#but also reinforces either that cis men are biologically bad or socialized bad

[cock-holliday]

It’s not at all surprising that cisfeminists try to push people out of conversations about reproductive care but it’s bizarre as fuck for trans people to do it. Like, I do not know how to express to you that this topic affects like 99% of trans (and adjacent) people.

Obviously (apparently not obvious to many of you) trans and not-cis or not-dyadic people who have or had (at least some of) the organs that allow you to carry a pregnancy are affected by it. It’s YOUR parts. Everyone who can get pregnant is affected. Everyone who could have an abortion is affected. Everyone who has to worry about birth control for THEIR specific own protection is affected. Everyone who has to get a pap smear is affected. It’s regulation about THAT healthcare, about THOSE parts, about accessing care for YOUR body.

Likewise, the ability and responsibility to bear children is placed on ALL women. Every woman who cannot, will not, or won’t become pregnant has their womanhood challenged. It doesn’t matter if it’s a physical impossibility (infertility AND choice to remove ability AND never having the ability to begin with) or a personal choice despite the ability—if you identify with womanhood, a large piece of the narrative is equating that role with baby-carrier. Which exists both in larger misogynistic society and as a point of pride among cisfeminists.

It’s a feminist issue for how we need to destroy the way society forces a role, it’s a feminist issue on the grounds of bodily autonomy. So just about everyone, regardless of AGAB, is affected in some way.

It does no good to forget (accidentally or intentionally) the trans people whose bodies are being policed in medicine, nor pretend those whose bodies are being policed by societal role are “being brought up for no reason.”

Of all the genders; trans man, trans woman, cis woman, and identities adjacent and between—none escape this scrutiny and it is a topic that affects all of us.

The only role that it affects less is ‘cis man,’ and even then only so far. Either cis man is an identity that one may not hold permanently in which case the previously cis man is brought into the above categories, OR it’s a role that should be brought into the conversation more because of personal responsibility to the above groups. If we are to actually shift sole responsibility for pregnancy from the one who can get pregnant to also encompass those who can get people pregnant (expanding birth control responsibility, financial and parental responsibility, etc) we have to recognize that no body or identity is absent from this conversation, even if one identity is a silent presence over it all.

#LJsm #while I think cis man is a category most unlike the rest #I still don’t even think THAT identity should be in a total us vs them #both because of how cis men are not solely responsible for this bullshit #but also because of the potential essentialism #by isolating the identity away from the rest of us #it makes it hard for previously cis men to come over to our side as an ‘ex-enemy’ #but also reinforces either that cis men are biologically bad or socialized bad #and both create thought patterns that are used to police trans people within community #aka ‘cis men are the enemy’ isn’t less of a foundation of radfem bullshit than ‘men are the enemy’

[ambidexterous-lesbian]

A different approach to gender

Hi, here is the low-down on who I am and why I’m posting this: I’m a 22 year old trans woman from North Carolina. I grew up in a backwards ass town, and I got into philosophy when I was about 15. When I was 20, I had several things happen (life events, surfacing memories) that lead me to the conclusion that I was transgender. I’ve been in transition since then, and the whole time I have searched for some sort of philosophical justification about why I am this way. Why it is that I can have this identity, and it be respected. I’ve been through all the iterations of transpolitics, talked to other trans people, talked to GC feminist, and turned ideas over again and again in my head. Ultimately I don’t aim to invalidate anyone, in fact the opposite is true. We, the trans community, aim to welcome and validate all identities, and yet, the current state of discourse is appalling. We’re arguing left and right, and the thing that we all want to believe, that we are all valid, often gets fucked and twisted by the people who stand against us. It is truly my belief that this is because the most progressive policy (that people simply *are* what they identify as) has no philosophical backbone. So, this post is going to try to take you through my own reasonings on the matter, and how I did in fact arrive at the conclusion that people are what they say they are.

### Part One: The Female Brain/Soul or some other shit

When I first came out, I latched onto the classic narrative of being “trapped in the wrong body” it was simple, it was to the point, and it provided a since of validity by staking some claim that gender exist in the soul. Now there are other variations of this stance, some of which argue the same from a biological stand point. Regardless, most of these views break down into some kind of essentialist thinking. In my case, I believed I was a woman, on some plane of existence was my soul, and that was the soul of a woman, but what does that even mean? What are the essential qualities of womanhood? Was it the fact that I liked doing dishes? That I saw myself as weak? Or was it that I liked to be held? I do not see how any answer to that question doesn’t harken back to the olden days where white men wrote books about “the fragility of womanhood”.

Now, there are other issues here. For example, let us say that sometime in the next few years I reexamine my life and come to the conclusion that all this trans shit was hogwash and detransition. I wouldn’t be the first, and I wouldn’t be the last. Hypothetically, every trans person could come to the conclusion that they were wrong about their identity, and change it. They apply some other label to themselves then what they currently use, and hell every cis perosn could do the same and become trans. Here is what I know, I spent twenty years shamelessly living as a man. For a lot of that time I was happy, and I was secure in my identity. Now, because I identify as a woman *now*, some trans activist will argue that I was ALWAYS a woman, and therefore invalidate my identity as a man. Alternatively I could start identifying as non-binary, by doing that do I retroactively invalidate myself as a woman? Is the conclusion to be drawn that I was just trying to figure things out? Now, all of these are possibilities, so how is it that we can make the assertion that the “X is a Y” in any immutable sense? We simply can’t.

There are also some arguments in this vain that propose that there is some inherent biological thing that makes one trans. Conveniently, this mystical structure has yet to be identified. Even if it was I find it hard to believe that the trans community will accept it, because inevitably someone, lacking in the component, will identify as trans, and then we’d make up some other reason as to why they’re valid. So, here’s the skinny: arguing that transness, or gender, is anything more than something socially constructed has some pretty terrible implications. Either it breaks down into something sexist, or some kind of unenforceable gate keepery that we have fought so hard against.

### Part Two: Whateverism and Performativity

Performativity is a school of thought that was originally presented by Judith Butler in 1991, the basic premise being this: Gender exist as a set of socially constructed roles and expectations, and ones gender is determined by how they fit into and fill those roles. When co-opted by trans people though, this creates a bit of an issue. A trans woman is only valid assuming she fills the societal ideal of womanhood, thus reinforcing the sexist ideas found in that ideal. Meaning that when asking a trans woman why she is a woman, she parrots back all these sexist ideas about fragility, and daintiness, it is because, according to this paradigm, that is what being a woman is.

There are a lot of trans people that recognise the sexism here, and the fact that it invalidates many trans people who fail to live up to a societal ideal, as well as non-binary individuals. Because of this, there is a new school of thought that I've dubbed whateverism. This is the one that makes little sense to most people. The idea that it's whatever, that it doesn't matter what people wear or look like, but simply that they say they are a thing and are therefore a thing. This is the one I take the most issue with, because as of right now it exist as a liberal attempt to be all inclusive, and in doing so renders language almost entirely meaningless. This is the school of thought that 52 genders exist in, not as 52 cumulative categories and sub-categories, but as a multitude of distinct separate entities. This is the biggest divide among trans individuals right now, and for that reason it is what I'd like to argue for.

### Part Three: Pragmatism

There is a school of epistemological thought known as pragmatism. It preaches that a thing is true if it is beneficial to consider that thing true. The best example of it being used is in the field of psychology. A person is not schizophrenic because of some inherent brain issue, or because they simply present the symptoms of schizophrenia, rather they are schizophrenic because they do have a set of experiences, and it is *beneficial* to consider them schizophrenic. Put another way: We label someone as schizophrenic because it allows us to contextualise their experience a certain way, an prescribe treatment based on that experience.

In the same way, gender exist as a framework through which we contexualise our experience, it is a tool that provides us with a way of understanding ourselves. Most of us have had that framework handed to us at birth, and conditioned to think and behave in a way that conforms to the behaviours and experiences in societies framework of that gender. Now, I'm not arguing that this isn't bad, or that society wouldn't be better off without it, instead I am simply saying that everyone, trans and cis alike, uses the framework of gender to think about themselves. Some people are able to overcome the worse aspects of whichever set of ideas they've been handed, and some people are not. For some people the act of labeling themselves non-binary, allows them to think of themself outside of the shitty framework they've been handed. This is the source of all the female non-binaries, of all the people who choose this label and profess themselves to be enby, without changing much about their presentation or physiology.

So, it's obvious that I agree that gender is bullshit, that it's a made up thing that is oppressive, and yet I still identify as a woman, and see my identity as valid. The reason being is that for some reason, the framework of masculinity is not something I can overcome. Maybe it's because I like to wear dresses, maybe it's because I like dick and harbour some internalised homophobia, but ultimately it doesn't matter because it is healthier for me to identify as a woman, that identity conflicts less with the person I find myself to be, and all the hormones and the dress-up serve to validate that view of myself, and put me in a better state for fighting the oppression that all of us face under gender.

#trans #transgender #gender critical #queer stuff #queer theory #philosophy #critism please

[feminismforlesbians]

I mostly see accounts of people who were terfs in their youth and changed their mind. What made you go the other way?

@bluegone  

I’m finally back at my laptop. 

(I had this huge essay going in reply to this and then realized that absolutely no one would read of all it and started from scratch).

I’d have to agree with some of the people who commented on this through replies or reblogs while I was away—-I have never seen someone who was a “terf in their youth” shift entire ideologies into liberal feminism. You’ll see a lot of people apologize profusely for being a transphobic cis gay before opening their eyes to tumblr dot com and becoming an instant trans inclusionist. That means that as young 14, 15, 16 year olds (their youth) they had never heard of gender identity vs sex or else didn’t know that attraction based on sex, which was their natural attraction, was a bad thing. It doesn’t mean they were “terfs”. It means they were young gay or bisexual kids who hadn’t ever been exposed to gender theory before and now have subscribed fully to it, apologies for the past crime of feeling sex-based attraction always ready to be offered up. They didn’t change their minds from one ideology to another; they simply subscribed to one without comparison to anything else. 

I actually fully engaged in one movement, then consciously made the decision to subscribe to a different one. 

I’ve been on this hellsite for a very long time. I’m 21 now and I was either 14 or just newly 15 when I first ~made an account. The mainstream “LGBT and feminist movement” on here is liberal trans-inclusive ace-inclusive feminism. It’s large, it’s the default, it’s the social justice community you participate in unless 1) you know there’s a different one you value and you find it or 2) you find a different one through the mainstream and value it (a la me). This mainstream collective has enjoyed trends such as monosexual privilege, gender bang pt 1, mogaii, split attraction model, gender bang pt 2, “q*eer”, and others. I was involved in all aforementioned and the others in between. I believed myself to be bisexual when I first started, because I knew I was attracted to girls and I assumed I was attracted to guys. The monosexual privilege, mogaii, and split attraction model trends all did fantastic jobs of reinforcing this internalized heterosexism but also created a substantial amount of internalized lesbophobia. Gender bang pt 1 and the split attraction model together also created some short-lived but intense body sex dysphoria (wherein I would find myself browsing through packers and binders and shutting my eyes while using the restroom, despite still knowing myself to be a woman) because between the pressure to hyperdefine every aspect of my attraction and to deconstruct my gender, I went through the extra identity crisis that was never needed. This is all a very compressed version of the experience, and is more of a background for the events that started the momentum to my switch in ideologies. 

The tumultuous gender and sexuality crises that I personally experienced as a result of these trends lasted from about the ages 14 to 18; I didn’t start to drift away from the libfem community until I was 20. It was not the personal crises that made me leave, and it’s not my crying about them, about my individual woe-is-me tale that makes me a “terf”. It’s the foundation, though, and that’s why it’s worth mentioning. So you are aware I am not talking out of my ass when I describe things in the libfem community, like language used, priorities made, or the effects on young and/or gay people. I’m not talking out of my ass because I was fully subscribed to it for years; enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. It was my community. 

By the time I was about 18-19 I had finally just let myself be a girl and the sex dysphoria had dissipated along with the frantic attempts to gender-trend myself so that I could make my sexuality “make sense”; I knew I was attracted to girls and though I assumed I must have been attracted to guys, I couldn’t describe how and gender-trending seemed to be the answer. I let that go, the gender-trending part, and then I was just a “cis” bisexual girl. I was okay with that; I accepted that trans people were The Most Oppressed. I knew (and still know) that trans people are deserving of safety, and health care, and that dysphoria can be life threatening. I was content with the standards that trans people came first. Trans women are women and trans men are men, check your cis privilege, and so on. 

And then somewhat of a trio of things of happened in quick succession: there was finally that “duh…I’m a lesbian” moment, a wave of gender theory craze that I call gender bang pt 2, and then I got involved in the ace diskhorse. When I finally let myself be a lesbian it was like…learning to fly. For about two seconds. I just felt free from the discomfort and frustration and pain I’d put myself through trying to convince myself I was attracted to men when I really just wasn’t. And then I came out as a lesbian on here, on this hellsite, and I got people telling me, immediately, that that was great as long as I wasn’t One Of Those Lesbians. The terfy ones. Suddenly it became imperative that every time I talked about women I said and trans women. It was with my own internal freedom to be attracted only to women that I finally saw that the reverse was true in this community I was a part of. I was friends with straight women, bisexual women, pansexual women, q*eer women, q*eer nonbinary people, and many trans people. And they were all attracted to men. And what I watched was how normalized and encouraged attraction to men was—how the “thirst” for men was being called empowering and sexy and “q*eer”. Maybe it is empowering and sexy (it’s certainly not “q*eer”), but not when attraction women was either hush hushed or practically infantilized. Attraction to men was loud and suggestive and sexual and humorous and encouraged; attraction to women was…not. This I noticed first. Men and women. And then I noticed something else. It was okay to connect men to penises. It was assumed, by nearly every person around me, that when one “thirsted for that dick” they were talking about a man and that was okay. If someone said “I really want to fuck her”, without even citing whether “cis” or trans, the entire community was on alert. If someone were to say “I would eat her out”, there would be goddamn riots in the name of transphobia. This was where I started think that it was kind of fucked up that people could be “transphobic” in talking about men and penises have it celebrated as feminist, and then utterly destroyed for talking about women and vulvas. This was where I started to wonder why it was okay for my straight female friend to talk about her thirst for men using explicit details involving dick, but it wasn’t okay for me, a lesbian, to have a sexual attraction to vulvas. This was where I started to want to ask questions about sex-based attraction (but I didn’t, because you don’t ask questions in libfem communities. You just accept, validate, and welcome everybody and shut your goddamn mouth if you don’t.)

This overlapped with the gender bang pt 2, which was a reinforcement of the gender theory that had been prevailing for a while but was more significant to me at the time. While I was now starting to wonder why people attracted to men could specify male genitalia in their attraction and lesbians weren’t permitted to do the same for women, there was beginning a larger push to pretend like biological sex didn’t exist at all. There was a push for people to believe that only gender, a concept of personal identity, factored into attraction. It was a push that made it so a woman was only a woman because she said so, and to speak of biological sex was to be transphobic. It was a push that deconstructed my womanhood and my sexuality in one blow. It was a push that further amplified discussions of “dick”, except now where my lack of participation in such talks would have been unnoticeable, it was a “red flag”. It was upsetting. It wasn’t trans people that were upsetting to me, or trans women, or trans “validity”. I wasn’t angry about the fact that trans people existed, I didn’t wish them ill or dead. I was angry that my femaleness, my womanhood, the part of who I was for which this movement claimed to stand for—feminism—was now the enemy. It was being erased. I was angry that my sexuality, which I had had barely a breath to revel in, which I had had denied to me through all this other genderist bullshit, was now treated as a “risk factor” for being a transphobe—the ultimate evil. I couldn’t say any of this, though, I couldn’t ask any questions, I couldn’t differ even slightly in opinion, or disagree with something or have some fucking boundaries, because this is the libfem circles we are talking about. So, instead, I just buried my thoughts because part of me felt that maybe I was evil for thinking that way. 

And right around then I stumbled into the ace diskhorse. Yes, that one area within liberal feminism where there is the slightest variety—I say slightest because in fact, if you openly suggest ace exclusion as a libfem, you will be decimated just as you would for criticizing genderism. However, I say variety, because there are a decent amount of libfems who are ace exclusionists but subscribe to literally everything else in libfem rhetoric. That’s where I found myself, on another tiny blog, lurking curiously in these trans-inclusive gender-not-sex q*eer ace-exclusive posts. (Mind, I am ace exclusive. But that’s not what makes me a terf. Just an aphobe, apparently). This was where I learned that, hey, it was possible to not agree with every single little thing that the tumblr mainstream declared “valid”. I had never strayed away from the mainstream because I didn’t know of any other circle except, you know, terfs, which were obviously evil—so why would I have ever bothered to look at a so-called terf’s blog or in a “terfy” tag? I hadn’t. I hadn’t ever seen anything but the tumblr mainstream all very forcefully agreeing with each other, supported by kawaii banners and not much else. Yet here was the tiny ace-exclusive corner, where people actually discussed like, concepts, and constructs, and facts, and histories, and actual manifestations of oppressions. I saw people actually asking goddamn questions. 

A few times, I would see an ace-inclusive libfem telling an ace-exclusive libfem that they were evil fucking aphobes that were “just as bad as terfs”. Privately, I would think, no, no I’m not like a terf. Terfs are evil! They want to kill trans women and are total fetishists! I don’t want to kill anyone, I know trans people. Just because I think maybe being female matters and that maybe it’s okay to be attracted to sex, does not mean I’m a terf. 

So it was all happening in congruence: I was a lesbian finally free from her own internalized lesbophobia, looking to embrace and revel in my sexuality after hating it for so long, as the community I trusted told me that it was wrong to desire vulva but empowering to suck dick. I was starting to look up and outside and thinking about asking questions just as I discovered that questions could be asked. I was thinking.

I can identify a moment that could be called the catalyst. 

I was perusing my ace-exclusionist corner, and an ace-exclusionist libfem had made a post about asexuality that a “terf��� had dared agree with. There was no mention of trans people or sex or gender on either end and still the libfem said:

“go get hit by a truck and die, terf”

It was so brutally violent and since the “terf” had said nothing that was trans or gender or sex related, I thought that this must mean that terfs are so universally evil they’re worthy of fucking death threats just for commenting on a post. And then I worried the thoughts I’d been having, the anger about devaluing my sex and sexuality in the name of trans activism, were terfy. And so I clicked on that terf’s blog, to see how maliciously cruel and hateful these terfs were so that I could reaffirm my previous loyalty to trans-inclusive feminism. 

Except what happened was that I clicked on that terf’s blog and she wasn’t the spawn of Satan. I clicked on people she reblogged from and people they reblogged from and soon found myself lurking in honest-to-God terf circles. It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t evil. No one was asking for the rapes and murders of trans women. No one was fetishizing women. There were black terfs and brown terfs and disabled terfs and lesbian terfs and bisexual terfs and young terfs and older terfs. These terfs weren’t at all the kawaiied pasteled hivemind that libfem was. They actually talked about things; they explored, explained, and support ideas, history, facts, and values. It was invigorating. They didn’t all agree all the time all at once and no one was threatening lives for having a different perspective. Their commonality? In the most basic definition, these trans exclusive radical feminists believed in sex-based oppression, in sex-based attraction, and in the prioritization of women in feminism. Obviously there’s much more to it than that; that’s what made it so fascinating, this movement that had a foundation and entire layers of analyses and arguments and facts and history and convictions. 

I lurked and I lurked and I lurked and then I said fuck it, and I made a blog. I believe that gender is a social construct, that biological sex is fact, that sex-based oppression exists; I don’t want trans people dead, I don’t think trans people don’t deserve health care, I don’t think trans people don’t deserve safety. There’s more, but those are the baselines. 

So I guess now I’m a terf that switched sides. And apparently deserving of things like getting hit by a truck and dying. Comes with the territory when you decide to be part of a movement that asks questions and doesn’t deny reality. 

#terf #feminism #trans activism