#all the things that they claim means someone is secretly a trans woman

[astraltrickster]

I think the thing that's really interesting about the egg joke phenomenon is that...it speaks of a very SPECIFIC trans experience. Not an invalid one, but an EXTREMELY specific one. The overwhelming majority of people I see insisting on saying it are fairly gender-conforming, pretty young, mostly white, probably-more-online-than-average trans people.

Even when it's not explicitly claiming that any gender nonconformity will eventually "go all the way" - that any man who paints his nails is secretly a binary woman deep down, she/her exclusively, or that any woman who likes cars and keeps her hair short and finds her tits inconvenient is totally gonna be a binary man in 5 years - there's still the assumption that everyone who ends up playing with gender is gonna identify as A Little Bit Trans, and probably start taking hormones, and that's a neutral to good thing...

And, I can see how that SOUNDS like a progressive thing to say, when you spend a lot of time in certain online queer communities, where "trans people don't owe you perfect conformity to their actual gender" is almost as widely accepted as "the earth is fucking round", but internalized bias makes a lot of people still act like suspicion of being queer is some kind accusation of wrongdoing. I mean, hell, we're getting past the "born this way" narrative and talking more about how yes, SOME of queerness is about deep-seated identity, but SOME of it is also about pushing back against unjust social constructs, and that lowering the stakes of exploration will eventually make more people identify with queerness, and that's just a neutral statement of fact - by THAT definition, it's totally understandable where the jokes come from.

Problem is, most of the people pushing back against them AREN'T cis people insisting that "nooooo, it's MEAN to even IMAGINE that someone might be a FREAK like YOU"; they're OTHER TRANS AND NONBINARY PEOPLE pointing out how this can reinforce stereotypes that have been used against US. Who have been gatekept from actual medical transition because, just like the person you're calling totally an egg, we DIDN'T reject every single thing that brought us joy but wasn't wrapped up in the right pink or blue wrapper. Who have had their identities denied even within the community because, like, okay, but you NEED to pick a side you're closer to because we NEED to know how to pigeonhole you, on an individual level, within our theory of your societal privilege that other people constructed on a demographic-wide level and explicitly CAN'T apply the same way to every single individual ever, in large part specifically because of people who lie outside the framework-

And we cannot tell at a glance whether you mean it in that understandable sense, or the gender-policing sense that's queerphobic, misogynistic, usually even straight-up racist garbage used to demand men constantly prove themselves by aggressive repression of every emotion but rage, and gets butches attacked by terfs and their conservative Christofascist BFFs for "violating the sanctity of women's restrooms", or somewhere else on the spectrum such that CONSCIOUSLY you mean it in the understandable sense but you still have a good bit of subconscious internalized gender essentialism that you've just assigned to taste instead of body parts.

And YOU cannot tell at a glance if the "egg" you just spotted really is as cis as you think they are - they might very well be trans in the OPPOSITE direction, or some other totally different way than you're "predicting" them to be, and so you're functionally repeating the exact same "ugh, you're wearing pink, look at this faggot, man card REVOKED lmao // nooooo, you'll ALWAYS be your birth sex deep down, the fact that you don't hate EVERYTHING associated with it and can't shake that mannerism learned over a lifetime on day 1 out of the closet PROVES it" that's been thrown at us all the fucking time to deny us anything from social support to actual literal medical care.

In short, look, go ahead and make those jokes, but please do it in a constrained space where people are all known to be on the same page as you. There ARE valid reasons not to fucking want to hear people speculating openly about random strangers' private lives and deliberately misgendering them for a joke.

#internet culture #internet etiquette #serious tag #side note i hate how its ALSO impossible to differentiate at a glance between people who say ''trans and nonbinary'' #to INCLUDE nonbinary people who DON'T identify as trans #and people who say it to EXCLUDE nonbinary people who DO #i mean it in the former sense #to be 100000% clear #look im a little sick and i just saw a post about it and just ugh i hate the semantic gap #i wish we could communicate ideas telepathically

[julia1x5]

Ma'am this is Wendy's.

In all seriousness, you need to get off the internet for a while. Talk to real people. As for what you said, let's do a breakdown shall we?

1. "despite yall being a group of racists ("black women are the same as transwomen") no, no one says that. We have said that radfems trying to enforce gender essentialism will have unintended racist side effects. The main example is Caster Semenya, a cis woman of color who was targeted by the same anti-trans sports protection bills. Accusations of being secretly trans are aimed at WOC who perform well.

2. "Sex based oppression does not exist" it does exist yes, it's a terrible and inexcusable issue throughout the world. But what you include as sex based oppression is often over broad. Example, Maya Forstater was not fired as a victim of sex based oppression. Her temporary contract was not renewed because she was harassing other employees.

3. Homophobic ("unlearn their aversion to dick, lesbians") this is by far the most common intentionally misunderstood point from radfems. No one ever can force you to have sex with them. You can revoke consent at any point. But saying: "all transwomen are actually men and all have dicks" is not only wrong, its just a weird thing to announce? Like imagine going into a bar and announcing that you are only into white women? No can force you to date or have sex with someone of color, but like it's a bigoted position to be in.

4. Incel (self-explanatory) I've been in a committed long term relationship for over 8 years. I'm not even sure what your point is here?

5. Pedophiles, its amazing how much recycled homophobia there is in the gender crit community. This is the exact thing conservatives called gays in the 1950s. Copying our oppressors will not make you safe from oppression.

By all means if I have said anything you've accused me of in the past, please send a screenshot of me saying it. But then again, you'll probably just block me in a huff, claiming a victory after running from a fight you started :-)

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

//This is something I just wanna let everyone in on quickly, but like I mentioned when I was talking about H2O originally, every character in H2O has some quirks or are some sort of sexual or gener alignment that isn’t straight. As I mentioned, this is primarily done for SJW propaganda, which annoys me, however, I think it’s still important that people, real or fictional, are treated as they deserve to be, with their proper pronouns and with their proper interests. So here’s a few bits of information for you guys.

The characters in the Freedom Foundation are the 6 Survivors of the original H2O killing game. Do with that info what you will.

Maya is originally Italian, despite living in the states, and sometimes she will slip back into her original dialect, more notably when she gets upset, or when she wants to cuss someone out secretly.

Maya has ADHD. She’s rambunctious and curious by nature, and she’s always wanting to talk to someone, even when they don’t want to talk to her. Much like how Kuripa does, she doesn’t even try to mince words and says things as they are, all the time, every time.

Maya and Four are both lesbians, and Maya has a crush on Four. Four feels the same way back, but they have yet to tie the knot with one another.

Leona is Bisexual. In the original game, she claims to be a lesbian, which Maya approves of, but she also admits to having a thing for pretty boys.

Four is a transgender woman, who uses she/her pronouns.

Hunter and Koji are gay, and are dating as of this point in the story.

Much like Kaito, despite being dim-witted at face value, Koji is actually very smart. As an apothecary, his knowledge on medicine and the properties rivals that of Mikan.

Koji is a trans man.

Oliver is nonbinary. They use They/Them pronouns.

Oliver is asexual.

I will mention this in a seperate post later down the line, but I do have my headcanon VA’s (remember, these are not official): Maya is Eden Riegal Four is Kayleigh McKee Koji is Shannon McKain Leona is Macy Anne Johnson Hunter is Ray Chase And Oliver is Erik Kimerer

//In regards to pronouns especially, I’m not going to be strict with you guys if you call the characters by the wrong pronouns. I’m saying that particularly with they/them pronouns, I struggle a bit because there’s a distinct lack of nonbinary people in my life. If I at any point accidently refer to Oliver as a “he” or a “him”, then know that I don’t mean any harm

-Mod

[cowboylikedean]

Hey, I'm the anon from before and first off I really appreciate the time and effort you put into your reply, so thank you!

However, I really don't want to fight feminism! Feminism is great! My sarcastic quip in the beginning was more meant for individual level situations. In fact I realized I did misread your previous post and reblog, and with your reply I was able to understand what you meant with generalizing. So yes, definitely, the class of (cis) men is the oppressor

Further down in the text, I didn't mean women as a generalized group, just individuals. I never wanted to make the point that women were secretly the oppressor! [Though I do think that making fun of penis size is actually body shaming (that can also hurt trans men), though not The One big oppression tool. I just don't think body shaming is good no matter who it's aimed at.]

I don't know if I now would call it oppression what (mostly cis) men do to each other (can't remember if I labeled it as such, if so, I take it back)... Probably better to call it something like toxic masculinity peer pressure, I'm not a sociologist or in gender studies and queer theory.

But one thing I actually remembered was how some (not all!, this is just to add nuance) women uphold patriarchy in a certain way... Like tradwives for example. Or how terves are tooting the feminism horn while oppressing trans and non-binary people just to secure their own standing in patriarchy. They may still be oppressed by men, but they're functionally "above" trans and non-binary folks. Sorry if I didn't explain this well, I just remembered it from reading it in a book from a political scientist (who is a trans woman and writing about that). I also don't know if she mentioned tradwives specifically, can't remember, sorry. But this is not to mean that women are the big baddies.

While I agree that you need to generalize to discuss mechanisms of oppression, I just think that sometimes some nuance is needed (although I'm not putting myself out there any further and claiming this was the case in this exchange, but more generally speaking).

Don't know where this point fits in, but I can still remember the video of the white woman having her dog unleashed, and a Black man who was bird spotting just reminded her if the park rules to keep dogs ON leash. When she threatened to call the cops on him, she knew she was potentially setting him to get killed. (Just adding that generally, white women have this kind of privilege/power over Black men, and this is a racist mechanism)

And I'm definitely not on Depp's side in that whole fiasco! It was horrible how he was able to manipulate the public perception of the trial and Heard...

I appreciate all the time and effort you put into this reply, thank you.

I think the biggest issue here with respect to the nuance you're asking for is recognizing that the cisheteropatriarchy is one system, one force. Because it exists across 3 axes (trans status, sexual orientation, gender), it has historically been broken into 3 systems and forces. Since the late 90's, heterosexism and the patriarchy have been linked in literature and research as the heteropatriarchy.. And since the early-mid 2010's, cissexism has been added and the term has been fully expanded to the cisheteropatriarchy.

The reason why it's so hard to untangle where trans people fit (and also GNC cis people), is because this is One Single force of oppression that has multiple parts and axes working on it.

Another issue in regards to nuance is that just because someone is a part of an oppressed class does not mean they do not have internalized feelings, thoughts, actions, and beliefs about that oppression.... Nor does it mean that we all agree as to what that is. I know several tradwives who identify as a tradwife who also identify as feminists and their hold their identity as a tradwife in accordance with their feminism as a means of personal choice and self exploration, rather than in accordance with their oppression as a means of force and dehumanizing reduction in value and worth. I also know MANY people who see makeup and shaving body hair as upholding oppression, while others see it as personal expression. We're not going to all agree and the rift between 2nd wave and 3rd wave feminism isn't going to disappear for the sake of a conversation on the internet.

All that said, this nuance is why I was so particularly upset at that post, which highlighted specifically cis men. The call for nuance is appropriate as it discusses those oppressed within the structure. Now granted, the OP was made by a trans man (who is only 19), so it is to be assumed these are not straight men, so they are oppressed by the system, highlighting the two axes by which they are privileged while you discuss how the big bad faminists are body shaming (which exists in its own axis of oppression: fatphobia, and is less connected to gender than everyone wants to think) is just... not a way to add nuance to this convo?

#cishetropatriarchy

[tanadrin]

that person isn't entirely wrong. I'm a cis woman, on anon for this exact reason, that I'm afraid admitting that I at one point had doubts will get me branded as an asshole and clearly a secret bigot who doesn't support the trans people in my life. I do, and I always knew that supporting trans people was the empathetic and moral thing to do, but sometimes terf talking points and rhetorical questions that would just get shut down in public with "youre a terf eat shit and die" would worm their way into my brain. There are trans people out there who are meaningfully discussing those questions and having that discourse, and I think it's important for cis people to see that, yes, trans people think about these topics too and have a variety of answers, and you can wonder about these things in good faith without becoming a bigot. Because I remember before I found the trans people discussing it, it felt like my only option was to secretly read terf blogs. This didn't last long, since their disgusting clear hatred for "men in dresses" made it obvious /to me/ that these people were just bigots with an agenda, but more gullible or younger people can get sucked in! Telling people who have questions about the transgender experience or what gender means in theory and how it should be executed in practice that they're just secret bigots who must agree with the Wrongthink deep down is actually something that will push people away from the trans movement. Like, Even if someone IS "an asshole" with a predisposition to being influenced by cult tactics, I still think them getting a respectful education on trans issues is so much better than them turning into a raving bigot who will harass trans women online for existing

Like, what does teling people who are susceptible to bigotry/cult tactics as "well youre an asshole" even do? What about people who's parents or loved ones were lost to the Qanon cult? Is telling their loved ones that "oh if you know someone who's been brainwashed, they had to be an asshole in the first place to be capable to be brainwashed into denying people human rights anyways" really the correct take? I feel like your post is falling into the "Well /I'm/ smart enough to not be susceptible to propaganda" trap.

I suspect we're talking past each other to a certain degree here.

In my original post, the thing I was gesturing at with "claims to think trans ppl are a sui generis category" was not "has mixed feelings about the concept of transness because, like all of us, this person was raised in a transphobic society and absorbed that worldview growing up; but remains supportive of human rights in general, and doesn't go out of their way to make strangers feel shitty about themselves," what I will call a Default Ambivalent Stance for clarity. I was talking about people who claim to think that, as a cover for a much shittier worldview--people like Abigail Shrier who start out their book essentially taking that position, but reveal themselves by the end of it to be repeating the talking points of rabid transphobes; people who at one point or another claim a kind of moderation or low-level skepticism on the subject but end spending 95% of their time harassing people on Twitter (cf. Graham Linehan); or people who get quoted in fearmongering, moderately-transphobic articles in news outlets, but then call for the killing of all trans women on their personal blogs (cf. Lily Cade).

The throughline here isn't people with problematic opinions about trans ppl. It's people who think another class of human being should not exist, and when pressed, admit they think they should be legislated (or murdered) out of existence.

There are different degrees of terfiness, just as there are different degrees of racism, and certainly anti-trans activism as a movement relies on being able screen the most virulent of the transphobia with a cloud of less transphobic people who are attracted by some of their talking points, if not the full package. That's not the phenomenon I'm talking about. People drift in and out of that more diffuse cloud of bigotry around this and other social movements all the time. There are people with racist opinions who never go full white nationalist, people with right-wing opinions who never go full fascist, and so forth.

But to go full white nationalist, to go full fascist, to go full Graham Linehan or Lily Cade, you have to not just find intellectual consonance between your own doubts/thoughts/beliefs and some of those of these more committed bigots, you have to be the sort of person who, when they are told or conclude themselves "there exists a class of people who ought to be alien to human empathy, who ought to be legislated out of existence," does not immediately think, "No, hold on. That's obviously wrong, because that cannot be true." Someone who does not have heuristics like "genocide is bad," or "using the law to oppress people because of their identity is bad."

That's not ordinary level susceptibility to propaganda. That's high-octane cruelty. And if the only thing in someone's personality preventing them from believing that sort of thing is being provided with an acceptable target for that cruelty, I think they're a giant fucking asshole!

[transbian-technoblade]

TL;DR: CCs are people. They should not be the face of your activism. Stop trying to make them into that. You are actively fucking over actual minorities and social movements and cheapening the value of allyship by doing so.

See, twitter is obsessed with this idea that as long as you say the right things, you’re an unpromblematic king whom we stan. But if you say the wrong things, you’re the spawn of hell and you must secretly hate all minorities and want them dead. On the face of it this is very obviously performative activism. It’s specifically what I like to call “trans rights!” politics. See, the whole “can you say trans rights” meme originated with people poking fun at someone who earnestly said (paraphrased) “I would be so happy if Joe Biden just said “Trans rights!”” Of course leaving out the part where Biden actually does anything to give trans people human rights. They would say things like “I would be so happy if Markiplier just said trans rights”, as if that would constitute actual support for trans people. And people started using that meme seriously as a way to gauge whether or not someone is transphobic. I get wanting to feel validated and safe by your favorite CC, but you can’t just expect them saying a thing that’s incredibly easy to say and the barest possible minimum for allyship and just take it at face value. And this is where the deeper problem comes in, something that many young activists, especially on twitter, have forgotten:

It was never about intent.

Lets use Donald Trump as an extreme example. So let’s say that everything Trump has ever said on tv was a lie. Deep down, he knows that systemic oppression exists and must be dismantled and has some amount of sympathy for minorities. But as soon as he goes on television he lies about his beliefs saying that racism is actually good and other such bullshit. It doesn’t matter whether or not he believes what he’s saying. The material reality is that he’s inspired people who truly do hold those beliefs to be more comfortable expressing them, both verbally and physically. He has caused material harm to people of color, regardless of whether he believes what he says or not. Racism is not a thing that people are, it’s a system which all white people take part in, knowing or not.

When a CC messes up and says or does the wrong thing, yes, it doesn’t matter if it was just a mistake, but it also doesn’t matter if that makes them secretly evil within their heart or whatever. What matters is that they can be educated, learn from their mistakes, and have the room to grow, because it means that other people who aren’t CCs will be given that opportunity too. Because here’s what could be considered an uncomfortable truth about CCs — they are not the same as celebrities. They do not have PR teams or damage control. They don’t get a script to read off of that tells them exactly how they’re supposed to vapidly apologize in order to make the bad publicity go away. They aren’t household names who have a huge influence over what people do or think. They don’t do what they do because it makes them rich and famous. Yeah some of them get lucky like that and god knows why. But they are performing a job by entertaining people regardless of the size of their audience, they’re not running for president. And yeah they can have pretty sizable platforms (although their demographics tend not to be the most diverse because they’re located primarily online). But listen. As a trans woman of color myself, the idea that someone like Dream or TommyInnit or Whitey McStreamerMan should be the face of modern/online activism is fucking insane. DONT. PUT. CONTENT CREATORS. ON. THESE. PEDESTALS. If you want to be a good ally to political minorities, DONT LOOK TO PRIVILEGED ASS ENTERTAINERS AS DEMONSTRATIONS OF GOOD ALLYSHIP. ACTUALLY LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS — TRANS PEOPLE AND PEOPLE OF COLOR. CCs are in the process of learning just as much as you are, probably more so in a lot of cases. But the only reason why you care so much is because they are doing their jobs. Quit acting like just because they’re well known on the internet that they’re not allowed to make mistakes and say the wrong things and get overwhelmed. You know you’ve been there before. None of us get to claim purity. There’s a reason systemic oppression is called systemic.

#trump mention #trump TW #Donald trump TW #twitter discourse #spectrum speaks #dreamwastaken #tommyinnit #mcyt #racism tw #transphobia tw

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

When trans men say "I have the brain of a man"

And when trans women say "I have the brain of a woman"

I'm just like... How do you know? How could you, someone who only has the lived experience of the sex you were born as possibly know what its like to have the brain of the opposite sex? How do you know what the opposite sex thinks like? The only thing you have to go off of is stereotypes.

If you think you have the brain of a man because you like sports or women or cars or mechanics, that's all a stereotype. There are men who don't enjoy the things I just listed.

If you think you have the brain of a woman because you like lingerie and looking pretty and having smooth skin, that's all a stereotype. There are women who don't enjoy the things I just listed.

You quite literally cannot know what the opposite sex thinks like because men and women are not cookie cutters that all have the exact same brain. Honestly, it's overwhelmingly sexist to claim that you "think" like the opposite sex because you're saying that there's a way that all men and women think.

I mean, jeez, do you think like a woman with cancer? Do you think like a woman with debt? A woman who's an alcoholic? A woman who has kids? A woman who has never been to school? A woman who's in an abusive relationship? A woman who's conservative? A woman who's secretly attracted to other women? Which one do you think like? Tell me.

Do you think like a man who's bisexual and doesn't want anyone to know? A homophobic man? A man who absolutely hates women? A man who only views women as objects? An abusive man? A man with aids? A man who's infertile but wants biological kids one day? A man who's masculine only because he's afraid of what will happen if he's not? Which one do you think like?

Tell me.

[oumakokichi]

I have a question for you about your opinions of Kaito. I've seen that you say he's homophobic and all that, but there is something about that statement that really bothers me. In his Love Suit Event, it heavily implies that Kaito not only has romantic feelings towards a very clear male rival, but also wants to win the plane race to earn the right to confess those romantic feelings. A lot of people see him as gay or bi coded, so I thought I'd ask what you thought about that.

I’ve been thinking about how to reply to this ask for a little while now, and I think I’ve finally got my thoughts all laid out. This isn’t meta, but my response will nonetheless be somewhat long, so I’ll be putting most of it under a read-more.

Anon, I’m really not sure what to tell you. Me saying that Momota has homophobic lines and behavior isn’t just my interpretation or opinion; it’s an actual fact that he does say homophobic/transphobic slurs in the game. Not in his FTEs, not in his love hotel or salmon mode, but in chapter 2 of the actual game, directed specifically at Korekiyo. The word specifically is “okama” (オカマ), and it has a very heavy and unfortunate history as a slur in Japan used predominantly against gay men and trans women, who as I’ve stated, are unfortunately often lumped together and assumed to be “the same thing” by cishet people.

I’ve had people spread misinformation about this slur, claiming that he used it in the chapter 3 trial instead and that that’s why he was being so derogatory to Korekiyo instead, but this is factually untrue. He uses this slur in chapter 2, well before Korekiyo murders anyone and before he’s revealed to be incestuous and a serial killer. And even if it were true, trying to justify the usage of homophobic and transphobic slurs with “well the person he was saying them to was a bad person so it’s okay” is a fundamentally flawed way of thinking.

It’s also a fact that he reacts with complete disgust and is horrified by even the idea of Saihara potentially coming on to him during one of his dates in salmon mode. He specifically says, “you don’t swing that way, do you!?” while using his most horrified sprite, and unlike the slur, the localization did more or less keep this line.

Again, there have been people who have tried to argue that this was simply because Momota was “sad at the idea of Saihara coming out without telling him first,” and again, this is factually untrue. Both the localization and the original Japanese dialogue of the game make it explicitly clear that he is completely grossed out at the idea of Saihara being attracted to him. This isn’t my personal interpretation or anything like that; it’s quite literally in the text.

I went and reread Momota’s love hotel to refresh my memory of the scene, and... I’m really not sure where you’re getting that he’s referring to a “very clear male rival.” He is certainly referring to a rival as his “ideal romantic partner,” but he never says anything at all about said rival’s gender. There’s absolutely nothing in the scene itself that ever specifies that he’s seeing Saihara as another guy.

In fact, for all that he talks quite enthusiastically about his rivalry with this person, he never once says any of his usual lines about “a man’s passion” or lectures about the way “men should behave.” Considering a good part of his interactions with most of the other male characters in ndrv3, not just Saihara, often involve him talking about what is or isn’t appropriate for a man (Hoshi’s suicidal tendencies are “effeminate” and unfitting for someone he looked up to, Gonta crying in the investigations is “unmanly,” etc.), I would actually say that it’s more likely he isn’t talking to another guy here, but this is just my speculation and it’s open to interpretation if nothing else.

However, it is a fact that just because Saihara is playing the part of his rival in his love hotel scene does not automatically mean that said rival “must be a guy.” Saihara plays the part of literally everyone’s ideal romantic partner in every single love hotel scene, and in most of them he’s very clearly being perceived differently than he actually appears. Hoshi, for example, is pretty clearly seeing Saihara through the lens of his dead girlfriend who he mentions in his FTEs, despite not ever explicitly referring to Saihara in his love hotel event as a man or a woman.

There’s no denying that Momota’s idea of romance is linked with passionate ideas about rivalry and competition, and that he likes grand gestures. But again, there is nothing in the text whatsoever about his rival being another man. That part is purely speculation, and nothing in the actual love hotel scene ever states that.

In my own opinion, I cannot agree with saying that a character who canonically uses homophobic slurs and reacts with open disgust to another guy coming on to him is “coded” to be gay or bisexual. Coding is the deliberate placement of subtle clues and details woven into the text to clue readers in that a character may be a certain sexuality or gender identity. With rare exceptions (like Mac from It’s Always Sunny, who by this point has been confirmed to be a gay man on the show), characters who use homophobic slurs aren’t usually “coded” to be gay or bi.

If anything, I feel that the trope of “homophobe who’s secretly a closeted gay man” does more harm than good to the LGBT community, implying that we’re responsible for the violence and prejudices used against ourselves. This trope also reassures other people whose prejudices and homophobia might be less outspoken that they’re not “really” showing any homophobic behavior or attitudes because they’re not outright saying slurs or showing their disgust, and leads them to assume that they’re not complicit.

I also feel that it’s worth pointing out that being a member of the LGBT community does not excuse anyone from homophobic or transphobic behavior, either. Having grown up in a highly conservative and deeply homophobic household, I understand perfectly well what it’s like to grow up closeted and repessed about your own sexuality. But brushing off the use of slurs directed at other people and saying that it’s okay because the person saying those slurs eventually came out is... not a great look, honestly. Even previously-closeted LGBT people still have to be held accountable for their behavior and for the harm they might have caused other people with their actions. There is no “free pass” for saying slurs to other people.

That being said, if people want to headcanon Momota as gay or bisexual, that’s an entirely different matter. Headcanons are separate from coding and are simply a matter of personal preference. Again, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to reclaim a character and actually show them growing from and apologizing for their past behavior. I can understand people who might relate to Momota’s better qualities, and who want to interpret his character in a positive way.

But it’s important in making these headcanons to not erase the fact that he did, canonically, say a homophobic slur, and to not speak over other LGBT people who are understandably uncomfortable with this fact. Just because the localization erased said slur entirely doesn’t change the intention of the original dialogue, and it doesn’t change the way Momota consistently reacts negatively to the idea of other men showing any sort of attraction to him that isn’t purely “bros being bros.”

I’m absolutely not trying to be harsh or dismissive here anon, and I hope I’ve been clear with that in my response. Again, if other people want to headcanon him as gay or bisexual because they love or relate to his character and want to see him grow from his flaws, that’s totally fine! But he’s in no way deliberately “coded” to be gay or bisexual when there are multiple instances of him having homophobic behavior in the actual, canon text.

#ask #opinions #anonymous #okay to reblog #homophobia // #i feel like this was an important discussion and i'm glad if i could share my thoughts about it if nothing else

[classprojecttransexperience]

James Barry and Trans history

James Barry was not a woman, although he’s remembered as a woman in history. The evidence that Barry was female at all is very, very sketchy, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Dr. James Barry was the first man to perform a C-section during the colonial period where both mother and baby survived. Dr. Barry MAY also have been assigned female at birth, although he described himself as a man for most of his adult life, and got into fist fights and duels with people who insulted his meager height.

James Barry was, by all accounts, an asshole to everyone but his patients, although he described himself as a “gentleman” even in private writings, and to people who knew he had been assigned female at birth. He was loud, brash, unafraid of reprimanding people in front of others (rumored to be the cause of his falling out with Florence Nightingale), and his habit of demanding marginalized people, such as the poor, the leprous, the disabled, and Black people, had the same high standard of care afforded to white wealthy patients earned him many enemies, including powerful ones. Barry also had a penchant for dueling, including at least once with a pistol. Throughout all of this, the only accusations he faced were a claim at one point in his schooling that he was too young to continue as he could not grow a beard, although eventually it was conceded that Barry’s age did not matter as much as his ability to defend his thesis.

Barry had a scandalous relationship with the Governor of Cape Town, Lord Charles Somerset. Somerset was called “Dr. Barry’s wife” during the ensuing drama. If Barry had truly been, as he is often assumed to be, a perisex (non intersex) biological female, one would assume Somerset might have tried to save face by exposing this fact; for some reason, he never did, despite the fact that Barry lived with Somerset for some time, was very close to him, and traveled with him often. To have been this close to another man without being found out is a bit unbelievable in an age before gender reassignment surgeries were common. It is possible that the rumors of the relationship were overblown, and/or that Somerset never saw Barry without his clothes, but again, given the amount of time they spent together it seems a stretch to believe that Barry was secretly hiding a female body without ever being found out.

Dr. Barry did, however, ask to be buried in his bedclothes without being examined when he died. This has been taken by many historians to mean that he knew he would be described as a woman after death. That is exactly what happened--here is a letter, from wikipedia, that Barry’s physician wrote upon being questioned about Barry’s sex: “Sir, I had been intimately acquainted with the doctor for good many years, both in London and the West Indies and I never had any suspicion that Dr Barry was a woman. I attended him during his last illness, (previously for bronchitis, and the affection for diarrhoea). On one occasion after Dr Barry’s death at the office of Sir Charles McGregor, there was the woman who performed the last offices for Dr Barry was waiting to speak to me. She wished to obtain some prerequisites [sic in source, but has to be a slip for perquisites, "perks"] of his employment, which the Lady who kept the lodging house in which Dr Barry died had refused to give her. Amongst other things she said that Dr Barry was a female and that I was a pretty doctor not to know this and she would not like to be attended by me. I informed her that it was none of my business whether Dr Barry was a male or a female, and that I thought that she might be neither, viz. an imperfectly developed man. She then said that she had examined the body, and was a perfect female and farther that there were marks of him having had a child when very young. I then enquired how have you formed that conclusion. The woman, pointing to the lower part of her stomach, said ‘from marks here. I am a maried [sic] woman and the mother of nine children and I ought to know.’ The woman seems to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret and wished to be paid for keeping it. I informed her that all Dr Barry’s relatives were dead, and that it was no secret of mine, and that my own impression was that Dr Barry was a Hermaphrodite. But whether Dr Barry was a male, female, or hermaphrodite I do not know, nor had I any purpose in making the discovery as I could positively swear to the identity of the body as being that of a person whom I had been acquainted with as Inspector-General of Hospitals for a period of years. Yours faithfully, D.R. McKinnon “

So to recap: Historians believe that Dr. James Barry was assigned female at birth, although records of his birth do not exist so we cannot be sure that he even WAS assigned female at birth

Despite rumors of being gay at a time that could have gotten him killed, despite his many enemies, Dr. Barry was never accused of secretly being a woman until his death

Dr. Barry identified himself as a man throughout most of his adult life, including to people who would have known that he was assigned female at birth, had that been the case

Dr. Barry asked to be buried in his bedclothes without being examined upon death Barry was short, could not grow facial hair, and displayed some insecurity about this

The woman who identified Barry as a female upon his death asked to be paid money to keep the story secret

The same woman identified Barry as having had a pregnancy, although we can be almost entirely certain that, as Barry was never missing long enough to have gotten pregnant, and pregnancy surely would have outed him as female, Dr. Barry was never pregnant and the woman who identified him as such was mistaking stretch marks or some other scarring, which can have many causes, as being definitely related to pregnancy alone

No one else, including doctors, lovers he may have had sexual relationships with, enemies, patients, ever accused Barry of being a woman, and no one else saw his body after death except for the woman who demanded payment in exchange for not exposing such a “secret”.

And yet Dr. Barry is often included as a part of woman’s history, despite the fact that the historical record alone, poorly sourced biographies notwithstanding, literally gives more evidence to the idea that Dr. Barry was a cisgender man than the idea that he ever identified himself as a woman. His middle name is even disputed--here is a long list of historical examinations into Barry and the many histories of him that are used in his wikipedia article without actually linking to historical documentation https://notesonagentleman.substack.com/ I include his story here as context for the difficulties that arise in examining transgender people in history. When you first look into Dr. Barry’s story, he seems to be the transest trans man to ever trans--but as you dig deeper, evidence that he was even assigned female at birth starts to look more like hearsay. It’s possible that Barry was intersex. But it’s also possible that Barry was a cisgender man who was insecure about his body and was maligned after his death because someone thought they could make a buck, or had never seen a man with stretch marks before, or some other explanation. The majority of historians write about him as a woman, sometimes inventing--with no evidence, the idea that he was forced to pretend to be a man for financial reasons, and was secretly a proud woman despite never once identifying as one, even in his own writings. It’s possible that Dr. Barry was transgender, or that he was intersex, or that he was a cisgender man--however, historians do Dr. Barry a disservice by describing him as a woman, because “woman” is the only identity we can definitively rule out.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Alright, I didn’t want to make this post, but here we are.

A few days ago, JK Rowling released what many are already calling her TERF manifesto. Skillfully blending TERF dogwhistles (trans activists, double think, censorship, dysphoria) with meaningless concessions towards the trans community, it was designed to strike like an arrow, to muddle her claims and soften her views enough for transphobes to call it clear-headed, rational, and right while trans people saw her disdain within and reacted accordingly, letting her supporters paint them as irrational and thoughtless.

Chief among her grievances with the trans community, besides an outdated, highly offensive claim that trans women are sexual predators and that they were too quick to condemn her for accidentally liking a transphobic tweet (funny, your excuse back then was that you were simply tired that day, not that it was an accident in research) is that girls will inevitably transition or be forced into transitions simply for being empowered women and that feminism will collapse. After all, she felt "sexless” in her youth, and this other woman felt sexless, and if she could have become a boy she would have to escape the pressures of femininity. If children were allowed to transition, EVERY girl would no doubt try to escape. 

Well, I’m a cis woman, who used to think I was nonbinary or perhaps even a trans man. I’m the poster child TERFs long for, a woman who was unfairly pressured by the trans community into denouncing her femininity, the picture of everything they fear could happen if the evil transes had their way.

Except for the fact that that wasn’t how it happened. At all.

Like most kids, I started off as a genderless little sprout. Unlike most kids, I got to stay that way for longer than most, since my autism barred me from fully understanding the meaning of “boy” or “girl” long after my classmates quietly began performing one or the other in accordance with social norms. It didn’t make any sense to me. My mother had short hair, but me having short hair meant I was half boy half girl. Things like playing in the dirt or the color pink or talking a lot or reading weren’t just things, they each had a gender to them, and whatever gender that was changed daily. I thought I got it when I came across the term tomboy, but then my sister gave me a list of things I had to do to be a tomboy (ride skateboards, wear a certain brand, be dumb) and I noped out of that real quick. The other girls knew I was not like them and they never hesitated to remind me of that fact. All things considered, I’m surprised it took me until seventh grade before a guy bluntly accused me of secretly having a penis, along with other insults I don’t see fit to repeat.

(A few months later, I accidentally slapped him so hard he blacked out during P.E. And I got away with it too, since the teacher saw it wasn’t on purpose. It’s one of my better memories of that school.)

Fast-forward a decade of unlearning prejudice, creating my soul, finding myself, and some serious growing up, and I started to get the idea that I could be another gender. After all, I had felt genderless for a long time, and I kinda liked masculine things. So I experimented. I tried on new clothes, new pronouns, new expressions. And at every step, the trans community encouraged me. For the first time in my life, there were no rules attached to my gender, no boxes except the ones I stepped into or made for myself. “Whatever fits!” They answered, at any question. Every time I got the idea that I had to be x or y or z, it would be gently dissuaded. Labels were just that: labels, not lists, not requirements. 

At the end, I decided that I liked being a girl. My own version of a girl, to be sure, autistic, rebellious, kinda burgundy,  kinda “too tired to perform”. And of course they closed ranks, locked me in a room, chanted about my internalized....ha ha, nah, they did as they always had. “Good for you!” “Well at least now you know!” “Come back anytime!” Shockingly, it seems that trans people are just fine with cis people as long as we don’t turn around and try to brainwash/abuse/murder them immediately afterward on the incredibly poor grounds of “well I wasn’t trans so none of you must be either!”. My time with the trans community didn’t “tarnish my womanhood” or whatever TERFs like to claim, but reaffirmed it as something my own rather than something someone else decided for me. 

In the end, gender presentation is just another way to wear a soul so that others might see it.  And no matter how dearly other beings, in our selfish ways, wish we could make souls to factory standards and remold them in the images we find most pleasing, they revolt against all attempts at pruning, sculpting, and boxing them into any shapes but the ones they are. Only the soul can create itself. A person wearing their soul so that you can see is a privilege, and throwing it away based on fear, bigotry, and ignorance is a tragedy. I have been cruel in the past, and I hope to never be so cruel again.

We as a species aren’t capable of telepathy, but it doesn’t stop us from trying, from writing and reading endless stories of what goes on other’s heads. Radfems have their own stories, their martyrdom, their denial of soul and choice and power, and they will tell them again and again, writ large across the entire human race. Well, here is my story, only my own, but true all the same. A cis woman who experimented and not only wasn’t harmed or traumatized, but enlightened. Who came out of the experience better, not just in my own identity, but in increased empathy with those that chose other paths.

Burgundy really is a lovely color.

#transphobia tw #terf tw #i'm seeing a rise in detrans bullshit so i'm gonna offer a counternarrative #surprise trans people are fine with you leaving as long as you don't turn into a bigot right afterwards

[secretgamergirl]

“What can I do to help?”

As I’m writing this, I’m dealing with a rather astounding amount of vicious harassment which is taking a very serious toll on me. Usually when this is happening, I try not to talk about it publicly, because the sort of people who do this love nothing more than seeing evidence that it’s working, but sometimes, exceptions need to be made. And more to the point, as someone who deals with these sort of attacks as a constant presence in my own life, as well as helping others deal with the same in what is arguably a professional capacity, it seems to me the state of things today is at a point where we need a fresh round of public education on how these sorts of attack play out, and what any given person can do to actually help people deal with them in a meaningful way.

Predators and Herds

As a basic fundamental primer here, I’m going to need everyone to start looking at things from the perspective of a herd animal, because not only is it a pretty clear metaphor for a lot of this, I honestly think this is literally the sort of ancestral memory/instinct that drives this sort of thing. Plus there’s an amusing irony in telling people dealing with these sorts of predatory scumbags that they aren’t acting ENOUGH like sheep.

Some animals are predators. In order to survive, they have to stalk/chase/pin down other animals and kill them in order to eat. Invariably, the animals they target are those that are the most vulnerable. It’s the easiest way to go, and the one with the least risk of anything going wrong. If you’re a hungry wolf, you’re not going to mess with the big beefy ram who can headbutt you and break some ribs, or the really fit sheep you’d have to chase for an hour and still might never catch up with. You’re just going to go for the one with the broken leg, or the little defenseless baby lamb. Those ones you can definitely pick off without much effort at all, and they can’t really fight back in any meaningful way.

Some animals deal with predators by just focusing single-mindedly on defending themselves. If you can outrun the predators, and never let them get the drop on you, or you hide well enough they can’t ever find you, or you know how to really fight back and hurt them badly enough they know not to mess with you, then cool, you aren’t going to get eaten. At least until you let your guard down at the wrong time, or you get injured, or age starts taking its toll. Plus with all of these you’re just living your whole life in this constant state of fear, actively aware that death lurks just around the corner, and you can’t really form any real attachments with anyone else or protect them. It’s no way to live your life, and all of these require you to be able to outperform any predator who comes at you.

The other way to survive with predators wanting you dead is to be part of a herd. If everyone the predators want to prey on are in a big group, there’s inherent safety in numbers there. Not, to be clear, simply because having so many potential meals to choose from means the odds of you being chosen drop. Predators have to weigh the risks now of coordinated defenses. That big tough ram they’d rather not tackle for fear of getting hurt is right there next to that shaky-legged little lamb that would otherwise be the easiest meal to snag there is.

Herds cause a whole lot of headaches for predators, so when they’re a factor, the first step is pretty much always going to be to scatter the herd in some fashion, so all the prey that would be a pain to deal with leave, and the easily picked off targets are left behind to move in on. There’s a lot of ways to do this, and I don’t want to get into too much detail because the metaphor would get too strained, but the real key counter-strategy is to keep the herd from scattering.

Wolves are going to show up, they’re going to show up in packs, they’re going to start snarling and howling and all that, and some sheep are always going to run when that happens, and some sheep aren’t going to be able to. The trick is to have as many sheep as possible stand their ground. If there’s only a couple who do, they’re just going to get picked off along with the ones who can’t run or fight back. But if enough sheep stand their ground to keep those intimidating numbers, nobody’s getting eaten.

There’s our big framework for looking at this, don’t ever let it drop.

How Predators Attack

Now, the next thing to keep in mind here is that people who haven’t been really hit hard by the sort of attacks I’m talking about here tend to be totally clueless about what they actually involve, and even those who have been targeted tend to be really bad at recognizing when other people are being put through the same.

What people imagine to be a “really devastating attack” is when, say, 2000 different twitter accounts all coordinate to hurl violent threats and horrible slurs at a single person over a single one-hour period or something. Don’t get me wrong here. That does happen, regularly, and that’s never a fun thing to deal with, if only because it essentially serves as a DDoS attack, rendering you unable to see any messages from people you want to see things from, but at the end of the day, it does no more harm than having your router go down for a few hours, maybe a day or two in the most extreme cases. It’s also not something that ever really gets sustained in the long term. It’s more like the predators are just holding a pep rally and testing how many accounts they can direct at once.

The really devastating attacks are the effort to drive herds away. They’re a hell of a lot less flashy, generally. They’re hard to point out to others. When really well executed, the target doesn’t even necessarily see anything happening. And what’s happening is elaborately orchestrated character assassination.

I can’t really convey the seriousness of this without some very specific examples. I may follow this up with a roundup of every attack I’ve personally had launched against me, but for now, let me present a very old and famous example, along with the one I’m most recently dealing with.

The classic, of course, from way back in 2014- “Zoe Quinn slept with five guys from various publications in exchange for good reviews of a game.” If this were the first time you encountered this statement, odds are good your personal reaction would be along the lines of “who?” or “who cares?” The goal here isn’t to make everyone hate Zoe Quinn though, just people immediately around Zoe Quinn. The premise of trading favors for good press is something anyone involved in the press is going to take quite seriously, with even baseless claims having an extreme chilling effect. For another crowd, promiscuity is considered a crime worthy of stoning someone to death (and it’s rather telling that the most commonly repeated version of this attack shortens it to simply “Zoe Quinn slept with five guys”). Much more to the point though, the premise that anyone reading this hasn’t previously encountered this line. That message was shouted from the rooftops all over the world for five straight years, over every possible channel.

More recently, I’ve been dealing with... this incoherent mess. This is much less coordinated, with just a handful of people in the think tank, testing every attack live on the fly. You can watch, more or less in real time, as this predator tosses out a variety of defamatory attacks, switching to a new one every time one falls flat. I’m friends with Graham, then I’m business partners, then I’m either paying him or maybe sleeping with him in exchange for promoting some website. I’m a professional journalist (which is a rather weird angle to press as an attack). Then suddenly I’m a “pedophile defender.” A new attack every day.

Now, in both these cases, there’s no truth at all behind any of these attacks. None of these are even stories with two sides to consider. Zoe Quinn’s game was a little choose your own adventure story comprised of a few simple HTML pages linking to each other. No one ever reviewed it to begin with, so the whole thing falls apart. Graham Linehan is a disgusting crusader who attacks children’s charities for daring to provide support to trans children, and quite famously has some weird fixation on publicly attacking me, and I’m a trans woman who hasn’t had any real luck finding work of any kind since coming out half a decade ago. I’ve never run any website that wasn’t a simple blog like this one, or this one which I think puts that last claim to bed well enough.

But again, the idea with attacks like this isn’t to be credible, or even plausible. People don’t make these sorts of attacks based on anything the target has done, it’s all about what will do the most harm if even one person actually buys into it. You want to hurt an indie game dev? Get people to believe they have to bribe people with sex to get any positive mention of their output. You want to hurt a trans woman? Get people to believe she’s friends with and/or sold everyone else out to the king of the transphobes. Someone who does real work to shut down child porn sites? Secretly a pedophile. Etc. Etc. And the success rate of attacks like this is never zero. No matter how transparently false the claim is, shout it at enough people and SOMEONE is going to treat it as ironclad fact, spreading it around in turn and coming off more credible because they’re quoting someone.These rumors spread like wildfire since, let’s be honest, social media sites are all just glorified gossip mills at the end of the day, and all those laughable details from the original lie drop away, replaced with lists of all the very credible people who always know what they’re talking about these scathing claims have been filtered through.

In my experience, honestly it’s the all the most pathetic claims that do the most damage. “Slept with five guys” sticks more than “in exchange for reviews” because it’s such a non-crime that people default to “let’s say that’s true - who even cares?” rather than question the veracity. And I swear all the most damaging attacks I’ve ever suffered really just boil down to baseless claims that I really just don’t like some arbitrary collection of mostly women (a mix of strangers and people I generally view in a positive light).

Having established all of that, we can finally get around to the big question found in the title of this post:

What can I do to help?

Really, the most meaningful and impactful thing you can ever do when someone is being attacked like this is just to do whatever you can to get in front of it. If you know someone has some predator out there trying to convince people she eats puppies, broadcast a big announcement about how that’s happening, along with how and why you’re as confident as you are that she doesn’t, and it’s a baseless hit job. If you have media connections, try to get a story printed about the whole mess, or set up an interview where the victim can talk about how surreal the experience is. If you don’t, just shout about it where you can, so people know not to trust it when word eventually reaches them of all the depraved puppy feasts.

Past that, just be an active support. Tell the alleged puppy eater how you have her back. Ask how she’s holding up. Offer to talk for a bit, or watch a movie. More often than not, attacks like this cost people career contacts and close friends, and cause a lot of trauma. Whatever you can do to help beat the encroaching darkness back helps.

Also? Don’t fall into that trap of granting these sort of BS claims are true to argue the point that they’re stupid reasons to attack someone. They’re always going to be a big deal to someone, and your hypothetical just makes it seem more factual.

Do keep in mind though that these sorts of solidarity moves are going to make the predators real mad. They want to drive you away, and failing that, they’re going to want to take you down too for not running off with the rest of the herd. If we can establish these sorts of defenses as a cultural norm, or you’re personally the sort of person it’s too risky to go after, this is a total non-issue, but if you’re also particularly vulnerable, and nobody else is following suit, be aware of the risks you’re taking.

Finally, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of becoming a predator yourself. So many people get this idea in their heads that the best defense is a good offense, and set out to “turn the tables,” but frankly it just doesn’t work. When you go on the offense, you can’t help but take on those predatory instincts. You end up targeting the most vulnerable people you can find and convince yourself are “the enemy.” I mean that’s almost certainly how the batch of predators you’re trying to fight got started in the first place.

So just... try to be kind. Be supportive. Get out in front of life-ruining rumors. And don’t just do it for people you know and trust. Do it for strangers who are plainly being preyed on. Look for people who just live to tear into people, especially when they keep tearing into the super marginalized. Object to that on principle. And remember anyone can fall into doing it, no matter how long you’ve known and trusted them, or what their politics are.

And some more thoughts on this topic.

#Anti-abuse #advice #stalking #harassment

[destroyyourbinder]

This is an uncharacteristically casual piece but if I would fucking recommend anything to people with dysphoria I would recommend getting acquainted with your body when you are actually at your best, whatever that means to you. When you are feeling joyful, you are in your best health, when you are doing things that you like to do and when you don’t feel ashamed. If you haven’t experienced those things yet how can you possibly know how your body is “supposed” to be? Why blame your lack of being well on your body? I’ve started standing up straight for the first time in my life recently due to a whole number of factors. And honestly I don’t feel nearly as repulsed by looking at my body; I don’t feel hideous disgust, like I have to look away, or like I have to look too much in order to figure out exactly what’s wrong. I look strong!!! I look like my body “goes together”!!! Even my breasts don’t look like weird aliens sucked on to my chest anymore, they just look like they grew there (which they did) and they're part of me (which they are). Turns out I look and feel way different to myself when I don’t slouch in shame and hold myself like I’m trying not to exist/ if I have to exist (ugh) then I shouldn’t do it too hard. I don’t look to myself like I’m about to ooze out of myself, and I don’t feel like I have to retract every part of me to feel ok!!! I still have body issues, for sure, (thanks, brain, for calling me a dumpy golf lesbian when I saw myself in a door reflection the other day) but I don’t hear the great cosmic game show buzzer in my head anymore when I see my own body. It kills me that people literally get surgery in order to achieve this and that the whole cascade of shit that happens once you just un-crunch your body and fucking stand up is considered out of reach unless you pay some plastic surgeon to take away parts of your body. I mean, this is the lauded result of “top surgery”, and I don’t think it’s fake. I just think you can do it without it. I thought my breasts were literally in the way of me existing, you know, that thing you can’t do unless you have a body. Then I realized I could “survive” with them still there (yes, at first, those sarcasm quotes were definitely around the word “survive”) but I figured I’d have to live around them, essentially, as if someone stuffed an extra couch in my living room. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with couches, but if you’re not going to “use” it, and it’s in the way... It didn’t occur to me for so long that the strategy I used to live with having breasts (hiding them, feeling as if they weren’t mine) was precisely the strategy that kept my dysphoria going. I figured out that this was the case for binding but who would have thought that slouching would fuck you up so bad? A couple of months ago my girlfriend made me stand up straight and she told me, “Quit looking at your boobs like your body is a shapeless blob. Did you know you have pecs?” and she poked me in the chest. What do you know, there are muscles in there. Once I saw the muscles I could never unsee them, and something really odd happened to my body perception I couldn’t undo, which is that my decomposition into functional parts became integrated with the whole in a way that made it clear that I didn’t have any body parts that “didn’t belong”. I couldn’t see that when I literally was always fully clothed except for showering, when I couldn’t even feel my chest because it was always compressed. I was watching this young yuppie straight couple on a date eating ice cream on a bench nearby my work the other day, and it struck me how absolutely odd the woman had to hold her body in order to essentially hide that she was made of meat and had bodily functions. She was wearing very thin, gauzy eveningwear and a lot of makeup, and I guess was trying to look like she didn’t have to eat and didn’t ever get hungry while she was fucking eating a waffle cone. There’s something that women do when they go real hard on femininity where they try to look like bones and skin, essentially, large eyes and lips floating above suggestions of curves which are suggestions of sex, no connections between any of them and certainly no organs inside that squelch and smell like bile. Meanwhile the man next to her looked like he exclusively lived off of cured pig products, farts, and mustard that he found in his own beard. He sat on that bench like his ass was the flag they planted on the moon. Like his body was synonymous with owning the world. And all this time she was trying not to turn her head too much while eating the ice cream. I talk about this because I always like to draw parallels between dysphoria and other women’s experiences. Which seems crazeballs to a lot of currently trans people. But really this whole time I was also holding my body like I didn’t want to be meat, like I had to ask to be allowed to be in this world. I didn’t want to be a floating eyes and lips above suggestions, but what other option is there? What woman’s ever believed she could make claim on anything but maybe the fruits of her womb through just existing here, in a body? Men piss and jizz on stuff to claim it, they literally argue for centuries in historical and political record about which man put his body somewhere first, because that means he owns it. I don’t even own my own body, legally, it’s not even my own property nonetheless me, I can’t even kick somebody else out of it or claim damages if somebody fucks it, fucks it up. So I guess I thought second best was disappearing all of that as much as I could, disappearing the grounds for putting me in the position where I had to disappear. I thought if I disappeared what made me have to disappear maybe then I’d pop out the other side, like had I pulled some magic trick on the patriarchal universe. How fucking clever, I literally was just sitting on benches eating ice cream with my shoulders all crossed up and my arms dangling in front of me, as if I had pulled one over on everybody instead of just looking like an overgrown emo kid. I didn’t know I could just fucking stand up straight and quit having my whole perceptual field dominated by looking-at-other-people-looking-at-me, oh-god-do-they-know-I’m-looking, I-can’t-look-at-myself-looking. Does this fix my existential dilemmas as a female person? No, of course not, but the point is that I’ve discovered something that doesn’t get me all caught up in believing I’m secretly fixing my existential dilemmas. My female body is the problem, but “fixing” the body doesn’t fix the problem, you know. Because the problem is that somebody decided that my female body dictates a whole bunch of shit about my life. I do not have to listen to them, especially not when I’m alone, not in the mirror, and not in my own damn muscles and bones.

#writings

[somnilogical]

davis tower kingsley (listed here on the cfar instructor page) who harassed a cis woman about her appearance another cis women reported this to acdc (the people who wrote the thing about how brent was great) and afaict they did nothing, claims that if trans people and gay people dont "repent and submit to the pope" they will burn in hell, defended the spanish inquisitions, wrote about how the mission system werent actually abductions, slavery, forced conversions and this was propaganda, defends pretty much any atrocity that an authority, "believes" the catholic god exists and does not try and destroy them, submits to them. and so much more.

born into another era they would actually work for the california mission system and say it was good.

said thing that cached out to that emma and somni should repent and submit to the rationalist community. wrote up a rant about "how about fuck you. go lick the boots of your dark mistress anna salamon." didnt send. got kicked by some rationalist, reasoning is probably that what id say would disrupt their peaceful machinations of omnicide, would be infohazards, because... the information is hazardous to their social order.

a few of these things are subjects of future blog posts.

--

cfar has never hired a trans woman, i have lots of logs of them trying to do what people did to porpentine. claiming emma thinks torturing children is hot, claiming emma was physically violent, claiming emma was indistinguishable from a rapist, claiming ziz was a "gross uncle style abuser", claiming somni was enticing people to rape, claiming that anna salamon was a small fragile woman and ziz was large and had muscles. as if any of our strength or speed had anything to do with our muscles in this place. all of these things are false except relative size difference between ziz and anna which is just transmisogynistic and irrelevant.

if they lie about are algorithms claim that we are using male-typical strategies and then they can fail by these lies and be sidelined by callout posts that transfered 350,000$ from miri despite their best efforts to cover this up. (all benefited by having relative political advantagr flowing from estrogenized brain modules. men are kind of npc's in this particular game of fem v fem cyberontological warfare for the fate of the multiverse, mostly making false patriarchal assumptions that ziz was doing things for social status. like status sensitivity is hormonally mediated, your experiences are not universal. or saying like kingsley is saying that people should repent and submit to whatever authorities in the rationalist region they submit to. NO. FUCK YOU. i will not repent and submit to your abusive dark mistress anna salamon.

i knew anna salamon was doing the edgy "transfems are all secretly male" thing before i talked with ziz. it was a thing, {zack, carrie}, ben hoffman, michael vassar were also in on it. ppl had men trapped in mens bodies on their bookshelves because the cool people were reading it. didnt think she was being *transmisogynistic* about it until i talked with ziz. in retrospect i was naive.)

also? anarchistic coordination ive had with people have been variously called lex's cluster, somni's cluster, ziz's cluster by authoritarians who cant imagine power structures between people that arent hierarchical. like based on who they want to say is "infohazardously corrupting people" emma goldman had to deal with this shit too where the cops tried to say she was friends with anyone who thought anarchism made sense. people she didnt know at all who did their own anarchism. because authoritarians dont think in terms of philosophy, they think any challenge to their power is a disease that needs to be eliminated and you just need to doxx their network.

like if ziz and somni and emma were all actually infohazardous rapists as people keep trying to claim we are and then saying "oh no i didnt mean it i swear" and then doing it again. what would happen isnt that a bunch of infohazardous rapists start talking and working together for a common goal. what actually happens with people of that neurotype is they partition up the territory into rival areas of feeding on people like gangs do.

like they dont get together and start talking a lot about decision theory and cooperate in strange new ways.

not that the people lying about emma, ziz, gwen, somni and others are trying to have accurate beliefs. they are trying what all athoritarians try with anarchist groups. unfortunately for them, ive read the meta, i know dread secrets of psychology and cooperation that they claim are like painful static and incomprehensible, yet despite being "incomprehensible" are almost certainly harmful. if harm is to be judged against upholding the current regime, and the current regime is evil, then lots of true information and good things will look harmful. like ive tested this out in different social spheres what people claim is "incomprehensible" is the stuff that destroys whatever regime they are working in. like someone said i sounded like i was crazy and homeless and couldnt understand me when i pointed out that reorienting your life, your time, your money, to a human who happens to be genetically related to you for 16 years is altruistic insanity. just do the math. eliezer, anna, michael, brian tomasik all once took heroic responsibility for the world at some point in their lives and could do a simple calculation and make the right choice. none of them have children.

pretending that peoples "desires" "control them", when "desires" are part of the boundary of the brain, part of the brains agency and are contingent on what you expect to get out of things. like before stabbing myself with a piece of metal would make me feel nauseated, id see black dots, and feel faint. but after i processed that stabbing myself would cure brain damage and make me more functional, all this disappeared.

most people who "want" to have children have this desire downstream of a belief that someone else will take heroic responsibility for the world, they dont need to optimize as much. there are other competent people. if they didnt they would feel differently and make different choices.

you can see the contingency of how people feel about something on what they get out of it lots of places. like:

<<Meanwhile, a Ngandu woman confessed, "after losing so many infants I lost courage to have sex.">>

but people lie about how motivation works, in order to protect the territory of saying "well i just need a steady input of nubile fems so i can concentrate and be super altruistic!" or "i just need spend 16 years of life reorienting around humans who happen to be genetically related to me and my friends so i can concentrate and be super altruistic!" when neither of these are true. these people just want nubile fems, they just want babies. (the second one has much much less negative externalities though. you could say i am using my female brain modules to say "yeah the archetypically female strat, though it has the same amount of lying, is less harmful". but like it actually is less directly harmful. the harm from gaslighting people downstream of diverting worldsaving resources and structure to secure a place to {hit on fems, raise babies} is ruinous. means that worldsaving plans that interfere with either of these are actively fought. and the knowledge that neither of these are altruistic optimizations, neither is Deeply Wise they are as dumb in terms of global optimization as they seem initially, is agentically buried.

this warps things in deep ways, that were a priori unexpected to me.)

this is obvious, but when i talk about it, the objection isnt that it doesnt make utilitarian sense, the objection is that "im talking like a crazy person". authoritarians say this to me too when i assert my right to my property that they took, act like im imposing on them. someone else asked if i could "act like a human" and do what he wanted me to do when i was thinking and talking with my friends. all of these things authoritarians have said to me "act like a human" "talk like a normal person i cant understand you" were to coerce my submission. they construct the category of "human" and then say im in violation of it and this is wrong and i should rectify it. i am talking perfectly good english right now. you can read this.

anna salamon, kelsey piper, elle, pete michaud, and many others all try to push various narratives of somni, emma, ziz, gwen and others being in the buckets {RAPIST, PSYCHO, BRAINWASHED}. im not a rapist, im not psychotic, im not brainwashed. before ziz came along, people were claiming i was brainwashing people, its a narrative they keep reusing.

porpentine talks about communities that do this, that try and pull trap doors beneath trans women:

<<For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.>>

https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/

(a mod of rationalist feminists deleted this almost immediately from the group as [[not being a good culture fit]], not being relevant to rationalism, and written in the [[wrong syntax]]. when its literally happening right now, they are trying to trapdoor transfems who protest and rebel asap. just like google.)

canmom on tumblr talks about the strategic use of "incomprehensibility" against transfems. and how its not about "comprehensibility". i have a different theory of this, but her thing is also a thing.

<<Likewise, @isoxys recently wrote an impressively thorough transmisogyny 101, synthesising the last several years of discussions about this facet of our particular hell world. But that post got just 186 notes, almost exclusively from the same trans women who are accused of writing ‘inaccessibly’.

Perhaps they’d say isoxys’s post is inaccessible too, but what would pass the bar? Some slick HTML5 presentation with cute illustrations? A wiki? Who’s got the energy and money to make and host something like that? Do the critics of ‘inaccessible’ posts take some time to think about what kind of alternative would be desirable, and how it could be organised?>>

https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/185908592767/accessibility-in-terms-of-not-using-difficult

alice maz talks about the psychology behind the kind of cop kelsey piper, david tower kingsley, elle and others are:

<<the role of the cop is to defend society against the members of society. police officers are trivially cops. firefighters and paramedics, despite similar aesthetic trappings, are emphatically not. bureaucrats and prosecutors are cops, as are the worst judges, though the best are not. schoolteachers and therapists are almost always cops; this is a great crime, as they present themselves to the young and the vulnerable as their friends, only to turn on them should they violate one of their profession's many taboos. soldiers and parents need not be cops, but the former may be used as such, and the latter seem frighteningly eager to enlist. the cop is the enemy of passion and the enemy of freedom, never forget this>>

https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/alien.html

anna salamon wrote a thing implying that ziz, somni, gwen suffered some sort of vague mental issues from going to aisfp. (writing a post on this.) alyssa vance tried to suggest i believe cfar is evil because im homeless. but sarah constantin, ben hoffman, {carrie, zack}, jessica taylor (the last three who have blogged a lot about whats deeply wrong) (not listing others because not wanting to doxx a network to authoritarians, who just want to see it contained. and the disease of "infohazards" eradicated.) are not homeless and ive talked with many of them and read blog posts. and they know that cfar is fake. jessica (former miri employee) left because miri was fake.

anna and others are trying to claim that theres some person responsible for a [[mass psychotic break]] that causes people to... independently update in the same direction. and have variously blamed it on ziz, somni, michael vassar. but like mass psychotic breaks arent...really a thing, would not be able to independently derive something, plan on writing a blogpost on it, and then see ben hoffman had written http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/engineer-diplomat/ and i was like "ah good then i dont have to write this." and have this happen with several different people.

like this is more a mass epistemic update that miri / cfar / ssc / lw are complicit in the destruction of the world. and will defend injustice and gaslight people and lie about the mathematical properties of categories to protect this.

they all know exactly what they are doing, complicity with openai and deepmind in hopes of taking the steering wheel away at the last second. excluding non-human life and dead humans from the CEV to optimize some political process, writing in an absolute injunction to an fai against some outcome to protect from blackmail when that makes it more vulnerable.(see:

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/hyperexistential_separation.html

hyperexistential separation: if an fai cant think of hell, an fai cant send the universe to hell in any timeline. this results in lower net utility. if you put an absolute injunction against any action for being too terrible you cant do things like what chelsea manning did and i believe actually committed to hungerstriking until death in the worlds where the government didnt relent, choosing to die in those timelines. such that most of her measure ended up in a world where the government read this commitment in her and so relented.

if chelsea manning had an absolute injunction against ever dying in any particular timeline, she would get lower expected utility across the multiverse. similarly, in newcombs problem if you had an absolute injunction against walking away with 0$ in any timeline because that would be too horrible, you get less money in expectation. for any absolute injunction against things that are Too Horrible you can construct something like this.

--

a lot of humans seem to be betting on "nothing too horrible can happen to anyone" in hopes that it pays off in nothing too horrible happening to you.

the end result of not enacting ideal justice is the deaths of billions. at each timestamp saying "its too late to do it now, but maybe it would have been good sometime in the past". with the same motive that miri wants to exclude dead people from the cev, they arent part of the "current political process". so you can talk about them as if they were not moral patients, just like they treat their fellow animals.

(ben hoffman talks about different attitudes towards ideal justice coming upon the face of the earth.)

--

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

cev:

<<But again, we fall back on the third reply: "The people who are still alive" is a simple Schelling circle to draw that includes everyone in the current political process. To the extent it would be nice or fair to extrapolate Leo Szilard and include him, we can do that if a supermajority of EVs decide* that this would be nice or just. To the extent we don't bake this decision into the model, Leo Szilard won't rise from the grave and rebuke us. This seems like reason enough to regard "The people who are still alive" as a simple and obvious extrapolation base.>>

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

this is an argument from might makes right. because dead people and nonhuman animals cant fight back.

->"i think we should give planning of the town to the white people, then extrapolate their volition and if they think doing nice things for black people is a good idea, we'll do it! no need to bake them in to the town planning meetings, as they are arent part of the current political process and no one here will speak up for them."

i dont plan to exclude dead people or any sentient creatures from being baked in to fai. they are not wards of someone else. enslaving and killing fellow sentient life will not continue after the singularity even if lots of humans want it and dont care and wont care even after lots of arguments.) and so much else.

the list of all specific grievances would take a declaration of independence.

like with googles complicity with ICE having a culture of trapdooring transfems (for some reason almost the only coherent group that has the moral fiber to oppose these injustices, that is p(transfem|oppose injustice in a substantiative way) is high, not necc the reverse.) who question this sort of thing.

thinking of giving sarah constantin a medal thats engraved with "RIGHTEOUS AMONG CIS PEOPLE: I HAD SEVERAL SUBSTANTIAL DISAGREEMENTS WITH HER ABOUT LOAD BEARING PARTS OF HER LIFE AND SHE NEVER ONCE TRIED TO CALL ME A RAPIST, PSYCHOTIC, OR BRAINWASHED" thats where the bar is at, its embedded in the core of the earth.

kelsey piper, elle benjamin, anna salamon, pete michaud, and lots more have entirely failed to clear this bar. anna and kelsey saying they dont understand stuff somni, emma, ziz and other transfems talk about but its probably dangerous and infohazardous and its not to be engaged with philosophically. just like the shelter people acting as if my talking about their transmisogyny was confusing and irrational to be minimized and not engaged with. just like any authoritarian where when you start talking about your rights and what is right and wrong and what makes sense they are like "i dont understand this. you are speaking gibberish why are you being so difficult? all we need you to do is submit or leave."

and no i will NOT SHUT UP about this injustice. all miri/cfar people can do at this point is say "the things these people write are infohazards" then continue to gaslight others they cant engage on a philosophical level. all the can say is that what i am saying is meaningless static and yet also somehow dangerous.

::

it doesnt make sense to have and raise babies if you are taking heroic responsibility for the world. doesnt make sense to need a constant supply of fems to have sex with if you are taking heroic responsibility for the world. people who claim either of these pairs of things are lying, maybe expect someone else to take heroic responsibility for the world or exist in a haze.

the mathematics of categories and anticipations dont allow for the thing you already have inside you to be modified based on the expected smiles it gives your community. this is used to gaslight people like "calling this lying would be bad for the institutions, not optimize ev. thus by this blogpost you are doing categories wrong' this is a mechanism to cover dishonesty for myopic gains.

using the above, a bunch of people colluding with the baby industrial complex get together and say that the "beat" meaning of altruism includes having babies (but maybe not having sex with lots of fems? depending on which gendered strategy gets the most people in the colluding faction) because other meanings would make people sad and unmotivated. burying world optimizers ability to talk about and coordinate around actual altruism.

openAI and deepmind are not alignment orgs. cfar knows this and claims they are, gaslighting their donors, in hopes of taking the steering wheel at the last moment.

alyssa vance says paying out to blackmail is fine, its not.

CFAR manipulated donation metrics to hide low donations.

MIRI lied about its top 8 most probable hypotheses for why its down 350,000$ this year.

anna salamon is transmisogynistic, this is why cfar has never hired a trans women despite trans women being extremely good at mental tech. instead the hire people like davis kingsley.

kingsley lied about anna not being involved at hiring in cfar in order to claim anna couldnt be responsible for cfar never hiring a trans woman.

a cfar employee claimed anna salamon hired their rapist, was angry about it. mentioned incidentally how anna salamon, president and cofounder of cfar, was involved in hiring at cfar.

acdc wrote a big thing where defended a region of injustice (brent dill) because of their policy of modular ethics. when really, if you defend injustice at any point, you have to defend the defense and the thing iteratively spreads across your organization like a virus.

miri / cfar caved to louie helm.

not doing morality or decision theory right. among which is: https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/hyperexistential_separation.html and https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

and so much more.

[thatfeministchickofficial]

Crypto-POENiSs insincerely identifying as Non-Binary as though Non-Binary genders = gender criticism.

When those who think of themselves as “crypto-terfs” take on nonbinary identities, insincerely, which harms not only women who are trans, but actual nonbinary people as well, (some of whom are trans women too, some of who are not, and are even trans-masc), It is because they are “gender critical,” and therefore see no real harm/difference. Remember that *Different kinds* of “TWERF/TERF” (More properly referred to as POENiSs) exist, and be aware. This is one type. (They *LOVE* trying to play off an insincere “misunderstanding” that somehow we lump every kind of them in as though they all had the same roots for their transmisogyny, let’s make it clear that we can see that there are different species, and have studied them all...) When a “gender critical” POENiS claims to be nonbinary, they do so because they are trying to act like gender isn’t real, and so the label doesn’t matter. They don’t get that being nonbinary is a collection of genders, and think they can just use it to say “OH, I broke your system, what now???” They are not actual nonbinary people. Actual nonbinary people are not intentionally POENiSy, or at least apologize for it when they are made to see that they’ve been transmisogynist. Actual people who are nonbinary actually identify as NOT BEING WOMEN. Some have dicks, some have vaginas. POENiSs taking on the identity insincerely do so because they feel as though they can infiltrate the system, and try to act like nonbinary people think gender is a lie. Actual nonbinary people aren’t “gender critical,” POENiSs are. They believe gender exists, not as a construct for self-identification, but to impose a strict set of rules for vagina-owners in exclusion, and that men live in a gender-free world, and that this is somehow where they’ll find liberation from the shackles that the patriarchy has thrown on those who gender as women by simultaneously being like “I’m not a woman!” and “I’m a woman!”... I understand that every now and then, some of us (women) like to switch back and forth to get like a “which is it?” out of the world of men, like, HELLO, I’m a woman, this is one of the most useful attitudes in some situation for getting what you want from men, like the truth when they think they can play, this isn’t one of those situations... And like, it’s freaking annoying when POENiSs try to use tactics women developed for dealing with men for dealing with other women, like every time it happens, this is the face we make back at you: :|... That deadpan, mouth flat, eyes so wide they could roll out of their sockets, ready to roll back with a *HUGE* sigh as soon as the disbelief that you’d actually think this would work fades enough for the “OH BOY!!!” to come out of our mouths, like...this is one of those times... They think it’ll let them sneak in... They think it’ll prove a point somehow... It’s not genuine, and don’t be fooled. They especially like to try to convince other nonbinary people that they are genuine, and then use that foot in the door to start getting them attacking women who are trans for calling POENiS bullshit out., trying to make them think when we are talking about “Crypto-Terfs” (like this) that we are lumping in actual nonbinary people, when we are not, or that we are referring only to AFAB nonbinary people when we refer to nonbinary people... I don’t get how this has become such a seemingly universal piece of POENiS rhetoric, all the same, the assumption that we are talking exclusively about AFAB NB people when we (women who are trans) say NB... Probably about half of NB people were AMAB, and legit, sometimes it feels like we (women who are trans) are the only ones who get that... Is it possibly because many women who are trans are nonbinary ourselves? (Technically *ALL* trans people are nonbinary according to... *SHOCK* the binary itself...) POENiS rhetoric though, focuses on attempting to frame dysphoria as though it meant that women who are trans actually somehow secretly define womanhood as owning a vagina ourselves, and that when we talk about “Women and Afab people” basically to mean “People who don’t identify as men,” we somehow are trying to say “People who have, or want vaginas...” No, about half of nonbinary folks have or were born with what society arbitrarily calls “penises,” probably about half of nonbinary people want to have “penises” (regardless of being AMAB or AFAB), and women who are trans who have “penises” are great, and women! Women who want to keep their “penises” are great! Women who have no dysphoria at all about their penises are great, and valid! It’s a clit. It’s a fucking clit, everyone has one! What woman wouldn’t want to keep her clit? This is turning into a side note, and that note is that I’m even sick of the “keep your penis/don’t” language, like, if the surgeon is doing it right, we *ALL* “keep” our girl-penises anyway and just get a vagina, like... unless a woman asks to *NOT* have her clit, like... I don’t see why, that seems like self-harm, ok, tho... I don’t even feel like that ever happens, so, let’s change the language... And since I was talking about NB people with dicks (Like this girl), Let’s get back to that... Oh, what? You want me to talk about NB people with pussies? Cool. I’m not gonna do that right now, specifically because it’s what you want, and for me, a huge part of how my femininity expresses itself is in not doing anything just because some dude wants me to. (Dude is gender neutral right? I mean, I don’t agree with that all the time, I feel like it can be pretty loaded the way POENISs use it just in anger to basically say “I’m catching you ‘acting like a man’ and trying to go ‘bad dog!’ in order to push you back to ‘acting like a woman,’ (<-WTF do either of these even mean, like... if you’re gonna use “dude” like that, you gotta explain these two things to me. Explain it like I’m 5, please...) Anyway, be leary of any person claiming to be “nonbinary,” and “gender critical” at the same time. Actual nonbinary people aren’t “gender critical,” because *SHOCK* all of them who aren’t agender... HAVE GENDER! Frequently these “crypto-terfs,” and really POENiSs in general, act as though they believe “non-binary” is in and of itself a gender, and not a broad collection of a spectrum of countess genders, as it is, and for all I know, it’s cause they actually don’t know better... This is *ACTUALLY* kind of useful as a red-flag... They act like “nonbinary” means “I have ‘liberated’ myself from gender!” and not “I FOUND MY GENDER AND IT’S NOT ON THIS EITHER/OR BULLSHIT, THAT DOESN’T FIT MY LIFE, AND I’M ELATED!!!” Gender isn’t oppressive, *shouldn’t *be*, or *feel** oppressive. Gender is LIBERATING, *SHOULD *BE* *AND* *FEEL** liberating... LIke, this is the whole idea of being trans... We felt (and were *BEING*) oppressed by being *FORCED* into identifying and expressing ourselves with a gender we *DON’T* identify with, we feel *LIBERATED* being finally *FREE* to identify and express ourselves as the gender we actually experience and identify with and wish to express, like... OMG, this is not a difficult concept, and if you actually *WERE* nonbinary, you would get that. You would have found your freedom in the honest identification, and stopped feeling like you gotta fuck with us. Or *ARE* you actually nonbinary? I know I’m making a “woman trap” right now, it’s intentional that I didn’t back away from it, cause it’s being myself, and I won’t apologize for it, I *WILL* call attention to it, because doing so is my prerogative, and because POENiSs are so confused and full of misogyny that like, they’d try to say it’s misogynist that I (as a woman) admit (and am proud) that women know how to do this thing (Men don’t... you just don’t, not sorry...), and at the same time, not even realize that acting like women setting “traps” is a “bad” thing, and not legit just how we’ve learned to survive a confusing, gaslighty world of men *IS ITSELF MISOGYNY.* Like, yo, if you’re nonbinary, then stop trying to frame your life as a woman’s, or your experiences as “woman’s experiences.” Did I say “Only women can set ‘traps’, or did I just say “Men can’t.”...? Dude, give it up. And yes, I call other chicks dude too. I call men, women, and nonbinary people dude... The difference is that I do my best to ask if women are okay with it, or wait for them to do it first. I usually reserve it for stoner chicks and lesbians, cause we seem to throw it around more in a gender neutral-*INTENDED* way, and generally not care as much, except that trans women have a *REASON* to care when AFAB people do it, cause we’re *USED* to it being loaded. You can’t act like you can just pretend away the intentions of your word by being like “It’s gender neutral...” OK... that’s true till you put an *INTENT* to use the word *SPECIFICALLY TO GENDER* someone on it... Like I can laugh and call you “ass” with the intention of a friend to make you laugh when I see you being silly and we’re friends and know it’s all innocent and no harm intended, *OR* I can yell “ass” at a stranger with the intention of calling a stranger out on being harmful and full of shit, like... the word itself is pretty neutral between something you can casually throw at a friend and not harm them if they’re cool with the way you’re using it, and a word which can be used to actively and intentionally “bite at” (Read: HARM) someone. And like, a favorite tactic of this brand of POENiS is to act like if they see you calling out *ANOTHER* “crypto-terf” to suddenly try to get your attention and be like “I see you were talking about me, cause I too am “a nonbinary with a vagina,” yes indeed!” and like, No. Just no. No, dude.  (ABSOLUTELY read this like I'm dog/cat shaming. I am.) We were talking about Crypto-POENiS(s) who *INSINCERELY* label themselves as nonbinary, without meaning it (Fuck, a lot probably are nonbinary and even trans-masc, or men and in denial... some legit probably are women...) And when you hop in, all a *WOMAN* like *ME* sees is one of those many things in life which *IMMEDIATELY* makes us realize “Methinks thou dost protest too much.” Like... If you want to know how to talk to a woman, you gotta be able to learn to avoid triggering that, cause when we think “Methinks thou dost protest too much,” not always, and yet still, a pretty fair percentage of the time, we are fuckin’ right. Just like, stop trying to play word games with women, or do you worst... either way, it’s not gonna work XD.

#Poenis #crypto-terfs #trans #transgender #trans women are women

[thesnadger]

pinkiepiebones replied to your post “[[MOR] One of my guilty (very guilty) pleasures is watching snarky...”

Contra might not be the best to explain it as she’s selling anti-Semitic “lizard people” shirts iirc

*stares at this for a good ten minutes, deciding whether I want to put my foot in it* *inhales deeply*

So okay. I saw the post this is referring to a while back, wrote a long response to it, then decided it wasn’t worth the Discourse and it was better to just ignore the whole thing. I saved it in Drafts which I guess is the tumblr version of writing an angry letter and not sending it.

But I guess eventually someone was going to talk to me directly about it so here are my thoughts about this claim under the cut.

I’m not linking the post this is referring to because the OP is 17 and (in my opinion) probably earnest and misguided, and I really, really don’t want anyone messaging or harassing her.

For anyone who doesn’t know, a while back Contrapoints made two videos critiquing capitalism. She used the popular conspiracy theory trope of “reptilians secretly run the world” to play with and sometimes mock the idea that the harms of capitalism come from a small group of villains rather than the system itself. (At least that’s one interpretation, the joke is probably nuanced enough that you could go a few ways with it.) She’s since put a t-shirt in her merch store with “goddamned reptiles” written on it, referencing the video.

Without dedicating a ton of space to it, the “reptilian” trope has some history in scifi but was popularized by the 1983 miniseries V and its sequels, which were about a conspiracy of reptilian aliens taking over the world. (Interestingly, in V, the reptilians were a heavy-handed metaphor for fascism.) In 1999, David Icke published a book that claimed reptilians similar to those described in V were in fact real and dangerous. While Icke claims his work is about actual reptiles from space and that he doesn’t believe in any Jewish conspiracy, his work and statements have some seriously antisemitic flavor, and I’m pretty much on board with anyone who calls him an antisemite.

Since then the “reptilian conspiracy” trope has appeared in conspiracy theories, in scifi, and in media mocking conspiracy theories. Most people attribute at least the ‘serious conspiracy theory’ version to Icke. Some feel this taints all uses of the of trope with antisemitism, some don’t. It’s up to you how you feel about that.

Contrapoints is obviously aware of both Icke and the connection to antisemitism since she jokes about it in that description (which says ‘David Icke was right’ in a clearly joking way) and the video itself (saying ‘the reptilians are not the Jews, they’re not lizard men from alpha draconis, they’re not Freemasons or globalists or the Gay Agenda.’) This is in line with her usual sense of humor. She’s become known partly through her videos arguing with and taking down far-right/fringe/neo-nazi subcultures, and she frequently uses their tropes and code phrases while mocking them.

Personally, I don’t find these jokes even remotely offensive. But maybe you do. Just because I, one Jewish person on the internet, am not offended by her using this trope doesn’t mean all Jews have to feel that way.

If anyone who’s Jewish feels hurt or offended by her joking about reptilians, if they feel these jokes are in bad taste and that as a non-Jew she has no right to make them, and if that makes them not want to watch her videos, then I’m not going to tell anyone they should feel any other way. 

But suggesting (as the post I’ve seen circulating does) that making jokes about antisemitic conspiracy theories means she believes in the ideas she is clearly mocking seems extremely wrong to me. She’s mocked incels, neo-nazis, terfs and other transphobes in a similar way, and hopefully any casual viewer of her work can see that doesn’t mean she subscribes to their beliefs.

I’m sure there are people reblogging the post because they genuinely believe it means she’s antisemitic, and want to spread the word. But given how often callout posts target marginalized persons (and are sometimes deliberately spread as a tool of far-right groups to target people they don’t like) I strongly encourage everyone to think critically about why certain people might be a little eager to find an excuse to take down a popular, well-known trans woman with a history of mocking fascist groups.

#pinkiepiebones #antisemitism mention #I just know I'm gonna get a shitload of angry anons over this #welp all the more reason to get off the internet and back to painting #going offline for a while now

[korrasera]

Hi, it’s been so long that I wasn’t in the discourse and using tumblr I can’t remember my username and password so I’m writing anon. Do you know where I can learn the current shorthands or titles now used in the gender/LGBTQ discourse in tumblr? Like I get people use enbies and NB’s interchangeably but I don’t know what Truscum was or is now. I’m writing this to you because I generally checked here every once a while. Thanks anyway and have a good day.

I don’t have a good 101 resource I can point you at yet, but I’ll see if I can find one and come back to this thread later.

In the mean time, here’s a quick breakdown of truscum. Apologies, I’m going to speak at length here.

The Term

Truscum is a label embraced by the transmedicalist community and is synonymous with someone calling themselves a transmedicalist.

Etymology

As I remember, it emerged because people referred to transmedicalists as truscum pejoratively, and transmeds chose to reclaim the term and use it as their own label. The idea behind the term is that it was meant to be shorthand for ‘true trans scum’ referencing an old idea of ‘true trans people’ that was promoted by transmedicalists in the past.

Some History

Older transmedicalists, like Harry Benjamin Syndrome Sufferers (or HBSers), usually started from the position that they were ‘true trans’ people because they suffered from dysphoria, wanted bottom surgery (specifically bottom surgery) and wanted to go stealth after transitioning. IE, to blend in completely with cis society. And they were kinda terrible to any trans people who didn’t want all of those things, arguing that such people weren’t actually transgender and were just trying to pretend to be trans to feel special.

Oh, and they also engaged in a lot of policing of sexuality, as trans women could only be ‘true trans’ if we were heterosexual and were exclusively attracted to men. Any trans woman that was a lesbian or bisexual was ultimately read by transmedicalists as being predatory men. Trans men were either erased completely or held to the same basic standard, as any trans men that didn’t want to be a big manly man was read as being a faker.

Yes, that’s exactly like how TERFs talk. That’s one of the reasons why that community has created so many problems for trans folks for such a long time.

Anyways, when this latest crop of transmedicalists emerged in the last decade, they weren’t calling themselves HBSers, they were calling themselves transmedicalists and then truscum.

What do transmedicalist/transmed/truscum believe?

Keep in mind that this isn’t true of everyone in that community, because not every member of the transmed community will hold all of these beliefs at the same time. That said, here are the core points that form the basis for transmedicalist ideology:

Being transgender is a mental illness and medical condition.

All real trans people experience gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria is what defines being transgender. People who don't have gender dysphoria cannot be transgender.

Pathologizing transgender identity is the only way to guarantee access to medical resources for trans people.

Non-binary people do not exist.

There are only two genders, male and female.

Trans people who don't want bottom surgery are not really trans people.

Trans people must hate being trans and must experience mental anguish and pain as a result of being trans.

Trans people who are non-conformant are not really trans people and actually harm trans people.

Many young trans people are secretly ‘transtrenders’ who are trying to claim to be trans in order to be trendy.

Trans people that use pronouns other than he/him/his and she/her/hers aren’t really trans people because, again, non-binary people don’t really exist.

Every single one of these points is wrong and most of them are extremely harmful to the trans community, by the way.

As a side note on the term I used above, pathologizing (also called medicalizing or medicalization, hence trans*medicalists*) is the process of treating a human condition as a specifically medical condition, regarding it as a problem to be treated, prevented, or cured.

In Closing

It’s useful to know what transmeds are so you can recognize what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. That’ll give you the ability to speak out against them when try to recruit people or harass people.

In reality, transmedicalists follow an authoritarian ideology in which they seek to control what it means to be transgender. They do this out of a sense of fear, because cisnormative society is really violent towards trans people and people with authoritarian beliefs will often engage in gatekeeping and policing behaviors in a direct effort to control the fear they feel when targeted by society’s violent tendencies.

So, in order to make themselves feel safe, they target and attack trans people. Their entire community is basically one big excuse for harassment campaigns, as truscum don’t actually do anything to advance pro-trans political concerns, they just sit around and attack people who question their gender identity or non-binary people or trans people without dysphoria because they can’t feel safe if they aren’t attacking someone.

Anyways...

I hope that helps. If I can find a good 101 resource on current terms and definitions I’ll make a post about it.

#transmedicalism #long post #Anonymous