#and primarily nonbinary people and women in a particularly nonbinary way

[sunkern-plus]

i know there should be more yuri (because of this website being the yuri website and the woman prioritizer website, and i agree as a woman prioritizer), but...there should also be secret third thing, secret fourth thing, and secret fifth thing stuff too (n/n stuff, women x nonbinary stuff, and men x nonbinary stuff)

#nln #nlw #nlm #and no being a nonbinary person primarily attracted to other nonbinary people no matter the alignment #and also being a man or woman attracted to nonbinary people in a non-chaser-y way is not a fetish. like a lot of discourse shit has said #as in i've literally seen blog posts that have said this. #like that basically made us feel ashamed for being nonbinary and me specifically for being unlabeled #but primarily attracted to other nonbinary people and women and rarely men #and primarily nonbinary people and women in a particularly nonbinary way #literally most of the women/women adjacent people i'm primarily attracted to are some form of nonbinary/genderfluid/femgender unaligned #literally most of the women i'm attracted to are also nonbinary. and somehow to most mainstream lgbt people #who DON'T fall out of acceptable binaries (mainly people saying this abt people like me were trans men) are 'fetishistic' #like how a lot of transmasculine 'fat positive activists' save for a few think that people (even if fat) having preferences for fat people #is fetishistic somehow. even if the other person is fat and genuinely prefers other fat people in general #ANYWAY rant over. i'm tired of being mad at every single community treating me like scum

[butch-reidentified]

i know it’s none of my business, but if you mind sharing, why did you get top surgery? i haven’t heard of any woman who has gotten it for reasons further than being transgender (or medical ones)

I dont mind; it's just a bit complex and hard to communicate. I've found that whenever I try to on here, people end up misinterpreting a lot of it. I'm willing to try tho, esp since I've previously talked about it only in specific contexts and not just discussed all the reasons.

I had a few reasons, and part of it was medical (primarily bc of constant painful cysts), and I did have what I think may be a version of "sex dysphoria" (tho I'm not 100% bc other ppl describe sex dysphoria so differently & I didn't have body image issues or care how I looked to others or in the mirror) where my breasts felt (felt as in a literal physical sensation) like a prosthesis that I was wearing all the time. I had genuinely gorgeous, ideal-by-societal-standards breasts, and I actually quite liked them aesthetically. but they got in the way a lot and caused all the usual issues that large breasts do, so I was gonna get a reduction regardless. I was kinda like, why not go all the way and then I won't have to deal with cysts or that odd sensation I mentioned? I think it kind of comes down to that + the fact I knew I'd enjoy being a butch woman with a flat chest.

but then I also kind of got this sense of amusement from the idea of removing from existence a pair of breasts that sooo many people who saw them called flawless, just because they were "too perfect for this world to have." that's now the reason I give men who ask me about it, bc the reactions are honestly priceless.

I did a whole ton of research, including a lot of exploring stories of women who regretted doing this for the pupose of checking my motivations for pursuing it, my external and internal contexts around it, and my thought process and actual process I had designed for myself to complete before "clearing" myself to go forward with it - the idea being if any of those were a match with anything I read in a regret testimony, I would not move forward. I did therapy as well, specifically not affirming and with the woman who was my therapist after surviving the Pulse shooting in 2016, who I trust and respect deeply and who is not particularly on board with trans stuff or the new brand of "feminism." And I waited over 4 years from when I first thought about it to do all the above, and so it wouldn't be at all impulsive as I'd had a lot of time to dig deep, analyze, try other options, and really think hard about it/how I'd feel. And so I'd be old enough that my prefrontal cortex was more or less done cooking 😅

I'm not really sure either way if I would do it now if I still had them, but that's only bc I'm informed about the cosmetic surgery industry now in ways I wasn't then, and as a result, I'm opposed to giving that industry my money. But it would still be a tough call if I'm honest. I really like the way my chest is now. I'm quite happy with it and find it much more convenient in several ways, so I couldn't honestly say I have any regrets about it.

I truly had zero desire to be viewed as a man or "nonbinary" and went a bit overboard making sure people knew that for a while after my surgery. My misandry runs too deep to ever not love being a woman, no matter what the world is like, if I'm honest. I am so madly in love with womanhood and sisterhood and being a lesbian and female solidarity and devoting my life, body and "soul," to women's liberation. It's my cardinal raison d'être. And I do think there's some good can be done by an extremely gnc woman with no breasts who's loud and proud about being a woman.

#mine #ask #sex dysphoria #NGAMT

[disquiet-doll]

thinking about the terms tme/tma again

this will get long and rambly, maybe (imagine how embarrassing this note will be if i barely write like 2 paragraphs here lol)

(Note before anything: I have written on this subject before and some of what I'm about to say I'm repeating, but I looked back at that post and disagreed with much of it enough to deleted it despite my generally archivist nature. Sorry lol.)

So the first, and probably most important thing is: I mean good terms to have for like, discussions, yeah? Kind of important to be able to note the concept of who is and isn't affected by transmisogny in discussions of it.

Of course, I have said before that basically everyone is affected by transmisogyny, and that is something I believe! But as always with these kinds of things there's a difference between the primarily targeted and secondarily affected* by bigotry, and so while the terminology is a bit imprecise for those things like... It's fine enough.

(Of course it does open the gate of "Ok but who IS primarily affected, like obviously trans woman, and surely most transfeminine nonbinary people, but the lines between these and other genderfuckery are blurry". And that's true! Who's being shot at and who's catching strays - to use a perhaps overly violent analogy for the context - can be complicated question!

...One I should offer an answer to, but I don't have one. Sorry!)

But with that out of the way, I should address the ACTUAL complaint that usually comes up with the terms: The idea that asking about it is, effectively (like asking someone if they are afab or amab) asking "What's in your pants?". I have a few thoughts on this.

The first is that in a general sense, not really? If you don't know someone's gender at all the being told they're tme tells you nothing but "not transfem". Cis men, trans men, cis woman, varying sectors of the amorphous blob that makes up non-binary identity... It covers more than it doesn't.

The problem instead is, to me, that being told they're tma means they are transfem. Given the amount of trans women who aren't openly such online to ward off harassment I hope the issue here is clear! I'm open about my identity (perhaps more than I should be), but if I wasn't it certainly wouldn't be a question I enjoy getting.

(This is also why I don't particularly like the posts I've seen that amount to "if you won't identify as tma or tme I know you're tme". I would hope after incidents like Isabel Fall "trans women have to identify themselves to be allowed to speak" would be a less commonly taken stance, but alas.**)

The second is that within the trans community yes, it does basically mean that. Not necessarily - amab nonbinary people with no particular attachment to femininity do exist after all; I should know, I was one of them for quite a while!*** - but often enough that I can hardly fault people for seeing it as such.

However, this leads into my third thought: That I don't actually think that's such a big deal lol. Like, yes, the information gleaned is almost the same as asking someone's genital configuration directly, but so does asking someone's sexuality ask "What kind of people do you like to fuck?". The fact that it's a more tactful version of the question is actually quite relevant! It's not just some rhetorical slight of hand!

Now, to be clear: If the response you get is "that's none of your business" you should respect that, but I don't think the question itself is the worst thing in the world. It's information that is sometimes relevant, or just something you want to know! Certainly, I can't fault a transfem for feeling more comfortable around other, similar people.

Just, you know. Privacy is also a fine thing to want, and assuming the worst of anyone who wishes for it is, I think, not the best.

*I dislike the concept of bigotry being "misdirected" or equivalent terms, so I won't be referring to it in this way, but the "person is mistaken for a member of an oppressed group and attacked for it" situations are what I mean here. **Also, not great for questioning people! Someone unsure if they're a trans woman may be unsure if they "count", since they haven't been directly affected but like, saying no implies something they don't want either. The response to this from some is likely "if she's a trans woman she always has been, and so has always been tma" but... Ehhh, not everyone sees themself that way (Example: I don't!) ***Also, bottom surgery exists lol. Even someone saying they're tma does not in fact instantly answer the "What's in your pants" question.

#musing #this may be incoherent

[tricky-pockets]

I've been mulling over the origin of the word 'transmisogyny'. Julia Serano, who coined the term, used a framework that distinguishes traditional sexism (the idea that femaleness and femininity are inferior to maleness and masculinity) from oppositional sexism (the idea that male and female are rigid, dissimilar, mutually exclusive categories). Oppositional sexism maintains the hierarchy of traditional sexism and keeps people in their "correct" position. The idea is that all trans people face oppositional sexism because of our Gender Crimes, but trans women in particular face another layer of traditional sexism because they're transgressing in the direction of "inferior" femininity. 'Transmisogyny', then, describes the ways that bigotry manifests againsts trans women and transfeminine people in particular due to the intersection of oppositional and traditional sexism--that is, transphobia and misogyny, respectively.

Serano acknowledges that "...for others (e.g., certain nonbinary people, trans male/masculine-spectrum people), misogyny may intersect with transphobia in different ways that aren’t adequately articulated by transmisogyny. This doesn’t necessarily make transmisogyny “wrong”; it may simply mean that we need additional language."

I'm not personally satisfied with the traditional/oppositional model overall, but I am also not terribly well-read and it's been a while since I've done any theory. I think there might be insights to be gained by applying this lens to transandrophobia.

Serano describes transmisogyny, in part, as "additional scrutiny due to the specific direction of our gender transgressions—that is, toward the female and/or feminine, which are both delegitimized due to traditional sexism." This reads to me as indicating a direction of specificity--bigotry primarily against transness in a broad sense, and then against trans femininity in particular. In other words, the bigot sees it as "The first problem is that you're a deviant, and to make it worse, a womanly deviant."

I'd argue that in the case of trans men and transmasculine people, the direction of specificity is opposite. Transandrophobia is primarily against (perceived) femininity in a broad sense, and then against (perceived) feminine transness in particular. "The first problem is that you're a woman, and to make it worse, a deviant woman."

Bigots (focusing on wider society for now) don't want to drag maleness or masculinity. If they don't want to drag your agab itself, they'll drag your transness and femininity. If they don't want to drag masculinity itself, they'll drag your agab and transness.

Some of this sounds weird, but sexists and bigots do not see trans men as men. There can be no denying that we experience misogyny; the misogynist doesn't care how we identify. A bigot who sees a trans woman as a man is not deterred from enacting misogyny against her--why would they be deterred from enacting misogyny against people they see as women? Even if/when we pass, we're still affected by systemic misogyny. And even for the Most Passing Stealth Trans Man, being forced to live in fear of being clocked is not an experience of privilege.

To make it abundantly clear, none of this says anything about the degree of bigotry experienced by any group; I'm only trying to describe the nature of the bigotry using the framework put forth by Julia Serano. Trying to count up the transphobia and misogyny points and compare their proportions would be both reductive and inaccurate; that's not how intersections work.

I have more to say on this, particularly about how masculinity has been treated as an achievement and femininity has been treated as an expectation, and how those framings influence the perception of different kinds of Gender Crimes. But this post is already quite long, so, uh. I'll come back to it.

Also, I'm terrified that some of the inelegant phrasing here will get wildly misinterpreted. I swear, I am keeping the language as consistent and precise as I can. I did choose my words with intention, so please do ask me to clarify before you drag me to filth. Thank you.

#transandrophobia #sam tag 🌌

[nothorses]

I think there's some level of exorsexism as a system in the residence to transandrophobia. Many arguing against it seems to be immediately equating it to or judging it by transmisogyny, as though it must just be the "male" version of transmisogyny and saying that's not a thing. Of course it's not a thing. But you don't (or at least I don't) see these same arguments about enbyphobia, a term looking at the unique forms of transphobia and oppression against nonbinary people. Of course enbyphobia isn't the nonbinary version of transmisogyny, it's its own thing and equating it like that would be inaccurate and potentially offensive. With nonbinary people there's not the same need to immediately equate it to transmisogyny, so why the need with transandrophobia? I think part of it is still unlearning the idea that men and women, masculinity and femininity are clear inverses and opposites that should be judged based off one another. That belief is wrong, and it's a part of exorcism, gender essentialism, enbyphobia, and transphobia in different ways. It's also deeply ingrained in our society and the social construction of gender. It's hard to unlearn, but worth it. Just sharing thoughts with you because you post interesting analysis. It's also just one potential part of things, not everything.

Ohh, that’s a really great point!

And it does really reveal some flaws in how we think about transmisogyny, even; as if it’s just transphobia + misogyny, and nothing more.

Transmisogyny is a system that targets transfemininity as a whole, and it’s founded on certain ideas about gender that aren’t specific or exclusive to just women, or just trans people. It drums up a panic about transfemininity because “men in dresses” are dangerous, and trying to hurt and predate on women; and this is rooted in a misogynistic idea about men. Because the patriarchy also believes that men (particularly men of color) are dangerous, aggressive, and sexually insatiable.

It says transfeminine people are trying to “trick” straight men, because gay men are dangerous predators; combining homophobic and misogynistic ideas that are primarily about gay men. Plus, of course, the transphobia in all of these ideas- that trans people aren’t who we say we are, that being trans is gross and unnatural, etc.

Take that with other forms of transmisogyny: transfems being tokenized, objectified, fetishized, and of course, suffering the more familiar types of misogyny that we see directed at women- and those the patriarchy sees as women.

All of that those things are valid struggles, and all of them need attention. “Transmisogyny” isn’t just saying that trans women and transfems experience misogyny (they do), it’s also saying that there is a deeper system of interconnected gender-based oppression, which is targeting transfemininity in specific ways. Erasing any aspect of that erases large swaths of those experiences.

There’s resistance to the idea that “transandrophobia” is describing a similarly unique system of oppression, founded on other, interconnected forms of gender-based oppression. Like transmisogyny, there are aspects of misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia there- all in ways that are unique in how they target transmasculine people. 

And it reveals a resistance to the exact same ideas in “transmisogyny”. Because- like you said- people don’t like this idea that there is deviation from a neat gender binary in how these things work.

Trans women and trans men are, under the patriarchy, viewed and treated as entirely separate genders from cis women and cis men. We aren’t perfect opposites (men and women never are!), and our experiences of oppression will always be closer to each other’s than they are to cis men and cis women’s.

That’s what “transandrophobia” actually says. But people argue with the arguments they fabricate instead, because it’s easier & more comfortable than widening their entire understanding of gender-based oppression- for the benefit of all trans people.

#trans #transandrophobia #transmasc #not horses #Anon #Ask

[metanoiamorii]

Wip Re-Introduction: A Rope In Hand

❛Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can’t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.❜

♧ Title: A Rope In Hand [ARIH]

♧ Status: First Drafting

♧ Point of View: Third Person, flexible between a few

♧ Genre: Dark Fantasy, Supernatural, LGBTQ+, Action, Drama

♧ Warnings: This story revolves around the occult. There will be talk of witch hunts and trials and cults. There will be torture methods used to gain confessions, and these methods will be justified under religious belief. There will be toxic and abusive relationships, particularly family; finding an escape from them, and healing from the trauma. There will be homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and colonization. There will be major character deaths, but I can spoil after the book ends the main characters do get a happy ending. Each chapter and scene posted will have personalized warnings, but these are the main things to expect.

♧ Featuring: The majority of the characters will be LGBTQ+, from pansexual, homosexual, to asexual; genderfluid, agender/nonbinary, and transgender. Each character is complex and morally grey. Yes, they will do things that are blatantly terrible, or actively good. Overall, they will be morally grey and questionable at best. There will be complex world-building, from both the universe it takes place in, and the religious pantheons brought up. The religions brought up will be polytheistic and animism-themed. The romance between the major characters will be slow-burn enemies to friend to lovers, and them learning to love themselves through one another. There will be an exploration on generational healing, and unlearning toxic, and bias believes.

♧ Setting: The setting is influenced by Victorian London, and Medieval Ireland. There will be mention of other places, primarily western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Ancient Rome, Eastern Asia, and Napoleonic France.

♧ Synopsis:

In the town of Arkaley, in the northwest of the Duchy of Ruairc, the people have been plagued by bad fortune and crime. Attacks of bandits on the road, raids from pirates on the shores, untimely deaths of children and young women, elected officials coming out corrupt; there is no end in Arkaley of the suffering the locals endure.

Rationally, to explain such a bad string of luck, there is only one possible explanation: Witchcraft.

The Duchy of Ruairc already has a history of witchcraft: the Ó Ruaircs turned out to be witches, the Abondé incident in Salem, the Liathain incident in Trakee; the Ruaircs have their record. Perfectly acceptable for everyone to assume the worse of the Ruairish, as they have proved to be nothing but.

To prove his worth, the young Reverend Prudence Clemency Frye, takes up the task of quelling this coven of witches and heading this witch-hunt. Young and naïve, witch only knowledge from books and little hands-on experience, he’s unprepared for this challenge. When he finally leaves the town, well… everyone would rather put this incident behind them.

♧ Tease:

My darling dear, a knave so clear

You appear, so bravely near;

Do you hear my darling dear, sneers of austere jeers?

Behave, my dear, when I am near;

For peers will lear, in their fear,

Allow me o' dear our persevere

So my fave you appear

And volunteer a slave so dear 

in an atmosphere we fear.

my darling dear, wave so clear

Depravely as we leave, and give a souvenir;

My lips to yours, as you crave in these fallin' years. 

Be brave darling dear, and give into hearts o' queer.

For mine you be, your darling dear, 

To the stars you have swore in love, so crystal clear.

My peers shall sneer, but whore I be, and you I crave

Oh so bare. slurs and glares, just listen to my prayers.

Kiss me love, and leave o'they to a'crave 

In this atmosphere that we fear

Their own, o' pure, knave so dear.

♧ Excerpt:

".... This is wrong." Prudence finds the words slipping from his lips, voice a quiet whisper; a breathless tone of voice. He allows his fingertips to falter against scarred skin, watching as Mastema turned his cheek, he pressed himself into the palm of Prudence's hand. Eyes closed, a smile curled on his face. Prudence couldn't help but smile at the scene, but slowly, slowly, slowly, he rescinded his hand; breaking the hold.

"Revered..." Matching his voice, Mastema replied. Maintaining such a soft voice, as he shifted himself forward on the bed. One foot to the ground, the other drawn beneath himself. Over Prudence he leaned, resting one palm to the sheets, the other lifting to seize Prudence's hand before he could recoil back. "You have made me feel something in which I've never felt before..."

From where he laid, Prudence could only form a soft frown. He knew he could draw his hand back, the grip was far from tight. But he didn't. He laid there, allowing Mastema to hold his hand. "... This is wrong, Mastema."

Mastema frowned; he matched the reaction Prudence wore. Through it, he forced a half-smile, tightening his grip on the other's hand, and forward he brought Prudence's hands to kiss the knuckles. "... If this is wrong, I do not wish to be right."

At the response, Prudence shook his head. "It is not for us to be right or wrong, the gods—"

At the angle he sat, Mastema shifted once more. He dropped Prudence's hand, to lean forward; to lean in close. Both of his palms found the other's cheek, as he touched their foreheads to one another. "... Do not force your will onto another." In that soft whisper, he spoke. Eyes closed, breath drawn in. "Is that not a Commandment of our Creator?"

"I..." Prudence faltered. In, he drew his breath, to try to steady himself. "... I did not take you for the religious sorts."

"I'm not." Mastema all too quickly retorted. But as he was, he laid; this proximity. "But you are."

♧ Characters:

The Order of Witchesbane

Prudence Clemency Frye; The Reverend

Half Fae/Half Human • Intersex • Genderfluid • He/They • Homosexual • Homo-demiromantic

The bastard son of Lord Zachariah Frye. Raised by his father, with his mother dying young, he took to following in his footsteps. He became a religious young man and an active witch-hunter. A part of him desires his father’s acceptance, his praises; the other part despises his father and everything the man stands for. In recent years, he has joined the De La Cruz household, becoming an apprentice beneath the famous Witch’s Advocate; upholding the beliefs that not every witch is evil and has foul intentions, and the ones that mean harm are the only ones that should be hunted.

Zachariah Frye; The Bloodhound

Human • Male • He/Him • Bicurious • Aromantic

The oldest living member of the Order. Now he is the man that holds the face of the Order, who you think of when they come to mind. Cold. Vindictive. Despotic. Violent. He is not a good man. He is firm in his beliefs and stubborn to change. Once his mind is made up, he cannot be reasoned with. He is blindly convinced of his beliefs and his cause to eradicate every living witch, unfazed if he has to fill a few innocent thousands in the process.

Calisto Ferzan Hermengildo Melchior Lorencio De La Cruz; The Witch’s Advocate

Half Fae/Half Human • Amab • Nonbinary • Genderfluid • He/They • Asexual • Aromantic

A witch-hunter in title alone, Calisto has been making enemies since he could first talk. He’s always enjoyed being the underdog, going against the expectations of society, being ridiculed by his peers. The sole reason? Proving them wrong. To ridicule his own peers for their outdated beliefs, he’s taken to defending witches, proving them innocent of their ‘crimes’, and going on to help them to set up a life in a country more accepting of witchcraft

The servant of Calisto, never seen far from his side. He is a servant in name alone and is more-or-less an assassin, a hitman for Calisto. Held in contempt by Athylian society for being a foreigner, he often treated by others more as a slave than a servant. To help be unseen, to help the De La Cruz Household, Michelotto endures the treatment and goes as far to be perceived as ignorant, alongside him being born a mute. Keeping his true intents and intelligence duly guarded, only a handful are aware he is also a witch.

Myk'loumihr [Michelotto Dougal] Siavash; The Man-Servant

Witch; Amab • Agender • He/They • Asexual • Aromantic

Austin Duvine; The Lord Without A Ring

Half-Human/Half Fae • Amab • Nonbinary • He/They • Pansexual • Demiromantic

One of the younger members of the order, Austin relies on his father's wealth and name. He doesn't care for responsibilities, he doesn't care for hard work. He's a playboy at heart. He's fit to hold social events, and use his natural talent to gib and fib his way through life. He'll keep his mixed feelings to himself, struggling with doing the right thing or upholding tradition.

Alistair Lavine; The Witchfinder General

Human • Amab • Agender • He/They • Bicurious • Aromantic

The best friend to Zachariah and his right hand. Where Zachariah is business and lacks charms, Alistair can charm a crowd and hold their attention. He knows how to feign being an ideal human, without letting on his own bloodlust; he's a monster in human skin. At the end of the day, unlike Zachariah, Alistair does have morals and standards he will abide by, even if they come back to ruin him.

━━━━━━━━━━

The Vakari Coven

Ausrine Baoghal; The Lady

Witch • Female • She/Her • Bisexual • Aromantic

The woman in charge of the town, widowed and inheriting the right to rule as her husband had no heirs. She is a manipulative and dangerous woman, eager to commit any sin or crime for more power. She, in truth, cares only for herself and would feel no remorse if she had to turn on one of her coven to further her own agenda.

The magistrate and also the chief policeman of the town. He maintains a  calm, but manipulative personality. As a front, he presents himself to be fair and just, liked and favored by the people for genuinely caring for them. While in truth he has his own heinous and sinister agenda, aiding Ausrine in her plans.

Leary O'Laoghaire; The Magistrate

Witch • Male • He/Him • Bicurious • Aromantic

The oldest member of the coven, Dairine lives under the guise of an elderly woman, who lives alone with her children and grandchildren already leaving her to live their own lives. She is a kind and understanding woman and cares for the younger witches in the coven. She will not support Baríon with her agenda, nor does she care for the servant girl, she even despises the so-called ally Ausrine claims to have and who they all adhere to.

Dairine Ó Séaghdha; The Crone

Witch • Afab • Agender • She/They • Asexual • Aromantic

The acting servant of Barion, Anisha’s true loyalties lie elsewhere. She stays within the town, serving the coven while acting as the eyes and ears of someone, the person who is truly pulling the strings. She is the one to relay information and letters between the coven and her master.  She is a quiet woman, that keeps her head down and her mind to herself. She only shows her true, confident and demanding, nature behind closed doors with the coven when they dare to question her.

Anisha Kaur; The Servant

Witch • Afab • Demigirl • She/They • Asexual • Aromantic

The charming son of Leary. Many whisper that is part fae, due to his charm, if it’s true or not many are unaware. He is a very sophisticated young man, that has managed to wrap the entire town around his finger. While on the surface he is alike his father is a caring, compassionate, charming young man, something sinister brews beneath. He is devious, demanding, domineering.

Nathir O'Laoghaire; The Magistrate’s Son

Half-Witch/Half-Fae • Amab  • Agender • He/Him • Bisexual • Aromantic

Being the baker's daughter, Liannah helps around the bakery and family business. Unlike the company she keeps, she is a reserved young woman. She is polite and maintains her manners with whomever she is dealing with. She has the patience of a saint and rarely loses her cool. Liannah is a woman with a calm demeanor about her, being a woman many are comfortable around due to her peaceful and calm aura.

Liannah Ó Buachalla; The Baker’s Daughter

Witch • Afab • Genderfluid • She/They • Asexual • Panromantic

Ausrine's bastard son she had with a spirit she bargained with for more power. Since he was young, he was raised by the servants of the house, and the coven, over his own mother; the two have more of a business relationship over a family one. Since he cares less about what his mother does, he spends his time with Liannah and Reyes, either at the bakery or getting into trouble somewhere. With Reyes as an influence, Mastema is a flirtatious man that enjoys scandals and making the most of life

Mastema Baoghal; The Knave

Half-Witch/Half-Spirit • Amab • Genderfluid • He/They • Pansexual • Demiromantic

Rochan Misra; The Charlatan

Half-Witch/Half-Spirit • Amab • Queer • He/She • Pansexual • Aromantic

A foreigner to the Coven, born and raised in the Duchy of Incali. At a young age, he became a traveling charlatan, recently settling within the coven only as he befriended Liannah and Mastema and enjoyed their company. Now, he is the local bad influence: scamming locals out of their money at the taverns, wooing and seducing young men and ladies alike, always trespassing and vandalizing something. He is trouble but has a heart of gold when it matters.

ARIH: : @hekat-ie, @writings-of-a-narwhal, @silent-creed

━━━━━━━━━━

Taglist:

General: @endlesshourglass, @writerray, @poore-choice-of-words, @alexwritesfiction, @primusesgiantmetalballbearings

Both: @cecilsstorycorner, @little-boats-on-a-lake, @hazard-writes, @egg-shark

#Wip intro #wip introduction #writing community #writeblr #writeblr community #writers of tumblr #writers on tumblr #original writing #original story #fantasy #fantasy writing #fantasy writer #Morri's collection #Morri's Fish Tank #Wip: A Rope In Hand #Wip: ARIH #Witches #witchcraft #occult #dark fantasy #supernatural #My writing #My wip #My edits #Again I said redo an intro #But a new aesthetic #I'm kind of liking this one #So I'll probably redo them all.. #Again

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

#video essay

[urproblematicfav-arsonk]

There's a lot of things about Borderlands 3 that makes it kinda a garbage game. And all of those things are valid and true but a aspect of bl3 that deeply bothers me isn't something I've really seen people talk about?? Maybe they have but I missed it but I want to say my interpretation. (Also like, spoiler warning throughout all of this post)

To start off with: hi, I'm a autistic afab nonbinary person and this is relevant for this little rant I'm bout to go on.

I want to begin by stating why I love this franchise so much.

Borderlands, whether you like it or not, is INCREDIBLY queer. And not in a coded kind of way, it's just flat out gay as fuck. And that means so fucking much to me. Borderlands 2 was one of the first times I ever felt fully represented in a game. Zer0 being this dumbass making Yugioh references and generally being a fun garbage boy and also being nonbinary meant a lot to me and I adore him to this day (nonbinary people can use gendered pronouns fuc off). And getting more and more into this series and finding out that basically every character was on some level queer was really cool to me. Maya being asexual and most of the characters being attracted to multiple genders so honestly and off handily was so refreshing and amazing to get to play through. The casual mentions of a woman's wife or some man's husband in the echo's you find or Moxxi talking about her ex girlfriends was one of the reasons I loved this so much.

Another thing I loved particularly about Borderlands 2 was how feminist it was. I can not tell you how quickly I lost my shit at Mr. Torgue talking about the friend zone being misogynistic(it is btw). And the repeated jokes about fully murdering men for being rude to women was some of the highlights of my first playthrough. Punching a guy till he explodes because he disrespected a sex worker?? Fucking immaculate.

SPEAKING OF SEX WORK.

Mad Moxxi is a icon. She is a mother of MULTIPLE children, a survivor of rape and assault and a fucking bad bitch who runs a now intergalactic titty bar. Getting to have not only a sex worker be respected in a narrative, Moxxi is fun and a genuinely complex character who isn't defined by her job or her appearance. She is emotional and strong and funny and flawed but amazing person.

And then there's the way the male characters a represented and treated. I'll be honest here, I haven't really played Borderlands 1, mostly because have been spoiled by auto pick up and also I just didn't feel like it. So my idea of most of the men are based entirely off of Bl2, the pre-sequel and Tales. Anyway, Mordecai in particular is a character I really liked upfront. I love how a lot of his motivation and character is driven by his love of animals and Bloodwing. He's kind and though troubled knows when to get his shit together and be there when he needs to be. His casual "are you okay?" After the latter falls in the Arid Nexus was such a nice moment and the way he genuinely tries to be there emotionally for all of the people around him who he cares for is so fucking rare to see in a male character. And his arc of giving up alcohol to focus on being a better bird dad and you getting to help Brick make Mordecai a special gift to celebrate his sobriety is so amazing and I'm so proud of him.

Mr. Torgue is my dad and I love him. As mentioned, he is normal and believes that the friend zone is absolute garbage talk is ICONIC™ and the best scene in that game fight me. Torgue is a crybaby. He is an emotional person who is not afraid to express his pain and hurt when people are mean to him. He respects women and loves unicorns. The fact that is physical appearance is a big muscle guy who screams but is the literal opposite of toxic masculinity will forever make him the best male character of all time and I love him and he is my dad.

Roland was a character that I was never in particularly attached to but I still respect him and did enjoy his presence. I really appreciated his leadership style being primarily based on empathy and logic as opposed to him being a big meanie man with a HUGE dick who yells at people. I always really resonated with the echo from Tannis talking about how she came to Sanctuary. Roland going out of his way to bring Tannis to safety while completely respecting her autism and struggle with socializing really made his death hit harder when Tannis was very obviously distraught by losing him. It really seems that Roland was the only one who didn't treat her differently. And as someone who's autistic, finding people who legit 100% understand and respect you and just let you live the way you want/need to is kinda hard and those are the qualities I'd personally want in a leader.

Angel is also a big spot of affection for me. Handsome Jack being a irrefutably horrible person who Angel flat out says gaslights people and killed her means a lot to me considering 99% of Bad Parent stories end with "I forgive u" getting to see an abusive victim take that narrative and say fuck you was powerful and meant a lot to me coming from my own abusive home life.

There's a lot of other things I love about Borderlands but if I keep going I won't stop lol so let's get into why Borderlands 3 makes me so uncomfortable.

One of the main things that bothered me was the sexism. Its nothing too horrifying but given how feminist bl2 was it was really shocking and a bit hurtful the number of times women are called bitches or made to seem crazy. If you recall I brought up how you punch a man to death for calling a woman a bitch? Yea no, in this game we mock women for having boundaries and opinions because lol she's just a CRAZY BITCH who just needs to stop acting so hysterical am I right guys?

Yea the whole mission with that stupid bear thing and his ex robot girlfriend made me insanely uncomfortable and upset. I kept waiting for the gotcha moment where it says actually this bear guy is a dick and he shouldn't use language like that but no we just,,,,,, are supposed to laugh along. I hate it.

Even though Borderlands 3 is still very much queer, this game introducing 2 new trans characters as well as a whole DLC about a gay marriage and one of the playable characters being a lesbian there was this some shit that bothered me.

The mission where you crash and ruin a lesbian wedding.

That mission made so upset and uncomfortable. I hated how traumatized and hurt Tumorhead was as I murdered her family and wife. I hated how unfulfilling the mission was where PLOT TWIST the lady was actually a spy or whatever. I hate how there's a mission about ruining some poor psycho ladies wedding. I would've much more preferred a mission where Idk Bloodshine asks you to help her kill a spy who's causing problems and then fucking go around Promethea collecting wedding decorations or something. OR MAYBE JUST NOT A MISSION WHERE YOU KILL LESBIANS FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

I'm mad, anyway.

I also hated how Tannis was treated in this game. Under absolutely no circumstance would Doctor Patricia Tannis ever willingly take up a position of leadership. She is a severely autistic woman who gets nose bleeds from talking to people she wouldn't just be like "I'm in charge now pls talk to me!!!" Fuck off. And the joke about her dating a minecart isn't funny. The whole thing with the chairs, though funny in its absurdities was still a very important and powerful moment of character exploration. Tannis is insane. She is traumatized and hurt and in a moment of severe torture, she humanized some inanimate objects to cope. Tannis crying over the echo over Phillip is a heartbreaking moment of true vulnerability. It is also funny, because that's how good dark comedy works. It can be both hysterical and emotionally ruining at the same time. So what exactly does Tannis divorcing a minecart mean? What is this saying about her character? Why is it funny? Because lol lol reference??? Again, fuck off.

I hate how the Calypso twins childhood is handled. Troy implies it was horribly abusive and traumatic. But when we met Typhon whatever, he acts like it wasn't that bad??? He acts like he just didn't buy his kids the latest iPhone and oh no whoopsie now they're evil, my bad guys. It feels super weird and I don't like it.

Speaking of abusive parents. THEY DID MY GIRL ANGEL DIRTY SO BAD. This was literally when I decided I hated this game. Angel being the one who killed her mother and not Jack was fucking horrible. Especially after the literal foreshadowing in borderlands 2 implying he did. The fact that Jack is treated like a fearful man making what he thought was the right decision was insulting. I get that MattPat manipulated the fandom into thing Jack is a uwu bean but fuck you, you're the writers and you should fucking know better. Handsome Jack saw his daughter had power and turned her into a living battery for him to use as he saw fit. He was not scared and he was NOT right. Fuck you and fuck you for framing child abuse as chill and ok if your spooked enough like that. And the mission directly contradicts the echo's in Get To Know Jack. If Angel killed her mom why does she ask Jack where her mommy is when he's putting her in her chambers?? Why is it in the echo Jack is aggressive and forcibly and hurtfully makes her go into her chambers but in the memory, he's quiet and passive about it?? That's literally just flat out bad writing. Also fuck you.

Anyway,

I think that's really all I wanted to say about this topic. Obviously, there are also things that suck about bl3 but I'll try to chill and not make this too long.

I mostly wanted to make this to see if people cared/are bothered by the same things I am. I've seen how some of the fandom treats the more emotional and gay aspects of this franchise(the people throwing a fit over Amara, the friend zone line, not respecting trans peoples pronouns, sexualizing and being gross about Moxxi)

Anyway that's it byeeeeeeeeeeeee

#rant time #i was also gonna post this on reddit but it turns out i don't know how to use that app lol #so i prob wont #but dont worry still got tumblr #anyway #borderlands #borderlands spoilers #borderlands 3 spoilers #borderlands 3 #borderlands 2

[olivieblake]

We have an English paper in which we can write about any academic topic or whatever and I was thinking of writing mine on expecting more from our female characters (I guess mostly in terms of a personality), especially in YA novels since that's what most people my age read, plus I was thinking of somehow including the "not like other girls" thing when its brought to life in the form of a character... anyway, do you have any thoughts/suggestions on this?

I have so much to say that I’m going to try to break it down to bullet points, okay? I’d answer in a vlog but I know you’re working on a paper that I assume is due soon, so I’ll try to be succinct and possibly (possibly!) organized.

I’ve talked before about the fallacy of scarcity, which in this case is the idea that in a male-dominated world, only a few women can succeed. This is applicable in the professional realm, of course, where women in a male-dominated field (aka historically all of them except maybe the sex industry and witchcraft) are competing for fewer spots, and therefore women must tear each other down in order to be the one to get ahead. This is a fallacy primarily because there’s no reason only a few women should succeed outside of the patriarchal system positioning us as rivals rather than allies; isolating us that way is, in a sense, a very effective subjugation (but that’s a point for another time.) In romances, this idea somehow permeates our narratives: that there are only a few good men (arguably true) and therefore we are all competing against each other for them (definitely false). 

In romances especially, there’s this idea that one woman prevails because she is a specific subset of qualities; as I mentioned in my discussion of Jane Eyre, Brontë uses Jane’s narrative to highlight how Jane is clever, devoted, headstrong, whereas other girls are not. In modern YA, the “not like other girls” character prevails because she has offbeat interests, quirky opinions, she doesn’t care how she looks, etc. (See below re: male-approved qualities.) But first of all, this is not how relationships work. You do not win someone’s affection by possessing a list of qualities that other women don’t have. That’s issue number one.

Now add in the fallacy of scarcity, aka that you are competing with other women and therefore you must be different and better in order to win. What does this do in reality? It pits women against each other. It presumes there to be more or less value in the way in which you are a woman. But consider this: why should caring about your looks be a sign of stupidity or vapidness when there are entire industries devoted to making women—and especially teen girls—feel ugly or fat or generally imperfect? This is worse for POC women who are underrepresented and criticized for their otherness, of course, but on the whole, women are targets for a marketplace of self-hatred. Adding in the internal misogyny of “I am better than this girl because my desirability meets a male standard for behavior and hers does not” is not helping us. (Besides, the “not like other girls” is usually told she’s beautiful, isn’t she? So it rather undermines the whole thing, and creates an even more impossible standard for perfection: i.e., that you should be perfect without trying.)

Elena Ferrante (by way of Lenù) says something in the Neapolitan Novels about how she’s male in her head, or essentially has taught herself to think like a man, and this is how she has succeeded in her career. This is essentially the same concept as the underlying foundation for the “not like other girls” archetype: a beautiful woman who acts and thinks like a man (and who doesn’t know she’s beautiful, of course, because vanity is a characteristic belonging to Evil Women who ultimately prey on men; yikes!! Poor, poor men). Can you see why this might be more conducive to keeping men in a position of privilege rather than contributing to us raising each other up? Men set an unrealistic standard, and for some reason, women police each other with it. We are women, with women’s experiences; there is no reason we should act or think like men, and yet for some reason we force each other into the same woman-shaped hole by shaming each other for the pieces of ourselves that don’t fit.

The last fallacy is that of the “not like other girls” being a “cool girl,” aka someone who does not have emotional needs. Someone said this brilliantly recently that there is a pervasive belief among women that in order to be worthy of being loved, you must require as little as possible. Carrie Fisher says something interesting in her autobiography about how Harrison Ford “taught her how to be casual,” which I think is a common experience for young women. Yes, boys are often conditioned to reject the “femininity” of emotion and this is equally problematic, but I’m not going to worry about them right now. I want to focus on the idea that as a result of male emotional detachment, women learn that reluctance or ambivalence to make demands is a desirable quality; i.e., they will want us more if we need them less. We are conditioned over and over—particularly as teenage girls—to need less, to demand less, to ask for less. The entire romance genre is built on this idea that a man will one day come along and save us; not from a tower (we’ve progressed at least that much) but from loneliness or desire. That there is a man who will not only know our secret wants, but also give them to us without us having to say what they are. But not only is this unreasonable to expect, it’s unhealthy for both genders. The man who can read your mind or who knows intuitively how to love you does not exist; especially if he is unpracticed in loving others.

I would argue that yes, we should honor our female characters by expecting more from our authors—more truth, more sensitivity, more awareness—but this can manifest by expecting, in some senses, less. There is no universal woman (certainly no Perfect Woman) and thus, female characters should not all feel the same. They should also be allowed to have flaws, and to grow as they go. There shouldn’t be one girl who is so different from the others that only she can be the victor; this is in some senses expecting too much, and also implying all the fallacies above. 

IN CONCLUSION (lol), true diversity is about expressing reality; not that there should be an array of female personalities because different female personalities need to be provided, but because the world is occupied by a wide variety of women who ARE deeply unique even while we are sharing the same universal human experience. The same argument goes for just about anything, gender (or nonbinary) experiences in addition to race, ethnicity, religion, culture, sexuality, etc. 

#Anonymous #hmmm how to tag this #I'm going to say #writing advisements #even though it isn't really #feminism #big sistering #i really want to teach a course about the sociology of romance novels #put it on the vision board #not like other girls

[lingbooks]

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

While I know a lot of linguists who are feminists, there is some tension between feminist ideals and the anti-prescriptivist approach that linguists take towards language. Linguists, as a general rule, aim to document and examine language as it is used, without providing their own opinions on how they think language should be used. This approach to language allows linguists to show that certain forms of language, from split infinitives to singular they, are not bad or wrong or “grammatically incorrect.” However, when it comes to sexist language, it’s a lot harder to say that there’s no such thing as “bad” language use. 

Some of the questions that arise are easily answered. It is fairly easy to distinguish between using slurs and splitting infinitives, as slurs are meant to hurt or disparage people, while split infinitives only offend the sensibilities of some long dead men who desperately wished English were more like Latin. But what about less malicious language use that still has sexist undertones? What about calling ships or storms she? What about using the word guys to refer to groups that contain women?

 I thought a lot about this contradiction while reading Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell, a book that attempts to cover a wide variety of topics related to language and gender. Montell’s background in linguistics admittedly isn’t particularly extensive—she has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics, but she’s primarily a journalist who only occasionally writes about linguistics. (I should probably also state that, depending on how you count my graduate work in a related field, I have the same amount of linguistics education, so I’m not going to make any judgments on who “really counts” as a linguist.) That said, Wordslut is definitely a linguistics book—and a pretty good one at that.

 Wordslut covers a broad variety of topics in sociolinguistics. Some are expected. The first chapter discusses the variety of (often derogatory) slang words used to describe women, while another chapter discusses the ways women speak to each other. Other chapters cover topics I see less frequently. One chapter, for example, looks at how women swear, while another looks at the vast array of slang words used to refer to genitalia. (I’d warn you that this book is NSFW, but if you’re reading a book entitled Wordslut at work in the first place, you’re a braver soul than I am.) One of my favorite chapters focused on how gay people speak, including both discussions of gay slang as well as examining why there’s a “gay voice” but no real “lesbian voice.” While I already was familiar with some of the topics in the chapter, I was not aware of Polari, a sort of code once used by British gay men as early as the 1500s that gave us such words as twink, camp, and fantabulous, and now I definitely want to know more about it. On a similar note, throughout the book, Montell makes sure to discuss queer, trans, and nonbinary experiences when relevant, which provides perspective that’s usually lacking in older writing about language and gender.

I did find that the quality varied from chapter to chapter—or even within the same chapter. Consider, for example, the chapter on catcalling. One section of the chapter compared catcalling behaviors with linguistic studies on compliments, breaking down precisely why catcalling is not a compliment. I thought this was a really interesting analysis, but I found the rest of the chapter fairly dull; some of it discussed facts I (and most other feminists) already know about how men dominate conversations and interrupt women, while other parts talked about the act of catcalling more generally. (A problem I found throughout the book is that Montell sometimes chose to discuss general feminist issues without really tying them back to linguistics.) While some of this unevenness is to be expected in a book with such a broad scope, one pattern emerged: I generally enjoyed the portions discussing how women speak, such as the chapter about conversational norms in groups of women or the section about the many uses of like, more than the portions discussing how women are spoken about. Perhaps this is because the former read like a celebration, while the latter was more of a rant. Montell is not happy about how our culture talks about women, and while I don’t disagree with her, I often found myself more frustrated than properly fired up.

It is worth noting that Montell is not an impartial voice throughout the book. She wants our language to become more equitable. Mostly, her ambitions are good. (And in her defense, she notes that certain approaches to making language more equitable, such as attempts in 70s to create a “women’s language” or storming a dictionary headquarters to demand the word slut be removed, are unlikely to be successful.) But in doing so, sometimes her own linguistic biases shine through. Consider, for example, an anecdote from the intro of the book, where Montell gives the following speech to a woman who critiques her use of the word y’all:

I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun. I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation. I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?

 It’s a nice “take down the prescriptivist” story in some ways, but while I agree that y’all is a perfectly acceptable and useful word, Montell tries to argue that she chose to use y’all not just because her geographical and linguistic background make it the natural choice for her but because it’s the best choice, thereby turning an anti-prescriptivist argument into a prescriptivist one. Later in the same speech, she dismisses the option of using the pronoun yinz because it “doesn’t roll off the tongue nicely.”  I’m more intrigued, however, by her insistence that it would be sexist to use you guys. Montell notes, “Many speakers genuinely believe guys has become gender neutral. However, scholars agree that guys is just another masculine generic in cozier clothing. There’d be no chance of you gals earning the same lexical love.”  However, she provides no real evidence that guys isn’t truly neutral to speakers who use it, only that it is less marked than gals and that only masculine terms can ever reach this level of unmarkedness. I can’t help but wonder if it’s speakers who are excluding women when using phrases like you guys or if Montell simply hears it that way due to her own linguistic background.

 Another issue I had with this book is that it heavily focuses on English. While the topics discussed throughout the book are fairly universal, only one chapter provides any non-English examples. However, given how Montell handles these non-English examples, especially those from non-Western languages, in that one chapter, that might be for the best. The chapter examines how grammatical gender affects speakers’ perceptions of natural gender, as well as the political consequences, and at points, it’s very effective. I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of French feminists’ attempts to introduce feminine terms for certain jobs in a language where words like doctor are obligatorily masculine (and l’Académie Française is trying very hard to keep them that way). A few pages later, Montell moves onto talk about more complex gender and noun class systems. She gives the now famous example of Dyirbal, where most animate nouns belong to one noun class but “women, fire, and dangerous things” belong to another. She then concludes that this demonstrates that this shows something about Dyirbal speakers’ worldviews—that they see everything as masculine unless it could “literally kill you.” It’s a compelling argument in some ways, but it’s hard to discuss Dyirbal speakers’ worldviews without remembering one thing: Dyirbal is an indigenous Australian language with a single-digit number of native speakers. Yes, it has an interesting—and perhaps problematic—approach to gender, but it’s tied to a very specific (and mostly eradicated) cultural context, and it simply isn’t problematic in the same way as l’Académie Française. 

Overall, while I had my issues with Wordslut, I had a good time reading it . It’s not a must read, but if you’re looking for a fun, modern source on gender and language, it’s certainly entertaining and informative. It’s also a book that can definitely be enjoyed by linguists and non-linguists alike; there’s not much jargon that would trip up a non-linguist, but it covers a wide enough variety of topics that linguists (at least those who don’t specialize in sociolinguistics) won’t already know everything it covers. In general, if you’re interested in linguistics and feminism, you’ll probably have a good time and learn something new.

TL;DR

Overall rating: 3.5/5 Good for linguists? Yes, unless you’re already an expert in sociolinguistics Good for non-linguists? A definitive yes, since this assumes no background in linguistics Strong points: Broad scope and a fun, modern overview of the intersection between language and gender Weak points: Very English-centric, and the author’s outrage overshadows the actual information sometimes

#linguistics #pop linguistics #sociolinguistics

[tamamonomaes]

Clearing Up Misconceptions on How Gendered Language Works in Japanese

In specifically relation to Fate, how this effects how the characters present, and why these misconceptions could be interpreted as disrespectful to the Japanese trans community.

(DISCLAIMER: I am NOT cis like people seem to think! I realise you may assume that looking at me, but it's because of medical reasons. Corrections and input from native Japanese speakers welcome and encouraged!

1 The "I pronoun" is not indicative of gender as there is no such thing as a "personal pronoun. " The "I pronoun" is not primarily focused in gender, but rather, whether they are formal or informal, who you are talking to, sometimes your age, and what mood and tone you are trying to convey. "Ore" isn't a suitable option for a "personal pronoun" in the first place as it is informal and comes off extremely rude in some situations, like a job interview, so it is likely that the ore user is going to be switching to something more polite. For example, Astolfo's pronoun of boku is not indicative of them being male as its primary focus is to represent humbleness; yes it is "primarily" used for boys, however it is also considered "cute" for young girls; basically what Astolfo's use of boku can tell us about Astolfo is that Astolfo wants to be perceived as humble, and has an element of childishness to them.

2 Within the fandom, there seems to be this urge to binarise pronouns to support certain arguments that certain characters are cis and that certain characters are trans, when in actuality, the Japanese language is already far more diverse and expresses far more freedom in it's way of expressing pronouns and gender. The absolute biggest misunderstanding comes with the use of "ore" and "atashi." Basically, people believe that anyone who uses these pronouns wants to be perceived as either hyper feminine or hyper masculine, and if someone uses one of these pronouns, they want to be perceived as either female or male. However, this is simply not what these pronouns indicate at all. While atashi is traditionally considered feminine, gay men have adopted the pronoun as a means of talking casually without presenting; the same goes for ore. While it is true it is tradionally masculine, these days, it has evolved more to present the image of being casual, as well as youth wanting to sound tough. While a woman may not usually use ore irl, it is also true that anime characters don't actually talk like real Japanese people, and female characters in anime using ore is an actual thing.

You will often see this double standard that people will say they support pronouns not being idictitive of gender in English, ie, a he/him lesbian, but then binarise the Japanese language in the sense that atashi means you present female, and ore means you present male, like NB and trans Japanese don't exist. If you were told only women use atashi and. Men ore no shade, I'm just letting you know it's more complex than that. You see this particularly with ore as it creates a "tough" image, and people believe women don't want to, or even can't, be seen as tough. If you believe someone can use he/him and be female, for the sake of respect to the Japanese language and the nb community, I ask you to do the same for men who atashi and women who use ore.

3. Grammatically, Japanese doesn't actually require the use of she/him when reffering to others. This is why you don't see characters reacting to being misgendered because, quite often they just aren't there in the original. Since they are in English, this results in the translators own perception of the character affecting how they identify in the story. There are so many instances of transphobia in fate, however, because the series is handled by so many different writers and it's hard to track down who is responsible for what, I really shouldn't have to explain to you why it is disrespectful for you to put the Japanese writers at fault for getting angry because a character is being misgendered when you're literally reading a fan translation and the pronouns just aren't there in the first place. Please stop calling out "transphobia" on the writers part because you saw Astolfo being called a he in a fan translation, or even in NA where different translators with different views have to add pronouns in. There's bigger issues of transphobia you can be focusing on rather than non-existent pronouns. The only real way you can be sure if a character is being misgendered is to check the original Japanese. But reminder certain characters using the wrong pronouns, ie, Ophelia using she/her for Caenis does not necessarily reflect the views of the writers.

Contrary to what people think, Fate does actually have a way of acknowledging certain characters as GNC. This method isn't perfect and has problems, but Astolfo, Enkidu, D'eon and Avenger Nobunaga are all canonically considered GNC with the genderless attributes in Fgo. To me this includes trans as historically D'eon is a trans woman and Nobu a trans man, but nonbinary readings of these characters are still absolutely fair, so some may disagree. If you don't consider Nobu a trans man and instead nb, you could argue that the reason Mordred isn't included because the series may have a predudice to trans men considering they want waifus and have made historical men women instead.

#Fate grand order #Fgo #Astolfo

[nothorses]

I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, and I worry about saying this off anon but I want to actually, be a face as I do. When I came out I knew I wasn't cis, and I was lucky enough to have the support of two wonderful trans partners, but I had an extremely hard time finding my place in the trans community. I am pro MOGAI and new, hyperspecific terms because I know how important it can be to want to put a name, a flag, and individual pride to your identity. 1/?

I switched my own terms quite a lot, from demigirl to genderfae to genderflux to where I am now, genderfluid. But I remember there was a moment, because I was so sure I was only female aligned, where I thought for just a moment that I might be a boy, and I was terrified, I didnt want to be a boy, I didnt want to be "that trans." Like every trans person, I struggled with internalized transphobia, not feeling valid or true enough in my identity, 2/15

But that dreadful feeling of being Scared of being a boy is something I think about a lot, and something I think is truly telling. I'll admit I primarily (only) use tumblr because social media honestly isnt my thing, so I can only speak to what I've seen here, but I remember seeing so little about trans men, other than the occasional mention in broad positivity posts, the even rarer info about binding or passing, but I did see how much people hated men. 3/15

It was always implied to be about cis men, I've been spared the more modern issues regarding overt hatred of trans men, but I saw the constant anger and vitriol and genuine hatred for men. And I realize now I wasnt just scared of being "too trans" I was scared of being hated. So I made myself nonthreatening, I called myself a boy, I performed femininity to an even higher, though subversive standard, because I was still so scared of being a man. The enemy. The oppressor. 4/15

It took many more months to dare say I wanted to call myself a man, and even then I was scared, in the comfort and safety of my girlfriend's company. I felt dirty saying it, and I still do. I always only dare to refer to myself as a trans man, instead of just as a man. And I do want to sidetrack for a moment and say my relationship to gender, as a genderfluid person, is admittedly more complex than just when I feel this way, in other ways people are also particularly hateful towards, 5/15

But even with those other facets, and my fear of being open in them, pale in comparison to my relationship with masculinity. Because when I did come out and admit to myself that sometimes, I am not a woman, or nonbinary, I am a man, I became more aware of things. I exited wonderland, so to say. Suddenly I became so much more aware of how much people simply did not care about me or people like me, and especially not our problems or concerns. 6/15

I saw how invisible I was, and worse than that, I saw a very subtle malice. The only mention of trans men were in those broad positivity posts including everyone under the trans umbrella, or in the rare case something was positive exclusively for trans men, it was always reblogged with "dont forget trans women/enby people" tacked on, I remember once I looked in the trans tag and counted how many posts it took to find one exclusively about trans men that didnt mention binding 7/15

I got into the forties. Because on other posts, I would see people make passive aggressive remarks about how "trans men are talked about too much" or "there's all these resources for trans men, what about trans women" and I wanted to know on what earth the people who said that were living on, because the only, and I mean the only thing people tend to talk about in regards to trans men is how to safely bind, and rarely, the effects of HRT. 8/15

This happened a while ago, but I remember seeing a number of posts on my dash about how much representation trans men receive. I believe there was a panel about trans people, where a majority of the panelists were trans men, and trans women were less represented than them. They encouraged people to complain, said we received too much attention, and pointed at mythical trans male rep in media that in reality, I could count on one hand. I remember being so angry and passionate about it 9/15

Now im honestly just tired. I dont feel accepted by the trans community, and even the trans male community is iffy (I fit in amongst mogai people most, but I cant deny trumeds are particularly prevalent, and it wore on me), and it's so tiring to have every post made by trans men for trans men have to be preambled by belittling themselves and downplaying their own suffering. I just want to exist in peace, but I feel like that's too much to ask. 10/15

I've reached a point of exhaustion that I have become entirely apathetic to my own gender, what was once a deeply important aspect of my identity. I feel disconnected from it, and as a consequence from my own body. I don't bother examining it anymore because I can't feel it, as someone who suffers from dissociation, I feel dissociated from it in order to protect myself, something I was once so openly proud about. 11/15

Im scared to try and push for transition, for my own personal reasons, but now on top of those Im terrified of being silenced and belittled and hated for something that should make me happy. I've tried so hard not to feed into the lateral violence and become embittered towards trans women, because that's not fair, but I won't lie and say it hasnt been hard when I have seen more than I ever would've liked be so willing to ignore or outright throw their brothers under the bus 12/15

And of course there are even more who do show their support for their brothers, and for that im thankful, but this invisibility effects how I perceive everything. I feel like I've been pushed back into the closet, I say im trans because I know I'm not cis but I don't even know who I am, what my place is, and I'm scared to explore because I'm scared that who I am will be violently rejected by the people meant to support me. I want to be free to even explore who I am. 13/15

I wish people would listen to my experiences and what I have to say, but in every microaggression every act of ignoring I feel silenced. Trans men are viewed as predatory, just in a different way; trans men are fetishized and have chasers; trans men face higher rates of violence and sexual assault for being trans men; research about transmasc transition is almost nonexistent, and new, better surgeries are not even thought about; transmasc history is erased and silenced. 14/15

I, feel like im rambling at this point, and I'm sorry I've been so longwinded, I just. I want to thank you, for creating a space where I can speak my truth, because before finding your blog I didn't think anyone would care. I feel like I have so much more to say but honestly im scared, and too tired, and have said enough for now. I just want this feeling of loneliness to go away and hopefully I'll find a way to accept myself. Thank you for listening to me, and giving me a platform to speak 15/15

(Edited the numbers for accuracy)

Thank you for trusting me with this, and to other folks: I think this is an important narrative to listen to and share!

#trans #transmasc #transgender #ftm #nonbinary #the 'transmascs are overrepresented' argument is also provably false #there are about 1/3 the amount of trans male characters in film and tv that there are trans female #and thats being generous #its very clearly an issue of hypervisibility v invisibility and both groups struggle in different ways! #harlequincy

[pandiepie35]

I truely do not understand the hostility that society has harbored against all men. truely i dont. Like, we’re here, living in the year of our Lord 2020, and we still have the audacity to say that a group of poeple are disgusting, inferior, and should all die because they share a characteristic that they cannot control? like Why Do You Want All Men To Die? What The Hell?

this rant is brought to you by a vid that I saw of a bisexual woman saying that it is easy to defend her attraction to women to her male partners because women are great and they’re nice because they’re women, but when she has to (“has to”) defend her attraction to men to her female partners she has to be like “*visibly cringing* yeaahhh, UNFORTUNATELY I’m attracted to MEN... it’s GROSS i KNOW hahaha..” and like they laugh it off and whatever but then other women agree with them, and it’s primarily the lesbian community that’s like “death to all men 😌” “men are useless lol just throw them away” “ew you actually LIKE those things 🤢🤢🤮” and it’s like why????? why the prejudice and lumping a group of people together and expressing hatred towards them not ok, oh but if it’s towards a man it’s fine. does that exclude trans men? does that include any masculine presenting person? does it include trans women? are gay men exempt from the death wishes? what about nonbinary persons who were assigned male at birth? what is the basis for the hatred? shouldn’t we be past it by now??

I find it so disheartening when I see or hear men talking about themselves, particularly in a progressive social group setting, and they’re like “yeah sorry that I’m a man, I’m pretty gross and terrible for being the way I am haha” like that shits so sad. like, I have self hatred and depression and I’m thoroughly convinced that everyone around me hates me, but I couldn’t even IMAGINE people VALIDATING those thoughts??? like could you fucking imagine being like “i feel kinda unwanted aha” and someone tells you “actually you’re Really unwanted, you’re also gross scum lol” ???????????????????????

like, are men not people?? is that also not another human brain conducting these dumb flesh sacks that we all reside in? are we not born like them? will we not rot like them? can they not be soft and vulnerable, dellicate and emotional, can they not have the same feelings of love and sorrow that we all experience? can they not be traumatised like the rest of us?? like come fucking on, in the age of the increasing push for individuality and the self, you’d think that people would learn not to generalize at this point. I’m so tired of people being cruel and heartless for no reason.

#a rant from a very frustrated and tired empath #i feel like i have more to say but im not going to spend hours typing up a fifteen page essay #maybe some other time. #i feel like i may have ranted about this already but whatever #maybe will delete later #like. next time someone says death to all men. ask them why #if it’s anything men cant control or it it’s something any other person could have in common with a man it’s pretty much invalid imo #why is hatred towards them so fucking accepted i dont get it #why is hatred accepted #[yells into the void] #im going to go dissociate and idk think about something nice for a change #men #women #bisexuals #bi #lgbt #mens issues ?

[zareleonis]

Transgender, Non-Binary and Gender Diversity in Star Wars

As of 2019, the only transgender characters found in Star Wars are human and non-binary, Taka Jamoreesa from Last Shot and Eleodie Maracavanya from Aftermath. While out of universe, authors Daniel Jose Older and Chuck Wendig have referred to both characters as non-binary, in-universe there is not a term for their genders. In “An Incident Report,” (In From a Certain Point of View) the word “neutrois” is used in the context we use non-binary as a rough umbrella term: “the hardworking men, women, and neutrois.” It’s worth noting this short story was written by Daniel Mallory Ortberg, who is queer and transgender.  Another reference to genders outside the binary and evidence of the wider gender diversity in the galaxy in where Bloodline, in a scene where Leia notes seeing people of “at least four genders.”  Despite these references, there is not yet an in-universe term for transgender and we have yet to see a trans man or trans woman character.  Outside of humanity, there’s also the Chalhuddan species who appear in Leia: Princess of Alderaan. They can be termed ‘genderfluid’ in that their species have five different genders which they shift between over their lifetimes.  This is a universal experience among the species, and the one named character from this species is Occo Quentto, who is referred to by they/them pronouns throughout the book (more on this later!)  

We don’t know much about what avenues for physical transition exist in a galaxy far far away, but Lost Stars does contain one reference:

“I’m going to freeze my choobies off” “There are easier ways to switch genders, you know.” “I didn’t mean I wanted to freeze ‘em off. I just meant–it’s so cold.”

Choobies is slang for testicles, so they’re referring to something akin to gender affirming surgery–although whether it’s achieved through surgery or some other cool sci-fi means is anyone’s guess. It is worth noting the casual tone of the conversation and that these characters (Thane Kyrell and Dak Ralter) don’t attach any stigma to it.  Just a bit of ribbing Thane for complaining about the Hoth cold.  In the same vein, both Eleodie and Taka are not met with any hostility regarding their genders in the book. In fact, Eleodie has just about the coolest most glorifying introduction ever: “His highness, her glory, his wonder, her luminous magnificence—the picaroon! The plunderer! The pirate ruler of Wild Space! The glorious knave, Eleodie Maracavanya!”

When it comes to pronouns, while the sample is very small, so far the nonbinary characters in Star Wars are as diverse as in the real world.  Taka uses “they” pronouns and Eleodie primarily uses “zhe,” but swaps in “he” and “she” pronouns too.  Among non-humans, the Chalhuddans mentioned above have particularly interesting pronoun conventions. I’ll let C-3PO explain: “Their native pronoun cases are rather complex–indicating not only current gender but two or three previous ones, and occasionally the gender they feel most likely to be next, bus as our language has no equivalent words, ‘you’ or ‘they’ can be used in all cases.”  Wookiees also have gender neutral pronouns and in Shyriiwook, there is at least one “gender nonspecific honorific pronoun,” as noted in Doctor Aphra Annual 1.

On the whole, while the Star Wars franchise has a ways to go, there’s some nice groundwork for more trans characters.  The two that we have are both very cool and were created by authors who have both been publicly very defensive of their LGBT characters (PLEASE Del Rey bring them back!).  The mentions of a more diverse gender spectrum, both with straight up sci fi alien stuff and regular ol’ transgender people (in SPACE!) is really great to see running through a variety of Star Wars works.  If we’re lucky then Claudia Gray, who’s referenced the topic in each of her novels so far, will go all out and include a (major 🙏) trans character in Master & Apprentice! On the whole Lucasfilm needs to do A LOT more, but what there is makes me hopeful for a positive future.

#star wars #eleodie maracavanya #taka jamoreesa #transgender #nonbinary #occo quentto #note: this deals only in canon material dont know legends dont do legends cant tell you about legends #and on that note no the hutt stuff is not canon anymore thank god #and yes i know the title of this doesnt really make grammatical sense fuckin roll w it bro #also this is mostly meant to be informative for other fans #and written from the point of view of a trans fan who is trying their best to be cautiously optimistic #i ask you to please relegate your negativity and criticisms to other posts as this is not the place for it #though you are welcome to use this as a source or ask questions (though i did my best to note all sources) #also if there's anything i missed or anything new please share thank you

[baekura]

Gimme ur LGBT headcannons for Crowley and Aziraphale my dude ♥️

Gladly!

I definitely see Crowley as genderfluid/nonbinary as he does change up his gender presentation pretty frequently throughout the show and seems to do everything he can to toy with and and break the norms of the gender binary in his gender presentation. Very gay. Very very gay (for Aziraphale). I also see him as ace/demisexual; I could only ever imagine him having anything resembling sexual attraction towards Aziraphale. He just,,,,, loves Aziraphale,,,,, so much,,,,,,, The sexual attraction would rarely be there, if at all, but he’d be more than happy to indulge Aziraphale in such a human pleasure. He enjoys seeing Aziraphale happy more than anything and partakes in the occasional kiss and cuddle session.

As for Aziraphale, he’s a “gender? never hear of her” kind of person; would very much fall under human’s umbrella term of nonbinary but I don’t think he’d particularly care about the labels and is fine with people addressing him as a man or anything else really (so long as they’re not going out of their way to be offensive). Also very much gay in human terms. I think he primarily has an attraction towards men/masculine identifying or presenting people. I can also see him experimenting with women (out of some kind of compulsion to abide by acceptable human norms; he gets over it though and sticks with men) and not getting any further than kissing before backing out because he just ain’t feelin it. I think he might be gray-ace; he’s definitely indulged in hookups but didn’t feel super fulfilled with them. Still enjoys the experience nonetheless, more so with Crowley than anyone else.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #i could go on and on and on and on #but i will spare you of anymore of my rambling lmao #crowleystemptation #answered asks

[askanonbinary]

Blog Information

Before You Ask

General notes

This is a safe space for nonbinary folks and those questioning their gender identity.

I will always prioritize nonbinary and trans people over cis feelings. This blog is not a stand-in for having a difficult conversation with your partner (such as a cis person asking their nb partner how to best support them) or putting your own work into doing research (such as cis people learning what nb issues are and how to be a good ally).

I am, obviously, pro-people-coining-their-own-language. I do not care if you think alternative pronouns are superfluous or silly. Go away.

If you would like to add to the pronoun list or glossary, please message me with your additions. If you feel you have not been properly credited for the coining of pronouns, message me and I will fix it. If a pronoun set needs a (only use if you identify in X way) note added to it, message me and I will fix it.

With Regard to Questions

If you do not ask me to answer privately, I will publish your question along with my response whether you are anon or not.

If you ask something bigoted, I may well respond in a satirical, joking, or mocking fashion. Deal with it.

Some things are going to be beyond the scope of this blog and if that is the case I will redirect you to a more appropriate source of information.

I can no longer answer every ask that I get. If something is particularly urgent or time-sensitive, approach me on my personal account. Be aware that I am much less inclined to deal politely with bigotry there.

Before you ask

Do a quick search of the archives to see if I’ve been asked something similar recently.

Read this page.

Know that this blog is primarily for nb people.

.

What does nonbinary mean?

Non-binary is a term for people who are not men or women, or are both men and women, or who are something else entirely, or are some combination of these things, or some of these things some of the time.

Please remember that gender presentation, assigned sex, body type, and gender don’t have to “match”.

If you have any more questions, or believe our definition needs changing or adding to, please let us know via the ask.

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