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ask-redditxtomblr-migration · 11 months

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hullo! I'm a returning tumblr user after the whole reddit fiasco.

how has the relationship between users and the staff around here been recently? i'm still salty about the purge but it seems like staff is a lot more easygoing than they used to be. certainly more than reddit lol

I would say that they're just different. The purge was forced onto Tumblr. Staff might not have handled it well, but it was the ban it or can it. Tumblr wouldn't be on the app store without it, which could be quite a problem for a lot of people. It would lose users if they switched to an download or online login in platform.

Now staff being more chill here? Sort of? They aren't doing what reddit is doing, but they aren't perfect. A lot of us still war against staff. One war we are currently dealing with is layout changes, or unwanted new additions. It's not the fault of the majority of staff, only a few are a part of it. The random changes and updates come from having to prove a paycheck and keep the development team. It happens with other social media. You have to constantly innovate or your position is useless, but development teams are important to keep, the corporate world just doesn't care.

As for the bad side of staff? They don't do much about far-right people on the platform and their hate. Staff also bans people indiscriminately. They don't deal with some of the bots who post porn all the time and dm people, or a guy whose whole Tumblr is promoting something illegal, but they'll get rid of the blogs of Kinksters, and poc, predominantly black women.

There's also the claim that staff has terfs, which would make a lot of sense. There are terfs who get off free even after talking in their spaces about hurting and hating a majority of the user base. They'll have unhinged tirades and stalking with no repercussions. That doesn't make this place safe, and staff doesn't seem to care while also saying they are friendly to Queer people.

A post was circling a few months ago where a bunch of terfs, who most have blocked, they were talking about a woman. She's a disabled wheelchair user who's bisexual and in a heterosexual relationship. She'd gotten a tattoo of the f-slur, and the terfs on here hate that stuff, want to police who can do what and why. They talked about shoving her down the stairs and we're joyously laughing about it. They posted popular reaction images made in mspaint, but they were using them as references to killing her. Those reaction images are usually used on Tumblr as the feeling of being unhinged, or reactions to news, not threats of violence. It took a large group of people reporting it to get anything done.

The problem with this is that one person or a small group flagging a trans person's suggestive or kinky photos gets them canned really fast. The same can't be said about people who threaten minorities on here. There's a lot of antisemitism (that's sadly common on every platform) and it harms Jewish users who have to deal with being harassed and stalked. It was really bad a few months ago because JKR made herself relevant again and a bunch of arguments started and a lot of people who are out about being Jewish, were getting hate mail and harassment by a lot of users. Staff doesn't do much about that type of stuff, even letting people make hate blogs around harassing minorities. Nothing happens to them.

There are some bad people on staff, they have their own blogs and they sit around reading and reblogging our posts. Staff sucks, but it's not because of everyone working at Tumblr. Since a few can't really be trusted, staff shouldn't be seen as laid back or kind. They are not our friends, this is their job and not all of them do it well. Some don't leave their biases at the door, but rather, indulge themselves on the job without repercussions. That's why staff isn't actually chill. They seem nice, but that's their job. They also help aid reports against many minorities who should feel safe, and they see it as doing their job.

#ask response #reddit migration #reddit #reddit refugee #tumblr staff #reddit going dark #reddit protest #staff don't nuke this post or me #but you probably will #ask: nicoconot

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mishafletcher · 4 years

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Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping.

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but—

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something.

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers.

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too.

#queer stuff #lgbtq #gold star lesbians #long post #sorry #Anonymous

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secretgamergirl · 4 years

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Hate Mobs Gotta Go

Last night, I did something I have never expected to do, and just full on gave up on a fun RPG writing assignment. Which I had to do because I hit a point where it was so overdue and unfinished that I was falling asleep sitting up and stress vomiting and other such things. There’s a whole lot of factors behind that. Other health issues, the toll of being on total pandemic lockdown for months, with neighbors just straight up open mouth coughing at my door, emergencies with friends and family, multiple fires and hardware failures, but the main thing was, and still is, the constant harassment from a militant hate mob, completely out of touch with reality.

Years ago, I remember there was this thing the internet at large was fond of doing with foaming at the mouth far right religious extremists- Mercilessly ridiculing them in public to expose how disconnected everything they said or did was from reality. Remember seeing this one float around and laughing your head off?

And if I mention the Westboro Baptist Church, you immediately picture a single family of raving bigots picketing funerals and such with their big homophobic signs, with a bigger crowd mocking them, right?

For some reason, the modern version of that particular flavor of fringe weirdo doesn’t get that sort of ridicule. Presumably because they’re focusing almost exclusively on trans people, and most people have this weird thing where like if you stick up for trans people you get cooties or something and never dig into the real juicy ridicule fodder. But for real, this stuff is OUT THERE. Just look at a few examples here.

Come for the weird ravings about harvesting baby organs. Stay for the... adult woman who apparently believes breasts get their shape from actually being sacks filled with milk under women’s skin? Now, how about this colorful comparison?

For anyone who wasn’t aware, pronouns are words like “I” “you” “he” “she” “it” and “this,” while rohypnol is colloquially known as “the date rape drug,” so this is utter gibberish. The full context of course is that this person is trying to make the argument that forcing this bigot to refer to women she’s prejudiced against as “she” instead of arbitrarily tossing around “he” or “it” is... raping her brain, I guess?

So... this is pretty clearly some creep’s weird little fantasy. The obvious giveaway is pretending that trans women “aren’t in the correct bathroom” when going to... the correct bathroom, and that the non-existent law about this is somehow enforced by... random bigots opting to deputize themselves. What DOES happen for real though is bigots like this being arrested for barging into public restroom stalls with camcorders aimed at the crotches of women on toilets and trying to defend themselves by insisting they have some duty to check what their genitals look like. On which note...

That’s just disgusting. It’s also as close as I feel comfortable to posting all the graphic fantasies I see from these people about the barbaric genital mutilation they imagine trans women subject ourselves to which really has no basis at all in reality. Well maybe I can post this one.

I’m not going to go through and itemize all the baldfaced lies in that, because I really kinda hope I don’t have to, and also because the person who slapped this together was kind enough to break it up in such a way that I legitimately can say “every single line of this is a completely baseless lie.” Also the art in the corner is stolen from a child-friendly comic whose author is trans, so, that’s extra slimy. Also wow that “bone scans” bit is actually one I’ve never seen. Where the hell do they even get these ideas?

Also this one needs some setup. If you have time, this right here is a freaking journey, if not, I’ll try to summarize.

So a while ago, this one particular unhinged bigot decided the most productive way to spend all her time was to get in touch with a bulk sticker printing business and order thousands if not millions of these weird gross poorly framed slabs with a really crude drawing of a penis and bunch of gibberish she really wishes were the names of popular twitter hashtags that nobody else but her ever uses. And then after receiving these, just... wandering around the city she lives in all day every day plastering them on phone booths and power poles and the mirrors of bathrooms in like.. elementary schools and park benches, just everywhere. And then makes multiple passes a day apparently to make sure nobody has tried to remove any of them, as detailed in this amazing thread I’ll link again.

So the latest break in that particular saga is that same zealot going around plastering stickers like this around too, to make it seem like “both sides do it.”

It should be obvious that that’s a “blacks rule!” sort of fake between the baffling text and using the extra inclusive, particular emphasis on supporting people of color, general purpose LGBT+ flag, but also, like their fellows on 4chan, they plan this sort of “false flag” crap in broad daylight:

I should really properly credit the whistle-blowing on that particular oddity, and I should also note that aside from the breast milk sacks, this is all just stuff I saw TODAY catching up on my twitter feed, but my main point with all this is to illustrate that we really are dealing with Jack Chick/Westboro Baptist-level unhinged zealotry... but again, nobody’s out there pointing and laughing. And it turns out, when you don’t have people pointing and laughing at this sort of thing, you get people taking it seriously. So... when I went to quickly search for a news story to link with the bit about creeps barging in on women with cameras, the results I got were... this.

That... sure is a lot of stories about totally innocent people in a demographic I belong to being murdered by total strangers goaded into blind murderous hatred by the sort of people I’m pointing and laughing at! Ha ha! There’s a very real chance of that happening to me every time I step outside, for any reason! Tee hee! I live in a state of constant fear! Whoopsie!

And it’s not just stuff like that. The people posting these rambling tirades about “breast milk sack implants” and putting crude penis stickers everywhere, never being called out as the unhinged weirdos they are, either have the world turning a blind eye to all this crap, or have everything they do downplayed in the media to the point where outright sexual harassment, doxing, and slurs I don’t want to repeat get headlines like “so-and-so made comments that some fringe trans activists on the internet deem ‘possibly transphobic’” and that’s AT BEST. More often you get stuff like the one incident I managed to bring a lot of public attention to way back when, where some bigot just literally walked up to someone on the street, grabbed them, savagely beat the hell out of them until pulled apart, had friends film the whole thing, and bragged after the fact about it, and every story that appeared as a result claimed the assailant was the victim, because they were all written by her friends.

Face obscuring provided by me here, by the way.

And that isn’t a one-off incident. Because, see, most of these unhinged weirdos spewing out all this transphobic gibberish are not, as you would think, a bunch of barely educated Trump hat wearing members of some fringe religious congregation. They’re editors and producers in major British news outlets. This isn’t me shouting conspiracy nonsense either, this is well-documented. Like, The Guardian gets public internal protests over this crap. So does the BBC. Yes, other respected news sites cover this. Media watchdog groups do their best to reign this in with hearings and such, but, don’t actually have any power to enforce anything really. So when there’s “reporting” on this crap, it’s coming directly from the “breast milk sack implant” people. Oh and here’s some screenshots of the headlines of those stories you’re too lazy to click through and actually read:

And of course, sometimes when they want to really come across as respectful, they try to find “scientists” and “doctors” who back up their ravings but all they have to fall back on are disgraced quacks who spend most of their time on activism work to normalize pedophilia.

I’m not bringing that point about Cantor up to discredit his writings about trans people by the way. He doesn’t really HAVE any writings about trans people. He just pasted the names of a bunch of random studies from the 70s about whether playing with barbies makes you gay into his blog a few years back and this crowd was so desperate for validation they declared him an “expert in the field” and started passing out links to his.... pro-pedophila blog. Which is part of this whole pattern, but I’ve written about that before. Oh and the governments of multiple countries manage to treat all these people as “experts” and make policy decisions based on their ravings. That’s fun.

Anyway, aside from encouraging random people to, you know, just randomly murder anyone they see who looks like maybe a trans woman, every so often this weird little cult pulls in an actual celebrity who then has a public meltdown as they post all this gibberish to a wider audience. Currently this is going on with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (who’s actively promoting the pedophile guy up there on Twitter), and I think also William Shatner, but I haven’t really looked into it. The last big one though was Graham Linehan. Who you might remember from co-writing some sitcoms that were popular decades ago in Britain, or from being the weird cartoon villain who tried to kill the funding of a children’s charity, prompting this strange pledge drive marathon of Donkey Kong Country.

You might also know him as one of... I think honestly just two people who have ever managed to be such out of control stalking hate mongers that they were actually given a permanent no possible appeal ban from Twitter. Personally though I know him more as, you know, that one absolute creep who’s been obsessively stalking me for like 5 years and never shutting up about his weird personal obsession with me.

I WOULD link the recent freaking filmed interview he did where he spent forever rambling about me, but I’d have to actually watch it to confirm I had the right link, and also the only place I could quickly find a link to it would be on his twitter feed, which as stated, no longer exists. Oh and random side note there, despite being personally, by name, the person he was explicitly targeting all his hateful ramblings at, he wasn’t banned from that site for any of the disgusting stuff he said to me. He just slipped up and mentioned a cis woman with a professorship while shouting about this crap recently and that caused people to actually take action. I do so love being invisible.

Anyway, point is, prior to Rowling grabbing the baton from him as his social media presence went up in flames, this guy was name-dropping me a LOT. Presumably he still is, just in places fewer people see it. And when you have as big an audience as he did, and that audience is as full of hatemongers as his was, that has a pretty noticeable effect. I’ve been deluged with so much hateful garbage for so long it’s impossible for me to put any numbers on it. The closest I can do to quantify it is note that hate dump was big enough that I was also flooded with more weird messages intended as support from total strangers than I could deal with, totally losing access to social media feeds and my e-mail from the volume for a good bit, and THAT flood was big enough that I got this whole second wave of creepy stalkers who’d built up this whole weird fanon where this stalker here is like, someone I used to date or be business partners with and not just some creepy dude like twice my age stalking me over the internet, from a completely different hemisphere.

And I mean... in the broadest of strokes, I can kinda laugh all this off. Because... these people are completely ridiculous, out of touch with reality, and mostly live in other countries. But... all the threats and shouting are very real and very constant and like.. picture someone outside on the street shouting at your windows about how they’re going to break in and kill you. You really can’t ignore that. Even if they’re unarmed, and all they’re really capable of doing is shouting and pounding on your door, you can’t really just ignore that shouting and pounding and just watch a movie or play a game or write this article you promised would be done 3 months ago. You can certainly try, but a pretty big part of your brain is going to be occupied with thoughts about how maybe you should call someone to see if they’ll escort this violent person away, or maybe you should barricade your door in case all that pounding does something.

And I mean this isn’t a bad metaphor for how all the constant threats and stalking I’m dealing with thanks to celebrity bigots personally obsessed with me impacts my life, but it also does a pretty good job of describing how my night went pretty recently when I ACTUALLY DID HAVE SOMEONE POUNDING ON MY ACTUAL REAL PHYSICAL DOOR SHOUTING ABOUT STABBING ME TO DEATH, and no, there was no resolution to that beyond the sound of sirens causing that person to back off.

I also had an experience not too long ago where I was supposed to take a cab to a routine appointment, a car showed up with the cab company’s name on it, somewhat early, and proceeded to drive me... out to the middle of the freaking woods like an hour from where I live, and when my phone rang with my actual cab asking where I was the driver freaked out, had me get out of the car, and took off leaving me just... stuck in the middle of nowhere freezing to death and trying to find a landmark an actual cab could pick me up from. Still don’t know what the hell that whole thing was about and whether a cab driver just REALLY didn’t know what he was doing and panicked or what, but I do know that talking about it publicly in the vaguest of terms lead to a bunch of unhinged shouting from... apparently some unconnected ride share driver with a habit of dumping trans women between stops when they try to get medications or something, convinced I was calling him out for that.

So.... yeah. Things aren’t exactly going great in my neck of the woods. I’d really appreciate it if people would properly treat these unhinged violent weirdos like unhinged violent weirdos and not respectable members of society so they quit getting so bold and public with the violent stuff, and people who listen to them get properly shouted down for doing so.

#transphobia #stalking

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kah-ween · 4 years

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So, I didn't really like this drawing, like, at all.

I wanted to post something pride-related-ish and had planned on doing a series of drawings of LGBTQ+ artists to post throughout June. However, with everything going on in the world right now it didn't feel like the right thing to do. I 100% support the blm movement and am grateful for the black trans women who made Pride Month becoming a thing even possible.

Everyday I try to educate myself out of the racist mentality taught in most religious latin households. As a Venezuelan queer woman, I stand by the black community as they have fought for my rights before. It is now our turn. Don't stop educating yourselves just because a hashtag isn't trending anymore. Growth can never be achieved if we don't commit to it.

Before pride month is over, I wanted to share with you this one drawing I did finish from the bunch, even if I didn't even quite like it. Melanie came out two years ago and has since influenced many queer fans such as myself with her loving and supporting words and actions. I know I post about her a lot but she really is the person I look up to the most

🌸 Happy Pride, never stop learning and practice empathy everyday. It hurts nobody to be a good person. 🌸

[Sorry for my trashy English. I swear I tried my best lmao.]

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Bueno, realmente no me gustó este dibujo.

Quería publicar algo que tuviera que ver con el mes del orgullo, de hecho, había planeado hacer una serie de dibujos de artistas LGBTQ+ para subir durante junio. Sin embargo, con lo que está sucediendo en este momento, no me sentía bien haciendo eso. Yo apoyo al movimiento anti-racista al 100% y estoy tan, tan agradecida con las mujeres negras y trans que empezaron las protestas que hicieron el Mes del Orgullo posible.

Todos los días trato de "desaprender" la mentalidad racista que se nos enseña en los hogares religiosos latinos. Soy una mujer queer Venezolana y apoyo a la comunidad negra ya que ellos también han luchado por mis derechos antes. Es nuestro turno ahora.

No dejen de educarse sólo porque ya no es tendencia. Jamás podremos cambiar nuestra mentalidad si no nos lo proponemos. Antes de que se acabe el mes del orgullo, quise compartir este dibujo, el único que terminé de los otros, incluso si no lo amé.

Melanie salió del clóset hace dos años y desde entonces ha influenciado a muchos fans queer, incluyéndome, con sus palabras y acciones llenas de amor y apoyo. Sé que publico bastante sobre ella pero realmente es la persona a la que más admiro.

🌸 Feliz mes del Orgullo, jamás dejen de aprender y practiquen la empatía a diario. A nadie le hace daño ser una buena persona. 🌸

[Al que me diga mucho texto ban]

#fanart #pencil drawing #portrait drawing #art #artists on tumblr #drawing #kah ween's art #my art #traditional art #melanie k12 #melanie martinez #melanie martinez fanart #melanie cry baby #cry baby #pencil portrait

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whitehotharlots · 5 years

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So we’re just gonna straight up embrace conservatism?

A few months ago I came across the story of a group of young trans activists who wrecked up the opening of a feminist library in British Columbia. To avoid accusations of taking sides or whatever, here’s what the feminists had to say about it, and here’s what the trans activist kids had to say about it. (Direct link: https://www.facebook.com/notes/gag-gays-against-gentrification/response-to-vancouver-womens-library/379623995740078 )

Both sides agreed that the activists physically disrupted the opening of what was purported to be a feminist space, caused several hundred dollars worth of property damage, threatened physical violence against the library’s proprietors, and demanded that a dozen or so books be removed from the shelves.

I decided not to write about this. Firstly, because engaging with trans discourse in any way other than nodding politely guarantees you will be accused of Literal Murder, and I just don’t want to mess with that. More importantly, I felt I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t amount to a simple, maybe even pedantic observation: namely, it’s kinda weird how we’ve begun to fear subjectively perceived, metaphorical “violence” so intensely that we’re willing to accept literal, physical violence as a response to it. It’s easy to make fun of people who say that using gendered pronouns is a direct cause of murder or whatever, but these people aren’t just obscure cranks anymore--they control the discourse; we’re living in the world they’ve built.

Here’s a sample of what I tried to write:

Here, in the interest of objectivity, it’s traditional for a writer to point out the tremendous amount of danger faced by those trans people who committed violent acts against the cis feminists and have demanded that the cis feminists radically alter their own space. A writer should re-cite the oft-cited statistic that over twenty trans people were murdered in 2015--and that, no doubt, at least half of them were beaten to death with a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography. And I don’t mean to be facetious: should a trans activist suggest that these books were being wielded as literal, physical weapons, there might at least be a smidgen of logic behind their demands. But such a connection, however tenuous, is never proffered. We are left instead with a vague implication by association: the trans activists understandably don’t like trans people being murdered and they also don’t like books they assume question the essentialist foundation of their self-understanding, therefore a responsible author will make sure to establish a sense that the former is indeed caused by the latter. Or, if it’s not a case of actual causation--since obviously it’s not and no one would ever be so daft as to suggest that it is--at the very least we should respect the trans activists’ sensitivities toward literature they find upsetting, seeing as they’re acting out of a sense of extreme fear that they at least believe to be justified. Criticizing them at lashing out would be like getting mad a cornered raccoon for showing its teeth.

Just… can you believe this? Honestly? Here, very real violence and property damage is excused simply by putting in the context of the emotional state of those who committed it. Can you imagine any parallel situation taking place in contemporary America? A black man would have a much more solid case in going down to his local police station and wrecking up the place. Police violence against black people is an actual, direct, and literal thing--no flimsy metaphors are required to explain it. If such a thing were to happen, however, the black guy would be killed or imprisoned and his actions would be condemned in all but the most radical of spaces (try to find a mainstream publication that supported Chris Dorner. You can’t). Or more on point: let’s say a group of radical zionists entered a store the specializes in classical music, so at to disrupt a talk about Wagner. They post threats on social media. They wreck merchandise. They tear down posters, shove some elderly classical enthusiasts, cause several hundred dollars worth of damage, and leave a manifesto demanding that certain naughty works be banned. Again: they��d most likely be arrested. They would find no defense within the mainstream press. Their sense of victimhood would certainly not be used as justification for their actions, and no serious person would yield to their demands that certain works of music be banned from stores.

So… yeah. I was having trouble not sounding dismissive. But since then other shit has gone down, and it’s dawned on me that this tendency to prize the metaphorical over the literal isn’t new. It’s very old. It is, simply put, the general grounding of the American conservative worldview. It just happens to be coming from woke people now.

For an example, take a look at a piece about trans activists vandalizing a rape crisis center with death threats. The vandalism was, of course, denounced on all sides. But check out the phrasing here:

Trans people face employment and housing barriers, Jenkins said, and the graffiti could be a product of a trans person’s pent up frustration. Vancouver Rape Relief, she said, is a visible organization at which to point a finger.

“A lot of the actions of Vancouver Rape Relief through exclusion of trans women I think are symbolic of society’s disdain for trans people generally,” she said.

“So I can understand that for someone who is having a really hard time generally, this is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the world that is treating me terribly — which is no excuse, but I can see how someone could get to that point.”

Just… fucking seriously? Again, can you imagine this kind of even handedness being afforded to any other marginalized group? The only time you see violence regarded in such an apologetic or celebratory manner is when cops and soldiers do it.

But, oh, it gets even weirder and stupider:

More graffiti adorns the sidewalks of Commercial Dr., further east from the Vancouver Rape Relief location. In support of trans people, the message “Trans women are women” appeared on sidewalks near Grandview Park earlier this summer.

Another message reads “Lesbians unite,” coupled with a double Venus symbol. Claire Ens, president of the Vancouver Dyke March and Festival Society, said the two Venus symbols are a coded threat to trans people.

“The two Venus symbols, that may seem innocent and to some even a call for lesbian rights and women-power, but in fact it is the opposite,” she said.

Two Venus symbols, side-by-side, is a larger symbol for “biological essentialism,” she said, a belief that peoples’ identities are determined by their genitals or chromosomes, which is inherently discriminatory to trans people who may have genitals that don’t match outdated ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman.

“The Venus symbols are meant as a warning sign to trans women, to state that trans women are not included nor welcomed, and is a perfect example of ... ‘dog whistling’ (because it is) innocent to those who aren’t in the know about it (but) harmful and hateful specifically to trans women,” she said.

Oh... oh dear.

I’m reminded of the time when I was in 8th grade and my best friend did some weird art project where he put an arrow through a George Jetson doll he won at the carnival and painted the wound with a red marker. His mom found the doll. She spoke with her evangelical busybody cunt friends at work, who informed her that the “ritualistic sacrifice” of stuffed animals was a surefire sign that the boy had been brainwashed by Satanists. She then had him involuntarily committed. A state official determined him to to be depressed but not under any demonic influence, and so he was released under the condition that he start going to cut-rate therapy, where yet another evangelical busybody cunt informed him that the doll was, in fact, a sign that at least one satan lived within him (possibly several) and advised his mother to throw out all of his cds and videogames and keep him under constant watch. Oddly, this did not help with my friends’ depression. Made it a lot worse, in fact. Kicked off about a decade of severe substance abuse. But that’s neither here nor there--the point is, he did something objectively harmless that a bunch of hateful conservatives found offensive, and demonizing and bullying him was a small price to pay to get him to stop doing said harmless-but-offensive things. He might not have meant the plush art project to be a sign of aggression. A dispassionate observer would most likely not regard it as such. But the subjective, spiritual harm suffered by his mother engendered a violent reaction, and the cruelly conservative social structures of our community prized her perceived victimhood over any actual harms, and so they therefore encouraged her to damage the boy so as to make herself feel more safe. Nobody wins. Everyone was worse off. But the woman got some momentary catharsis, and that’s what was important.

Uhh… shit. I was gonna try to connect this to something else, but I think maybe I made my point. If you don’t agree with me yet, you’re never going to. But just remember, pedantic as this argument may be, there’s a reason censorship has historically resided in the conservative purview. There’s also a reason why it used to be considered virtuous, in liberal spaces, to not regard your own tastes and pet peeves as moral issues that warranted vicious remediation. Conservatives are conservatives, regardless of their color of their skin, the people they like to fuck, or whether or not they regard themselves to embody the gender they were asigned at birth. Cruelty is likewise always cruel. A cunt is a cunt. And there’s nothing to be gained by denying these basic truths.

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ikemarth-moved · 5 years

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A little more about me, since it’s TDOV

So, hi! My name is Valentin, I’m currently 19 years old, and I’m a gay trans man. I’m dysphoric and gender non-comforming at the same time.

If I have to share a little my story about my gender identity and status(?), here is it for short, the impacts that caused as well:

Negative causes on my life:

Have been kicked from high school because of that, saying I’m whining for something that doesn’t matter. Never got the diplom.

One of my ex-abusers was a cishet but kept staying in relationship with me because I’m AFAB, and kept misgendering me to his friends

Have been “””banned””” on a website by rude members back in 2011 because of my gender and mental illness, being called “that girl who wants a dick”. Thankfully, members’ politics changed a lot and they’re now more acceptful with (also because a bunch of old members are gone lol). Sadly, the staff did nothing for it, but I was also too shy and afraid to do something for.

Lost any contacts with my father, when I made my coming out to him at first, he said I would be a very bad representation of manhood, and might disgusted of me, as a man, being in relationship with another one

A lot of breakdowns, obviously. I pretended a lot to be sick when I was in high school because I don’t wanted to see those transphobic classmates...

A month ago, I have been hired to a fast-food (not gonna say the name for some reasons), but they wanted to refuse me at first because I’m trans. So they used my deadname and only kept me for a month in there. Also the reasons of me being kicked of were odd.

When I was currently in diagnose for my mental illnesses, they didn’t take seriously my gender identity. Keeping deadnaming me. GREAT. *sarcasm*

Positivity/Goofy time!:

My current relationship used to be “”M/F”, but once I finally made my coming out to my current boyfriend, he accepted it! And later on he confessed me to be bisexual! Didn’t wanted to told me earlier because he thought it would be odd just because of the sake I’m trans. So we’re basically gay now.

It’s my boyfriend who chose the name “Valentin”, describing the fact I’m into romance and lovecore in general. Also I moved to live with him IRL in February 14th 2018!

Unlike my father: my mother fully accepted me! At first it was hard but then she’s now using the proper pronouns and calls me “Val”

Games like Metal Gear Solid and Castlevania gave me happiness and comfort for my gender, and this is how I’d like manhood to be more often instead of toxic masculinity if we talk about the characters.

Actually in progress to have a lower voice! By using the tip of drinking hot water or tea (according to my boyfriend, it actually works! But as expected, it’ll take some time)

I might forgot some stuff to say but, the point of my post is that if there’s any closeted trans people around: It will take time. Wanna know how old I was when I started to question about my gender? 13. Yep. And according to my grandmother it was apparently at 8 instead.

So huh I’m not excellent of making speeches but as again: I wish to any trans men, trans women, nonbinaries a happy Trans Day of Visibility, and to any cis allies to be kind and supportive to them.

👑Valentin👑

#👑.txt #tdov #trans day of visibility #long post #ask to tag?? who knows #for the negative part #btw it's ok to reblog #wanted to show experiences and story about it

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doedipus · 7 years

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housekeeping and personal stuff

coi ro do~! it’s yer old friend doe-chan, here with some mostly off-topic rambling. I’m probably not going to have a lot of content for a while- I’m taking some classes this quarter that are assigning a lot of work, so I’m not going to have a huge amount of time to stew over reddit arguments over less-than-serious, trans-related topics like usual. one of the classes will probably produce something I might post here, but that’ll be in march sometime, and I’m not sure how active I’ll be until then. I have some stuff laying around that I might post, but most of it relates to my ongoing d&d game, so idk how interesting the folks here might find it. it kind of varies from “you had to be there” to “this is an obvious vehicle for discussing my insecurities,” which might not make for the best content. it prominently features some ostensibly cis folk attempting to play trans characters, though, so it might be worth sharing for the schadenfreude.

speaking of vehicles for discussing my insecurities, the rest of this post is going to be exactly that.

my angst has been acting up again. in the grand scheme of times I’ve been depressed, this is pretty fucking mild, but I feel like venting a bit to whoever will listen, so here we go. it is pretty personal stuff, though. I don’t use facebook or anything, and my past on TIA earned me a ban from most of the half-decent venting subreddits, so this is kind of my only outlet for bitching aimlessly into the void. also, no, I won’t make a separate blog for personal stuff! you followed queen doedipus the wicked, you get queen doedipus the wicked, whether you like it or not D:<

over the past month or two, a bunch of stuff has happened that’s kind of been eating at me. nothing particularly traumatic, mind you, just a flurry of papercuts that kind of built up over time until it kind of hit me that I have no idea what I’m doing in a very general sense.

I broke up with my boyfriend of about two months recently. despite being twenty-fucking-two, that was the first relationship I’d ever been in. it didn’t really live up to the hype. we never had much of a connection, and I think I went along with it mostly because nobody’d ever really expressed interest in me before, and I wanted to see what dating was like. in retrospect, I don’t think it was representative of what actually being in a relationship as an adult is on any level, it felt like I was dating a highschooler or something. the guy is also rather clingy, so there’s pretty high evil ex potential there, unfortunately. we’re in the same rather obscure major, so he’s going to be in like all of my major-specific classes. please, someone, just shoot my dick off now and get it over with.

the whole mess also kind of highlighted that I have a really poor grasp on my sexual orientation and preferences in general. up until a couple years ago, I just assumed I was a straight dude, and I think I interpreted a lot of the dysphoric jealousy I have towards other women as sexual attraction, and a lot of the sexual attraction to guys as platonic friendship. whatever the case, there are a handful of men and women I can point to and confidently say that I’ve definitely been attracted to them, but there are basically no common threads I can think of besides just spending a lot of time around them. I know that’s not an uncommon experience or anything, but “I like the people who I like” is a tautological mess that won’t really help me size up potential future romantic partners at all.

at this point, we’re really starting to plumb the depths of what makes me such a weird person. the more I think about it, the more I’ve realized that I have ridiculously poor emotional literacy. I don’t know if it’s a result of toxic masculinity or whatever, but somehow it’s just not a skill I ever really worked on. the confusion over various flavors of wanting to be around people is an aspect of the problem, but it’s honestly a lot deeper than that. for instance, within the past couple weeks, two of my friends have been caught up in some bullshit with their folks, and while my heart was screaming a visceral, nonverbal sentiment approximating “I want to help you!” none of my attempts to communicate that to them really felt like they captured what I was feeling. in the end, the frustration got the better of me, and I kind of just stopped talking to them in the middle of the conversation. this is not an uncommon occurrence.

I kind of wanted to try meet up with some of my friends from the pre-patch days while I was back in town over winter break, but anxiety got the better of me and I ended up not doing or saying anything. I guess I was afraid that they’d be uncomfortable. these were all people who’d been totally supportive when I came out to them initially, but part of me just felt weird about it. I want nothing more than to run into one of them and show them my progress and catch up and pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on, but alas, it never happened. maybe I’ll be able to do it over spring break or something.

whatever.

#personal #idk maybe you just like reading this shit for some reason I'm not gonna judge

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