#are all gay feminists or like suddenly believe in social justice

[leahcee]

something I can rant about forever is the fact that this one couple I went to high school with (a year to two above me) got famous on TikTok/IG bc he’s a “stay at home husband” and his wife is the breadwinner when like… in high school I got so much shit and I mean so MUCH SHIT for being so open about feminism and how my mom is the breadwinner in my family and my dad is a stay at home dad and like people were sooooo mad about that and saying how “unnatural” that is and yet…… these white asses get clout on social media for being so “out of the norm”

[rantingcrocodile]

I totally understand the connection between girls/women reading gay male fanfiction and then starting to think they must be gay men themselves but it's still so insane to me. I'm a straight woman that has been reading m/m fanfiction for years bc the fandoms I'm in mainly have popular gay ships, but the thought that this might make ME a gay man has never ever entered my brain. I like the fanfictions bc they are genuinely well-written (BY women FOR women), and I can admit that the sex scenes are hot because I'm attracted to men and there's two of them 💀 How exactly do those girls jump to thinking that means they're men, is it simply because they're young and impressionable and see trans stuff everywhere nowadays?

It's because of fandom culture on social media.

They argue over who is the best character and which is the best ship, but they believe that they're right and really hate anyone that disagrees with them. So how did they "prove" that their opinions and interpretations were right? They adopted social justice language.

I was speaking to someone about this recently, and I was reminded of seeing, unironically, someone argue that X character was the best because - and I wish I were joking - he was "female coded" and therefore if he wasn't your favourite, that made you a misogynist.

So when you mix that kind of deep obsession into a fandom with the must-outdo-everyone-else when it comes to pretending to care about social justice topics, then fandoms became hotbeds for "I'm a feminist!" etc. Writing fanfic porn was "empowering" and "queer culture." (Do you remember the anger about "queerbaiting" that didn't come from lesbians or gay men, but mostly straight girls and young women that demanded that showrunners make their most popular gay ships canon, or forever be called homophobes?)

At that point, they were very invested in their fandoms, and then also just as invested in "social justice" language. Trans issues came up. Opinions about fandom mattered more if the source of those opinions was "more oppressed" than others, and then suddenly a lot of the girls/young women in fandom spaces started calling themselves things like "demisexual" and "queer" and that they were "systems" and everyone was autistic to avoid criticism when they sent other people death threats over differing opinions over fandom. Then they were "non-binary."

It sounds bizarre because it was bizarre.

I was around on Tumblr then and saw it for myself, so I wish I could tell you that this is all theory about how it came about, but it really isn't. I saw it on Tumblr in real time and watched straight college-aged women become "demisexual biromantic aroace non-binary" women and in-fight over which characters were best and which ships were best and which fandoms were best depending on whether they talked about trans issues as "trans*" or simply "trans," because one day you had to use the * or you were being transphobic, and then the next, using the * was transphobic.

It was a very real social contagion that started thanks to stupid internet slapfights about mediocre shows and mediocre actors.

Again, I wish I was joking. This is genuinely the worst possible timeline to exist.

[whattaloser]

Why I’m a Leftist

I know I’m probably just some dude who reblogs cool stuff to most of my followers but I’ve got a nice long story/rant about my political beliefs here that I’ve been wanting to write for awhile

I am a leftist first and foremost because I value human life. Everyone matters. No person is inherently more important than another person. Everyone has inherent rights that should not be infringed. People who infringe on other’s rights are morally wrong to do so. In essence my leftism is based on doing what is right. Obviously everyone has their own opinion on what is right but what is vitally important is knowing why your moral code is right. This is why so many people become liberals or conservatives or otherwise rather than leftists. They simply do not know enough about how the world works. There are a lot of reasons they don’t know, not the least of which is intentional covering up history and preventing education. I don’t believe people who aren’t leftists are stupid, but I do believe leftists know more. It’s kinda fucked up but it’s the only way you can explain inconsistencies in other’s values.

My path to leftism was full of cringe. When i was 7 years old Al Gore was running against George Bush for president. I did not know enough to have a real opinion on it but I am happy to say that I wanted Al Gore to win. This thought was based on very little if any logical reason. I basically flipped a coin in my head I think. Or maybe there was some outside influence that I wasn’t aware of, like my older sister who I looked up to might have said she liked Al gore. Either way, from then on I was in favor of democrats and did not like George Bush. When 9/11 happened I remembered thinking how dumb it was that people lined up around the block to get gas. Even as a child I knew that some buildings going down wasn’t going to end the great nation of the United States. In general I thought the United States was a great country. I knew from movies and tv as well as elementary school history that the United States was the most powerful country in the world. 

I recall in Sixth grade my teacher mentioned she liked George Bush because he was against gay marriage. Somehow at the time my opinion was the opposite despite being raised Catholic. I believed in god until I graduated high school and suddenly my desire to be religious slipped away and so did my belief. I do not consider this a great loss. 

Sometime in middle school or early high school I had solidified my opinion that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was pointless and George Bush was a bad president. I was heavily influenced by movies and somewhat by video games that had imparted plenty of anti-war messages. Talks with my dad about nuclear missiles, watching History channel shows about world war 2, and playing Metal Gear Solid which had explicit nuclear disarmament messages, all informed me on the horrors of war. This was not enough to make me totally anti-military. In high school I wanted to join the military because I thought it was an easy way to get life experience and eventually pay for college. I was attracted to the Marines because of how cool movies like The Rock and video games like Call of Duty made it seem to be a Marine. I thought they were the best of the best. I was simultaneously against war, against veteran worship, and very pro-military. I was indoctrinated by years of government propaganda but also disillusioned by all forms of media including the book All Quiet on the Western Front which was about a soldier becoming disillusioned by witnessing horrors of war and the negative impact it had on everyone in his country. I spoke with a recruiter during my senior year and expressed my desire to be a Marine but I told him I wanted to wait a year after high school so I could get physically fit enough. The recruiter did not care that I was underweight and out of shape. He didn’t even care that I was very enthusiastic about joining, he was still putting on his best salesman demeanor which made me incredibly uneasy. The experience is supposed to pressure people into signing up on the spot, I think they even had forms for me to sign (i can’t really remember though) but I was not ready and was aware enough how I was being manipulated although not entirely cognizant. After that I no longer wanted to be in the military.

I also have to point out that I grew up in an unstable household. My parents were both loving but they were flawed and made mistakes and had problems. My dad was a typical Gen x man’s man. A little bit too emotionally repressed, but actually really good with kids when it came to play time and still is. He worked a lot because my mother couldn’t. My mother has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as long as I can remember. Her medical bills related to her problems combined with other financially bad decisions by my parents caused my home life to be fraught. I lived in varying degrees of poverty until my parents separated and me and my siblings moved with my mother to her parents’ house away from my father. Prior to moving though, we endured great financial difficulty. We were unable to afford school lunches but could not apply for free or reduced lunches because technically my father made a lot of money, however it was all garnished for medical bills. My father always tells about how he bought a car that had hidden frame damage and when he attempted to sue the dealership for selling a bad car he lost and was garnished for that as well. Despite making over 25 dollars an hour in 1999, my father could not afford school lunches for three kids and couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill. Without going into too much more detail, life sucked and continued to suck until I graduated, at least financially. I still found plenty of joy and it wasn’t always that bad. We still found ways to have good things like video games and we could always rewatch old movies but there’s a lot of psychic weight that comes with being that poor as a child and I’m sure it affects me and my ability to empathize with others who in bad conditions. 

So i watched a lot of movies and documentaries, read a lot of books growing up, discovered internet forums at the age of 11, played video games, moved to a town that had a very large Hispanic population, and I even grew up poor. All of this life experience turned me into a very average liberal upon graduating high school. I was a very optimistic 18 year old. I thought science could save the world. If I was 18 today I would be an average redditor stereotype probably. The point here though is I still wasn’t a leftist. Only vaguely progressive and full of optimism. This is when I got sucked into the anti-feminist pipeline.

I can’t remember what exactly what I had going on in my life but I remember it was around the time of Gamergate. Everyone on the internet, celebrities, and pop culture were saying “if you believe in equality between genders you’re a feminist” an did not like that. And there was a ton of people online to tell me I was right in not liking that. They all said feminism was not necessary anymore because legally you couldn’t discriminate against women and I agreed. Gamergate made it worse for reasons too complicated to get into in this already long post but suffice it say I was “pro Gamergate.” This put me at odds with my closes friends who thought feminism was great and had no qualms with it, and were already embracing the idea of being a “social justice warrior.” Despite reading all kinds of anti-feminist think pieces and reveling in the discourse, I was still very progressive and liberal minded person. Still thought the military was bad, that black people were discriminated against etc. But so many aspects of anti-feminism were appealing to me as a white guy who tried their hardest to do what they’re told is right, had low self esteem, undiagnosed adhd and depression, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism was. Two things got me out of anti-feminism though. The first and most important thing was having friends who were patient with me about it. I didn’t reveal how into anti-feminism I was because I was ashamed but they could sense it and pushed back when they could. The second thing that got me out of it was actually finding feminists online and reading what they had to say, staying away from poorly written clickbait articles that fueled misogynist tirades against feminism. After reading and learning from feminists it finally clicked. Our society is patriarchal and that affects how people interact with each other regardless of what is legal. Many of the complaints of anti-feminism talk about how men have it in society, so how can society be patriarchal. It’s because of patriarchy that men are put in bad positions. Some of the more self aware anti-feminists had retorts against these ideas but they were emotionally charged. There’s still some anti-feminists I have respect for because of how well prepared and logical they were when it came to disputing feminism. But when it came down to the fundamental tenants of feminsim all they could respond with was anger or outright denial of reality. (If you’re like I was and don’t understand how anyone can thing modern feminism is good please feel free to ask me more, I just can’t get into specifics in this long ass post) Anyways, once you understand patriarchy and how it affects an individuals actions then you can start seeing how other institutions and cultural norms can affect an individual. This is basically fundamentals of leftism. I’d say about 90% of my path to leftism was just naturally absorbing cultural and historical information through consumption of media. The most conservative people I know are people who haven’t read very many books or seen very many movies. I’m not saying watching Austin Powers at the age of 10 will make everyone a leftist but constantly recontextualizing the world by learning something new, even if you learned it from some dumb comedy movie, can give you better grounding in a shared reality.  Don’t know how to end this but I want to say when I was a teenager I thought “communism is good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice” and I had almost no historical basis for it other than the vague notion that USSR = bad despite having consumed a massive amount of media. None of it taught me what communism actually was, I didn’t know who Karl Marx was, and I had no clue why communism in the USSR failed. You can know a lot without knowing the truth so if you’re struggling with a loved one who is mind poisoned by conservative keep in mind that they know a lot but they’re missing something important to give clarity. 

This has been my Ted Talk

[novakidds]

can i ask what it’s like to be both a radfem and a trans person? like how are u treated in the radfem community and how does your view of yourself differ from typical non-radfem trans people? i’m sorry if this seems invasive but i’m actually also a transman and it’s rare for me to find blogs like yours. i often find myself agreeing w radfem ideas but all my friends r hardcore trans activists and it makes me scared to ever admit it

this is a good question, thank you anon. never feel the need to apologize for asking legitimate questions, this is what radfems are 100% into- open discussion :]

i ended up typing a LOT so im gonna tuck it away with a read more a little down the line. my bad bro

i completely understand how you feel, transitioning (lol) into the radfem community meant losing some trans-activist friends who formerly had rays of sunshine beaming from their rears. suddenly someone they knew had become, in their eyes, ‘dangerous’ which has never ceased to baffle me because i was... y’know, still me. still feminist, still lesbian, just focusing on women’s issues and calling out male behavior, which is what feminism was made for, right??? i was very bluntly disagreed with in that regard, due to my belief that trans women are biologically male.

that’s a pretty key difference between me and other non-radfem trans people i think. trans people are, and always will be, their biological sex. if we weren’t, what would we be transitioning from, exactly? our dysphoria is based in our sex. i’ll tally up the biggest beliefs that differ me, personally, from ‘them’:

1) you cannot change your biological sex. your biological sex and resulting primary/secondary sex characteristics are the reason you feel the need to transition. otherwise, what you are experiencing is not a desire to become the opposite sex, but distress at how others treat you due to your sex. this is why a lot of detransitioners are women due to how poorly women are treated, and the resulting regret of having changed their bodies so drastically in an attempt to escape sexism.

2) gender roles and the unfair standard for expressing gender are oppressive and should be abolished. women are attacked for being masculine, meanwhile... uh, drag queens exist. (i’m currently figuring out wanting to be perceived as a man vs hating performing gender for people hnnng)

3) medically transitioning, as it is now, is hazardous guesswork at best and a moneygrab by Big Pharma at worst. hormone blockers on minors, diagnosing gender dysphoria with precious little questioning, and ESPECIALLY the emphasis upon medical transition all serves as a lifelong detriment to the lives of gay and GNC people who simply don’t have the language to understand who and what they are before trans ideas found them first. there are also precious few trans people who have lived for great lengths of time after these surgeries and hormone treatments, and so there is next to no research on how these surgeries will affect ones life longterm. i can’t find the discussion on this as i type this, but i believe there was also concerns about elderly transgender people suffering from dementia being disoriented and in distress at their primary or secondary sex characteristics being missing. but again, we literally cannot know because this movement is so fresh, yet has such rapid traction.

4) activism for trans rights is on easy mode. the reasons being, say, rich white men are funding it, and places like iran pushing for the forced transition of gay people to make them appear heterosexual. what is truly being fought for? what is truly being fought against? this was a big thing that made me opt the hell out.

5) trans people still have many (if not all) behaviors of their assigned gender. i say gender and not sex, because although there are different hormones at work and chemicals are produced by the sexes at different quantities, this does not make shit like “lady brains.” that concept is misogynistic. hear me out: 98% of sexual crimes are committed by males, and proof of this can be found in the statistics of crime (october 2011 to september 2012) in the criminal justice system for england and wales. an easier to read chart with the gender of offenders and crimes can be seen right here. i can’t find the source as i type this, but iirc roughly 40% of transgender women who have been convicted of a crime were convicted of some form of sexual assault, but in spite of this statistic there is a push for transgender women to be put in women’s prisons. it’s a dangerous neglect of male-pattern violence. have you noticed how transgender men never push for access to things like, say, “gentleman’s clubs?” it’s because as females we’re socialized for complacency. we don’t want to take, vandalize, and take some more like males are socialized to do.

TL;DR

i refuse to view transitioning, trans activism, and the oppressive perceptions of gender that are required for trans ideology to exist without a critical lens. i also refuse to blindly trust males who want access to female spaces. this has, in one person’s eyes, warranted very violent threats.

the worst i had ever received from a (presumed) radfem was this anonymous ask. at worst it was a little condescending. (the answer i gave is probably old and not super relevant btw, no worries over not reading it.) i do sometimes fret to myself when i get caught up in thought about never finding ‘my people,’ but usually when i actually talk to other radfems mutual respect is perfectly intact and i was just overthinking it lmao

the biggest thing i can tell you is- being trans and believing in women’s rights as a radfem have one big thing in common that you need to embody: self-confidence. not necessary loving yourself to bits, i’m still on that path myself. just the belief in yourself that you know what you’re talking about, you know yourself well enough to make this decision, and with that knowing you refuse to crumble over the fear of what other people think. because using peer pressure isn’t politics, it’s outright bullying. any activism that depends on manipulating the human need to fit in is no longer activism- and once you’ve distanced yourself, you’ll see how much of that emotional bribery is occurring, and it being used against radfems with the assumption that they, like other women, will apologize and fall in line.

you can do it, brother. no longer having those old friends was the best thing for me in regards to my confidence and growth, and plenty of radfems will understand the system shock of being dubbed ‘dangerous’ and blocked by people they formerly talked to in a matter of a day. if they throw a hissy fit, just know that it isn’t you- and that at the very least, i’m here for you if you do decide to take the plunge.

[misterbitches]

i do not ID as a man nor a gay/on the spectrum etc so i can’t specifically speak to that. i’m a millenial~* not a zoomer. i’m coming from a perspective where i’ve been able to hone my skills in what i care about which is social justice and art. no one knows things right out the gate nor do we know everything. i’m still learning

the basis, though, is to recognize that gender and sexuality get tied together and that not only are gay men not fucking predators insofar as that men in general are socialized to care less about others and take what they want (mostly women) but that the absence of a vagina (a problem in itself) suddenly pushes the realities of interpersonal relationships into the stratosphere

the notions reinforced in BL are not only detrimental to all those who consume it and seem to reinforce the weirdest homo/teeeeransphobic beliefs but given that people who ID as girls/women/female consume it at rapid rates. in our lifetimes, a lot of us will have engagements with people of the opposite sex and it’s simply unacceptable for a 15 year old to read something like addicted heroin and come out of that experience downplaying the manipulation and coercion that is purposefully put on the pages (but also the same gender! and that matters too because people ignore consent anywhere for power) 

and why do we accept that? it reinforces an idea that is so toxic it follows us forever. there’s a lot more to this conversation even in terms of bl and its depictions but considering who these things are targeted for it is concerning that consensuality is even QUESTIONED. and i know as an adult, a person who’s gone to school and acquired (too expensive) degrees, and is presumably an artist what i know. i know it’s wrong. i know that i hate to accept certain things that i see but i also know and am developed enough in who i am to discern what to take in and what to ignore if i so choose to continually engage in material. 

a lot of people are not like me and it takes a long time to understand things (taken me 20+ years mate.) the person i am today is not the person i was yesterday. the girl i was at 15 who happened to stumble upon feminist forums could have first stumbled upon this genre or yaoi and been slowly trained to believe that love models this (and in het romance too btw)

we [women] are the biggest consumers and creators. so if we do that we have a responsibility to let younger people know or people who have had no true foundation or care about these things that it isn’t acceptable. the comments you see on youtube videos are indicative of overall social thought...

consent is not up for debate. it isn’t. some kind souls can argue the ins-and-outs but it is not a question of “if you express discomfort or say no is that a legitimate response?” it is a question of “why do you think this way and how do we stop it and stop the perpetuation in overt and subtle ways.”

and finally...it’s 2019 and the world is literally at our fucking fingertips. google. seriously. google if you are curious. input questions, research the politics of bl and consent or even why these things exist, question what you see fucking always. know that you are the center of your universe and your safety comes first and after that maybe, if it interests you (and i hope it woudl interest someone!) explore how we treat others and keep hurt alive and what we cean do to fight against it. because unfortunately we become the biggest losers of the very things we keep alive. 

and just to be smug...if you  have no clue what you’re talking about just dont fucking talk lmao now everyone knows you’re a dummy on the internet when u could be reading shit instead to not be a dummy and help yrself

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

The Women’s War: Book Review

Women’s War is a great book. It’s a 550-page monster that I got through straight in 5 hours and well into the night because I couldn’t stop. The characters, the plot twists, the magic system, it was all enthralling. What Women’s War suffers from is bad marketing that implies it’s a vast feminist statement rather than courtly intrigue with an undertone of feminism.

If you’re looking for the most overt feminist book, this isn’t it. There are no mass uprisings of women, no radical shifts of power, no women running through the streets shooting lightning...at least not yet. It’s a “court intrigue” novel and its themes stay in the “court intrigue” circle.  We hear about radical new changes, about women beginning to negotiate their own marriages with the new bargaining chip they’ve been given (the fact that women can only conceive children with their full consent), but largely the narrative is about a handful of people, not the majority of women. And of those women, only one is fully dedicated to the cause of women (or at least of her own women, who are former sex slaves) from the first, while the other slowly develops into it and the third seems to only get involved in the third act.

Perhaps it’s because, unlike The Power, it’s the first act of a trilogy and thus is setting the stage for major changes rather than showing them outright. Many men, including the villain, refuse to believe that they truly need women to consent, and those that do seem to be looking for any way around that. It’s the spell’s side effects, rather than the spell itself, that seem to have the most interesting implications, like the creation of a totally new branch of magic only women have access to, and  the fact that rape victims can now unleash deadly magic on their attackers. The instant I heard about that, I wondered why the abbess didn’t make that the big world-altering spell, because that seems like a better way to ensure women’s sexual freedom than ‘you can miscarry after the fact’, and I was gravely disappointed (though admittedly not surprised) when the king decided to keep that from common knowledge. The sequel better have that becoming common knowledge, and more examination of the fallout from that.

The most interesting of the three protagonists is Chanlix, a common woman and abbess suddenly finding herself in charge of a Well of magic and a cohort of former sex slaves who are recovering their own sovereignty through their new magic, especially the “Kai” mote that grants them power over the men that hurt them.  The second is Alys, a bastard daughter who suddenly finds herself in the crosshairs after her mother unleashes the spell that allows women to control their fertility, and is torn between her duty to her family and her connection to the growing magic. Her character development between purely wanting to preserve her own family and safety to realizing that she will have to take on the whole patriarchy is interesting, and with the twist at the end, I want to see if she’ll regress into selfishness or abandon it altogether. The least interesting is Ellin, who took up the throne to avoid a succession crisis and is struggling to hold it in against those that expect her to just take a husband and cede, and only becomes involved in the main plot in the last third. In any other story, this would be a pretty good feminist take, but the story of one woman being empowered doesn’t hold up in a story about all women being empowered, and it becomes annoying when it detracts from the more interesting plot. It comes across as small minded and sort of white feminist, ironic for a setting with only 2 white supporting characters.

How does it do on the social justice front? As mentioned before, all characters are people of color unless otherwise mentioned, but race seems to be a non-issue aside from some xenophobia against the (white) Nandels. Disability is present (the abbess is blinding, another woman is missing an eye, etc.) but not addressed. Fatphobia.....yeah, this is the bad one. The “evil ugly fat misogynist” is a trope in and of itself and it is fucking bad here. The antagonist is influenced by Henry the Eighth, with the narrative often poking fun at his weight, and there’s one scene with a fat man that had me honestly groaning at the woman constantly pointing out how fat and ugly he was, as though that was worse than him using sex slaves. And of course, there’s no fat women or good fat people to balance this out. Jenna Glass, if you’re listening, cut this shit out. Having a middle-aged woman as your protagonist and commenting on how women are seen as “less attractive” as they age rings pretty hollow when you’re commenting on how disgusting fat people are. Which brings me to my second problem: no queer people. At all. Seriously, you have an abbey full of women and none of them are in love with each other?

In short, 4 out of 5 stars. At the end of the day, it’s still a very good read, fascinating characters, good worldbuilding, and one of the best and most unique magic systems I’ve read in a while. The twist at the end had me on the edge of my seat, and I’m eager to see where it goes from here. I do have my complaints about the narrow scope, but I expect it to be addressed in future. Also, less fatphobia, more gays.

Until then, if you want a book with similar “feminist fantasy” themes, but with more marginalized women and cutting commentary, I’d recommend the Red Abbey Chronicles by Maria Turtschanioff.

[feminismforlesbians]

I mostly see accounts of people who were terfs in their youth and changed their mind. What made you go the other way?

@bluegone  

I’m finally back at my laptop. 

(I had this huge essay going in reply to this and then realized that absolutely no one would read of all it and started from scratch).

I’d have to agree with some of the people who commented on this through replies or reblogs while I was away—-I have never seen someone who was a “terf in their youth” shift entire ideologies into liberal feminism. You’ll see a lot of people apologize profusely for being a transphobic cis gay before opening their eyes to tumblr dot com and becoming an instant trans inclusionist. That means that as young 14, 15, 16 year olds (their youth) they had never heard of gender identity vs sex or else didn’t know that attraction based on sex, which was their natural attraction, was a bad thing. It doesn’t mean they were “terfs”. It means they were young gay or bisexual kids who hadn’t ever been exposed to gender theory before and now have subscribed fully to it, apologies for the past crime of feeling sex-based attraction always ready to be offered up. They didn’t change their minds from one ideology to another; they simply subscribed to one without comparison to anything else. 

I actually fully engaged in one movement, then consciously made the decision to subscribe to a different one. 

I’ve been on this hellsite for a very long time. I’m 21 now and I was either 14 or just newly 15 when I first ~made an account. The mainstream “LGBT and feminist movement” on here is liberal trans-inclusive ace-inclusive feminism. It’s large, it’s the default, it’s the social justice community you participate in unless 1) you know there’s a different one you value and you find it or 2) you find a different one through the mainstream and value it (a la me). This mainstream collective has enjoyed trends such as monosexual privilege, gender bang pt 1, mogaii, split attraction model, gender bang pt 2, “q*eer”, and others. I was involved in all aforementioned and the others in between. I believed myself to be bisexual when I first started, because I knew I was attracted to girls and I assumed I was attracted to guys. The monosexual privilege, mogaii, and split attraction model trends all did fantastic jobs of reinforcing this internalized heterosexism but also created a substantial amount of internalized lesbophobia. Gender bang pt 1 and the split attraction model together also created some short-lived but intense body sex dysphoria (wherein I would find myself browsing through packers and binders and shutting my eyes while using the restroom, despite still knowing myself to be a woman) because between the pressure to hyperdefine every aspect of my attraction and to deconstruct my gender, I went through the extra identity crisis that was never needed. This is all a very compressed version of the experience, and is more of a background for the events that started the momentum to my switch in ideologies. 

The tumultuous gender and sexuality crises that I personally experienced as a result of these trends lasted from about the ages 14 to 18; I didn’t start to drift away from the libfem community until I was 20. It was not the personal crises that made me leave, and it’s not my crying about them, about my individual woe-is-me tale that makes me a “terf”. It’s the foundation, though, and that’s why it’s worth mentioning. So you are aware I am not talking out of my ass when I describe things in the libfem community, like language used, priorities made, or the effects on young and/or gay people. I’m not talking out of my ass because I was fully subscribed to it for years; enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. It was my community. 

By the time I was about 18-19 I had finally just let myself be a girl and the sex dysphoria had dissipated along with the frantic attempts to gender-trend myself so that I could make my sexuality “make sense”; I knew I was attracted to girls and though I assumed I must have been attracted to guys, I couldn’t describe how and gender-trending seemed to be the answer. I let that go, the gender-trending part, and then I was just a “cis” bisexual girl. I was okay with that; I accepted that trans people were The Most Oppressed. I knew (and still know) that trans people are deserving of safety, and health care, and that dysphoria can be life threatening. I was content with the standards that trans people came first. Trans women are women and trans men are men, check your cis privilege, and so on. 

And then somewhat of a trio of things of happened in quick succession: there was finally that “duh…I’m a lesbian” moment, a wave of gender theory craze that I call gender bang pt 2, and then I got involved in the ace diskhorse. When I finally let myself be a lesbian it was like…learning to fly. For about two seconds. I just felt free from the discomfort and frustration and pain I’d put myself through trying to convince myself I was attracted to men when I really just wasn’t. And then I came out as a lesbian on here, on this hellsite, and I got people telling me, immediately, that that was great as long as I wasn’t One Of Those Lesbians. The terfy ones. Suddenly it became imperative that every time I talked about women I said and trans women. It was with my own internal freedom to be attracted only to women that I finally saw that the reverse was true in this community I was a part of. I was friends with straight women, bisexual women, pansexual women, q*eer women, q*eer nonbinary people, and many trans people. And they were all attracted to men. And what I watched was how normalized and encouraged attraction to men was—how the “thirst” for men was being called empowering and sexy and “q*eer”. Maybe it is empowering and sexy (it’s certainly not “q*eer”), but not when attraction women was either hush hushed or practically infantilized. Attraction to men was loud and suggestive and sexual and humorous and encouraged; attraction to women was…not. This I noticed first. Men and women. And then I noticed something else. It was okay to connect men to penises. It was assumed, by nearly every person around me, that when one “thirsted for that dick” they were talking about a man and that was okay. If someone said “I really want to fuck her”, without even citing whether “cis” or trans, the entire community was on alert. If someone were to say “I would eat her out”, there would be goddamn riots in the name of transphobia. This was where I started think that it was kind of fucked up that people could be “transphobic” in talking about men and penises have it celebrated as feminist, and then utterly destroyed for talking about women and vulvas. This was where I started to wonder why it was okay for my straight female friend to talk about her thirst for men using explicit details involving dick, but it wasn’t okay for me, a lesbian, to have a sexual attraction to vulvas. This was where I started to want to ask questions about sex-based attraction (but I didn’t, because you don’t ask questions in libfem communities. You just accept, validate, and welcome everybody and shut your goddamn mouth if you don’t.)

This overlapped with the gender bang pt 2, which was a reinforcement of the gender theory that had been prevailing for a while but was more significant to me at the time. While I was now starting to wonder why people attracted to men could specify male genitalia in their attraction and lesbians weren’t permitted to do the same for women, there was beginning a larger push to pretend like biological sex didn’t exist at all. There was a push for people to believe that only gender, a concept of personal identity, factored into attraction. It was a push that made it so a woman was only a woman because she said so, and to speak of biological sex was to be transphobic. It was a push that deconstructed my womanhood and my sexuality in one blow. It was a push that further amplified discussions of “dick”, except now where my lack of participation in such talks would have been unnoticeable, it was a “red flag”. It was upsetting. It wasn’t trans people that were upsetting to me, or trans women, or trans “validity”. I wasn’t angry about the fact that trans people existed, I didn’t wish them ill or dead. I was angry that my femaleness, my womanhood, the part of who I was for which this movement claimed to stand for—feminism—was now the enemy. It was being erased. I was angry that my sexuality, which I had had barely a breath to revel in, which I had had denied to me through all this other genderist bullshit, was now treated as a “risk factor” for being a transphobe—the ultimate evil. I couldn’t say any of this, though, I couldn’t ask any questions, I couldn’t differ even slightly in opinion, or disagree with something or have some fucking boundaries, because this is the libfem circles we are talking about. So, instead, I just buried my thoughts because part of me felt that maybe I was evil for thinking that way. 

And right around then I stumbled into the ace diskhorse. Yes, that one area within liberal feminism where there is the slightest variety—I say slightest because in fact, if you openly suggest ace exclusion as a libfem, you will be decimated just as you would for criticizing genderism. However, I say variety, because there are a decent amount of libfems who are ace exclusionists but subscribe to literally everything else in libfem rhetoric. That’s where I found myself, on another tiny blog, lurking curiously in these trans-inclusive gender-not-sex q*eer ace-exclusive posts. (Mind, I am ace exclusive. But that’s not what makes me a terf. Just an aphobe, apparently). This was where I learned that, hey, it was possible to not agree with every single little thing that the tumblr mainstream declared “valid”. I had never strayed away from the mainstream because I didn’t know of any other circle except, you know, terfs, which were obviously evil—so why would I have ever bothered to look at a so-called terf’s blog or in a “terfy” tag? I hadn’t. I hadn’t ever seen anything but the tumblr mainstream all very forcefully agreeing with each other, supported by kawaii banners and not much else. Yet here was the tiny ace-exclusive corner, where people actually discussed like, concepts, and constructs, and facts, and histories, and actual manifestations of oppressions. I saw people actually asking goddamn questions. 

A few times, I would see an ace-inclusive libfem telling an ace-exclusive libfem that they were evil fucking aphobes that were “just as bad as terfs”. Privately, I would think, no, no I’m not like a terf. Terfs are evil! They want to kill trans women and are total fetishists! I don’t want to kill anyone, I know trans people. Just because I think maybe being female matters and that maybe it’s okay to be attracted to sex, does not mean I’m a terf. 

So it was all happening in congruence: I was a lesbian finally free from her own internalized lesbophobia, looking to embrace and revel in my sexuality after hating it for so long, as the community I trusted told me that it was wrong to desire vulva but empowering to suck dick. I was starting to look up and outside and thinking about asking questions just as I discovered that questions could be asked. I was thinking.

I can identify a moment that could be called the catalyst. 

I was perusing my ace-exclusionist corner, and an ace-exclusionist libfem had made a post about asexuality that a “terf” had dared agree with. There was no mention of trans people or sex or gender on either end and still the libfem said:

“go get hit by a truck and die, terf”

It was so brutally violent and since the “terf” had said nothing that was trans or gender or sex related, I thought that this must mean that terfs are so universally evil they’re worthy of fucking death threats just for commenting on a post. And then I worried the thoughts I’d been having, the anger about devaluing my sex and sexuality in the name of trans activism, were terfy. And so I clicked on that terf’s blog, to see how maliciously cruel and hateful these terfs were so that I could reaffirm my previous loyalty to trans-inclusive feminism. 

Except what happened was that I clicked on that terf’s blog and she wasn’t the spawn of Satan. I clicked on people she reblogged from and people they reblogged from and soon found myself lurking in honest-to-God terf circles. It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t evil. No one was asking for the rapes and murders of trans women. No one was fetishizing women. There were black terfs and brown terfs and disabled terfs and lesbian terfs and bisexual terfs and young terfs and older terfs. These terfs weren’t at all the kawaiied pasteled hivemind that libfem was. They actually talked about things; they explored, explained, and support ideas, history, facts, and values. It was invigorating. They didn’t all agree all the time all at once and no one was threatening lives for having a different perspective. Their commonality? In the most basic definition, these trans exclusive radical feminists believed in sex-based oppression, in sex-based attraction, and in the prioritization of women in feminism. Obviously there’s much more to it than that; that’s what made it so fascinating, this movement that had a foundation and entire layers of analyses and arguments and facts and history and convictions. 

I lurked and I lurked and I lurked and then I said fuck it, and I made a blog. I believe that gender is a social construct, that biological sex is fact, that sex-based oppression exists; I don’t want trans people dead, I don’t think trans people don’t deserve health care, I don’t think trans people don’t deserve safety. There’s more, but those are the baselines. 

So I guess now I’m a terf that switched sides. And apparently deserving of things like getting hit by a truck and dying. Comes with the territory when you decide to be part of a movement that asks questions and doesn’t deny reality.