as you can see, reblogs and replies are now turned off for this mind-numbingly braindead post, but I couldn't resist sharing some of the batshit content in the notes.

typing in color so it's easier to tell my commentary apart from the screenshots

radfems are insane because... we think "all women matter" doesn't include males. incredible insight. I also love "leave my sisters alone. and leave me and my brothers alone, fuckers," as if that's the direction the harassment is typically occuring in. as if radfems are hunting trans people for sport simply by not believing in or supporting the gender construct. yes. we are clearly the insane party here.

more evidence we're the insane ones, as this person claims men aren't an oppressor class and that somehow believing that they are will lead to... believing butch lesbians are an oppressor 💀 this is your brain on gender - completely unable to even consider sex, only "masc presentation," which is how they come to the batshit conclusion that acknowledging men are an oppressor class will ultimately come to include butch lesbians.

... girl. what.

however........ there's one reblog that really stands above all others. It is so long and so unhinged that it surpasses tumblr's image cap, so I'm going to have to do a part 2 of this post. but here's a sneak peek:

Gender worshippers learn what gender essentialism & bioessentialism actually mean challenge: impossible

Seriously. Y'all loooove redefining shit so much, but these terms were created for specific reasons and you can't just rewrite any word or term you want to suit your beliefs. Gender essentialism refers to the commonly held belief that gendered traits are biologically determined by sex rather than learned. The idea that women are "naturally" or "biologically" homemakers, more nurturing, less confrontational, and more emotional, that little girls "naturally" or "biologically" prefer dolls over toy trucks, that women "naturally" or "biologically" feel driven to have babies and there's no such thing as a happy childfree woman, that sex is inherently more emotional and meaningful for women, that men are more logical, better at STEM subjects, better drivers, that it's "natural" for men to cheat but not for women to, that men are "naturally" or "biologically" more aggressive, that paintball and Call of Duty are naturally "for boys," and a thousand other ridiculous things way too many people believe.

But oh shit, what's that? The people who really started fighting back against gender essentialism and arguing that gender is a social construct were... second wave feminists???!!! the very movement radical feminism is born from and shares most of its tenets with???!!! it's... it's almost like... radfems are the literal opposite of essentialists 😱

Meanwhile, today's trans community will tell gender-nonconforming people they're "eggs" and "totally going to come out as trans any day now" while simultaneously claiming not to define gender by stereotypes 🤡 like, OK...

check notes for Part 2!

"No one is conflating gender with sex!"

Yes you are. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you would say you were "masculine to feminine" and not "male to female." If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be using the term "assigned male/female at birth" to decribe the gender assigned to a person because of their sex. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be pushing to have the words "male and female," which are the only terms we have to refer to sex specifically, redefined to mean "person who identifies as belonging to the masculine/feminine gender." If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't so consistently act as though masculinity is what makes someone male and femininity is what makes someone female. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be saying that transgender people need access opposite sex hormones. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be calling surgery to make your genitals more resemble those of the opposite sex gender confirmation surgery. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be bothered by your legal sex being different from your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be demanding access to single sex spaces on the basis of your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be upset when homosexual people don't want to sleep with you because of your sex and not your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't consider sexual dysphoria to be part of being transgender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you would be distinguishing between people who are transsexual and people who are transgender, and you would have invented a separate word by now for people who are both, instead of using "transgender" to mean both or either. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be pushing the idea that sex is nonbinary, arbitrary, debatable, and a social construct in order to make how people think about it more closely resemble how they think about gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be claiming that gender identity is an innate and immutable part of a person's biology present at birth, just like sex, despite the fact that gender is a social construct and so by definition can't be inherent to a person based on their biological traits. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then when you argue that some people have the brain of the opposite sex, and thus are neurologically a different sex from what they are physically, you'd be using that to legitimize transsexualism and not transgenderedness (and even if we could easily and reliably identify the sex of a person's brain, that should be assumed to tell us nothing about their gender identity, since sex and gender are different things, right?). If you didn't equate gender with sex, then you wouldn't go to such great lengths to obscure the fact that most binary-identifying transgender people are also transsexual, that they want to belong to the opposite sex and not just the opposite gender, and that they want to adopt the gender associated with the opposite sex specifically because it would make them feel more like they belong to that sex.

It doesn't how matter how often or how vehemently you claim otherwise, you absolutely do conflate gender with sex, and it is one of the main reasons we take issue with your ideology in the first place. Women around the world and throughout human history have fought and bled and died for the idea that femininity, or a "feminine essence," is not what defines what it means to be a woman, for the idea that people of the female sex are oppressed on the basis of their sex and deserve not to be oppressed on the basis of their sex, and you people spit and piss on their graves and call feminism "regressive" while waving a flag with pink stripes for girls and blue stripes for boys.

By: Colin Wright

Published: May 3, 2023

The transgender movement has left many intelligent Americans confused about sex. Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year, Ketanji Brown Jackson demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere “social constructs”? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.

Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention “exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.” Scottish politician Maggie Chapman asserted in December that her rejection of the “binary and immutable” nature of sex was her motivation for pursuing “comprehensive gender recognition for nonbinary people in Scotland.” (“Nonbinary” people are those who “identify” as neither male nor female.)

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless. In “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (1998), the historian of science Alice Dreger writes: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex.

Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.

Acknowledging the existence of rare difficult cases doesn’t weaken the position or arguments against allowing males in female sports, prisons, restrooms and other female-only spaces. In fact, it’s a much stronger approach because it makes a crucial distinction that the ideologues are at pains to obscure.

Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn’t complicated. Trans women are unambiguously male, so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth is zero. Any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded (or “assigned,” in the current jargon) female at birth.

Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but the problem of intersex athletes in female sports is less pressing than that of males in female sports, and there seem to be no current concerns arising from intersex people using female spaces. It should be up to individual organizations to decide which criteria or cut-offs should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of bodies, not “identity.” Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety.

Ideologues are wrong to insist that the biology of sex is so complex as to defy all categorization. They’re also wrong to represent the sex binary in an overly simplistic way. The biology of sex isn’t quite as simple as common sense, but common sense will get you a long way in understanding it.

What is gender?

Instead of asking “what is a woman?” I propose we should ask more what gender is.  The transgender movement is, fundamentally about placing gender above sex, in language and law- although claiming sex is a spectrum or a complete construction is becoming more common.  ‘Woman’ and ‘man’ aren’t sex terms, they’re genders, sexual attraction is based on gender, not sex, and public planning should be based on gender.  So, what is it?  

The roots of the word gender came from Latin, and originally meant ‘category, group.’  It has etymological roots with the word genre, and this is partly why we have the term grammatical gender in many languages.  Gender became a synonym for biological sex hundreds of years ago, and is used partly as a more family friendly alternative.  As a separate entity, however, gender refers to the social roles of male and female.

Here are a few definitions and helpful information:

Let’s look at the specifics of the different interpretations of the word ‘gender’.

Gender roles: Self explanatory. What feminists are against. What transgender activists claim to be against, and what they claim is not the basis for transgender identity. This seems to be the most clear and understandable definition, to me, anyway.

Gender identity: An internal sense of gender. This has been claimed to exist, but how this could possibly present or feel has not been in anyway demonstrated. Studies have shown transgender people have the brains of the gender they identify as, but those studies are shoddy and flawed. Brain scans aren’t required to transition, these studies don’t account for nonbinary-identified people, and the brain sex argument has fallen out of favor- so, we’ll say that’s not what’s being discussed here. So, what is? What is this internal gender identity? Can we find it? How do we know everyone has it? And why should it be prioritized over birth sex? What’s being described is, frankly, unverifiable and flimsy. Not to mention quite useless. This doesn’t mean I think that people who claim to have this feeling are lying- they could have something that is interpreted as gender, but that doesn’t mean it’s experienced by the general population, and this feeling could be caused by any number of areas. If this feeling is, indeed, dysphoria at being referred to a certain way, and/or euphoria at being referred to a certain way, again, how can we know this is a symptom of some deep held identity, or a sign of something different? How can we verify this, and while I understand personally adapting language to accommodate someone in your life, why should this take priority over sex for the general population? Gender expression- How is this different than sex stereotypes, and gender roles? While I’m told that this doesn’t need to match general societal expectations, how does that actually work? If you’ve expressing your gender- whether that’s man, woman, or some form of nonbinary- even if you know anyone can dress how they want, even if you say ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ means something different to everyone, you are still making a connection between gender and how one looks- and according to the Miriam-Webster photo, acts. Not only is this, again, ridiculous to elevate this above sex in language and law, it’s unhealthy to hyper focus on how others see you, not to mention confusing and harmful message to constantly use the terms ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ together. I’ll be honest, even if transgender people claim the movement isn’t about stereotypes, I don’t believe that’s the case. At the very least, it’s not the message every one of them got. Conflating gender with sex, and the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ with personality, a feeling, clothes, vibes, interests, or an aesthetic, is a dangerous and ridiculous concept. Instead of what it’s claiming to do- breaking the gender binary- it’s putting men and women in a box, yourself. You are the one limiting what men and women can be. Even if everyone decided to identify as some form of nonbinary, this would not affect the reality of sexism and the perceived inferiority of 50% of the population- it would only paint a coat over it. It would make communication and activism impossible. By conflating experience of autism, or interest in space, or interest in a certain style of dress- with the terms man and woman, you are perpetuating stereotypes, not breaking them.

is it weird to feel like i was still treated/classed as a faggot before even knowing i was a boy (i'm transmasc)? i was never called a dyke or derisively called a lesbian or any of that. but i was a tomboy, always was. and i was always heavily derided for crying or "being a crybaby," derided by boy and tomboy friends if i ever liked any Girly Things with comments like "that's so gay (derogatory)", and being masculine but still interested in boys was regarded as this weird and disgusting thing. it's like being a tomboy and, for at least for a part of my life that being accepted, i had this expectation of masculinity placed on me that led to me being castigated by my peers for stepping outside it.

there were still expectations placed on me for "being a girl" and i was punished for not doing that correctly and i experienced heaps of misogyny, but there are so many instances in my life where i was specifically punished for being a tomboy who wasn't masculine in the right way but instead in a gay way. i never felt targeted by anti-lesbian sentiment but always felt very heavily targeted by anti-gay man sentiment. but despite desiring my whole life to be a boy i didn't truly know and accept that i was one until i was 18 and didn't start living as a man until i was 20

idk man my experience with gender growing up was always so weird and confusing and people's assumptions about what i Must Have Experienced based on agab and identity are always incorrect and it's just so incredibly alienating.

I've heard things very similar to this from a lot of trans(+) people. I myself have been out since I was very young and spent the majority of my life openly (gender)queer which definitely shaped how I experienced gender socialization.

This is the problem with using socialization as a Gender Binary 2: Its Inclusive Now! While there are broad trends, people can have such wildly different relationships with gender. Some trans people have always felt targeted based on their assigned sex, some people have always felt targeted based on their gender identity, some people have felt both.

The thing about the patriarchy is that it's a liar and you should never trust anything it says. The patriarchy claims to be a strict gendersex binary for control purposes, but it also must grapple with the existence of queers (gays, trannys, intersex folks) whose existence proves that what it claims to be natural is constructed. Because the ways in which misogyny and transphobia actually function are not tied down by any logic other than "stay in control." Demonizing queer&trans+ people for being "monstrous" for blurring the boundaries between (cishet) men and (cishet) women is like, alongside misogyny, a core part of how gender oppression works. Whenever people expect us to have the exact same experiences as cis people, whether based on gender identity or agab or socialization, they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

At this rate I honesty wouldn't be at all surprised if soon we'll have people calling vaginas "innies" and penises "outties" and claiming that a penis and vagina are actually the same organ just inverted and when that shit gets rightfully called out as ridiculous people will say that the idea that male and female sex organs are meaningfully distinct from one another is a neocolonialist social construct invented by wealthy white men in the past 200 years in order to enforce gender essentialism and people will start claiming that actually penises self lubricate just like vaginas and the cervix is like the meatus of the vagina and the glans and the clitoris are exactly the same thing and vaginas get erections and women have innie testicles because ovaries are the same thing as testicles and testicle skin is just saggy labia skin and actually everyone has both a penis and a vagina and is both male and female at the same time when you think about it since it's all the same thing so why have any kind of social barriers or segregation or boundaries or safe spaces or legal protections or support systems based on sex in the first place let's completely desegregate prisons and women's shelters and bathrooms and sports and sororities and support groups and so on in the name of inclusion and equality and those of us who remain cursed with sanity are gonna wish we spent our formative years huffing spray paint and whip-its so we were too stupid to be bothered by any of it.

trans rights

The basic claim of trans rights isn't that trans people exist (a non-negotiable human fact) but that trans people deserve everything available to cis people, in the same way that the original feminist claim was not that women exist but rather that they are equally as human as men.

The shift in material terms (what opportunities we have, how we are treated and so on) as well as societal understanding of us is that we are not implicitly sexual objects, the same as the original feminist push for change.

Along the way to explaining this to people we have to divorce the notions of sexuality and gender, which many cis people still do not understand as distinct, but although they are divorced, sexuality and gender are not completely alienated from one another. Gender and sexuality are friends with benefits.

Trans people put a lot of labour into their gender.

(Please read Wages for transition if you haven't)

The labour that trans people put into their gender is quite visible in ways that the labour that cis people put into their gender is not. For many cis people this creates an implicit impression that trans people by existing are claiming that their gender is more valuable than cis people's. This exists quite comfortably in a society that never talks about trans people unless it acknowledges their existence as sex workers or fetish objects, but not in a society that would treat trans people as equally human. Therefore a push for social and legal equality for trans people is, in the minds of those cis people, a push for a society in which it is broadly accepted that some people's gender is more valuable.

However, we already live in a society where it is broadly accepted that some people have more valuable gender than others. "Hot" people, many of whom put a significant amount of labour into their gender, are also treated as having more valuable genders than others. I'd like to draw attention to the obvious similarity between transmisogynistic rhetoric and ideology and the rhetoric and ideology of incels. Incels believe in a sexual hierarchy which essentially treats "more sex" as better and reflexively indicative of a more valuable person, rather than a uniquely communicated and negotiated consensual connection between two or more people.

(We could also draw a parallel between people's reaction to nonbinary people and people's reactions to vegans, i.e. "so you think you're better than me?")

Under patriarchy, women are treated as responsible for the reproduction of society, which is often essentialised as an inherent (biological) quality of women. Trans women, assumed by people who are not trans women to not be burdened with a disproportionate share of reproductive labour, are treated by transmisogynists as getting to enjoy all the aspects of being a woman (implicitly under patriarchy being a woman is doing more gender than being a man) without paying the price for being a woman.

When we say that we are gender abolitionists we simply mean that we are feminists, and that we wish to abolish societal hierarchies based on gender and allow people to self-determine and fully control their own gender without it having implications on their social status. Naturally the relations between genders are not abolished unless they are hierarchical because gender is frequently constructed through gendered relations. This, again, is why sexuality and gender remain close despite the fallout from their earlier codependent relationship. We should, in fact, want a billion squillion kajillion genders because allowing people to treat gender as a multifaceted social performance instead of an inherent characteristic rigidly attached to sex, we support implicitly the abolition of cisheteropatriarchy.

You asked yesterday for someone to explain what trans people mean when we say we do or don't feel like a gender or sex. My comment is too long to put in the replies to I'm answering here instead. I don't really think this will change your mind at all, but this is the best way I can explain what it feels like to be trans masculine.

Seeing myself and having others see me as a girl was painful. I felt a deep sense of wrongness when people called me "she" and when people described me as a girl. It sometimes made me throw up, it made me cry, it made me dissociate. When I transitioned and people called me "he" or "they", I felt an overwhelming amount of joy. I felt like they were seeing who I was, I felt right. I felt this deep sense of wrongness in relation to my body as well - I couldn't stand seeing my breasts, I couldn't stand having a period, I hated the way my face was shaped. I also often felt uncomfortable when doing things or wearing things considered traditionally feminine, but I think that was because I hated that people used those to associate me with being a girl. Now, I often enjoy wearing clothing or activities that fit feminine gender roles. My point is, my dysphoria and my experience of gender is almost entirely based on how I feel most aligned with the gender designation of man, and not at all aligned with the gender designation of woman - rather than what aspects of those gender roles I wanted to participate in.

I don't think there's one simple explanation as to what it means to feel like a woman or a man or any form of gender that does not fit within the binary. I personally believe that we all have unique experiences of gender, and most people's match up with how they are perceived by society, but others make them feel dysphoric. I honestly agree with the idea of gender abolition - as long as we don't divide people by sex either. It would be great if we could all just exist as people without these arbitrary categories acting as defining characteristics of who we are.

I can't answer if, in that hypothetical society where we don't have genders, I would still experience the dysphoria I've felt about my body. I don't know - I'm sorry. I get that there are a lot of confusing things in play when it comes to gender and trans people, and I think it's great that people like you want to understand, and I get that it can seem suspicious when there are some things that we can't answer.

But I don't think that those areas where there's a lack of clarity need to push you away from supporting trans people. We are not claiming to be trans for some manipulative agenda, or just very swept up in internalized misogyny. Most of us are people who suffered a lot trying to exist as the gender that society ascribed to our sex, and now that we've found another way to exist, we feel freer. I feel like a man because I don't feel wrong when I exist as a man. I don't feel like a woman because I felt wrong when I existed as a woman. I don't see what in that is a threat.

Thank you if you bothered to read all of this! Have a lovely evening.

Hi ^^ good morning, I just read this and I'm going to try to make my point as linear as possible. I want to start off by giving you a definition of sex and gender (just so that there's no confusion over what I'm talking about) I've simply taken the definitions from The World Health Organisation as I find those exhausting and agreeable enough:

Sex is defined as the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females, such as reproductive organs, chromosomes, hormones, etc

Gender is defined as the (of course variable based on place, culture, and historical period) socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men.

I want to start by addressing what you said at the very beginning of your argument: you said that people perceiving you as a girl distressed you even to the point of physical sickness, whereas getting gendered as a man made you feel seen as your true self. First, I want to say that your "true self" can't be the social classification of characteristics attributed to either sex. Gender is, by definition, purely constructed, therefore any identification with either gender comes from a personal sympathization with its elements and not from an innate connection to a system that is man-made and cannot therefore borne any biological bond. Secondly, I don't want to make a diagnosis out of your experience, but that simply sounds like an extreme result of growing up as a female. With the way girls are treated in every society it's no wonder that the passage from childhood to girlhood is burdensome. When a male child grows up he becomes a person, whereas a female grows to be a woman. Very trivially, the reason why I used to identify as non-binary when I was around 13-14 was that I felt too complex to fit into something as shallow and one-dimensional as womanhood. Of course I'm not saying that's why you specifically feel this way, as there could very well be another reason personal to you that has shaped your mind and put you in a psychological condition where you feel alienated from your body. But even in that case, the argument of transgenderism still doesn't hold up. Gender is not biological, so of course anyone can identify themselves in and out of it as they please, but that doesn't change two things:

1) the structure of it remains the same

2) a female who identifies as a man is still female and vice versa

You also go on and say that your experience with gender comes from feeling aligned to the “gender designation of men – rather than what aspects of those gender roles (you) want to participate in„

I find this definition quite feeble, as the "gender designation of men" is exactly equivalent to the gender roles linked to it, and nothing more. Again, I can't help but get the idea that the motive of your discomfort with femaleness stems from an underlying uneasiness with the poor way women are treated in a misogynistic society rather than an abstract and impractical affinity with the male sex.

Now, toward the end of your argument you hypothesized a world where gender has been erased, leaving sex as the only undeniable distinction between people, and you said:

"I can't answer if, in that hypothetical

society where we don't have

genders, I would still experience the

dysphoria l've felt about my body"

And, although I don't know you personally, I'm quite confident that the answer would be no. Feeling discontent over your body is not innate, it's learned (subconsciously or otherwise) through socialization. If you feel envy towards the male body and hatred towards your female body it is not because there's something inherently wrong with it, but rather because you aspire to the male gender class. Without sex discrimination & gender existing in the first place, there would be nothing that would make you resent your female body.

However, we clearly don't live in a word free of gender, so does that mean that we should endorse transgenderism for the sake of those people who suffer from dysphoria? The answer is no. Dysphoria is a direct result of gender, therefore the solution is to question the very construct of gender, and not to go through medical procedures to change one's sexual characteristics in order to "be your true self". Just like anorexia can't be cured by starving, but only by deconstructing the underlying fixation with thinness and body image. Not to mention the idea that gender is actually real is harmful to feminism. It does not only solidify gender stereotypes, and promote the definition of certain behaviors as either masculine or feminine, it also strips words away of their meaning, making the fight for female liberation a nebulous movement that stands up for the rights of – who exactly? Females? Anyone who identifies as female? Men who say they are women?

I'm genuinely sorry that there are people who suffer to the point that they want to be the opposite sex, but I refuse to advocate for the idea that you can be born into the wrong body. Believing that your body is wrong is a fucking miserable way to live, and it's also simply not true.

Let me know if you want to ask me anything else, have a good day

https://www.tumblr.com/familyabolisher/729804795639152640/do-you-not-believe-in-gendered-socialization-not?source=share

what do you think of this post?

Insane how this person writes. Boggles the mind.

"in discourse terms, it gets pulled out to denote an ineluctable state of "womanhood"-subjectivity in those coercively assigned femaleness and ineluctable "manhood"-subjectivity to those coercively assigned maleness; in other words, it gets used as a cudgel for gender essentialism coming from "progressive" types by which the claim that trans women/otherwise TMA people have "male privilege" ("male socialisation") can be smuggled into the discourse; the experiences of cis women and trans men/otherwise transmasc people are privileged as a standardised form of 'female socialisation' that pits them not as agentive within social forms of gender (and as beneficiaries of transmisogyny) but as unilaterally 'oppressed' to the unilaterally 'oppressive' male-socialised."

That's one sentence. Good lord.

You only write like this if you want to obscure your own bullshit, hoping it'll be too exhausting for someone to pick apart and thereby goes unattested. Because...what other explanation could there be.

But by god, this is so fascinating so I will try, for you anon.

>no. "gendered socialisation" is about a stone's throw away from "sex-based oppression" if we're being real about it.

So the assumption here for the author is that oooobviously the idea of "sex-based oppression" is ludicrous. This does not bode well for those of us who understand that "sex-based oppression" is not secret code language but is exactly what is described by the words being used. But let's discover what this person thinks.

>in discourse terms, it gets pulled out to denote an ineluctable [ie: can't be avoided] state of "womanhood"-subjectivity in those [people] coercively assigned femaleness and ineluctable "manhood"-subjectivity to those [people] coercively assigned maleness;

I added some editor's notes to make it more readable, hopefully. Essentially, op is positing that people only use the phrase "gendered socialization" to suggest there is an unavoidable (and, I assume, innate) womanhood and manhood based on sex. This is not true, socialization is a topic of great interest to many disciplines, and although it's never referring solely to sex/gender socialization, gender socialization is not just made up tumblr language. It's academic. If op believes that gender is a social construct, then I don't see how they can't believe in gender socialization. But op is clearly someone who believes that observing sex is coercive assignment.

>in other words, it gets used as a cudgel for gender essentialism coming from "progressive" types by which the claim that trans women/otherwise TMA people have "male privilege" ("male socialisation") can be smuggled into the discourse;

Observing gender socialization is neither progressive or conservative, depends on the context. The feminist context is progressive. The view from a feminist is that gender is entirely socialized, and is not innate to the sex, which is the opposite of "essentialism". To understand this you have to actually understand what socialization is, and I have a feeling that op does not. More on that in a second.

Obviously op isn't interested in discussing whether male privilege exists, they've already decided there is no sex hierarchy, that sex is not an axis of oppression, as they disregarded that idea in the first sentence. If I was to bet, it's because they already decided or believe that this idea belongs to "bad people" thatare in opposition to them, so they can't try to understand it.

>the experiences of cis women and trans men/otherwise transmasc people are privileged [???] as a standardised form of 'female socialisation' that pits them not as agentive [ie. taking an active role] within social forms of gender (and as beneficiaries of transmisogyny) but as unilaterally 'oppressed' to the unilaterally 'oppressive' male-socialised.

Op is just reiterating again they don't subscribe to the idea that sex-based oppression exists. Sex-oppression doesn't exist, therefore female people can't be unilaterally oppressed by men, etc. This person also posits that "cis women and trans men" are the beneficiaries of transmisogyny...unclear if cis men are the beneficiaries as well?? Firefox doesn't recognize transmisogyny as a word btw lol.

By the way, in case this isn't clear, op has used essentially 4 sentences just to say over and over again "I don't believe in sex-base oppression" and has not furthered a point beyond that. So....so so so boring.

>there is no one coherent form of "gendered socialisation";

This isn't seriously argued in feminist theory or scholarly. I'm not talking about random women on tumblr. When someone alludes to gender or sex socialization, they aren't saying that all women or all men are equally socialized the same and all women are the same and all men are the same. They are saying women are socialized as women and men are socialized as men. This is more clear when we actually understand socialization.

Okay, so what is socialization? Socialization is a complex topic, but divorce it from scholarly mumbo-jumbo what we're ultimately talking about is how the human brain absorbs information. How does the human brain absorb information? Socializing. Yeah, like the thing you do at parties. Yeah, like when you call you friend up. Yep, like when you chat up the cashier at the gas station. You know that meme, we live in a society? Okay that but for real. You live in a society, you can't say society doesn't affect you.

So what do we mean by "society"? Well, that's a prety complex topic, but! if you want to divorce it from scholarly mumbo-jumbo we're ultimately talking about how humans live with humans. Oh, you live alone? Yeah sure, but who designed your bed? Who manufactured your door? Who wrote your tv shows? Who decided that green means go, red means stop? Who made my bagel sandwhich $7? Wait wait wait, why does "manufacturer your door" matter? Well imagine if we lived in a world where "normal" doors were assumed to be ten feet tall and 8 feet wide, that would change a lot of things, right? Okay, expand that thought into the infinitesimal: think about how every dimension of every single manufactured physical thing you interact with had to be decided by at least one other human, if not thousands of humans.

You literally cannot avoid socialization. You are socialized by walking outside your house. You are socialized by never leaving your house. If you don't want to be socialized you have to be abandoned in the woods as an infant. People who survive that don't turn out so good. They weren't ever socialized into even understanding what a "door" is. Yep, the fact that I can type d-o-o-r and you know what I'm talking about is proof that you are socialized. Doors don't have to exist. We made those up.

So, when we talk about "female socialization" we aren't arguing there is a finite and concrete list of traits all women have, we're talking about how society has ideas, roles, myths, images, stories, explanations, expectations, etc. about and for women, and you just can't avoid them and they will affect you. That PLUS even if you buck every trend imaginable, people around you will still act according to those ideas they've been socialized into. If you're a woman who gets interrupted a lot at work, that doesn't go away just because you shave your head.

>how gender is coercively socially imposed varies along countless axes that cannot be accounted for under one sole framework.

much like doors

>if you want to say that experiences and subjectivities are shaped by misogyny or patriarchy then simply name misogyny and patriarchy as deciding factors.

annoying false equivalency. people can use as much clarifying language as they need to make their point. This is a person who believes in hidden evil secret subtext in words women use.

>it suffers from the same fundamental issue as many contemporary feminisms ie. that even in its most charitable form, it attempts to present a complete account of "womanhood" and account for transfemininity only after the fact via hamfisted exceptionalism, rather than beginning with transmisogyny as the lynchpin of gendering and developing itself from there.

wrong

>+ in general i try not to overrely on the language of "socialisation" and "conditioning" to describe behaviours and relationships

can't imagine what blowhard reason that would be because frankly I don't think this person really understands socialization

>unlike "coercion," which i think identifies the discourses of power + antagonism present in these modes of subject-creation, the language of socialisation and conditioning conjures up this idea of a non-agentive, immutable relationship to gender

Why? They don't explain why socialization (and conditioning?) is "non-agentive"...and then they don't explain why that matters. I mean, I agree, you don't have a lot of agency in socialization, but you also get to decide how you live your life. Plus why does gender have to be agentive? We're entering into ideas of transness that the audience is assumed to know and agree with that I would be called a feminazi for asking for clarity on so w/e

>(one in which gender is not something we do but something that is done to us) which stands fundamentally at odds with what transness should articulate. i guess another way of putting it is that i don't really believe in appeals to what people do or do not "experience" [x does or does not "experience" misogyny etc] as a cogent way of developing an actual theory of oppression + liberation.

idk what they're saying here sorry

Earlier today I alluded to the fact that Young Royals has some interesting stuff to say about heterosexuality. Let me elaborate.

One of the many intriguing moments in Young Royals season 2 (in my mind, anyway) is the phone call where Jan-Olof asks August a lot of questions and ends with the question “Are you heterosexual?” To which August replies that he is. It’s only ever been girls! (I think that’s how the line goes, anyway.)

What intrigues me about this is the way it puts the emphasis on heterosexuality as a label—or, to put it more colloquially, on the idea of being heterosexual as a “thing.” After all, the whole notion of being straight or hetero is a fairly recent one in human history. The word heterosexual hasn’t been around too long, first appearing in German in 1869 after being coined (along with the word homosexual) by Karl Maria Kertbeny. In the late 19th century, western culture saw a shift in how people understood sexuality, and people started describing sexual orientation as more of an identity thing (who you are) than a behavior thing (what you do.) If Wilhelm’s family has been on the throne at least as long as the IRL Swedish monarchs, then the current Swedish monarchy in Young Royals predates the ideas of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The Swedish monarchy as an overall institution definitely predates heterosexuality as a concept. Social constructs, baby!

That said, Jan-Olof, the show’s keeper of tradition, still asks August if he’s straight. What he’s really asking, given the uncomfortable reproductive subtext of the conversation, is whether August is willing to produce a legitimate heir to keep the monarchy going. This is interesting because of the way it conflates heterosexual identity with reproduction. We know there are plenty of straight people who choose not to have kids and use various contraception methods to prevent pregnancies from happening or being carried to term. (Heck, August and Sara themselves have a whole conversation about condoms.) We also know that there are plenty of non-straight people who have biological kids. Ultimately, straightness doesn’t matter for that kind of thing! And yet, by including a question about heterosexuality in a series of questions that’s really about reproduction, wrapped in an even longer list of questions about fitness for the throne, this conversation is putting forward the notion that heterosexuality isn’t just about sex and romance. It’s also a political stance.

And that’s… that’s kind of fascinating. Usually it’s queer people who are said to be inherently “political.” Straightness, of course, is just as political. It’s just that no one calls it that. So I’m struck by the reversal of that dynamic in the show.

I’m also struck by how August’s heterosexuality is a matter of attraction, performance, and labeling, and each of these is addressed separately and a little bit differently by the writing. We know he has heterosexual attraction toward Sara (and possibly Felice, depending on how you read that relationship) based on the fact that he has ~those kinda feelings.~ But there’s also the public performance of heterosexuality, where we see August hitting on Felice in a very overt and aggressive way. In those moments, August’s performance of heterosexuality becomes an expression of power and privilege. This is further reinforced by some of the crude sexual jokes he makes about women. Even the softer stuff toward Sara puts him in a protector role that lines up with gender roles by the end of s2. If the performance of heterosexuality is an attempt to claim power, then what does claiming the label of heterosexual mean? I think perhaps we’re supposed to see it as August declaring his alleged right to power, within this particular social system where heterosexuality means something specific.

Labels can confer power on a person by giving them the power to define themself, but labels can also be limiting, in a way. August is, for the most part, straight in terms of his identity, behavior, and personal politics. He’s willing to claim the power and privilege that straightness gives him. However, there are times where his heterosexuality gets a bit fuzzy around the edges. That time where he’s (fakely) singing Simon’s praises and out of nowhere kisses him on the forehead comes to mind as kind of a weird moment. Like, where did that come from, August? The fact that August has watched the video of Wilhelm and Simon a few too many times also hasn’t escaped fandom’s notice. Finally, the fact that August labels himself as hetero in a scene where he’s lying through his teeth about other things, and when the palace is trying to fabricate a perfect princely persona for him, really shows how much of a social construct sexual orientation labels are. They describe something real, but they can’t describe all the nuances of it.

My point here is not that August is some sort of hidden bisexual representation sleeper agent—he really isn’t! (Like I said he is functionally straight, and also these moments above still involve him behaving in aggressive and dysfunctional ways.) Rather, I’m more interested in the way August ignores his own fuzziness-of-orientation (however minute) when claiming the strict heterosexuality label, and therefore cuts himself off from the possibility of empathy for Wilhelm and Simon, as well as enlisting himself in a system where he wouldn’t really thrive. Sure, there’s lots of other aspects of his personality that play a role in this as well. But I wanted to talk about this one today, so I did.

Anyway, binaries are harmful and divisive and reinforce weird power structures. Regardless of our orientations, we would all do better if we all embraced a degree of queerness in the world and in ourselves, don’t you think?

(Hey, are there other characters in the series where you want me to talk about their relationships to heterosexuality? Let me know with an ask or something; I’d be happy to ramble.)

Hey I have several questions???

In a post you made a bit ago you said "transmen are women with gender dysphoria who live their lives as men"

- https://www.tumblr.com/autistic-and-radical/727261773689978880/trans-men-are-men-3

So what makes a man? Or a woman?

And I mean socially because gender *is* a social construct, yes a construct that can and often is tied to biology but a social construct nonetheless.

So to be clear I am asking what *socially* makes a man or women

And if you say "presenting as one and going through life as one" then why do you say on other posts that "if transwomen were women they wouldn't need to transition :)". Because in your view they cannot socially be something cause ???

- https://www.tumblr.com/autistic-and-radical/727205270180282368/dear-trans-women-if-you-werent-men-you-wouldnt

Let me explain it simply. There are two factors that I think go into gender, although I am gender critical therefore I don't believe in the concept of gender. In my book there are two unchangeable sexes: male and female.

This two factors are

1. Sex

2. Socialization.

Socialization is something you can't unlearn. men are socialized in the position of power and privilege. A man can't become a woman, he can live his life as a woman and appear like a woman but he can never be a woman.

I'm not denying the existence of trans people, gender dysphoria is a real thing and us treated by transition, but a man who transitioned, has silicone tits and a festering wound that he calls a vagina, calls himself a woman is inherently misogynistic.

Men have oppressed women based on their sex for centuries

Males claiming to be female is a form of oppression. Females claiming to be male is a form of defense mechanism

How do terfs know that gender is purely a social construct, push the belief to get rid of it, and not see the irony of enforcing pronouns and other gendered terms?

They are legit a part of gender and gender expression. A butch lesbian can preferrably go by Sir and still call himself a woman as much as he can wear a tux and cut his hair short.

Like, I know it's probably because there's a focus on being anti transgender before anything, and when one of the common methods to show acceptance is asking for pronouns, they want to push against it. It's so contradictory though.

"They're based on sex!" Tell that to LGBTQ history and culture that was around before either of us were born. Might as well tell me that women can't wear pants while still claiming to be against gender roles.

I have such enduring sadness when I see TERFs respond to trans people by saying shit like, 'What do you MEAN you just ~~feel~~ like a woman??' As though it's a gotcha, because... like... if you don't know what that means you might be AGENDER.

I often feel like there might be a lot more agender folk out there than we tend to see. We're marginalised in both trans and cis spaces, which often try to describe everything in terms of gender. But there is a strong thread in a lot of these discussions of people saying they don't understand gender and don't want to be gendered.

And it should be, like, FANTASTIC! There's a word for that: AGENDER!

And the beauty of this word is that it's fundamentally accepting.

It doesn't SAY that everyone is agender. It just says that YOU'RE not gendered.

It's a beautiful admission that YOU don't get it, and don't want to be a part of it, without trying to restrict how anyone else feels or what they do.

It is the epistemic humility of understanding that just because you don't - you CAN'T - understand something, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

All you need to do is look at someone who feels gendered (cis or trans) and say: I don't understand what it is that you're feeling, but it's clearly important to you - to your health and well-being - so I support it and validate it and celebrate it with you. Please also respect that it doesn't apply to me.

But because being agender isn't something most people know or talk about, these people have mostly only found a home inside TERF spaces. Which means they are existing in a world that should be largely inimicable to them, as the leaders of the movement are gender essentialists, whose end game is to convince them that because There Is No Gender everything is SEX-based.

But that doesn't follow at all from the simple fact of one BEING agender oneself. That's a fact about ME, not about you. And because I am an adult I can conceive of a universe that is not entirely like me.

But the trouble is that because most of the pro-trans and non-binary discourse is reactionary to this TERFist rubbish, it's ALSO aggressive towards agender people.

It's why I speak up every time someone says that gender is a spectrum that everyone falls somewhere on. NO IT'S NOT. Firstly, it accepts the anglo-european, colonialist assumptions of the binary - only two points. But importantly: NOT EVERYONE IS GENDERED. If such a spectrum were in existence, I wouldn't be on it!

When you say this offensive, exclusionary, erasive nonsense you are telling agender people that they don't exist in a world that accepts trans and non-binary people. So they dig their heels in and stay in the enemy camp - a harmful place for them!

It's also why I am increasingly upset to see 'gender' treated as another word for 'style'. I get the positive idea behind bots that propose random genders - it is poking fun in the seriousness of people who claim to not be able to compute more than two genders. It seeks to make the idea of gender fun and flexible. And if that were all it did, that would be to the good.

But it's not.

I have had young genderqueer people deny my existence to my face when I say that their poll doesn't include me because it assumes everyone is gendered. Because their understanding of 'gender' is 'it's just however you express yourself, so everyone is gendered'. NO IT IS NOT.

LISTEN. You can define your own gender, that's valid. But gender is still a socially constructed set of behaviours. It does not reduce down to 'however you choose to express yourself personally'. This is what distinguishes it from sex - it is a concept understood BY its socially defined aspect as distinct from sex.* And this enables us to understand agender people in a context where gendered people exist. How I express myself is not defined by the restrictions of social constructions of behaviour. I don't want it to be. I cannot identify myself with that. I just like the things I like, and the idea that those should be grouped together under social expectations isn't just foreign, it's harmful to me. You don't get to erase the harm done to me by gender by handwaving it away. And you don't get to deny me a personal sense of style by insisting that to have style is just what it is to be gendered.

Moreover, you know there are cis people who choose to express themselves in gender-nonconforming ways, right? Cis people whose sense of style is separate to their gender. I don't understand what's going on with them any more than I understand how trans people feel gendered, but I don't think I have a right to say 'You're not actually a woman, because your sense of style includes wearing trousers and having short hair, and those are Male Styles of self-expression.'

I get it. We all understand the world in part through our understanding of ourselves. And it's hard to take a step back and let go and say, 'I'm never going to understand what that person's experience is like, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.' It took me a long while to get my head around it.

But hearing that being agender was an option was a huge part of understanding how I could fit into a world where other people had gender and it wasn't a bad thing that needed to be educated away from other people's lives in order for ME to exist as me.

I'm not saying you have to be nice to TERFs just because they might be confused agender people. I'm saying that erasing the existence of agender people from your thinking and discourse is Not Helping.

It's actively harmful to agender people just trying to exist in a world that is dominated by gendered attitudes, and it has the side-effect of making a lot of people who might be agender feel like they're only welcome in the TERF camp. And that's deeply upsetting.

Very few people reblog when I talk about this stuff, which makes me feel like most of y'all probably find it annoying, or think that by asking for inclusion I am somehow attacking you. But I'm not. Allowing that some people may not be gendered and don't want to be gendered is not antithetical to you being gendered - quite the reverse.

Say you are a trans woman who doesn't want to be gendered as male. It sucks when people do that, right? It hurts. It's actively harmful and invalidating to you.

Now imagine you feel that way whenever anyone applies any gendered concepts or expectations to you. That's all it is to be agender.

It feels awful, and it's constantly happening in almost all spaces - cis and trans. But there's no reason it has to be that way.

Just stop projecting the gender you identify with onto other people when you don't know if they are the same gender. That's it. That's all you gotta do. Apply the same respect that you want from others to agender people.

Fini.

*Some of y'all haven't read the people who came up with the sex/gender distinction, and it shows. It's fine to have not read The Second Sex or The Sex Which Is Not One or The Traffic in Women. We all have limited time on planet Earth. But that means you have to be a bit more humble when you try to define away other people's lived existence based on concepts you haven't really researched.

What would almost-terf talking points look like? Genuinely curious because I never see stuff like that, though I may just not be aware of it. Thank you in advance ❤️

hey! no worries, it takes a lot of being on the internet (unfortunately lol) to notice the patterns of how online terfs talk about gender and make their stuff palatable for the masses, so here are a few pointers. keep in mind that people who post this kind of rhetoric aren't always terfs and you should be skeptical of ANYBODY who tells you that there are a complete set of "rules" you must follow or subjects you must avoid. think for yourself, but also be careful. with that being said, here are some things i've noticed after being on the trans internet for a few years:

1- "radfem"/"radfem-safe"/"radblr"/etc. usually they're a terf they just dont want to add the te- to the acronym. funny thing is they're not all that radical lol.

2- gender essentialism. this is one of the most insidious i think, because it's so well disguised, or simply poised as common sense. this can include anything about men and women being inherently different, whether this is about sexual violence, sexuality in general (including types of queerness), love, understanding/intuition/empathy, certain skills, whatever. sometimes it's just a joke but be careful because humor is a form of persuasion as well, just easily able to avoid blame. the reason why gender essentialism is terfy is because it posits that gender is immutable. ie. can't change. women are inherently like this, so someone who identifies as a man now will never get it, even if they end up being trans later. though some of these takes might have an addendum of, "trans women are women" or something like that, supposedly being inclusive of trans ppl, they don't account for people who aren't secretly eggs their whole lives. sure, a transfem who always knew she was a girl might be "included," but not a trans person who lived as their agab for their first 20, 30, or even 40 years. etc. tldr: this kind of rhetoric reveals how people truly feel about gender difference regardless of what they claim to support.

3- "male/female socialization." this one's tricky because yes we as humans in a society are socialized and yes that includes gender (which is a social construct in and of itself), but the vast majority of times i've seen this phrasing used is by terfs, so much so that if trans people want to talk about gender socialization, we have to use other terminology. the problem here is that folks' "current" gender is considered null and void due to how they were raised. this one is sort of the opposite of the phenomenon of "including" trans people in gender essentialism--it blocks us out from our actual gender in favor of seeing us as what we once were.

4- a weird fascination with militant genetalia. urls or bios that include stuff about vaginas and cunts killing people or whatever...i'm not against this, but most people who have this on their blog are terfs lol. aside from the jokes, people who see phallic imagery as something inherently violent or the penis as a body part as violent instead of like, the person as violent (if they are) is a big one. i guess the militant vagina is like reclaiming this somehow. i'm not sure. but it's a thing.

5- gatekeeping queerness. people who try to limit queerness to being lesbian/gay/bisexual, acephobes, arophobes, people who have this very basic understanding of queerness as same-sex attraction. sometimes they hate the word "queer." people who don't understand queerness as a culture and a way to play with gender and identity and presentation as well as sexuality, or as a political entity. queerness isn't just about being gay or straight. now not all acephobes are terfs, but because terfs have admitted to using acephobia to induct people into being radfems, and most terfs are acephobic....well. that's just one example, of course, but the point stands. anyone attempting to divide the queer community is inherently sus to me.

and finally, 6- if you download shinigami eyes, people marked as terfs show up in red. be careful because sometimes people mark others as red out of malintent, but if the person is showing other signs of being a terf and is red, they probably are one, lol. hope this helps, and other people feel free to add on! as always, take my post as just the observations of one individual, as a grain of salt!

*might be sending this to a bunch of people with great blogs who I really like and appreciate

saw a claim made that ocd "can never be cured, like thatevery person who has ocd will always deal with it, "have it" and that's because ocd is caused by a "chemical imbalance in the brain" and that it's been "proven by research". so they say you can't deal with ocd for only a few months or years, if you say you have than it wasn't actually ocd you're lying or exaggerating. which I find ridiculous and insulting, but than they say something worse "research has proven it's chemicals in the brain" which sounds even more ridiculou (im anti-psychiatry all the way. but what can I say to that?! any thoughts?? is this person referencing any real research? or just made up pro psychiatry nonsense??

I'm afraid I might not have a satisfying answer to this ask, mostly because I'm 1) agnostic (at my most generous) to the "chemical imbalance theory" of "mental illness" (as it were). there is nuance to this: i don't think that we are somehow entirely unaffected by our brains, in terms of structure and contents etc. Rather, I think that the construction of "mental disability" is relatedly only tangentially to what our brains actually "do." That is, the construction of mental disability preceded and continues to exceed what is capable of being known about the brain "itself," because mental disability is first and foremost a social, medical, legal, linguistic construction. Little more evidence of this is needed than the fact that I have never had my brain scanned, yet have been diagnosed with myriad mental disabilities and institutionalized against my will. The brain is to mental disability what "sex" is to gender –– a mythology of concreteness designed to (unsteadily) bolster the flimsiness of the diagnosis, the assignment.

While I am also uninterested in recovery as a paradigm, and in theorizing what it might look like to be "free" of a certain part of the way i move through the world (ocd included), I am interested in collective healing with and through self-determination and free association. What I know for sure, despite the murkiness of everything else, is that it is possible to substantially improve your quality of life in a wide variety of ways: some people find medications that help, some counselling (whether professional or informal). Others choose spirituality and meditation. Others self-direct using freely available therapeutic resources. Still more enlist the help of their friends and loved ones to keep track of types of behavior they'd like to avoid. And, of course, some don't do any of that, and it is their right to do so, so long as they are not endangering others, regardless of how shitty it feels (both for them and the people who care about them).

so: I'm giving you a non-answer. I don't believe in cure because I don't believe in disability-as-disease. I think people who are obsessed (haha) with figuring out the etiology of different diagnoses are at best naïve and at worst eugenicist. (Note: i am not upset with you, nor do I think you're a eugenicist or any other genre of bad person! Thinking about these things does not make you bad. Asking these questions in good faith does not make you bad, either.) I think that we will be much better positioned to talk about living and improving together when we forget chemical imbalances or medical decrees of terminality or unrecoverability or treatment resistance, and start thinking about things we can do in our lives now that help us create better futures.

Kind of wild how the LGBT+ community went from "gender is a harmful and arbitrary social construct that is completely separate from sex and that should be done away with so people can be liberated from its oppressive nature" to "actually the concept of abolishing gender is bigoted and transphobic because people need gender or else they'll kill themselves and also gender is objectively real and innate and present from birth" in what seems like less than a decade.

Like my views as a gender abolitionist wouldn't exist if it weren't for all the "actually gender is just a social construct" discourse that used to take place. Never mind how utterly nonsense it is to claim that gender itself is fake and made up but that gender identity is real and innate. How can you innately identify as a made up social construct? If you were born and raised as the only human on a planet occupied by genderless robots, would you still feel like wearing dresses or shaving your legs or wearing cargo shorts or chugging beer at a sports bar affirmed your gender? Would you even have a conception of gender at all? No! Because it's a social construct! And if your response to this is to say, "well, I would still have sexual dysphoria, so I would still be transgender," then you are conflating sex with gender and therefore sexual dysphoria with gender dysphoria and therefore transsexual with transgender, when those are not the same thing. Another concept that I was only introduced to because of queer discourse!

It honestly feels like the queer community is shifting into some kind of bizarro backwards inverse version of itself at this point. This is far from the only example of a radical shift in the kinds of ideas that are being spread, legitimized, and accepted that I've seen. Shit that would garner praise ten years ago for being progressive and enlightened will now get you canceled for being a bigot. Things that were staples of a queer understanding of the world are now derided as hateful and phobic. And this isn't a simple case of "well the times change and what we used to see as progressive we now realize was still pretty messed up," like core and foundational ideas and concepts are being cast aside and swapped out for ones that are fundamentally incompatible with, and sometimes even the direct opposite of, them. What happened?