#discussing that transphobe

[drake-atello]

Can’t believe I got tumblr beef with a transphobe this is WILD.

Let’s break down some things here so I can finally be done with this.

This is a rant/vent. I will be throwing insults like rocks and swearing like there’s no tomorrow.

TLDR: PLEASE, just shut up and read your thing over again. You sound incredibly transphobic and ableist and that’s not okay at ALL.

Main points I’m pointing out are highlighted in the images below. The original replies can be found under the first comment. I screen recorded my proof just in case they get any ideas. I will reblog this post once I figure out how to share videos on tumblr. /gen /srs

rant under the cut, no need to open it if you’re not comfortable with the topics I bring up: blatant transphobia, ableism

Alright. Listen.

I get sharing your opinion.

That’s normal. Everyone has opinions.

What I don’t get is being a fucking bitch about it.

Your post was so toxic and blatantly rude that you got Jael herself to come and yell at you. Jael is trying to take a fucking mental health break and you can’t seem to understand she needs a SAFE SPACE to unwind and calm down.

“OOOOH JUST STAY OFF THE INTERNET OOOOOOOOONSDCDHBJHSDBCS”

shut the fuck up. The internet is nearly essential these days with how much we use it and with how much of our information is stored on it.

I don’t get why you have to scream and sob about well done representation when you aren’t even in the trans community in the first place.

I’m not African American or dark skinned, so I can’t comment on their portrayals in media.

I’m not gay, so I can’t say a gay character is badly written or wildly rude without substantial evidence and research and peer review.

I am autistic, however, so I can comment on the portrayals of autistic characters in media and say “THIS IS ASS” when I see something ass.

I have transgender friends, so while my opinion can’t advance beyond “this seems really fucking rude, what the hell, bro?” I can ask my friends for their opinions. And my friends agree that said post was very transphobic and just fucking rude. You are doing nothing but giving yourself and the trans community a bad name.

I admitted I was wrong being a bitch to you, I apologized for my behavior. I said you didn’t deserve to be attacked for sharing your opinion. No one under that post should’ve said more than “Dude, that seems really mean and transphobic, can you explain yourself please?” And gone on with their day.

You had every opportunity to fix the situation and repair your reputation, but all you’re doing is digging yourself a grave.

You call us all dumbasses and idiots who need to go back to kindergarten, you act like you’re better than all of us and refuse to see that your post hurt a lot of people.

I politely try to explain my view to you days after the issue, and all you do is throw another hissy fit and screech at me that I’m stupid and dumb and that I’m the problem. That it’s my fault cross is being seen this way and that it’s my fucking fault I’m tarnishing the reputation of transgender people.

I may have come off as rude in those comments, I admit that possibility. I tried to make it clearer with tone tags, but either you don’t understand them or you just don’t give a shit.

No, it’s not your problem that I’m autistic. You don’t know me beyond my profile picture. But what IS your problem is making sure that your opinions and words are understood.

You had a chance to make your opinion clearer to me when I informed you that I couldn’t understand your words because of my autism. Instead, you take the chance, curb stomp it, and say I’m stupid for not understanding you. Which, I’m gonna be honest, is kinda ableist. I can’t fucking control what my autism understands, I wouldn’t be using it to explain myself if I could.

Is my autism an excuse for me being an asshole? HELL NO! NO FUCKING WAY! autism or not, I was still an asshole and that’s not okay. I’m in control of how I react to situations, but I’m not in control of how I perceive them. It’s up to me to ask for clarification, but it’s up to you to give me that clarification.

You either don’t seem to understand anything beyond the surface level of my words (which is likely why you’re so adamant about there being no deeper meaning with cross) or you just don’t give a shit.

Anyway yeah no you are absolutely transphobic (thank you Kaz for explaining who mizuki is im gonna draw her and cross together later because i think they should beat up transphobes together)

Like, Jesus girl. I’m autistic and I know damn well no one makes that face when they’re gendered correctly. Thats a shocked face. That’s an upset face. Not happy. Not neutral. That is a very upset woman.

But no, seriously, dude, what the hell.

How are you transphobic in the undertale community, where the fuck do you think you are?

Please, for fucks sake, grow up or shut up. I’m done dealing with your ableist, transphobic bigoted ass. Fuck you.

[rivetgoth]

It's honestly crazy that discussion around testosterone HRT skews so much towards the beginning stages of it (to the point that you have dozens of guys thinking their transition is "failed" if they don't pass by like a year in lol) and what the initial changes of the first couple of months to years look like, like the classic laundry list of those early basic changes like bottom growth, voice drop, etc, when IMO literally none of that compares remotely to the depth and intensity of the long term total masculinization you start to experience like 3-5+ years in.

[butterfly-ribbon]

the most miserable thing to me about people doing the "mizuki is mizuki" bit is that the reason she says "i'm just me" when she's questioned is because she's exhausted of feeling like she has to always explain herself or prove things to others only to be faced with transmisogyny. it's insidious that people will ignore the context surrounding this to argue that mizuki's gender doesn't matter and insinuate that people who think it does are "reducing her to her gender" because this is just degendering from people who don't want to engage with textual transfemininity.

"inferiority" is a common refrain for mizuki, but not in the context of how ena struggles with inferiority - instead, it's an inferiority informed by how people see her as lesser or it being an inherent impossibility for her to ever be truly who she is (which is being a girl) when what she wants is to be treated as a normal girl without any asterisks attached and this is the reason she lets niigo assume that she's a cis girl for so long due to the internet allowing her the "plausible deniability" of cisness. mizuki is a character who reflects a very real experience where transfemininity influences every part of her life, because it informs how she lives, how she acts, her goals, and her choices each day.

this kind of complaint can be even worse when it's coming from people who acknowledge her transness, because it's always made by tme people who refuse to engage with how much being transfem can shape one's life and saying that discussing her transfemininity in depth is flattening her nuances even though it's a huge part of what makes her a very layered character in the first place is insinuating that this is a shallow aspect of her character which is really not that much different from saying she would have richer interiority if she weren't a girl (ie, a femboy).

[nonbinarymlm]

I wish there were more posts on malgendering sharing many different trans experiences. I think every trans person (and likely other LGBTQIA+ and GNC folk) have experiences with it and it’s so insidious.

So. This is going to be an open post for LGBTQIA+ folk, particularly trans and intersex folk, to talk about your experiences with malgendering.

Malgendering is when you’re gendered correctly, but that gendering is treated negatively or used to justify bad treatment. It could include a wide range of behaviors, from trying to silence trans people who discuss their experiences from before coming out to being passive aggressive about gendering someone correctly to using a trans person’s gender so justify violence.

Do you have any experiences with Malgendering that you’d like to share? Aspects of it that you want others to understand? Would you prefer being misgendered or malgendered? This is a post to share your experiences and thoughts! (While respecting others.)

[enbycrip]

So given the Rowling stans crawling out of the woodwork to say they are still allies - or worse yet, community members - while still plastering Potter stuff all over their online presence by saying they “separate the art from the artist” after the latest acknowledgment that she is trying to swing Labour in an even more transphobic direction, a short primer on what “death of the author”, which is the origin for that less provocative phrase, actually means.

“Death of the author”, in extreme brief, is an academic construct that was developed at a time when the author as the sole arbiter of meaning in a text was very privileged in the discourse to help people understand that any interpretation of a work is valid *as long as it can be supported by textual evidence*. Your interpretation of a text, as the reader, is as valid as the author’s *if* you can produce just as much, or more, evidence from *within the text itself* that supports your interpretation.

This is particularly useful for students within an academic context.

It is *not* in any sense a reasonable justification to say that one is not *actively supporting* a living artist/author/creator, particularly one who has gained huge cultural influence and financial wealth, by buying and actively promoting their work.

Genuinely, I wouldn’t engage with work from a dead very bigoted artist without acknowledging their bigotry.

If I write about or produce a story set within the Cthulhu Mythos, you had better bet that I am acknowledging Lovecraft’s horrific and pervasive racism and misogyny and the effects of that within the Mythos.

If I write about or do some sketches that acknowledge Degas as an influence, you can bet that I am acknowledging his rampant racism and antisemitism and the fact that his familial wealth which allowed him to have the financial freedom to create the art he did was built on plantation slavery in the Caribbean.

If I write about or paint something with Klimt’s ethereal goldwork as an influence, you can bet I’m writing about his deeply abusive sexual relationships with the women he drew and painted, that he used sapphic eroticism in his work while sexually abusing working class sapphics he paid to model for him, and acknowledging that he had the freedom to produce that work because he got the women in his family to tend to his every whim and perform all his domestic labour for him.

That’s the basic acknowledgment you undertake while engaging with the work of someone deeply bigoted - *even* if they are not directly benefitting from your engagement with their work because they are deceased. The material conditions around how a work is produced and consumed are *always* relevant to that work, because otherwise we miss why, for example, privileged people have the time, resources and cachet to create art and have it be consumed *as* art, while other people never have the resources to do so or have the work they create relegated to categories like “domestic crafts” if it is acknowledged at all.

So just saying “I can separate art from the artist” while financially supporting a living bigot who continues to use your money and the cultural cache you are giving her by doing so to wreak genuine damage on the queer, especially trans, community - that’s basically both completely meaningless and incredibly disingenuous. Particularly when said bigot is *actively* attempting to parlay that financial and cultural influence into making an already very transphobic, racist and disableist political party who are, according to current polls, likely to be running the U.K. shortly, into supporting more actions that *will* materially harm trans people.

[switchscene]

Remembering that time three years ago I came out to my clan on 4/20 with this meme and a letter I posted to pastebin

And I'm horribly tech illiterate so I did the entire thing including making the meme font and estrogen notes and cutting Drifter out in MS Paint (stock not .net)

And I have since seen it circulate online cause I posted it on Twitter later

I guess I'll stick it here for posterity, thanks D297 y'all are the best (I'm sentimental cause I recently started playing again and had to catch up on discord drama and the post is still posted)

[resdayn]

"headcanoning mizu as transmasc is racist because mizu is half japanese" is SO disingenuous

you guys know there are transmasc japanese people right? there are transmasc people who are mixed race? is them existing also racist? should transmascs only be allowed to see similarities to their gender in white people?

[seriousbrat]

Okay I'm sorry to break it to the people who can't understand books meant for children, but the simple fact of it is that Lily is important in the story of Harry Potter because she's his mother. Like that is quite literally her role in the story. She's important because she's a mother.... because she happens to be the MOTHER of the protagonist. The same way James is important because he's a father because he is the father of the protagonist. If they were just random people with no relation to Harry, they would not be important to the story.

This does not mean that the character of Lily is ONLY a mother. If you think that a woman being a mother and her motherhood being important means that there is nothing else to her as a person, that's on you. That says more about how you view mothers (INCLUDING trans mothers. For whom motherhood is also important. God. Can we think critically about this for second??) and women in general than anything else.

If you believe that there is a ~serious problem~ with Lily fans claiming Lily is a mother and nothing else, literally prove it. Point to one single scrap of evidence of this happening. Prove that the people who actually spend time writing about Lily are focusing with any sort of exclusivity or even frequency on her motherhood.

I've probably written tens of thousands of words of fanfiction about Lily. And not a single one was about Lily being a mother. Go on Ao3 right now and see how many James/Lily fics are about her being a mother vs, idk for example her years at Hogwarts.

This "problem" of Lily fans reducing her to motherhood does not exist. You know what does? Certain corners of fandom where Lily is used narratively as a surrogate and nothing else. The call is perhaps coming from inside the house.

[feminist-bitches-only]

Hey @ trans inclusive radical feminists, how do y’all beat the terf accusations while also talking about sex based oppression as a form of misogyny? I literally highlight my support of trans people in my bio and my pinned post and just got hit with a terf accusation :/

[edwardallenpoe]

man I sure do hope people who say that trans people don't have to present hyper-binary or be passable are normal about masc/butch trans people, including trans women who don't want surgeries or hrt or use she/her pronouns. Man I sure do hope they don't just mean femme trans men and exclude trans women and nonbinary masculine people. Man I sure do hope that they aren't super fucking weird about masculinity, especially when performed by trans women.

[unsaltedtoast]

the absurd amount of ppl on tiktok who are participating in the whole 'whats the definition of lesbian' and 'are lesboys valid' discourse who are so anti-discussion that they comment 'cringe' when you tell them to read actual lesbian history is so funny like ??

[uncanny-tranny]

I think more people need to accept that part of oppression is that violence is done to maintain systems, and while part of that is punishing the oppressed, not everybody abused by the systems of power will be part of oppressed groups.

A cis woman who is beaten for the "crime" of being thought as a trans woman still faced transphobic violence. A straight man who walks down the street and is called a faggot will still face homophobic violence.

Some people assume this means that, for instance, gay people facing homophobia shouldn't be listened to because "straight people can face homophobia, too! 😢" but that's looking at it wrong.

What this acknowledgment recognizes is that while there are people who will be directly abused by systems that oppress them, and often, it is incredibly violent all by itself, there are people on the "out group" who also experience it, even to a lesser extent, because the systems of power that oppress people want there to be an intrinsically lesser person/out group, even if by perceived proximity. The proximity is also what we have to get rid of if we want to abolish the systems that oppress people.

[the-woman-upstairs]

Honestly, all my schadenfreude over the public evisceration of James Somerton by Hbomberguy and Todd in the Shadows is tempered by the anger I feel at how much damage, pain, misinformation, and marginalizing one man was capable of accomplishing through the platform he built through plagiarism, blatant lies, and outright bigotry.

And frankly it sucks that it took the efforts of two other popular YouTube creators to bring him down when Somerton was clearly never good at hiding any of his horrific behavior. There were clearly women and trans/non-binary people who knew something was up with him and his “work” but were either harassed/doxxed by the fans he set on them or knew they didn’t have the same kind of clout/support to be believed over him.

It just boggles my mind how EASY it would have been for him to cite these sources and work with other queer creators on the platform to help create a wealth of accessible, comprehensive knowledge of queer media and history available to a younger generation. Because clearly, there’s a hunger in the younger generations of queer kids/people for that knowledge, the understanding of the past, how it informs the present and creates the future. But all Somerton did was steal from other creators, ones who either didn’t know their work was stolen or were given the run-around by Somerton instead of proper accreditation.

Instead of uplifting other people and their research, he selfishly stole and hoarded it, before regurgitating it and claiming it was all his own while also infecting some excellent analysis with awful, bigoted opinions, particularly geared towards women, trans people, or any type of queer he didn’t believe was the “right kind.” You know, like all the “boring gays” that “survived” the AIDS crisis.

I want to believe that this time we’ll learn to not take people at face value, just because they give the appearance of professionalism and sound authoritative on whatever subject is covered. Because that’s how dangerous misinformation is spread and taken for fact. Todd was absolutely on the money when he pointed out how it is important to document all the lies and plagiarism with Somerton because how many young people believed what he was saying? How many people watched his videos on the adult film industry or “bad gays” or Nazis influence on body image and walked away thinking they were learning something about their history? Far too many, I’m sure.

Though at least having these two videos to refer to can help people learn when to spot someone who’s being disingenuous in “teaching people something.” And that any person who claims to be the “only person” talking about an issue is mostly likely lying and trying to sell you something. Usually, their own brand. It’s far better to diversify the people you follow and the voices you listen to, and the playlist Hbomberguy made available is a great place to start.

But I also recommend seeking out some of the original sources yourself. There’s typically queer history books/memoirs in the nonfiction section of your local library. You can find the original Celluloid Closet documentary on Tubi, along with another interesting one, Do I Sound Gay? Disclosure, the documentary on depictions of trans people in Hollywood, is available on Netflix. And that’s just a couple of the top of my head. If you’re looking for queer films in general, Wolfe Video has so many available for purchase or even just to peruse and rent the titles later.

I do hope some good comes out of all this, even if the damage done by Somerton still lingers in online queer spaces (fingers crossed this means the end of Illuminaughtii and Internet Historian as well). It helps to be wary of people seeking to take advantage of the online spaces we now inhabit, but there’s still people and places across the internet that are doing good work and want to help educate people. They may not always be easy to find and may even require some effort on the part of the audience, but the end result of really learning something, discovering interesting research/work, or being part of open minded discussions is a worthwhile reward. And always something to be proud of.

[yuridovewing]

i understand the frustration with “i made this gay pairing cis x trans so they can still have biological babies” with no thought to other methods and how ppl assume thats the case when it comes to mothpool aus where mothwing is also the mother of the three, but also…. idk i kinda dont give a shit if someone wants to do that and i dont really think its inherently transphobic as long as its handled with care and respect.

what really concerns me about this debate is how some people are adamant that you cannot portray trans people having biological children in media or youre being disrespectful. and im gonna say as a nonbinary person who doesnt want children for themself- thats kinda fucking weird? like i understand that for some people, theyre trans themselves and theyre speaking from a place of dysphoria, and i absolutely get that, which is why i think the topic should be handled with nuance and diversity in trans characters, but like…. guys. pregnant trans men exist irl. trans women get people pregnant irl. trans ppl’s ability and right to parent and have biological children are being debated irl. we get denied the opportunity to adopt as well.

in a climate like this, are we SURE we want the stance on rewrites and headcanons in the silly cat books to be “if you portray trans characters having children, especially with a gay couple, youre a transphobic freak no matter what!” does it really matter? especially if its being done by a trans person handling the topic with nuance who has a lot of trans characters with varying perspectives?

obviously yes, remember that thats not the only way certain gay couples can have kids, remember that not every trans person is fully comfortable with it and keep that in mind, remember that surrogacy and adoption are also perfectly valid ways to give fan babies- but remember that there are OPTIONS. not that you need to condemn the idea of transgender parents in the first place unless they fit the very specific criteria of “proper transgender representation” and anything that dares deviate from that is proof the op is a transphobic monster (bonus points if theyre a trans creator bc i mostly see trans people getting shit for this and it kinda pisses me off. although idm if cis people do it either as long as theyre handling it with respect)

[catboybrain]

i dunno if its just who im following rn but im really rocked lately by all the division btwn transfems and transmascs on my dash... where is this coming from .?

[gamblegun]

I really don't understand seeing posts hating on another group of trans people as a whole. Like, that's trans people. What makes you different from any other transphobic bigot? Ohhh, but Gun, I have reason, [insert extremely specific ideology or semantic complaint]. I hate to break it to you, but all the screaming Republicans believe their reasoning is sound and righteous too lol