#also if you're bi and think it's the only 'real' mspec identity we will all join forces to beat you up like that one jojo gif

[weedle-testaburger]

if you exclude bi people they get to bisect you. if you exlude pan people they get to deck you with a frying pan. if you exclude poly people they get to rip you up like polystyrene. if you exclude omni people they get to whack you over the head with an omnibot. we're not just called mspec because we're a spectrum of multiple forms of attraction to multiple genders, it's because we have multiple ways to beat your ass if you try and invalidate us

[bilesproblems]

This is based on a TROLL on TikTok who said "basically I'm a straight lesbian which means I'm straight but I like the lesbian aesthetic." Even though the troll account exposed themselves and said nobody would ever ID as a straight lesbian (despite the fact multigender people and people with split attraction DO), people now think that's a thing the contradictory label community does. That has real consequences on lesboys and mspec lesbians now because when we reclaim our places in lesbian spaces, or our complex experiences with sexuality or gender don't sound "complex enough" to someone with only the labels we use to go off of, then you'll get thrown in with the people "using it for the aesthetic" (a boogeyman that doesn't exist.)

If the person who wrote this sees this post:

NOBODY GENUINELY USES THE LESBIAN LABEL AS AN AESTHETIC. THAT'S NOT REAL. THAT WAS ONE PERSON WHO WAS TROLLING.

ALL lesboys have a complicated relationship with gender or they wouldn't feel like lesbians! Even if they appear like they're just a trans man, being trans itself can cause a complicated relationship with gender and how you label your orientation. NOBODY who is truly a perisex, aptobinary, monogendered cis man wants to call themselves a lesbian unironically. This is another boogeyman that isn't real. The only cis man lesboys are multigendered, on the nonbinary spectrum but still consider themselves cis because they're close to their AGAB, and "men" who are exploring their gender with the lesbian label - it is actually not uncommon for transfems to call themselves lesbians first and then trans second. Or maybe they are intersex and that made them end up having a complicated relationship with gender, how to label their orientation in regards to it, and the cis-trans dichotomy. There is most likely nobody who actually fits the stereotypical idea of what a cis man is (perisex, monogendered, aptobinary, and gender conforming, and without any complicated relationship to his gender) who actually identifies as a lesbian, and if there were, oh well. It's just like one or two guys. That's not an invasion and I'm CERTAIN that guy or those guys would actually indeed have a complex relationship with their gender. Sure some fully aptobinary cis men will jokingly refer to themselves as lesbians when they get rejected by us, but this kind of "no u can't be a lesbian" post won't stop them. They don't actually identify that way.

Mspec lesbians also do not identify as lesbians for the aesthetic. Like I said, that's not real. That was one troll who pretended to be a straightbian. Mspec lesbians and straightbians alike almost all have a complicated orientation. Straightbians are largely multigender, nonbinary, or have split attraction. Mspec lesbians also have split attraction, but we also have abrosexuality, difficult to distinguish orientation, aspec experiences, conditional attraction to men (depending on if there are other genders present), fitting both modern definitions of bi and lesbian (ie, me. I am attracted to women and a vast array of elsegender identities. This means I am attracted to 2+ genders and am therefore bi. This also means I am not a man and not attracted to men therefore I fit the modern definition of lesbian, despite the fact that I hate it as a definition, and am a lesbian), and reclaiming a historically backed identity that was destroyed by TERFs and radfems.

Please, OOP, if you see this: I think you're a good person and I think you'll fully support our communities if you get to know them, but first you have to stop attacking that boogeyman of invaders. They are not real. Nobody is using lesbian as an aesthetic and nobody who's an aptobinary man with no complicated relationship with his gender calls themselves a lesbian. What you'll end up doing is looking for this boogeyman and projecting it onto people without really knowing their relationship to gender, or their orientation, and assuming intentions. Sometimes there is complexity you can't see. Okay?!

occasionally I will see posts like these and I am not sure how some people still miss the point so hard

[posi-pan]

(You don't have to publish this if you don't want, it's lengthy and I guess I'm just looking for some reassurance than I'm not losing my mind...)

Aren't pan people the expert in the experiences we deal with as pan? I think so! People generally agree that talking over others' experiences with their own labels is bad. So that goes for us, too.

Aren't pan people the ones who will catch panphobic dogwhistles the easiest because some of us are aware it's directed at us and it's bad faith? Absolutely!

With all that said... I've come across a post (that I'm sure someone talked to you about it here before, around February) where the gist of it was a prominent bi talked about typical bi things (and there was no mention of pansexuality) but a lot of pan people caught on the dogwhistles right away. Some digging through that person's blog and there we have... *Babs. Then a bunch of bi people became defensive saying stuff like how it's not about pan, and bi people saying "bi is not transphobic etc" is not a dogwhistle... And that shutdown the conversation and didn't address the elephant in the room: a bi person saying "innocent" bi positivity statements that read as panphobic dogwhistles and this same bi person associating with *babs being just a coincidence and not at all related /s.

So then we have a bunch of bi people unwilling to hear pan people (and other non-bi mspec) and call out anti-pan and anti-mspec sentiments in the bi community, and you have a bunch of non-bi mspec people terrified of the (much more visible and bigger) bi community because of *babs, because of being mislabeled as bi... And everyone is unhappy but especially non-bi people get shunned out and silenced (much like in aspec discourse, trans men/transmasc discourse, and so on).

It makes me wonder if people even know what a dogwhistle is... The point is exactly to be stealthy and look like something completely ordinary and inoffensive... it's literally why it's called that. I wouldn't count on bi people understanding panphobic (or any mspecphobic) dogwhistles because these can come disguised as bi positivity! But I would at least expect them to stop and try to listen, see it from our perspective, you know like... in solidarity with their mspec siblings. And I'm glad many of them do! I just wish it was a community-wide effort.

A lot of the time I feel like the "I'm mad when it's not about me" and "read this manifest/book/article/magazine, it's the bible of <identity>, no I don't care about your, actual, real life experiences" and "well, I won't listen/do anything about it because it doesn't affect me personally" and "well, I'm <identity> and I don't think <thing> is that bad, you're overreacting" are things that are so pervasive in the community, especially from mainstream labels and binary people... like... in some kind of hierarchic, oppression olympics, way and people don't even need to say it explicitly like that... And this is why you see so many new labels, mogai, xenogenders, bi lesbians, etc getting so much hatred all the time. Somehow it's threatening to Certified(/s) lesbians, gays, bisexuals, binary trans people, and it's so depressing... I hate exclusionists. I don't really have a solution. I wish I didn't have to be blocking a lot of panphobes/mspecphobes everyday :( thank you! (I don't mean to be antagonist against mainstream labels btw, I believe solidarity and union can make us all much stronger.)

*Babs are not the only panphobic/mspecphobic types out there, but they're pretty public about being assholes. It could be anyone, really. And unironically, *babs also harm fellow bi people because their rhetoric is biphobic too.

just........everything you said. yes. you are not losing your mind. you are spot fucking on.

[posi-pan]

Do you think there's a real way to tackle exclusionist rhetoric? I see so many "well" intended people fall for it because of how eloquent it is, because of how much it makes sense (in the same way people fall for trans-exclusionary rhetoric, radical feminist rhetoric, sex-negative rhetoric [including kink and sex work] and so and so...). I saw some people sharing posts that made very thoughtful and easy-to-follow points that were also really exclusive. Stuff like how "fragmenting" the community was bad and would cause a loss of identity in individuals, and that we're strong in a collective, not individually, and I was like... ok, I get it, that's really valid. Then I open the article and it's a bi person basically dunking on pan and omni people (and other mspec) and I close it immediately 😅 The post has thousand of notes and my mspec ass is baffled that: 1) no one see anything wrong that and "well maybe all those special snowflakes coming up with different words are just bi" and 2) mspec-phobia aimed at anyone who isn't bi is the norm in LGBT+ spaces. How do we even start fighting so much misinformation and bad faith from exclusionist if it seems like people will always take their side? We can't get angry, we can't dare to correct or call some bis on their bullshit, we can't talk about our experiences because "you're just bi" and it feels so very discouraging! Why is "fragmenting the community" bad? Putting people in one big umbrella that might not fit them doesn't sound good either. Why is "we're strong in a collective, not individually" bad? Excluding/ostracizing/erasing/silencing people for not fitting in the "collective" also doesn't sound good at all.

how are more labels "fragmenting" the community? how is that leading to the "loss of identity"? more labels encourage individuality and the exploration and expression of oneself. more labels enrich the community.

the only that fragments the community and leads to the loss of identity is trying to force everyone to be the same. when you try to shove people into boxes they don't want it creates tension and bad blood and creates divides. when you try to shove people into boxes they don't want you erase and encourage them to hide or repress or deny their actual identities.

like do people not care about queer history? they are literally advocating for the same things that were done to them/others. there was a time when bisexual wasn't included in the overall community name or event titles etc. it was just gay and gay/lesbian. that didn't encourage community and solidarity between gays/lesbians and bi people. it didn't make bi people feel part of a collective. it made bi people feel erased and unimportant and left out and misunderstood.

and that's not even getting into the fight to include trans and nonbinary people, because certain people had the exact same idea about inclusivity and expansion.

restricting self-expression/identification and trying to cram everyone into a few preapproved boxes regardless of how they actually feel about it is what fragments the community and destroys identity. prescriptivism and assimilationism harm the community; not people daring to define their identity on their own terms.

my take on how to tackle exclusionist rhetoric is posts like this, others on my blog, other blogs and accounts like mine.

exposing it for what it is, showing its roots in the narratives that queer people generally know are bad and damaging, pointing out how they're regurgitating that and repeating history, challenging it in whatever way you're comfortable with (my way is usually indirectly so i don't have to actually interact with queerphobes), and/or boosting it when other people do the same.

basically spreading accurate information however, whenever, and wherever you can. the more you do that, the more other people will see it and share it and take it in.

i don't think you can reason with exclusionists, because in my experience they actively reject any attempt at educating them and will see what they want to see even if they do read anything you send them,

but spreading accurate information can help other people not fall for exclusionism. like you said, a lot of it is purposely disguised in language that sounds reasonable, so reaching them before the exclusionists do or while they're still open to the idea of the exclusionists being wrong is always helpful.

[rjalker]

[ID: A screenshot of tags that reads, "#kills every MOGAI and then myself". End ID.]

And I guess it's time to remind everyone all over again that the acronym MOGAI, which stands for:

Marginalized Orientations, Gender identities, And Intersex

Was created specifically because of the rampant and violent exclusionism in the LGBT community. It literally serves to include more people than the strictly and violently policed labels of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Trans.

You know, that time, which continues to this day, where people went out of their way to harass Queer people whose identies they didn't like, claiming we were "cishet invaders" "pedophiles" "faking being trans" and "white people trying to be oppressed"? (These are all real examples that these kinds of people said about ace people!)

Aspec people, most popularly ace people, nonbinary people, mspec people who weren't bi, gender non-conforming people, and literally too many other fucking things to list.

We were told we were not allowed in the LGBT community and we were told that Queer is a slur that no one is ever allowed to reclaim.

So the acronym MOGAI was created to explicitly include everyone who was being excluded from the LGBT. It's literally a fucking synonym for Queer but as an aconym.

MOGAI is not just kids on the internet.

I know everybody likes to say that as a very easy way to condemn bigotry against us, but that's literally just erasing why the acronym was created in the first place.

And because everybody continues to pretend like the reasons it was created didn't happen, people continue to reinforce the belief that MOGAI is just for cringey kids on the internet.

And it shouldn't fucking matter how old most of the community is. "Well they're kids so it's okay" is not the defense people think it is. That literally just means that once you're past a certain age it's no longer okay.

MOGAI was literally created as a safe haven for everyone who was excluded and harassed and attacked for not being strictly LGB or t. And half the time this exclusion also attacked trans people who were part of the target minorities, reducing the acceptable letters down to just LG and B. And you know, bigots being bigots, why don't they just get rid of the B, too, while they're at it? So they did.

The acronym MOGAI was created in response to years of harassment campaigns bigotry and violence from within the LGBT community and the bigots who were gatekeeping all of the Queer people who were seeking safety and community.

Aspec people were harassed and hounded on this website for years. So many people were fucking traumatized back into the closet that they haven't even fucking come back out and they might never come back out again. Everyone who wasn't a victim either forgot that it happened or pretends it was just some silly harmless "bullying on the internet" (Because these people have never been bullied and they think bullying is harmless fun!)

There is a reason that the MOGAI acronym is so consistantly fucking violently attacked, and it's because it's literally just a continuation of all of the exclusion ism that has come before.

The only difference is that it's no longer socially acceptable in the wider reachees of tumblr to say you hate ace people and want us to die. But it's still acceptable to say you hate MOGAI people and want them to die.

MOGAI is not just for weird kids on the internet anymore than Queer or LGBT are. That's just the fucking myth that gets spread around to excuse attacking and already marginalized and attacked community.

You cannot separate MOGAI from the Queer community. They're the same fucking thing, just under different names.

person who posted this tag is 26. like idk considering a lot of mogai is young queers figuring out their identities. maybe it isnt the best idea say you'd wanna kill them. and that people calling themselves catgender is horrendous enough to make you want to kill yourself. idk.