#we’re allowed to be gnc as much as cis people | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

searchingforproofsthatimwrong · 3 years

Text

THE JAMMIEDODGER VIDEO ABOUT JK ROWLING (as recommended by a very polite anon)

so I go point by point after the cut but in short: they should read more feminist theory, they are lying, they are not as coherent as they think they are but they make some points, notably about the rapid onset gender disphoria that’ll need to check in more depth later on.Most of their sources were unfortunatly either on points I already knew or already agreed with. Also that woman ( the “cis” one not Jammy), should really stop thinking being born a woman is somehow a privilege.

So the video starts by saying three things I agree with :

1) Biological sex is definitely real

2) Women’s right and girls’ right need to be protected

3) JK Rowling is entitled to like support and write whatever she wants

So far so good. Except it then goes on to say that TRA agree with that. Now maybe most do but at least some don’t. Don’t lie to me, Jammie Dodger.

They then go on to misrepresent what our problem with “cis” is. Are they going to spend that entire video about trans people at destination of the non educated on that subject without ONCE defining what a trans person is? They are aren’t they ?

“TRANSPEOPLE AGREE THAT BIOLOGICAL SEX EXISTS!!”

see earlier but given the number of people who are saying “sex is a social construct” and “sex is a spectrum” and “a neovagina is just like a vagina”, you may at least put a “most” in your statement here. Anyway this is not the problem we have, we wouldn’t even discuss this if it weren’t for the brain dead morons who argue with us about it.

“my biological sex -the one I was assigned at birth- was female”

is Jammie here telling me he knows biology exists but his sex WAS female ? It still IS female. You’re a female. Moreover you cannot say I know biology exists and I was assigned a sex. The entire “assigned sex” is a refutal of biology by implying doctors choose a sex for you. This is stupid.

Strawman. They are saying radfems have no argument against “gender identity is a real thing”. The lies. Gender identity is not a real thing it’s just gender stereotypes and gender is a tool of oppression for women, it’s sexist garbage. I also notice they don’t define gender identity, this is starting to be a pattern, this video is aimed to normies but the only thing they defined so far is terf.

They did 5 fucking minutes on “transpeople know that biological sex exists” I am already exhausted.

Oh my bad they defined “gender identity” as “the gender you know you are”. THANKS A BUNCH THIS IS SO HELPFUL . Define gender please I beg of you.

“They know they are a man but their bodies don’t match”

okay so you agree that man and woman are words that depends on your body right? Since it can “match”, they are not gender then ? Nevermind he then says that man is their gender identity. This is not making sense.

Ooooooh the floating head analogy never heard that one before, this is a stupid one because gendies also argue that their gender is innate (unless Jammie here specifically says he doesn’t think that I’ll act as if he agrees with that statement) so the good question would be if you were born as a floating head and never even had a body would you still be a woman? And my answer here as well as plenty of people I suspect is “men and women don’t make sense if we’re born as floating heads what are you on about?”

“transwomen needs women’s right too”

I know you think that is self evident but I’ll ask what exactly are the women’s right transwomen need. Abortion? Affordable periods product ? The right to have places free of male? oh wait. They are male so they can never have that can they ?

“so feminism also needs to believe in gender identity”

because if we don’t our feminism is only for females and we exclude males. Notice how they didn’t continue their logic by saying how THIS feminism excludes transmen and nonbinary? Because it does, but guess who actually need the women’s right of abortion for exemple?

“transmen don’t need women’s rights”

I FUCKING CANNOT YOU STILL NEED IT WTF ARE YOU ON ABOUT. OK I need them to define women’s right asap

“well JK Rowling said she supports trans rights”

funny how you can understand how those words are not a proof that she in fact does but you still started your video by “we support women’s rights !!!”

“adding [to Harry Potter] content that was LGBT+ friendly”

she added things that were gay friendly. I don’t remember her adding trans characters.

“transphobic” = saying men can’t become women. Whoah. The hatred.

“the lack of belief [in gender identity] is what she wants protected”

yes and ? Atheism, the lack of belief in a god, is protected. Gender identity existence only proof is some people saying it does exists, it is not a scientific reality in any way shape or form.

“His biological sex was previously female”

BUT WE KNOW WHAT BIOLOGICAL SEX IS WE SWEAR; Damn they spend 7 minutes on “transpeople know biological sex exists” and then keep acting like they fucking don’t.

After that they point blank say that gender identity is more important than sex, having someone who passes as an exemple. What about transpeople who don’t pass? How much you bet this will never be discussed in this video.

Anyway they follow that with that :

Which is true but defining what a woman is does affect women actually (I know weird right) so it’s completely irrelevant to the discussion here.

“When a large group of transpeople are telling you something is wrong please listen to them”

please afford women the same courtesy. We are a large group of women saying males are not the fucking authority on what womanhood is but we are told to shut up. Listen.

“we cannot take the behavior of the minority [online abuse] and group it onto the majority”

I agree with that statement but the majority still didn’t condemn the abuse. Honestly the people in this video did -just before saying HOWEVER but hey – but it is pretty rare to see TRA actually confronting the people who abused JK Rowling online, they cheered them on more than anything.

It is very telling how they spend more time in this video saying people collecting screenshots of the abuse JK Rowling suffered were “not cool” than the TRA giving them a bad name by actually abusing JK Rowling. They even say Jammy was also insulted online so TERF and TRA are as bad as each other right ?? Being called delusional or idiot is not the same as death threats sorry Jammy. (I doubt the “freak” one was from a terf tbh but even then, this is not even comparable) I mean didn’t you get at least one person saying they were going to kill you ? Because I did, and I have ,like, 200 followers. I find very weird that the woman here said “I received sexual assaults threats and this is as a cis woman!” as if women weren’t the primary target of sexual assaults threats. Yeah it’s the misogyny. What’s new. You really should stop thinking you are somehow priviledged even when you are being sexually threatened ffs. What gender ideology does to a mf.

“neither of these sides are innocent”

oh come on, you cannot possibly means that the men who gave you sexual threats were terfs, this is ridiculous, you are just trying to excuse and diminish what people did to JK as per fucking usual.

“persistent low level harassment”

it hasn’t stayed low level tho. Stop trying to say you and JK are receiving the same abuse it’s embarrassing.

JK Rowling’s essay having real life effects on policies for exemple has an element of thruth ,even tho we disagree on wether or not this can be a good thing but your are deluding yourself if you think people assaulting transpeople are the sort of people whose views are in any way influenced by feminists. This is laughable. Also please stop with the guilt tripping, we are not responsible of the mental health of transpeople, we are not their therapists, sorry.

I love how they implied that the guy who forced GNC kids to behave as their assigned gender would somehow give a letter of thanks to a feminist. This is implying “terfs” want the same things as this maniac which is just a straight up lie, terfs absolutely adore GNC people and are mostly GNC themselves.

“What rights of women are actually being eroded by the inclusion of transwomen ?” I am glad you asked !! Well apart from the freedom of speech since “terfs” are losing their jobs and being deplatformed because of this, we have the inherent dangers of replacing sex by gender in what the law protects : https://www.aclu.org/blog/speakeasy/firing-mom-because-shes-breastfeeding-sex-discrimination this is a link to a story about a woman who was said being fired for breastfeeding was not sex discrimination because men can lactate. Do you see the problem ? Moreover there is quotas for women in politics etc….Women fought for their quotas and now males can have them, who do you think an employer would prefer someone who probably will be pregnant at one point or someone who never will ? and let’s not forget the right for women to have women only places :Women in prison are raped by the trans identified males in it .

“I cannot think of a single right that is removed from me”

good for you maybe you should have actually researched radfems talking point before doing this video ? Your ignorance is not a good argument.

“transwomen can use the women changing room because they are women”

you keep saying that but apart from “they feel like women” you didn’t explain how they are women. This is the basis of this entire video and you never explained. Also allowing any person who say they are women into the women’s changing room does not only allow transwomen does it ? It also allows lying freaks.

“You can protect cis women’s rights and transrights simulteanously” HOWWWWWWWWWWW, please tell me how to keep female only spaces (women’s right) while saying TWAW (transrights apparently according to them).

“transwomen can be the victims and cis women can do the voyeurism”

true but did you forget we actually live in the real world and in that one males are much more likely to be sexually harassing people than women ? It is a brazen form of lying to tell women that since theoretically other women can also be creeps they don’t have to worry about males. Get a grip. Live in the real world for a change.

“It doesn’t reference transwomen but men pretending to be women”

apart from “they feel it” you still haven’t told us what the difference is. You are aware nothing from an outside perspective distinguishes the two right ??

“there is no evidence of men pretending to be trans to enter female only spaces” and how would you know they are pretending ? This is the same problem again and again, if you define transwomen as men who feel like women then there is absolutely no way of verifying someone really is trans. And that’s a lie anyway since we do actually have proof of that happening?? There was that video making the room on radblr a while ago of a clear male pissing in the women’s bathroom saying (lying) that he was trans.

Yeah actually radical feminists would accept transmen in their bathrooms, but it’s not an easy question with an easy answer to know how to check they really are transmen. Although notice how they are again only talking about transpeople that passes ? I would feel safer with Jammy in my toilets than Hannah Mouncey for exemple :

That is so obvioulsy a man in a dress.

“ If a transman with a beard and penis and balls can go into a women’s toilet and that is deemed okay because of his biological sex what is to stop a cis man from doing the same”

I am sorry but are you saying a transwoman cannot have a beard and penis and balls ?????????? This is incredibly transphobic of you, you said that gender identity Is just feeling like a gender, how exactly does that mean transwomen cannot have beard ? If you want to know, radfem are arguing for a third toilet for transpeople, that’s our solution. What is yours ?

Ok the next part is racist I’ll skip that thanks

On accusation of TERFery intimidating people and organizations “we haven’t seen these” again, your ignorance is not an argument, I am posting these on Tumblr where cryptoterfs arer numerous. Why do you think that is ?

Are they seriously saying Nike and addidas “accepted” transpeople because they “realized it was the right thing to do” ?????? Those companies employs slaves IN WHAT WORLD DO YOU LIVE IN??

“trying to make transpeople look crazy”

the clownfish things were said online by real transpeople. We don’t need to invent thing to make transpeople look crazy, if there is large enough group some people belonging in that group will say stupid shit .

“We support these rights”

when speaking about women victims of abuse. This is a lie, the Vancouver rape shelter relief is often targeted by transactivists, recently a gofundme for it was cancelled because of transactivists, they are quite litteraly stealing money from raped women. This is not a small, inconsequential part of transactivism.

“The trans-inclusionist views expand the meaning of women to include transwomen”

It doesn’t expend shit actually since it excludes transmen and non-binary. If anything it reduces it.

They go on to say that transwomen deserves protection as women because of their murder rate. It doesn’t explain how being seen as women will help them here and anyway it’s a bold lie considering their murder rate is actually quite low. They also fail to consider how depriving transmen and nonbinaries of those same women’s right might be a problem.

Again they make the distinction between transwomen and men pretending to be transwomen without a way to identify which is which. This is starting to get repetitive and tedious. The problem is not that all transwomen are predators is that there is no way to see a difference until the predators acts, until a woman gets hurt, so accepting transwomen is accepting predators and saying transwomen feelings are more important that the women being hurt because of this. I disagree. The tiny tiny percentage of transpeople doing bad things is actually the same percentage as men doing bad things. If your argument could be used to say women only spaces shouldn’t exist at all because not all men are dangerous maybe you should reconsider your argument because I will not reconsider women’s right to have female only spaces.

“If you push transwomen out of female only spaces you push transmen in”

Yes. I don’t even see where the problem is here. Now why don’t we analyse the fact that if you push transwomen into female only spaces you push transmen out of them ? I don’t think transmen belongs in men’s prisons, do you ?

“Transpeople don’t dispute biology and don’t impact how female only diseases are treated”

eat shit. They do impact this, every woman trying to say “female biology” get shit thrown at her faster than you can blink, stop lying to me Jammy. Do you think I would get called a bleeder, a fetus carrier, a motherfucking birthing body if transactivism wasn’t trying to erase sex ? Don’t you think the sentence “men can have periods” is not eroding biology ? Fuck off

Back to JK, Jammy is saying her disabling comment on her blog was not conductive to a conversation, I have to salute the straight face he says it with because do you really think a nice educated conversation would have taken place on JK Rowling’s essay ? They flooded her children’s book tag with porn for fuck sake.

“Thre is no explosion in young women who wishes to transition” sources ? Because it does seem to be true :https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsm.12817

“the detransitionners rate is actually really low” hard to know but most people who transitioned did it not so long ago since transgender is a recent trend, we will have to wait and see to have a more robust number. But maybe they are right on that one, this is not going to be the one argument that changes my views unfortunately.

“Does that mean we should stop people from getting plastic surgery then ?”

lol you don’t know the radfem stance on plastic surgery do you ?

“There is more significant transphobia than homophobia”

sources ? Because transition is used as converstion therapy in Iran so it is at least untrue in one country.

“If transmen transition to escape womanhood why is there transwomen ?”

You really didn’t research this did you ? the radfem answer is that transwomen are either gay men who have gender disphoria OR AGP (autogynephiles) read this if you want to learn more about it: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-elephant-in-the-room

“why would people who have male privileges choose to give that up”

you are assuming they lose their male privileges but I will need sources on that because most transwomen do not pass and are treated more as special men than as women.

“We have already shown you that transphobia is far more rife and damaging than homophobia”

did I miss that part ? When ? You just said that ? Without backing it up ?

“anti trans narratives constantly contradict itself”

No we do not, we are feminist so we OF COURSE we analyse men and women differently, this is an issue of gender which radical feminism posit as an hierarchy, trying to explain transwomen and transmen with the same arguments is doomed to fail because they were not equal in their relation to gender to begin with. Do you think black people trying to pass as white do it for the same reasons white people try to have more black features ? Of course not.

“What am I a lesbian or a homophobe ?”

You are both, you are a lesbian in denial with a deep case of internalized misogyny and homophobia. You know yo can be both sexist and a woman right ? Well it’s the same here.

I heard “Simone de Beauvoir” and I knew they were going to be really fucking stupid with that “One is not born a woman but rather becomes a woman” quote and THERE IT IS! Please read the book. She is not saying male can become women if they try hard enough, she is saying basically the same thing JK Rowling’s quote said which is that “womanhood” as it is forced on women is alien and not natural and the point is that we should not accept it, it’s a feminist quote on femininity and I am so sick of men using it to say that they are women.

Transactivists acting as if sex recognition patterns don’t exists is exhausting so I won’t comment on “nobody checks if you have XX chromosomes before passing you over for a promotion” other than to say : passing over for promotions happens a lot when women are pregnant and after giving birth stop acting as if misogyny is unrelated to our reproduction capacities it is fucking insulting.

“transwomen will support [fights against tampon tax and FGM] too”

FGM was a bad choice here considering transactivists tried to stop a bill against FGM . I will need sources here actually since I never seen a transwoman fighting for women’s right in my life.

Ok I let a lot passes here because I’m tired but we are 48:40 in the video and fuck you “intersectional feminism” is not about males. It was for black women. It is not reductionist to say women are people with a vagina, this is just a definition, and one that applies to 50% of the population at that, there is litteraly no definition of woman that includes more people than that.

Imagine thinking “women are people with vagina” is reductionist but not calling women “vulva owners”. Please , I am begging for coherence.

“transwomen who experience greater abuse than cisgender women will ever experience” .

This is revolting. I don’t have any other words. I am glad this is the end of the video because I would have stopped immediately if this was at the start. What abuse transwomen can experience than ciswomen cannot ? Because I would have thought forced pregnancy was horrific but maybe this doesn’t compare to being misgendered?

“most people are comfortable with transwomen going into women’s bathrooms” https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39147/bsa34_moral_issues_final.pdf

It says 13% of women are at least uncomfortable with sharing bathroom with transwomen, why are we ignoring their wishes? Because 0.1% of the population wants to ? Whatever, the really interesting thing in this study is that for this question they defined “transwomen” as someone who has gone through all the steps to become a woman aka someone with surgery. I find extremely misleading that this is used for bathroom bills which defines transwomen as male identifying as women. Do you think the numbers would be the same if they specified the transwoman in question still has a penis ? Which is the case for most transwomen btw?

#anon #jammiedodgers #transgender #op is a terf #this took wayyy to long don't read this

25 notes · View notes

skullvins · 3 years

Text

random fuckin gender ramble scroll if ur not interested in my gender bs

aaarrrggg i hate that radfem bs has caused me to still associate butch and femme with being lesbian only terms (even though i KNOW they’re not) and thus making me associate both of them with being women, even though i KNOW theyre historically not. its so hard to unlearn???

like, the overlapping lesbian/butch/transmasc history is so hard to navigate as a funky lil enby/genderqueer because a lot of terms are either too masc or too fem for me to be comfortable with, and now that im TRYING to explore exactly how my masculinity and femininity work its so weird!!!

I’m in solidarity with queer men and queer women, both trans and cis or gnc or whatever and figuring out my personal relationships with those communities is hard!!! I relate to my cis female peers as someone who’s only started socially transitioning in recent years, I relate to their issues as someone who doesn’t pass well, I relate to transmascs in terms of wanting to be seen as more masculine, in wanting to physically transition, i relate to trans mlm in terms of sexuality, i relate to lesbians/wlw in terms of sexuality too! some of the best comfort and solidarity ive found is in amab enbies and even some transfems when it comes to comfort and gender expression. the two amab demiguys i know make me feel comfortable exploring masculinity because i feel safe around them BECAUSE they’re not cis, and like, i can be ‘one of the guys’ with them without having to be A GUY, and i relate so so so hard to gnc guys or amab enbies when it comes to presentation. i almost want to transition JUST so i can reembrace femininity in a masculine way.

i dunno, i feel this insane pressure outside of the queer community to either be as masc as possible to pass and be taken seriously, and that’s gotta be at least partially due to the way radfem bs has spread, especially here in the uk.

i wanna be read as masc, i wanna be read as fem, i wanna be incomprehensible! I wanna wear men’s shirts and t shirts and polo shirts with a skirt because i can!! because skirts are fun and cute and i enjoy wearing them. i really do wish i was amab because it would be so much easier to present the way i want to, I think, but then again, i don’t have bottom dysphoria, not really.

all this changes though, really i might just be genderfluid, but i hate the binary connotations of that too. so many enby words are stolen or defined in terms of binary gender: being bigender to most means being male or female, being genderfluid means being fluid between them, being nonbinary is being not male or female, when people equate being nonbinary to being genderless it kills me because I am not binary! but i am not genderless! my gender is here and present and part of me and part of my relation with the world around me and with other people and part of my sexuality and orientation

i dunno, this is turning into a big queer rant. this isn’t me trying to shove labels onto myself, I’m fine with rejecting them if that’s what’s needed - i don’t define my sexuality any further than queer even though hypothetically i could probably id as bi or pan or any mspec label, but I choose not to because being QUEER is my orientation. perhaps my gender as well (i do id as genderqueer as well as enby) but i want to really truly understand my gender AS queer, rather than just brush it off as queer because I cannot define it to myself or understand it. i want to understand my relation to the world around me and to other queer people.

so am I butch? am I femme? maybe it changes? is that allowed to change from day to day? my gender doesn’t FEEL like it changes but that presentation does, maybe! maybe I need to try new pronouns, but using she/her like i want to is hard when i associate it with misgendering and failing to prove myself as trans enough to cis people.

i wanna be masc with women and fem with men, but the latter is hard due to fears that come from experiences with misogyny. a lot of cis men ARE scary to me - I’m an 18 year old afab for fucks sake. i wish i could have that re-embraced femininity, but I’m not flat when i bind or build masc or tall or fuckin. anything! and hormones aren’t an option yet because a lot of my mental health is too unstable, the nhs is in shambles, and I don’t have money. i can’t embrace that yet unless im in the right circles, with the right people, and i can’t be that in society, I don’t trust it. I don’t know if I wanna dress fem and have people see me as masc or fem, i don’t know what pronouns i want them to use, i dunno man!!!

i wanna reach out to older queer people but again its hard, we’re in lockdown, i don’t live somewhere with a big queer community, i’m not a fan of bars and such and there’s not any in my town so i’d have to travel a bit, i wish i could just feel at home!!! i wanna be feminine without being female but also without being male, at least not fully male! I’m not male, i have this connection to femininity and it doesn’t feel male to me, I don’t want to be included in explicitly male or explicitly female spaces, I wanna be with everyone or no one, i dunno

again, i wish butch and femme didnt feel so gendered to me personally, and that’s not just this site but also what ive grown up with, my mum used to always say i was a wannabe ‘butch lezza’ whenever i was trying to get her to take my NONBINARY identity seriously and I’m not that! not because it’s bad to be, but because that’s just not me. I’m not a wlw, I’m not even sure on my attraction to women, or to men, or to anyone, I’m just attracted to queerness, and i dunno it’s hard. being ‘butch’ to me, somewhat, still means wlw, even though it’s not true, and i hate how radfem bs has ruined the word for me. i wish i could understand my identity in terms of being butch or femme, or whatever i am, and i wish those words weren’t tainted for me in the first place. i guess all of us are just ‘failed women’ in the eyes of society, huh.

characters who are feminine, but still explicitly male, or have some relation with masculinity, or are fluid between it, or who return to masculinity as a default give me so much euphoria just to witness. I’m in desperate need of a haircut and i don’t know whether to grow it out properly again or cut it short

either way, I’m gonna dye it purple

#purple is a queer colour #DONT rb unless you have some advice or something #then again my replies/inbox exists #dont send me shit accusing me of being some flavour of bigot im figuring out MY relationship with this shit #if someone calls me homophobic or transphobic or something over discussing my own queer identity on my OWN DAMN BLOG ill eat my fucking hat #this is all without applying the aro lens but idk how much that applies to this either #my aromanticism affects my relationships with people and how i approach them but that's more on a personal level than a GENDER kinda level #though perhaps my unique approach to relationships and my approach to gender are linked #especially with how being alloaro causes me to often prioritise different things in relationships #is that linked to gender? who knows #queer tag #illusion.txt #again dont rb unless u have a point to make #older queers PLEASE interact #older butches and femmes what is your wisdom #gender tag

10 notes · View notes

ablednt · 3 years

Note

Im not a terf and im sending this in 100% good faith because I like u and i like ur blog but the women post was not it. I think its valid to want more inclusive language but when cis women talk about their oppression they should be allowed to say women because they are talking about their own experiences, u know? Policing an oppressed group of people’s language use when talking about their oppression is peak entitlement.. this is like telling disabled people they cant say disabled while talking about their oppression because other people experience oppression rooted in ableism (any oppression that paints a group as less capable or less intelligent comes from ableism)

Also, while ur right that in some aspects cis women have privilege over trans men (cis privilege) it’s really dangerous to act like trans men are never misogynistic because they often are. Same with nb people. It’s not that black and white, u kno? Anyways i hope the terfs leave you alone soon /:

Yeah maybe I could have been extra clear but I didn't say they shouldn't use the word to talk about their own experiences.

Every discussion on misogyny uses the terms women and men only, centers the cis binary only. Any resources for victims of misogyny and for misogynistic abuse use the terms for women only.

And there's entire discourse groups of cis women dedicated to being transphobic to transmasc and nonbinary people because they can't realize that whilst transmascs can be misogynistic and I'm not at all denying that they are still largely victims of misogyny. Most of the transmascs I know are because a large part of the community isn't able to magically become a man in the eyes of cis men. It's just not nearly as simple as cis and binary people want to make it.

I'm frustrated because I am not allowed to be nonbinary in the eyes of cis women. Even the ones who are supportive of me call me a woman regularly, because I undoubtedly experience misogyny so they will always view me as a woman. Until recently I've always said I'm woman-aligned solely because I knew cis people would never acknowledge me as anything different than that and even when I've tried to gently remind people otherwise it was made clear by the community if I wanted resources for my abuse, if I wanted any space for discussion on just about anything, if I wanted any acknowledgement for being "not man" then I had to ID as a woman.

So I tried to word that post in a way that would get it through to cis women that if they arent talking about themselves or binary women, if they are talking about a general issue that they're trying to start a community discussion about, then they need to stop excluding nonbinary people and everyone else with the same experiences.

Because I'm very tired having that label forced on me every time someone talks about our shared experiences. It's not just women who experience misogyny, and I am not going to change that view just because cis women don't want to think about gender outside of their own experiences.

We have to bend over backwards for cis women because of the misogyny they face even when we face the exact same things. Like not only do I have cis men making my life a living hell the same as theirs I have to deal with their transphobia and forcing a binary on me. Cis men have never and will never acknowledge nonbinary people and gnc transmascs who aren't trying to appeal to their perceptions of men as men. So we don't get the same privilege as cis men and can and often do experience the same things as cis women, all of this is misogyny so why should we only get to call it that if we call ourselves women?

The point of that post was "please use inclusive language before I drown in the dysphoria that I'm getting from being forced by the whole of society to ID as a woman to have my problems acknowledged."

But I was trying to be patient and polite about it and when I said "limit the word woman as much as possible" it was because cis people have had a history of doing the bare minimum so if they tried that they'd still be very much underdoing it. But I shouldnt have said that I should have made it clear from the start and that's on me tbf. Because it was too easily misunderstood and too easily demonized (not by you obvs your criticisms are valid) as well.

I could have worded it better yes. But I'm allowed to talk about the transphobia I face as a nonbinary person to cis women specifically and I'm allowed to ask that they acknowledge their privilege and do something about it.

I will be deleting that post soon anyway because it's now just a swarming ground for transmisogynists and if I remake it ill reword it.

But I'm done trying to appeal to cis women because it's very clear to me if we aren't telling them we're basically cis women but please call us by they/them haha then they will decide we don't belong in their spaces and we don't deserve their solidarity. And that's absolutely crushing to me but until cis women start to acknowledge that gender is so unbelievably complicated and that intersectional feminism means acknowledging that everyone who isn't a cis man will experience a fluctuating level of misogyny based on how they're perceived then we will achieve nothing. And I'm tired of it.

Basically I'm disillusioned with cis feminism because they say it's intersectional but that comes with the unspoken expectation that people who aren't cis (including trans women because they get put through the worst of it because they have TME people as a whole to deal with and I cannot speak on what that's like as I'm TME) cater to them and support them wordlessly and put all of our needs secondary.

Cis women talking about their own experiences and being cis women isn't the problem and I never ment to apply that but the label "woman" is forced on so many trans and nonbinary people who don't ID with it automatically because it is the only label ever used to discuss misogyny because cis women are the ones leading every convo and that's exactly the problem.

Hopefully that gives some insight.

#thank you for your ask tho op #i appreciate that youre taking the time to discuss this #long post #ask to tag #dont rb #im just. so tired #and i didnt realize i experienced dysphoria but now i want to sob bc i cant escape being pereived as a woman #and the people who say theyre solidarity would flip their shit the minute i try to be anything other than their perception #and im tired of it im tired of this i want to cry

3 notes · View notes

intersapphic · 5 years

Text

Intersex wlw (and intersex people in general but focusing on wlw here) who have been told that we can’t be women, that we’re too much of something or not enough of the other. We can be. We are enough. The people who told us this are wrong and cruel, but they can’t ever define us.

So for those of us who resonate with this: we can be. We are not imperfect or broken just because some ignorant people said so, they have no basis and said so without kindness. This goes extra for those of us who are gnc/not cis. We’re deserving of and allowed to reclaim what was taken from us.

#mod s #intersex #actuallyintersex #wlw #gnc #nonbinary #lgbt #lgbt+#lesbian #bisexual

349 notes · View notes

blackwoolncrown · 5 years

Note

i feel like any time i see bisexual women represented in media, the character is always feminine and often sexualized. and i don’t think it’s fair that gender nonconformance ends up basically being policed by sexuality. like if you’re gnc, gay people call you gay and straight people call you gay. and if you’re bi you’re not allowed to be gnc and if you are it’s obviously *different* from being gay and gnc even to the people who were projecting gayness onto u 5 seconds ago. and i think this [1/?]

is what contributes, in part, to gnc bi people feeling like we have to change in order to be desirable for the other binary gender. even tho like i’m a bi guy who is wild about gnc women, but i also feel like no woman will be interested in a gnc man. so i feel like i’m not even allowed to call myself bi bc my interest in women isn’t the same as the straight mainstream. and god forbid i talk about this or else i’m being homophobic. like screw the fact that i have a boyfriend lol [2/2]

The biggest difficulty I have with gender/sexuality as a nb/bi person is that both LGBT spaces and cishet spaces demand that I collapse myself, cut myself, ‘decide’ in SOME way. We’re not specific enough for any group and they all expect us to change somehow to conform to something they can understand/regulate.

It’s so backwards bc all this talk of supporting gender nonconformity and ‘queerness’ falls apart when pressed by the ambiguity of someone’s body. At the end of the day everyone wants to use us to validate THEM so they’ll pick and choose what parts of us to validate and ignore the rest. And they ALL fucking do it.

There’s an aspect of all of this which is a distinct extension of the idea that women don’t have a full sexuality of their own, and also of the idea that men can fucking taint someone with their ~powerful sexuality~. There is exceptionally little space for Bi women, gnc and nb ppl (who may or may not identify as women) to talk about their attraction to men (or attraction along a m/f axis) and everyone’s too caught up in their own feelings of attraction or repulsion irt men (The Patriarchy) to actually pay attention to us so like…the patriarchy continues, it’s just gone underground.

They’re still ignoring everyone else and centering cishet men, in a way? And like you said this idea that gnc ppl owe to anyone to be same-sex attracted or they’re ‘straight’ like lmao so much for progress.I’ve spoken before about how there’s an active effort in society not only to enforce gender norms to maintain cisheteronormativity but also like, to divide human presentation and attraction along lines of gay or straight and part of this is done by perpetuating attitudes that say if you’re a gnc man you have to be gay bc no woman wants you, if you’re a gnc woman you have to be lesbian bc no woman wants you. And cis ppl do this from the outside but lesbian and gay ppl do this on the inside by constantly invalidating our bisexuality as ‘straight’ the moment we aren’t performing same sex attraction. We’re punished for being ambiguous.We’re constantly expected to make a choice when our sexuality (and often gender) is literally that we cannot do so without cutting ourselves but fuck us I guess. Not to mention tbh that how someone looks should not actually be considered a hard marker for how their attraction works. That’s backwards as fuck. I know social coding is a thing but let’s bring that back to shit ppl can choose, like clothing, instead of whether they’re thin or buff or delicate or strong, yeah? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it though.

#Anonymous

9 notes · View notes

tenderwiki · 5 years

Text

a lot of cis bi women have like...only the most basic understanding of how gender and (bi)sexuality work for nonbinary people. which is why so many cis bi women think they’re like. at the top of the pyramid of bisexual suffering when a. there is no pyramid b. there is no fucking way cis people are more materially disadvantaged due to their cisness than trans people.

the bisexual reality of nb people is one of doubled erasure, because there is little to no data on us or our experiences; much of the our experiences are filtered through our agabs because our nonbinary identity is denied - afab bisexual NBs experience everything cis bi women do but through the lens of the denial of their nonbinary identity. sometimes this denial is at the hands of our partners, which in itself is a form of abuse. for amab bisexual NBs, the perception of bisexual men and gnc/nb camabs as predatory strikes double because they’re at the intersection of those two identities. they are also vulnerable to abuse, and that vulnerability is ignored because it’s inconvenient.

genderqueer and nonbinary bisexual people occupy a realm of silence so intense that even progressive spaces refuse to allow for us. we’re not wlw enough for wlw spaces and not mlm enough for mlm spaces. we do not belong in gay spaces at all. there are no nonbinary spaces to cater to our needs, and no established bisexual community that we could find solace in.

cis women have a tendency to center themselves in any feminist dialogue and the dialogue around bisexuality is no different. I have no desire to claim that bisexual nb people are more or less oppressed than cis bisexual women. I want to no longer be erased in these conversations, to have my experiences and subjectivity dismissed, and to have my experiences diminished and overshadowed by those of cis people. and cis people need to learn how to step back and realise when they’re taking up too much space in the conversation.

#nonbinary #nb tag #bisexual #queer #original #bi tag #bad bi blogging #okay to rb

52 notes · View notes

bullyfemme · 5 years

Text

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” and Bad Transphobic Pop Science

Many people engaged in discourse on this website, especially with truscum, have probably encountered their concept of “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria”. Those who have the fantastic shinigami eyes extension enabled and search for the topic will often find a litteny of red sites when you look for anything involving the term from sites that often spout anti-trans rhetoric and are constantly looking for pseudoscience to back up their beliefs.

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” as defined by the official website for it (yes, really. Don’t click here if you’re triggered by transphobia) run by the transphobic parents of young trans teens, goes as follows: “A type of adolescent-onset or late-onset gender dysphoria where the development of gender dysphoria is observed to begin suddenly during or after puberty in an adolescent or young adult who would not have met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood.”

There are obviously flaws with this, even on the surface level of just this definition, without looking at the actual study conducted itself (though we will get there, trust me).

First of all, you have to assume that you require gender dysphoria to be trans. There’s evidence quite to the contrary in that professionals and groups dedicated to assisting trans people agree that dysphoria is not a requirement for identifying as trans, and actual (read: not pop science) that has found that the brain is not sexually dymorphic and that there arent “male brains” and female brains”, that very few people actually regret transitioning (roughly .6% of trans women and .3% of trans men, please note the decimal and that both of these, when accounting for the fact that both groups only account for roughly half of all binary trans people, equal less than half of 1% of all trans people).

Pretending that evidence doesn’t exist, let’s pretend that the assumption that gender dysphoria is needed for being trans is correct. Even in that world view, this definition is poor and tenuous. When you describe “not having met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood”, you are going with the assumption that the child didn’t experience and hide it very well out of shame. Or that they did express it and their parents dismissed it and continued to dismiss it throughout childhood. Or that the child did not force themselves to perform hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity in order to try and “make it go away” in the same vein of a gay person forcing themselves into relationships and situations with straight people. Or that the child is not gay and gnc. Or that didn’t experience adolescent or adult dysphoria which the dsm-5 does define as legitimate experiences, as do MANY ACTUAL TRANS PEOPLE IF YOU TALK TO THEM, SOMETHING THE AUTHOR OF THE STUDY HAS FAILED TO DO.

Many trans people who experience dysphoria don’t experience it until they hit puberty and their body undergoes changes associated with the wrong kind of puberty for them. Which, for the trans children of the parents surveyed (yeah, we’re getting there, they didn’t actually survey trans kids), allows them to say “well you weren’t like this before!”

There is one, single study conducted with regards to “Rapid onset gender dysphoria.” Lisa Littman, the woman who conducted the study, isn’t even a professional in gender studies. She’s a fucking gynecologist and obstetrician (pregnancy doctor). This is not her field of study. Much of her research is focused on detransition and her coined “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” despite, again, no experience in those fields of study. She’s a cis woman obsessed with making trans people identify as cis again, or as “normal” by her standards. If she would have done actual research, she would have found just how few trans people want to detransition after transitioning in the first place, or how many people who do detransition are trans people, often trans women, forced to detransition in order to survive every day.

Beyond this, the study itself: where do I even begin.

I have defined Ms. Littman as coining ROGD, and that’s not quite fair. The actual people who coined it are well-known terf website 4wavenow.com, conservative website Transgendertrend.com, and YouthTransCriticalProfessionals.org which is an organization of conservative scientists (theres an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) who hide behind degrees while they churn out anti-trans propaganda. In fact, that’s what all three of those groups do.

Now, finally, with all that out of the way. Let’s talk about this study, posted in the non-peer reviewed journal of academic health.

First of all, as alluded to previously, it was conducted by talking to the parents of these kids, not the kids themselves. This opens up a whole host of things to talk about, and trust me - we will. It was a 90 question quiz posted on the three websites mentioned previously: 4thwavenow, transgendertrend.com, and youthtranscrticialproffessionals.org. So, the survey is already poisoned, placed on websites with deliberate anti-trans agendas, with no way of verifying who the fuck was taking that survey. So if Tammy Terfbangs, mother of absolutely no one, gets on 4thwavenow and sees that a ~super scientific survey~ about those evil 14 year old trans kids, there is quite literally nothing stopping her from filling it out. I cannot even begin to describe how shoddy the foundation for all of this is. Or if, per say, a popular terf blog linked to this, there’s quite literally nothing stopping dozens or hundreds of terfs from filling this survey out.

As a scientist, the methods in which she procured the “””evidence””” on anti-trans websites run by the parents of trans children makes me fucking furious. Imagine running a study about, per say, autism, and how sensory overload feels, instead of asking the autistic person, they asked the parents of the autistic person, and posting it on “TheCureForAutism.org” and “DontVaccinateEducate.Com” and then posting it in a shitty non-peer reviewed journal. Essentially, thats exactly what this is.

This idea isn’t even new. The WPATH standards of Care, published in 2011, hosted a section called “Phenomenology in Adolescents”. This section had the following to say.

“Yet many adolescents and adults presenting with gender dysphoria do not report a history of childhood gender-nonconforming behaviors (Docter, 1988; Landén, Wålinder, & Lundström, 1998). Therefore, it may come as a surprise to others (parents, other family members, friends, and community members) when a youth’s gender dysphoria first becomes evident in adolescence.”

The idea that the internet made your kid trans, the backbone of all of this, is just so ridiculous that the fact that I have to even talk about it is stupid. Many kids who understood they were trans when they were young but didn’t know what that meant and couldn’t put their identity into words. Fun fact, if you explain to someone a concept that they didn’t understand but felt before, they might in fact realize that it applies to them. The fact that resources are now available to them to give them information about their identity, and that trans people are more visible now than a decade ago when this generation of trans and nb people were growing up, is a good thing.

Besides, considering just the quantity of shit like “transgender people DISPROVED by ben shapiro” and “NONBINARY CRINGE COMP #400000000000000000″ available on youtube being fed directly to toddlers with ipads, it’s not like all exposure to trans people has been framed positively, nurturing, or encouraging, and it would be beneficial to talk about the ways in which this is going to affect the trans and nb people who will be around a decade from now.

There’s so much more I could talk about here, but I don’t think I need to. Instead, I will link to this amazing article that was the backbone of much of what I wrote. The author is a bisexual trans women with a degree in biochemistry, she knows what the fuck shes talking about.

#science #trans #lgbt #nb

20 notes · View notes

discyours · 5 years

Note

What are your thoughts on contrapoints' new video if you've watched it ?

I had actually watched it before I got this ask but I wanted to rewatch it to make sure I had a good answer. Terrible idea, I spent way too much time on this, too much to justify shortening this out so I’ll put a cut out of courtesy to my followers.

I did actually find myself agreeing with her on a few points, though I didn’t spend much time being excited about that since criticising “TERFs” is hardly a new or rare thing. Starting out the video with a dramatic reading of a Germaine Greer quote was funny in my opinion, but it did set people up for an obvious bias. Some radfems truly are that transphobic and that’s really important to acknowledge, but it’s hardly news to anyone in her audience. I would’ve preferred if she’d engaged with more moderate forms of gender critical feminism, though I can’t say it’s all that much of a surprise that she didn’t do so since the entire basis of her channel is essentially putting on a wig to create a strawman (that’s not to say that the points she argued against were never made by anyone, but she does get to pick and choose which ones she talks about rather than debating a real person).

It’s also quite telling that she only asked past gender critical feminists for their input, not anyone who currently holds those beliefs (though again, can’t say I’m surprised). I did actually like her explanation of gendercrit ideology (”The idea is that gender [femininity, masculinity, gender roles, all that] it’s all a patriarchal construct, and biological sex is the only thing that makes a person a man or a woman.”). It’s fairly rare to see people represent it even somewhat accurately, so props for that. She then went on to mock questions about trans ideology as being comparable to “the Jewish question”, so,,, that strong start didn’t last long.

She explained that trans people are on the defensive against genuine questions because of the amount of transphobia we have to deal with from the government, the press, and oftentimes our family. It’s the reason we stick together and stick to unambiguous slogans that don’t concede anything (”trans women are women”). Which, cue 10 people unfollowing me, I don’t disagree with. I started this blog to talk about trans issues and at this point I’m about as trans-critical as troons can get, but even I don’t have the energy or desire to engage every single person I come across in their genuine concerns about trans people. The part Natalie leaves out however is that these slogans and chants are often part of an attempt to change legislation, where you don’t get to just state that trans women are women and refuse to discuss it when people don’t blindly accept it. Being on the defensive makes sense, but it’s incompatible with being on the offensive to change laws and social norms.

Moving on to CONCERN ONE: GENDER METAPHYSICS

This is one part where I actually strongly agreed with Natalie (well, as much as could be expected). She explains that sometimes, people use metaphors to explain feelings that are difficult to put into words, and that that’s how she understands the “trapped in the wrong body” language. Thanks to some groups who do mean this literally (thanks transmeds!) I don’t blame radfems for taking those statements seriously and attempting to debunk them, but I’m also really not fond of radfems jumping on just about any attempt to talk about dysphoria. A lot of the time these objections go beyond wanting to debunk something that is assumed to be meant literally, and beyond wanting people to think critically about their dysphoria; it reaches the point of expecting that they’ll simply reason people out of their dysphoria, since being dysphoric (and being trans) just doesn’t make any sense.

She also criticises brain sex theory much in the way that I do, and says she thinks of herself as a woman who used to be a man rather than having always been a woman. I’m too gendercrit to relate or agree completely, but compared to most trans people’s stance on this it’s pretty damn agreeable.

She finishes off this… chapter? With a quote about “living as a woman”, and while I have plenty of thoughts on that it’s elaborated on later on, so let’s move on.

CONCERN TWO: GENDER STEREOTYPES

Natalie explains that her clothes, makeup or voice don’t “make her a woman”, and that no trans woman thinks femininity and womanhood are the same. Rather, they’re using femininity as a cultural language to prompt people to see them “for what they are” (women).

Obviously the question of what makes someone a woman has yet to be answered here (unless the quote from the last chapter was intended to but that’s pretty circular [go watch the video this is too goddamn long to copy everything]) so I’ll leave the “see us for what we are” be for now. But it’s absolute bullshit that no trans woman equates femininity to womanhood. How many trans women have explained that they knew from a young age because they liked to play with dolls and their mother’s makeup? There have literally been trans women claiming that butch lesbians are closeted trans men, and that an aversion to femininity counts as gender dysphoria. I do agree with her last point, though. I didn’t cut my hair when I came out because I thought that would “make me a man”, I did so because it’d help me pass. A lot of radfems are intentionally obtuse about the existence of cultural signifiers just to paint trans people as delusional gender-worshippers.

I am actually gonna quote her here because I think it’s important;

“I think butch or gender nonconforming cis women sometimes side-eye hyperfeminine trans women because they don’t identify with this version of womanhood at all, and they’ve had to struggle since childhood against a society that’s told them they have to be feminine. And I completely sympathize with that. I think there should be more gender freedom, less coercion less restriction. But also, I’ve had to fight against the same society that told me I should really, really, really, not be *this*. So, I feel like we should be able to form some kind of solidarity here.”

I was ready to be mad at the start of the sentence but I actually agree. I just think that solidarity is lost when trans women refuse to acknowledge that society’s insistence that they don’t be like *that* is about gender roles and hatred of gender nonconformity. There is great potential for solidarity between GNC females and feminine trans women, but trans women reject it because they don’t want to be seen as GNC males or acknowledge that other people do. They want to be treated as normal, feminine women, and not doing so counts as misgendering.

CONCERN THREE: ABOLISH GENDER

Natalie argues that, while potentially a good idea, abolishing gender is a Utopian project (/pipe dream), much like abolishing borders. That denying trans people their gender identity because “abolish gender” is much like denying immigrants citizenship because “abolish borders”. It’s targeting the people who are most vulnerable under the present system, and then leveraging that system against them under the pretense of abolishing it.

I’ll concede that abolishing gender (and frankly, radical feminism as a whole) is fairly idealistic. Most radfem goals are incredibly long term and while that’s a good thing in some ways (I’m quite happy to be with a movement that refuses to accept anything less than complete female liberation, rather than some form of feminism that insists it’s only needed outside the west [”We’re already equal! I can vote! Look at the pants I’m wearing”]), it also leads to quite a lot of abstract academic bullshittery, and unreasonable expectations of ideological purity.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to view individual trans people as personally responsible for accomplishing the very long-term goal of abolishing gender. But radical feminism is not about individualism (which a lot of radfems do seem to forget, to be fair). There are radfems who are supportive of trans people; Andrea Dworkin herself supported transition. Only as a bandaid for a much bigger issue (the existence of gender) but she at least felt that trans people should be allowed this bandaid, should be allowed to reduce their suffering in current society in whichever ways they can. Dworkin’s view on this is far from rare and some radfems are even trans themselves. But to get back to the part about radical feminism not being individualistic; while individual trans people are not necessarily an issue for gender abolition, the wider trans community and its current political ventures most definitely is. The entirety of radical feminism is not going to collapse from a singular tran getting a gendered hairstyle, but replacing laws to refer to gender identity rather than sex can absolutely be devastating in the long term (and in the short term, when you look at the amount of protections that female-bodied people lose as a result), and that’s exactly what the trans community is currently pushing for.

Natalie also criticises the fact that gender critical feminists don’t seem to go after, say, Kim Kardashian for promoting gender roles. That they attack trans women with barely any following rather than people with actual power and influence. And I disagree with that, radfems are definitely highly critical of women like Kim Kardashian. But the way Natalie makes this point exposes part of the issue; nobody is going after Kim Kardashian for wearing a dress because Kim Kardashian never made an active choice to start wearing dresses. She experienced female socialisation no differently than any other woman (or, arguably, far more strongly considering who her parents were), so there’s some sympathy to be extended there. She has more responsibility due to her platform, but it’s no easier for her to break out of gender roles whereas trans people, to some extent, knowingly stepped into another gender role.

CONCERN FOUR: MALE PRIVILEGE

Natalie argues that men don’t treat trans women like their equals. That non-passing trans women are not treated like men, but like monsters, and that “male privilege” is not a good description of that experience.

This is one of those things that’s really hard to argue against because there’s an inherent disagreement about gender. Natalie’s insistence that non passing trans women aren’t treated like men comes from preexisting notions that a man is more than simply an adult human male, which is where I disagree. Non passing trans women are treated like men, but that does not mean that men will treat you like an equal; much like straight men can still treat gay men like shit, white men can still treat black men like shit, etc. “Male privilege” has never been a good descriptor of gay men’s experiences with homophobia either, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any. There is more than one axis of oppression.

Moving on, Natalie brings up radfems’ skepticism about the whole notion of “passing”. I’m not going to bother to quote it because the entire part is good, but I do have strong feelings about this.

Her argument about gas station attendants and plumbers is completely on point, and I fucking hate it when people try to argue that anyone who reads trans people as their desired sex is simply being polite. It’s genuinely fucking impossible that everyone we run into has been indoctrinated into politically correct gender ideology, and the nerve a lot of radfems have to insist that our genuine life experiences are worthless next to their opinion is downright insulting.

Passing is, in fact, subjective. With my shift in perspective since becoming gender critical, my perception of trans people has changed too. People I used to believe passed flawlessly are now quite noticeably trans to me, but that’s not to say that that’s a result of “breaking free from trans ideology”. Relying on gender roles to identify people’s sex is in fact the cultural norm, and only actively attempting to view things differently (or spending large amounts of time around GNC people) changes that.

CONCERN FIVE: MALE SOCIALISATION

Natalie starts off by acknowledging that she has no idea what it’s like to be catcalled as a nine year old girl, or what that does to a child’s psyche. It did not start happening to her until she was an adult, when she knew what she was getting into and was ready for it. I just want to mention that separately because I just about cried when she said this. Sexual harassment at a young age is one thing I see trans women consistently failing to acknowledge, and an end has just come to the years of frustration I have suffered as the result of this argument going completely unaddressed.

She goes on to argue that socialisation does not stop at childhood; that it is a lifelong process. One example she gave is that her appearance is commented on far more now that she’s transitioned, and that that’s been something she’s had to get used to. I actually think that’s a good point and one that should be considered more, but I’m uncomfortable with the implication she brings when talking about resocialisation, as if childhood socialisation can be erased/redone entirely (which I don’t believe it can).

Then there’s the “trans women don’t experience socialisation the way cis men do” argument. Let me quote this and see if you can spot anything wrong;

“But also, trans women often don’t experience the socialisation the way cis men do. Many trans women are feminine and queer before they transition, and have always experienced a kind of femmephobia that is rooted in misogyny.”

The implication that feminine/queer equates to trans is really harmful, and once again she’s arguing from a different concept of what a man actually is. Not to mention that “femmephobia” is only a thing against men, as women are expected to be feminine.

“Some trans women also identified as women years before transitioning, and internalised society’s messaging about women more than society’s messaging about men. Now that’s still not the same as living in society as a girl from birth, but it’s also pretty different from the socialisation of most cis men.”

Interestingly enough, I initially wrote down “masculine cis men” rather than “most cis men” because that’s what the captions said. I wonder if Natalie realised her unfortunate implication that feminine = trans after uploading her video and decided to change it in the captions, since the words don’t sound all that alike.

She then talks about “stolen valor”, that she suspects that male privilege and male socialisation are such major talking points for gender critical feminists because they feel like it’s an injustice for people to claim their identity without experiencing their oppression. She compares radfems to transmeds; both groups supposedly believe that you need to suffer for your identity to be valid.

Fundamental disagreement about gender is affecting her understanding yet again. Identity-based thinking just can’t be applied to gendercrit ideology at all; the whole point is that gender identity itself is harmful, and that women who consider themselves as such because they are adult human females have extremely different experiences than people who feel that they identify with womanhood regardless of their lack of life experiences actually being female.

[”You didn’t suffer like I’ve suffered! You don’t know what it’s like”] “I’m tempted to strike back by saying that you don’t know what it’s like to occupy an identity so stigmatised that most of the people who are attracted to you in private are too ashamed to admit it in public”

Ever heard of butch lesbians, Natalie?

“You don’t know what it’s like to have a body so non-normative that you’re shut out of whole areas of society”

Cough

CONCERN SIX: REPRODUCTIVE OPPRESSION

I’m getting fucking tired at this point and I hate myself for even writing this long of a reply up until now. Basically, she pulls the good ol’ “not all women experience their womanhood the same way” argument, and then makes a fucking coat hanger abortion joke. I wish I had an in-depth reply to that but I don’t. I honestly don’t have the words to express how angry it makes me that someone who has never even had to deal with even the mere possibility of unwanted pregnancy thinks they have any place to joke about the horrific lengths women were forced to go to as a result of their reproductive oppression.

CONCERN SEVEN: ERASING FEMALE VOCABULARY

Through her assumption that feminism is a mere shield for gender critical radfems to hide their transphobia behind, Natalie is disregarding the actual feminist motivations behind opposing gender-neutral language. I mean, she literally does not even touch on it, she only says that nobody has any issue with individual women referring to themselves as women rather than “menstruators” (or, by her suggestion, “people who menstruate”).

Medical lingo is complicated, and I understand wanting to ensure that trans people do not lose insurance coverage when they change their legal sex. I don’t believe that changing all medical language to be gender neutral is the only possible solution there, but at the end of the day doctors are gonna know the difference between male and female anatomy even if their textbooks talk about “pregnant people”. Medical language is not the issue here, it’s the expectation that this language becomes commonplace everywhere, including in feminist discourse. That’s the point where female vocabulary is erased, and where it becomes impossible for women to discuss the reasons for their oppression. Menstruation and pregnancy are not “gender neutral” issues when it comes to institutional oppression, and we should not treat them as such.

Moving on, let me quote her directly:

“I have no problem with cis feminists discussing or celebrating periods or wearing pussy hats at political marches. […] I totally get why cis feminists would want to celebrate their reproductive anatomy in defiance of a society that routinely shames and subjugates them for it. The problem arises only when menstruation or reproductive anatomy are used to misgender trans men or exclude [women who don’t bleed].”

The assumption wasn’t that every individual trans woman takes issue with women discussing their anatomy, so “I don’t have a problem with it” is not an argument. I mean, you’re obviously free to say it to get people off your back about it, but it does not debunk radfem concerns when there absolutely are trans women who believe it’s “terfy” and “exclusionary” to talk about issues that only affect “cis” women. That last point is a funny one, despite all the inclusive language trans women regularly forget that menstruation is not a cis thing. And that’s an issue Natalie appears to suffer from too, unless this was unfortunate phrasing and we were just meant to assume that trans men talking about periods is not up for discussion. Either way, it’s clear that inclusive language is clunky to everyone, the mistakes that are acceptable to make just depend on which side you’re on.

CONCERN EIGHT: TERF IS A SLUR

Natalie uses an interesting definition of “slur” here: “a pejorative that targets someone’s race, religion, gender, or sexuality”. I say interesting because I can’t find it anywhere. I could find “an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.”, “an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo”, “a derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people”, but not hers. Presumably because she made it up herself (and haf-assedly at that, did you forget disabled people exist Natalie?) knowing that all of the former definitions would, in fact, consider TERF to be a slur.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the whole “TERF is a slur” thing. I’ve seen someone use that to say “if you call me TERF I can call you tranny”. I don’t think being called a TERF (which I have plenty of experience with) should be considered to be comparable to being called a tranny or a bitch. TERF has become essentially meaningless and is an inaccurate term roughly 95% of the time it’s used, but it is meant to have a meaning (”this person excludes trans people from their feminism”), whereas other slurs don’t tend to have any message aside from “this person belongs to a minority and I want to insult them for it”. I’m not ignorant to the fact that it’s often used as a synonym for “lesbian” though, and that it absolutely is used insultingly and with the intent to ruin a person’s reputation, so I’ll stay in my lane on that.

After comparing “gender critical” to “race realist” and mentioning a general refusal to use these terms as to not legitimise bigotry, Natalie explains that she has very little patience for “TERF requests for linguistic decorum” because of the “maximally hurtful, harmful, and insulting” language that radfems use to talk about trans people (eg, referring to transition-related surgeries as mutilation, and the terms “TIM” and “TIF”).

I have some thoughts on this because, while I fucking hate these terms, Natalie’s disdain for them is hypocritical. She just acknowledged that using certain language legitimises the ideologies behind them, and that’s exactly why “TIM” and “TIF” were born. Referring to trans women as trans women while also insisting that woman means adult human female, something trans women do not fall under, did not work out well for radfems in the past. Conceding linguistic ground merely for the sake of respect essentially meant they’d instantly lose that argument, an argument that is in fact extremely important for feminism. I justify using technically incorrect terms (including pronouns) to refer to trans people because I’m trans myself, I understand what it’s like to be dysphoric and I believe that signaling that level of respect can at times be essential to get people to listen. But this is not an apolitical issue and as much as I despise being referred to as a “TIF”, I can’t blame that term’s existence on hatred.

Natalie concludes her video by being “real” about what the core of the gender critical movement is actually about: transphobia. Visceral disgust and hatred for trans people’s very existence.

And you know, for some people that definitely is the case. But this isn’t where I concede that I’ve been faking trandom to give credibility to my transphobia, or where I break down, admitting that I’ve based my entire political stance on pure self hatred (I mean lord knows I have enough of it, but nah that’s not what happened). The reality is that there are gender critical trans people (including trans women), and I’d dare suggest that we are not the only ones who believe in gender critical ideology for reasons other than transphobia.

In conclusion, this video is just another rebuttal against a strawman of “TERF beliefs” which never even attempts to treat them as genuine, only as ignorance that is easily educated away, or hatred that can’t be argued with regardless. I can’t say I’m disappointed with this video (it’s certainly not lower quality than I’d expect from contrapoints) but I am disappointed with the political climate where this is the furthest any outsider is willing to go to debate against gender critical ideology.

#anon #gender critical #contrapoints

21 notes · View notes

gneumatics · 5 years

Note

Hey hope I don't offend anyone but I wanna ask a question. Do you think it's a bit unnecessary and harmful by grouping nearly every single person into the LGBTQ+. Like things like demiromantic and demisexual seem to be an extension of other sexualities and people who are those ones are not really obressed or at risk of death like gay or trans ppl. I'm technically demiromantic but it doesn't impact my life and I'd rather more obressed or shamed ppl get the pride since I'm straight and get no hate

Well, that’s a bit of a loaded question but I’m going to assume you’re asking it in good faith.

Short answer:

I’m queer and I believe that queer is an incredibly inclusive identity and political ideology that anyone who doesn’t fit into the dyadic cis-allo-hetero-patriarchy can opt into.

Therefore, my products are for anyone who can identify as queer, i.e. anyone who isn’t cis dyadic hetero (both romantic and sexual). The only reason I don’t call my collections ‘queer pride x’ is because I already have a ‘queer pride x’ with the queer chevrons.

I have demi friends who id as queer and I have demi friends who don’t. The important thing is that the umbrella is open to anyone who wants it.

Long answer:

The idea that you can only have pride if someone is trying to hurt you is.

Uh.

Problematic.

Playing Oppression Olympics like this - saying that you must experience so much aggression to be able to show pride in your identit(y/ies) - is directly cribbed from the terf playbook, and therefore you should be careful about whether or not you want to pick this particular hill.

Terfism as a movement comes from Political Lesbianism, which saw lesbians as the most important - and therefore most oppressed - identity. Therefore terfs see lesbians as the most oppressed minority, which means that any attention given to any other identity is ipso facto an attack on lesbians. Later, this mindset transitioned to straight up trans-antagonism and transphobia (for obvious reasons: lesbians are women only!!! -> Trans women are men trying to trick poor innocent lesbians into sex!1!! -> All trans people are fake!!!1!1!11!!) that gave terfs the name.

Now, if you go up to any random lgbt person and tell them that only lesbians are important, at best you’ll be gently corrected, most likely you’ll be laughed at, and and at worst you’ll be at the business end of some very pointed remarks/violence.

So terfs shifted their targets to be ‘acceptable’ which is to say, people not in the then majority-used acronym LGBT. So the aces and aros (and all aspec folx tbqh), the nonbinaries, and if we’re really honest, the bis have always been acceptable targets to terfs.

This is because if a younger lgbt or queer person gets convinced that this group or that identity isn’t really lgbt and that giving them any attention is at best a waste of time, energy, and/or resources and at worst a direct attack on more deserving minority groups (particularly lesbians), then it’s much easier to expand the focus.

If the demis aren’t ‘allowed in the lgbt’, why should the other aspecs? If the aspecs aren’t lgbt, then the bi people aren’t really either, are they, if you think about it, right? The same escalation occurs with the gender spectrum too, from gnc non-lesbians ‘appropriating lesbian terms’ (even if the terms in question were never lesbian specific) to all nonbinary folx (these two often happen concurrently) to all trans people.

This is called radicalization and it is how the terfs went from a movement with little online presence outside of the spaces that made for themselves to getting terf ideology spread by well-meaning blogs that don’t realize the movement behind that catchphrase they just reblogged.

Back to my original point, people are allowed to have pride even if they are accepted and not “at risk of death”. My gay friend is allowed to wear a rainbow pin even though his whole family

has supported his relationship with his husband and the closest thing to oppression that he has experienced, by his own words, was minor bullying by kids in middle school that stopped after the school stepped in.

Having pride is not contingent on how many times you personally have been insulted or bullied or attached. It’s not even dependent on how many people who share your identity have experienced any of those things. If you don’t share the whole experience of the Cis Straights, then you don’t have to be one of them. If you’re not one of them, then you’re one of us.

For some people, being hetero demi is basically straight (like you!) and that’s absolutely fine! But not everyone feels that way. And to say that everyone like you has to share your experiences and opinions is insulting - both to those others and to yourself.

If you don’t want to buy my merch, that’s fine. But don’t take away the option for others.

#queer #demi #gatekeeping #terf rhetoric #im not saying that liyahhblogs is a terf but i do discuss terf rhetoric in this post #liyahhblogs

3 notes · View notes

beelzebubskeeper · 5 years

Text

On Transgender Discourse

To begin, can we please stop regurgitating the strawman transphobic things that Kalvin Garrah and others like him say. Please. He's grossly uneducated on real world trans issues and publicly shames and misgenders other trans people when they don't act/present like him. I advise y'all, especially young and impressionable trans and queer people, to get some other sources. Do some reading, look into gender studies, listen to Gender Non Conforming (GNC) and Nonbinary (NB) trans people and their experiences. I suggest reading or listening to work and poetry by Alok Vaid-Menon, a femme GNC performance artist who talks about their experiences as a trans femme person. I know how easy it is to listen to a charismatic and relatable trans person and have him validate some of your internalized or subconscious transphobia. Some of y'all won't listen to gnc and nb trans folks, so maybe hearing it from a binary trans person (who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by 2 psychologists) will somehow make it stick? I feel like I need to make this more comprehensive post about this because I haven’t really seen one and at this point the burden of educating is less than that of seeing blatant transphobia so often.

If you want to talk about resources I can tell you that the "trenders" are not why trans medicine is so difficult to access. Trans people are disproportionately discriminated against in the medical field. I go to the leaders in trans and lgbt health and it still takes me months to get in. But guess what, it's not because some secretly cis people are "stealing the resources" it's because the lgbt community is so heavily discriminated against within medicine that its the entire communities outlet and they are a set of less than 10 clinics serving the entirety of Chicago's lgbt community. I suggest looking at their site as well, as they talk about these disparities far better than I can, as well as having some more comprehensive information about trans health and identification. If “trends” are really hindering your access to medicine that much, wouldn’t it make more sense to make trans medicine more readily accessible? People who most of you would consider “actually trans” actively do have to lie to get hormones and surgeries because of the discrimination we as a community face.

If we're talking bare bones definitions, The World Health Organization defines transgender people as experiencing gender incongruence which is "characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex," according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). I have personal opinions on dysphoria but hey I'm not about to tell people how they're allowed to identify, especially not by trying to clock them. Dysphoria is experienced as physically, mentally, and socially. Every single trans person experiences this to some different levels. For example you may be extremely socially dysphoric while not feeling any kind of physical dysphoria. You may have dysphoria surrounding your genitals and not your chest or vice versa. Some people can't or don't want to medically transition. Along with this, the notion that GNC and NB people don’t exist because of some unsourced claims to biology and the binary should be met with heavy scrutiny. The idea that human sex is binary is outdated when we look at intersex people who make up an estimated 1.7% of the population, though the estimation may be low. Most people who have disparities between chromosomes and their sexual presentation don’t ever know seeing as we don’t try to identify one’s chromosomes unless their is some other issue that could be linked to the chromosomes.

The myth about detransitioning is another straw man. Only about 1 percent of people detransition, and for those who do it’s for much more complicated reasons than they aren’t really trans. A lot of times these people have complications with insurance, hormones, and/or surgery. Sometimes people detransition because hormones weren’t the right move, or didn’t make them “pass” the way they want to. There is no cut and dry answer here.

This is a long one, I know but I also want to bring in caricatures because I think they’re really important. I would really rather not have to attach photos because it can be incredibly triggering for people and I want this to be as accessible a post as possible. All of the anti-tucute or anti-tender art and rhetoric I've seen directly mimics and refers back to classic TERF caricatures, except always inverted and targeting afab/dfab people. They’re given large breasts and dyed hair and “get mad if you misgender them” (as if being upset about being misgendered is a bad thing?) We need to unpack this, so lets begin. With these caricatures an outsider or cis person will read that all trans masculine people look or act like their caricature, or that it’s okay to discriminate against trans people who look a certain way. It’s also saying that you can “clock” or ID both “real” and “fake” trans people. It’s saying it’s not okay to be a trans man or trans masc person and have breasts or dyed hair or wear pride flags. Caricatures and rhetoric like this serves only to push away questioning trans people and actively dehumanize and degrade our trans family.

It’s not our job to vet and question other trans people, it’s not our job to try and find the secret cishets who’ve “snuck in” and kick them out. Our job is to support each other, to continue to try and educate ourselves, to try to understand the experiences of other LGBT people that are unlike our own, to give space to those questioning their identity. Giving people room to explore rather than shutting down young LGBT (or questioning) people isn’t going to help you face less discrimination. On the contrary you are merely adding to the transphobic rhetoric that already exists and validating -for example- TERF rhetoric and imagery. I’ve seen a spike in lgbt and specifically trans “flop” accounts dedicated to dehumanizing and humiliating trans people, which weaponizes transphobes. The running trend of “this is why cishet people don’t like us” is repulsive. Transphobia has and will continue to persist regardless of GNC and NB folks, and blaming them is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Stepping on other trans people in order to get cis acceptance is dangerous, and to be honest not particularly effective. Playing at “pick me” politics don’t really help anyone, but only serve to divide us, to encourage greater discrimination. Read here about internalized misogyny, as it articulates the same argument but within a different group of people. We operate within the margins as a community, i.e the term marginalized.

I would love to have other trans people way in, especially GNC and NB trans folks as I would like to avoid talking over y’all. I’m only one man, and I can only do so much. If I’ve made a mistake I’ll gladly listen to critique or correction! It’s necessary that we grow and learn from each other. I spent a long while composing this, as well as looking for sources, which are linked to various points in my post, that reflect my points. I’ll gladly add all of the sources separately at request if it will facilitate easier access. While anecdotal information is important, especially within understudied and marginalized groups, having empirical evidence is so important.

(Posted Tuesday March 26, 2019)

2 notes · View notes

full-course-identity · 5 years

Text

@saddestlittlebaby-intheroom

First off: thank you for replying. I apologize if I came off unnecessarily harsh, but frankly, I didn’t really think you were gonna be interested in talking--I mostly made that reblog for anyone else in the be m/ore chill tag who saw your post and checked the notes.

I don’t know if I’ll reply in depth anymore after this. This post is long, and took a lot out of me.

While, yeah, most people who headcannon it are trans, as someone who’s bi, the treatment of how being bi is Jeremy’s only personality trait kinda annoys me.

... well, I mean. If these are queer people, specifically queer kids, hyperfocusing on his queerness and making their content all about his queerness... maybe there’s a valid reason?

Fandom, specifically, is one of the first avenues kids today get to explore being aaaaanything but cishet. When a part of you so fucking massive that it DOES, actually, radically change your personality, gets pushed down and oppressed, you’re gonna wanna fixate on it when you get the chance to try--at least, a lot of people will. Maybe not you, and that’s fine.

But I implore you: rethink your takeaway. Your OP directly shames the people doing this, and makes it sound like the people who do it must not truly understand transness--and considering that, again, the majority are trans, that is actively harmful. That’s my biggest issue.

(and... yes. I am using queer as an umbrella term. Queer is used as not only a community term, but an academic one, so if you’re not okay with being called queer, just tell me and I won’t refer to you as such... but I will still use it.)

I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I’m not trying to say that GNC trans men don’t exist, but it’s the way people portray them as basically just being soft trans bois with no other personality outside of being trans that annoys me. It’s not even just that, I feel the fandom basics reduces down any character to just their sexuality or their gender, and as someone who’s bi, it kinda pisses me off that people just state that such and such a character is gay, bi or trans, and then everything just becomes about that. People are more then their sexuality or gender, this is LITERALLY what the LGBT community has been fighting for for years, and now the newer generation wants to just snatch being gay or being trans as a quirky personality.

That’s... not what we’ve been fighting for, actually.

I’m not going to get as in depth with this as others could bc I don’t have the spoons to write up an entire essay on the problems with what you said, but, I mean, for one thing, we’ve been fighting for the right to exist. Not to prove we’re “more then our identities”--that’s not the point at all. Our identities are fine. We need to be allowed to be the people we are, and if you truly believe in a “live and let live” philosophy, you cannot shame people for prioritizing a massive part of their live experience. Being queer changes everything. It is NOT the newer generation that suddenly decided to change this; things like found families, queer communes, whole bubbles of ‘safe spaces’ hidden away from society were all the fucking rage waaaaaay before the internet came around.

Just because what used to be hidden out of sight is now finally reaching the public at large doesn’t mean these concepts are somehow fuckin invalid.

I kinda wished I actually touched on that as well about how Jeremy and Michael are always just sad boys who cry a lot. That annoys me as well because the rest of their personalities is thrown completely out the window, just so they could cry a lot for no real reason. And as someone who literally can’t get through a day without crying, I just wanna say it’s not cute. It’s actually really fucking annoying, both for myself and everyone else.

So much of fandom is used as venting. These sad boy portrayals--why do you think they exist? Do you think the majority of the fans are romanticizing depression? Because, personally, again, I think you’re talking down to people who are literally going off their own life experiences and their own mental illness. No. Real life crying isn’t cute. Good thing this is fandom, where making characters suffer is a GREAT way to work through shit, which is the case for most of the kids who might see your post.

When I talk about ‘kink material’, I mean the whole idea of being trans has become a kink to a certain group of people. It lessens the idea that being trans is actually an important issue, just for some soft angst then can be cured with a few kisses and snuggles. So, not exactly a kink in the typical sense, but more that, again, being trans is an idea that’s meant to be ‘soft and cute’.

‘a certain group of people‘ ... ‘just for some soft angst then can be cured with a few kisses and snuggles’

I’m guessing you’re truscum. I sorta was too, in high school. I’m not touching that specifically because it is a whole other can of worms, but I wanted to point out something.

We established most of the people talking about trans headcanons are, well, trans. Right? Okay.

So why do you think trans people somehow don’t know the harsh realities of being trans?

This is, again, fiction. Why would you assume they just don’t get it, and why are you bothered by people glossing over whatever they don’t care to talk about in fandom, where you don’t have to talk about whatever you don’t like.

The exact idea of my post was that trans people aren’t supposed to be infantilized?????

Yeah. The problem is that you were, in fact, infantalizing people.

I never stated to talk for everyone, let alone the trans community, just in my experience, the trans people I’ve talked to have been extremely uncomfortable with the portrayals specifically trans Michael and Jeremy.

Except we are talking about trans people overwhelmingly making these headcanons. Which means the people you talk to would be outliers. But more then that... I’m sorry, but their discomfort isn’t important. Block people, block tags, move on.

I’m not saying you’re not allowed to have your portrayal, just that people kinda need to make sure that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

That is 100% fine. I agree.

And no, don’t worry, I’m not going to go around attacking people for how they portray a certain character. Yeah, maybe I’ll make a post about it or whatever, but I’m not going to go around personally attacking people by tagging them in posts, commenting on their posts, direct messages, etc.

That’s good. But I am quite bothered by you making this post on the main fandom tag, tagged a couple of different things, and made it so people would see your post. Just... if you’re gonna make a post like that, please ease up on the implications that the people who disagree with you are badly treating their own identities

But if people are allowed to make trans Jeremy and Michael, or even just cis Jeremy and Michael, extremely soft, then I’m allowed to speak against it.

You’re allowed to discuss it, yes. I certainly don’t like some portrayals, and I’ve talked about them before, in the tag in fact. But you went way beyond discussion and into active, negative judgment of people. If you’re going to do that (trust me, I’ve had to vent some things before), please DON’T put it in the main tag, at the very least.

YKINMK.

#oc #text #ask to tag

0 notes

laundryandtaxes · 7 years

Note

ive had ppl make the argument that butch queen & femme queen terminology in ballroom culture mean that butch and femme can't be claimed exclusively by lesbians. ik they're different terms with different definitions but i didn't know how to articulate a counter-argument that validates both ballroom & lesbian culture? any help?

Short answer is, I’d ask exactly what variety of that terminology they’re referencing when they use the terms “butch” and “femme” because they’re claiming something that has nothing to do with them.

Long answer:

1. The people making that argument are never connected to those scenes and think of them as dead scenes from which they can pull a history that is literally not theirs when those scenes are still alive and not just bargaining chips, and they are using them as a bargaining chip specifically because they want lesbians to shut up and think we’re too stupid to see through that.

2. Those terms have totally different meanings within those scenes than they do in popular self-styled radical queer communities and almost everyone involved in this conversation knows this.

3. The people using this argument as a bargaining chip are almost all very aware that what lesbians are combating is the notion that nonlesbians have an inarguable right to use lesbian terminology WHILE lesbians are written out of the list of acceptable sexual orientations in a lot of these communities, and the use of these terms to push misogynist politics about how “femme people” as a group (which many people into queer politics will tell you includes gnc cis gay men) are oppressed by “masc people” (which these same people will tell you includes butches and other gnc women) in a way that is not just outright nonsense, not only misogynist, but lesbophobic, especially because it disrespects the history of butch/femme and the autonomy of butches and femmes so deeply.

4. Most of what lesbians are uncomfortable with is the absolute ripping of both terms from any connection with lesbianism when they’re so inextricable from each other, and the absolute denial that they have any connection to lesbianism when the terms (AS USED by the kinds of scenes that do this) are so obviously taken from their specifically lesbian context.

5. I haven’t done extensive reading on it but I’d bet good money the way the terms got there is still literally from lesbians- a lot of people don’t realize most of the biggest drag and bar scenes used to just be general drag scenes before drag kings became more rare and gay and lesbian communities became more separate, wherein drag queens, drag kings, and necessarily all kinds of LGBT people (as in lesbians, gay men, bi people, trans people, all of them) would have been mingling and would have shared a lot of the same language. But it’s clear that they developed in two different ways in ball cultures/scenes and in lesbian communities/scenes, and I don’t think ball scenes are appropriating anything from lesbians in that sense- I USED to think that but, no offense @ me, I think I was just heated and that was a stupid position. It seems most likely to me that the term ended up in both scenes because there was a lot of natural mingling before they separated and they developed in both cultures differently.

That development is VERY different from people with no connection to either coming along and using “femme” as a term to denote femininity in a way that seems CLOSEST to the lesbian context- mind you, the term is usually used for people who at least vaguely see themselves as related to women even though they may not use the term “woman” because “femme” has been so wholly substituted for it, and even when used by men who are very involved in queer scenes, it usually (not always but especially among white men) has nothing to do with the way “butch” and “femme” developed in ball scenes or lesbian scenes.

6. Frankly, I very, very often see the term used by bpq women who primarily date men as a way of comparing literal men with gnc women because they’re uncomfortable with gender nonconformity, point blank, and like having a term that, for them, allows them to claim that they are marginalized specifically for NOT being gender nonconforming, and it’s deeply disrespectful. It’s a way of writing marginalization onto themselves that they literally do not face while marginalizing women who DO face stigma and marginalization for being gnc, and that’s outright appropriation. To see it coming from women whose primary issues often include not being seen as queer enough because they are dating men (all those articles on queer femmes being seen as straight are, I think, about another anxiety, because I guarantee you femmes who are out and about with their partners are not getting read as straight while they’re together at LEAST) . To be very clear, yes it is fucked up to call bi women straight, and not all bi women have the same relationship to men or the same attitudes toward lesbians and lesbianism. But for women who are not lesbians AND not gnc and don’t have all that much in common with lesbians to grab a lesbian term, USE it to marginalize women (including lesbians) who actually are gnc, and then claim that butches are oppressing them, all within the context of politics which are usually hostile to lesbians, is upsetting and frustrating and yeah it pisses a lot of lesbians off.

6. Honestly if queer cultures weren’t so generally hostile to lesbians and working so hard to erase us, I bet women would generally care a whole lot less. If we didn’t have so little left to hang onto it wouldn’t be nearly so big of a deal- not to say it isn’t a big deal in and of itself, but I’m saying the context around these things matters.

#Anonymous

86 notes · View notes