#...basically my point is that trans people and cis people can have common ground but to not lose sight of dismantling transphobia...

[uncanny-tranny]

I think multiple things can (and are) true and important to recognize:

1. Cis people are trans people will more often than not have a ton in common. Trans women and cis women, for example, can have a ton of experiences in common as women

2. Trans people oftentimes do have very different experiences from cis people, and it can be irresponsible to say that trans people have to have the exact experiences as cis people of the same gender identity. The experiences of transness can overlap with experiences of cisness, but by no means does that require them to overlap in every instance. Trans people don't need to be the same as cis people in order to be authentically their gender.

3. Trans people aren't solely responsible for "saving" their gender, or for making people better men/women/people.

4. For the love of all that is holy, cisness is not the default. It is simply one human experience of gender and/or sex, and transness isn't an anomaly - it is just as much a human experience as being cis.

These are complex conversations, and I know it can be hard to navigate sometimes. I'm not here to condemn people for not being the most Nuanced about trans topics, in fact I want to invite more people to the table. We all have something to contribute to making the world a better place for trans and cis (and those beyond or inbetween) people

[8-evil-annoying-catboys]

i didn’t spend my time going through TERFs’ blogs before blocking, and familiarising myself with what their common beliefs about stuff other than transness are, to then have to see someone claim that “decentering” their hatred of trans women (and pointedly, not trans people, in general, even tho more and more these days i see TERFs talking about trans men and nonbinary people with the same level of vitriol), is “ceding ground” to TERFs, and that recognising that they also hate cis men is invalidating trans women’s identities as women, because they treat trans women differently than cis men (true but… does not prove that TERFs don’t hate men???) and some TERFs are straight or bi (???). and like. sorry but youre being fucking stupid if you think this.

TERFs hate men. political lesbianism is huge in bi/straight TERF circles for a reason, and lesbian TERFs still actively send hate mail to bi and straight TERFs for being attracted to men, regardless of whether or not the bi/straight TERFs in question are political lesbians or not, which they oftentimes are. and it is not only okay, but necessary, even vital, to recognise what TERFism looks like aside from how they talk about trans people, because otherwise you leave the door open to cryptoterfs getting you with their “men bad” rhetoric leading you towards SWERFs and their “porn is all evil and all sex workers are either victimised women or evil men or evil trans people who want to keep victimising women in porn” leading you to openly radfems with “all men think about is abusing women sexually” and eventually to the conclusion of “trans people don’t deserve bodily autonomy to the same level that cis people do and should be convinced (through coercion or force) to accept the reality of sex (detransition), and, failing that, they should just die, to protect women from them, because they’re all either men who want to get in women’s spaces to commit sexual assault, or women who mutilated and defiled their natural bodies and want to indoctrinate other women into doing the same.” it does not matter if you’re a trans ally or if you are trans yourself, you NEED to educate yourself on TERF talking points if you want to avoid falling for and spreading their indoctrination tactics. no one is too smart to fall into a cult, and even if you avoid actually becoming a TERF, you can easily spread cryptoterfs’ posts to end up in front of someone who WILL become a TERF more easily than you. so here’s some stuff to avoid.

- basically anything villainising Men As A Group or neutral traits associated with men (as in, things that they can’t control like their appearance, or behaviors that are more common in men but ultimately do not make a misogynist by themselves, like being a gamer for example.) making fun of men for balding, for having a neckbeard, for having a beer gut. making fun of men for doing dumb, but harmless shit, like pranks and friendly competitions, making fun of gamers as a whole, etc.—all of this not only harms cis men who are actually allies but also people who aren’t even cis men, including and especially trans people when it comes to physical traits associated with men: trans women who wear wigs to hide their hairlines and trans men who are on T and balding are not gonna be helped by you making jokes about bald spots, for example.

- “porn abolition” and the attitude that porn and/or kink is inherently evil and violent. it’s fair to point out that the porn INDUSTRY is riddled with problems and that sex workers are incredibly vulnerable, it’s fair to point out that kink puts all its participants in an incredibly vulnerable spot, but that’s not what TERFs do. they may start there, as a hook, but ultimately they believe that porn and kink should be abolished and that if that happened it would lessen, if not entirely eradicate, sexual violence against women. they believe that sex work should stay criminalised and become even more so, and some of them even falsely believe this would somehow help sex workers, when in reality it would just make them even more vulnerable to the long arm of the law. others may know that it would be a life sentence or even a death sentence for many of the women they claim to want to protect, but falsely believe that it’s possible to actually destroy the porn/sex work industry through criminalisation and so they believe current sex workers are an acceptable sacrifice towards that end. let it be known that porn and other forms of sex work will continue underground if they are fully criminalised, and sex workers who actually are victims of human trafficking or who have information that could be used to stop or lessen sex trafficking will merely be discouraged to approach the police, since doing so will put them at the risk of arrest. this is already true and will only get worse if sex work and porn are criminalised more thoroughly. let it also be known that the majority of human trafficking is labor trafficking, NOT sex trafficking, contrary to popular belief.

- circling back to kink, anti-kink and sex negativity are both prevalent in TERF circles. most of the time, sex negativity in TERF circles will center around the involvement of people with penises, and anti-kink sentiment usually follows the same pattern, but TERFs generally condemn kink even between consenting, adult, cis lesbians in loving, monogamous, white picket fence type relationships. when you see anti-kink sentiment that is not the misguided “don’t have sex in public at pride!!”, nor the diabolical “i didn’t consent to see your leather kink gear which covers you up more than most casual summer wear but which i project the idea of sex acts onto” rhetoric, when it’s instead “kink is just an excuse for men to abuse women” or similar, that should set off all the alarms in your head bc that is TERF rhetoric. TERFs correctly identify the fact that certain aspects of kink are normalised even in straight “vanilla” sex culture, but the part where the stigmatised aspects are literally the safety features (using safe words, learning how to choke someone safely, learning how to do shibari and other safe bondage practices rather than just tying someone up willy nilly, learning extensive first aid and applying it during aftercare when necessary, practicing aftercare in the first place) flies over their heads, and so TERFs see how dangerous straight vanilla sex culture is when it comes into brushing contact with kink, and they think that kink is the problem. in actual reality, kink communities are filled with people who want to give you information on how to keep your partner(s) safe, how to practice proactive consent (as in, scene negotiations, establishing safewords and learning how to keep them fluid to meet your needs, and learning how to read your partner(s) to know when you need to check in on them), and generally just keep your kink practices safe and sane. it’s straight sex culture that has the problem, from stigmatising the interest in kink that would lead someone to learn kink safety, to making fun of people—especially women, who, when straight ‘vanilla’ sex and kink collide, often are the submissive ones in the dynamic—who want to cuddle after sex as being ‘clingy,’ even tho cuddling after sex is like, aftercare 101 lesson 1 first page first line type stuff. i could go on, but my point here is that anti-kink sentiment is ALWAYS worthy of distrust and in some cases it should absolutely set off TERF alarm bells.

- this is the last one bc i’m tired of typing this post but a major point of TERF ideology is seeing sex-based oppression as paramount to all other forms of oppression, and outside of openly TERFy circles, this will be substituted with the idea of gender-based oppression replacing sex-based oppression (basically, the exact same idea, only with a veneer of trans acceptance, so, generally, asserting that all trans men always have privilege over all trans women and also even all cis women—cryptoterfs usually won’t speak directly on intercommunity dynamics in the trans community, bc they hate all of us and have to keep it secret so they can indoctrinate us, but it’s clear that some trans people have chosen to drink the radfem koolaid on this one anyway based on how much resistance the transunity movement is facing from trans people of all genders, based on their beliefs that either sex-based or gender-based oppression—which one they believe in depends on their personal background usually—trumps transphobia). to a TERF, a Black bisexual woman will always be oppressed as a woman first, and her ethnic/racial identity and sexuality are just “adding to” that sex-based oppression. most Black women will outright tell you that white people actually routinely deny them their womanhood based on the fact that they’re Black, and misogynoir is separate, albeit related, to the misogyny faced by white women, and the racism faced by Black men, and cannot be extrapolated from the unique lived experiences of Black women to be “misogyny with a pinch of racism” or “racism with a sprinkle of misogyny” and is not consistent in the way you’d expect if you thought one form of oppression was more important than the other. if you’re versed in intersectional feminism, it’s very easy to see where this argument falls apart—while marginalised women ARE generally treated differently than their peers who are men, all else being equal, and while marginalised communities DO always have misogyny problems, just like how non-racialised marginalised communities always have racism problems and marginalised communities always have ableism problems, even the disabled community itself, etc… it all works together. there is no one immutable trait that is oppressed above all others, and if there is one trait that IS oppressed first and foremost, it would most likely actually be socioeconomic status, and not sex/gender or anything else like that—given that rich people who are marginalised in another way can always get away with much more than their poor counterparts of the same marginalised group(s), bc money is power. and even rich people aren’t immune to oppression if they aren’t privileged in every single other aspect of their identity. anyway, you can see this in how TERFs talk about oppression—they will usually only talk about that which affects them personally, and misogyny will always be what they talk about most. this is also why most TERFs are women and most male feminists are not TERFs even if they are not good at being feminists—TERFs’ attitudes tend to sway towards “i need to get mine first, then everyone else can get theirs,” even if they don’t realise it. male TERFs exist, but they are few and far between

[doberbutts]

Well I don't necessarily disagree that there are points within Mizu's story that are super relatable to trans fems, my disagreement is that she is more relatable to a trans fem than to a trans masc. I think both have reason to feel very seen when watching her journey, sometimes for similar reasons even.

In fact, many justifications for all of these posts talking about Mizu's gender and what it could or couldn't be do usually point to the same scenes, but different lines of dialogue within them. Almost everyone points to her marriage to Mikio, likely because that is the most on-the-nose metaphor we have and where we see her being directly compared to both men and women. But I find most of these discussions point to a specific line instead of an entire scene or the episode as a whole.

We see Mizu trying to find happiness in her arranged marriage and succeeding to a point before suffering heartbreaking betrayal. Many of the women [none of whom have been trans women, as said this is not coming from trans fems at all that I've seen] have said that Mizu was happy to be Mikio's wife and enjoyed being a woman. And while I don't think this is a necessarily incorrect interpretation, I think it also needs a "...but-" statement added to it.

Because... she didn't seem happy to me until she was able to find common ground with him, mostly over things that 1600s Japan considers a man's role. She was frustrated with cooking and with household chores. She was frustrated that she couldn't measure up to the standards he expected of a proper wife. She stopped with the makeup almost immediately and only went back to it after he snapped at her. She bonded with him learning to tame and then ride the horse. Learning to throw knives to cut peaches*. Discussing swordplay. Then she was happy, being allowed to occupy a more masculine role in her marriage, feeling safe that she was allowed to express herself in a way that was more comfortable and more natural to her. She still sucked at cooking, and cleaning, and all the other "wife" duties, but it didn't matter, because she trusted that he loved her anyway.

Where we see her happiest is in combat with him, having torn her kimono so she can move the way she needs to, completely overpowering him. She's not trying to be "a woman" in that scene. She's just being her truest self. Whatever gender that's supposed to be. She shed the tight cage that she's been confined to, to let her spirit shine, and almost immediately after has to stuff herself back into that cage.**

Another point to this that many folks who say that Mizu can't be trans masc is that conversation she has with Mikio after their first time together. When he asks "you wanted to be a man?" and she responds "I had to, in order to survive". And that is where I think a lot of connection to trans fems comes from- because that's the most basic explanation of boymoding I've ever heard. The interpretation is that she's a woman who has been forced to be a man in order to survive in a world that is actively hostile towards her, where it is extremely unsafe for her to even stop and consider her own womanhood, and so she remains a man to the outside world so that she doesn't get killed. Yeah, that's a pretty strong connection to trans femininity, and also a pretty strong connection to how many mixed race women and women of color feel to oppression that degrades them and refuses to acknowledge their womanhood.

The problem I have with saying that that's solid proof that she can't be trans masc is that that's also how many trans mascs feel about their own relationship with gender. Not all trans mascs are binary men, and even binary trans men can have complicated feelings about whether they are women or men. When you look through a historical lens as well, you will see many people throughout history who could have gone either way discussion both their womanhood and their manhood in similar manners. You even see cis people discussing their gender this way to this day because gender is often very messy and not quite so clear-cut as people want it to be.

But I also think that it's just as important to continue watching this scene and the one following, because Mikio immediately responds with "I want to see all of you"- implying that the wife's face that Mizu's been showing him isn't actually her whole truth. And it's not. We know that, having watched several episodes leading up to this, that the Mizu we're currently seeing in the flashback vs the Mizu we've been following are very different people while still being the same person.

And, when Mizu shows him "all of [her]", that person occupies both "ronin" and "bride" simultaneously. She is his beautiful and happy beloved wife. She is also a fierce warrior many times his better. The ripping of the kimono to let her legs move freely is also symbolic- she tears away the parts of "wife" that chafe and restrict her, taking a man's stance, a man's place, a man's own weapon, and proves herself to be a better man than her cisgender husband who vastly underestimated her and who becomes angry when seeing that she has honestly been humoring him this entire time.

He spits "monster" at her in her triumph and a lot of the interpretation is that he is humiliated and angry to have been bested by a woman, and I think that is partially true. But I also see his shock that she really is that much better, *his realization that her lack of skill with the knife throwing, her inability to ride Kai in a manner that keeps up with him, is because she has been letting him think that he's the more skilled one. I see his disgust when he realizes "all of you" is far more than he ever bargained for.

And I remember the first time I dated someone who thought what he was getting was a femboy or at most a woman badly pantomiming manhood, and being shocked and displeased to discover what he was getting was... me. I was too much of a man for him. I was more of a man than he was in many ways, and that threatened his ego and his sense of security in his own masculinity, to see someone that he expected to be a barely GNC woman be better at whatever his arbitrary standard of manhood was. We didn't last. But it did hurt, learning this about him, and what he expected of me, and how disgusted he was to see me being happier and more comfortable as a man when he wanted someone with much more proximity to womanhood.

And I know trans fems who have had this exact situation happen to them too, which is why I'm not mad at the claim itself but more annoyed that this is a narrative that almost directly mimics my own intersex and transmasculine life and yet there are people who are adamant that it is disrespectful, racist and sexist even, to even consider any interpretation that would make Mizu trans masc. If you can acknowledge that there is heavy transgender symbolism here whether the creators intended it or not, then you can acknowledge that trans mascs seeing themselves in her journey is to be expected.

And immediately after that, **Mizu puts on her bride makeup again and sits in a meditative state to wait for him to come back home so she can apologize and smooth things over with him. She sheds every ounce of the man she had to be, the man she's comfortable being, because Mikio very clearly only wants a wife, and she very clearly only wants to be loved. There are so many trans mascs who are trapped in marriages and relationships like this where they cannot do anything except be their husband's perfect and proper feminine wife. Any and all masculinity is actively dangerous to them, even if that's what they'd prefer. That entire sequence is "please, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, please just love me, I'll be good". She's groveling- or at least preparing to, because she recognizes that her masculinity is wrong to him, and she is so desperate to be loved and accepted that she's shaving off the parts of herself to make herself fit into the image of "woman" laid out before her. She wants things to go back to the way they were that night after they had sex, when they stayed up and talked and bared their hearts to each other.

Again, I know, in person, as close personal friends, trans women who have had this exact experience as well, so I'm not saying this is exclusive to trans men. I am saying that it is very concerning to me that the folks stating this very clearly are either purposefully or accidentally disregarding the real, lived experience of trans men and mascs who have gone through this exact situation. I'm a very binary trans man and I have often described myself as both husband and wife.

Lastly the big concern I have is honestly transphobia. I've seen a lot of justifications for why she can't be a trans man but could be a trans woman to be that she's clearly exclusively interested in guys, which would make her heterosexual, which means she has to be a woman. Which like. Um. Gay trans man here. I've heard this multiple times throughout my life for why I can't possibly be trans. It sounds just as transphobic now as it did the last time I heard it direct to myself. She likes men, yes, true. Also, trans mascs do sometimes also exclusively like men. I should know, that fits my description.

But also that implies that trans women who are lesbians don't exist either. Being transgender doesn't mean that you are only interested in a specific gender and it always has to be the "opposite" to your own. Straight trans people exist. So do gay trans people and bi trans people and ace trans people and more.

And finally I see people saying that trans mascs seeing kinship with Mizu is "taking away" representation from cis women. And that's very, um, butch flight, gender traitor, male invader of them. For folks who claim to not be TERFs, they're using a lot of TERF arguments. And it does make me concerned, for all the lip service they have regarding how Mizu is more relatable to trans women than trans men, that they are using the argument of "support" for trans women to not actually support trans women but simply to be able to get away with their transphobia regarding trans men. Not a single one of these posts I've seen have been made by trans women or trans fems. They're also not being made by trans men or trans mascs. And it's interesting, and concerning, to me to see a group of people who are not trans be so vitriolic about who is allowed to relate and see themselves in this story.

Scrolling the fandom tag for BES and once again finding longwinded rants about how white trans mascs aren't allowed to find any similarities with themselves in Mizu's story because A: it's racist and B: her story is more for trans fems (and ofc it's not trans fems saying this) and I'm like

So trans mascs of color don't exist and mixed race trans mascs don't exist and there was never a single trans masc that felt caught between womanhood and manhood and felt joy at just being free to be themselves rather adhere tightly to society's gendered expectations? There was never a trans masc that saw themselves in cis women who lived as men or in masculinity even if it was just for safety? You sure about that?

Like I've said before I'm not really offended either way what pronouns someone uses for Mizu because I think any of them in English are varying degrees of incorrect because *Mizu is [half] Japanese living in 1600s Japan and Japanese pronouns are not one-to-one equivilants of English pronouns and 1600s Japanese gender roles are not one-to-one equivilants to modern American gender roles* and *Mizu herself reacts with violent rage when called a woman, while the creators explictly stated that she is a cis woman and exclusively use she/her to talk about her in interviews*

But it is really interesting that non-trans-mascs are so, *so* angry that trans mascs watching this show are seeing themselves in her journey. I think there is something to be stated for people who are not understanding the racial aspect of it- I'm mixed race myself though not with any Japanese blood, so maybe that lets me see a portion of this story more easily than someone who has never been so caught between worlds and identities, but also like. Japanese trans mascs and trans men exist. I just watched a documentary about being transgender in Japan, I know they're there. Being trans masc is not exclusively a white thing nor is it exclusive to Western gender roles. We've existed, everywhere, as long as gender has. Whether we were explictly called "transgender" or a different word.

I'm neither a woman nor a lesbian but that didn't stop me from seeing myself in almost every butch and stud I've ever met. And those I've talked to about it have said they've seen themselves, in me. We're allowed to have similarities and to share experiences.

[nothorses]

Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

[milimiki]

To manifest hatred for a group of people that simply want to live their lives in your every waking moment... how do you even live? How do you live with yourselves?

It's one thing to hate hate groups, like the kkk. They want everyone who isn't white dead (not gonna get into the minority myth talk). They're basically nazis. All nazis are like this. There's no middle ground/grey area with them in conversations.

But trans folks? Jesus, what the fuck did they do to you? Literally every single trans person I've come across in my life have been nothing but kind and understanding. They're spiritually gentle. Before I myself came out as (nonbinary) trans.

And all these stories about trans people actually sexually assaulting people? I denounce them. But I'm not gonna go around denouncing every fucking trans folk for a few with bad intentions. That's not how this shit works.

Growing up as an Asian in america, I have been a target of bullying, abuse, racism, xenophobia, and even sexual harassment when I was younger. Mostly perpetrated by boys/men, most of which who were white, passed as white, or benefited from either white privilege or male privilege.

I hate those people. They've done me wrong. I hope I never cross paths with them again. But am I denouncing every fucking white boy or man in the world for what happened to me? Is every boy or man like the ones I've had the unfortunate luck to know? Do I hate every boy or man for being a boy or man? No, of course not. To hate them all is heavily irrational and severely illogical. It makes no sense.

Which is why every time I'm given a hypothetical scenario by a terf/radfem where a trans woman enters a woman's bathroom with the intent to bully/abuse/assault a cis woman is, frankly, laughably illogical and irrational. That they think this is what every trans person does on a whim. Especially if it never happened to them.

They're so illogical and irrational in their thinking, they don't even see it that way, and they take the intents of a few bad apples in the grand scheme of things, and apply it to every fucking trans person in existence. It makes no sense. I pity them, and I'm staying the fuck away from them. They're the danger, not trans folks.

Coming back full circle with the mentioning of the kkk. The ideology of terfs/radfems, from what I've seen here, is eerily similar to that of the kkk/nazism. Terfs/radfems have more in common with the kkk and nazis than they let on. They generalize and normalize hate for a group of people who just wanna chill and vibe, to exist. If this world doesn't need a particular group of people, it's terfs/radfems/kkk/nazis. There's no place for hate here. Y'all can just fuck off to an uninhabited island and stay there.

Edit: adding in my tags. I've noticed a pattern with terfs/radfems. Don't know if there's a correlation, but the majority of them seem to be cis (white) women who are lesbians and harbor misandry/a misandrists' point of view. My theory is that they don't hate trans folks directly, but men in general. Who can be trans women other than men? That's the whole point of the trans (women) bit.

Hypothesis: terfs/radfems hate men directly. Trans women were men to an extent in their past. They're incapable of perceiving trans women as real women. Just men disguised as women.

Conclusion: it checks out.

[the-light-followed]

EQUAL RITES (1987) [DISC. #3; WITCHES #1]

“‘Where does it say it?’ said Granny triumphantly.  ‘Where does it say women can’t be wizards?’  

The following thoughts sped through Cutangle’s mind:

…It doesn’t say it anywhere, it says it everywhere.  

…But young Simon seemed to say that everywhere is so much like nowhere that you can’t really tell the difference.  

…Do I want to be remembered as the first Archchancellor to allow women into the University?  Still…I’d be remembered, that’s for sure.”

Rating: 6/10

Standalone Okay: Yes

Read First: Yeah, if you like magic and bad puns, you’ll be fine.

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

* * * * * * * * * *

Equal Rites does not mess around.  It’s early Discworld, so you’ve still got a little bit of that High Fantasy vibe to it, where sometimes Pratchett just spews fantastical-sounding terms and concepts so that the reader can’t forget that This is Fantasy, We Are Not in Kansas Anymore, Folks!  And to be perfectly honest, a lot of the plot, especially the early stuff, is kind of forgettable.  There’s a lot of people talking to people about doing stuff before the actual doing gets done, if you know what I mean.

But that doesn’t really matter, because Equal Rites has important shit to say and, by god, Pratchett is going to say it. And in case you didn’t bother to read the book itself, you can tell just by looking at the title that a) it’s about gender inequality in the magical community, and b) there’s going to be puns. So many puns.  Sir Terry, please, take pity on me.  I just don’t have the time to go around explaining to every person I meet on the street why this kind of thing makes me absolutely batshit feral for the Discworld.  

I love it so much.

Anyway.  Equal Rites is the story of Eskarina Smith, or Esk, the first ever female to be born a wizard.  The whole concept of ‘the eighth son of an eighth son is chosen by the magical staff of a dying wizard to become a new wizard’ brings up a lot of questions for me—a lot of questions that will never be answered—but if I ignore that and just accept that it’s true, then by Discworld tradition Esk is undeniably a wizard. She is the eighth, uh, child of an eighth son, chosen at birth by the magical staff of a wizard who promptly dies and decides to be reincarnated as a weirdly randy tree and then, later, as an ant.

…Cool, I guess.

More importantly, and also by Discworld tradition, Esk undeniably cannot be a wizard, because she’s born female.  Honestly, Pratchett might as well have named this Sit Down and Shut Up While I Talk About Gender Roles and Gender Inequality, You All Are Going to Listen to Me Because I’m Going to Make Bad Puns While I Do It.

Over the course of the book, Pratchett does some deep dives into what it means to be a witch, what it means to be a wizard, how they’re the same, how they’re different—and why none of that actually matters.  For something published over thirty years ago, I think Equal Rites holds up incredibly well as a conversation on gender and society, and it’s still just as relevant as ever.  It just goes to show that a) writing with thought, kindness, and care makes for a timeless product, and b) society really hasn’t made that much progress since 1987, has it?  It’s a little sad that the issues Pratchett wants us to think about here are still just as recognizable and just as common in the world as they were thirty-three years ago.

(Kind of as a side note, there are definitely things I don’t think Pratchett considered about the basic premise he’s set up, namely that just because Esk was born with a certain set of genitals, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything about her gender.  I’ve seen a lot of discussion, especially on the internet, about trans Esk, and trans wizards and witches, and what that would mean for the Discworld universe—really interesting stuff, things people should definitely look into, but not what I’m going to focus on here.  I would highly recommend that people think about it, especially cis people like me. It would be wrong to go through Equal Rites without even bringing it up, even if I read the text as more as a discussion of gender roles rather than gender identity. Since Pratchett was a cishet man writing this in the 80s, I’m also willing to bet it’s what he was intending. But it’s still an important conversation to have.)

Anyway, let’s jump in and look at the dichotomy that Pratchett is setting up for us!

What is a witch?  What is a wizard?  How are they the same, and how are they different?  Why does that split matter?

I did the messy work of going through my copy of the book and highlighting every instance where definitions are provided for ‘witches’ and ‘wizards,’ specifically so that I could run a compare-contrast, and I want to point out right off the bat that basically all of the details on so-called ‘defining’ features of these two schools of magic are provided through characters and their POV—direct dialogue and thoughts—not by word-of-god narration or omniscient POV.  So, obviously, we have to run all this through the internal bias filter; this stuff is all what people believe about wizards, witches, and magic, not necessarily how things are.

What makes a witch, according to Equal Rites:

Magic out of the ground

Dress in black to look the part

Witches bow. They’ve got to be different from everyone else; it’s “part of the secret” (headology)

Cunning, old (or they try to look it)

Suspicious, homely, and organic magic

Appearance of magic can do more work than actual magic (headology)

“Leaving the world as it was and changing the people”

They can “Borrow” and work gently

“Fighting her [Granny] was like swatting a fly on your own nose”: if you don’t struggle and make waves, you can do a lot with less outright power

Do the messy, practical stuff, not just the flash

Always, “without exception, women”

What makes a wizard:

Magic out of the sky

Over-the-top ways of dressing up to look the part, often with robes and sequins

“Books and stars and jommetry.”  (Granny absolutely does not know what geometry is, or what it is for.)

“Talked too much and pinned spells down in books like butterflies,” and looked at “numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing”

Wise, old

Powerful, complex, and mysterious magics

Magic is condensed out of the air and into the staff, and used by the wizard

“Magic changed the world in some way, wizards thought there was no other use for it”

Can’t “Borrow,” only take/seize control

Too busy with the “infinite” and “never noticing the definite”

 Always, “without exception, men”

Witches “normally work with what actually exists in the world,” while a wizard can give thoughts shape, “put flesh on his imagination.” Witches learn to walk softly and move over and around an obstacle, while wizards puff up and fight to go straight through it.

Witches “need a head.”  Wizards “need…a heart.”

In short, witches are self-taught, intuitive, grounded in reality, and fluid in their magic use—when they actually use it at all.  They work with what they feel and what they know about the world.  Wizards are academics and learn from set rules and their books, and their magic is often over-complex, overpowered, and difficult to control.  Wizards are more rigid and structured in their magic use—ritualistic, even—but less connected to reality or grounded in the real world.

And, of course, both groups wear fabulous outfits and dramatic pointed hats!

Just look at ‘em.  Such wonderful weirdos.

The more I look at the ‘definitions’ like this, all laid out and proper, the more I start to think that the witches who do things we would consider ‘bad’ witchcraft are just correctly using elements of wizardry. For example, think about Mrs. Earwig, with her books and rituals, her special tools and fancy dress code; even though she doesn’t focus on the world around her or the people in it, the way a ‘good’ witch would, she’s good at what she does, and so certain in herself that she can stare down the glamor of the Queen of the Elves without flinching in The Shepherd’s Crown.  On the other hand, we have our classic ‘bad’ wizard, Rincewind, who demonstrates some exceptionally witchy tendencies—he’s excellent at headology even if actual magic isn’t really in his wheelhouse, as Interesting Times makes pretty obvious.  And despite the fact that he’s a coward-sprinter who’d really rather avoid danger if at all possible, when it comes down to it, he’s still the man who’ll put himself between the world and a great evil with nothing but trembling knees, a spine reluctantly turned from water to iron, and a half-brick in a sock.  As Granny would say, he walks the line.

So, really, what does gender actually have to do with it? Why is there a distinction at all? Is it actually important?

And to make a long novel short, what Pratchett is saying in Equal Rites is that it’s not.  There’s no difference between witchcraft and wizardry that actually makes for a good reason for a gendered split.  Men aren’t inherently better at math and academia, or as Granny says, “jommetry;” women aren’t inherently more practical, emotional, or intuitive.  That’s a social construct, not a biological one.

And beyond that, even, there’s no real reason for the two ‘types’ of magic to be split up at all.  They might be different ways of operating, but it’s all magic.  Anyone could do either.  Or neither.  Or both.

There’s an early conversation between Death and the wizard whose mix-up with his staff marked Esk as a wizard—just after the man has died, when he’s realized that he’s passed his magic along to a female and, in his mind, made a terrible mistake.  “I was foolish,” he says, “I assumed the magic would know what it was doing.”  But instead of agreeing, Death tells him, “PERHAPS IT DOES.”

It all comes down to what Esk calls magic beyond magic—the reality of the thing beyond the concepts we’ve created to define and confine it.  If we’ve invented these distinctions between ‘types’ of magic, between ‘types’ of gender and the self, then what remains once we’ve removed them?  What happens when we peel them away and see what’s left behind? Why do we cling to our invented categories, the things that limit both sides and create conflict?

I really like that Equal Rites never puts Esk into a specific category.  She doesn’t end the book as a ‘true’ wizard or a ‘true’ witch, but she also doesn’t fully reject either.  As sad as I am that Pratchett never goes much deeper into Esk (her brief appearance in I Shall Wear Midnight doesn’t actually explain much), I’m fine with not having a concrete answer.  One, the other, both, neither—it’s not the point.  Magic is magic.  People are people.  Gender is, honestly, irrelevant.  Beyond the academic divides we’ve made for ourselves, it’s all the same stuff given different names.  Esk does magic, and she is herself, and in the end, she’s not bound by the limitations that witches and wizards put on their reality.

Infinite possibilities!

It’s something the other wizards and witches never get to have.  They’re so locked into what they believe magic to be, what they believe themselves to be, that they never really look outside those boxes.

It’s wild to me that the concept Pratchett is introducing here—specifically about wizards and witches and gender—basically disappears as long as Esk does.  Esk is a really cool character; the idea of female wizards and male witches is fascinating. I want more of all this.  So, I’m genuinely sad that Esk doesn’t reappear again until the Tiffany Aching books, specifically I Shall Wear Midnight—in 2010, more than twenty years after Equal Rites was published.  And we don’t get another wizard or witch or magic-user in general working outside their typical gender alignment until Geoffrey appears in 2015 in The Shepherd’s Crown and asks to become a witch, and even then, the witches take to calling him a ‘calm-weaver’ instead.

I like that the idea eventually comes full circle.  I don’t like that the circle takes thirty years, and goes basically unacknowledged in the meantime.

But the point Pratchett is making is still there in the Discworld, and it never really goes away.  Remember how I said earlier that this stuff—all this ‘witches do and are x, wizards do and are y, that’s how it has to be’ nonsense—it’s all what people believe about magic and such, not how things are?  Pratchett and Discworld are huge on belief.  Belief shapes reality, belief becomes real, and we see that over and over again.  But part of what Pratchett is saying here is that even if we all believe in something, then it doesn’t mean that it’s right.  Just because something is doesn’t mean it should be.

More importantly, though, it also doesn’t mean we’ve locked ourselves in place.  Esk proves that much.  We learn. We grow.  We change our understanding of our reality and ourselves, and we believe something different.  And then the world changes, too.

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Notes:

We get to see Granny Weatherwax for the first time!  She’s absolutely fabulous and I love this sharp-tongued bitter old lady so much.  In later books starring the witches we will focus in a lot more on Granny herself as a witch and a person, rather than just as a teacher.

Granny Weatherwax is said to live in the village of Bad Ass in Equal Rites.  In future books, she will live in Lancre.

There actually aren’t that many footnotes in this one.  Since I kind of just…expect footnotes to appear in every book Terry Pratchett touches, despite the fact that they’re super rare everywhere else, it’s almost weirder to not see a footnote every page and a half.

Esk does some magical nonsense—mainly by not realizing the magic she’s doing should be impossible—that ends up “changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways.”  This is probably part of Pratchett’s attempt to slowly shift what he started establishing in The Colour of Magic to what we’ll see in later Discworld books, moving from High Fantasy to more of a, I don’t know, steampunk-y magical surrealism?  What even is the Discworld, I ask you?  It’s impossible to describe.  But what Esk does to it here is described as follows: “the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence.  You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.”

We get our first mention of sourcerers here in Equal Rites, but they’re not very well defined. We’re just told that they’re now extinct.  They’ll turn up in a lot more detail in a couple books, of course, once we get to Sourcery.

Favorite Quotes:

“I know what I mean, she told herself.  Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push.  Anyone could do it.  There’s nothing magical about it.  All the funny words and waving the hands is just…it’s only for…  She stopped, surprised at herself.  She knew what she meant.  The idea was right up there in the front of her mind.  But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.”

“‘But,’ he said, ‘if it’s wizard magic she’s got, learning witchery won’t be any good, will it?  You said they’re different.’  ‘They’re both magic.  If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least ride a horse.’”

“The old witch yanked the staff out of its shadow and waved it vaguely at Esk.  ‘Here.  It’s yours. Take it.  I just hope this is the right thing to do.’  In fact the presentation of a staff to an apprentice wizard is usually a very impressive ceremony, especially if the staff has been inherited from an elder mage; by ancient lore there is a long and frightening ordeal involving masks and hoods and swords and fearful oaths about people’s tongues being cut out and their entrails torn by wild birds and their ashes scattered to the eight winds and so on.  After some hours of this sort of thing the apprentice can be admitted to the brotherhood of the Wise and Enlightened.  There is also a long speech.  By sheer coincidence Granny got the essence of it in a nutshell.”

“‘Never mind what I said, or common sense or anything.  Sometimes you just have to go the way things take you, and I reckon you’re going to wizard school one way or the other.’  Esk considered this.  ‘You mean it’s my destiny?’ she said at last.  Granny shrugged.  ‘Something like that.  Probably. Who knows?’”

“Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp.  Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed.  The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”

“‘Why are you holding that broomstick?’ he said.  Esk looked at it as though she had never seen it before.  ‘Everything’s got to be somewhere,’ she said.”

“Why was it that, when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft?  She’d be both, or none at all.  And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.  She’d be a witch and a wizard too.  And she would show them.”

“‘Million-to-one chances,’ she said, ‘crop up nine times out of ten.’”

“For a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him.”

[oceanmonsters]

the problem with Tall Girl

this turned into more than an essay than I was expecting so get comfy:

Look, I get it, I know I’m a short bitch so I don’t know what it’s like to be tall etc. etc. and I’m sure there are a lot of tall girls who do / have felt insecure about their height, and maybe there are even girls who’ve faced problems similar to those in the movie. But this movie... I had so many problems with it, from the plot to the cast to the writing.

First off, the premise: a movie about a tall girl who gets picked on and harassed for her height trying to find love. On the surface, doesn’t seem too bad. And I’m not gonna deny that the main characters life isn’t harder because she’s tall than it would’ve been if she was short. But here’s the thing: tall women aren’t insulted considered less attractive for being outside what’s considered normal (if it was about that, tall guys would face the same thing) - it’s specifically about not being considered feminine enough, or rather conforming to the standard that women are supposed to be smaller and more petite than men. Jodi, however is played by a blond, cis, white girl who conforms to typical female beauty standards in pretty much every way other than being taller than average. And I’m not saying that her height or any problems she may faces because of it are invalidated by those things, but in the movie it’s like all of the rest of those things are invalidated on account of her height. WOC (especially black women) are far far far more likely to face adversity for not looking “feminine” enough and for years have been insulted and degraded for looking “masculine” - being too hairy or too tall or too large or our features not fitting eurocentric female beauty standards. The same point stands for trans women and even more so for trans woc. So while I’m not saying the kind of situation in the movie could never ever happen in real life, the fact that they’re making a movie about overcoming adversity faced due to not conforming to female beauty standards and making a thin, cis, white girl out to be the one facing the most adversity with the woc in the story either bullying the protag for not conforming to those standards or being the best friend who defends and supports the protagonist is pretty tone deaf. This isn’t just a normal movie situation where I think that it would’ve been nice for it to be more diverse or have a main character of colour - the premise would make much so much more sense with, for example, a tall black girl or trans girl at the lead because they’re so much more likely to face the problems faced by the main character in this movie.

Those were all thoughts I had even before the movie even came out, just from watching the trailer and reading the description. I tried to go into the movie with an open mind, thinking it would maybe exceed my expectations and I was being too harsh based on two minute trailer. However, almost straight off the bat the movie really tested my good intentions. Less than 5 minutes into the movie, Jodi is narrating how hard her childhood. And I could sympathise with her - children can be cruel and it can be tough to stick out like that in such an obvious way. I don’t doubt her childhood was harder on account of her height. But any goodwill is immediately destroyed by Jodi asking the audience “You think your life is hard?” and challenging them to “beat” her struggle. Because yes, while I’ll admit being tall has probably made her life harder up until this point, she’s still a straight, cis, rich white girl! Her height doesn’t make it harder for her to get a job or make her more likely to lose her job or to be the victim of a hate crime or be murdered by the police. And yet she still thinks her life is harder than anyone else in the school - where her main problem is apparently being asked “How’s the weather up there?” constantly. Jodi’s friend Fareeda even completely goes off at some random guy for saying it to her. Is it annoying to be asked that, constantly? Yes, probably. But the movie treats it as if it’s literally a slur. The movie constantly goes on about the “adversity” Jodi faces, but other than being picked on by one other girl (who is an asshole to Jodi and only Jodi for seemingly no reason whatsoever other than that she’s a Mean Girl) the “How’s the weather up there?” comments are literally the only “adversity” she ever faces over the course of the movie. Apart from said mean girl, there’s no one else making mean comments or laughing at her behind her back - she’s largely ignored by her peers. By teen movie standards, she’s not even receiving the typical treatment faced by the unpopular and bullied protagonists - no one’s spreading rumours about her or trying to ruin her life or throwing slushies at her or really harassing her in any way. But the movie still tries to push the narrative of Jodi facing so much adversity. There’s a part in the movie where Jodi’s mom tells her she has to stand strong in the face of adversity, and starts talking about all the problems she faced in high school for being so beautiful and popular - for example that she once had 10 guys ask her to a dance. Jodi looks completely incredulous that her mom considers this adversity and emphatically responds “No, it doesn’t.” when she’s asked if it is. The screenwriter somehow fails to see the irony in the fact that Josie herself is shown interest in by three different guys over the course of the movie (yet still continues to lament throughout the movie that “tall girls don’t get happy endings” and that all people see is her height and not her or something along those lines). This scene is so lacking in self awareness about the movie it’s in that it’s almost a metaphor for me watching the movie - me as Jodi, watching the movie and thinking “She really thinks THIS is adversity?” Another thing the movie seems to fail to consider is that Jodi’s problems are very much limited to high school. Yes, some people are assholes to her and she feels insecure but that’s definitely not a unique experience in high school. And once she actually moves into adulthood and the real world, she’s not really gonna face the same issues. As I said earlier, her height is not going to make it harder for her to get a job or make her more likely to lose her job or to be the victim of a hate crime or be murdered by the police, whereas these are issues that POC and LGBT people may have to deal with for the rest of their lives. The only way that being tall is going to significantly affect the rest of her life is in dating & finding a romantic partner, but even within the movie her height clearly doesn’t hold her back that much because 3 GUYS pursue her over the course of the movie.

While I do think the premise was bland anyway, the movie could’ve been somewhat enjoyable if they stopped trying to convince us and shoving down our throats that Jodi’s life is harder than everyone else’s and actually made the issue to be Jodi’s own insecurities and shown her overcoming those, instead - and maybe they would’ve had more time to actually focus on developing the relationship between the eventual endgame couple.

I was really hoping at some point there would be a scene where Jodi is being self-pitying and Fareeda (or hell, even Kimmy) were to sit her down and say “Look, I know you have problems, I know some people have been assholes to you because you were an easy target to make fun of for being different but you’re still a rich abled conventionally attractive cis white girl. I’m not saying your life hasn’t been more difficult because of your height, but it doesn’t make your life more difficult than everyone else’s,” and then maybe made a point about the adversity they face as WOC. I was so expecting Fareeda to do something like this in the bathroom scene but all she does is try to be Jodi’s emotional support which Jodi is ungrateful for. Which brings us up to the last point of how badly the characters of colour are treated in this movie. Fareeda is literally a walking “angry black girl”+”sassy supportive black friend” stereotype. Her only purposes in the plot are to go off at people when Jodi’s being “harassed”, support and uplift Jodi constantly even though she’s completely ungrateful, and be her friends’ dumping ground for their emotional problems. We literally know nothing about her other than this. She only exists to support the white characters. Kimmy, once again, is a one dimensional stereotype. She’s basically a caricature of a movie Mean Girl, with absolutely no reason given to why she’s such an asshole to Jodi. She’s not shown being a dick to anyone else, she’s not shown to be the queen bee of the school trying to consolidate her power, she’s just a pretty girl who apparently only has two interests - hating Kimmy for literally no reason, and being crowned homecoming queen. Her only purpose in the plot is as a device to prevent Stig from being with Kimmy. In fact, that’s the only purpose of the remaining two characters of colour as well - as romantic obstructions to create drama in the central white love triangle. There’s literally a scene where each white character (Stig, Jodi, Jack) is kissing their respective love interest (who each happen to be POC) but are distracted by / looking at each other instead of their love interests. They have no character or development or anything beyond being eventually rejected love interests to the white people. The only thing we know about Liz is that she’s gluten free, but the only reason for that is for her to have something in common with Jack. The school they go to looks very diverse - a lot of the extras & background characters are POC which imo just makes the movie worse because they’re making Jodi out to be the poor girl who’s life is harder than everybody else’s while all the people making fun of her & making her life difficult are POC. Literally all the people in the movie who ask her how the weather is up there are black. Most of the girls laughing at her while Kimmy makes fun of her are WOC. It was like they wanted the movie to look diverse for woke points but didn’t actually bother to have any of the characters of colour be developed or have any complexity or actually be relevant to the plot other than to obstruct the white romances and help the white people realise what they really want. They literally only existed as plot devices, not as people. And yes, Stig’s only purpose was to have Jodi realise her worth and that Jack was the right person for her but his character has some kind of emotional depth and character arc. He’s given a motivation and reason behind his actions - he likes being the popular kid and he lets it get to his head. Nothing of the kind is afforded to Kimmy or Schnipper.

I think the worst thing about this movie is how inoffensive it seems on the surface. It’s racially diverse, it’s about a girl overcoming her insecurities and learning to lover herself, what could be the problem? Which is why I don’t necessarily blame people for missing how shitty it actually is beneath the surface. But what I definitely don’t appreciate is (white) people insisting that the people who are rightfully pointing out this movie’s flaws are just being mean or bitter or being “discriminative” for “hating on the movie just because the main character is white” when that’s just so far from the actual point. I think the moral of the story is that it’s not enough to just think critically about the media you’re consuming, sometimes people need to actually listen to marginalised people when we’re telling them that something is not okay and not just insists that we’re being mean for no reason and then maybe we can avoid more movies like this in the future.

[whitehotharlots]

TERF war

I took feminist lit and theory courses as an undergraduate, in 2003 and 04. For the time, the courses were incredibly trans inclusive (bear in mind this was a year before Jon Stewart would dismiss Dennis Kucinich’s suggestion of appointing a trans SCOTUS justice, referring to the hypothetic appointee as “the honorable chick with dick”). A good 20% of the course was dedicated to reading books by and about trans people. We even got a visit from Leslie Feinberg—the person who literally coined the term transgender, and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

The foundational, explicit understanding I was taught in these classes was that biological sex is innate, a fixed fact of a person’s bodily being, whereas gender is a fluid and malleable social construct. No one could have gotten through these classes thinking the opposite.

The utility of this understanding is easy to grasp: by denying the fixity of gender, feminists were able to undermine social and interpersonal structures that had traditionally denied women freedom, choice, dignity, and agency. A woman was not biologically destined to a life of domestic servitude; nor was she naturally inclined to be more submissive or deferential. Most germane to this discussion, this understanding validated the existence and experience of gender non-conforming lesbians: just because they were not traditionally feminine didn’t mean they weren’t women, or that they were in need of any fixing.

Very recently—within the last 5 or 6 years, as the abstract language of feminism has permeated the wider culture and gotten watered down for sake of digestibility—the poles have shifted. Now, we are told, it is actually gender which is fixed and innate, a metaphysical force lurking within us, suppressed by social pressures, unleashed gloriously with the aid of surgery and supplemental hormones. Biological sex, meanwhile, is a construct that doesn’t exist and shouldn’t even factor in to one’s analysis of gender relations. Sex is hereby an utter fabrication, a projection of the sick evils of normalized (cis male) consciousness engrained upon people’s erstwhile blank bodies.  Taken to extreme, we are told this therefore means trans women can get periods and that there is “literally zero” difference between trans and cis women. Ergo, having a uterus doesn’t make you a woman, biological or otherwise—it simply makes you a “uterus haver.”

The utility of this shift comes from the fact that trans self-actualization relies not just on social positioning but on bodily experience. Trans peoples’ mental wellbeing often hinges on their having access to the medical interventions required to get their body to conform to their innate sense of gender. Since we live in a country where few people have access to basic healthcare, trans people have had to medicalize their position—assert a fundamental and harmful mind/body disconnect—in order to have these interventions regarded as essential, rather than elective.  

So while it’s perfectly understandable and useful, this shift nonetheless represents a profound upending of decades of feminist thought, and I’m shocked that it doesn’t appear to have even been deliberated upon. It was asserted through tumblrs and tweets and everydayfeminism dot com posts, everyone kind of nodded their heads in agreement, and that has been that. For the most part.

Now, we might able to say that the reversal is simply academic: trans people and cis women each need to advance their respective theories of gender and sex to serve as the basis of political programs that might afford safety and respect to each group. There’s no need, necessarily, to concern ourselves too exclusively with the details. Consider a parallel: anyone who was actually involved in theoretical side of gay rights in the 70’s-90’s knows that saying gay people were “born gay” was not a universally agreed upon assertion. Many argued that this was essentially a reactionary frame which stigmatized homosexuality, making it seem like gays would have chosen to be straight if only their brains or genes hadn’t screwed things up. Eventually however, the “born this way” line prevailed, became mainstream, and was the basis of most of the gay rights campaigns of this century. Most of the people who disagreed with it on academic grounds still supported it, at least publicly, once they became aware of its political utility. Why can’t we do the same with today’s split conceptualizations of gender and sex?

Seriously, why can’t we?

The sex/gender-fluid/innate reversal came around the time when trans people started receiving their first regular, non-dismissive appearances in US media. This was the first time most people had been bothered to think seriously about gender, and the first time that the existence of trans people was admitted to as something that wasn’t freakish or a punchline. That’s a huge positive, obviously. And it happened with surprisingly little mainstream pushback (compare the responses to Laverne Cox’s appearance in Orange is the New Black with the intense outrage that accompanied Ellen Degeneres coming out just 15 years earlier—the difference is astounding).

This is where things get troublesome. Many established feminists, especially second wavers, were upset to see their life’s work upended in such a way. Some reacted horribly dismissively. Others wrote thoughtful, seemingly even-handed pieces that nonetheless seemed calculated to subtly dismiss the experiences of trans people, like by repeatedly misgendering trans authors. And still others respectfully expressed objections to or concerns with mainstream trans rights assertions. These writers tended to operate in either academic or upper-middlebrow spaces, and their prose is consequently calm, erudite, and often super dense. The rebuttals to these pieces came from places like jezebel, loveisarainbow dot com, or geocities.com/sunsetstrip/3765/madtransbitch. These pieces are easily digestible, frequently angry or even violent, and hyperbolic without exception, accusing the cis feminists of fomenting or even committing violence against trans people. In the court of woke public opinion, the second wavers did not stand a chance. They were accused—sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly—of abject hatred of trans people, blamed for suicides and murders, and grouped in with the racists and homophobes of yore. Within a very short period of time, those who haven’t learned to be quiet have been shunted away to the darkest academic backwaters (or they live in the UK, where university cultural studies is dominated by second wavers).

But, again, why not just be quiet? Honestly, that’s my preferred approach. Maybe it would be different if I had based an academic career on one assertion over another. But overall it seems like both groups should still be able to pursue their own political agendas on their own terms, so why bother discussing this contradiction? And just on a personal (that is, cowardly) note, I might not agree that biological sex is a construct, and I certainly don’t think gender is innate, but I also think trans people should have easy access to medical intervention, so why not let the inversion stand? 

But herein lies the problem: politically, the two groups are not separate. One of the most frequently levied criticisms against certain feminist authors and movements is a lack of trans-inclusivity. Pink pussy hats were verboten within hours of their debut. Colleges have cancelled productions of The Vagina Monologues (not because it’s overwrought treacle, but because it talks about vaginas, which makes it de facto transphobic). These incidents may seem trifling by themselves, but they serve as avatars of a very real and important conflict: cis feminists are being demanded to center their feminism in an understanding of sex and gender that directly contradicts the base of their ideology. Because of this, actions and symbols that were recently taken as signs of love and solidarity are now being cast as hate speech. Cis women are being told, literally, that they have no right to call themselves women (trans women are “women,” cis women are “menstruaters”). Cis lesbians are called homophobic for not being attracted to people with penises. In short, a trans movement that purports to dedicate itself to ensuring that its purveyors be given the right to be recognized by own their self-understanding is doing so by denying that same right to others.

The only possible result here is a complete collapse anything resembling a unified feminist movement. Meaning, I guess, that it fits in perfectly with the atomized understandings of social justice that stem from internet-based discourse. I suppose I could end with a plea for decency and understanding, perhaps even outline a alignment that would allow for trans advocates and cis feminists to recognize tactical points of departure from one another without fear of committing literal assault or denying the existence of one another. But we’re past that point, I think. There’s no more space for humane liberalism. Everything’s a knock-down, drag-out these days. We don’t even pretend to want to help one another.

Addendum:

People are raising the fair point that a vast majority of trans people don’t subscribe to the sort of wrecker beliefs I outline here. That is absolutely true and part of what makes the shittiness of online gender discourse so tragic. I did not mean to suggest that these beliefs are at all common among trans people. I intended to criticize only the shitty woke media apparatus (everydayfeminism et al) that occludes any attempt at effectively theorizing gender because it prioritizes hyperbolic victim mongering over achieving political goals.

[trans-advice]

Hi, I'm a trans woman and I need a little advice . So uh I tried to come out to my parents as trans recently. They just straight up denied it. Then later I tried again (my dad instigated it) and he blamed it on mental illness and said that they weren't even going to try to respect what I told them. And now they're treating me more like a boy than ever. It's all really starting to get to me and making me doubt myself. Not even just my gender, just myself as a whole. What should I do?

first of all, consider the source: your parents are acting like ...(i’m trying not to curse/swear) ...annoying people on the internet who intentionally try to trigger people because they forgot the word of their goal is to ... (again, trying here) ...“tick someone off” instead of giving others a psychological breakdown. so instead they try to give other a psychological breakdown.

basically, your parents are bullies right now.

so what i would recommend is to hold your ground, find places where you are accepted, minimize contact with your parents (so if you live with them, stay out all day if possble), so on & so forth.

now while conducting research that affirms who you are can be important (say how the transgender identity is not a mental illness & so forth) because it can help you batten down your hatches & feel less secure & more like yourself, i wouldn’t recommend sharing these with them immediately, because you will be transgender regardless of what they think or how long it takes for them to catch up.

we do have links in some of the masterposts on this blog. articles explaining how transgender people & distress work are common. we also have a tag regarding theology aka religion affirming transgender people. generally, i like to say god likes to mix & match & diversity is the survival strategy of life aka evolution.

point being, another thing to take note that for cis people the closest experience they have transitioning is puberty, (which to be fair can be a traumatic era that they just wants to run away from). usually our media depictions of puberty involve a ton of teenage sexuality (because again, everyone wants to run away from it, but they need to find something good about it or else the people going thru it will revolt).

the relevant parts to relate to (cis) people about puberty & trans people’s transitioning is: 

we are often taught in private the various gender roles of our (designated) gender, 

we get taught how to manage our bodies since they’re changing (similar to like physical therapy & other disability accomodations),

we also get taught all of this gender related stuff without having our legal gender markers or names getting revoked. and when we do, we call it out as toxic! (with discussions of “pretty hurts” “macho bull$hit”, eating disorders, and bad boys.).

there are no schools for learning these lessons for transgender people. we have to live our lives while learning these on the side. which to be honest, has been true for (cis) middle-schoolers & teenagers too.

i want to mention this to you because trans people & cis people are similar barring transphobia. if cis people didn’t go thru puberty/transitioning to gender roles as well, then we’d probably have a lot more diverse gender expressions & diversity because there wouldn’t be coercion. so if you’re dealing with people attacking you for transitioning, basically stick to cleaning up & looking decent since it seems everyone relates to that struggle. also cleaning up your life in ways that bring you joy will help too.

(i sense this is stuff that’s been floating around in my head for a while. however, when you a have a plan, there’s less to be unsure about which can help with insecurities. also it seems that your parents definitely aren’t going to be helpful with transitioning, so if transitioning is kind of explained then we have lift-off, right?)

good luck, peace & love,

eve

[midnight-fox-boy]

This is why overlapping identities are important

So here’s the thing. People like to point out how “X is just Y!!! Just admit you’re Y-phobic!!” Because they see overlaps in definitions. The reason why these exist is because people deserve to feel comfortable in their label. For instance, just because your pansexual doesn’t mean you’re biphobic, you just don’t personally feel comfortable with that label, or feel it doesn’t grab the whole picture of who you are. Another controversial example is homoflexible and heteroflexible. People constantly shout how it’s biphobic and they’re just bisexual with a preference...When..that isn’t the case. People don’t understand that “exceptions” to a usual orientation aren’t the same as a preference. A preference is preferring something over something else, but you still like that something else to a certain degree. An exception is different. An exception is like a very rare occurance. For example, Maybe you usually eat fruit and have no interest in vegetables. But very very rarely or under specific circumstances, you do have an interest in eating vegetables. It’s not a preference, you just usually don’t like vegetables. Hetero/homoflexible are the same. You are USUALLY ONLY attracted to a certain gender, but you acknowledge that you maybe have been attracted to someone else in the past, but they were an exception, and you like nobody else sexually/romantically of that gender, just that specific person. Knowing this happened in the past, you may not want to exactly call yourself gay or straight, but bisexual doesn’t feel right either. So homo/heteroflexible is I suppose a “Middle ground” for lack of a better word. You aren’t bicurious, because you know you have been attracted to someone of that gender, rather than being unsure or curious of how you feel.

Pansexual, Polysexual, And hetero/homoflexible do not erase the meaning of bisexual and they don’t exclude them. They’re all a part of the same pie. They all experience some form of multisexual attraction, but they are all separate pieces of the puzzle. It is wrong to accuse bisexual people of being transphobic just for being bisexual, just as it’s wrong of accusing someone who is the others of being biphobic, just for being something other than bisexual. (Both instances exist, but they do not make up a large portion of each community, there’s exclusionists in basically ALL communities)

Now onto the gender side of this. We see terms that widely overlap, but have slightly different meanings. For instance, there are many ways to describe my gender, but I picked the one that made me most happy and comfortable and I felt it captured how I feel about my gender better than the other labels I knew of. I identify as an Agender Guy. Which to me, means that most of the time I don’t feel any gender, and rarely experience feeling male. But I always want to pass as male, be perceived as a guy around cis people, I wish I had a male body, and I don’t mind being gendered as a male. I am agender, but I’m also very much a guy. Even more rare than male, I feel almost androgynous, but I don’t really include it in my gender label as it’s very rare and is more of a more androgynous masculine feeling)  Gender is more than the gendered feeling you feel. Your connection to gender can vary. Which is why we have masculine-aligned nonbinary people, because they may not experience the male gender, but they feel they’re very tied to masculinity.

There are definitely other terms that could describe me, as mine is just a mix of the words “agender” and “guy” with my own meaning. I defined it my way.

For instance,

Demiboy,

Transmasculine agender

Transmasculine nonbinary

Proxvir

Boyflux/Genderflux

Agender masculine (Similarly, Libramasculine, I coined agender masculine as an alternative if you don’t want to use zodiac names, and it has a slightly different definition)

Nonbinary Trans guy

Genderqueer

Bigender (Agender + Male)

Trigender (Agender + Male + Androgyne-masculine/Androx)

Genderfluid

The list could probably go on.

My point is, is that labels exist to help us define ourselves and find communities of like-identified people who we can connect to. One of these labels never takes meaning away from other similar labels. They all have meaning to those who use it. You’re not X-phobic for being something other than “X”. You’re X-phobic if you have negative thoughts and feelings about the “X” identity or anyone who uses that identity. Gender is more than black and white, and we’re blessed with the language people have brought to the table. Because it gives us more options than the general LGBTQIA. But we still all fall under that umbrella. There are people who have used a common label for a long time because it was closest to how they felt but still weren’t content but found something similar but different and felt less paranoid about being “different than most people who identify as X” and felt happier with that label.

Don’t let ANYONE tell you who you are. YOU know who you are! If polysexual makes you happy and feel good and bisexual doesn’t? That’s okay! It exists for people who feel polysexual describes them better.

If bisexual makes you feel good but you could technically identify as pansexual but it didn’t feel right? That’s okay! Bisexual makes YOU happy that’s what matters.

Maybe you identify as the lesser known omnisexual but keep being told you’re just a pansexual who “wants to feel special”. You matter too! Your identity and how you label yourself is completely valid.

Maybe you identify as an abinary gender like neutrois, maverique, or agender but don’t feel female and are AMAB, but are also transitioning medically because that’s the body you want and not tied to your gender, Because sex doesn’t always equal gender. You exist and matter, and you if you don’t feel demigirl or something similar fits you, then you keep the identity you have!

Nobody has to fit EXACTLY into strict definitions to identify as something that feels comfortable. Sometimes the best we can do is find something “close enough” until we find something that works. Bisexual means 2 or more, and if you’re attracted to men, women, and nonbinary people, that is 2 or more. So you don’t have to pick pansexual or polysexual if you’re happy. Some definitions are left more open for that reason. Polysexual means many but not all genders. It doesn’t specify how many you have to be attracted to. Attracted to men, and all masculine genders?  Attracted to all genders but men? Attracted to all nonbinary genders but not people who are strictly binary? Those all COULD fall under polysexual

Sorry this was long, but I’m tired of seeing comments like “X IS JUST Y!!!” and “Y-PHOBIC!!” When that doesn’t have to be the case. When I was explaining hetero/homoflexible, people kept calling me biphobic. All because I said this identity exists and how SOME people see the differences between the two. Exceptions does not equal preference. But they don’t seem to get that. But others who were bi agreed with me. There’s nothing wrong, transphobic, or enbyphobic about being bisexual. The identity itself isn’t any of those things, though people who ARE bisexual CAN be those things, just like any other LGBTQIA+ person can be “phobic” against other LGBTQIA+ labels. We’re all under this umbrella together, after all, so we shouldn’t be trying to invalidate other people’s experiences when we don’t sit in their shoes or experience their lives and emotions.

I’m also tired of being told I can’t be agender AND a guy. Because the way some people see gender is very inaccurate. It’s a spectrum, and you can fall on multiple spots on the spectrum in different ways, shapes, and shades.

Keep being you, and don’t let people gatekeep your experiences.

[mycroftrh]

Hey can u explain your cis savior post? I'm just curious to hear your analysis about trans fanfic tbh since it's a topic that interests me

Ack, I’m so sorry I haven’t answered this yet, I’m on vacation and I haven’t had time.  I hope you see this, anon!

First, to be clear, I really, really love transfic.  It was a transfic that originally started me on the trip to realizing I was trans, 8 years ago when transfic was very thin on the ground and the only thing thinner was trans representation in anything else, so it’s… more important to me, personally, than I can really express.

I have written a lot of transfic (the ones I have published on Ao3 are a Handmaid’s Tale (novel) fic, a Daredevil (MCU) fic, a Star Wars (Sequel Trilogy) fic, a Batfamily (DC) fic, and a Supernatural fic, but I’ve written a lot more that’s not on Ao3).  I’ve got two trans headcanon blogs, @onlytheforceisbinary and @transdctv.

I have the “Trans Character” tag search on Ao3 bookmarked and I have gone through all 1240 pages of it.  (In most cases only reading the fandom and scrolling down, admittedly, but I have read in full literally thousands of transfics.)

So my point is - I love transfic!  I really, really do!  But… it also has a tendency to piss me off, for a number of reasons.

There are a lot of tropes that come up over and over, like the Same Name Change (Once I was Thomas… but now I am… Thomasette!) and they make my eyes roll a bit but don’t really upset me.

There are some things that do really bug me, like making someone trans just for their body (e.g., so they can get a male character pregnant without technically writing mpreg, or a cis female writing a trans man menstruating so she can project the unpleasantness onto a favoured male character, or of course the classic PIV But It’s Slash).

But, as I said in the post a few days ago, a whole lot of my serious issues can be narrowed down to the Cis Savior Trope.

As I have it conceived, the concept is based on that of the “White Savior” trope.  Here’s Wikipedia’s description: “the white savior is a cinematic trope in which a white character rescues people of color from their plight. The white savior is portrayed as messianic and often learns something about themselves in the process of rescuing.”

And that’s what I find, over and over, in transfics.  There are two basic types: the Lover and the Mentor.

In both, the trans character is terrified to come out to the cis savior because of being “wrong”, “defective”, “disgusting”, “not a real [x]”, etcetera, etcetera.  Sometimes also reasons that come up more frequently in real life, like fear of being kicked out or assaulted, but the most common emphasis is on negative self-image.  Sometimes, the trans character has never heard of trans people before and just knows they’re “broken” etc.

Then, somehow they are outed to the cis character, against their will almost without exception - and shock!  The cis character is incredibly accepting, and unrealistically knowledgeable!

The Lover will say things like “It’s okay, I love you for you, not your parts, I’m not revolted by the mere sight of you”.  The Mentor will say “I have only learned you are trans three minutes ago but I have already planned to pay for your surgery which I assume you want”.

The trans character will be wearing Ace bandages and the Savior will be greatly distressed because of course all good cis people know you shouldn’t bind with bandages and they say “Never do this again, I can’t believe you would bind like this!  I will buy you a binder with your logo on it/in some other improbable pattern!”

If the trans character doesn’t know they’re trans, the cis character does.  Why, they know exactly what all these feelings you’ve been struggling with for so long are.  You’ve never googled somehow, but the cis savior has, has had extensive training in Trans 101 and can explain your own identity to you in detail.

While this is the most common storyline, the Cis Savior appears in many other shapes.  For example, in the afore-mentioned trans-guy-menstruates storyline, they start moaning and immediately the Cis Savior knows that they are in great pain because of their Curse and runs off to get chocolate and pads and so forth, and then comes back and hugs the sobbing trans character who is deeply comforted.

Or sometimes the Cis Savior (Lover subtype) will be with the trans character who breaks into a meltdown because their body is so disgusting and wrong but no worries - for the Cis Savior will make it all better with his magical healing penis!  They have Extremely Fulfilling Sex and then somehow all the trans character’s dysphoria is gone, because apparently they didn’t have issues within their heads but just needed to be assured they were still sexy to other people?  I guess?

In general:

The Cis Savior knows way more about transgender issues than is remotely realistic, and is instantly, immediately accepting (in a slightly more advanced form, the Cis Savior is mildly confused at first then spends a night devotedly googling out of Love and then becomes in the former condition).  Not only this, the Cis Savior knows more about transgender life and issues than the trans character does.

The trans character’s problems are all solved by the Cis Savior, including dysphoria, depression, and anxiety.  The Cis Savior accepting the trans character counteracts all self-hatred the trans character has - and they have a lot (they need acceptance from outside).

This is super long, so I’m going to leave it as a description of what exactly the Cis Savior is, but if someone wants a detailing of why it’s not necessarily a good thing, I can do that too.

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Does dysphoria always mean that a person is transgender? For example, could a cis woman experience physical & social dysphoria, but still be a woman? I thought I was ftm for a few years, but being called a man felt off too. Then I started playing with genderqueer labels, but lately I've been wondering if I'm just a dysphoric cis woman. Is that a thing?

Lee says:

Identifying as trans is what makes someone trans. I actually recently read a book on gender dysphoria that said “Not everyone who is transgender experiences gender dysphoria, and not everyone who experiences gender dysphoria is transgender.”

Some cis people may experience dysphoria but not identify as trans, which seems to be more common with women and especially lesbians. Gay men also seem to have a higher rate of gender dysphoria than straight men, but they don’t seem to be able to be as open about it because of toxic masculinity.

A cis lesbian woman who got top surgery

The second question in this post is a cis gay man who wants bottom surgery

Is transitioning the only cure for gender dysphoria?

Can cis people have body dysphoria?

cisgender female who’d be happier without boobs

What are some examples of cis people experiencing gender dysphoria?

Cis With Dysphoria

Can cisgender people experience genital dysphoria?

Of course dysphoria is more commonly experienced by trans people than it is with cis people, and it’s experienced by many (and maybe even most) trans folk. But some trans people may not experience dysphoria, or label what they’re experiencing as dysphoria, so you don’t need dysphoria to be trans. 

Non-dysphoric trans people are still trans

More about non-dysphoric trans people

Non-dysphoric trans people

Gender euphoria

Do I have to have Dysphoria to be Trans?

I think it’s really invalidating and gatekeeper-y for someone to insist they know someone else’s gender better than they do.

If someone has questioned their gender and explored the trans community but ultimately decide that they’re cis but have dysphoria, who are we to say that’s invalid?

I think that it’s always best to believe someone when they state who they are, instead of trying to impose rules on their identity and claim they have to fit within certain guidelines to identity as either trans or cis.

If it isn’t okay to tell a trans person that they’re actually cis and in denial, it isn’t okay to tell cis people they’re actually trans and in denial.

So in the end, having dysphoria not having dysphoria doesn’t automatically make anyone trans or cis. Basically, yes, it’s possible to identify as a dysphoric cis woman or whatever makes you most comfortable.

Ren says:

There’s a lot of discussion about this (not all of it nice, or trans-inclusive). When it comes down to it, though, I’m not really sure that anybody can tell you what the answer is for you in particular.

A lot of people will say that it’s common for women to feel uncomfortable about their gender, because of misogyny, and also because a lot of womanhood is built on things that are inherently discomfiting (like sexualization and objectification). I can see where that argument is coming from, but I think it’s taking a lot of things for granted (like gender essentialism, i.e. the belief that gender is a static, unchangeable, unquestionable fact; a “universal female experience”, which simply does not exist; and the fact that being trans and otherwise queer can look and feel and be an infinite number of ways).

Generally, I would say that if your gender doesn’t feel right, it’s for a reason, and you should listen to that reason, and try to follow it. It sounds like that’s what you’ve been doing, which is great - but also that your journey thus far hasn’t been very fulfilling or productive for you, and it makes sense that it’s been a frustrating experience because of that.

Here is the advice I would offer. Let’s say that you can be a dysphoric cis woman. If that’s the case, what does being a cis woman mean to you? Likewise, what does your dysphoria mean to you? What are the changes you want to make in order to reduce that dysphoria, if any, and what do those changes mean to you?

A butch lesbian can consider herself a cis woman, experience dysphoria, and make changes to alleviate it - maybe the same changes that a genderqueer person or trans man would make. What would make that person trans is the decision to use the word.

If you find comfort and community and fulfillment in the word trans, then I would encourage you to keep exploring nonbinary identity - there is more out there than genderqueer. You may also consider looking into different ways that traditionally cis, but otherwise queer women experience gender: butch women, lesbians, and bi women have a rich history of expressing and understanding gender in very different ways from the traditional cis non-queer woman. It may be there that your journey takes you, and that is okay.

Here’s some resources that might give you some insight into other nonbinary identities and other queer gender experiences:

Non-binary resources

NB Flowchart

What am I?

Harper says:

I’m going to add on something a little contrary to your advice Ren, but I’d absolutely second the latter half of your advice: if a transgender embodiment is right for you, absolutely go ahead and embrace that, it is nothing to be ashamed of or shy away from if it is for you.

However, I’d absolutely say some cis women experience dysphoria, and I’d also say this is a point that can be made (and something that can be felt) without being gender essentialist at all.

Although dysphoria is often the grounding experience for a lot of trans people, and it is often the reason that many trans people seek medical assistance with their transitions.

However, if we’re going to talk about dysphoria, we need to first approach it from a wider approach. We are all living in the same world and so are subject to the same material and social forces. Each of these forces will impact us and affect us in different ways. These forces can be understood largely in terms of oppressive forces that systematically benefit the ruling class: rich, white, straight, cis men. In such a world, misogyny is a force that dictates which bodies are allowed to exist, and for what purpose.

I won’t make any rulings on what is and isn’t dysphoria, but an appreciation of dysphoria rooted in being non-consensually gendered (at birth: ”It’s a boy!”, “It’s a girl!”) can be a way forward. This notion always then reflects back onto constructions of gender that uphold cis heterosexuality: certain bodies are made to be girls, or women; and girls and women are aspects of a class that is made to always and only reflect back onto men for their advantage.

This is a violent and non-consensual state of affairs, and it is not one that will come with any comfort for anyone who doesn’t benefit from it: LGBT people, women, and so on. It doesn’t surprise me, at all, that a dysphoric experience can be attributed to an individual’s experiences within womanhood, and also to an individual’s experiences being otherwise gendered.

For example, as a trans lesbian, I experience dysphoria given the world’s instance that I should not be a woman (the “usual” dysphoria that comes with being trans). I also experience dysphoria when I dress in a way that makes me look “straight”. If I don’t dress in a way considered gay, or lesbian, etc., I get distressed, dysphoric. This latter dysphoria is completely within the axis of being a woman and the pressures that comes with to make myself available and centered around men: through the way I act and the way I dress.

I also know several cis women (admittedly all lesbians, so perhaps that limits the scope of my argument here), who experience dysphoria. Being cis doesn’t mean you can’t have a troubled relationship to gendered forces, and it doesn’t mean you can’t question them. It also doesn’t mean that you can’t, at any point, and for any reason, re-analyse your position to gender: to consider a transgender identity, or to re-consider your identification in sexuality.

I think, therefore, that the notion that “dysphoria means you’re trans” can be unhelpful; diverting women from a way of conceptualizing their profound discomfort to a world that aggressively sexualises and oppresses them. It can also divert attempts at solidarity within a community of trans and cis women, and between women and trans people as a whole. Dysphoria, and conversations about our lived experiences, can then be used to form a more cohesive (and less lonely) class appreciation of what it’s like to live under white heteropatriarchy.

In the meantime, see our dysphoria page, and the above links. Hope this helps somewhat!

[violetsystems]

#personal

The weather is back to being amazing again.  This is the horrible curse about Chicago.  For maybe five or six months out of the year, the temperature is gorgeous if not sometimes extreme.  Now that the AC is on, my cat sleeps like a human in bed often.  A little human.  I wake up a few times a night to find her in different spots.  Mostly just waiting for me to feed her wet food in the morning.  I still feed the cat outside my door.  My immediate neighbors do as well.  I think when you think about common ground between people in society you have a good starting point there.  They share the porch here.  Sometimes it’s a little claustrophobic.  But it is never trans or homophobic.  I think people like myself who openly identify as straight and cis could do a better job at empathizing.  But people are already bothered enough by society to where I try to tread lightly as to how I do this.  Nobody wants to be patronized.  It’s tacky.  So it’s always the little things in this neighborhood that communicate the most.  Hanging a plant for your elderly neighbor.  Shoveling the snow early in the morning in the dead of winter.  In the summer, it’s a little easier to be patient with the ways people try to communicate.  And then there’s the glaringly obvious clues that people don’t really give a shit.  I went to do the laundry yesterday.  It’s a small building so not a lot of traffic down there.  The trash is usually filled with laundry supplies.  I went down there and somebody had deposited a U Kotex tampon box in the trash.  This act alone baffles me but it’s such a familiar thing.  I would call it a microaggression.  And here’s how I would explain it.  Back when I was shoveling the snow, somebody had scrawled a message in my immediate neighbor’s doorstep.  Part of it had been snowed over but the message I could read simply said “Gay people live here.”  I couldn’t tell who wrote it.  I worried that my neighbors didn’t.  In short, I cared silently about how this would be perceived.  So I erred on the side of being inclusive and shoveled it last.  Either way, it was information I could choose to respect or neglect.  Months later, finding a tampon box in the shared laundry room when you know some of your neighbor’s identify as nonbinary at the least is sus.  I did the same as I did back in winter.  I disposed of it before anyone got the wrong idea.  Again I’m no detective.  But it’s obvious to me people don’t care about how that might make somebody feel.  I do.  I don’t go knocking on somebody’s door and loudly exclaim “why are you throwing your tampon box in the trash?”  It could have been them for all I know.  So like I do often, I fix the situation before an incident arises.  And nobody knows it was me.  I know for a fact certain neighbors of mine are completely passive aggressive.  The couple behind me definitely gets off on not locking the gate behind them.  It just so happens my immediate neighbors and I are the ones who seem to get targeted for package theft.  I’m used to being targeted and smeared.  When I see other people getting fucked with it largely concerns me.  I can’t always erase the fact that people often play elaborate pranks on me in public.  Where I live and sleep is a different matter.  The problem with microaggressions in society is pretty simple.  Bullying never went away.  It’s normalized as a badge of courage.  A rite of passing in society.  A hazing and a reprogramming of sorts.  Some of us feel pressured by society to fight back.  To act up.  To tear down.  And then some of us have fought that battle alone for years only to be ostracized and explained away.  I spoke with a friend recently about being bored with Chicago and alienated.  They replied flippantly “Well everybody knows you aren’t really a big fan of being social.”  Everybody also knows I flew to Asia fourteen times by myself over a five year period.  The attention to detail only goes so far before it has jumped the shark.

Any sort of a sacred communication, writing or otherwise will eventually degrade into noise.  People in Chicago definitely don’t like you being you outside of a clearly, organized group.  I was reading something about Pride recently how the organizers did not want police involved at all.  It sounds like a no brainer to me.  Pride started as a riot.  A necessary response to oppression and repression.  As an aging straight white man I don’t really see myself at pride.  Neither do I see police belonging there as well.  And yet.  The police feel left out or something?  When Black Lives Matter makes a valid point about police being the number one threat to the very definition of the movement this is a threat how?  When you’ve had your civil rights shredded daily in broad daylight just being a regular person and I mouth the words ACAB all of the sudden I’m a threat to society?  Somehow me opening my mouth and speaking up for other people makes me a target.  And yet I do it pretty clearly and succinctly under my rights of freedom of speech.  It gets abused.  Toyed with.  Tampered with.  Just like any basic infiltration of any cool thing or movement here in America.  No matter how many years I see these people try to throw a wrench in independent movements thinking for themselves, I’m struck at how amateur they become.  America can’t have you thinking for yourself without supervision.  It bullies people into being afraid.  It infiltrates with a smile and a well meaning look only to poison the well and look back accusingly.  “Why aren’t you thirsty?”  It sticks it’s fucking nose into everything and acts like its the champion or savior when it has done nothing except play the villain.  Good cop.  Bad Cop.  Still a fucking cop.  And it doesn’t actually have a leg to stand on.  It uses other people to do it’s dirty work.  Pits movements against each other to neutralize dissent.  It takes over the core history and rewrites itself into the story as the main character.  It buried people’s authentic narratives in favor of lumping them into a moderated congregation.  It talks but never lets you speak.  When it does, it talks over you and mansplains everything you’ve been saying all along wrong.  It’s baked into the culture.  Traditional American doublespeak is an advancement of Orwellian lying.  People think they can smile so sweetly and say absolutely nothing of substance.  That these little pockets of resistance need to be ironed out and managed.  That autonomy isn’t an actual survival reflex.  Of all the people you know who have been fucked with and survived.  It’s me.  And I am just some normal dude on the internet.  And yet I can’t speak loud enough in mainstream society to get people to understand I have a point.  That people gaslight, gatekeep, and gestapo their way into putting you in your place.  The shit I’ve seen here in America let alone Chicago would have Germany in 1940 blushing.  And yet, I don’t really put up with any of it.  It’s fucking clown show level cosplay.  Rich people who think they can walk through walls of ethics, privacy and culture to throw around their weight.  People don’t like me these days because I interfere with them directly making a profit.  Imagine that.  I’ve been targeted for everything.  Made to look like I’m crazy, old and alone.  And now I have to deal with billionaires afraid of where I’ve invested my meager retirement funds.  And I deal with it everyday.  Sharks swimming around me in Teslas and T-Shirts trying to intimidate me into throwing in the towel.  After the towel was thrown at me repeatedly.  I can’t explain how ridiculous this is.  I can explain how insensitive it is to throw a fucking tampon in the laundry room when your neighbors are gender queer.  And then as an ally, people think it’s my job to confront this.  I do.  I put all in the trash where it belongs.  Where the racoons and my civil rights still dwell.  You don’t need these people in your business.  You don’t need to feel guilted by the oppressor into thinking there is something wrong with you not trusting authority.  They openly lie, plot and spread deceit.  So don’t let them into your scenes, movements or personal lives and move on.

This is easy to say when you live outside the blast radius of culture war.  I happen to enjoy the freedom of living in a city just as much as everybody.  It is something else to manage the personal and organizational politics therein.  New York to me is a little less pretentious and stuck up about the status quo than the midwest.  The midwest is clingy and clumsy about how it asserts it’s power in a vacuum.  And Chicago right now is just one huge lawless fucking vacuum.  I would love to write about it.  Maybe even sit down for a chat with the Mayor about how she plans to fuck up the next two years of being half in control.  But we all know I’ll never make it as a journalist.  I’ll never have the opportunity here to be acknowledged as a writer.  I’ll never be recognized for anything I’ve ever done because it would require an inconvenient truth to be brought out into the open.  You only make it in this town if you are connected.  You only get to be free if you let the powers that be have their say.  It’s only ok to survive if you are transparent in everything you do.  And when you are, your information is spread out to the point it’s a liability at best.  People already know everything about you including where you fit in the hierarchy of capitalism.  I belong on the outskirts with all the “freaks.”  Being bullied like it’s 1990 all over again.  These people never learned to be better.  So they simply get off on judging everybody else by their lackluster fucking standards.  You can stand up to them.  You can learn how to tell if someone is being genuine or trying to subvert your power.  You can say no.  You can not let these fuckers into your most trusted places and spaces.  And you can fuck with them back if they do.  For me, it’s not a good look for me to take the bait.  This entire process has been hopeless to me.  I have learned nothing good about how real society operates at its bitter core.  What I can tell you is this.  People tell you whatever they think will make you feel good.  And if you question their motives, they will make you feel guilty first before getting caught in a lie.  If you catch them in a lie, they act like you are crazy.  And this is the rhythm of how protest, resistance, and freedom is squelched in America.  Nobody is fighting back.  I would know.  Because I am literally exhausted making this point as an ally for years on the internet.  We need to organize and yet we’re too busy ripping each other apart.  We know we have common ground.  We know we connect in genuine ways still.  And people are scared to.  They’re just coming out of their shells.  I think the whole point of things like Pride were to create autonomous zones where people could feel free.  To feel like they weren’t judged or watched.  I know what it is like to be surveilled on levels I’m embarrassed to share.  I live that hell every day of my life for reasons unknown.  I don’t know how it was brought on me.  It hurts.  Every fucking day of my life to be watched and misunderstood.  I created a sacred space for myself to communicate this.  A place where I can be proud of who I was and talk about it.  A place where I could catch my breath and continue to resist and to think.  And there’s no shortage of right wing nuts who argue their stupid clubhouses need to be protected by a flag most people wipe their ass with.  Respect is a two way street.  I’m just directing traffic.  And I’m warning people around my neighborhood specifically.  I’ve seen the passive aggressive judgmental bullshit go too far and I’m not going to let it go by unnoticed.  I know just who is completely full of shit out here and why.  And people trust that I know because it’s my job to pay attention to detail.  I don’t get paid shit to be a good person.  But you don’t get away with being racist, homophobic, transphobic or any other shit like that on my watch.  I will let you know on site.  One tampon at a time.  <3 Tim

[insteadhere]

A post in which I somewhat unexpectedly go on a rant in an attempt to think through things

So I ended up digging into the Margaret Atwood tweets which led me not only to some badly written scientific american blog posts with 0 actual argument (I will have to dissect those at some point as a piece of ‘scientific-adjacent’ writing) but also lead me to this video by Jamie and Shaaba which Margaret Atwood recommends (I will note that I have seen quite a few of Jamie’s videos over the past years in my attempt to have a better sense of trans experience).

I really do appreciate their efforts to present ‘both points of view’—however, what bothers me is that  they fail to grapple with the most central disagreement between the ‘two sides’, and even fail to acknowledge it.

Basically, right at the beginning of the video, they make a strong claim about “gender identity being a real thing” (while mocking the GC perspective for ‘not hearing this’ and simply continuing to argue that ‘biological sex is a real thing,’ which also signals the fact that they just don’t seem to get the issue here). This then follows:

Shaaba: Trans inclusionists know that biological sex exists. They just also know that gender identity exists as well. For most people in the world, like me, you know you’re a woman, like I do up here, and my biological sex if female. It aligns. 

Jamie: But for a small minority of people, they know they’re a man, like me, but their bodies don’t match, and that’s what makes us trans. Trans men are men. Their assigned biological sex is female, but their gender identity is man. Trans women are women. Their assigned biological sex is male, but their gender identity is woman. And non-binary people are non-binary. Their assigned biological sex could be male or female, but their gender identity doesn’t match. Shaaba...

Shaba: yeah?

Jamie: If your body suddenly disappeared and you were just a floating head, would you still be a woman?

Shaba: Yup.

Jamie: This is gender identity. Forgetting your internal plumbing, it’s what you know you are up here.

What is happening here is that they are taking as a given the central point of disagreement. If you start your argument from the assumption that gender identity is some sort of thing everyone is born with, you’re not really presenting the debate.  Pretty everything else in the video is a corollary of this assumption, including the rebuttals of gender critical concerns about the role gender roles, discrimination, homophobia etc might play in transition, as well as how the trans-narrative can shape people’s own understanding of their struggles and identity. The claim that gender identity is something you just are and know is repeated, the innateness of gender identity is heavily implied and transitioning is framed as a need and not  choice, let alone a simple ‘wish’ (there’s also some pretty absurd semantic games in that move, too).

I think many GC people that I know of are accepting of the fact that there are some people who have a (to others incomprehensible) discomfort with their sexed body, and that no other approach other than medical intervention and a transition can alleviate that discomfort. Still, it is important to ask and understand why that discomfort is there and if it can be alleviated in a different way that might be less risky than life-long hormones and surgeries. (and my sense is, this has been the shared main perspective until not that long ago)

But this isn’t really the subject of the debate—when the trans inclusionists (to go with Shaaba and Jamies term) discuss what being trans is, they don’t discuss extreme discomfort with one’s sexed body, they discuss ‘knowing’ that one is a man or a woman, as somehow separate from the body.

Now GC people have been trying for years to really understand what is meant here, because it makes little sense. 

Let’s take a different case of immutable biological reality, and I know its imperfect but it’s difficult to find a good not-charged comparison. (and hey, height is actually a good old spectrum, while tall people are generally favored over short people, not to mention discrimination against people with dwarfism). 

I am some 5′3″ (160 cm) tall. What would it mean if I said that I just know I am actually a 5′11″ (180 cm) tall person?

My experience of myself and the world around me is shaped by my height—different grocery stores shelves are at my eye level, I look up at people more than I look down at them, and people treat me as weaker and less threatening and maybe even younger than they would if i were taller. I often feel really awful about my height and spent most of my young life desperately wanting and wishing to grow taller, to the point of looking up surgeries that could add a couple of inches to my frame. What would it mean for me to be a ‘tall person’ in a ‘short person’s body? What would it mean for me to just ‘know’ my height even if I was a floating head? And if I went to a professional telling them I am a lot shorter than I really feel, what would it mean if there was a ready made path for me to get surgery and pharmaceuticals to grow taller? And if I could watch video after video of people who followed those paths and are now really happy (tall!) people? 

How do we know that we don’t all have a height-identity and while most people’s actual height and inner sense of their height aligns, it does not for some people? We would then ask ‘what doesn’t it really mean to be a ‘tall person’ (as opposed to somebody whose body is of a certain height) and what does it mean to be a ‘short person’? Does it have to do with how short and tall people are perceived? Like ‘short people’ are more vulnerable and more passive, and ‘tall people’ are more confident and aggressive? But isn’t that just weird stereotypes that people (both short and tall) have been wrestling against? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just find a way to come to terms with and lead a flourishing life with the body that you have?

Some would say, then, ‘this is conversion therapy, it is bad!’ But these comparisons to sexual orientation conversion therapy are misplaced. In terms of homosexuality, there is the contrast between changing the person (conversion therapy, ) and changing society in order to let the person be as they are without any intervention. A separate thing would be having supportive therapy to minimize distress while society is changing. So I would argue that  changing my height is more akin to conversion therapy as it is intervening on me as a person, as opposed to trying to understanding why I might be ‘feeling tall’ and, if necessary, changing society so I can lead a ‘tall person life’(whatever that might be) in my short body.

Now if this whole example sounds absurd, it’s because it is. And that is how a lot of discussions of gender identity sound to gender critical feminists. And what makes it even worse in terms of gender is that stakes are much higher (no pun intended) and stereotypes much more powerful.

If we want to  find some common ground, and if we want to envision a kind of future that will be better for everyone, we need to debate and understand the basic assumptions, and their corollaries.

We cannot simply make a claim that ‘gender identity’ is an innate thing everyone has  pretty much without empirical data as that makes it an ideological, not a factual claim. It’s clear that we will need to grapple with this so we need to determine

what is ‘gender identity’? 

is it innate?

how many people have it?

why do some people’s gender identities align with their bodies and others’ do not.

It is unclear how we could really study any of these, especially if ‘gender identity’ is simply a contemporary idiom for speaking about parts of our selves  that have to do with sex and gender (that is identification with one’s social ascribed gender role). As such, it would be highly susceptible to environmental influences and might simply be a ‘transient construct’ filling a particular cultural niche (c. Ian Hacking’s transient mental illness).  But we need to seriously address these questions, and we need to be able to do so without accusations of invalidating people or perpetrating violence against them.

How we talk about things, how we name things makes a difference, which is of central concern to critical feminists. Often when we see people talking about ‘gender identity’ it sounds more like they’re talking about a sense of self/personality that aligns more with one set of stereotypes than the other, which to us is obviously problematic. And if the main cultural narrative about gender-non conformity (societally produce issue) is that of being trans (a matter of individual) than people who are gender non-conforming will be more likely to understand themselves as trans (I would argue that ’trans’ is a human, not a natural category, and it does not exists outside or without our narratives about it. this is yet another very basic things on which there seems to be disagreement. I will highlight that ‘human’ categories are no less real, but they behave differently from natural categories)

This all matters if we are to imagine some sort of a future we can all agree on, because I think we can  all agree on the fact that we want the world to be a different place, and who knows, maybe we actually share a vision and we do not even know because we don’t talk about it.

As a thought experiment, let’s assume that most people are agender, in that most people do not have a deep innate sense of their gender—I know I don’t, so maybe I am just projecting, but let’s just roll with it for the thought experiment’s sake. It might also make the most sense in terms of ‘gender is a’ spectrum, maybe not a bell curve but, you have ‘trans’ on one tail and ‘gender identity aligned with the same sex’ on the other tail and the majority of people in the more undefined middle with some cis skew? Or maybe it’s a man-woman normal distribution. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched because I think most ‘cis’ people (based on my conversations with cis people in my life) would say, for example ‘I am a man because I am male’ and if you told them ‘well being male doesn’t mean you are a man’ than they would say ‘I am not sure what being ‘man’ is then, but I guess it would mean I am not necessarily a man’. I don’t have any data on this because I cannot find any, and I’ve tried really hard.

I would be an agender female, for example, and part of my struggle would be that the world keeps reading me as a ‘woman’ because of my female-looking body. I just want to be a person and have nothing with whatever ‘woman’ might entail. What I really want is for people to stop assuming things about me based on my sex. This is exactly what GC feminists want. 

We push this further, maybe we end up with a whole slew of people identifying as ‘agender’ and maybe even using they pronouns to communicate that. And you would then end up with smaller numbers of people on the ends of the spectrum, strongly identifying with their sex or the opposite sex, and maybe using their preferred sex pronouns to indicate that. People who feel a strong discomfort with their sexed bodies despite less intrusive interventions physically transition to a body they feel more comfortable with.  Some of them are maybe also agender, others have a strong sense of their gender. In most contexts their transition doesn’t matter, and in those in which it does they clearly acknowledge that they’ve undergone sex transition because it matters in those contexts.

But then things have to change again. It makes less sense to discuss men and women anymore, especially when majority of the population are agender males or females, though we still use ‘male’ and ‘female’ in matters when biological differences matter (health, menstrual products, pregnancy, sports). ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ might likely take on more and more extreme meanings as they are detached from biological sex, and fewer and fewer people opt to identify as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ because their sense of self does not necessarily align with the sense of those words. Ultimately everyone is they, everyone is agender, we are constantly talking about ‘males’ and ‘females’ to discuss different parts of the population with different needs. We are kind of back at square one, though hopefully with less gender stereotyping. 

Notice how this is the future that GC feminists are working towards, but we got there through the notion of gender identity ( with a bit of a detour?)

Maybe I am getting it wrong, maybe gendered identity is something else altogether, but I am still unable to grasp what it’s supposed to be (like many GC feminists), and the ‘trans inclusionists’ are consistently failing to engage this question in a systematic and reasoned way, despite it being the central question.

[grison-in-space]

Well, yeah--and like, frankly I don't care who started making fun of what kinds of genitals first, it's still not okay! I think what it is re: cis queers engaging in that, especially cis gay men and cis lesbians, is that you'll get that kind of bonding in queer spaces that are really centered around either cis gay men or cis lesbians but are labeled as "queer/gay space" for the folks who are participating in them. So what seems to me to be happening is that cis gay men I meet through work are way more likely to go excitedly "another Queer!!!" at me and launch into modes of bonding and cultural connection they associate with their home spaces, and if their home queer community is almost exclusively other cis gay men they sort of automatically reach for genital insults and are then startled when I go "...excuse me?" I have vaguely found trans folks of all genders are more likely to have friends who have different genders and/or genital configurations from themselves so this culture isn't as common in trans friendly spaces, but that might be selection bias idk.

Anyway, that's beside the point--no, your frustration is real and valid and I see it too, especially in my queer spaces, especially for men who are trying to carve out a space to talk about sexual pressure and assault that has victimized them, especially for men who are trying to create their own spaces to help each other with their own vulnerabilities.

You mention "it's like my friend was spouting incel MRA bullshit or something" and the wrench of it is that I really think you're onto something there, I think a lot of people have gotten burned by MRA shit and learned to associate the notion of men's rights and activism with, uh. MRAs and their distinct tendency to react to real ways in which men suffer under patriarchy and toxic masculinity by.... assuming that those harms are being caused by attempts to check or overthrow that system rather than by the system itself.

And that fucking blows for everyone, up to and including men! I see way too many men in my life who care deeply about people around them and want to do right by them and try to listen to other people and check themselves... deciding that they, by existing, are the problem in the world and that the only way they can think of to be men is to apologize constantly for it. That shit ain't sustainable. It makes me really sad to see! And at the same time when what you see offered to you in terms of men's issues and discussions from people paying attention is either MRAs or reflexive shame and guilt, it's hard to figure out how to construct something you can feel good about for yourself.

And of course all this shit is getting inflamed heavily by TERF groups at this present moment, because that notion that men are inherently enemies to women instead of potential allies and friends is absolutely textbook radical feminism at its very worst. It's so frustrating. Plus you're right, it DOES particularly further harm men who are already marginalized on other grounds by other axes and prevent them from talking about their own experiences--that's one of the original sins of radical feminism, that's why intersectionality is antithetical to radical feminism, and that's a major reason why intersectionality was articulated and advanced in feminist discourse in the first place!

And on practical grounds it furthers inflammation of the basic issue by making it harder for men who want to access discussion of men's issues without denigrating women's issues (and vice versa) to do that, which winds up shifting the damn Overton windows even further.

You shouldn't have to apologize like that. You shouldn't have to choose between minimizing someone else and minimizing yourself to engage in communities and connecting to other people. I hate that this is happening to you and your friends and I'm just, I'm sad that these dynamics are so common. I want better allyship in queer communities, because we're all allies to one another under the rainbow sometimes--ally doesn't mean straight, it means listening to other people and holding space for them sometimes so they can hold space for you, and we all have to learn how to do that for each other if we're going to have any kind of solidarity. Which I would like for us, collectively, to be able to do.

Space that queer men are trying to mark as being centered around queer men are not default queer space. It is not exclusive or bad or evil for queer men to want to have places to be the center of attention that are marked off as being for them sometimes, because we all need to have that sometimes. The best way to let folks practice sharing resources easily and without resource guarding is to make sure everyone's needs are getting met, and that means men too.

Anyway, I just wanted to underscore that, because I know that for me it often means a lot when I'm grappling with that kind of frustration and someone who doesn't personally benefit from the Thing I'm advocating for sees what I'm trying to say and publicly goes "yeah you're right that thing DOES suck and you're right to be mad and frustrated and I'm sorry that is happening and I'll try to do better stopping it around me." So I wanted to say all that to you here and now, because: yeah that shit is terrible and it's not fair and it's really, really frustrating to watch that crap go down, and I'm sorry you and your friend are dealing with it.

@regular-mulder

i hate those jokes so much tbh but every time i speak out about how shitty they are i get so much hate for it

it makes me hate being a man

and then some of them will even say shit like ‘trans men are fine though we don’t include them’ and it just smacks of transphobia to me

Your tags on that post hit the nail directly on the head.

As someone who is both trans and gay, I can verify that those jokes Feel Bad Man and that most of the time I see someone make them and instantly I think that that person is no longer safe to speak to. Because either they are including me in whatever shittiness they’re talking about because I am a dude, or they are NOT including me because I’m trans and thus not “as much of a dude” to them. Either way it smacks of transphobia and homophobia and a lack of intersectionality and I am just not here for it.

My attraction to men is neither unfortunate nor a bad thing nor shameful. I find men quite pleasing to look at and think about and perform various affectionate and passionate actions with. Making it out to be a bad thing would force me back into the shame and despair I found myself in when I was a young teen trying to figure out why these things made me feel the way I did when everything around me told me it was wrong. I refuse to go back to that closet for the sake of being the butt of someone’s shitty jokes.

My being a man is neither unfortunate nor a bad thing nor shameful. Shaming me for living my truth is not okay no matter the labels of the person doing it. I fought long and hard to live my life the way I am happiest and I will not let someone who wants to score a few laughs make me ashamed of who I am. I will not live as something I’m not just because people disapprove of my entire gender.

But when the affected speak up about it, the only response is hate and vitriol. This happened IN A QUEER SPACE. Somewhere that was said to be a safe space for all LGBT+ people. Not even our supposed safe spaces are safe for us half the time.

[2319-oermergerd-blog]

CLA Safflower Oil Review - Does It Work & Legit?

Some of the time realistic persuades: if indulging causes fat development inside body then starvation must do the inverse and enable one to dispose of those additional pounds to quick. In any case, our body's rationale framework does not work that way.

When you choose to embrace starvation-eat less as your weapon against expanding body weight your body's self protection framework becomes possibly the most important factor and diminishes your BMR (basal metabolic rate which is really a measure of calorie utilization when you are very still). What's more, decreased BMR implies less calories devoured by your body and more fat collection. It resembles as though your body detects extreme days are ahead and begins to store vitality for hard days.

So you get comes about that are very inverse to your unique intensions. Also, on the off chance that you are not cautious while on starvation-eating regimen to take all the required vitamins, minerals and different micronutrients in adequate measure you may really make harm your wellbeing.

So my recommendation would be; don't be cruel on yourself and don't rebuff your body to get in shape at lightning speed. After all you have put on weight gradually and it will be more common in the event that you lose it gradually too.

What's more, luckily there are simple approaches to do that than starving.Here are a few thoughts you can use to get great outcomes:Enact your digestion: digestion is the substantial procedure that changes over the calories we take through our nourishment admission CLA Safflower Oil into vitality for all our day by day exercises. On the off chance that our digestion is drowsy then we will have less vitality consistently and the unspent calories will be put away in our body as fat tissues.

There is a basic and compelling approach to make your metabolic procedure more dynamic. You have likely caught wind of it earlier yet did not use it on the grounds that no body enlightened you concerning how it really makes a difference.

To exploit it, simply take 5 to 6 little suppers daily rather than 3 or 4. Isolating your sustenance allow in more number of times straightforward keeps your digestion on toes.

You require a rich breakfast: Take bunches of crisp natural products, entire grain oats in your breakfast. What's more, evade handled and greasy sustenances.

A decent breakfast makes a feeling of satisfaction in you and that can limit your unreasonable yearnings for nourishment for the duration of the day. When you check your propensity to indulge you are well on your way to your optimal body weight.

As the US populace develops, the journey for weight reduction supplements grows in show. Supplement-searchers want exacerbates that are compelling, reasonable, and without the trademark "jumpy" symptoms of many weight reduction supplements. "CLA" is a gathering of dietary fats that many effect the body in an irrational manner - eat fat to lose fat?

CLA has various substance frames; they are called "isomers" of CLA. There are two unique isomers that are generally found in supplements available, cis-9,trans-11 CT) and trans-10,cis-12 (TC).

Besides, deceptive showcasing and naming of CLA alludes to it as a "characteristic" result of Safflower oil; in any case, the CLA supplements in stores a synthetically controlled result of safflower oil. The major known genuinely characteristic wellspring of CLA originates from the muscle to fat ratio or drain fat of ruminant creatures. For the vast majority, dairy animals drain or hamburger fat is the essential source; in any case, goats, sheep and deer are additionally ruminants and their items contain CLA. The CLA is really made in these creatures by the microorganisms in their stomachs and after that it is retained and added to their own muscle to fat ratio.

The normal type of CLA is for the most part the CT shape; the lab made frame can be either CT or TC, yet is generally approximately a 1:1 proportion of each.

No ifs  or buts, the stuff works in creatures rodents and hamburger have been considered widely. With supplementation of , these creatures regularly may demonstrate 1) More fit weight; 2) Less muscle to fat ratio; and 3) Less fat generation in drain; or 4) bring down general weight. A few investigations have additionally demonstrated changes in CLA Safflower Oil lab esteems related with diabetes, coronary illness, and bosom tumor. Then again, some creature examines additionally demonstrate expanded aggravation and more regrettable results for lab esteems related with diabetes and coronary illness. So as far as general , the outcomes are profoundly blended.

In people, the outcomes are significantly more questionable. Many examinations indicate literally nothing, while around 1/3 to ½ demonstrate constructive outcomes, including: somewhat decreased muscle versus fat, marginally expanded fit mass or the counteractive action of weight pick up/recover. One late investigation (1) gave individuals a 3.2 g/day of  for a half year, including all through the Christmas season, and the  avoided fat pick up in the supplemented gathering. The creators reasoned that the supplement might be more helpful for counteractive action instead of treatment. Numerous, many components have made the human investigations difficult to contrast with each other however:

 certainly a long haul supplement; there is no noteworthy proof supporting it's utilization for the fleeting (you have to take it for no less than a couple of months to see an impact, not half a month)

 measurements are distinctive in each investigation and are generally chosen pretty self-assertively

 isomers (CT or TC) are given in various extents in a large number of the examinations, or are not controlled for by any stretch of the imagination.

Some human examinations likewise indicate potential provocative impacts and insulin protection from CLA supplementation-these impacts appear to be caused more by the TC frame than the CT shape. Keep in mind that TC is just made in noteworthy sums in the lab, while CT happens normally in drain items, and so on.

Taking everything into account, the jury is unquestionably still out on  Scientists are almost certain that the impacts are reliant on the kind of  you take, CT or TC. Clinical trials don't indicate huge measures of weight reduction in people, however is may make you a little more slender and keep some fat pick up. The effect on  and sickness is additionally essential to think of some as; considers have demonstrated that  supplementation builds irritation and brings down your "great" cholesterol.

CLA does not merit taking unless you truly need to get super tore (particularly at $20/3-4 week supply). Your cash would be better spent on enhancing the nature of your eating routine! Then again, on the off chance that you are resolved to take a CLA supplement: 1) attempt to discover one that was extricated from dairy fat (on the off chance that it exists, it's profanely costly); or 2) discover one that contains more CT than TC. Starting at quite a long while prior, these proportions were not recorded on the jug, but rather now numerous makers do incorporate the isomer rates. Keep in mind that nobody is checking to ensure the name is precise, so purchase just from supplement creators that you trust!

Stomach or paunch fat is especially hard for everybody to lose, yet ladies appear to get the short end of the stick the distance around. The issues start with menopause, since it is frequently connected with hormonal changes that can cause weight pick up. This is regularly a period when a lady's weight movements to the stomach and weight appears to simply appear suddenly. Safflower Oil is being considered as a supplement to enable individuals to lose overabundance stomach fat.

There are particular risks related with overabundance midsection fat. It can build the danger of building up various restorative issue arranged as "metabolic disorder." This issue regularly expands the danger of diabetes and cardiovascular ailment, so getting more fit, especially in the stomach region, can incredibly decrease these dangers.

Safflower oil has been found to help in the diminishment of midsection fat. It is a characteristic wellspring of palmitic corrosive, oleic corrosive, stearic corrosive, and linoleic corrosive. In an examination that thought about high linoleic safflower oil (SAF) to conjugated linoleic corrosive (CLA), the CLA appeared to make a superior showing with regards to of lessening the all-finished muscle to fat ratio while the SAF made a superior showing with regards to diminishing the paunch fat.

The aftereffects of this investigation demonstrated that the stomach fat misfortune impact of the SAF was not affected by changes in eating regimen or action. There was no moderating or ceasing with the fat misfortune amid the investigation time frame, which frequently happens with get-healthy plans.

Notwithstanding the stomach weight reduction that was recorded, the  was appeared to help in bringing down blood glucose levels, which expanded insulin . It has been demonstrated that overabundance stomach fat can cause both insulin protection and high blood glucose levels, so it is speculated that the decrease of the insulin protection and the bringing down of the blood glucose levels were caused by the  of stomach fat activated by the .

Note that the safflower oil that is utilized as a part of most investigations where genuine loss of midsection fat happened was high in corrosive and isn't the same as the cooking oil on the racks of your neighborhood supermarket. The cooking oil found in markets typically contains generally corrosive which has a higher smoke point making it perfect for cooking.

More Info: - http://www.supplementadvise.com/cla-safflower-oil/