biradstrawberry

[biradstrawberry]

[biradstrawberry]

This is hard to read, but if you care about survivors of CP, please try to. She was very brave to post this.

[biradstrawberry]

have you considered that you might be agender? Or maybe a demigirl? Idk I’m trying to be compassionate and I see a lot of suffering under your hate

Yeah, anon. I have. If you read even a little bit of what I’ve written about my experiences with gender identity, even just my pinned post, you’ll see that I am very open about the fact that I identified as some flavor of trans or nonbinary for nine years.

Gender identity is a coping mechanism that allows women and girls to dissociate themselves from their status under patriarchy—a status that causes suffering on a scale that can’t even begin to be measured. Young girls see and experience that suffering, and they learn that suffering and being disrespected and violated is part of being female in our world.

Gender identity offers an escape. “What if, deep inside, you’re actually somebody who deserves respect? What if you’re an individual with needs and desires and an internal life that has nothing to do with the way women are forced to live?” For many women, that realization is simply that of “Women aren’t all the patriarchy says they are! We’re more!” But for many of those who are exposed to the grooming, petting, sycophantic rhetoric of gender identity, that thought process is interrupted, and molded into “If I’m not what society says a woman is, then I’m not a woman!” And you’re encouraged to never reflect on what that logic might say about how you perceive the women around you. You’re alienated from other women and from yourself, constantly occupied with how others perceive you and the crushing need to be different, bolstered by the doctrine that any woman who stays a woman must like it. You don’t like it.

Gender identity deadens your ability to meaningfully analyze and express your suffering. It takes away your language. It cuts off your connection to the women who came before you and the women who will come after you.

So yeah, I am suffering. But at least, having rejected everything that gender identity is and everything it does, I’m allowed to talk about what’s actually causing my suffering.

[biradstrawberry]

Adults, please read this.

I am only 16 years old. I live in a very liberal part of America. My entire friend group, with no exceptions, is TIFs and one TIM. I am the only person who is not trans-identified. On Tuesday, I came to my literal high school full of literal children and went to sit and eat lunch with everyone. I found out that one TIF has dredged up my old radfem Reddit account and suddenly everyone at school knew I was a “TERF”. Everywhere I went, people awkwardly looked down at their phones or glared as I passed. Before this, I had a reputation as “the only good cis person in school”. I had kept up the act so well, but I’d been torn up with guilt every day for lying to my friends.

On Wednesday, I received the news that I’ve been accepted to a program in my area where gifted children as young as 14 can go to college (known only as uni in the UK, I think) and the cost will be covered, and I’ll get high school and college credit at once. This would mean no more high school. Obviously, I will be accepting this offer. (This is so exciting, by the way; it’s basically all that’s keeping me afloat today! I’m so proud)

On Thursday– today– I went back to high school to tell my friends that I’d be leaving. Everybody just looked down awkwardly. Only about half of my friends would even appear in the same room as me for long enough for me to tell them this. The only person who responded was the TIF who found the account, to celebrate my leaving. I had to leave school early because I couldn’t stop crying.

The environment I am now facing is cold, hateful, and scary. I am met with malice at every single corner.

A lot can change over the course of a couple days. I have no moral or point in publicizing this information. Part of me just wants to tell someone about my being accepted in the program, because I really am very proud of that. I think I just want to add to the list of young girls trying to explain what it’s like to be a teenage girl (especially an SSA girl, especially a lesbian girl) at a time like this. I want the adult radfems on here to hear and understand the genuine anguish, sexual harassment, and complete ostracization that we’re going through, because I can’t imagine most of y’all have heard this before. 

Teenage girls, please add to this. Adult radfems, please hear this and advocate for us. I am getting my education and doing my best, but we need help and there’s only so much a kid can do. Please do something. You’re the adults and we need help.

[biradstrawberry]

[biradstrawberry]

since TRAs love to talk about 'science', here's some science for you

cochrane is a highly respected organisation which compiles meta-analyses of scientific research in order for people to be able to accurately assess the state of the science in specific areas. a meta-analysis looks at all the studies in an area, assesses their reliability, and comes to a conclusion on what the evidence shows. if the science is settled, for example, you would expect meta-analysis to clearly demonstrate a particular outcome (for example, that the mmr vaccine does not cause autism).

let's have a look at what they have to say about hormone therapy for mtf trans people:

"our review found no RCTs that looked at whether hormone therapies are effective and safe when used to help transgender women to transition...we found insufficient evidence to determine the efficacy or safety of hormonal treatment approaches for transgender women in transition."

this was the only entry I could find on the subject of transition and dysphoria on their site.

this means that, not only is the science of hormone therapy contentious, there isn't actually any good science on the issue at all.

considering that there is literally no reliable evidence to tell us whether a) hormone treatments help make transgender women actually feel satisfied with their transition and b) what the potential health risks of the treatment are, I don't want any of you ever again acting as if medical transition is anything other than a risky, experimental treatment. I also don't want to hear about informed consent.

I do not hate trans people or want them dead. if individual adults wish to undergo medical transition, I do not want them to be denied this exercise of their autonomy. but do not try to minimise our concerns that medical transition is a risky procedure with no proven benefits, and that young people suffering from gender dysphoria should be offered extensive therapy, especially for any comorbidity, before they are put on hormones.

[biradstrawberry]

people nowadays are treating their gender and sexuality like it's a phd instead of a facet of lived experience. but if you're going to treat your identity like an abstract academic theory, then I will too, by rejecting it as having no basis in reality. lmfao

like tumblr 'straight people are boring' rhetoric means that everyone has to analyse their identity to the nth degree just to find some possibility that they're not like the normies so now every microdivision of the human experience has been labelled as 'queer'

meanwhile if they actually looked at their real-life feelings and relationships they would have no basis to just call themselves gay because they're not

and this is why you get people agonising over comphet and whether they're asexual even if they sometimes get horny. because they can't accept that sometimes it's not that deep and that they're just straight

and I'm supposed to feel kinship with other 'queer' people, but what do I have in common with someone who is demisexual or genderfluid??? if these people had been born 20 years earlier they'd just be your average annoying young person and I would still have avoided them like the plague

[biradstrawberry]

The big problem I have with gender dysphoria is that it relies on the way other people perceive you. When I dated a trans woman, every time we would go out she would be so concerned that people didn't see her as a woman. She would talk different, dress different, sit different, all because she wanted people to see her as a woman. Sometimes we would have to leave as soon as we got to a place because she thought someone had clocked her or she felt like they might. And I get why. Violence against trans women is a big issue. She was afraid of getting hate crimed just for existing. She lived with that fear constantly.

It's not that I don't understand or don't feel sympathy for her. I do. It's hard to be a trans woman. The issue became when she would start criticizing the way I sat or ate or walked because I was "too feminine" which made her feel less feminine. In her mind, she had to be more feminine than me in order to pass as my girlfriend. This led to her trying to control how I dressed, my hair, my speech. I never felt like I could wear makeup because it would make her feel like less of a woman because she didn't understand how to put on makeup. I offered to teach her but she never wanted to learn. Every time I wore makeup or wore a dress or anything pink she would be so uncomfortable that we would have to leave almost immediately.

Having experienced all this and seen firsthand how mentally taxing it is to deal with feeling whether you are passing or not, I don't understand why anyone would want to transition. I get that feeling like you're the wrong gender is so unbearable that you may even want to commit suicide. But Anna wanted to commit suicide every day, so that didn't solve the problem. Many of her friends who were also trans or non binary were depressed or very distressed that people were not using their correct pronouns. It just makes me wonder if therapy for gender dysphoria would be more effective if it focused on why those feelings are coming up and how to treat them and learn to live with the body you have rather than make life altering changes only to make you constantly worry if someone is going to want to kill you for existing. Is it really better?

If you have the money for facial and bottom surgery and breast augmentation if you need it then maybe it's a different story. Maybe if you look more like a woman you will not have that fear. But maybe you still will. Relying on plastic surgery to solve your problems doesn't really sound like a good solution. I don't know because I don't know anyone who's had it. But most trans people don't realistically have that kind of money anyway.

This may be too simplistic, but personally I've found that the solution to caring too much about whether or not people accept you is to just accept yourself. Caring about what other people think is exhausting and not good for your mental health. But like I said, when you transition, it's like you HAVE to care about what other people think to protect yourself.

I'm not a doctor, but I have seen a therapist for years and I can attest to how much it has changed my life for the better. And I can't help thinking if people who wanted to transition just had a good therapist who didn't push them towards permanent life altering changes maybe they would be able to accept themselves the way they are and avoid a lifetime of anxiety and fear. Maybe that's naive. But I've seen what happens when you take the "recommended" route and I can't personally recommend it to anyone.

#gender critical #radfem #radical feminism

[biradstrawberry]

there's a common pattern where someone drinks respect women juice and wants to support girls entering male-dominated fields but they're still hyper-focused on femininity and it comes out in weird exhortations that you can play sport without being an ugly lesbian, mechanical engineers can wear high heels, you can care about software as well as hair and nails, and it's like thank you but please shut up

[biradstrawberry]

I spent a long time agonizing over whether I was a lesbian or bi. I had crushes on guys, I had dated guys, but after my sexual assault, men scared me and I wanted nothing to do with them. So I called myself a lesbian. I didn't date for years because it just wasn't a priority and I'm not very good with people and I still had trauma to deal with.

When I finally did date again, the first person I dated was a trans woman. I figured: she's a woman, so this should be just like dating a woman. But it wasn't. She talked over me, tried to tell me what I was feeling. When we did have sex (which wasn't often) she wanted me to penetrate her. I'm fine experimenting with new sexual things but it ended up grossing me out because she wouldn't clean herself so I didn't want to do it anymore. I feel like it would've been fine if she had the right parts but otherwise it's just messy. She couldn't penetrate me because that didn't make her feel like a woman. So we just didn't have sex.

The whole reason I wanted to date was to experience women. And dating a trans woman just didn't give me that experience. I tried to break up with her several times and she always manipulated me into taking her back. When I did finally kick her out for good, I started dating cis women. And it was everything I was looking for. They understood the struggle of women in a way Anna couldn't, even though that was her major. She'd never had a period, never grown up as a woman, never experienced all the expectations people place on you for being born female. In the end, even though she tried her best to mimic womanhood and learn everything she could about it, she sounded and looked and behaved like a man. And that was not what I wanted.

When we broke up I started dating women exclusively, but I still included trans women. I didn't want to exclude them, it felt mean and disrespectful of their gender expression. Then one turned out to be a pedophile. That was where I started thinking, would I be terrible to exclude them? Would that make me a terf? I knew a terf was one of the worst things you could be. But there were so many differences between dating trans women and cis women. They just weren't the same.

I went through a lot of arguments in my head about this. I couldn't be a terf, I'm not a vile person. I don't want trans genocide. But I was curious if anyone else had experienced what I had, and I stumbled across the radfem community. And I did find some extreme points of view that I thought were just mean. But for the most part I found supportive women who wanted women's voices to be heard over the loud trans right activists trying to tell us who to date and accept into our lives despite the danger and discomfort we may feel. People standing up for real women.

Having dealt with the trauma from my assault and my last relationship, I can now say that I am bisexual. But despite this, I will never date a trans woman again. It is too much mental energy trying to convince them that they are women when I don't really, if I'm honest with myself, believe that they are. It something looks, talks, and behaves like a man, how can you tell me I'm supposed to treat them like a woman? I won't take part in that delusion.

I also won't date a non binary person, because I have always thought that changing your pronouns is a futile exercise that does nothing but inconvenience the people around you. It seems arrogant to me to think that you're so different you need a new category. Not fitting into the gender box doesn't mean you need more divisions in the box, it means you can just exist outside of the box. Why care so much about how other people refer to you? Let them say what they want, be yourself. Don't hinge you sanity on other people calling you the right thing, that's putting your fate in someone else's hands.

I think whether you're gay or bi or straight you have a right to exclude whoever you want from your dating pool. It doesn't mean you're bigoted or you hate them - I have no problem calling anyone by the pronouns they prefer. But I'm not obligated to be attracted to anyone. I don't have to let anyone in my life that I don't want there.

#radical feminism #radfem

[biradstrawberry]

Oh no the horror!

Preach ladies, preach!