#even/especially within queer/feminist spaces sometimes...

[cypr1anlatew00d]

I feel like both gender reveals and sex traffiking paranoia (via truecrime) are things that can be directly mapped to increasing as queer/trans visibility increases as well... when parental authority over children's presentation and roles wanes + cis white femininity loses its crown jewel status of desireability and worthiness of protection, crises need to be created to shore up their self-esteem basically; you ARE correct and normal to announce and enforce your will in increasingly ridiculous ways, you ARE so desirable the world warps around you

[dykeulous]

the infantilization of men is so severe, so mind-blowing and so present in all parts of leftist spaces, and we should be calling that out more often. cancel culture tends to be very flawed itself (i’m not saying that people shouldn’t face repercussions for their wrongdoings, and i’m obviously not talking about actual bigotry & crime here, that isn’t cancel culture– cancel culture is made up of snide people who want to appear to stand a high moral ground, picking on anyone who makes a small mistake, or even just generally on anyone who they deem weird, cringe & unlikeable– refusing to let people move on from their *unproblematic* past), and a lot of people point out how it does a very bad job at addressing actual problematic behavior & instead focuses on ostracizing and partaking in cringe culture as its brother culture– but what is often swept under the rug is how cancel culture entertains & platforms heavily problematic men, even allowing rapists scot free– while its focus is primarily directed at women. cancel culture wishes to bully & tear down any woman it deems unlikeable, and this is not an overstatement, nor is it an unnecessary exaggeration; cancel culture proves itself time and time again to be very forgiving, and even forgetting of actual crime and bigotry committed by men, and in turns infantilizes said men, while it pays special attention to micromanaging & twisting women’s words. cancel culture is misogynistic, and it is based on the First Rule of Misogyny: Women are responsible for what men do.

this issue extends further from mere cancel culture. the rigid problem regarding the infantilization of men, and the encouragement of micromanaging & surveillance of women is extended to leftist & progressive spaces in general. the superiority complex of leftist men is set aflame & left to keep burning joyfully as it wishes, leftist men believing they are more intelligent, more progressive and tolerant than leftist women ever will be. all a man has to do in order to be considered a hero and an activist icon is say something that supports queer capitalism here & there, and for a woman to even be referenced once, she has to be a highly intelligent sociologist & activist politician, completely compliant & submissive, inconsiderate of her own emotions & boundaries and willing to debate her own basic human rights with a smile imprinted on her face. leftism is not exempt from misogyny, and leftist spaces aren’t sexism-free, especially given the inflated ego of leftist men & the tendency to treat female liberation as a side quest, and female oppression as a bystander to other systems of oppression, being extremely primarily class reductionist & failing to analyze the categories of “woman” and “man” as two classes with their own oppressive relations connected to labor. female socialization; women being nurtured to be more kind, more considerate, more gentle, more nice– all of this is being efficiently used against us in the very end, waiting to bite us with lethality. women are expected to be perfect advocates, perfect activists– and when we fall short in any way, when we dare show even the smallest signs of being human and not working as robotic vehicles 24/7 made to solve world problems– we get called misogynistic slurs, and smear campaigns ran against us.

the insane infantilization of men within leftist spaces is a problem that needs to be fixed, immediately. leftist men are not exempt from criticism. feminists are tired of having to do the majority of work and still being stabbed in the back by our supposed allies, while genuinely dangerous and horrible men are being allowed to conceal in the shadows by leftists, and sometimes they are even celebrated. the male hero, male savior, perfect male activist icon– mainstream leftist spaces infantilize & idolize the men they crown the movement’s heroes of the week, painting them as infallible, misunderstood, Cool Cute Quirky Little Guys; and if those men end up being racist or misogynistic, and even if they are accused of something as severe as rape, their fanbase will be ready to fight wars for them & sweep the evidence under the rug, say there is no evidence, say the evidence is not enough, not neatly provided– their fanbase will do anything to preserve these grown men as their perfect celebrity gods, incapable of wrongdoing, incapable of being scum and danger. this issue further extends to men who aren’t leftists at all, who aren’t popular or celebrities at all– it extends to normie men, to ordinary men. this can be observed when a teen person wants to come out as gay or trans to their parents, and they record/track this process on their social media– the observers are usually more likely to critique & be suspicious of the person’s mother, despite the fact that men are usually the perpetrators of violent homophobic & transphobic hate crime. the person’s father is often presented in such a light that will give the audience an overview of men being such cool & chill creatures, such rational creatures. people will often post text messages of them coming out to their fathers where their father acts confused but supportive, or says something as simple, disingenuous and uninteresting as “i don’t care”– and the viewers will go crazy, presenting this father as such a cool father, as such a supportive parental figure for commiting such non-actions; while in the same breath bullying mothers & calling them cringe when they buy rainbow products for their children.

you need not go in deep details, searching for specific scenarios– you get the idea of what is being said here. this is not a non-issue, and it must be fixed. leftist women do so much for this movement, yet they are unappreciated & straight up degraded when they slip even a little off the current mainstream standards, being presented as monstrous and bigoted, and downright evil. a woman can do so much actual activism, for gay & trans people alike– but as soon as the micromanagers of her words find something to be mad about, or accuse her of wrongthink– it is over for her. it all goes in the trashcan, all of the work she has done– all the while literal rapists are allowed to run free. class reductionists are going to yell leftist infighting! at me, but if leftist infighting is when women point out valid criticisms of how the people within our movement are treating us, then we will never be truly united in tackling systems of oppression. stop coddling men.

[drdemonprince]

I read your newsletter about "transmisandry" today. I'm a trans man and I generally agree with what you said. However, I was wondering how you would classify a particular experience of mine and other trans men I know irl or have seen online.

In short, I find that in some queer spaces, masculine and/or "binary" (meaning, not non-binary) trans men are treated as outsiders and enemies. I imagine some straight-passing queer cis men experience similar.

This prejudice against masculinity has nothing to do with us being trans, and is in no way oppressive, but it seems to me that some people have a hatred/disgust/discomfort/etc. with masculine men, especially if we are proud of our manhood. I sometimes feel excluded in queer or progressive spaces, and like I have to change myself to fit into others' idea of "acceptable" manhood.

I think this tends to emotionally affect trans men in particular because being a man is generally hard-won and joyful for us. Have you experienced prejudice in queer spaces, especially trans spaces, for being transmasculine? And while I don't believe there exists systemic misandry, is this not a form of misandry, just interpersonal?

Thanks, I really appreciate your work.

Hi there, thank you for great question. What you are describing is certainly a very real and troubling dynamic within both queer and feminist spaces, and it's put me off for a very long time. I have sometimes referred to this as "playful 'misandry' feminism", always with "misandry" in quotes because, as we've already established, it's not a real locus of systemic oppression. I have also sometimes in the past likened it to "Men's Tears Coffee Mug" feminism in its performative, self-congratulatory, typically white feminist stance.*

*in the Koa Beck sense of the term. Someone who is not white can be a white feminist.

I was always put off by performative man-hating jokes and the exclusion of men within feminist spaces because, well, I was one, and because it nearly always played out in transmisogynistic ways that were transparent to me, and because I was a major ride-or-die for men who were victims of sexual violence yet were frequently excluded from survivors' spaces (again, because I was one, even before I realized that I was).

There are a lot of troubling effects that happen when feminist women make a big performance out of finding all men to be disgusting and evil and frequently express disinterest in men's feelings or suffering (which used to be way more common in my estimation, around the early 2010's or so it seemed to peak). I was driven away from feminist spaces as a young closeted trans man because I could see such spaces were not for me or for any of the other men that I cared about and needed support. On the inverse side of things, I have spoken to many trans men who said that "playful "misandry"" feminism actively made it harder for them to realize that they were guys. Men were seen as the enemy and inherently evil and destructive and so they felt absolutely disgusting about the possibility of being a man, or feared transitioning would get them seen as a betrayer of the feminist movement.

As you rightly note, it is not just trans guys who get excluded by such dynamics. Cis men who are genuinely avowed feminists can be driven away by such forces, which is especially upsetting in the case of sexual assault survivors and queer men. Trans women and TMA enbies are excluded from feminist and women's spaces because they supposedly "look like" men to these types, and their own feelings of superficial safety rank above the actual data on who is the most at risk structurally (which is trans women). Butches are regarded in some spaces as too aggressive or unacceptably masculine because of it. And people's analysis of gender oppression just overall sucks when they buy into "playful misandry" style feminism because they go around saying shit like "femme people are oppressed by masc folks." what the hell does that mean. Does a cis, gender conforming feminine woman have less structural power than a butch lesbian? I don't think so.

It seems to me that the big problem here is that "playful misandry" feminism is rooted in a deep deep misunderstanding of the structural nature of oppression. Sexism isn't caused by patriarchy and capitalism, it's caused by "men" and so hating men and excluding them is what will fix things. Men as individuals are responsible for sexism and so women should be as detached from them and unsupportive of them as possible. This logic leads to a TERFy place really quickly, and yes, it also really really damages trans men.

My opinion is that it's best to critique this problem as the political failure that it is: a misunderstanding of sexism as individualistic rather than systemic. That's the core issue from which all the problems flow -- from rampant transmisogyny to the exclusion of cis male sexual assault survivors to the feelings of alienation of trans men. Yes sometimes naming the performative nature of "man hating" jokes and the like is helpful because people recognize instantly what that dynamic is when they hear it. But the "misandry" itself is not the core problem -- it's the shitty gender politics and white feminism.

Does that make sense? To be clear, I think it's something trans men get to talk about. I talk about it from my positionality quite a lot really. I don't think "misandry" is ultimately the helpful or clarifying way to name it, but I will sometimes throw around that term with a TON of qualifiers if I'm discussing the specific interpersonal dynamic of women saying that men are evil rapists innately or whatever. But really discussing the broader gender politics failure that leads to those little shitty comments and looks is almost always more helpful. If trans guys and cis guys are feeling excluded from a space due to these dynamics it's almost always the case that trans women, TMA enbies, butch women, and lots of women of color are too.

[hauntingofhouses]

Seeing fan discussions about Blue Eye Samurai and especially Mizu's identity is so annoying sometimes. So let me just talk about it real quick.

First off, I have to emphasise that different interpretations of the text are always important when discussing fiction. That's how the whole branch of literary studies came to be, and what literary criticism and analysis is all about: people would each have their own interpretation of what the text is saying, each person applying a different lens or theory through which to approach the text (ie. queer theory, feminist theory, reader response theory, postcolonial theory, etc) when analysing it. And while yes, you can just take everything the authors say as gospel, strictly doing so would leave little room for further analysis and subjective interpretation, and both of these are absolutely necessary when having any meaningful discussion about a piece of media.

With that being said, when discussing Blue Eye Samurai, and Mizu's character in particular, I always see people only ever interpret her through a queer lens. Because when discussing themes of identity, yes, a queer reading can definitely apply, and in Mizu's story, queer themes are definitely present. Mizu has to hide her body and do her best to pass in a cisheteronormative society; she presents as a man 99% of the time and is shown to be more comfortable in men's spaces (sword-fighting) than in female spaces (homemaking). Thus, there's nothing wrong with a queer reading at all. Hell, some queer theorists interpret Jo March from Little Women as transmasc and that's totally valid, because like all analyses, they are subjective and argumentative; you have the choice to agree with an interpretation or you can oppose it and form your own.

To that end, I know many are equally adamant that Mizu is strictly a woman, and that's also also a completely valid reading of the text, and aligns with the canon "Word of God", as the creators' intention was to make her a woman. And certainly, feminist themes in the show are undeniably present and greatly colour the narrative, and Episode 4 & 5 are the clearest demonstrations of this: Mizu's protectiveness of Madame Kaji and her girls, Mizu's trauma after killing Kinuyo, her line to Akemi about how little options women have in life, and the way her husband had scorned her for being more capable than him in battle.

I myself personally fall into the camp of Mizu leaning towards womanhood, so i tend to prefer to use she/her pronouns for her, though I don't think she's strictly a cis woman, so I do still interpret her under the non-binary umbrella. But that's besides my point.

My gripe here, and the thing that spurred me to write this post, is that rarely does this fandom even touch upon the more predominant themes of colonialism and postcolonial identities within the story. So it definitely irks me when people say that the show presenting Mizu being cishet is "boring." While it's completely fine to have your opinion and to want queer rep, a statement like that just feels dismissive of the rest of the representation that the show has to offer. And it's frustrating because I know why this is a prevalent sentiment; because fandom culture is usually very white, so of course a majority of the fandom places greater value on a queer narrative (that aligns only with Western ideas of queerness) over a postcolonial, non-Western narrative.

And that relates to how, I feel, people tend to forget, or perhaps just downplay, that the crux of Mizu's internal conflict and her struggle to survive is due to her being mixed-race.

Because while she can blend in rather seamlessly into male society by binding and dressing in men's clothing and lowering her voice and being the best goddamn swordsman there is, she cannot hide her blue eyes. Even with her glasses, you can still see the colour of her eyes from her side profile, and her glasses are constantly thrown off her face in battle. Her blue eyes are the central point to her marginalisation and Otherness within a hegemonic society. It's why everyone calls her ugly or a monster or a demon or deformed; just because she looks different. She is both white and Japanese but accepted in neither societies. Her deepest hatred of herself stems primarily from this hybridised and alienated identity. It's the whole reason why she's so intent on revenge and started learning the way of the sword in the first place; not to fit in better as a man, but to kill the white men who made her this way. These things are intrinsic to her character and to her arc.

Thus, to refuse to engage with these themes and dismiss the importance of how the representation of her racial Otherness speaks to themes of colonialism and racial oppression just feels tone-deaf to the show's message. Because even if Mizu is a cishet woman in canon, that doesn't make her story any less important, because while you as a white queer person living in the West may feel unrepresented, it is still giving a voice to the stories of people of colour, mixed-race folks, and the myriad of marginalised racial/ethnic/cultural groups in non-Western societies.

[velvetvexations]

tbh it's kinda frustrating how some transfems act like they're not allowed to say transmisogyny anymore. the shit like "if only there was a word to describe this specific intersection of transphobia and misogyny we face. oh well." really rubs me the wrong way. nobody has been saying that transfems can't use that word! nobody's saying transmisogyny isn't a Real and Palpable form of oppression that transfems face! well, maybe someone is but they're not representative of the broad scale discussion around TME/TMA language and also they are being a shitty person. but there's this fuckin melodramatic "oh woe is me I am so beset upon by the horrible transmisogynists who won't let me talk about my oppression" and it's especially hurtful because transmascs ARE told we're not allowed to use our word. the denial of being able to have the language to discuss our oppression IS happening. it's frankly driving me up the fucking wall that they can't/won't make the connection like c'mon please you understand being denied the language to talk about your oppression is harmful you are saying so with your own fucking words you understand the denial of that language is a bad thing right you get that right so why is it okay to do to trans men? is it the pushback against TME/TMA language?? is it the idea of transandrophobia implying everyone else is an oppressor even when that's not actually what's being discussed?? is it viewing transmisogyny through a radical feminist framework positing transmisogyny as the ultimate font of oppression from which all other oppressions flow??? I want to be charitable but I don't understand why other trans people talking about their oppression is interpreted as a threat, or why it's bad that other marginalized groups within the queer community are asking for specifically TME/TMA usage to be changed so that it doesn't throw the rest of us under the bus.

sometimes it really hurts knowing just how little the so-called trans "community" actually cares about people who aren't the correct flavor of trans

(disclaimer inb4 the replies: I've experienced shit of this general variety a lot irl and it doesn't just happen in online spaces even though I really really wish it did. I'm sure there's good irl trans spaces out there but I don't have access to them in my area and the ones I do have access to make me feel like I'm in a fucking panopticon where everyone is just waiting for me to slip up and say the wrong thing so I can get thrown out. going to an irl trans space to connect with the community in a safe and healthy way is not and has never been an option for me. on an individual level I know plenty of transfemmes who I have had normal and healthy relationships with both irl and online, it's trans "community" spaces that make me feel unsafe. including tumblr)

they will truly take anything and everything as an assault on their dignity and freedom while happily kicking over others

[chaos0pikachu]

tldr: censorship fucking sucks and word of honor and xena are mlm/wlw solidarity 

okay this was a random thought that came to me during a combo of rewatching of Word of Honor and reading a post that declared Word of Honor “didn’t count” on their BL list of whatever the fuck and here’s the thought, here’s the vibe, Word Of Honor has a lot in common with Xena: Warrior Princess

Hear me out

Everyone kinda knows that Xena - and by extension Lucy Lawless - as a bisexual/queer woman icon, and that Xena/Gabrielle is probably still one of the most prominent wlw ships in western canon. That’s a huge part of the shows iconography in pop culture. But like, if you rewatch the show, things between Xena and Gabrielle are kept pretty ambiguous but in that ambiguously totally gay way (like WenZhou!). 

The network was actively against Xena and Gabrielle being more than, what fans would probably call nowadays, bait. An executive told producer Rob Tapert that by making Xena and Gabrielle explicit there would be a surge of interested followed by a sharp decline. 

It should be noted that Xena was already a controversial show for it’s era - not just for the gay subtext but under fire from religious groups, anti-feminist groups, and others. 

The showrunners and producers also didn’t intend for Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship to, eh, blossom the way it did. Fans ran with it. Ironically, the intention of the show was to push Xena’s men of color love interests which also made the network gun shy (remember folks racism exists alongside homophobia!). 

Xena and Gabrielle operated in a highly censored space (that still exists in American media btw!! Take it from someone who knows first hand) that was beholden to network hand-wringing, capitalism, and societal homophobia at large.  So their relationship could only live within an ambiguous space. Ironically enough, just like WenZhou, Xena and Gabrielle are also referred to as “soulmates” in the text of the show. But ya know, sometimes soulmates are platonic, sometimes romantic. Which are WenZhou and Xena/Gabrielle? Well that’s up for the viewer to decide b/c the production teams hands are tied. 

Even so, even with the censorship, we all still view Xena as legitimate queer representation within the pop culture space. Why? Why Xena and not Word of Honor?

For me, they both count, especially WoH because it’s source material IS queer. But the filter of censorship snipped and cut the text away so everything would be forced to live within that ambiguous “up to the audience aka gotta make the advertisers comfortable” space. 

I don’t think it’s fair to throw WoH out because the production couldn’t, like they were not allowed, to showcase text on screen. Similar to Xena queer fans knew that her and Gabrielle were in love, soulmates (romantic) by the end (where Xena dies, like literal for reals death she’s ashes carried on by Gabby at the end btw spoiler alert for a 20 year old show at least WK got silver hair and immortality out of his death experience). 

Queer fans appreciated and cultivated what Xena gave us because, no offense but what the fuck else was there? Not a lot, and even less in the fantasy space. Hell, there’s still not a lot of queer representation in the fantasy space we’re only just now going “hey maybe Tolkien’s ultra white British view of things is not the only way to do things?" And now House of Dragon has Black actors in terrible wigs (they’re so fucking bad rip) in 2022. Woooo~ most queer chars in western fantasy media are mainly found in kids cartoons - which, fucking aces there but also - probably why there’s so many adults in those spaces in fandom (not my bag personally) and why I think the popularity of danmei, c-dramas, and k-dramas is on the rise. People are hungry for epic fantasy content, epic romance content, and queer content. 

but like, I think about queer folks who live in China, who watched WoH (ya know, the intended audience, not Americans) who are probably feeling the same thing people felt when they watched Xena. Yeah, Mr. Advertiser Xena and Gabrielle are soulmates (platonic) wink wink, Yeah Mr. Network ZZS and WKX are soulmates (platonic) wink wink

and I think that’s still valuable. idk I just don’t think it’s right for foreigners to be like “no you’re queer media doesn’t count actually because I deem it so” when the reason for the relationship being subtextual is literal censorship. And yet the text is hella gay anyway!! like at the end of the day we’re all battling the crushing weight of homophobia but not everyone’s fight is exactly the same especially country-to-country and I think that should still be respected. given how damn gay WoH is anyway I imagine the producers fought really fucking hard to give audiences what they did. Just like the producers of Xena fought against the network to do what they could. 

anyway, thoughts and shit

[ngaatee]

I'm very curious about the thesis! I've been trying to look into posthumanism/transhumanist ideas more, especially from multiple perspectives. There's stuff I see never talked about irt it, for example, you see a lot of people idealizing robot bodies or whatever, but this sometimes gets weaponized into negative views towards disabled bodies. Meanwhile, the idea in your thesis is a complete blind spot for me and I would LOVE to see what it's about.

Hi anon, thank you so so much for the question! I agree, there are so many areas in this topic that are underexplored and under researched, and I intend to change that. I will be posting more and more research alongside my artwork, but I will probably also make the entirety of my academic thesis available considering how little research there is in the area altogether.... Would that be something you'd like access to? Enough of that though lets get into what the thesis is about:

Broadly speaking before we even get into the posthumanism/transhumanism aspect of bioethics, we have to contend with the increased access in, and the proliferation of biotechnologies. Biotechnology has come to include a lot of medical interventions that could be viewed as falling in line with the positions, goals and aims espoused in posthumanism and transhumanism.

This increase in access has challenged the way that we think about existing within our physical bodies because it changes the limitations of our human bodies that we are bound to. In order to consider the potential impact of biotechnology, bioethics has grappled with issues of the correct ways of “being” or existing within our bodies including but not limited to the emergence of identity, performance of identity, body modification as escapism, and movements such as posthumanism and transhumanism.

However, like much of philosophy as a broader field, bioethics is plagued by the exclusion of ways of thought that are nonwhite, nonmale, non-Western and non-working class and that has been a glaring problem. The above issues that bioethics deals with are arguably all related to the right to bodily integrity which can be defined in this context as the right to protect one’s body from the interference of other people.

In the philosophical space, the right to bodily integrity typically involves but is not limited to reproductive rights and general autonomy. This has made bioethics a space that requires philosophical feminist thought to confront the uneven ideologies about identity formation and the correct ways of existing in one’s body.

Given that Black African women have been greatly impacted by the issue of the right to bodily integrity, it is especially important that there is an African feminist framework that deals with the power dynamics that determine how people are allowed to exist and identify with themselves. The absence of African feminist thought in Bioethics is an epistemic injustice, that has weakened the overall process of collective knowledge building in the field. As a result, the practical application of ethics and morals in biotechnology is skewed into a cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze.

The cisheteronormative gaze or cisheteronormativity refers to the oppressive institutions of socialisation such as the media and structural systems in general that use cisgender and heterosexual behaviours or norms as the prevailing or dominant status quo. By doing this, the lived experiences of queer and transgender people are excluded. This is compounded by the ways that social institutions reinforce white supremacist and patriarchal ideas, creating communities whereby groups that do not belong to the dominant status quo perform their identities in a way that oppressive institutions deem acceptable, similar to the panopticon view presented by Foucault.

The cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze is a socialised way of thinking that favours the assumed moral and ethical values of cisgender, straight and white men, who form the majority of both the biotechnological and the bioethical fields. This gaze imagines existing in one’s body as a stagnant and neutral form of identity whereby decisions that we make regarding our bodies exist in a vacuum away from the impact of colonisation, white supremacist thought, the patriarchy and classism amongst other issues of marginalisation such as homophobia.

The scholar Pumla Gqola refers to the overlap of white supremacy, classism and the patriarchy as the “triple threat of violence”. In this conceptual framework, she suggests that when we consider ways of being, we have an emergence of new identities based on the need to navigate this triple threat of violence. This triple threat of violence has, according to Gqola, led to the treatment of Black African women’s bodies as public property which must be wielded in ways that people who are not Black African women deem appropriate.

The issue of treating Black African women’s bodies as public property is echoed by Gabon Baderoon who uses the case of Sarah Baartman as a means of understanding private and public performances of identity. In doing so, Baderoon highlights the specific ways that Black African women have historically not been treated as having ownership over their own bodies and instead have been made into a spectacle for the consumption of other people who act as voyeurs when it comes to Black African women.

This creation of spectacle has turned Black African women into hypersexualised beings whose bodily integrity has been inherently compromised through colonial violence and violation. These issues are relevant to the philosophical conception of identity, as it highlights the relationship between certain identities and shame or humiliation. Over time, Black African women’s identities have transformed. In part this is because identity evolves with societal, cultural and philosophical developments that challenge our assumptions about correct ways of being. However, this is also in part due to an effort on the part of Black African women to escape the violence and violation of identity, and fantasise about existing anew, in a body that is not subject to public spectacle.

The notion of fantasy is central to biotechnology and by extension bioethics because it imagines the human body and identity beyond biological limitation. The human body and identity beyond biological limitation is a general way of understanding posthumanism and transhumanism as movements.

In my academic thesis, I argued that African feminisms in the space of bioethics would assess whether or not posthumanist and transhumanist technologies compromise their bodily integrity by looking at the extent to which it bodily integrity may push them to either violate their bodies or free them to reimagine their identities, and by extension their bodies anew. I also explained the notion of a “cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze” using Foucault’s panopticon, explained what posthumanism and transhumanism is (and how we tend to differentiate the two), discussed how identities emerge, showing how violation and violence relate to decisions about our bodies, the fantasy about ways of being versus socialised identity and responding to potential objections.

The reason I included Foucault in this is because I wanted to convey the ways that in posthumanism and transhumanism there can be an element of performing specific ways of "being" that are akin to the idea of the panopticon. More specifically, posthumanism and transhumanism force us to contend with what we think "humanness" is, and to what extent it should be preserved, and what that preservation looks like. This has a domino effect of sorts, because when we concern ourselves with what humanness looks like in the posthumanist and transhumanist sense, we also then deal with the idea that our idealised bodies are a performance of some kind of standard.

Overall for the most part, I used the works of feminist scholars from Southern Africa to build up my thesis, most notably Pumla Gqola's notion of triple violence. This is because posthumanism and transhumanism in the philosophical space is also about the way that human bodies can encounter violence, or violation. When we speak of bodily integrity and bodily autonomy, in part we are talking about protecting people from violence, and from violation. What this then means, is that the philosophy and the ethical and moral conceptualisations need to explicitly contend with the history of the human body, and of violence and violation, this also extends into how posthumanism and transhumanism then engages with disabilities, dignity in the difference between bodies and so on and so forth.

I needed examples for this so I opted for the field of biogerontology, an area of biotechnology that can involve things like facial reconstruction which has a use outside of cosmetics, but is also an area with a lot of technology that is strictly cosmetic related to concerns around things like aging which comes up in a lot of posthumanist and transhumanist literature.

Interestingly, as I studied this, I was also tutoring the ethics of artificial intelligence to second year students at my university so I actually noted a lot of overlap in some of the concerns regarding posthumanism and transhumanism, and the way we discuss the positives and negatives of technology with regards to humans as a whole. This was not the focus of my paper, but if you would like to know more about that, I would be happy to explain farther.

I think one of the key elements of bioethics as it pertains to posthumanism and transhumanism is to ensure that the ideas are not treated as though they exist in a vacuum, separate from history, societies and so on and so forth. Rather, bioethics is at its most robust when we confront the relationship between the philosophies and their histories. It is that grey area, between imagination and history, where philosophers who concern themselves with bioethics must reside and it means seeking a balance between the more idealised and fantastical side of biotechnologies, and goes into the realities of what manifests in real life, and what that means for our ethical and moral standards.

That is the basic primer for the thesis that I wrote. Let me know if you have any questions! I really loved answering this, my thesis really truly is my baby you know haha, and I am proud of my firstborn.

[maglorslostsilmaril]

I'm transmasc, and lesbians scare me. I know there are non-radical feminist lesbians, but so many of the lesbian spaces I know of have been taken over by TERF brainrot that 'lesbian' has practically become a dog-whistle (to me) for TERF. I see lesbian stuff and I feel afraid. Seeing pro-lesbian stuff has almost become like seeing aggressively patriotic or Christian stuff. It makes me worry that the person displaying lesbian pride is going to attack me for being trans. And I hate all that! I know nice lesbians, lesbians who accept trans people, lesbians who don't see me as my agab or a confused butch. I should not be afraid of other members of the queer community. But because of the TERF/rad-fem infection, I am. Sorry for coming into your inbox and ranting, your last post just sort of sparked something

no, that makes sense! i totally understand what you mean…sometimes i feel similar in the way that i don’t necessarily feel comfortable interacting with a lot of blogs centered around lesbianism anymore, simply because so many of them are radfems. it’s so aggravating to realize that your identity is being gatekept, I really hate it, and i hate that you’re scared of being attacked for being queer by other queer people…the point of a community is that we stand WITH each other, not against. i’m so disgusted that so many lesbian spaces have been taken over by radfems and terfs, especially because so many of us aren’t cis. it’s like they’re saying you can be one or the other, lesbian or not cis. sorry for replying to your rant with another one, i don’t check my inbox often, I just hate that even within the queer community we can’t feel completely accepted.

EDIT

(11/28/22)

 So uh

This post has made quite a few people really fucking mad if the anons telling me to kms are anything to go by.

Therefore, I want to try and clear up a few things, because I fear the meaning behind the message was trying to share may have gotten lost in the unclear wording and poor grammar.

1. I myself am a lesbian, and genderqueer. Just know before you get mad at what I'm saying that this is coming from the point of view of a queer person.

2. I am not trying to attack fellow lesbians in any way. What I was trying to say was that transphobia is prominent in lesbian spaces, and that can make them feel unwelcoming for trans and nonbinary lesbians

3. I don't agree with the anon's comparing lesbian flags to white supremacy and christian propaganda, I think that's a bit extreme. What I do agree with is that TERFs taking over lesbian spaces excludes other lesbians

tl;dr The point of this post was not to attack lesbians for being themselves. I support that wholeheartedly. What I do not support is the exclusion and fear that follows trans and nb people in lesbian spaces. This was not supposed to be interpreted as an attack on sapphic, it was supposed to be an attack on transphobia. If me defending trans and nb people makes you upset or uncomfortable, I would suggest asking YOURSELF why you're so bothered by trans people being supported instead of attacking ME for standing with my fellow trans and nb lesbians.

[flightlessnightingale]

On Lesbianism

I’ll state it at the top here, because many have not understood my stance. The purpose of this essay is not to say that Lesbian cannot mean “Female homosexual.” Rather, my objective is to show that Lesbian means more than that single definition suggests. Female Homosexuals are lesbians, unless they personally do not want to use that label. Now, on with the show: Lesbianism is not about gatekeeping, and I don’t want to have to keep convincing people that the movement popularized by someone who wrote a book full of lies and hate speech then immediately worked with Ronald Reagan is a bad movement. In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces. For example, trans woman Beth Elliott, who was at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference to perform with her lesbian band, was ridiculed onstage and had her existence protested. In 1979, radical feminist Janice Raymond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the defining work of the TERF movement, “Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale,” in which she argued that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandating it out of existence”—mainly by restricting access to transition care (a political position shared by the Trump administration). Soon after she wrote another paper, published for the government-funded, National Center for Healthcare Technology — and the Reagan administration cut off Medicare and private health insurance coverage for transition-related care.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is a fundamentally unsustainable ideology. Lesbianism is a fundamentally sustainable existence.

There used to be a lesbian bar or queer bar or gay bar in practically every small town — sometimes one of each. After surviving constant police raids, these queer spaces began closing even Before the AIDS epidemic. Because TERFs would take them over, kick out transfems and their friends. Suddenly, there weren’t enough local patrons to keep the bars open, because the majority had been kicked out. With America’s lack of public transportation, not enough people were coming from out of town either.

TERFs, even beyond that, were a fundamental part of the state apparatus that let AIDS kill millions.

For those who don’t know, Lesbian, from the time of Sappho of Lesbos to the about 1970′s, referred to someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. It was not only a sexuality, but almost akin to a gender spectrum.

That changed in the 1970′s when TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, working with Ronald fucking Reagan to ban insurance for trans healthcare.

TERFs took over the narrative, the bars, the movement, and changed Lesbian from the most revolutionary and integral queer communal identity of 2 fucking THOUSAND years, from “Someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy” to “A woman with a vagina who’s sexually attracted to other women with vaginas”

How does this fit into the bi lesbian debate? As I said, Lesbian is more of a Gender Spectrum than anything else, it was used much in the same way that we use queer or genderqueer today.

And it’s intersectional too.

See, if you were to try to ascribe a rigid, biological, or localized model of an identity across multiple cultures, it will fail. It will exclude people who should not be excluded. ESPECIALLY Intersex people. That’s why “Two Spirit” isn’t something rigid- it is an umbrella term for the identities within over a dozen different cultures. In the next two sections, I have excerpts on Two-Spirit and Butch identity, to give a better idea of the linguistics of queer culture: This section on Two-Spirit comes from wikipedia, as it has the most links to further sources, I have linked all sources directly, though you can also access them from the Wikipedia page’s bibliography: Two-Spirit is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional ceremonial and social role that does not correlate to the western binary. [1] [2] [3] Created at the 1990 Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, it was "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples." [4] Criticism of Two-Spirit arises from 2 major points, 1. That it can exasperate the erasure of the traditional terms and identities of specific cultures.           a. Notice how this parallels criticisms of Gay being used as the umbrella           term for queer culture in general. 2. That it implies adherence to the Western binary; that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female" [4]          a. Again, you’ll notice that this parallels my criticisms of the TERF definition of Lesbian, that tying LGBT+ identities to a rigid western gender binary does a disservice to LGBT+ people,—especially across cultures. “Two Spirit" wasn’t intended to be interchangeable with "LGBT Native American" or "Gay Indian"; [2] nor was it meant to replace traditional terms in Indigenous languages.  Rather, it was created to serve as a pan-Indian unifier. [1] [2] [4] —The term and identity of two-spirit "does not make sense" unless it is contextualized within a Native American or First Nations framework and traditional cultural understanding. [3] [10] [11] The ceremonial roles intended to be under the modern umbrella of two-spirit can vary widely, even among the Indigenous people who accept the English-language term. No one Native American/First Nations' culture's gender or sexuality categories apply to all, or even a majority of, these cultures. [4] [8] Butch: At the turn of the 20th century, the word “butch” meant “tough kid” or referred to a men’s haircut. It surfaced as a term used among women who identified as lesbians in the 1940s, but historians and scholars have struggled to identify exactly how or when it entered the queer lexicon. However it happened, "Butch” has come to mean a “lesbian of masculine appearance or behavior.” (I have heard that, though the words originate from French, Femme & Butch came into Lesbian culture from Latina lesbian culture, and if I find a good source for that I will share. If I had to guess, there may be some wonderful history to find of it in New Orleans—or somewhere similar.) Before “butch” became a term used by lesbians, there were other terms in the 1920s that described masculinity among queer women. According to the historian Lillian Faderman,“bull dagger” and “bull dyke” came out of the Black lesbian subculture of Harlem, where there were “mama” and “papa” relationships that looked like butch-femme partnerships. Performer Gladys Bentley epitomized this style with her men’s hats, ties and jackets. Women in same-sex relationships at this time didn’t yet use the word “lesbian” to describe themselves. Prison slang introduced the terms “daddy,” “husband,” and “top sargeant” into the working class lesbian subculture of the 1930s.  This lesbian history happened alongside Trans history, and often intersected, just as the Harlem renaissance had music at the forefront of black and lesbian (and trans!) culture, so too can trans musicians, actresses, and more be found all across history, and all across the US. Some of the earliest known trans musicians are Billy Tipton and Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax—Both transmasculine musicians who hold an important place in not just queer history, but music history.

Lesbian isn’t rigid & biological, it’s social and personal, built up of community and self-determination.

And it has been for millennia.

So when people say that nonbinary lesbians aren’t lesbian, or asexual lesboromantics aren’t lesbian, or bisexual lesbians aren’t lesbian, it’s not if those things are technically true within the framework — It’s that those statements are working off a fundamentally claustrophobic, regressive, reductionist, Incorrect definition You’ll notice that whilst I have been able to give citations for TERFs, for Butch, and especially for Two-Spirit, there is little to say for Lesbianism. The chief reason for this is that lesbian history has been quite effectively erased-but it is not forgotten, and the anthropological work to recover what was lost is still ongoing. One of the primary issues is that so many who know or remember the history have so much trauma connected to "Lesbian” that they feel unable to reclaim it. Despite this trauma, just like the anthropological work, reclamation is ongoing.

Since Sappho, lesbian was someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. For centuries, esbian wasn’t just a sexuality, it was intersectional community, kin to a gender spectrum, like today’s “queer”. When TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, they redefined Lesbian to “woman w/ a vag attracted to other women w/ vags”. So when you say “bi lesbians aren’t lesbian” it’s not whether that’s true within the framework, it’s that you’re working off a claustrophobic, regressive, and reductionist definition.

I want Feminism, Queerness, Lesbianism, to be fucking sustainable.

I wanna see happy trans and lesbian and queer kids in a green and blue fucking world some day.

I want them to be able to grow old in a world we made good.

[homosexuhauls]

Joanna Moorhead

Culture of silencing any challenge to prevailing ideology is damaging academic freedom, says professor

The press release that accompanies Prof Kathleen Stock’s new book says she wants to see a future in which trans rights activists and gender-critical feminists collaborate to achieve some of their political aims. But she concedes that this currently seems fanciful. As far as she is concerned, the book, Material Girls, sets out her stall – and she knows a lot of people will find it distasteful.

Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, says the key question she addresses – itself offensive to many – is this: do trans women count as women?

Whatever else about her views is controversial, she is surely on firm ground when she writes that this question has become surrounded by toxicity. But the problem for her is, at least partly, that many people do anything they can to avoid answering it. “Very few people who are sceptical talk about it directly, because they’re frightened,” she says. “It’s so hard psychologically to say, in reply: ‘I’m afraid not.’”

Stock is at pains to say she is not a transphobe, and also that she is sympathetic to the idea that many people feel they are not in the “right” body. What she says she opposes, though, is the institutionalisation of the idea that gender identity is all that matters – that how you identify automatically confers all the entitlements of that sex. And she believes that increasingly in universities and the wider world, that is a view that cannot be challenged.

“There’s a taboo against saying this, but it’s what I believe,” she says. “It’s fair enough if people want to disagree with me, but this is what I think.”

That last statement is loaded, too, because the gender identity row is closely linked, especially on university campuses, with freedom of speech. Campuses are a minefield for those wanting to discuss these issues, she says, and she has faced calls for her university to sack her. So she is supportive of the government’s controversial plans for a free speech bill, which critics including English PEN, Article 19 and Index on Censorship have argued will have the opposite effect.

In a joint letter, they argued that the legislation “may have the inverse effect of further limiting what is deemed ‘acceptable’ speech on campus and introducing a chilling effect both on the content of what is taught and the scope of academic research exploration”.

But Stock backs the bill: “I think vice-chancellors and university management groups have shown that they can’t manage the modern problems around suppression of academic freedom. I think there are some genuine instances of unfair treatment of controversial academics, and those academics should be able to seek meaningful redress.”

This week the University of Essex apologised to two professors, Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman, after an independent inquiry found the university had breached its free speech duties when their invitations or talks were cancelled after student complaints.

Stock grew up in Montrose, Scotland, the daughter of a philosophy lecturer and a newspaper proofreader, and studied for her degree at Exeter College, Oxford, going on to do an MA at the University of St Andrews and a PhD at Leeds.

Having come out as gay relatively late in life, she now lives in Sussex with her partner and two sons from her previous marriage. She regards her OBE, awarded earlier this year for services to higher education, as a signal that her views have at least some backing in the establishment.

“Academics being online, students being online – it’s introduced a whole new landscape for dealing with controversial ideas, especially when those ideas are controversial within your peer group or a student body. Threats to academic freedom don’t just come from China, or millionaires trying to buy a library wing for your college; they also come from students whipping up a petition within seconds of you saying something and trying to get you fired.”

Sometimes, she claims, it is more insidious than sackings: “For academics [the gender identity debate] has a chilling effect, because academics believe their careers may suffer in ways that are less visible: they don’t get promoted, or they’re removed from an editorial board.” The net result of all this, she says, is an impoverishment of ideas and knowledge, and damage to the dissemination of information.

Because another of Stock’s key arguments in her book is that her own profession, academia, has failed to look in detail at some claims made by trans activists. She questions some of the data that gets shared regarding violence against trans people, saying that a lot of it is produced by groups that adhere to a particular narrative.

“I don’t doubt that transphobic crime occurs, but I want to know to what extent it occurs in a way that could help the trans community better understand the problem it faces.” She’s disappointed, she says, in some fellow academics for not rising above the fray. “I thought the point of philosophy was that you would be able to argue things without resorting to ad hominem attacks – I thought that was the point of our training.”

How, then, in her view, have we got to where we are? Stock takes issue with Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, which campaigns for trans inclusion and opposes the views of gender-critical feminists. The charity’s Diversity Champions programme is very popular on campuses, and Stock believes this has in part “turned universities into trans activist organisations” through their equality, diversity and inclusion departments.

Beyond this, the introduction of student fees has played its part in the current situation, Stock believes. “As soon as students started to pay, they became customers, and universities became much more deferential. They started talking about coproduction of knowledge, giving them much more choice over the whole experience.” The problem with that, she believes, is that “some young people come along with fixed ideas about gender identity theory, and it’s awkward – especially when universities are branding themselves as LGBT-friendly and queer-friendly.”

Philosophy is a vast space, most of it without risk of abuse. So what keeps her in this particular arena? “I was bullied as a child and I think that gave me experience of social ostracisation and toughened me up,” she says. “I’ve also got amazing support. Sure, some philosophers and colleagues are against my views, but others are very supportive.

“Plus it’s personal for me: I’ve struggled with my body in terms of femininity. I could easily aged 15 have decided I was non-binary or even a boy. And I feel very worried for teenagers who are now foreclosing reproductive possibilities and their future, or damaging their bodily tissues in irreversible ways, based on an idea that they may come to relinquish at a later date.”

One tragedy of the gender identity debate is how hate-filled and polarised it has become. Stock says she has suffered online abuse, but makes it clear that she is going to continue to state her case.

Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock is published by Fleet

[drdemonprince]

I wanted to say, about the "transandrophobia" thing and specifically about that particular experience of getting less emotional support or even affection when transmascs transition, that while it's a very real problem, there are ways out that I never hear transmascs -but especially a particular brand of straight trans guy obsessed with passing- commenting. Like, you CAN build circles where men get emotional support and affection to the same level as anyone else. It's not a flawless strategy, you'll probably get some people weirded out that you'll have to decide whether to keep being close to, and you might very well get called a fag or a misogynistic insult, but you DON'T have to be isolated, you can build different types of relationships, which should be what being queer is all about anyway. Yeah strangers are gonna treat you differently, possibly more coldly, when you transition, but I see so many trans guys despair at how this is now the state of all their relationships and it's weird men don't acknowledge that all it takes for a good number of people to be warm and affectionate to you is to just be warm and affectionate to them first.

Yep, "transmisandry" bros don't want to make themselves vulnerable by asking for emotional support and affection, they don't want to put the work into building communities with other men to work on this shit, they don't want to provide the emotional warmth that they crave -- they want to complain that women aren't giving it to them and that people are sometimes wary of them when they are walking down the street because they now have visible social power. In these respects and many more they are exactllly like cis men's rights activists of yore.

Also. It's interesting isn't it that lots of transmisandry bros go on and on about how they cannot possibly have any male privilege, because they do not "pass"... but then also say that people treat them coldly and are suspicious of their presence in queer women's spaces and they feel like there's nowhere they belong. "Passing" is a regressive, self-defeating goal in the first place, so it's telling just how bitter many of them are that they don't meet that ridiculous standard 100% of the time, but also you can't claim that you're not being read as male at all while also complaining about people... treating you like they would a guy.

(in actuality, male privilege/being perceived as male is a lot more complex and amorphous than just magically passing as a cis dude one day. Passing is contextual, but trans men are often afforded a lot of social benefits even when they don't pass, especially within queer and feminist circles. more on this in my essay next week).

[not-terezi-pyrope]

TERFs: What you (don’t) want to know

CW: Overt discussion of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and acknowledgement of sexual topics.

So, for better or worse, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time observing (through chance encounter of via indirect commentary) TERF communities. TERF communities and rhetoric are something of a problem in-vogue right now, as, while TERF communities are generally fairly small, they are very vocal, and have managed to insidiously insert themselves into mainstream queer and feminist discourse through surface-level mimicry of progressive rhetoric. This is especially becoming an issue in my country, the UK, which is unfortunately now garnering a reputation as a hive-bed for TERF groups, something which has attracted some media attention as of late.

Given this, and because terfs thrive on misinformation campaigns, I thought I’d write up a sort of Q&A cheatsheet breaking down ideas about the “terf” movement and dispelling myths, malicious or otherwise. I think that confronting these people for what they are, and not letting them control the terms of the conversation by misrepresenting themselves and their opponents, is important as we strive for trans equality, and as a trans woman it’s a cause fairly close to my own chest. I may be putting a target on my chest a little by making a post like this, but then that’s par for the course. Also, keep in mind that this is all based solely on my own observations, experiences and reading, and you should probably seek out perspectives from other trans, feminist and queer people for a more diverse set of views. I am not an expert, and have probably made at least some mistakes as I’m not super knowledgeable in all these areas, so keep that in mind (and feel free to message me if I’ve made any really glaring errors).

So, here’s what you (don’t) want to know about The TERFs. (Long post under the cut: be forewarned).

What is a “TERF”?

TERF is a term used to describe a loose collective of conservative-leaning transphobes who couch their transphobic ideas within the framework of radical feminist rhetoric. The term “TERF” stands for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”, and was popularized over a decade ago by a cis feminist to distinguish these transphobic individuals from more mainstream and intersectional feminists and radical feminists (a common lie spread by TERFs is that the term was create by trans women to attack them -  this is not the case). TERFs often self-term themselves “gender critical feminists” as a euphamism for their particular brand of transphobic ideology.

TERF ideology has its roots in second-wave feminism, including the writings of people like Germaine Greer (now fairly infamous for her transphobic views), and the work of long-since discredited pseudoscientist Ray Blanchard, known for his characterization of transgender people as motivated by sexual perversion in the 80s and 90s (and who now spends his time complaining about trans people watching anime on twitter).

The core tenets of TERF ideology are that gender is synonymous with gender assigned at birth, chromosomal type, and one’s physical genitalia. TERFs believe that sex is a strict binary, and that the role of women in society and the origins of misogyny are defined by one’s genitalia, and/or one’s capacity to reproduce. As such, TERFs believe that trans women are men who are “appropriating” the experiences of “real women”. This is a view fundamentally incompatible with the consensus in the scientific fields of genetics, reproductive biology, gender studies, and with almost all mainstream intersectional feminist discourse. Despite this, TERFs tend to ignore all evidence that contradicts their claims, as their primary motivation (as with most bigots) is to justify their pre-existing prejudices and avoid self-examination that contradicts their prior beliefs and assumptions. As well as transphobia, the implications of terf rhetoric are frequently variously misogynistic, homophobic, and racist, despite attempts by terfs to decry this (more below).

While gender roles are a social construct, and gender is definitely informed by societal context, the nature and expression of gender is in reality unique psychological experience and identity that may be related to one’s sexual characteristics but is not defined by it. The human experience of gender is a broad spectrum, with different ideas and experiences of gender existing in different cultures and communities across the globe.

Are TERFs feminists?

“No” would be a simple answer, but at the risk of falling prey to “No True Scotsman”, I will say that it depends on how you want to define the term. TERFs justify their ideology with the rhetoric of feminism, and claim that their perspective is based in a radical feminist deconstruction of gender. Their basic logic can be boiled down as such; “1. Gender, as a psychological experience, does not exist. 2. As such, the terms “man” and “woman” derive solely from one’s genitalia (or, depending on the context of the argument, chromosomes), and the axis of misogynistic oppression solely derives from one’s genitalia. 3. As such, trans women are not “true” women, and claiming that they are is misogyny and/or erasure of women”.

While this breakdown may entice cis people who haven’t examined concepts of sex and gender any more deeply than they did in their school biology lessons, this definition of manhood and womanhood is deeply reductive and is in and of itself misogynistic. Particularly concerning is the insistence of TERFs that womanhood is defined solely by one’s genitalia, or, as it is sometimes framed, one’s possession of a womb or ability to bear children. TERFs will often complain that describing people’s bodies in neutral, ungendered terms (e.g. “a person with a vagina”) is somehow objectifying, yet one of their core beliefs is fairly degrading idea that the be-all and end-all of womanhood is one’s genitalia, and one’s “role” in the reproductive cycle. This sort of Victorian era conception of gender is deeply rooted in misogynistic ideas about the role of women in society, and it is the sort of rhetoric responsible for legislation such as the recent horrific bill introduced in Utah which defines a woman as somebody with ovaries and who have “external anatomical characteristics that appear to have the purpose of performing the natural reproductive function of providing eggs and receiving sperm from a male donor.” It should be fairly clear that this sort of definition of womanhood as being defined by one’s “purpose” to reproduce is deeply reductive, sexist, and would be harmful (and erasing of) intersex people and cis women who are infertile or who have surgeries such as hysterectomy, even prior to considering the impact of these ideas on trans people.

On the topic of intersex people, it should be noted that their mere existence is a refutation to the TERF conception of gender as an absolute binary set before birth and static throughout life. TERFs tend to reject intersex people as “outliers” or aberrations when this point have brought up, and more recently have switched to the tactic of claiming that any trans person who tries to discuss intersex people during debates about sex and gender is “co-opting intersex narratives”, which is in essence an excuse used to stall debate on the subject and avoid addressing it.

More broadly with respect to feminism, in addition to the misogynistic implications of the TERF worldview, their brand of feminism is widely denounced by more mainstream feminists as being outdated, offensive and non-intersectional, as well as harmful to feminism as a whole. Here are a few articles talking about this; 1 2 3.

Is “TERF” a slur?

This is one of the most widespread myths spread by TERFs in order to delegitimize criticism, and to provide a pretext upon which to report and silence people who are attempting to discuss TERFs and their ideology. TERFs will claim that the word “TERF” is a slur created by trans women to persecute them. Usually, they will claim that the word is a derogatory term for women in general, or sometimes for lesbians.

This is blatantly false. Firstly, TERF is a neutral acronym that was popularized by a cis feminist to distinguish TERFs from other, non-transphobic feminists. It is an abbreviation of a description of their movement; self-described radical feminists who campaign for trans exclusion from women’s spaces and womenhood as a whole, as such, they are “trans exclusionary radical feminists”. TERF is often an insulting term, but it is such in the same way that being called a homophobe or a racist is “insulting”; it is insulting because it has accurately descriptive negative connotations.

The insistence that TERF is a slur, that TERF just means “lesbian” or “woman”, is a weapon used to shut down discussion, and a shield used to hide the fringe nature of their views. TERFs will often claim that all women are terfs, or that all “real” lesbians are terfs, and so that people using the term TERF are using it as a general slur for lesbians or women. This ignores the meaning of the word, and the reality at whom it is aimed. Not all women are terfs, not all lesbians are terfs, not even all transphobes are terfs. TERF describes a very specific subset of anti-trans activist, and the idea that it is a slur against other marginalized groups is to terfs simultaneously a useful lie and also a comforting self-deception that allows them to believe that their beliefs and community is far more widespread than it is, and that criticism of their ideas is rooted in some external bigotry rather than in the flaws in their own rhetoric.

Does “TERF” mean lesbian?

No. As explained above, this is an offensive lie spread by TERFs to further their own ends. Lesbians who I have talked to about this are generally disgusted with TERFs trying to associate themselves with them and misrepresent their community as being transphobic. While some TERFs may be lesbians (although they far from all are), they do not speak in any capacity for the lesbian community, no matter how much they may pretend to.

It is worth noting that TERFs have a history of erasing lesbians. TERFs claim that the only “true” lesbians are cis women who are solely attracted to women who were assigned female at birth. As well as (inevitably) denying the identity of trans lesbians, they erase the identity of cis women who identify as lesbian by claiming that any lesbian who is attracted to any trans woman is not a “real” lesbian and is instead bisexual. This, once again, is a nonsensical and abhorrent attempt to redefine terms to fit their own worldview.

Are TERFs conservative?

TERF rhetoric aligns very closely with conservative ideology regarding sex and gender. Although TERFs describe themselves as as feminists and as such see themselves as being “progressives” in a sense, they tend to have a distaste for the left as generally rejecting of their views, and ally themselves with right-wing conservatives in order to pursue their goal of marginalizing the trans people and seeking rollbacks of trans rights and equality. It is common to see TERFs “lament” that far right figures with deeply misogynistic perspectives on gender equality and other social causes are “the only ones” who agree with them, without stopping to reflect upon what implications this may have for the nature of their own beliefs.

As right wing sources and media are usually the only sources which backup their views on trans people, TERFs frequently share right wing or even far-right articles and writers to fuel their transphobia or to be used as “evidence” when arguing against trans rights. TERFs will often collaborate with right wing groups in order to further their fight against trans rights, even when such groups also pursue agendas contrary to the causes of gender equality, body autonomy and LGBT+ rights that they claim to support. A prominent example of this was exposed recently wherein a major TERF group was found to be engaging in legal action in partnership with ultra-conservative evangelical Christian group “Focus on the Family”, known for their opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion access, and women’s equality, in order to lobby against legal protections for trans people in the US. In another recent example, conservative group the Heritage Foundation paid for two prominent British TERF “activists” to be flown to America in order to interrupt a meeting between Sarah McBride, national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign, and a colleague, in order to harass McBride for being transgender.

The nature of this relationship, wherein TERFs collaborate with, exchange funding with, and base their ideology on the publication of right-wing figures and groups, means that despite their cries to the contrary, TERFs as a movement should for all intents and purposes be considered right wing.

Are TERFs racist?

Writing this, I am a white trans woman and as such do not want to speak over trans women of colour who will have more nuanced and better informed perspectives on the links between TERF ideology and racism/white supremacy. You should definitely seek out the views and writings of trans people of colour who will be far more qualified to talk about and knowledgeable about racism in TERF circles than this one white trans girl. However, for the sake of this post I will provide a brief overview of some of the trends I have seen both in person and pointed out by others.

TERF’s feminism is by definition non-intersectional and tends to have a poor relationship with and understanding of how racial oppression intersects with feminist issues. A recurring theme in TERF politics is a condescension towards Muslim women and the stereotyping of actions of men of colour. TERFs also erase the particular intersection of transmisogyny and racism that trans women of colour experience by merely blaming their oppression on their actions as “men”. Moreover, TERF views about the gender binary are also ignorant of the diverse cultural conceptions of gender that have existed and continue to exist around the world that do not fall into their narrow binary. As did their colonial cultures before them, TERFs seek to apply their own binary conceptualization of gender to anyone and everyone they come into contact with. TERF-brand feminism is conceived therefore from a white, Western perspective and makes little effort to break free of this.

It is difficult to find articles discussing this aspect of TERF ideology specifically, but here are a few links in which instances of this are discussed. Examples are not difficult to find in documentation of activities undertaken by TERFs. I will also link this twitter thread that discusses TERFism as a gateway to white supremacy via the entry-point of transphobia.

What do TERFs think about trans men?

While a lot of discussion of TERF viewpoints centers their transmisogyny as the most visible manifestation of their transphobia, TERF ideology is also hostile towards transgender men, albeit in different ways to their hostility towards trans women.

A common TERF myth is that trans “genderists” are seeking to forcibly turn gender nonconforming cis people trans by “convincing them” (sometimes termed “brainwashing them”) into believing that they are of a different gender. As such, a common TERF belief about trans men is that they are simply GNC cis women, often characterized as “butch lesbians”, who have been “tricked” into thinking they are men by “transgender ideology”, or who seek to become men because they seek to escape misogyny. As such, a TERFs are often condescending towards trans men, pretending to empathize with an imagined plight of a “deluded woman”, while at the same time aggressively misgendering them and erasing their identities as trans men. While this idea bears no resemblance to the actual experiences of trans men, TERFs tend to have very little exposure to trans masculine people in general, and so, much like their conception of trans women, their ideas about the issues trans men face are largely based in a collection of myths that they themselves have invented.

This is not to say that TERFs will not be more overtly aggressive towards trans men; an alternative narrative peddled by TERFs about gay trans men in particular is that they are “fujoshis” who are obsessed with fictional gay couples to such an extent that they are compelled to try to become gay men. This idea is so blatantly absurd that it practically denies any sensible analysis even from a critical perspective, so I will leave it at that, however in this manner TERFs characterize trans men who they wish to attack with their more traditional aggressive, sneering countenance.

What do TERFs think about non-binary people (and queer people)?

TERFs do not believe that non-binary people exist. TERFs believe in a strict, immutable gender binary, and similarly to many people on the right and the “anti-SJW” crowd, they tend to characterize nonbinary people as all being teenagers who have been “deluded” by platforms such as Tumblr, and by progressive leftist spaces in general.

More broadly, TERFs have a narrow and regressive conception of sexuality and gender identity, and do not generally accept the existence of LGBTQ+ identities beyond Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual, which they view as being “rooted in biology”. Asexuality and pansexuality, as well as other identity labels and any non-binary gender descriptors, are dismissed offhandedly as being fads.

TERFs seek to gatekeep membership of the LGBTQ+ community by erasing the existence of people who do not conform to their strict definitions of “Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual”. This includes reclassifying gay and lesbian people as bisexual if they have any sort of attraction to trans people, and a broader attempt to expunge any terms that might allow people wiggleroom within this rigid categorization. The push to reject the reclaimed term “queer” in LGBT+ communities of late has been largely fueled by TERFs, who ridicule queer people (see this post for a relevant discussion) and try to repopularize the characterization of “queer” as a slur as a tactic to drive out non-cis people and those who identify with sexualities that they do not recognize. This is part of the overarching TERF strategy of attempting to control language and narrative to further their ideas.

How can I recognize a TERF?

Many TERFs advertise themselves as such and can therefore be avoided fairly easily. Common themes found on dedicated TERF blogs include usernames and bios with references to radical feminism (which, while not being synonymous with TERF, is a label that they have heavily co-opted), references to XX chromosomes or genitalia, or even straight up declaration of their own “terf status” in their sidebars or blog descriptions.

That said, there has recently been recognition of the fact that TERFs are actively pushing their viewpoints on “secret” blogs without any overt references to their TERF ideology in order to spread their ideas and draw people who don’t know better into their toxic rhetoric and movement. However, even then TERFs can often be recognized through the collection of specific terms and dogwhistles that they favour in their rhetoric. Here are some examples of red flags to watch out for in discourse:

Trans women/men being referred to as TIMs or TIFs (trans-identified males/females), also sometimes as “Timothies” and “Tiffanies”.

The term “Gender Critical” or “Gender Critical Feminism”. This is a euphemism synonymous with TERF favoured by members of their own community.

Reference to Trans-Rights Activists (TRAs, designed to sound like “MRA”).

Loaded references to “trans ideology”.

References to “genderism”.

A particular focus on crimes committed by a few selected trans people used to smear the entire community.

Discussion of “men trying to enter women’s/lesbian spaces” is often a euphemistic reference to trans women as the “men”.

The same can often go for broad declarations that lesbians “should not let people tell them that they should be attracted to men”. While this is of course true, I’ve seen this in many instances be said specifically with the undertone of excluding trans women as the “men”.

The term “womyn” or “wombyn”, used by TERFs to differentiate their concept of a “real woman” from women including trans women.

Radical feminism being discussed in relation to any of the above points is a dead ringer for a TERF.

This is of course far from comprehensive, and TERFs have become good at hiding their ideas within the wrapping paper of feminist rhetoric and the language surrounding other types of progressive activism. The best policy is just to be sure to pay attention to how people discuss gender identity and transgender people, or perhaps how they pointedly don’t discuss them when they are expressing their ideology. Keep in mind to watch out for ideas that seem to stem from the above arguments.

Anything else I should know (and what can I do)?

I am going to stop here to avoid this post becoming even more excessively long than it already is, but it should be kept in mind that this is a far from comprehensive examination of TERF ideologies and rhetoric. I have, for instance, not touched on SWERFs and the attitudes of these communities towards sex workers, which is an ideology that often goes hand-in-hand with TERF ideas, nor the extent of the TERF communities on platforms such as reddit or Mumsnet, not the prevalence of TERF writers and thinkers in some parts of the news media, nor the actual members of TERF groups themselves, nor have I done anything more than scrape the surface of the extent or implications of TERF beliefs and activism. Others have written at greater length, in more detail, and far more eloquently than I ever could on these subjects and more besides, and I will link some additional resources below for people who want to investigate some of these things in more detail, and get perspectives more diverse than mine (I am only one person, and I am far from an expert on all this!).

Overall, though, the key takeaway from all this should be to spread awareness in the public sphere of the nature of TERF beliefs, the form that their “activism” takes, and the consequences for trans people and other marginalized groups. TERFs thrive on misinformation and control of the narrative, and add to their movement by preying on the lack of knowledge of easily influenced young newcomers to feminist and LGB movements. The best way to combat this is to spread awareness and knowledge, which is especially important as TERF perspectives gain more traction in the public sphere. Transphobia is above all things fueled by prejudice, fear of the other, and ignorance, and all of this can be countered by spreading trans narratives, boosting the voices of trans people and sharing truths about trans lives and trans experiences.

Some more good resources about TERFs and their transphobic activities/movements:

The TERFs

TERF on GeekFeminism

GenderCynical (cw: analysis of some distressing content)

TERFs on the Transadvocate

Trans-exclusionary radical feminism on RationalWiki

[anarkittyuwuuniverse]

So I got this reply to this post which has since been deleted. Idk why the person deleted it but I decided to hide the username anyway in case he was being harassed or something, what do I know. But I wanted to address this argument anyway because I could see others making the same point and I can sort of understand where it's coming from. This talking point is a good example of the problems with reductive grand theories. The assertion that our society is a patriarchy is not actually proof that misandry or androphobia doesn't exist. Contradictions can and do exist within societies (especially if we're talking from a semi-global perspective where it gets nearly impossible to point at any 100 % homogeneity). Feminist spaces and especially radical feminist spaces do have issues with misandry and androphobia and I personally know men (and non-men) who have been negatively affected by it. The fact that feminist activist spaces aren't on the same scale as "patriarchy" doesn't make that oppression not real, it doesn't make it "not society". Any group of individuals who engage in repeated social interaction and form their own shared language, customs and notions are societies, even if they are societies within societies. And in the case of feminism, these societies are barely even countercultues anymore in many parts of the world. Feminism is becoming more and more mainstream and so as a consequence are the worst reactionary tendencies within it. Pointing that out does not make you an MRA, anti-feminist or a misogynist. It has only been through internal criticism of feminism that we even have intersectionality and trans-inclusive feminism in the first place. But even when putting feminism aside you can still make the case that androphobia is part of patriarchy. It might not be comparable in severity to misogyny but that doesn't change the fact that sometimes this same system finds negative attitudes and stereotypes of men to be beneficial, in the same way that it can find positive attitudes and stereotypes of women to be beneficial. In kindergarten, girls were taught to think boys were icky just like how boys were taught girls were icky. As an adult I still hear women call men gross, dumb, out of touch with our emotions, only able to think with our dicks. Even if this is based on personal experience, it doesn't warrant generalization, it doesn't change the ableist implications of faulting someone for their hygiene, lack of emotional insight and hypersexuality. Especially hypersexuality is something that both misogynists and androphobes love to project onto men. Misogynists; in order to excuse rape culture, androphobes; in order to dismiss male rape victims, demonize racialized men or to run stranger danger moral scares against queer and paraphilic men. Especially black and muslim men has historically had a lot of hypermasculinity and hypersexuality projected onto them, been framed as violent, abusive and sex-crazed under the guise of "protecting women", who then tend to be infantilized in turn, because these systems work together. The same qualities that get framed as aspirational in gender-conforming white cishet men will usually get exaggerated and framed as dangerous as they are aimed at marginalized men. Patriarchal moral values cannot be encapsualted so easily in a dualistic men = good, women = bad framework because the values will fluctuate and change depending on who the system wants to hurt. Terfs use many of these tropes against trans women as well but we still recognize that as transmisogyny because we know the people they're victimizing are women. When misogynistic tropes are used to infantilize, silence and commit violence against trans men we're apparently not supposed to understand that as transandrophobia but as "remnants of misogyny", even when the people who are victimized are men. When people use masculine stereotypes against trans men and say they are predatory, gross, oppressive, taking up space, etc. we're not supposed to recognize that as transandrophobia either because cis men are apparently never

subjected to this. Well a lot of feminists have argued that misogyny doesn't really exist without intersecting with other identities either, can't the same thing be true about androphobia? So no, I disagree that this is actually very simple. I cannot stress enough how complicated these kinds of large scale social stratifications actually are, they are impossible to sum up in a short snappy tumblr post and I really wish people would do the effort of having nuanced conversations about this instead of just reciting the same dualistic dogmas, name calling and dismissing people. I remember seeing a post talking about the issue of activist spaces seeing "space" as a limited resource and I feel like a lot of it comes down to that. Trans men or just men in general just talking about their experiences is not taking up space from women. I know that's hard to swallow when so many women are forced to give up space to men, but we all need to learn to tell the difference between talking and talking over.

transandrophobia doesn’t exist. Touch grass filthy male

It's very interesting how none of these objections I'm getting actually bother to explain me why transandrophobia apparently doesn't exist, it just seems to be a dogma I have to accept or otherwise I'm a "filthy male".

My first anon said that Elliot Page was subjected to transphobia, not specifically transandrophobia. So apparently it is transphobic to make fun of a trans man's gender expression while making use of male stereotypes, but it's totally not a type of transphobia unique to trans mascs. It's totally not a unique intersection between transphobia and societal views on masculinity because??

Why are people labelled conspiracy theorists for verbalizing this intersection? Why are trans mascs labelled misogynists for merely the crime of having a word to describe their experiences? Why are they accused of "decentering trans fems" just for talking about their own experiences. I have yet to see an explanation.

[infiniteglitterfall]

"By Mason Dunn I pose the following questions to you in the hopes that when (not if) a trans or gender creative person comes to your faith community, they find answers of hope, healing and freedom. A few years ago I attended a Passover seder and was struck to see, for the first time, an orange on the seder plate. Until that moment, the concept of modern-day additions to the plate were altogether foreign to me. In the course of the seder, the meaning of the orange was explained to me: Introduced by feminist and Jewish scholar Dr. Susannah Heschel, the orange represents “the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life.” Today, it is my fervent hope that the orange’s initial meaning on the seder plate has been expanded to include other identities in the LGBTQ+ community. As a queer trans man, I ache to be seen as a fruitful member of my faith community, not in spite of my gender identity or sexual orientation, but because of it. That ache for freedom and authenticity is precisely what Passover is about: the drive of all people to be free to express their faith, and their many intersecting identities. For trans and gender creative people, finding acceptance in our faith is often fraught with questioning: Will I be accepted? Will I be pushed away from a faith or community that is important to my identity? Can I be my full authentic self before my congregation? Can I be my authentic self before God? Although rarely limited to four, these types of questions cast a shadow on the experiences of many trans people, much like the Four Questions hover over the Passover table. Unlike Passover, however, the questions trans people may ask aren’t always so clearly answered. This year, I pose the following questions to you in the hopes that when (not if) a trans or gender creative person comes to your faith community, they find answers of hope, healing and freedom. What does “transgender” mean? What does “non-binary” mean? And what about “gender creative”? There are many ways to define transgender—simply because there are many ways to be transgender. To boil down the essence as concisely as possible, a transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. To use myself as an example, I was assigned female at birth; however, I am not a woman—I identify as a trans man. Some in the trans community identify on a gender binary, meaning within one of two categories: man or woman. Many know their gender identity to be outside that binary, thus are non-binary. Identities in the non-binary community include gender fluid, gender queer, agender, bi-gender and many others. Gender creative, as well as gender expansive, are two terms often used to describe youth who are journeying to discover their identity relative to gender. For many youth, it may take time and exploration to discover who they are or want to be, and gender is no different. Another important definition not included in the initial question is the term “cisgender.” Sometimes shortened to “cis” (much in the same way that transgender is often shortened to “trans”), this term is used to describe someone who identifies with the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. For example, my spouse, Lauren, is a cisgender woman: she was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. Questions for the table: What ways have we been exposed to or learned about transgender identities? And what stories, narratives or intersecting identities were missing from that exposure? How has the transgender rights movement differed from or intersected with other LGBTQ+ rights movements, like marriage equality, military service, etc.? The fight for transgender rights and equality is far from over; and for some states, equal rights are under attack. However, transgender people have been a part of the national push for LGBTQ+ equality since it began. Trans people—more specifically, trans women of color—were the first to rise up and push back against police at the historic Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Riots. Trans people were critical organizers during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s. Here in Boston, the first LGBTQ+ youth organization in the city was founded by the amazing Grace Sterling Stowell, a local hero and trans woman. However, the movement for LGBTQ+ equality thus far has often centered on marriage equality for gay, lesbian and bisexual couples. Now that we’ve attained this exciting victory in the U.S., transgender rights are beginning to move to the forefront of our movement. We are pushing for nondiscrimination laws that ensure we can access hospitals, education or employment free from discrimination. We are working to educate health care and insurance providers about our unique health needs. We are creating policies to ensure trans and gender creative youth are safe in schools and at home. Not only that, but many of us in the LGBTQ+ rights movement are also working for equality broadly—economic justice, racial justice, immigration rights, health care rights and so many others. We know that when transphobia intersects with other forms of oppression, such as racism, classism, ableism and others, our community sees even higher rates of discrimination and violence. Questions for the table: Who is Marsha P. Johnson? Sylvia Rivera? Who are other trans icons in the movement for social justice? How can we be better about lifting up their stories? What are ways we can incorporate transgender rights advocacy, allyship or movement building in our own lives? In my own work and life, I often come back to the passage, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The work for equality and justice is an essential part of my Jewish faith. So not only is it important to advocate for the rights of marginalized communities, but it is an expression of my faith to do so. The first and most important way to be an ally in your everyday life is to seek out educational and media materials about the trans and gender creative community. More specifically, look for materials or opportunities led by trans voices. There is a wide array of media out there, but not all of it is provided in an authentic way for trans people. Next, I would think about your own life and areas where trans voices are either absent or inaccessible. For instance, does your temple have any statement of inclusion for LGBTQ+ people? Does your place of work have a nondiscrimination policy that includes sexual orientation or gender identity? If not, find resources to bring that might be helpful.  Keshet is an LGBTQ+ Jewish organization that can help you think about ways to make a shul more inclusive. Organizations like the Mass Trans Political Coalition, GLAD and others may be able to help with policy materials as well. Lastly, think about ways you might be able to support the trans rights movement. Volunteer opportunities are available across the Boston area, especially for the upcoming trans rights ballot initiative. There are trans-led, trans-focused organizations locally and nationally that rely on donations to keep their doors open. These are all great ways to make trans rights a part of your personal pursuit for justice and equality. Question for the table: Make a plan together of ways we want to be involved in the transgender rights movement. Are there volunteer opportunities, events we can attend or trans-focused media (movies, theater, television) we can support? How is gender identity or expression represented in Jewish faith, texts or history? It’s important to remember that trans and gender creative people are not a new phenomenon or a “creation” of the millennial generation. We have been a part of human history since its beginning. Which begs the question: Are there trans or non-binary people in Jewish texts or history? I could spend days writing about the ways in which gender shows up in the Torah and Talmud in unexpected and fluid ways. From the very beginning, God created Adam (or more specifically ha-adam), the first human: before God splits Adam to create Eve (from Adam’s side or rib, depending on your reading), this first human (ha-adam) is both man and woman, containing the elements of both. And, as we read, Adam’s initial form was created “in God’s image.” Does that mean that God is both man and woman, and thus non-binary? Adam, and therefore God, do not fit into one gender alone, but all genders, all expressions, including trans identities. Our tradition certainly recognizes and celebrates that multi-gendered deity-names for the almighty are both masculine and feminine. I know many congregations that have moved to using gender-neutral pronouns (“They/Them/Theirs” or “Ze/Hir/Hirs” for God, rather than the patriarchal and limiting “He”) to reflect this reading. Granted, this is my interpretation (though one I’ve studied in text and with several rabbis over the years), but suffice it to say, the representation of trans identities is scattered throughout Jewish texts. The Talmud references not just two genders (man and woman), but six genders throughout. My point is, trans and gender creative people are part of Jewish history and text, if you take the time to look. And, more important, trans and gender creative Jews are part of our Jewish community today and will be forevermore. It behooves us to make space for trans members of our faith. This year, make the orange a part of your seder plate, make LGBTQ+ rights and history a part of the conversation, and make space at your table for trans and gender creative people this year and all years to come. Questions for the table: At first impression, how do you think the Torah and Talmud might address binary or non-binary trans identities? After learning more, are you surprised? How has your congregation or Torah study addressed gender?"

[dsm-v]

Hello! I’m nonbinary and I’m trying to research how different religions and their texts support and affirm nonbinary people. If you would like to, could you point me in the direction of some things to read on this subject pertaining to Islam? If not, then feel free to delete this. Thank you!!

Hello friend! Thank you for asking me, I am always very willing to share the extent of my knowledge on Islam with others. I will begin to say that your area of ponderance is very interesting and something that there definitely needs to be more dialogue and scholarship on, so I’m glad that there are people who are asking these types of questions. I don’t know if this research you mention is mostly for your own reference or for something like a research project but either way I hope I can help! 

From my understanding and my experience, Islam as is most commonly practiced and observed is a very binary religion in the context of gender. If you were to attend Friday prayers at a large Sunni mosque, for example, women and men are usually segregated (with women relegated to inferior spaces, sometimes not being permitted in smaller mosques at all) and sometimes there are even separate entrances for men and women. It is hard enough for binary trans people to find a comfortable place within Islamic and Muslim spaces, so I can imagine (and I know) that it is much harder even for nonbinary people. This is not to say that nonbinary people like me and many others haven’t found space for themselves within Islam and in Muslim communities, but that overall the most information I’ve found pertaining to LGBTQ or gender- and sexuality- diversity and nonconformity in Islam has been focused on binary identities and experiences. 

I know that this worldview is deeply rooted in the foundations of our religion, as well. For example, in the Quran, chapter 78 verse 8 reads “وَخَلَقْنَاكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا” which, to my understanding means something like “And we have created you in pairs”. The Quran also refers to this idea of things being made in “pairs” in ch. 36 verse 36 and I think in other places as well, including addressing at times both men and women or males and females. I am not a scholar of Islam so I also don’t know the original context of all of these verses but to my understanding the main idea is that things have been created in pairs, by God, who is unpaired and unlike anyone or anything else. So, beyond (perhaps unintentionally) enforcing this idea of a binary world, I think this idea has more to say about the concept of tawhid (the oneness of God), and that the diversity that exists is a reflection of the oneness and uniqueness of the creator. 

It is important to remember that the Quran is a text that originated in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century, and the Hadith (recordings of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) and sunnah (the corpus of hadith and the otherwise generally accepted “tradition(s)” of the Prophet) were compiled in the few centuries following the death of the Prophet, so the worldviews and ideas perpetuated in these primary sources may not necessarily align with how we understand the world to be today. This is not to say that these texts are wrong, but that their originally intended audience is different than their current audience. So, it is important that we also understand that the framing of your question may be significant in that we can’t necessarily be looking backward in history for something that we have defined and constructed in modern terms. We can speak of nonbinary today because we currently understand that binary gender and the corresponding baggage and rules are largely constructed socially and culturally, and because we are beginning to acknowledge (in our culture and society, at least) that there are options outside of these restrictions. These may not have been ideas palatable to people 1400 years ago, especially without digesting a fair amount of yet-to-be articulated gender and other poststructuralist theories. 

But, gender and sexual diversity were recognized and recorded in the early history of Islam, even if we are to be hesitant about using the term nonbinary for these things. For example, there are hadith and other texts that refer to and speak about people described as mukhannathun (مخنثون), effeminate ones, people who we might today, in our terms, describe as trans women, effeminate gay men, or perhaps somehow otherwise transfeminine individuals. I have also seen ahadith (hadiths) that refer to intersex individuals, but the treatment of these individuals in these ahadith also seem to reinforce binary (and patriarchal and sexist) views, as these opinions (which albeit, came from a really fundamentalist and misogynistic website) dealt with: can the person grow a beard? do they have breasts? can they sit down to pee? how would someone else categorize them? and then they sort of said “well if you can sit down to pee and you have breasts even if you have ambiguous genitalia then you’re a woman”. Again, I may be conflating how intersex has historically been treated in or thought about in this religion with how the Muslim community currently addresses these things, but it is clear to me that throughout history and presently, there is great pressure for Muslims to conform to binary sex and gender roles.

Much of this pressure stems from the perpetuation of and belief in really flawed rhetoric such as the idea that keeping men and women separate will reduce the incidence of sexual violence (hint: it doesn’t). These ideas also stem from historical communities and circumstances which are quite different from our own. I am not arguing that the world is presently some wonderful place for women and queer individuals, but when we analyze the history of Islam, we can see very real and rational reasons why what are today considered sexist and outdated (and they are) systems came to be in place, such as the “guardianship” (walayah) system or the concept of hijab/veiling, which were originally ways to protect and preserve the rights and wellbeing of women, but which in many cases today they do just the opposite. 

I don’t really know of any sources pertaining to nonbinary and Islam per se, but there is a plethora of information out there on Islam and sexual and gender diversity. The discussions held within the contexts of Islamic feminism / feminist Islam also address some of these issues such as problems in our communities with sexism and misogyny, which ought to be fundamentally unislamic, as in Islam, every person has the right to their own relationship with the divine, and no one person is deemed more valuable than another. Just as a man is not worth more than a woman, an individual with a binary gender should not somehow be fundamentally better or more valid than a nonbinary individual.

I also want to point out that I have been speaking mostly as a historian and addressing some of the (a)historical perspectives that are found within Muslim communities regarding these “areas of concern”. As we know, the history that we have never tells the whole story. The fact that we do have sources from very early on that speak of gender and sexual diversity, though, tells me that these people have existed in Muslim communities for as long as there have been Muslim communities, and that while we have likely been systematically underrepresented, misrepresented, or eliminated in the stories told, that there has always been room for diversity, ambiguity, and to an extent, non-conformity within Islam. I know that presently even within my few years of being a Muslim and the handful of years studying Islam beforehand, I have seen really an explosion in visibility and acknowledgement of LGBT, queer, nonbinary, asexual, and other stories of Muslims who may not necessarily fit within normative expectations for how a Muslim “ought to be”. So even where there may be silences or a lack of acknowledgement or support for us in our foundational texts (the Quran and the hadith/sunnah and other traditions that we are taught as being “Islamic”), Muslims are making inclusive spaces and communities, and we are going back and readdressing and rereading these texts and evaluating how we have almost always been fed the misogynistic, sexist, patriarchal interpretations as the “truth”. A few scholars/academics I can think of off the top of my head who are especially adept at offering these conversations include Kecia Ali, Scott Kugle, and Amina Wadud, certainly among many others, and it is definitely my belief and experience that “the average Muslim” is much more “progressive” or accepting than one may expect. 

I apologize for the long-winded and probably confusing and somewhat-off topic essay, but I sincerely hope that this has been of some help and that you receive the information which you are seeking!

[fairplayforwomen]

  Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared. Lesbian erasure is real. As a lesbian myself, I’ve noticed friends who of course want to be LGBT friendly and show their solidarity by sharing LGBT links. But without knowing it they are sometimes inadvertently sharing and supporting an ideology that is contributing to the erasure of my own lesbian community. This guest post is a must-read for all lesbians and anyone who cares about us. 

Nic Williams.

  Guest post by Iwantmycommunityback

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few days in particular about transactivism and lesbians and thought I might try to put some of it into writing, partly to try to make sense of it and partly because I still keep seeing people refer to the ‘LGBT’ or ‘LGBTQ’ community and equating transactivism with lesbian and gay rights.

I think the most obvious impact of transactivism is on young lesbians being encouraged to identify as heterosexual transmen and to subject themselves to damaging medical treatment, the effects of which they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. I think Janice Turner’s article in the Times already covers that issue very well (here).

One of the problems for young lesbians (in addition to the rise in lesbophobia particularly among the young) is that, when they reach out to ‘their’ community, eg join an LGBT group for support, what they get isn’t their community at all but something very hostile.

Gender critical feminists will be familiar with the idea of trans-identified males co-opting women’s identities, women’s rights, women’s spaces etc for their own ends but there are other forms of appropriation going on, particularly in the (former) LGBT ‘community’ (including transsexuals themselves having been co-opted by people who don’t have body dysphoria and who marginalise them as ‘truscum’) . For lesbians, in addition to the appropriation of womanhood, I think the two main additional identity appropriations that cause problems are:

  Transbians

These are heterosexual biological males who identify as women and, therefore, as ‘lesbians’ and have hijacked our community (support groups, social groups, bars, forums, you name it) and believe that lesbians should be open to having sex with someone with a penis if they ‘identify’ as a woman (see ‘the cotton ceiling’). This group has widened further e.g. including ‘transfeminine men’ and men who identify as a woman part-time (so get to walk through life as a heterosexual man but just ‘identify’ as a lesbian for a few hours to access a lesbian group or lesbian club night where they are of course the most oppressed person ever and must be centred at all times).

As well as being included in our groups, they are held up as examples to us. For example for International Women’s Day one group had a talk from an ‘inspirational woman’ who was a biological male, who hadn’t had any surgery, was dressed as a bloke (not that that should make any difference.), had a bit of stubble going on and identified as non-binary (pronouns something like ‘zie’) not as a woman. Like, not only could they not find an actual woman who was inspirational enough to fill that spot, they couldn’t even find a man who was prepared to say they were a woman. Stuff like this is being funded by charity grants intended for women and for lesbian and gay people.

Don’t quite believe it? Here’s just a random selection of biological males who identity as women found on the lesbian section of some well known on-line dating sites…..

‘Queer’ straight trans allies

This is pretty much a consequence of the above. For those who don’t know, queer is now used as an all-encompassing term for anyone who doesn’t identify as a heterosexual “cis” person. However, it is also preferred by certain people over terms like lesbian, gay and bisexual because it does away with what are considered the rigid boundaries of ‘gender’ and sexuality e.g. Homosexual, lesbian and gay meaning being attracted to the same sex, bisexual as being attracted to ‘both’ sexes. This allows people to reject these categories and the idea that there are two sexes.

Take, for example, Lily Madigan who is a biological male who has now come out as a lesbian and is dating a woman. Let’s presume for a moment that this woman (let’s call her Chloe) is a) a biological female b) and a passionate trans uber-ally. Chloe is a bio female who is dating a bio male with a penis who wears a pink hoodie and identifies as a woman. Say, before that, Chloe was dating a bio male with a penis who wears a blue hoodie and is, therefore, a man. Maybe in her next relationship, she will date a bio male with a penis who has purple hair and identifies as ‘genderqueer’. Therefore, Chloe can now say that she dates men, women and genderqueer people, including both cisgender and trans people. Therefore, she is a queer or pansexual woman.

Along with the transbians, these ‘queer’ woman become involved in what was formerly the lesbian and bisexual women’s community. However, these trans uber-allies have a lot of views that are contrary to the interests particularly of lesbians. They believe that lesbians have ‘cis’ privilege and also that lesbians (along with gay men) are the most privileged people in the LGBT community. They believe that lesbians are narrow-minded and transphobic for only wanting to date other biological women and oppress transwomen who can’t break through the ‘cotton ceiling’ of their underwear.

I’m not even sure when this stuff started because, like most of us, due to the blurring of the meaning of words, I just didn’t see it happening. A lot of the main online websites, blogs and forums for lesbians started to change, with different women running them and, over time, a shift in the tone – lots about trans inclusion and more references to being ‘queer’ and open to relationships with anyone, about how some people (the lesbians) had privilege in our community and should prioritise these other people, less representation of butch women (despite the talk of blurring of gender boundaries/genderfluidity) etc.

It was only years later, when someone who knew the women who had been running one of these websites was talking about who they were and who they were in relationships (bio females in relationships with bio males, basically) that the penny finally dropped with me.These were straight women appropriating our identity and lecturing at us and marginalising us in our own community.

This blurring of the language enables them to do it – but even in cases where you can see it for yourself (e.g. if you are looking at what is clearly a straight couple, who you know will be read by everyone they meet as a straight couple, even if the guy is wearing a bit of eyeliner) you couldn’t say anything because now it would be transphobic to say that he wasn’t a woman (or genderqueer or whatever).

      Why aren’t lesbians speaking out more?

It’s no always easy to spot what’s happening

Firstly, I think it takes a while to see what is going on. This for a number of reasons including the deliberate blurring of language, the shutting down of any discussion or even thought on the issue through the repetition of mantras such as transwomen are women and the misrepresentation of this issue in what we consider to be ‘our’ trusted (LGB) news outlets, organisations, websites etc. We also might be relying on our positive experience of and friendships with traditional transsexuals without understanding how much the trans movement has now changed (traditional transsexuals are often demonised in this new world order too and called truscum). There is also the tendency to conflate trans with gay issues when they are not the same at all. From my own experiences of coming out and being oppressed on the basis of being different, I know its so easy to automatically feel solidarity towards and feel angry about any oppressed group, especially if you are being told that other views are ‘anti-LGBT’ and coming from ‘anti-LGBT’ organisations.

  Many lesbians aren’t aware things are different now

Some lesbians aren’t really that involved any more so aren’t aware of what is going on. Many lesbians will have accessed the LGB community, lesbian support groups, lesbian/gay bars when they first came out, when they were looking for a relationship, in times of difficulties etc but are now happily settled in a relationship and don’t feel the need to access those resources. They will still have their lesbian ‘community’ but that will mean texting their friends Sarah & Jo and Claire & Debs and arranging to meet up at their (straight) local pub for the evening. Any involvement with the wider LGBT community will be more minimal like maybe watching the Pride Parade once a year or occasionally reading something on an LGBT website about some awful transphobes who are attacking the LGBT community. They will think back to the transsexual people they knew 10 – 15 years ago who were nice people who just wanted to get on with their lives.

  Young lesbians have no where to go

3) Young lesbians these days are more likely to be identifying as transmen rather than as lesbians.  For the few who do, they lack access to a real lesbian community which could introduce them to an alternative to the current discourse. They have little opportunity to discuss shared issues, learn from others’ experiences and have other lesbian women on their side. Young lesbians who aren’t accepted or feel isolated in their school, family, community etc will seek out an LGBT youth group and this community they reach out to will heavily endorse the transactivist agenda as part and parcel (and absolutely central) to their identity. Where else do they go and how do they know that there is anything else?

  Nobody listens to lesbians anyway!

4) The low status of lesbian women within the LGBT community also stops some speaking out.  I don’t think people outside are really aware of how much misogyny and in particular hatred of lesbians there is from some gay men.

  There’s a big personal cost to speaking up

There are big risks to speaking out for women. These risks are increased if you are a lesbian as it is coming from your ‘own’ community and being a lesbian puts you under suspicion of being trans-exclusionary (ie penis-exclusionary) anyway. If you run a lesbian business or events, you can’t risk being anything other than pro the trans agenda or they will destroy your livelihood. And I’m sure most of us have seen the threats and actual violence meted out to those who dare to disagree. There’s also a fear about just broaching the subject with another actual female lesbian because you don’t know how many of you are onside so it’s a risk. From tentatively raising the issue with a select few, I do know lesbian friends who have got concerns about this but we are very cautious and tentative about saying anything to other women because of the risk. The bigger stories like the closure of MichFest and the men wielding baseball bats to keep the lesbians in check on Women’s Marches and Pride Parades are just symbols of the way we are being policed. This is now what happens to what is left of lesbian events, lesbian-run businesses etc, if we don’t keep in line.

    Our lesbian voice has been diluted from within

Finally, simply, as I’ve explained above, another reason some of ‘us’ don’t oppose or seem to actively support transactivism is that not all of ‘us’ are actually ‘us’. As lesbians step away from the LGBT ‘community’ and more ‘lesbian and queer women’ emerge from the two groups referred to above, an increasing proportion of ‘us’ are actually a subset of heterosexual men and women who loathe lesbians and support the transactivist agenda – but, because of the way language is being twisted, you’d never know that.

    Lesbians are an endangered species. I want my community back! Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared.