#This is - so fucking laser focused and targeted at me specifically directly

[nakanotamu]

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

to help yourself understand the Mueller investigation, read this novel

“This novel” being, of course, a stack of court documents filed in the course of the investigation.

Hear me out.

This isn’t to trivialize or sensationalize an ongoing existential threat to western democracy. Precisely because it is not a fucking game, I think it’s really important for people to get new ways into this story. Because it still seems alarmingly common for even generally well-informed people to throw up their hands and say “well, the right says ‘no collusion!’ and liberals say ‘he’s a Russian agent!’ but the partisans all seem really worked up, I guess the truth is somewhere in between/it must not be as big a deal as they think.”

Maybe sometimes that’s motivated reasoning or sheer ignorance. But it’s also possible that “this Rusher thing with Trump and Russia” is unusually resistant to understanding as a conventional news story. We want our news to be solid, with “hard facts.” Maybe this is more like gas. Like gas, it always takes up as much space as it’s allowed. On slow news days it can expand to envelop everything else; unrelated dramatic events can compress it down to almost nothing. And you can’t get a grip on gas.

This whole bizarre situation is genuinely unprecedented in American history, which is perhaps why special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been doing something unusual in issuing a series of speaking indictments. Remember, a bill of indictment is basically a list of the crimes that a prosecutor has convinced a grand jury that someone has probably committed. Prosecutors are smart to keep these minimal, because every fact they allege in their indictment, they damn well have to be ready to prove. A speaking indictment means that the prosecutor is saying more than they have to say. In a case like this – which deals with a lot of sensitive information, and implicates people who haven’t yet been charged or even interviewed – that’s even trickier, because there’s a lot it has to avoid.

Generally, when a person makes their own job harder, they’re doing it for a reason. And I think at least part of the reason here is that the special prosecutor’s office is trying to tell the American public a story. Our minds can comprehend dramatic plot lines more easily than the seedy, fact-heavy, choppily-paced web of a real criminal conspiracy. There’s a narrative logic to the pre-election events described in the most notable speaking indictments in the order we’ve seen them, moving relentlessly closer in time, space, and relationship to Donald Trump on Election Day, 2016.

So if you’re frustrated or baffled by what you catch of this story in the news or on your Facebook feed, it’s not because you, personally, can’t understand it. You might just need a new angle of approach. If you are a movie person, I can recommend the documentary Active Measures (Hulu, iTunes). If you’re more of a reader, these documents, in this order, can be read like an epistolary novel – specifically, a pulpy, beach read-y spy thriller.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

TO BE CONTINUED [probably]…

I’m serious. Download the pdfs onto your e-reader – remember to make a note of the order! – brew yourself some tea, and turn off pop-up notifications for a while. (Don’t get too hung up on figuring out who “Organization 1″ or “Person 2″ are - sometimes it’ll be obvious, but don’t worry if it’s not. You can just treat the big tables like illustrations: look and see what they’re about, but you don’t need to read every line to get the gist. You can also skip the last page or so if you start hitting headers like “statutory allegations” or “substitute assets.” There’s no post-credits stingers.)

These aren’t all the documents that have been filed in court by the special counsel, let alone in related cases, and I doubt even the courts have heard the whole story yet. Most of the documents related to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn are still redacted. Maria Butina was charged by a different prosecutor’s office just as she was about to make a run for it, but her infiltration of the National Rifle Association could quite possibly be Chekhov’s gun. And it doesn’t even mention the UK spinoff! But I think they’re the ones that are, intentionally, useful to someone who wants to understand.

Still skeptical? Recap/analysis below.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

The first indictment of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort took its focus far away from, and several years before, the main story, deep into a 2010 election in Ukraine which ominously foreshadowed the 2016 election.  Manafort, an old friend of Stone, a Trump Tower resident, and the employer of his co-defendant Rick Gates and of future Sanders consultant Tad Devine, ran the campaign of a buffoonish businessman who was in hock to the Russian government. Their strategy relied heavily on exacerbating ethnic tensions within Ukraine and seeding skepticism about international alliances, as well as a vicious smear campaign of his opponent, an accomplished public servant who would have been the nation’s first woman president. Manafort’s candidate took office, was exactly as bad as his opponents believed he would be, and had his opponent imprisoned and tortured – but was eventually forced to release her and flee the country for Russia.

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

The Internet Research Agency indicted Russian nationals who worked on the propaganda campaign, spending over a million dollars a month to manipulate American public opinion from a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg. The action starts in 2014 and picks up in 2016, but still takes place a continent away. It deliberately stays away from the hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails, and pointedly does not accuse any Americans of committing crimes.

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

An installment with a foot in both worlds indicted Manafort and a Ukraine-based co-conspirator, while also showing Manafort’s corruption of a respected American law firm. This part shows us how Trump’s campaign manager – both his dirty politics and his illicit money – moved from Ukraine to the United States, set in the same time frame as Part II.

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Then another indictment did name the Russian military intelligence officers who stole Democrats’ emails in the spring of 2016, and traced their cooperation with “Organization 1,” which released those emails. This moves the story closer in time to the election, and shows the stolen data moving west from Moscow to Julian Assange’s hideout in London before being dumped on the American public.

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

The next installment targeted Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a New Yorker like Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to hiding what appears to have been early 2016 real estate negotiations for a property in Moscow, and of committing apparently unrelated crimes to affect the election illicitly by covering up the candidate’s affairs in the weeks before the election. The Southern District of New York – filing at the same time and in clear cooperation with the special prosecutor, but not working directly for him – overtly said it could prove Trump’s complicity in crimes. Trump is tagged “Individual 1.”

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

Currently in the barrel is Roger Stone, a longtime supporter of Trump’s political career and an old business partner of Manafort. Stone has a colorful backstory of extensive wrongdoing, but his indictment is laser-focused on conversations he had with a known Russian intelligence cutout in the summer and fall of 2016, and the crimes and lies he tried to use to hide those conversations. This indictment mentions the Trump campaign by name, and it includes a lot of specific conduct by individuals who are not named but are nonetheless readily identifiable. The document is succinct, clinical, clear as a bell. But it leaves one omission which leaped out screaming at just about everyone who read the whole document.

[A] senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.  

If you’ve taken high school English, you already know the million ruble question. “Was directed”? Who gave that direction? The indictment doesn’t say.

If you’re trying to avoid drawing conclusions the way a newscaster might, you would probably think it was not another senior campaign officer – otherwise, why not refer to them as “Senior Campaign Officer 2”? – but still someone important enough to boss around a senior campaign officer. Maybe if the candidate had adult family members who were not given official positions on the campaign, they would be suspects – though only because they could reasonably be assumed to be speaking for the most likely culprit. The simplest explanation for They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Pseudonymed is the most dramatic one. The candidate is not a senior campaign officer. The candidate is the candidate.

We don’t have all the facts yet. The only thing we can be sure of is that the special prosecutor has, quite deliberately, not yet shown this particular card.

But if you’ve taken high school English, you have a pretty good idea about the answer.

Okay, the genre snob reviewers might say it’s a little heavy-handed. Personally, I’ve always felt that subtlety is overrated.

[vaspider]

I actually don't really think they're joking. I think that a lot of people in the queer community don't realize how much the political lesbian/radfem simplistic view of "men bad" has infected the community as a whole.

You see it in the "my sexuality is every girl and precisely one man" which is hugely widespread in the way m-spec women discuss their sexualities. (Which is not to say that a lot of women don't feel that way, just that when I've pointed this out to my friends, and how shitty it made me and other transmascs/men feel, a bunch of them went 'oh shit, you're right.') You see it in how m-spec women are made to feel like they should apologize for being attracted to or involved with men/mascs, and how lesbian/sapphic/queer spaces eject -- sometimes violently -- m-spec women in "straight-passing" relationships. (This also happens to m-spec mascs/men, but not so loudly, and in a different way.)

You see it in the long and storied way that transmascs and trans men have been treated in our community. This isn't the first time that trans men have been told they are 'giving up womanhood' and how dare they. There's a scene in The L Word, a show that ended 12 years ago, which has a character literally saying that to a trans man, that he's 'giving up the most beautiful thing' by transitioning, and that thing is 'being a woman.'

This isn't a new message, that men are the enemy, and that anyone who voluntarily chooses masculinity or manhood (whatever form of masculinity or manhood they choose) is a gender traitor, "joining the enemy," deluded, attempting to "opt out" of misogyny, or any number of other loathsome ideas. This spills over into the idea that transmascs/men have "aligned interests" with TERFs, that we don't actually face societal transphobia, that we aren't targeted by institutional transphobia in any way, that we're 'collateral damage' of the "real" transphobia that transfems face, that we magically just gain male privilege the moment we start transitioning, that we're never targeted by misogyny, that we don't face physical violence, that we've "joined the oppressors" and are somehow capable as a class of being the oppressors of transfems rather than simply another oppressed class (which is its own topic that deserves like, a whole-ass essay, but whatever) that transmisandry isn't a "real" thing and transmascs don't face any sort of specific-to-us discrimination or issues... and all of those ideas damage our ability as a community to discuss and ameliorate these sometimes-fatal and always-damaging ideas.

Hell, to listen to people within the community talk, you wouldn't think that JK Rowling's horrible essay didn't spend a huge chunk of time misgendering and gaslighting transmascs, or that one of the big "bibles" of TERFery (Ab*gail Shrier's 'Irreversible Damage') wasn't targeted very specifically, fucking laser-focused, on transmascs, including non-binary transmascs. And this all spills out from the idea that we don't face any 'real' oppression because we've 'joined the majority/oppressors,' and "men are bad," which is such base-level 1970s retro radfem nonsense.

And honestly, at the end of the day? It doesn't matter if it's a joke, and I'm pretty displeased with "oh they don't understand that it's serious and they think it's just a joke." These sorts of "jokes", levied at transmasc people, aren't okay. Maybe if it's just you and your buds who have given each other permission to shit-talk each other, and you know each other and have personal context with one another, sure. But in this sort of open, parasocial context where you have people who don't know these two transhets, it is always damaging, and saying "gosh I think they just think it's a joke" does the opposite of excusing it.

This lateral aggression shit is terrible and damaging to lots of people -- I honestly think there's no segment of the queer community that this doesn't directly damage, and we should challenge it whenever we see it, not make excuses or permission for it in the slightest way.

link to original tweet

[itsbenedict]

No Driver’s License: Session 12

[adventure log- read from the beginning]

[session 11]

Last time on No Driver’s License, the party encountered, um... the main antagonists, apparently. One of the players had history with one of them, and rather than trying to negotiate or flee or do anything else sensible in the face of an overwhelming threat, decided to go into berzerker mode and try to kill them. This went... not so hot, and the team got pretty worn out trying to fight the end bosses way too early. 

So worn out, in fact, that Kazama Ibara witched out on her “lifestyle of a burnout” Trauma Track.

(whoops, i did scribbles and filter spam instead of art again)

So, the ensuing clusterfuck spanned two sessions- and I couldn’t really do a recap post for the first while the battle was still going on, since it involved the players having asymmetrical access to information. Remember Makoto’s witch? The whole parallel channel where everything was different? We did that again, and doing a recap post would spoil everyone. So...

Well, now it’s over. And now I get to try and figure out how to do color commentary on a fight that involved like, three or four separate factions from three different perspectives.

First off, the first half of the fight- session 12, where everything happens so much and no one knows what’s going on.

So! All of a sudden, everyone’s in a witch barrier. This time around, it’s... a city. Or what... used to be a city, maybe? It’s a grid of skyscraper-sized stone pillars in the desert, with, like... photographs of buildings wallpapered on. The wallpaper is faded and weathered, though, and it’s obvious they’re not real. There’s some kind of colosseum looming in the distance, in this ruin of facades.

The first thing that happens- because it’s not just the party, the cannibal squad is there too- is that the party tries to run like hell. Sakura and Makoto head north, towards the colosseum, assuming Ibara’s witch will be there. Yukari, unfortunately, can’t follow- she’s still a gold statue, under the influence of Katou Kimiko’s Midas Touch power.

How she escapes from this...

Well, what I told the players, at this point, was that Yukari has ticked off all four Overcharge fallout boxes and is now taking an Extreme Overcharge Fallout- in this case, a Magical Burst occurred, a huge discharge of magical energy with a dramatic effect.

The effect, apparently, is to summon... a girl in orange, a girl in a black and white robe, a girl in a deep blue dress, and a girl in red and gold. Manaka Chinami, Isekana Ayusa, Shunsen Nozomi, and Otoka Ruka. Four girls from Yukari’s past, who’d been killed by Midarezaki Honoka. The Nakatsu Hero Club.

kohotli’s prediction here, however, is incorrect. Yukari is not going to witch out next session. Because... what I told them about the Magical Burst was a lie. Yukari did not, actually, perform a feat of time magic to resurrect her friends.

No, no. “The gears inside her head are still turning.” The Yukari who apparently just escaped the gold effect is in fact a clockwork automaton, as are the rest of the Nakatsu Hero Club. They’re the familiars of Yukari’s witch- ＳＨＩＯＲＩ ＯＲＩＯＲＩ. Shiori Oriori was the leader of the Nakatsu Hero Club, and Yukari’s idol and mentor. 

Let’s check in on her.

Over in the colosseum, we meet ＴＡＲＡＮＴＥＬＬＡ- a fifty-foot-tall gorgon who isn’t immune to her own gaze. As she moves, her skin turns to stone and crumbles away. Her impossibly hideous face is hidden by a curtain of snakes that reach to the ground- their heads all burning, their length slowly decreasing. She has no Overcharge- only a stupidly massive pool of 100 Resolve, and all of her abilities are cast from HP.

Oriori is suddenly there with her. A girl in a sky-blue dress, standing underneath a glass clocktower.

Let me give you their character sheets real quick:

Whoops, left one of those abilities crossed out in the screenshot. Tarantella... ends up sacrificing a lot of her abilities for health, given how hard the fight ends up being.

They don���t... get along perfectly, initially, but don’t attack each other.

They team up, Oriori buffing Tarantella with her Midnight Crew ability. They do this because an obstacle immediately makes itself known: Katou Kimiko/Midarezaki Honoka suddenly teleports in. 

Kimikonoka took one look at Ayusa and bolted for the witch rather than stay and fight the Nakatsu hero club. Ayusa, see, had contracted with a specific wish- to kill Honoka. Consequently, her entire kit revolved around negating her- she could turn off all of Honoka’s powers if she got in range, she did extra damage, she could spend her own Soul Gem’s power to burn Honoka’s... she was a guided missile designed to get revenge.

In the past, Honoka defeated her by carrying a decoy Soul Gem- Ayusa sacrificed her life to kill Honoka by attacking her gem directly, but she targeted the wrong gem and died. Now that she’s back, and Honoka isn’t so well-prepared... well, Kimikonoka is scared.

What she wanted to do was quickly dispatch the witch and run off with the Soul Seed. Unfortunately, two witches, one of whom had an ability that hard-countered her... that, she wasn’t expecting. Ayusa teleported after her, and Kimiko found herself in the middle of the perfect trap.

Not that Tarantella can tell- both Ayusa and Kimiko show up as identical sentai- Ayusa in gold, Kimiko in red.

Which they do! Unfortunately, Kimiko’s abilities- the ones she had apart from Honoka’s abilities- remain intact, and she isn’t completely defenseless. She takes some hits, but she’s okay for now.

Back to the main crew!

Ayusa and Kimiko have just teleported away- but, um, it’s now Yoshe and Emiko’s turn.

Yoshe has a really fun ability:

So, the players do get to fight the witch right off the bat, technically! Yoshe’s hair turns into snakes, and she hits Yukari, Nozomi, and Orino for a bunch of damage, seriously wounding Orino. Nozomi’s kit, though, is very healing-focused, and heals most of that off. Yoshe then follows up by shattering Sakura’s armor and hitting her with Shadow Spears, and Emiko charges in after Ruka, throwing one of Chinami’s combat drones at her to destroy it and hurt her.

Ruka reacts by using her signature ability- the ability to completely annihilate a region of spacetime with a fucking chainsaw. Troublesome, because the map looked like this:

and now it looks like this:

So everyone’s all separated from each other- including Seina, trapped alone with Yoshe.

Orino- she’s here, and suggestible as ever- buffs Seina to help protect her. And by “buffs” I mean “makes her grow to nine feet tall”. This persists through the rest of the session, although I keep forgetting about it.

Sakura runs up and applies taffy to Yoshe, locking her in place- and Makoto follows up by summoning a SWARM OF PIGEONS, which divebomb her.

...And this, after the beating she took from Emiko’s fakeout, knocks her out of MG form. This forces her into a corner- first, she pops a pill. All it does is restore 1 Resolve, but that’s enough to transform again. With that, she has her witch actions back- and she uses one of Tarantella’s moves. Specifically, the one that lets her permanently burn an ability in order to regain health.

Then she stabs the shit out of Seina with Shadow Spears, which hurts but she’s giant and a Knight and so doesn’t take that much damage.

Ohhhhhhhhh Emiko’s got a giant robot! Right! Okay! Sure! And she gets inside and jetpacks up onto a building! Cool! And it gets shot to ribbons by Chinami’s drones, because apparently her giant robot is, um, just a physical machine with no magical enchantments of any kind and is therefore entirely vulnerable to magical laser blasts!

Sakura takes this opportunity to try to negotiate with her.

Yukari gets in on it.

That’s about when Chinami starts shooting her again, because Chinami isn’t interested in humoring Emiko’s survival-of-the-fittest spiel.

(god-shattering intellect: Use Gun.)

Seina starts beating up on Yoshe again, and Sakura taffies her- which she responds to by triggering her Chill Aura, a big AoE that slows down opponents and does damage over time if it lasts long enough.

Which is what she does! She says “MEGALODONNA” and fires off the giant ghost shark! Which eats Sakura and Seina! Sakura takes heavy damage, while Seina mostly shrugs it off- but the main effect is that it flies them over to the colosseum, far away from where they can hurt Yoshe. Makoto’s also running up that way, in hopes of getting to Ibara. The team is closer to the goal, now, albeit scraped up pretty badly.

Well, I say the team, but Yukari’s been left behind on top of a building, next to Nozomi. Nozomi casts a shadow. Yoshe has two Support Actions left. Yoshe uses Shadow Spears.

Yoshe uses Shadow Spears twice.

The party is at this point extremely worried about Yukari! She just straight-up died! What the fuck? When a magical girl goes to zero resolve, she’s supposed to revert to human form!

Of course, you and I know that this “Yukari” is a fake, and that the real Yukari- currently Shiori Oriori- is off fighting Kimikonoka.

The fight over there is going pretty well, all things considered! Gold ranger’s powers have locked red ranger out of Honoka’s Overcharge shield and all her crazy weapons. Tarantella has her in quicksand, and Oriori’s used her clocktower buzzsaw to do some major damage.

Unfortunately, just as Yukari dies...

On top of that, the red ranger manages to struggle free, using her Money Money Money Money Money Motherfuckers ability to fill the underground zone with gold coins- burying statue gold ranger and bursting out of the quicksand. She teleports to a safe range, and then...

How it works is- because Zero gave her a superweapon with basically no regard to how he’d actually have to deal with it in combat- is that she fires a giant fuckoff laser with no saving throw. 

It does 10 minus [target Heart] damage, and over half of Oriori’s health bar disappears in one turn. It’s not great. If they don’t do something to stop her, she could just keep firing those until they died.

So that’s where this session leaves off- with “Yukari” having just died, the team sent over to the colosseum, and Honoka escaping Ayusa and gearing up to take out the witches. This all resolves in the next session- which I’ll be writing up soon.

[femvulvaphile]

let’s break that weird shit down, then

“We’ve been here since the beginning. I know your hate group, your little Nazi sub-sect, has this lie you like to spread that we suddenly spring into being from whole cloth in the 1970s, but that fighting all through history? WE’VE. BEEN THERE. FOR ALL OF IT.” cool but that’s literally not what I said. transwomen’s and women’s fights are inherently different. Sex-based oppression doesn’t DIRECTLY affect transwomen: you will never be shunned for menstruating, you will never be afraid of having your prepubescent vulva mutilated for the sick pleasure of a men five times your age, you will never be afraid of being impregnated against your will, or of miscarriage of a wanted child, or of all the pregnancy and birth complications who are still killing women all over the world. you will never know what it’s like to have men catcall and grope you when you’re nine years old just because your boobs already began to grow.   

"The demonization of trans women is a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of human history and it is one that you have helped re-surge into the modern world.” that’s bullshit. the “demonization” you’re talking about can refer to one of two things: either the conservative view that transwomen are “deviant men” (which I definitely agree is shitty), or the radical feminist view that transwomen retain their male socialization and so, as a group, can represent danger to women (which is backed up by research, btw, and the amount of “receipts” in the form of news reports of transwomen hurting and murdering cis women AND in the unending threats and harassment that radfems receive online and irl).

"The idea of ASAB and tying it to gender in some inviolate and unchangeable way is something colonizing white people brought to this country, and others they invaded.” cool but that’s bullshit? pretty much every culture on earth has a history of identifying biological sex and applying sociological roles to them. that’s not a white invention, that’s not the fruit of colonialism. the concept of “gender” as behaviors and roles based on reproductive function has existed for as long as people have existed. some cultures have stricter rules about them, others are more loose. some cultures refuse to acknowledge non-conforming people as their “original gender”, and then you have things like two-spirit or hijras.

"Whether you realize it or not, and…let’s be honest, you probably do, your actions, your hate group, is just a laser-guided subsection of what fascism and white supremacy stands for.” wtf tho. fascists and white supremacists and nazi want a “pure” world without “lesser” groups, like black people, jewish people, homosexuals, gnc people. how is female-only radical feminism the same? are you aware that plenty of radical feminists are woc themselves, and even jewish? are you aware that the vast majority of people you’d call “terfs” aren’t even american, or english speakers? we literally just want men to stop fucking murdering us.

“Without colonization, without white supremacy, your argument, your constant, hammering on “male” as if to conjure some demon from the word, would mean nothing.” male violence has been a reality in human history. it’s not a theory, it’s not up to debate. it’s a fact. you know it is, according to your original post talking about men posing the most danger to transwomen. women all over the world are victims of men. it doesn’t change whether we talk about it, or use the words male, men, amab.

"I don’t mean that in the rhetorical sense, I mean literally, your words would not have a cogent basis without that.” again, bullshit. male violence is everywhere, in every culture, in every part of the world, regardless of how much contact with europen colonization the culture has had. japanese men are violent, russian men are violent, french men are violent, english men are violent, american men are violent, cuban men are violent, argentinian men are violent, brazilian men are violent. nazis didn’t invent misogyny.

“How fucking dare you invoke my dead sisters, how fucking dare you bring up that most of us getting murdered are PoC, while peddling Nazi approved propaganda.” uh. it’s “nazi approved propaganda” to say that women face violence from men and therefore need safe spaces from them? and I brought up the groups that murdered transwomen belong to because YOUR GROUP likes using them, using your so-called dead sisters, as argument points, as proof that a white middle class educated men with a dress and lipstick is somehow more oppressed than any woman on earth.

“Meanwhile, asshole,” oh cool name calling when I wrote a relatively calm and non-offensive post. “I was talking about SHARED SPACES. LGBT focused communities, the ones you are perpetually try to focus trans lesbians out of because you view us as the worst of what you already consider the worst.” yeah, maybe we wouldn’t need to do that if “lesbian” transwomen could stop demanding so much from women, or if they’d stop claiming protagonism when they don’t even experience SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, which historically has been, you know, the entire defining poing for “lgbt” people.

“You didn’t even notice it, did you? You were just launching into Pre-Written Terf Rhetoric #5 without so much as reading what I actually. Fucking. Said.” dude, you’re calling me a nazi literally just because I said women deserve female-only spaces and transwomen should create their own safe spaces away from men instead of demanding entry and protection from women.

"Your insistence that we’re “straight men” only serves to try and push us out of those communities as well." you have more in common with straight men than with lesbians, tho. you don’t experience same-sex attraction, you’re not female, you can impregnate a female lesbian (depending on transition specifics, but let’s be honest: the big problem is the transwomen who claim “there’s no need to need to transition bc my dick is a woman’s dick”), if you’re not “passing” you don’t need to fear homophobic violence from strangers.

“Jesus fuck, like did you even notice that was the fucking point? Like your shoving us aside as non-women is already fucked up but that wasn’t even the point of this particular post.” the point of your post was vilifying women who question the notion that “transwomen are exactly the same as women”. the point of your post was putting the blame on women, “terfs”, for what men do.

"The idea that men view us as also men is so beyond laughable I can’t even properly convey it.” they view you as “DEFECTIVE” men. they definitely don’t view you as women. men are violent towards you as a result of toxic masculinity - a non-conforming male is a threat to their notion of rigid male-female roles. the violence towards you is closer in motivation to the violence towards gay men, rather than the one towards women.

"But I’m just going to say: You don’t live our lives. You don’t live our experiences.” yes. just like you don’t live the lives of women. which is exactly why I said transwomen do deserve safe spaces, but not by invading female-only safe spaces.

"If you don’t know how wrong you are it’s because you’re incapable of treating our words as anything but the words of the target of your hate and thus discarded.” you’re lumping me in with nazis (I’m a latina gender-non-conforming lesbian, I’d be raped and killed by actual nazis faster than you could type “op is a terf”), refusing to actually ACKNOWLEDGE the things I said, bringing up way more arguments than the ones on your original post, and then blaming me for not being able to read your mind.

“The power you hold is that you have been aligning yourself with right-wing christian groups,” bullshit. again: women can’t even get men to stop raping us. how exactly do you think we have any power, any voice, over THE most misogynistic men on the planet?

"the power you hold is that your ilk has been speaking to audiences wherever they can find them in academia for decades,” again, bullshit. women have been in academia for, like, two years, in comparison to how long men have been dominating every public and private space.

"the power you hold is that you went into the communities that might have helped us stay alive and sowed false accusations to turn others against us,” b u l l s h i t. YOU came into OUT communities demanding we treat you as equals, when we are observably NOT equals. sex-based oppression doesn’t affect transwomen the same way it does women. men’s violence is distinctly different based on your sex.

"the power you hold is in helping, insidiously, to uphold the institutional biases that keep us marginalized, alone, and dying.” the same can be said of modern trans rights activists, tho. you’re all contributing to the strengthening of gender as a hierarchy - and not because you need to conform to survive. no, your original message (the one we can still hear from drag queens and transvestites from stonewall, for instance, that your kind likes to claim as “transwomen”) has been corrupted to the point where people look at a feminine gay boy and tell him he must be trans, he must transition, he must be a woman because he likes makeup and is attracted to men. your kind tells parents of vulnerable children that their little boys and girls will KILL THEMSELVES if they don’t take hormones as soon as possible. your group tells lesbians they need to suck dick to be proper lesbians. your group supports (and breeds) more murderers, rapists, and pedophiles than radical feminism could. your group tells women of color, lesbians, survivors of all sorts of male violence, that they’re the problem. you tell us we’re even worse than men. you tell us to die, you threaten us with rape, with baseball bats. you punch sixty year old women who dare take a picture of people trying to silence women. you rape and murder a twelve year old girl. you rape and forcibly impregnate a female trans person, and then brag about it. you support rapists and pedophiles being housed in women’s prison because of their “gender feels”. 

you tell women to shut up about their own experiences. you tell women they’re not the “right kind” of women. you tell women they’re not woman “enough”. you tell them to sacirfice themselves for yet another male.

“And yes, before you even start, I’m blocking you. I don’t debate Nazis or Nazi bootlicks.” still nowhere near being a nazi, but alright.

bonus:

“also do they just have a terf blog name generator somewhere, i swear all terf blogs read like a bunch of synonyms for vagina and spellings of rad and possibly a wolf reference or phile or fetishist, all put in a random name generator” that’s hilarious to men because I literally saved this url after I seeing an asshole claim that lesbians aren’t allowed to call themselves lesbians if they don’t suck dick, and that they’re actually vagina fetishists. the person used -phile on something, I can’t recall what, and I immediately thought “hmm, yes. I love vulvas. I’m a vulvaphile. A female vulvaphile.”