid conspiracist when I say that “queer is a slur” discoursers and “pedophilia and incest” scaremongers and their ilk (including anti-kink discoursers) are tied to TERF rhetoric, which is itself allied increasingly with the alt right. They are telling you this for themselves. Listen to them when they tell you who they are.

#queer #queer discourse #discourse #lgbtq #transphobia #terfism #dogwhistles #terf rhetoric

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ohnoitstbskyen · 5 months

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I heard a raw line from Guilllermo Del Toro the other day about monsters being the perfect way to express human failure:

“…monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.”

And i was wondering your take on this quote in relation to things like vampire and werewolf and other semi-monster subtexts. “Monstrous” humans that are ironically allowed to act more human more often than… humans. I just find the attempt to make an outlet for imperfection while still at large criticizing it fascinating.

I mean, yeah, there's a long history of interpreting monsters through queer, anti-colonial, feminist and other Outsider lenses for exactly those reasons. The monster is the Other who is vilified by the in-group, which represents all that the in-group hates. The monster must, by its nature, fail to live up to the standards and expectations of the in-group, which is why it must be destroyed. But that also means the monster is free from the standards and expectations of the in-group, including oppressive and bigoted ones.

So, as an example, if you're queer, and rhetorically treated as inhuman and monstrous and diseased anyway, or eugenically classified as a deviant mutation or sub-derivation of "real" people, there is real appeal and a real sense of resistance in claiming monsterhood, in embracing it and glorying in it.

In part, that's what the rallying cry "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!" meant and still means. It is a reclaiming of monsterhood as a source of strength and community and pride, rather than shame. Slurs are used to Other queer people, to set them apart from "real" people and mark them out as a monstrous deviation from the virtuous norm - slurs are used to call us monsters. And thus a lot of queer people find a lot of power and freedom in reclaiming them, in turning their Othering into a flag to rally around.

And I think that's still a big part of the appeal of the monster, honestly, that freedom from being what someone else thinks you ought to be.

If you're a monster, you don't have to have the perfect body, you don't have to suppress your lust or your love. You don't have to shave your body hair or dress correctly for your assigned gender, or have a white picket fence house with a spouse and 2.3 children. You don't have to sit primly at the dinner table, you don't have to repress your emotions, you don't have to hate the foreigner or despise the gays or fear the trans agenda. You don't have to have a small, straight nose or perfect cheekbones, you don't have to wait to fuck until you're married, or pretend you want to fuck at all. You don't have to want to get rich or be a CEO, you don't have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or be on your grindset, or cheer when the cops clear out a homeless camp.

To be a monster is to be free from the inhumanity that is forced on us by white supremacy, by fatphobia, by heteronormativity, by imperialism, and by the interests of capital. To be a monster is to be human in all the ways that are inconvenient to oppression.

... but I went off on a tangent there a little bit - vampires and werewolves, right. I have no theoretical or academic basis for any of this, so this is entirely a personal hot take, but I think vampires are perhaps a bit more about "passing" as a fantasy. Not necessarily in a gender sense, but the ability to keep your true nature undetected by the "normal" folk, while the secret things that make you different also make you dangerous and powerful. Surviving by stealing sustenance from a world that hates you, on terms that are entirely yours to dictate. "I will survive even if it kills you," that kind of vibe.

Werewolves, on the other hand, feel more like a defiant, angry embrace of the monstrous. Transforming into something vast and powerful and furious, growing out of your skin, out of your form, out of your boundaries; howling your nature to the moon and mauling any motherfucker who has a problem with it. Giving in to all the beastly unnatural urges, and diving into the horrible monstrous wants and desires that boil inside you (which, remember, include things like Not Wanting To Fuck or Wanting To Hold A Girl's Hand In A Lesbian Sort Of Way). Less the "I outfoxed your social game and drank you dry" slick vampire power fantasy and more the "call me a slur one more time and I'm going to wear your entrails like a fucking scarf" power fantasy.

Again, that's just personal hot takes, everyone's understanding of the monstrous in relation to themselves is different. I've seen a number of genderfluid and nb people use monstrousness as a way to defy occupying a shape that can be gendered for example.

#tb answers #monster #queerness

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direquail · 5 months

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You know the point of "protecting the children" dogwhistles, right? It's a reference to the idea that all queer people are child abusers. Super common belief among homophobes and transphobes, including (sometimes especially) gay ones.

It's also not just "a dogwhistle". When pressed to explain what exactly they want to protect children from, it's a ready-made emotional appeal to something that has broad social support. Most people, even if they don't like being around kids, are also not pro-child abuse. That's why conservatives go out of their way to invent (even if it's completely fictional) "reasons" why acceptance of gay and trans people amounts to child abuse. It helps them create an emotional connection with their target audience, and can be leveraged into logically ridiculous arguments like "well, if you don't agree with my platform, you must be pro child abuse, because I'm on the side of The Children".

"Protecting the children" is also super appealing to parents in particular, not because all parents are secretly authoritarians, but because it's super common to have a child and realize "Oh shit, I brought this person who can't defend themselves into the world and the world kind of sucks", and to feel horribly, horribly inadequate in the face of that.

I get very tired of people who mock, scorn, and ridicule people for falling for these rhetorical traps, or being snared by something that seems common-sense but disguises something ugly underneath. They are traps. That is what they're meant to be. That is why there are gay people who fall for anti-queer rhetoric, and get pulled into exclusionist or violently reactionary circles. We all have things we are vulnerable to, whether that is a history of being abused or a deep fear that we cannot protect our own children, who we brought into the world and are responsible for the protection of. And we gain nothing by mocking the latter.

I'm sure it makes some people feel great to say "well if you were really who you claim to be, you wouldn't fall for this shit", but frankly, that's a stupid-ass take. It misses entirely that these messages are carefully crafted by the people who hate us! They workshop these statements! They spend months or years trying to find the right message and when they find it they use the hell out of it, because it works. Because they are listening to the public conversations people are having online, and it doesn't take any level of basic agreement to be capable of regurgitating the party line word-for-word.

I am so sick of people who look at a deeply-embedded struggle over social and political ideals and think that this fight won't demand our whole brains and hearts and souls and yeah, we might fuck up because we care deeply and sometimes, people with bad intentions prey on that. On our grief and our fear and our rage.

And I'm frankly a lot more nervous around people who refuse to be aware of that, especially when they loudly mock the people who are willing to acknowledge their own fallibility and explore how they got ensnared in something. People are not moral machines, they are people.

#that post was pure moral purity police and it was so aggravating #the WHOLE point of that post was to shame every single person who saw it for being fallible and the net effect will not be to make us bette #it will be to make us less willing to interrogate ourselves and whether we're on the right track

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vaspider · 11 months

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Are there any good examples of how the right demonizes pro-queer straight folks specifically?

You mean other than calling parents who support their children transitioning child "abusers and groomers", harassing them, and creating laws to take their children out of their custody?

They usually don't actually separate straight allies from queer people rhetorically. We all have "blue hair and pronouns." It does not help them - and in fact hurts their points - to acknowledge that we have allies at all. So they usually don't, instead simply referring to anyone who objects to their bigotry as if they are also queer. The idea is to make it appear as if we are all alone, that no one supports us, rather than that the majority of US citizens think these bills are cruel bullshit.

Their anti-queerness is a way of enforcing gender roles on GNC straight people regardless of their politics as well. If you look too "swishy" (as my father would say) as a man or too butch as a woman, it doesn't matter what your politics are, you are a Suspected Queer and will suffer.

One of the only times they actually do anything that doesn't assume that our allies are secretly just queers is when dealing with the parents of minor trans people who are in straight-appearing marriages. By their logic, if you're in a marriage like that, you can't be queer, so they shift tactics and refer to the moms especially as having some sort of "Munchausen by proxy" wherein they're forcing their children to transition. They are trying to "get attention" through their children, and they're trying to "trans the gay away" and end up with a straight child who is trans (rather than a GNC gay kid??) so they don't have to deal with the "shame" of having a gay child is the theory. That these two things are totally opposed and make no sense doesn't really seem to bother transphobes.

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itsnotmyfaultsomepeoplecantread · 8 months

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Y’all. Leverage and Leverage Redemption are some of the best f*cking exposés about every layer of corruption that exists in our world.

Why? Because they can make each episode/story have the most satisfying ending, and it’s so fun to watch because of the camp.

But also, where else are you going to watch a show that makes you think about how there are people out in the world who exploit and abuse like competitive video game players? Where would you even begin to think about that? But they did it and they’re right… those people exist.

Abuse and corruption is everywhere. And not only does it talk about this system existing and thriving, but it also illuminates how it doesn’t matter how much you fight every corrupt person, because the system itself is broken. But helping one person at a time by exposing their abuser is a good place to start.

With film on shaky grounds right now, we NEED to keep fighting for these stories. We need to fight for the anti-capitalist rhetoric of leverage. The gay/trans supportive storylines of Good Omens. The modern issues brought up in Futurama. All of it.

We need people to be able to see themselves and see their stories so we can also fight to change their circumstances.

#capitalist hell #anti capatilism #fuck conservatives #leverage #leverage redemption #futurama #good omens #diversify #equality #neurodiversesquad #sag aftra #problems in the film industry #filmisnotdead

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gay-otlc · 1 year

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A take I've noticed among some (not all, not even most, just some) mlm transmascs is the idea that straight transmascs have privilege over them. They acknowledge straight transmascs don't have it easy since we still face transandrophobia, but believe trans + gay is automatically more oppressed than trans + straight.

It might seem like straight transmascs have straight privilege, but we really don't. For one thing, transphobes don't see us as straight. They see us as lesbians. Straight privilege is meaningless if we're not recognized as straight, you know?

For another thing, even if we are seen as straight in spaces where trans people are recognized as their gender, that's not always a privilege. Being straight and queer in queer spaces can be incredibly alienating (an experience we have in common with heteroromantic aces & heterosexual aros).

Also, in these kinds of spaces, the main thing I've experienced as a straight trans man has been the way other queer people will treat me like I'm dangerous to them because I'm a straight man, or like I've betrayed the community by joining the oppressor. Similar to the men-are-evil rhetoric that trans men of all sexualities face, but with a bonus anti-transhet twist. It's not that all men are evil, it's that straight men are evil.

So it might seem like mlm transmascs have the privilege of not being targeted by their fellow queers who think straight men are evil, but that's not a privilege. If this antimasculist rhetoric is only targeting straight men, this is because they (however subconsciously) see gay men as less male than straight men. This is a common component of homophobia against cis men as well. And although this often causes other queer people to see mlm transmascs as less of a threat than straight transmascs, it comes at the expense of being denied access to manhood, a painful experience for many transmascs.

The point I'm trying to make with all these words is that transandrophobia will affect transmascs differently depending on their sexuality, but we all experience transandrophobia and neither of us are really privileged over the other. We should avoid invalidating the other group's oppression, which some members of both groups are guilty of.

#god i spent like an hour trying to word this right #talking about transandrophobia is like walking on fucking eggshells i tell you #transandrophobia #transhet #mlm trans

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jedi-enthusiast · 4 months

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@confusledqueer apologizes for not responding sooner, it’s been a busy couple days and—honestly—I forgot for a bit.

Moving on-

—————

Me equating some of the things that anti-Jedi people say to antisemitism and, sometimes, outright Nazi-esque rhetoric is not “wild” or “a stretch,” as you’re implying.

Justification of their genocide, denial that it actually was a genocide, a belief that the genocided party “caused” their own genocide, and a belief that they genocided party were wrong or “led astray” while one person was sent to make things right- (via either making them change their ways or outright destroying them/their culture) -are all things I’ve seen people say about the Jedi…

…but they’re also things that people have actually said about Jews.

Take the example I put in the post of someone denying that the Jedi Purge was actually a genocide, and how—by changing “Jedi” to “Judaism” and “Force-religions” to “Abrahamic Faiths”—it sounds verbatim to Holocaust denial.

Or, as another example, people claiming that the Jedi “kidnapped kids to brainwash them”…don’t you see how that sounds like Blood Libel?

So me pointing out that a lot of stuff anti-Jedi people say sounds like antisemitic rhetoric isn’t a stretch, not when a lot of it sounds verbatim to what people are saying with the rise of antisemitism and stuff they have said in the past.

—————

Now, I’m not Jewish, but it’s not just me, your neighborhood White Girl™️, who’s pointing this stuff out.

Actual Jewish people have pointed out the alarming similarities between anti-Jedi rhetoric and straight up antisemitism. So, if you wanna argue about- “you shouldn’t compare real world discrimination to fictional stuff” -then you should probably take that into account.

Go ahead and try telling Jewish Star Wars fans to stop calling out antisemitic rhetoric in the fandom, I’m sure that’ll go down real well.

I also find it hilarious that you’re telling me to be careful about the rhetoric I use in a thread about how I shouldn’t point out that some of the rhetoric other people spout is basically antisemitism rebranded.

And my point in that post wasn’t- “since this is based off of a real world culture/religion, you can’t criticize it.”

My point was- “since this is based off of a real world culture/religion then you need to be careful about how you criticize it, otherwise you might unconsciously be spouting bigoted beliefs and antisemitic rhetoric because you don’t recognize that that’s what it is because you’re saying it about a fictional culture.”

By all means, I get that some people just don’t like the Jedi, that’s their prerogative and we all have our own tastes.

Criticize them, if you feel like it, but don’t go around spouting rebranded antisemitism to do it. I’m sure you can come up with plenty of things to complain about them for without doing so.

—————

Now, I can understand why you might be worried about the slippery slope from this to shit like actual censorship—which, I think we can all agree, is a bad thing. Or how you might think criticizing this could lead to the whole “fandom purity” debate.

My thing is, it all comes down to does it actually harm people?

Perpetuating harmful stereotypes via saying stuff like the Jewish based characters “steal children,” or “lost their way,” or “they caused/deserved their genocide”—that does cause actual harm.

Think about why the “angry black man” stereotype or the “cheating bisexual” stereotype are bad and people- (rightly) -push back against them. It’s the same thing here.

Shipping a problematic ship, calling a fictional serial killer “babygirl,” writing about dark topics*, headcanoning characters as gay or trans…none of that is actively harming people.

(*obviously when writing about dark topics you should tag appropriately so people can avoid triggers, but that’s another topic for another day)

That’s the difference.

And, for the record, I think letting people spout bigotry just because they’re saying it about something fictional is the more dangerous mindset than calling it out.

#star wars #sw prequels #the clone wars #pro jedi #pro jedi order #in defense of the jedi #antisemitism #fandom meta #star wars meta #fandom wank

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hadeantaiga · 2 months

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They're finally becoming self-aware...

Image description: User tejuina posted on Jul 5, 2022: I don’t think y’all want to hear this, but the right is gaining a lot of ground in the US and I believe it’s found a way to replicate the success it’s had in radicalizing men by taking a different approach with women: pretending to be the only ones willing to listen to women’s concerns over trans issues and then slowly introducing anti-abortion, anti-gay, and other conservative rhetoric.

Hey radfems... ever wonder why far-right patriarchal extremists court you?

Could it be that there's a lot about radical feminism that slots right into right-wing patriarchal rhetoric? Like your belief that men and women are binary, unchangeable categories? Your belief that there a woman's most defining trait is her reproductive system? Your belief that men are physically stronger than women? Your belief that men are biologically predisposed to want to dominate and control?

It's not a far leap from "male and female are biological categories that you can't change" to "sexual activity biologically exists to perpetuate the species, and therefore homosexuality is unnatural."

"But there are gay animals!" you say, "and that proves it's natural!"

Sure - and I agree with you! But trans people use animals who can change their sex as examples all the time and all radfems have to say in response is "humans are not animals, therefore your example is stupid". And right-wingers use the exact same excuse to dismiss observed same-sex behavior in animals.

It's also not a far leap from "male and female are biological categories that you can't change" to "the biological purpose of a female is to bear and rear offspring" and "males are biologically stronger and more dominant than females and that makes them better leaders" and even "human races are biologically different and the white race is superior to all other races".

So yeah. Conservatives are trying to pull you to the right - because you're already halfway there. Bioessentialism is a huge part of right-wing beliefs.

#feminism #lgbtq #trans rights #intersectional feminism #anti radfem

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a-room-of-my-own · 16 days

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You know the annoying thing is that, while the tide is turning in most of Europe and UK regarding the trans ideology, it's just getting started in my own country; or rather online media are trying to bring it over here, and there have been a few speakers on tv/radio talking about it, one of them a psychologist that claimed that it's nothing to be worried about regarding the rise in sex dysphoric kids cause actually the numbers are getting higher cause we're finally talking more about it(gods how I hate that rhetoric, whenever it's used for any topic on mental health; slight tangent: like yes, regarding mental health, part of it is we're talking more about that sort of stuff, but there's no denying that there are far more issues now than in the past; the numbers aren't just rising cause we're more aware. I really do hate it when people say that "oh we're more aware, that's the reason for high numbers).

However, people at the moment are still resisting the ideology, but I fear for how much longer; either that, or the ideology will make them even more conservative and against the LGB cause they're already conflating LGB with TQ+, and I really hate it. Honestly I fear that at this point the tide will sooner turn in the US.

In France we usually get the new American obsession 10 years after it started there, and I was really hoping that the tide would turn soon enough for us to be protected from the trans craze. Turns out we weren’t and faced the same collusion between trans activists, blue haired kweerios, former supporter of president Mao, fascists in balaclavas calling themselves antifa, idiotic bougie Parisians, critical race theorists, raging antisemites and Islamists (multiple labels can apply to one person, yes I know)

That’s quite the sour cocktail.

In ten years they managed to completely undermine feminism, ecology, anti-racism and LGB rights activism. We’ve reached a point where many people don’t want to hear anything about it anymore. I mean we have local planned parenthood promoting the Islamic veil and prostitution at the same time.

So what happened basically is that this ideology propelled many people towards the right and the extreme right. The left is slowly disappearing and the extreme left, to just exist in the media has been acting like a 1930s NSDAP supporter for literal months, obsessing over Jews and Israel.

Pride parades and feminists events have become sad displays of nonsensical ideologies and the media loves nothing more than interviewing the most unhinged people attending. So I’m afraid - and I’ve been saying that since the beginning - that without a strong reaction from LGB people themselves this will, in the end, send acceptance back to the 1980s.

And I’m not blaming it on gay people at all, I mean I see what feminism has become and how all major charities have been taken over… it’s really hard to be heard. If anything I’m heartbroken for the victims and for all the people who are going to suffer from this. People will forget the fetishists who will go back to their birth name and underground clubs, but not about the « slippery slope » that for them started with marriage equality.

#gender critical #feminism #politics #transgender

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transmascpetewentz · 8 months

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Moving The Goalposts: Infighting, Exorsexism, and Transandrophobia

I want to start this off not by getting directly into the meat of my theory, but instead by showing all of you a post that I came across today that illustrates exactly what I am talking about when I say that transandrophobes, and specifically TEHMs in this case, move the goalposts in a way that causes infighting within the trans(masc) community. This is a post by a pretty well-known TEHM whose blog I've been watching for a while.

What Jackson is doing here seems pretty obvious on the surface. He's making fun of nonbinary people who were AFAB because he perceives them as fakers and/or trenders. However, when you take a look at some of the other things that he believes, you realize that it just isn't that simple.

This is a post by one of Jackson's mutuals on here. If you don't know what some of these phrases mean, "trans heterosexual" refers to gay trans people (in this case, it's likely focusing on transmascs, but this rhetoric harms transfem lesbians too), and "trans homosexual" refers to straight trans people. What lavenderlad is trying to do is infantilize non-straight trans people, acting like we are complaining about nothing (maybe hysterical, even) for pointing out the oppression that we face from cishets and cis queers alike.

But it goes even deeper.

This right here is a very interesting post, specifically because lavenderlad seems to have changed his tune completely. As opposed to infantilizing us like in the previous post, he has now switched to transandrophobic conspiracy theories about how we are apparently some sort of dominant societal force despite being less than 2% of the population. My antisemitism radar is going off right now, too, because this sounds suspiciously like your average antisemite talking about Jews. He went very quickly from treating us like we're little girls who can't do anything to treating us like evil, scary men who are trying to invade his space.

He moved the goalposts because it was convenient for him at this moment to contribute to the oppression of gay trans men.

To elaborate, there's a specific type of transandrophobia seen in these circles that Jackson and lavenderlad are using. They are applying both maleness and femaleness to us. They infantilize us like we are women, and use our perceived femininity to justify gatekeeping us out of their spaces, while also using very common anti-gay male and generally anti-marginalized male stereotypes such as us being inherently aggressive, invaders, our bodies disgusting, etc. It's exorsexism, plain and simple.

And I feel like these posts show us how transandrophobes and transphobes in general can cause infighting within the trans community. A feminine nonbinary person might look at Jackson's first post and go "see! trans men have so much better than me!" but in fact, trans men, both binary and nonbinary, aren't actually treated any better. The grass is not greener. Trans men who try to conceal our birth sex and/or transness are considered liars, trying to invade spaces we don't belong, and more; but trans men and transmascs who do not try to pass, who don't try to conceal our transness, are accused of being "not really dysphoric."

Do not be fooled into thinking that transandrophobes would like you better if your gender expression was different. They don't want trans men to be displaying our transness, they don't want us to go stealth, and they don't want anything in between. They want us to be cis. Do not argue with your trans brothers about who society hates more; because society will see you as whatever will prove a transandrophobe's point. Address the root problems of patriarchy and transandrophobia instead of letting infighting eat us alive.

#wentz.txt #transandrophobia #free blocklist #long post #anti transmasculinity

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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I’m this anon who asked about radical feminist/trans debates. I appreciate your response and those of your commenters, particularly @elfwreck who described a long evolution of discourse that I’ve missed. I’ve not been intentionally dense…just a woman and working mother who’s been busy as hell for about the last 15 years and focused on getting through the day. I’ve always supported gay rights, never gave it a second thought. With my kids older and more time on my hands, I started exploring fanfic and have been drawn in. One thing led to another and I find myself down tumblr rabbit holes with women raising questions about girls sports and the dangers of HRT for teens and whether lesbians are allowed to not like dicks, with responses that generally amount to “die terf”. I start researching online and find academic papers and news articles, but find essentially a similar message to you and your commenters: “radical feminists are obviously wrong and not to be taken seriously”. No addressing the questions I’ve seen raised. I get the point—one side is indefensible and I missed the boat on seeing the discussion play out many years ago. I suppose I was looking for a short cut through social media which feels silly in retrospect. Regardless, the radical feminists are out there making intellectual arguments across social media on a range of topics, including men in general, misogyny, porn, prostitution. In all likelihood the post that first pulled me in to their viewpoints related to the imbalance between women and their husbands with respect to child raising, housework, and expressing anger over daily aggravations, which rang completely true to my personal experience and that of other women I know. Likely why I now find myself caught up in fanfic escapism. Anyhow, I’ll dig in deeper to academic literature on the intersection of women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights because I finding myself caring to know this history now.

It happens.

A lot of the roots of current feminist debate are in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80s. Those were about differing ideas around protecting women and the implications of pornography.

(TBH, part of how very old arguments are able to rear their ugly heads again is that this shit is old enough that the youth weren't born yet during those debates.)

While not about trans stuff per se, some of the ideas about embattled women whose territory is being encroached on link back to there. The "argument", to the extent that the anti-trans side has one, tends to be about defending women's spaces. Many of these arguments are coming from a place of genuine fear. (Maybe not realistic fear, but I believe them that they're traumatized and reacting accordingly.) Some, however, are malicious indoctrination.

There have been efforts (sometimes admitted to publicly, often not) to literally infiltrate young lefty spaces with this kind of rhetoric. It's the queer and female youth version of gamer boys getting indoctrinated by the alt right. So people on my blog have very limited patience for anything that gives this shit the time of day.

I don't think there's a particularly good shortcut since it's the culmination of decades of fighting.

But where I'd start would be by saying that a lot of the arguments sound good on the surface but boil down to "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" traps.

If someone on social media is still hung up on "But BDSM is abuse! A woman cannot meaningfully consent because [bullshit we fought about in the 80s]", we have nothing to say to each other.

The anti-kink and anti-trusting people when they say they consent attitudes tend to go hand-in-hand with suspicion of trans people and refusal to let people define their own identities.

Misogyny and unfair work distributions are absolutely real, but there's a certain "war on women" rhetoric that's about as legit as the "war on Christmas".

The "other" side agrees about a lot of the basics, like the fact that a lot of dudes really need to hold up their end of relationships better when both partners work and nobody should be solely in charge of the house.

But some feminist classic like the comic You should've asked is not on "The Feminist Side" as opposed to "The Trans Side". Regular feminism doesn't take issue with trans people. Lots of regular feminism accepts that women are kinky and horny and like impure things.

These feminist basics are often used as a strawman ("Our opponents disagree with this basic idea they clearly do not actually disagree with!") and as camouflage for much stupider ideas, like the notion that trans women would choose to be a demographic that gets murdered in bathrooms a lot. It's not cis women who are in danger from trans women! That's complete horseshit.

A lot of the talk of embattled lesbian space actually means "Oh no, some butches came out as trans men eventually, and we have to acknowledge bisexual women now".

Re the HRT thing... Yes, there are dangers to prescribing kids and teens hormones. A family should go into the process with a clear understanding of the effects on bone density and such. These risks can be managed the same as menopausal women manage bone density risks. These are not horrific and unknown problems: they're commonplace medical issues we've dealt with before in other contexts. They don't have to be a big deal unless a kid has some pre-existing bone disorder or something.

The part the transphobes don't tell you is that the biggest danger to trans teens is suicide.

Depending on which study you look at, something like 80% of trans youth have serious suicidal thoughts and maybe half make an actual attempt. Lots of teens have issues, but these rates are staggeringly higher than for cis peers, even cis gay peers who also tend to have higher rates than cis het teens.

Forcing someone to go through the body horror of the wrong puberty is... well... not great for their mental health. So a lot of medical professionals are understandably eager to treat kids and teens early because of the huge lasting mental toll. Taking hormones early can also result in an adult body that passes better. And perhaps people shouldn't have to pass as cis to be treated how they want to be treated, but we live in the real world.

Some people do start treatment and then regret it. That's reality. But it's a small percentage, and the issue is often that they're nonbinary and weren't presented with any options other than cis of their assigned sex at birth or transsexual in the 90s sense where you want the full top and bottom surgeries and you're still very binary. I know people who've detransitioned to a degree, but they're not like "Ah yes, I was 100% cis and a fool!" There was generally something going on, just something harder to pin down.

(In fact, most of the "evidence" of people regretting transition are from contexts where the only way to socially transition and get your government ID changed and so on was to do the full medical transition. The regretters would most likely have preferred something in the middle but were not allowed access to what they needed by punitive laws.)

A bunch of alarmist dickheads want to tell you that trans youth don't know their own minds and that everything will be safer and healthier if they just wait to get treatment. In most cases, this is completely untrue.

There used to be far more psychiatric roadblocks to getting physical medical treatment. What the haters want is for these to return. But they didn't deter trans people back then, and they're not going to now.

Re the dicks thing... People roll their eyes because it's such an old canard. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to like dicks. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to date trans women either.

But lots of trans women get bottom surgery and don't even have a penis. In any case, whether they get surgery or not, reducing them to a body part is the kind of bio-essentialist nonsense feminism normally strives to debunk.

These arguments boil down to "Have penis, will rape".

Re sports... Trans women don't end up being the issue. In practice, when there's a lot of scrutiny, what happens is that black cis women are seen as literally not female enough and racist shitheads demand that their hormone levels be tested and they be branded Not Female for testosterone levels or something.

Whatever this kind of regulation is intended to do, in practice, it establishes a correct way to be female, and that way is to have a body that conforms to a particular "feminine", white beauty standard.

The athletes who end up being attacked are sometimes intersex, which they may not even have known. Sometimes, they're just taller and stronger than other women. Often, they don't look normative enough to a bunch of creeps because they're too black.

The assholes cover it up with a good line of patter, but that's where this ends: treating black women like freaks.

The bottom line is that anti-trans supposed feminists try to pretend they speak for feminists in general and that there are two major sides locked in conflict.

In fact, they're fringe weirdos who've gained new prominence, particularly in the UK with the backing of JKR, and the rest of the feminists are over here going "This shit again? Jesus!"

I don't waste time debating their "intellectual" arguments on social media for the same reason I don't debate eugenics-preaching racists or fundie religious nuts.

Hence the lack of good resources on "both sides".

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