#because trans men are attractive simply by virtue of being trans regardless of how they look. cis men gotta be big and hairy tho

[hooved]

Are you attracted to Armin Shimerman?

honestly, no. i can absolutely recognize why others find him attractive (and i know a handful of people who do), but personally he's not my type. he just played quark in such a sexy charismatic way that literally no one else could've done, but that's also him under like 20 pounds of makeup and prosthetics and funky outfits

[graylinesspam]

Happy June everybody!

I've seen some really good discussion on my dash the last >24hrs, about labels in the lgbt community and the use of queer and reclaiming slurs and identifying turf rhetoric.

I'm gonna put my 2¢ into this discussion real quick because I think some of us are missing a big base concept of the LGBT community.

The community is wide and vast and diverse as it should be. And no matter your involvement in it, your label, your age, your race, there is one defining sociopolitical stance that makes us who we are. And that's simply being different.

I know that sounds fucking cheesy but stick with me here. Queerness intersects with so many other social struggles, struggles with class and religion, race and disability. And as any struggle it is a fight for freedom from the preset social structures.

Queerness (and yes I'm using that umbrella term for a reason) is about not being hetero-normative more than it is about anything else. It's about choosing to live your life against the social structures. It's not about the specifics of how everyone does it so as much as it is that you do. Trans lesbians and cis-Ace guys are always going to have more in common than they will with any hetero-normative person.

Don't misinterpret me, this isn't a 'straight people are the enemy' argument. This is an argument against rigid definitions and labels. Because the structure itself is what we're fighting. The structure that tells us that one man marries one woman in a Christian ceremony and they settle down into a white picket fence three bedroom home with their two and a half kids. And they better be white and conventional attractive and fit perfectly into their assigned gender roles. (and everyone else can suffer)

That is the enemy.

When you try to bring those kinds of structures into the community you fundamentally undermine the entire purpose of it. There are no good gender roles here. There are no roles of any kind. The strict definitions you're trying to assign to each label are hurting your community. Labels are a good tool for identifying people who may have similar life experiences as yourself. Or as a medium to communicate with straight people, but they are not lines we draw between ourselves.

We cannot survive divided. We must support and protect each other. That's the point of the community.

No more discussions of who can use what labels, no more fighting against 'slurs' that people have been using since before you were born. No more excluding sex and attraction and kink. And no more relying on it either. Sex cannot be a taboo in our community. And it cannot be the aspect from which we define ourselves either.

No more morally policing people who are just trying to live their lives, no more stepping on each other and throwing 'gross and weird' queers under the bus so you can virtue signal as the "Good gays".

No more telling people who they can be based on their genitals or their sexuality. No more telling lesbians to cut men out of their life because that's how we 'fight the patriarchy'. No more telling trans people how they should transition. No more allying with people based on their bodies, their looks, their health.

Asexuality is queer because it's a fundamentally different experience to build a relationship that isn't based on heterosexual attraction. Since sex is the basis by which straight people seem to couple, by not doing that, by connecting through other factors, you differ.

Queer men, or trans women, or others born male are welcome in our community because they are fundamentally choosing to be different from the role they were cast in by the social structure. Now does that include a lot of work unlearning their societal programming? Absolutely. But I welcome my brothers and sisters regardless of their gentitals.

And let's not for a minute pretend that queer 'males' are any more dangerous to us than terfs and the distructivly sexist (and blatantly racist and classist) roles they try to pigeonhole women into.

Other alt communities are our allies. Anyone fighting moral conformity. Anyone fighting racism and sexism and ableism and classism.

If your way of trying to obtain the life you want to live consists of trying to look good to the oppressors so they give you a pass, then your doing it wrong.

Use a hundred different labels to describe yourself. Use neopronouns. Base your relationships off of how well you can support each other. Practice your religion in a way that fulfills you and your identity. Cut off your shitty family. Or don't. Keep your elders close so that you can learn everything you can about how the world has changed, then figure out how to change it more.

Society as it stands will crumble in our collective grasps. We just have a break a little bit of it everyday.

(that being said, general advice, educate yourself on lgbt history, talk to our elders, educate yourself on intersecting struggles. Rascim, ableism, and classism. All of that is required reading babies.)

(((Do not come into the notes saying some shit like, Yeah, everyone is our ally except____. At best it'll be fucking obvious that we don't align ourselves with seriously bad people like pedos or something, and at worst you'll say someone we specifically do ally with and I'll be forced to publically shame you.)))

[eelsfeelgross]

Conclusions: Trans Activism v. Radical Feminism, a first-hand account

This is current stance after a lot of direct investigation on both radfems online and trans activists online. No group is judged based on the observations, rhetoric, or propaganda of any outside group, but from my own first-hand observations in combination with objective knowable facts such as actions known to be committed in public record by the likes of criminals or celebrities. However, the bulk of this is based on what I have seen, what I know to be true because it’s been done before my own eyes. While my conclusion may lack information on the more nitpicked aspects of things, I believe their overall impressions still hold true with the amount of experience I’ve had. Keep in mind: this is not my only account. I have dipped into the radfem community before, each time from a different perspective, at a different time, and with open eyes ready to receive whatever I was given. The same is true of the trans community.

Trans Activism

I want to make clear that these conclusions were mainly drawn from my direct experience with the trans community from within. I am not relying on critics of the trans ideology to tell me any of this, though they often echo the same concerns and observations.

The trans community has a serious problem with misogyny, homophobia, and sex denial. They employ magical thinking and emotional pleas to justify their conclusions and commit to arguments of definition that are ultimately lacking substance. However, while lacking rational, they are abundant with emotional reasoning and can be incredibly powerful rhetorical tools in convincing others to believe them without the necessary evidence of anything claimed.

This is especially prevalent when discussing sexual biology and sexual orientation. They consider self-harm to be the fault of other people, even in adults, and use this as a manipulation tactic to make it seem as if they’re being killed at higher rates than their general demographics. This plays hand in hand with the appropriation of statistics around things like racial violence or violence against sex workers to make it appear trans people, particularly white heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex) trans women from the middle class of Amerca who aren’t victims of prostitution, are under much more persecution than their lived experiences actually reflects.

This has grown into a political ideology not dissimilar to a religion, but without the usual trappings we associate with a religious group. It requires blind faith in the concept of gender and the “life saving” virtues of expensive hormone treatments and plastic surgeries without proper regard for the risks and consequences of these procedures. Challenging the dogma or asking critical questions is considered a sin itself, even when done with excessive caution for other’s feelings. Violence towards known dissenting groups is considered not just ok, but admirable. Expressions of this desire for violence against the out-group is seen as virtuous to the point that doing it too much will be taken as virtue signalling rather than a sign of deep-seeded anger issues as it would for any other situation. Self-identity is their belief system, and public shame are their tools of punishment to control those within the belief system. Due to sex denial, females suffer especially in this paradigm no matter how they identify or what presentations they choose.

However,

Radical Feminism

Once again, I want to make clear that these conclusions were mainly drawn from my direct experience with the radfem community from within. I am not relying on critics of the radical feminist ideology to tell me any of this, though they may echo similar observations.

Radical feminism, as it exists today in action and not in theories from the 1990s, has a huge problem with transphobia, homophobia, and racism. The focus has shifted almost entirely from protecting women to attacking trans women, understandable on some level but counter-productive to all but the individual ego. There is a preoccupation with what women are “allowed” to do, rather than whether their actions and the consequences of those actions actually benefit the cause of anti-sexism. People feel entitled to be nasty, hurtful and even downright transphobic and homophobic if it means hurting their “enemies” somehow. I’m not sure if they fail to see the big picture or have just given up on caring, but it makes all their pleas for compassion and an end to the trans community’s homophobia seem pretty disingenuous.

This focus on “women deserve more as reparations”, when self-applied to the individual, does nothing to combat sexism as these self serving actions often do little to stop sexism and everything to benefit the individual currently existing within a sexist system. It totally ignores the vital role women play in perpetrating sexism through the generations, from mother to daughter or sister or sister or peer to peer through an intricate web of social pressures.Its not totally ignored mind you, but it is conveniently unaddressed whenever addressing it would prevent them from acting aggressive and toxic toward someone else. However others in the community who aren’t personally benefitting from this at the time will notice, thus leading to endless pointless arguments as the egos clash.

This hypocrisy undermines all attempts at broadening their reach to a new generation of women. Similarly, this toxic attitude undermines all opportunity for organization and real activism which requires a certain level of tolerance and the ability to give basic respect to those you don’t like or agree with. All those who do not tolerate such behavior will simply assume radical feminism must be a hate movement because all they see is vitriol and toxicity, no matter how justified the perpetrator feels about it or the underlying motivators. They will not take the time to read theory because they’ve already seen the practice and they have the sense to know it’s bad. Then when these newcomers see this bad behavior for what it is, they’re belittled or deprived of their agency for their decision to turn away from your movement, called things like “handmaidens” and accused of being either selfishly misogynistic or plainly brainwashed, driving them ever further away. The refusal to take responsibility for your own image and the consequences of your behavior under some false impression of ideological purity justifying it only further cements this takeaway outsiders have.

The most egregious example that comes to mind is the “queers” issue. Radfems are adamant about queer being slur, and they’re right. I myself grew up having queer flung at me by violent straight men and I’m not even that old. I feel no joy in the sanitation and generalization of the term. That is not reclamation, that is erasure and appropriation of pain. Most radfems agree on this wholeheartedly. That is, until you decide to spell it “kweer” and start flinging it at trans people who fit a particular homophobic stereotype: strange appearances, unorthodox body modifications like piercing and colored hair, unwashed, perverted to the point of being predatory, self important children who are just playing pretend to be different. All these qualities call back to the stereotype of queers, gays, and it is deeply intrenched in homophobia going back generations. And yet, while radfems would condemn the trans community for the appropriation of queer and its homophobic implications, they have no problem employing it as a slur when it suits their own toxic impulses.

Some even seem to believe that misspelling the word or being homosexual themselves absolves this. It does not. Anybody without the blinders of radfem internal rhetoric will quickly see past this nonsense. If the trans community came back and started calling radfems “diques” and associating the term with severely lesbophobic stereotypes like being unwashed or too ugly to get a man or any of the other countless stereotypes around the slur “dyke”, radfems would be rightly livid. Making a point to only target straight radfems with this insult would not make it any different. But addressing these kinds of hypocritical positions has become a taboo within the radfem community, yet another spark to relight the fires of senseless infighting.

This is the worst example I’ve personally seen, but it is not the only one. There’s also the tendency for radfems, desperate for others who are gender critical to connect with, to make alliances with right wing conservatives despite their racism and homophobia simply because they’re also transphobic but for completely different reasons. And also a tendency to be much more forgiving of misogyny coming from these new “allies” that will glady destroy you too once trans people are out of the way. But I will not labor my point any further by bringing up everything all at once. Regardless, for those who harp on and on about getting to the root of the problem, the moment anyone suggests you try getting to the root of your own problems, taking accountability and making changes, all that self-righteous posturing seems to go out the window just like it does in the trans community. You’ve become a reflection of what you hate in an attempt to combat it, and it will be the death of your movement if you don’t make a serious effort to reform these behaviors and distance yourself from those who employ these forms of rhetoric.

It’s a harsh fact, but the world at large does not care what you deserve, just like sexual biology doesn’t care about your personal feelings about your sex. It just doesn’t. That’s why patriarchy exists in the first place. It is your job as a social movement to use your words and actions to convince them to care. That is what the trans community has managed to do successfully, in my opinion often for the wrong reasons but successfully nonetheless, but such things do not stroke the ego of the individual radfem and therefore simply doesn’t happen in an organized, ideology-wide manner. Small islands of rational stand isolated in a sea of this pointless vitriol, and alone they are hopeless against the attacks against radical feminism born from the trans community and their sex denial that leads to egregious misogyny.

Conclusion

When it comes to the underlying theory, the ideological core, I find that radical feminism has the best chance of growing to become a social movement for genuinely good change in the world, particularly for women and women-loving-women specifically. Trans ideology, in my opinion, is inherently flawed as its core tenants require faith in what one cannot prove and a rejection of science that doesn’t support said faith.

Trans ideology as it exists in 2020 is more akin to religion than science, and has proven its capability to do harm through its use of magical thinking and distorted points of view that constantly shift and change to make space for the core trans ideology to be “correct”. Core ideas such as: sex is either fake or less relevant than gender, that gender is an objective fact of the human psyche, that others failing to fix your own poor mental health are responsible for your harm or death, that transition is always a good idea if someone wants it and no gatekeeping should be performed regarding using plastic surgery to treat mental discomforts, and so on. Remove all these ideas, and the whole thing falls apart.

Meanwhile, removing the toxicity of the radfem community as it exists now will not destroy its underlying core beliefs. Its just that the current people who advertise themselves as radfems and take up that mantle do not actually follow the core ideology of their own movement when it doesn’t benefit them. It has been infiltrated and run amok with bad faith actors who abuse the movement for personal gain, whether they are aware of it or not. And with their combination of being excessively vocal and lacking any shame for their misdeeds, more and more are drawn into their toxic games to the point that the ones who actually speak to the spirit of the core theory get drowned out or attacked to the point none will associate with them openly. The ones who actually know the theory and practice it end up effectively shunned from a community that widely hasn’t even read the theory and thinks hating trans people and thinking pussy = superior makes them a radfem. And thus, by allowing this, that is what radical feminism has become in practice. No amount of appealing to that core philosophy will matter if the actual people don’t apply that theory properly.

So my conclusion? Radical feminism has the greatest potential for good, but it is grossly unrealized and will remain that way without radical internal changes. However, if anyone is equipped to get to the root of the problem and make a radical change it should be radfems. Or at least, the good faith radfems who aren’t abusing the movement, of which I’m convinced have become the minority of radfems in the present day. Perhaps it is time for feminism to once again branch off, not to try returning to the 2nd wave but to set the stage for a true 4th wave as many have talked about. A 4th wave that is based on the foundations set by 2nd wave feminist thinkers, but forward thinking, self-critiquing, and not limited by the hangups of the last wave. I guess only time will tell what radfems value more: their egos in attachment to the idea of identifying as a radfem, or the effective dis-empowerment of patriarchy through organized effort at the expense of satisfying your personal vendettas against all men.

[milkshakedoe]

le thoughts

something that bothers me about lesbian discourse i’ve seen, and a large part of why i’ve stopped really self-identifying as a “lesbian”, is how even among very well-meaning trans-positive groups or groups of lesbians who are trans themselves (at least online), a major problem always remains IMO not fully resolved: how to deal with closeted and questioning amab trans people, or people with nonstandard gender lacking the language to articulate it, without seeing them as Men in some degree.

it’s not that many don’t try, and i’m certain there are (and i know) very many lesbians who would (rightly) affirm in a heartbeat that such people are not "men”. but i’ve never seen a satisfying argument that really lays our anxieties to rest. as much as the idea that political lesbianism inherently supports transfems as a function of “centering women” or “the lesbian” may feel validating to transfems laboring to define themselves as clearly as possible as “not a man”, within the political framework often assumed by lesbian feminists i don't think this is a problem that ever can be really resolved.

----

in popular discourse about oppression there is the idea that oppression is a sort of relationship of individual wrongdoing, the “responsibility” for which ultimately lies at the feet of individuals, even if those individuals are seen as a “structural” group. in this worldview it is “men” who, as a collective of responsible parties, for their own self-benefit and pleasure, commit violence against women and those who aren’t men.

it’s controversial perhaps, but contrary to what you may hear on this site, there is no ‘secret cheat code’ for women to liberate themselves from patriarchal society when it’s all around them. it’s good and necessary to understand that you don’t have to date men, but the truth is that regardless of whether or not you date men we live in a misogynist society and trying to separate from it by divesting ourselves from Men - even where we don’t explicitly call it “separatism” or even “divesting” - isn’t going to save us, and the idea that we can become more or less liberated or more or less revolutionary or what have you by refusing Men and relationships with Men on the basis that Men are the source of oppression by virtue of being “Men” rests on flawed assumptions about gender that cause problems for transfems, and all of us.

the idea that “men” simply oppress women out of a kind of individual self-interest that either they are individually born with, or is somehow transmitted to them by their social man-ness (or their “privilege” makes pursuing their interests inherently detrimental to others, to put it another way), is not really compatible with an understanding of transness that goes further than saying that trans people were “born this way”. although many people, especially trans feminists and lesbians, are aware by now that thinking of trans people as being “born” trans is as mistaken as saying people are “born gay”, those that (rightly!) try to help defend transfems from accusations of “male privilege” still tend to latch on to narratives that essentially say the same thing.

that is, even if we recognize that babies can’t have gender, we say that transfems at least had decided their gender more or less from the point where they could first make conscious social decisions, and as such must be seen as having always been girls or non-men. therefore, when transphobes yammer that all people in patriarchal society are subject to “socialization” which corresponds exactly to assigned gender and defines their gender, we can answer: no, transfems were subject to transfeminine socialization, which decisively qualifies them as always having been feminine.

----

but the problem with this idea is that it takes “socialization” entirely at face value and ends up performing the same function: peoples’ gender largely isn’t decided by them; it was locked in once before a person’s social being really came to exist, and can’t change again. it denies the possibility that anyone who considers theirself to have been a “man” at any point in their life could ever be something different. it takes away trans peoples’ agency - and more importantly, it denies the possibility that patriarchal gender could ever really be transcended, since if cis peoples’ genders and interests too are basically locked in at toddlerhood if not at birth, then how can we ever envision doing away with it all?

so to be clear: it’s not “socialization” that makes peoples’ gender. if there is anything to be said about socialization, it is that gender is constituted not by socialization but by individual agency in response to that socialization, struggling against the conditions imposed upon them and what they've been told to accept.

but ultimately, the problem with all of our attempts to grapple with closeted and questioning people lies in the privilege framework itself. so long as we still take the idea of “privilege” seriously - that there are these identity categories to which people “belong” and which essentially determine their self-interests or the effect that pursuing their interests has on others (”mens’ privilege means that their benefit inherently comes at others’ cost”), which amounts to the same thing - then men can only be understood in such a way that ever being associated with men or seeing one’s self as a man (up to and including being attracted to and dating men, “gaining privilege” by becoming a “collaborator” of sorts) makes one inherently tainted with privilege and therefore wrongdoing for which one must be “held accountable”, that is, they must “pay for their crimes”.

----

when we see gender and oppression this way, yet try to understand transfemininity in a way that doesn’t give credence to “male privilege”, we run into irresolvable problems: we end up having to define all transfems as effectively always having been feminine as long as they were conscious, which may be the case for some - but thinking this is how it always works makes cis society seem inevitable and impossible to dismantle in the end. and because the privileged must always be “held accountable” for their privilege we have to say that, well it’s unfortunate but good feminists must treat “men” as inherently guilty of the sins of being men until they can prove otherwise that they are not really men. because if we try not to see people who call themselves men in this way, then the entire framework of resistance to patriarchy built on privilege starts to break down.

paradoxically, in defining privilege as a relationship of individual wrongdoing flowing from the social category to which one allegedly belongs, “privilege” sees people not really as people, but as mere representations of abstract categories: individual “men” become really mere physical appendages of the abstract category of Men, and become individually defined as oppressors, while non-men in turn likewise become defined as personifications of their position within gendered oppression. but there is a way out of this mess. i find it more useful and compelling to see people first as individuals who are potentially involved in structural dynamics but not inevitably so. while abstract social structures really do exist, and often dominate us, compel our actions, and structure our spontaneous consciousness (our understanding of the world before any analysis), again, it is our individual agency struggling up against the conditions imposed upon us that defines who we are, and defines our structural relationship to the world in turn.

furthermore, punishment is the logic of capitalism. as the Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis wrote, the idea of equivalent punishment to an equivalent “crime” can only arise in the context of capitalism and the commodity fetish. capitalism is a society where we relate to other people first and foremost as owners of commodities and where we obtain almost everything we need to live and enjoy life through buying and selling. in capitalism, the underlying logic of commodities - the logic of value, where two objects are socially held to be equal in trade regardless of their concrete properties that actually make them useful to humans - comes to seem like the primary natural property of all commodities. and because commodity owners always interact first through the comparison of their commodities, and not through a direct social relationship, it comes to seem as though all human relationships are really properties of commodities themselves which can be exchanged: the legal commodity of “rights”, or “dignity” as David Graeber might put it.

the logic of punishment knows no concept of healing and problem-solving, only a very simple math equation: so long as the offender has not served their sentence and “paid their debt”, justice remains unserved, and so the sin of privilege which makes one harmful regardless of one’s intent must always linger with those who were supposedly tainted by it. even if we can define all transfems who’ve realized their gender as having been always women, we find ourselves failing on a collective basis to help those who still lack the language or confidence to articulate themselves.

we can do away with all of this horrible nonsense. if we are really to do justice to transfems in a way that doesn’t frame us as in some sense "privileged” or “men” or a natural aberration within cis society or see cis society as inevitable, we can and urgently need to abandon notions of privilege and punishment.

[yelloskello]

i fucking hate the stag/doe - butch/femme thing. I hate it. I hate that we are explicitly told that we’re not allowed to use these terms, and for what? I went a’googling to see what lesbians were actually saying in regards to why they’re lesbian-exclusive, read the arguments straight from the horse’s mouth, and it amounts to this:

TERFs (and no, I do not mean lesbians = terfs, I mean it is TERFS who came up with this) straight-up believe that bi women and trans women just weren’t there in our history. They say that butch and femme carry the weight of a painful history and fighting for our rights in the words, and that when anybody but lesbians use the terms, they’re putting it on like a fancy dress and calling it an aesthetic.

As if bi women and trans women just straight-up weren’t there for that history, too.

They argue that ‘nobody fights men to use phrases like bear/otter/twink!’ and quite frankly, i’m pretty fuckin’ sure bisexual men and/or trans men can happily use those terms, too, so shitty argument there pal. 

So they kick us out of a history that we were actively a part of, and younger lesbians who want to do the right thing but don’t know the history of this argument latch onto it, and bisexual people... Within the last year... Create the terms stag/doe, since it’s evidently morally wrong to use terms that are part of our own history, but since we can experience the same kind of dynamics in our relationships, we need SOMETHING to describe them. And what do people say?

‘wtf this is so dumb/fucked up, this is just watered/down butch and femme, they’re literally the same thing, why would you make up new words to mean the same thing?’

because we experience the same goddamn thing, just because we like multiple genders doesn’t mean we always hop on “opposite” genders, we can have relationships with similar-gendered/nonbinary people, even outside of a relationship we are still part of the community, we still experience Gay Attraction, and it can still be part of our identity because we’re still LGBT+, but we’re not allowed to use those terms! We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

I hate the wave of separatism that we’ve gone through. I hate the idea that everything has to have shit exclusively for them, even if it has a history of being used by multiple sexualities. I hate that people think No Experiences Overlap Ever, when in truth, marginalized people (and I don’t mean just queer/LGBT+ people - I mean PoC, disabled folks, etc) have SO much more in common than anyone might ever think. Yes, some groups do have things that exclusively happen to them, as a white person i’m NEVER going to fully understand the struggle that brown and black people go through, there’s SO much i’m still ignorant to concerning that, i’ll never pretend all our experiences are exactly the same, but there are also at least some issues that I can strongly empathize with because I hear what they go through and can see similarities in the way i’m treated as an AFAB person or as a bi person or as a nonbinary person. A microaggression because you’re gay and a microaggression because you’re brown are both microaggressions, even if they’re presented in different ways, over different issues. Multiple groups are denied housing and jobs for their identities, even if it’s done quietly behind closed doors so the law doesn’t crack down on peoples’ bigotry. As a trans person I can feel the personal pain of my people being accosted in bathrooms by bigots, and I can look at how black people are assumed to be criminals by virtue of simply walking around in a store, and even though the issues are very different, I can see the similarities - we both are mistrusted by “””normal””” society based on hideous stereotypes - and I can feel for them, even if I don’t experience being assumed to be a criminal personally. I listen to them and I believe them not just because they’re fucking people who deserved to be listened to and believed, but because I have seen how general society treats people like me, so why should it be so hard to believe they could be treated like shit, too?

People think that our struggles are so fucking exclusive that they lose all empathy for other groups, thinking that the only people who have ever suffered are themselves. It’s always baffled me that LGBT+ people can be so fucking ignorant and racist and hateful when you think they’d be able to tap into their own hurt and understand that other people are being treated in similar ways because they’re ‘different’, too. But then again, LGBT+ people can barely understand how other subsets of LGBT+ people have struggled, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. I think of how ace people can write a laundry list of things they personally experience, and other subsets will scoff and say ‘yeah as if we don’t go through that too’, completely fucking ignoring what that overlap means. Thinking that since they go through that, anybody else who reports that they might, too, are just Faking, or trying to steal the spotlight. How can people so completely lack empathy? Why are we not there for each other? Why do we not care about anybody else? Why can’t we recognize the same fucking pain we’re all going through, even if that same pain comes in different flavors, and try to be there for each other because nobody should have to go through what we’re going through?

Like, it’s a complicated issue. Like I said, yeah, groups do have stuff that effects them exclusively, and it can be frustrating to express unhappiness with something exclusive to your group and have people who clearly aren’t actually understanding what you’re going through say they can relate. But denying that there are any similarities at all just drives us farther apart when right now marginalized people desperately need the support of one-another. 

(I was gonna give bi people’s Double Discrimination as an example of that exclusivity, unwanted by communities on either side of the fence, since obviously lesbians and gays don’t experience that... But y’know who probably can empathize? Mixed race folks. Or folks with invisible disabilities. Or ANYONE who’s caught between both communities, not x enough for one and not y enough for the other.)

Speaking only of communities that I am personally in: in LGBT+ circles, separatism breaks up the subsets and causes infighting. In circles concerning disability and mental/physical illness, it isolates its members, denies them support, makes them feel like nobody truly understands, even people dealing with the exact same disability or illness, because symptoms can be so widespread and varied. Hell, even when dealing with our oppressors, separatism fails to actually try and change the views of the people oppressing us: i’d much rather have narratives where men are gentle, kind, feminine, loving, supporting, open to their emotions, and respectful permeating our culture, teaching young boys how to be as they grow, than narratives where men are just evil.

There’s a lot of gray area. There are people who have been so hurt by oppression that I do not blame them one bit for prescribing to a separatist narrative. But I mean in a general sense... I don’t want separatism to be pervasive. I don’t want it to be the mindset people automatically turn to regardless of what they’ve gone through. I want sympathy and support for the people who have been hurt, and I want the groups that have been doing the hurting to change. I want people to recognize the similarities between each other and be unafraid of empathizing and sharing.

The butch/femme and doe/stag thing is a result of separatism, and I can see where they get the idea for it - basically pulling the ideas of appropriation from communities of PoC telling white people not to appropriate their stuff - but they’re lashing out at the wrong people. When a white person appropriates locs, they’re seen by the public eye as being carefree, trendy, and cool, while black folks are still punished for wearing the same look that occurs naturally for them. When a white person puts on a war bonnet, they’re seen as being high-fashion and ‘exotic~~~’, while literally desecrating a sacred part of a culture they don’t belong to in any way, shape, or form. When a bi person calls themselves butch, they’re a part of the community that shares the exact same history, their histories are literally interwoven, and experiences extremely similar dynamics, at the very least, as lesbians. These are two very different things. Tell cis/straight people not to appropriate the terms, but remember, other LGBT+/queer people aren’t fucking cis/straight.

anyways this got way longer than I was expecting but shit, I got like 60 followers, who gives a damn what I say, right? peace.