#have used this 'discourse' to further their exclusionary politics

[ngdrb]

The Growing Dangers of the MAGA Movement

The "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement, spearheaded by former President Donald Trump, has become a prominent political force in the United States. While its supporters claim it champions patriotism and traditional American values, the movement has increasingly been associated with extremist ideologies, posing significant threats to American democracy, social cohesion, and national stability.

Core Beliefs and Goals

At its core, the MAGA movement promotes a narrow, exclusionary vision of American identity rooted in nativism, white Christian nationalism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. It espouses a nostalgic longing for an idealized past when America was supposedly "great," often interpreted as a time of unchallenged white, Christian dominance. The movement's rhetoric frequently portrays immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and progressive values as existential threats to this perceived traditional American way of life.

One of the movement's central goals is to reshape the American political landscape by dismantling established norms, institutions, and checks and balances. This includes undermining the independence of the judiciary, weakening the separation of powers, and eroding the integrity of democratic processes, such as free and fair elections. The movement has consistently sought to consolidate power and marginalize dissenting voices, often through the perpetuation of conspiracy theories and the demonization of perceived enemies.

Ties to Extremist Ideologies

While the MAGA movement claims to reject extremism, its rhetoric and actions have increasingly aligned with far-right, white nationalist, and anti-democratic ideologies. The movement has provided a mainstream platform for individuals and groups that espouse hateful, discriminatory, and often violent beliefs.

The overlap between the MAGA movement and extremist groups has become increasingly apparent, with many prominent figures within the movement embracing or failing to condemn racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic ideologies. This normalization of extremist ideologies has contributed to the mainstreaming of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and the vilification of marginalized communities.

Moreover, the movement's unwavering support for former President Trump, even in the face of his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, has further solidified its ties to anti-democratic forces. The events of January 6th, 2021, when MAGA supporters violently stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, highlighted the movement's potential for inciting violence and undermining the foundations of American democracy.

Impact on American Democracy

The MAGA movement's assault on democratic norms and institutions poses grave threats to the integrity of American democracy. Its efforts to undermine the credibility of elections, the independence of the judiciary, and the freedom of the press have eroded public trust in the very pillars that uphold the nation's democratic system.

The movement's embrace of conspiracy theories and disinformation has fueled a profound erosion of shared reality, making it increasingly difficult to engage in constructive political discourse and find common ground. This polarization has paralyzed meaningful policymaking and exacerbated societal divisions, hindering the nation's ability to address pressing challenges effectively.

Furthermore, the movement's rhetoric and actions have contributed to a toxic political climate, where dissent is often met with hostility, intimidation, and threats of violence. This chilling effect on free speech and open debate undermines the principles of a vibrant democracy and risks silencing legitimate voices and perspectives.

Threats to Social Cohesion and National Stability

The MAGA movement's divisive and exclusionary rhetoric has profound implications for social cohesion and national stability. Its vilification of marginalized communities and promotion of tribalism has fueled a resurgence of hate crimes, discrimination, and societal tensions, eroding the nation's diversity and unity.

The movement's embrace of conspiracy theories and disinformation has also contributed to the erosion of trust in public institutions, mainstream media, and established sources of information. This has created an environment where misinformation and disinformation can thrive, making it increasingly difficult to address complex societal challenges based on facts and evidence.

Moreover, the movement's glorification of violence and its resistance to peaceful transfers of power pose direct threats to national stability. The events of January 6th, 2021, demonstrated the potential for the MAGA movement's rhetoric and actions to incite civil unrest and undermine the foundations of the nation's democratic system.

Conclusion

The MAGA movement, while purporting to champion patriotism and traditional American values, has become increasingly associated with extremist ideologies, anti-democratic tendencies, and threats to social cohesion and national stability. Its narrow, exclusionary vision of American identity, promotion of conspiracy theories, and embrace of divisive rhetoric have eroded democratic norms, fueled societal tensions, and undermined the nation's ability to address pressing challenges effectively.

As the movement continues to gain momentum and influence, it is imperative for all Americans to recognize the grave dangers it poses and to actively defend the principles of democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. Failure to address the underlying issues that have given rise to the MAGA movement's appeal, and to counter its extremist tendencies, risks further polarization, civil unrest, and the erosion of the democratic foundations that have sustained the United States for over two centuries.

[sapphos-catpanions]

Hey, so I do consider myself a radfem, but my politics are fully trans-inclusionary— not trying to argue abt that point bc I honestly can sympathize w where you’re coming from and want to think critically about my own views yadayada.. but on the topic of using “people with a uterus” versus “woman” in discourse surrounding rights to reproductive healthcare, I do agree with you that: yes, everyone with a uterus is affected by pro state enforced birthing legislation, but it is the political class of women who are being targeted in the minds of these christofascist actors; so I agree with you and I think making that distinction actually opens up the discourse in some potentially valuable ways. As in, when news articles and doctors talk about the explicitly medical aspects of accessing reproductive care, ie. who needs it and how to get it— isn’t that an instance where it’s more useful to use language that reflects everyone who is affected? Versus, when we as feminists discuss the overall political reality of this regressive social campaign, I think it’s very viable and in fact necessary to unite under the language of “women” for the political project of mounting a resistance. It’s fine if you don’t want to engage with this long winded ask, but I genuinely don’t mean to approach this as “ahahah stupid terfs you don’t know anything” because I think that you do, and that it would be a detriment to the project of anti-patriarchal action to ignore any women’s voices. I mean to ask this as earnestly as possible, bc I agree that this is a political campaign targeted at women, attempting to reinforce a society-wide sexual contract, while at the same time, in effect, it does medically impact the bodies of people who have different relations to “woman” as an identity class. Maybe using both kinds of language can make for a more specific and effective resistance movement?

i can appreciate what you’re saying but me personally, i do unto others as i would have them do unto me. i can see now that when people tiptoed around the word “woman” with me, when they attempted to exercise sensitivity toward my fraught relationship to “woman” as an identity class, it only further fractured my sense of self and delayed my integration and my healing.

contrast that to when the late and great @hotflanks told me “you are woman by virtue of your female reality and need never embellish or shrink yourself to fit,” which hit like a cool autumn rain after a long summer.

and i don’t really consider my feminism to be trans-exclusionary, not when it comes down to people. read my blog and you’ll see that trans men, trans masculine people and female nonbinaries are always in my thoughts. feminism is for all women.

[a-womans-rhetoric]

Natalie Wynn's "J.K. Rowling" and Disruptive use of Women's Rhetorical Tropes: A Defiant Reply to Transmisogyny

ContraPoints, surrounded by an opulent, candle-lit set and adorned in witch's garb, leisurely pours champagne into her glass — she's ready to breach the internet's hottest topic of January, 2021: her childhood idol being outed as a transphobe (link here). The video itself being over an hour and a half long, I would be hard-pressed to claim that I could ever hope to cover its entirety, comprehensively, in a single post. So to save-face, I'll be dedicating this space only to breaking down her most frequently used rhetorical tropes, one by one.

Irreverence

"Joanne, I wanna talk to you, Joanne! [Fans herself with a rainbow paper fan with the word "BIOLOGICAL" written across it] What is it about Joannes? I can't catch a break from these people" (00:23-00:29, emphasis added).

Wynn's introductory lines immediately open a dialogue with J.K. Rowling — however, this invitation of discourse is defiantly "irreverent" (reminiscent of Nomy Lamm's punk-feminist style in "It’s a Big Fat Revolution” (1995)). Contrapoints, herself a transgender woman, is aware that her very existence is considered in opposition to the TERF-ideology that Rowling subscribes to. Thus, she's rather playful — even openly disrespectful — with her diction: calling the British author by her first name in a mocking-tone and flaunting her own trans identity to the camera (in a way that would likely offend the fragile sensibilities of a transphobe). Her personal tone (with ample use of the pronoun "I") servers a duplicitous purpose: a simultaneous message of "sit down and listen" and a fair degree of "I don't care if you can't accept me."

"So, now that 2020 is finally over, I think we can let the record conclusively show that it was a year whomst is bad. And on top of everything else going on, truly the last thing we needed was the author of Harry Potter coming forward to announce there's two things she can't stand: bigotry, and the transgenders. (00:31 - 00:50, emphasis added).

Finally broaching the subject at hand directly, Wynn employs kairos alongside her irreverence. Kairos, or the rhetorical use of an "opportune moment," holds incredible weight in the first month after 2020: the year in which the whole world fell into a stasis. Characterizing Rowling's transphobia as a collective "the last thing we needed," is also rather dismissive — she unites herself with her audience with the pronoun "we" and invites us all to groan at the exasperating nature of Rowling's bigotry.

Claiming the Right to Speak / Personal Experience

"This is a painful topic for me all around because, as a transgender woman, I am honestly really hurt by a lot of the things Joanne has said in the last year. But I also know what it's like to be the target of a Twitter mob" (01:36-01:47).

As she begins to touch on the topic, Natalie Wynn claims the right to speak on the issue of Rowling's transphobia — a type of bigotry that directly effects her. However, Wynn also situates herself partially with Rowling in her acknowledgement that receiving Twitter backlash is a terrifying experience (an experience, she argues, that the human brain is not prepared to handle the scale of, 01:49-02:39). In treating her subject with such dignity — and adding her own deeply personal account— ContraPoints creates a credible ethos in the beginning of her video essay. The audience is inclined to listen to someone who has been directly effected by the subject of Rowling's controversy (transphobia) and someone who is, rather compassionately, willing to empathize with those who would wish her harm. Although the generally sassy, glamorous, and irreverent tone of the video still appears soon after (see: the above image), her opening up for this somber moment garners a fair degree pathos in the viewer — we, as human beings, are inclined to sympathize with people who are open about being hurt.

Metis (Embodied Rhetoric)

[The following ContraPoints quote is addressing the above J.K. Rowling tweet, content warning for transmisogyny] "Transphobes love to play this game where they pretend that trans people just don't understand basic biology, that's our problem! As if I didn't start taking female hormones because I'm acutely aware that my body is not the same as a cis woman's body, that sex is real. "[Fictional TERF character] You will never be a woman, Nathan. Every cell in your body is male and has a Y chromosome." Really? That's crazy. How you'd you learn so much about science? You know I don't really feel the need to have a second X chromosome, I get by with only one, I make it work. I actually like the Y chromosome, I think it's a little more dainty, you know, it's little softer, a little more petite. The X chromosome has a lot of extra appendages, and don't you think? I don't need anymore of those, thanks. No trans person thinks it's possible to change chromosomal sex and to pretend otherwise is to argue in bad faith" (08:47-09:34).

If you can excuse my gargantuan quote, I hope you'll agree that the dialogue ContraPoints builds here was just too good to cut short. Within this excerpt, we see Wynn's use of irreverance and personal experience blended seamlessly together. For this YouTuber, the personal is perpetually political — especially when her own identity is constantly taken as an ideological stance. She uses her own expertise in trans issues to pick apart just how disingenuous Rowling's assertions are — even accusing her of "argue[ing] in bad faith" with her reductive claims (later, taking specific issue with how Rowling treats trans-ness as a costume). But, here, she also directly invokes another rhetorical trope: that of metis, or embodied rhetoric. Natalie Wynn specifically references her transgender body as a sort of counterpoint to the condescending "sex is real" claims by TERFs. She cites her intrinsic desire to pursue hormonal therapy as evidence that she — and other trans people like her — are all "acutely aware" that there are chromosomal differences between themselves and cis women. With this salient statement, she then follows with some humor: which, again, utilizes her trans body in her rhetoric. Her characterization of the Y chromosome as "more petite" and playful declaration of not needing "extra appendages" lightens up the often dark tone that arguing for trans rights and liberation can take. The clever points she makes are by no means weakened by her humor — if anything, the audience is more willing to listen to someone who can "joke about themselves" (so to speak) while still arguing an incredibly important message.

Naming and Defining Issues

"When I see Joanne tweeting about how trans people think sex isn't real and they're erasing same-sex attraction and they're silencing women, alarm bells are ringing because I recognize these as familiar transphobic talking points, specifically TERF talking points. "TERF" means trans exclusionary radical feminism. God are we still talking about this? I promise this is the last time. So TERFism is a hate movement that disguises transphobia as feminism. ... The fundamental problem with TERFs is not that they're mean. It's that they're politically reactionary, they want to reverse the progress of trans liberation." (14:05-16:02)

In her definition of TERF rhetoric, Natalie Wynn outlines some dog-whistles that are obvious to her, as a trans woman. She calmly explains to the viewer that, oftentimes in the present-day, rhetorics of exclusion are thoroughly disguised; TERFs, specifically, hide their rampant transphobia as a form of feminism. However, she further clarifies that the specific "danger" that TERFs pose is not from their cruelty — it's from their fervent dedication to strip away trans rights through political means. By specifying this danger, Natalie Wynn shifts the conversation away from empty discussion of offensiveness/terminology, to issues which directly affect the lives of trans people every day.

[This portion addresses the picture above] Also an act of naming and defining, ContraPoints makes a distinction between "Direct" and "Indirect Bigotry." She argues that many people envision bigotry as a festering, public, frothing-at-the-mouth hatred — a phenomenon she dubs "the Westboro Baptist Church theory of bigotry" (20:06). In bringing attention to the human tendency to think of people as exclusively practicing "direct bigotry" — envisioning them as a sort of delusional "other" — she then forces the audience to contemplate the relative omni-presence of the more covert (and possibly alluring) "indirect bigotry." This definition, crucially, requires introspection. By allowing ourselves to think of bigots not exclusively as "Westboros," we're made to adopt a much more nuanced view of subjects (most) generally prefer to keep black-and-white. Natalie Wynn uses her J.K. Rowling case study to complicate this 2D view of "The Bigot," inviting others to more carefully examine how politically reactionary views develop.

Phew, this was probably the longest post I've ever typed up on tumblr! Hopefully, I succeeded in demystifying (or at least adding clarity to) some of the specific tropes ContraPoints uses (that are common to women's rhetorics as a whole). Thanks for reading if you stuck around this long, and my ask box is always open!

[talenlee]

Welcome to ERFs

Have you enconutered the term ‘TERF’ and left wondering: Wait, what’s that?

There are some people, TERFs mostly, who think that TERF is a slur. It’s not; slurs are terms used to direct social power against a marginalised group. If you shout TERF at someone on the street, they’re not going to assume someone else is going to attack them because of being so painted. If they are, they’re incredibly paranoid, because TERFs are typically very privileged people who are afraid of being criticised by trans people.

It may sound like I am overdoing it, but I really am not. The typical TERF discourse is an attempt to weaponise outrage at the idea of women facing disagreement from, pretty consistently, other women. But what is a TERF? And what about those other -ERF terms I’ve heard?

So, content warning: TERF stuff! And SWERF stuff! And BLERF stuff! What’s a BLERF? Well, after the fold.

The -ERF grouping of letters stands for -Exclusionary Radical Feminist. To further break that down, let’s work backwards.

Feminist means someone who aligns themselves, politically, with the position of feminism – that is, that there has been a system of power in our society that has directly imposed on women, and, once further examined, many, many groups, and the removal of these power systems will be to the benefit of everyone.

Radical means that there is a direct advocation of change. That is, it’s not enough to vote for these things, or to hope things get better on their own, or just do the things the best way you can in your own life. Radical change is advocated for, in the change of systems and removal of power structures. This is important, a radical feminist is someone who both recognises and wants to change structural power systems in our society that marginalise women.

Exclusionary and here’s the place where the problem starts. Because I’m down for radical feminism. It’s this word, where the term suddenly takes on a term. This is the letter that signals that this person has a radical feminist position but there is someone excluded from it.

So there are a couple of -ERFs, and they’re defined by who they exclude from their feminism. The most notable and commonly known are TERFs, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. This position is that yes, feminism is one thing and it’s very good and we need to dismanle all the systems in place that make gender enforcement unfair and that marginalise women, but we also need to make sure that any progress doesn’t benefit trans women. This is obviously shitty as hell, but it also works against itself. Suddenly, there are all these projects that have to be scaled back or done more carefully and more unhelpfully just because ‘well, what if a trans woman benefited as much as a cis woman?’

It sucks!

SWERFs are SEX WORKER Exclusionary Radical Feminists. That is, they think that anything to do with sex workers is somehow outside of feminism. This leads to some weird ideas like the notion that sex workers performing sex work are ‘doing men’s work for them,’ or ‘oppressing themselves,’ which sounds like an interesting academic conversation to have but it’s not an academic conversation, it’s a conversation which involves telling women doing work that they like and they are willing to do that the problems aren’t abusive labor practices or people refusing to pay them, their problem is that they’re only doing this for bad reasons.

Swerfs also tend to have to ignore a lot of things like the presence of nonbinary people, or, uh male-on-male gay porn. That’s pretty weird!

And my newest favourite is BLERFs. That is Bi Lesbian Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The conversation about ‘bi lesbians’ is one of those ones that should kind of not reach beyond the boundaries of ‘oh, that’s a bit silly.’

The idea is that some lesbians describe themselves as bi lesbians. Some other presumably non-bi lesbians, or, conspicuously, non-lesbians, object to this, usually framed as it being somehow harmful to the idea of lesbians to allow it to include lesbians who are bi.

This is, at its core, a disagreement over a word that could be regarded as a sort of clerical disagreement in a style guide, but that would require BLERFs to have an ounce of chill. Instead, BLERFs, as other ERFs, believe in radical, transformative, change-based feminism that extends to all of humanity, except lesbians who describe themselves as ‘bi lesbians.’ And the result is a kind of public discourse where people who rail at the idea of ‘bi lesbians’ say things that kind of give away why they are so annoyed by the idea of ‘bi lesbian.’ It inevitably starts to be about definitional arguments and brings in a wing of toxic conversation about things like ‘gold star lesbians.’

It’s important to remember that -ERFs aren’t just your run of the mill anti-sex worker or transphobic dickheads. -ERFs are still people who are wedded, in their own mind to the project of radical feminism – that is, feminism that sees the world as in need of change. Conservatives aren’t TERFs, they’re just assholes.

Part of why I think recognising -ERFs is that it’s important to have a way to recognise the people that you think might be on your side, but aren’t on the side of the other people on your side. If your aunt is pretty progressive on some things but isn’t okay with trans people, that indicates she’s already drawing lines about who the project of feminism shouldn’t be allowed to include – and that is a problem.

[alywats]

Let’s Talk About Mathematical Gatekeeping: Race, Gender, and Math Anxiety in Mathematics Academia

Today I learned the demographic makeup of the people who will be starting my math graduate program with me in the fall. And It’s Not Very Diverse. Let’s discuss.

There is a program in Budapest, Hungary (that I attended) for American undergraduate students in mathematics that aims to give a leg up to students in their academic careers, and to make them competitive for graduate schools. In the Spring of 2019, the demographic makeup of the group accepted was overwhelmingly white, male students. There were less than 10 women out of 60 or more participants, and again overwhelmingly white. This program is just one instance that I have personally experienced that demonstrates the sizeable gender and race disparities within the mathematical community, and the cause of this likely comes down to the same disparities in mathematics education. Mathematical gatekeeping is the cyclic way that historically oppressed people, like women and people of color, are excluded from mathematics in their early education, higher education, and within the mathematical workplace. This exclusion is unjust, as there is no evidence that any race or gender is genetically geared towards better performance in mathematics, yet this gatekeeping is difficult to counteract because of the widespread implicit biases of mathematics educators, and therefore extreme measures within the mathematics education system must be taken by mathematics teachers of all levels. Mathematical spaces should not be so heavily white and male, but they continue to be. Let’s look at why.

Firstly, we discuss the ways race can impact mathematics education. It is vital to understand mathematics in America as a white institutionalized space, which is to say, a space that has working systems that keep people of color out of the discourse. This stems from the structure of American education and society as a whole, which are also largely white institutionalized spaces. Political and social structures of societies that cater towards white people produce education structures that do the same. A first, and very common instinct for educators may be to take a “colorblind” approach to teaching, that is, educators attempting to teach all students exactly equally, ignoring the racial identities of their students. It has been shown, as Danny Martin explains in a 2009 article about race in mathematics, that this so-called “colorblind” approach does not actually level the playing field for students of color, in actuality, race-neutral education “only perpetuates inequality” by neglecting the needs of marginalized students. Instead, Martin urges educators to self-reflect on their biases, identify mechanisms within the mathematical spaces (like standardized testing) that perpetuate math as a white space, and then take action to help the students affected by these mechanisms. Though, it quickly becomes clear that the call to self-reflection for white educators may be more difficult than proposed: if white educators shy away from discussions and deliberate consideration of race because of their white fragility or discomfort in self-evaluation of racial biases, then changing the field of mathematics from a white institutionalized space will demand more from educators than the self- identification of racially charged systems.

And race is not the only bias that is served in mathematics education, there is also an alarming imbalance in the gender make-up of mathematics students. For instance, women in higher level mathematics programs are scarce, usually outnumbered four to one by their male counterparts. At the elementary school level, female students are more likely to receive lower quality mathematics education, owing to biases placed on them by their teachers. A study found that “teachers tended to overrate male students’ math capability and correspondingly underrate female students’ math capability” even when test scores and other empirical data were the same for male and female students. When sorting students by ability for mathematics instruction, a 1987 article wrote that “teachers are more likely to assign high-ranking boys to the high-ability group than high-ranking girls,” of course putting the girls at a long-term disadvantage. It is important to note that the research cited here is using an assumed gender binary and does not account for biases towards transgender and nonbinary students. The lack of research into biases in mathematics education for transgender students futher illustrates the severity of mathematical gatekeeping to groups who face oppression in society, showing that even now some groups are being ignored or forgotten in the research aimed at helping to create a more eqaulity drivin space.

Now, in addition to biases towards their students, we must note that educators have biases towards their own mathematical abilities. An effect documented by Beth Azar, deemed “math anxiety,” stems from the stress of not being ‘good’ at math. Azar explains that elementary school teachers (who are mostly female) have the highest occurrence of math anxiety within a sample of multiple occupations, and it is likely that this anxiety is rooted in these educator’s own mathematics education which may have been biased or exclusionary. Along with this inherited math anxiety, it can be further said that the teacher’s attitudes in general about mathematics (which again, are largely negative owing to educator’s own biased math education) can heavily impact the student’s attitude towards mathematics, which is a key factor in success, thus the biases of educators towards themselves and their students are working in conjunction to keep certain students excluded from quality mathematics education.

This truly documents the cyclic nature of mathematical gatekeeping, as students grow up and become the educators, they carry with them their attitudes, anxieties, and abilities, which are then transferred to the new student. Biases in educators must be confronted in order to break this cycle, for both gender and race. It is important that teachers end the implicit way students are sorted into ability groups based on a teacher’s subjective perception of them, which is so often tainted by bias. Students also need to see representation of mathematically confident female and racially diverse educators, they need to see mathematics as an inclusive space rather than a white male space. Representation of diverse teachers matters in mathematics education, but only if these educators can also leave behind their own internalized biases.

Gary Huang and his colleagues chronicle how few women and people of color persevere through college level mathematics related degrees.  In short, the students who had the opportunity to study higher mathematics in high school were the ones who often persisted through their degree, but as we have discussed previously, the opportunity to study higher mathematics in high school is predominantly given to white male students. Some, but not all, educators have readily recognized their biases towards themselves, their female students, and their students of color, and have begun to work towards a more inclusive mathematics education system which will set these students up for an equal opportunity in the field. Now, the goal must be to put pressure on all mathematics teachers in elementary education as well as higher education to counteract their implicit biases in order to make mathematics a tool all students have access to, in order to end the cycle of mathematical gatekeeping.

[jellyfax]

Bi Lesbianism, Lesbophobia, and the Hazards of Rejecting Countless (Trans, Nonbinary, and Cis) Lesbian Voices

At this point, it's very noticeable that most people who support and promote the "bi/pan lesbian" label aren't lesbians. I'm not talking about the people who claim the label. Self-proclaimed "bi/pan lesbians" can be lesbians, bi, pan, sapphic, queer, wlw, nblw, or so on but who ultimately are suffering from internalized hatred with some externalized bigotry in the mix too.

No, my focus is on how there are A LOT of people who aren't (trans, nonbinary, or cis) lesbians who like 1) the idea of lesbianism including attraction to (trans and cis) men and/or 2) the idea that all nonbinary people can be included in lesbian attraction by way of bi lesbianism. Even some cis men, trans men, and man-aligned nonbinary people have stepped in to agree that lesbianism should be defined more broadly to include attraction to the-, I mean, men.* While LGBTQ+ people, especially sapphic people, have been negatively impacted by the many definitions and defenses of bi lesbianism, lesbians by far have been the most affected.

After having observed this phenomenon for a while, I have seen that there are very few lesbians who are backing the "bi/pan lesbian" label and that detail is very noteworthy. For the few lesbians who do support the offensive label, they tend to gradually stop identifying as lesbians. Such “former” lesbians usually begin identifying as homosexual lesbians, gay lesbians, queer lesbians, sapphic, or even bi lesbians. The truth is “bi lesbianism” really doesn’t have space for just plain ol’ lesbians. Lesbianism in pro-bi/pan lesbian spaces is very often unfavorably viewed as an orientation that is predisposed to exclusionary, discriminatory beliefs and is at best tolerated or at worst maligned. Most trans lesbians, nonbinary lesbians, and cis lesbians have been very vocal about how invalidated and uncomfortable they feel about the label and the troubling trends its proponents perpetuate. Many, many, many lesbians have expressed outrage over the following though not limited to:

The assertion that all nonbinary people are excluded from lesbianism and that "bi lesbianism" will rectify that exclusion, so "bi lesbianism" indicates attraction to all nonbinary people. Note: Some nonbinary people are comfortable being a part of lesbianism and lesbian attraction, but some aren't comfortable with being associated with lesbianism. Lesbianism doesn't need to be augmented in a misguided, preemptive attempt to include those nonbinary people who feel their gender is invalidated by lesbianism. Nonbinary people aren't a monolithic, third gender, so individual nonbinary people can address how they feel in relation to lesbianism. This also has the ill effect of distancing nonbinary lesbians and nonbinary sapphic people from lesbianism. 

The belief that over 20 - 60+ years of homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual self-advocacy and activism is negligible and the definition of lesbianism should generally regress to how it was pre - 1960s.

The claim that lesbianism should include attraction to trans men, nonbinary men, and cis men to be considered a less restrictive, more inclusive orientation.

The insistence that trans lesbians, nonbinary lesbians, and cis lesbians are purposefully choosing to reject men and are akin to political lesbians.

The proclamation that lesbianism can be used as a kind of modifier to indicate a preference or split-attraction** for women and woman-aligned people.

The persistence that the word "lesbian" is just a word that carries no substantial meaning like a strong sense of identity and community.

Yet, that discomfort and justifiable anger towards blatant lesbophobia, transphobia, biphobia/panphobia has been largely ignored at best or attacked at worst by proponents of the label.

One thing supporters of the label tend to do most of all is severely understate the specific oppression faced by lesbians for our unattraction to (cis and trans) men AND our attraction to women. We all live in a world where intimate partnerships between men and women are the norm and womanhood is heavily defined by attraction to manhood, lesbians are sidelined and punished by most of society for not being able to meet those conventions. All too often supporters of bi lesbianism, who are typically not lesbians, revel in ignoring and downplaying that oppression lesbians overwhelmingly face. Contrary to what bi lesbian supporters believe, lesbians aren’t bi women with a preference for women who are just denying our sliver of secret attraction to men to try to fit some lesbian purity standard. No, these people, most of whom aren’t lesbians, just refuse to believe that some sapphic women and nonbinary people simply aren’t attracted to men and man-aligned people. They lack perspective and are lesbophobic just like any other bigot who pushes the idea that (trans, nonbinary, and cis) lesbians’ attraction should make room for (trans and cis) men.

I get the impression that at least for the sapphic people who push for this label's acceptance and validation, they think that confirmation will somehow fix all the intracommunal discrimination within the sapphic/wlw community. However, the label only serves to further agitate preexisting tensions and cause more harm. It's the metaphorical equivalent of using a small, dirty band-aid to treat a gaping, festering wound, and rubbing salt in the injury just for good measure. Transmisogyny, transphobia, biphobia/panphobia, aphobia, and so on in the sapphic community will not be confronted or eradicated by redefining lesbianism like this. Lesbianism simply existing as it is isn’t the root cause for these problems and to say otherwise is to affirm lesbophobia along with the very discriminatory beliefs that were trying to be denounced in the first place. Directly scapegoating lesbianism and by extension lesbians in this way has also negatively impacted all other sapphic people. For instance, trans and cis bi women and nonbinary sapphic bi people have all spoken out about how this fiasco has poorly affected them too. Hopefully, supporters of the label will see the damage all this has caused in due time, but I doubt it. Once you've decided to mistrust and dismiss a marginalized group of people, in this case lesbians, there's very little chance of change.

While most supporters of the "bi/pan lesbian" label aren't lesbians, with a discernable portion not even being sapphic/wlw, there also aren't very many of them. For every zealous promoter of the label there are likely hundreds more who won't stand for their misinformation, ignorance, and downright bigoted rhetoric and will respect the voices of (trans, nonbinary, and cis) lesbians hurt by such attitudes.

In conclusion, listen to (trans, nonbinary, and cis) lesbians. We know WAY more about our own identity than anyone else. If most of us lesbians feel that the “bi/pan lesbian” label is offensive, bigoted, and regressive, maybe people who aren’t lesbians should take note.

*Non-sapphic and man-aligned people, especially cis men and trans men, really have no business being a part of this issue.

**As an aroace-spec lesbian, I don't approve of or recommend that non ace-spec/aro-spec people use the split-attraction model. Though, funnily enough, most "bi lesbians" don't tend to use SAM to describe their orientation and its only cited ad nauseam in the discourse by clueless supporters of the label. Edit 7/27/2020: Use of SAM among non ace-spec/aro-spec people typically masks internalized issues like homophobia or biphobia. SAM is primarily used by and better serves ace-spec/aro-spec people.

[wizardnaturalist]

Something I've noticed lately is that the term TERF has become so widespread but simultaneously misunderstood, and when actual trans people try to talk about popular movements that were actually started and propagated by terfs, and are steeped in their ideology (you can force lesbians to like dick, queer is a slur, pretty much all other exclusionary rhetoric like anti-aspec and anti-nonbinary, etc.) we are almost universally ignored. We can literally show the receipts of transphobic women coming up with these terms, the rise in their popularity along with the rise in terf numbers, the reason they were started and all the ways that these things actively harm trans people, but the biggest responses we always get are "well I didnt mean it like that" and "yeah but they're right" as though you arent directly feeding their power by making all the disgusting shit they say more palatable and normal in society!!

Terfs very intentionally mask their hatred in ways that make them sound reasonable on a surface level, but when you buy into that, and especially when you continue to defend those statements after being told what they really mean, you are just going to keep accepting more and more of the shit they spey until you're also proudly calling yourself a radfem and turn your profile pic into a uterus.

This is not an exaggeration. It was incredibly popular for terfs to target aphobic people at the height of the ace discourse, and so many terfs have explicitly said that they started out as anti-aspec or anti-mogai and got further radicalized from their. There was a young lesbian that I was mutuals with, and I watched as she transitioned from posting not-uncommon "men are trash" and "womanhood is an uphill battle" type things to, over the course of a few months, reblogging things about how she shouldn't be forced to have sex with a dick and that it doesnt matter if anti-queer sentiments are terfy bcs they're true. And I confronted her, I told her as politely as I could that something she had reblogged was transphobic in origin, but all she could seem to respond with was "well I'm not transphobic and I dont see any problem with it, so therefore there cant be anything wrong" even as I explained in great detail the agonizing history of how sentiments like that came to be.

You guys need to actually take stock of what you post and reblog. I'm not saying you need to scour the op of every single thing you reblog bcs that's an unreasonable expectation for anyone, but just take the time to learn common dogwhistles, and maybe actually fucking listen to trans people, trans women especially, when we say something hurts us. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but I need you to remember that you, as a cisgender person, are sitting in a position of privilege over trans people, no matter in what other ways you may be oppressed. Things like this have real world consequences and I'm tired of seeing cis people post "no terfs!!" and then brush us off when we tell them that doesnt actually stop them from engaging in terf content

[thesunkenblog]

Black Horror and Narratives of Suffering

In their sanguine smears of crimson across the silver screen, horror movies have always painted impressionistic images of metaphorical real-life anxieties; our recreational fears bed down closely with the cultural conditions of the moment in which they were conceived. However, in such coded terms, audiences often consume these sign systems uncritically; it isn’t groundbreaking to draw parallels between Godzilla and nuclear anxiety, B-movie 50-foot women and the midcentury atomic age, or vampire resurgence and the 1980s AIDS epidemic, but the social conditions these movies are mapped onto are not typically on the moviegoer’s mind as they kick back buckets of searingly salty popcorn and cower behind plush seats in the dark of the theatre. Herein lies black horror's didactic value as a medium that helps to illuminate historical and modern issues within the overt fabric of its narrative and imagery -- black horror isn’t hiding what it’s talking about, and black audiences are invited to participate in the catharsis of seeing their own fears on screen in hypothetical situations without the burden of witnessing real-life violence. 

Or are they? As we enter into the study of black horror in a moment of black horror renaissance and national racial tension, we must consider the political implications of replicating brutal racial trauma in a venue largely taken to be recreational entertainment. The very inclusion of black characters in a genre formerly exclusionary, abusive, or maligned is striking, and global voices are raising in choir-praise for the nascent popularity of black horror; creators like Jordan Peele are broadly celebrated as bringing authentic black life (and death) to screens at last, and historically contextualized shows like Lovecraft Country (2020-) are praised for pulling no punches about the true horrors of racism through the ages. A history of social symptoms in black myth and reality surface in a multiplicity of themes: the legacy of slavery and subordination, the appropriation and coveting of black culture and bodies, interracial relations and tensions, black intuition, complicit white liberal culture, isolation, othering, the inheritance of trauma and domination, and the consequences of difference, to name just a flinching few. 

The question of authenticity and responsibility in narrative, though, is hard to grapple with after such a long history of absence from -- or reckless “representation” within -- the genre. Diverse stories, depiction, and creators are critical to making media space for blackness, and it is a chief value of entertainment to stoke these ideas and start these conversations at times when viewers have their guards down -- folks are more receptive when they're kicking back, suturing with the screen, and watching TV than when they're doomscrolling through the exhaustion of the day's fraught tensions in the news -- but we must ask if the underpinning of every single black story with the narrative-important presence of trauma induces plot exhaustion, threatens to retraumatize black audiences, and ultimately denies imaginative diversity in the content of black stories. (Many black critics have cited the same issue within the onslaught of Important Race Movies popular in the Academy in the contemporary theatre, and we can turn the same questions of not frequency or longevity of representation but content to black horror, as many critics appraised the inescapable slavery narrative in the same ways.)

Should we be concerned with the privilege of escapism in the horror genre? White audiences see their fears reflected in horror, yes, but much of the popcorn-appeal for blockbuster scares is the opportunity to be voyeuristic to others’ poor choices and dire circumstances -- horror may teach us about ourselves and help us to unpack our own anxieties, but it is also frequently described as an exercise in comparison. Yes, you just lost your job, but watch this teenage waif get chased by a machete-wielder for 96 minutes; it could be worse. An element of disconnect lets horror viewers enjoy terror on screen at the characters’ expense when they do not relate too closely to them; Jaws seems a little less scary if you live in a landlocked state, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems a little less immediate a threat to you if you live in Manhattan. The savvy horror fan leans on a reassuring mantra: I would never run upstairs. I would never turn my back on the dead-but-not-really-dead body. I would never leave the weapon lying out in the open. I would survive this movie.

White audiences leave the anxiety they experience on the behalf of black characters subject to black horror in the theatre as the house lights come up; black audiences enter and leave with the fear of relation stuck to them like spilled soda laminated onto the soles of their shoes. The modern black horror character shares in a smart black sensibility and intuition for danger that growing up in a culture that necessitates a survival mindset creates: black characters often do everything “right,” but still suffer brutality. The black horror fan percolates in an unsettling mantra: I would run out of the house early, too. I would grab the baseball bat early, too. I would do the same as he did. I know my aunt, uncle, dad, brother, ancestors, contemporaries did the same when it happened to them. I know what the police lights in the rearview mean, and it’s not the relief of help arriving in the last ten minutes of the movie. I know what this terror is like -- not just terror like it. I might not survive this movie. I might not survive my movie.

You wanted representation? Up on the screen -- that’s you. That’s personal. 

What does it mean for violence toward black bodies to be commodified via the media industry, often consumed by non-black eyes who walk out of the theatre with no repercussions, especially at a time when virality of brutality towards black lives is more visible than ever, forever shared and looping across digital spaces? Black horror has often re-created thematic violence in detail, but in the trend to take it further in pursuit and daylighting of historical injustice, real blood has intermingled with stage; Lovecraft Country recreates scenes from the Civil Rights archive in one-to-one scale, and in a recent-of-this-writing Lovecraft Country episode, the death and funeral of Emmett Till is wound into the narrative directly. Is it responsible for horror to borrow the blood of our ancestors for its fictional worlds in such a literal manner? Where do we draw the line? When is it exploitative? Exhausting? Empowering?

Trauma narratives are critically important stories to tell -- warts and all -- but if fiction media is a place to be inventive and especially a place for the potential escape for black audiences into a narrative world where they can see themselves on screen in an entertainment setting, we must ask what it means for your inclusion onscreen to see all of your stories rooted in the very real social abuse inflicted on your lived experience. Much of black social identity is bruised with this  shared experience and history of social trauma, but by recreating this in creative media with few exceptions, are we mandating that our stories must be about suffering? It is worth asking if the very act of a representation in media that showed us living our lives -- even our fears -- with no acutely racial repercussions or menace would be just as -- if not more -- subversive. 

Of course, these questions aside, art doesn’t have a singular purpose, and if it did, it would not be entertainment and ease; this is an idea horror knows well, and discomfort is often productive. Black horror is not just a place for reconciling and affirming black fear in a controlled setting. It also functions as a teaching medium -- a vehicle for fear and empathy, horror coded with many real issues and lived experiences like Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) or Us (2019) is a masterclass in conveying the consequences of otherwise abstract social injuries. Peele’s works, among others, resist the trappings of performing blackness as a narrative product for white audiences to consume. While Hollywood has gradually introduced more black bodies on screen over the years, they have often been failingly voyeuristic in nature, puppeted for the consumption of non-black audiences and relying on aforementioned distance and narrative device or on exploitative "correctness" for the purpose of letting white moviegoers indulge in recreational "wokeness" for the duration of the runtime. Black visions from black lenses for black eyes are always inherently revolutionary, to this end. Peele's impact in criticizing the "post-racial lie" of the Obama era spoke truth to power in symbols entertaining and cathartic for black audiences and cut a wide swath of space for black creators to come in proving a viable market for black horror that resists personal and narrative stereotype by modeling representation after wholly gestalt black lives -- not MacGuffins or monsters for white protagonists. Modern black horror has also provided black viewers with narratives of the possibility of survival, displaced from the realities of personal consequence, allowing a freeing of the genre to be both thrilling and reflective -- coping mechanism and entertainment. White audiences are confronted by this black lense when they are not “in” on the terror, accosting them in unexpected ways and inviting viewers to empathize with Black characters as human and to experience embodied terror on their behalf through the horror medium -- a strikingly effective mode of cinematic empathy.

Celebration and criticism are, of course, not diametrically opposed to one another; these arguments exist in tandem within the discourse. Going forward, we must continue to grapple with the positivity and power of this generic shift while staying critical of the black horror canon at large. We must see the theatre as not a Sunken Place unto itself but a space open to representation, reconciliation, and imagination. 

. . .

Blog #1 - AFAM 188 FA20.

[conchabae]

Greta Thunberg and Friday’s 4 Future

"I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice."

This statement by Greta Thunberg is very powerful. Every generation has had youth that to some extent like the idea of and strive for success, fame and power, but these aspirations have been warped and are all too important amongst our younger generations today. This is directly linked to the nature of internet culture and social media which profits and promotes extreme beauty ideals, materialistic possessions and expressions of grandeur alongside a fixation on followers, likes and the analytics of online “popularity”. Yet, we still have cultural norms that view the youngest in society as the progressives, those who are responsible for shifting and building a better tomorrow. Many Western teens today spend their free-time on beauty tutorials, fashion and other forms of entertainment. There’s beauty in that Greta Thunberg, a well-off Swedish white girl, who could turn a blind eye to injustices in the world, fights to unlearn and speak up against climate injustice. In addition, she fights to spread awareness and put pressure on global governments to make needed systemic change. Greta claims she doesn't care about being popular, because she clearly does not do this for being liked and famous, she knows that fighting for climate justice and sustainability is not popular or “trendy”, she does it because it is what she cares about, and because it is right.

It is because of her honesty and dedication, that she has moved and awaken millions of other western people. Ironically, she has become an iconic and famous figure for defending the environment. It is admirable that even with a platform which has received millions of followers, praise from celebrities, as well as invites from famous politicians, she has never given up her principles to become more likable and her message stays the same, even when it is uncomfortable to those who know they do not do enough for the earth.

I did not live in NYC last year, but there was a climate strike in Foley Square in 2019 as well as strikes all across the world. I was inspired by Greta’s movement and participated in the school strike for climate in Stockholm. It was amazing to see so many people of all different backgrounds and ages participating in the city’s center to hear climate activists and my friends and I boycotted school to support the Friday’s 4 Future campaign.

The long term dedication and commitment movements like Friday’s 4 Future and Black Lives Matter have shown for years now, have woken me up to my complacency to my reality, when it does not align with the world I want to live in. I was 13 years old when the Black Lives Matter hashtag and conversation started. I was 18 when Greta Thunberg started striking for the climate. I realize now that it is not only the people we see highlighted in the news who can make important change, it is all of us. Greta Thunberg’s book No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference, really was a wakeup call on how climate change, which is inevitable with our current ways, is a crisis and an urgent issue that can only be resolved by facing it head on.

 Photos from the Stockholm strike taken by: Lotta Fernvall / AFTONBLADET

These are a selection of a few photos taken at the global Climate Strike in 2019, but these are all taken in front of the Swedish parliament, where the movement began. It is surreal how people in the thousands came to join her on this historical global strike in her home country and all over the world, when she started striking all by herself at this exact spot. Greta Thunberg has been the catalyst for heightened awareness and care about climate justice.

I think many people, including Greta Thunberg herself in the trailer for her Hulu documentary, attribute her hyper focus on the reality and danger of climate change to her having Asperger’s syndrome. While a common symptom of Asperger’s syndrome is to have an “obsessive” interest in a particular subject, I do think we should not dismiss her drive, passion and heart in climate justice just to her condition. Greta’s ability to push against her discomfort with social networking, to perform speeches in front of millions, and exchange awkward pleasantries with powerful public figures to access their platform, shows huge amounts of bravery and heart. It is a character strength that she has tunnel vision on the science of climate change and carbon emissions, and this helps her continue to educate herself on the topic. This is something that many of us locals do not show interest in, especially since most of the information is clouded in complicated and exclusionary scientific language, often in lengthy journals.

She does not just care about the environment for the knowledge, she wants to save the world, and save future generation’s right to fulfilling and happy lives. I have so much respect for her and trust in her intentions, and as Greta has said herself, she does not struggle with Asperger’s, she has it. Her journey to activism and contributions to the world should not be pigeon holed or minimized by her condition.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced us all to experience a different state than our regular normal, has made it more clear than ever, that many of our customs and way of life are not sustainable. As the prevalence of police brutality and other systems of oppression are harder to ignore, I think we all are becoming more aware of daily injustices. In the first months of quarantine in Europe, reports were showing photographic evidence that wildlife and ecosystems were improving and thriving because of the reduced human activity that used to scare away wildlife and pollute ecosystems. The visual that is etched into my mind are the rivers in Venice, Italy. Because of the mandatory quarantine, no boats or gondolas were in use, and the rivers all over the water city cleared to a vibrant blue. It took me back to a trip there when I was 12, and how the waters were so green and muddy we joked that falling in would be a health risk. It was somewhat bittersweet to see this imagery, as it was beauty that was rare to see, and that it is rare because of us!

Photos taken of clear water in Italy, taken by @ikaveri on Twitter. 

In this same pandemic, we have also seen the red and orange skies of LA, filled with clouds and rainfalls of ash. This was heartbreaking for the world to witness, as we learned it was the cause of not some dreamy sunset or blood sun, but because of the massive forest wild fires that have devastated families and communities by burning down homes and making the air unbreathable in some places.

Photo credit: Brittany Hosea-Small / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Photo by Josh Edelson / AFP VIA Getty Images

There is no quick fix for the climate and like all social issues, we need to be committed and address it from various angles. We need to vote in political representatives that acknowledge climate change as fact, which unfortunately is the first crucial step we must take unlike other democracies with the same quality of education and science. We need to then protest and put as much pressure as possible on local, state and national politics to enact policies that lead to reduced emissions. We must reduce the amount of influence and investments fossil fuel corporations receive from taxpayers, and invest federally into sustainable alternatives. Unfortunately, most Americans do not even realize how much their lifestyle destroys their land but also the global climate temperature. We need to create a social shift in attitudes around consumption in all forms and this starts with widespread education, so perhaps media and specifically social media is the strongest and quickest way to do this.

“If a few girls can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to.”

I think this quote by Greta emphasizes the power of the people being unified and organized. When we are organized is when we are truly unstoppable and cannot be ignored by the appointed leaders that be. We outnumber them all. We need to organize and stay focused to make real and much needed change.

“Adults keep saying - We owe it to the young people to give them hope - but I don’t want your hope.

I don’t want you to be hopeful.

I want you to panic.”

- Greta Thunberg in her Our House is On Fire speech.

I think the discussion around Greta Thunberg and her activism is interesting and there are three camps with different receptions of her in online discourse. I think the first camp were responsible for her becoming a household name globally. People who felt overwhelmed about climate change, had made some attempts at doing their part, like only riding public transport and going vegan. The first camp mainly consists of the younger generations that were somewhat aware but overwhelmed with the amount of structural issues that contribute to climate change. They were the force that joined Greta at her strikes in Stockholm outside Swedish parliament, and the ones who organized strikes in their own home countries. The second camp, were those like me, who found out about her a bit later when a strong media buzz was already present and notably by media that did not intend to further her purpose and emphasize the importance of climate justice, but just used her for novelty, headlines and clickbait instead. Many marginalized people questioned some of Greta’s viral rhetoric that often spoke of her being “stolen of her childhood and dreams'' as we saw a European, well-off white girl, who was being invited to speak to the most influential politicians, embraced by Hollywood A-listers and was also being honored at protests around the globe for her strikes. What could she possibly know about struggle? We respected her passion for climate change, but convinced ourselves that she needs to scold politicians and those who actually hold power for change, so we carried on with our lives and continued to live in comfortable denial. The third camp consisted of active climate change deniers, and conservatives who weaponized her Asperger's and the fact that she was a young woman (can’t forget to add ageism and misogyny to edgy memes eh?) and aimed to assassinate her character and validity in the form of “jokes” and memes. The third camp often brought up her privilege not only as a critique, but as a means to silence her and the topic altogether. Many influential right-wing politicians, including Donald Trump, partook in this to distance their followers from having any interest in her, or climate justice.

“Greta Thunberg is the spark but we are the wildfire.” - Naomi Klein

As I mentioned earlier, Greta Thunberg’s book has taken away my criticisms of her global status. She has brilliant values, an in-depth scientific understanding of the subject she advocates for, and her emphasis on climate equity, which many white activists fail to acknowledge as an important factor, all made me a supporter of Greta. I do not care about the trolls and those who have tried to ridicule and minimize the honor in her life mission. She is probably one of the most inspiring individuals and change makers of my time. Her book and speeches have amazing rhetoric that unprogrammed a lot of my own learned helplessness about the environment. It also reminded me of my individual responsibility as well as my government's responsibility to stop global warming from happening and create a sustainable world. We need to put in the work, we only have so much time left before it is too late, whether we like that fact or not. Her stance that climate change is black and white is so effective and true: “either we reduce global emissions by 50%, or we do not.” It really is that simple. We need to activate so we can enact the needed solutions to meet that goal. Reading Thunberg’s book has inspired me to take more action and make more sustainable choices and unlearn a lot of U.S. consumerism culture. I have educated myself more throughout quarantine by learning about zero waste methods and the environmental benefits of veganism. However, while personal accountability is great, it is a form of privilege to be able to buy more sustainably, especially when the current market place mainly offers unsustainable products as the most affordable. We must also learn how to politically fight for actual policies and political change that force systemic and societal change .

“We have a new wave of contention in society that’s being led by women. … And the youth climate movement is leading this generational shift."

- Dana Fisher

In late 2019, The Washington Post conducted a poll that found that 46% of teen girls said the climate was “extremely important”, while only 23 % of teen boys said so. Furthermore, more than twice as many black and Hispanic teens participated in school strikes on climate change than their white peers, and girls were more likely to participate than boys. This data is one of several including Dana Fisher’s, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Maryland, who found similar ratios when studying the populations of activists and participants in the Washington, DC 2019 climate strike.

I think the ratio of who shows up for the environment points to social roles at large. The likelihood of caring about climate change can do with one’s privilege and ability to empathize with abstract or foreign problems that one may not be negatively affected with (right now). While we all hold some form of privilege, all women have experienced some form of sexism and misogyny, and therefore are more likely to be able to empathize with marginalized groups they do not belong to, and advocate for social movements that address injustices they may not themselves experience.

There is a correlation between those most marginalized in society, being the most active in social reform and revolution. Because when one is in the lowest or lower social casts of society, and has the least social freedoms and privileges, one has nothing to lose and everything to gain from change. This is why we can see in many social justice movements across the US, that black queer people and specifically black trans women, have consistently been at the forefront for important social progress.

When it comes to climate change, there is a certain amount of empathy required, especially when you live in a western country, or part of the world where you have an excess of resources at your disposal and you are comfortable with the status quo. That is something we all need to address and with that comes a checking of ego. Is my temporary happiness more important than other people’s well-being and lives? Am I contributing to the exploitation of people and the destruction of the planet? My planet?

I do not often see men on a large scale extending this type of self-reflection and empathy for social problems, either in small social settings or in positions of power. This is similar to how many men do not reflect on how it feels to be catcalled or sexually harassed as a woman. This is not because men are predisposed to be heartless rather, I believe this is a cause of social conditioning. Women are more conditioned to be team players, to listen and exercise great empathy at all times, otherwise she is socially scorned. Men are not expected to show these traits to the same extent, and often can rely on this lack of social standard and their own privilege to ignore social issues all together. We need to unlearn that issues women care about are insular to “women’s issues”, for they are societal problems, and we need to encourage and expect young boys and men to be equally accountable for a better world.

It is so inspiring to see so many young teens following Greta’s initiative, like Alexandria Villaseñor, who after experiencing an asthma attack during a wildfire in California, not only took the time to educate herself on the dangers of this phenomenon, but also organized Friday’s 4 Future strikes in NYC with the US Climate Strike group. Since then, she has also spoken at countless international conventions about climate change, and alongside Thunberg and 15 other youth activists, filed a legal complaint against UN nations who had not upheld their Paris agreement climate goals. This is so badass and I did not even know about this until today. In fact, there are countless teens all over the world, many of whom aren’t of legal voting age, who are suing local / federal governments and organizations for environmental malpractice and for jeopardizing their futures! 

As they should! Let’s all keep fighting for a better and sustainable future.

Students and youth striking in Seoul, South Korea. Photo credit: Chung Sung-Jun / GETTY IMAGES

Young people striking in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo credit: Jeff J Mitchell / GETTY IMAGES

Youth striking in Hong Kong. Photo credit: Kim Cheung / AP PHOTO

[arcticdementor]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate or discussion about their views, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it for ages, probably a year at this point. Surely you’ll have noticed that they don’t tend to engage in debates or conversation?

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation.

…

There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.

…

The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.

In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.

…

Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.

The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.

…

Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.

Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.

…

Secondly, the organizing principle of their worldview is that two things structure society: discourses and systems of power maintained by discourses. Regarding the systems of power, their underlying belief is genuinely that of the Critical Theorists: society is divided into oppressors versus oppressed, and the oppressors condition the beliefs and culture of society such that neither they nor the oppressed are aware of the realities of their oppression. That is, everyone who isn’t “Woke” to the realities of systemic oppression lives in a form of false consciousness. Members of dominant groups have internalized their dominance by accepting it as normal, natural, earned, and justified and therefore are unaware of the oppression they create. Members of “minoritized” groups have often internalized their oppression by accepting it as normal, natural, and just the way things are and are therefore unaware of the extent of the oppression they suffer or its true sources. In both cases, though in different ways and to different ends, the falsely conscious need to be awakened to a critical consciousness, i.e., become Critical Theorists.

Adherents to this worldview will not want to have conversations or debate with people who do not possess a critical consciousness because there’s basically no point to doing such a thing. Unless they can wake their debate or conversation partner up to Wokeness on the spot, they’d see it as though they’re talking to zombies who can’t even think for themselves. Unwoke people are stuck thinking in the ways dominant and elite powers in society have socialized them into thinking (you could consider this a kind of conditioning or brainwashing by the very machinations of society and how it thinks). We will return to this aspect of the problem further down in the essay.

…

Again, it is difficult to express from within the liberal paradigm (to their point, I guess) just how fully and profoundly they believe this. Their view constructs, in fact, a metaphysics of discourses that, in some sense, becomes the operative mythology underlying all of society and its operation. Because of the already critical orientation of the postmodernists and then the further amplification of taking on Critical Theory much more fully later, Critical Social Justice views this metaphysics of discourses in a very particular way with regard to the moral valence of how discourses are constructed.

…

That’s a bit complicated, I admit, and so a simplification of this idea is that adherents to Critical Social Justice see discourses—ways we think it is legitimate to talk about things—as the true fabric of reality and thus the core site of ethical consideration. This is their mythology, in a nutshell. As such, they will not be willing to participate in any process that reinforces, maintains, upholds, reproduces, or legitimizes the unjustly dominant discourses, as they see them. Supporting those is, in fact, just about the highest sin one can commit in the Woke faith. The discourses must instead be engineered into a state of perfection—God’s Kingdom through Perfect Language—and it would not be permissible to engage in any behavior or process that allows oppression to be spoken from or into our discourses. Conversation and debate with people who speak from and in support of the dominant discourses would certainly therefore be considered highly problematic, and anyone who participates in it intentionally or even neglectfully would similarly be problematic.

…

Thirdly, adding to this is a theme we draw out significantly in the eighth chapter of Cynical Theories: they believe all disagreement with them to be illegitimate. If we followed from Dotson in the paper named above and another slightly earlier one (2011) about “epistemic violence,” it could be pinned on what she calls “pernicious ignorance.” Robin DiAngelo would call it “white fragility” to disagree. Alison Bailey refers to it as an attempt to preserve one’s privilege under the kind of term George Carlin lived to make fun of: “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” (four words, twelve syllables, one hyphen). Further, Bailey said all attempts to criticize Critical Social Justice thought, because they come from that “critical thinking” and not the “critical theory” tradition (within which they’d obviously agree), generate “shadow texts” that follow along but don’t truly engage (in the correctly “critical” way; i.e., agreement with her). Barbara Applebaum said similar in her 2010 book, Being White, Being Good, wherein she explains that the only legitimate way to disagree with Critical Social Justice education in the classroom is to ask questions for clarification until one agrees (which, you might notice, isn’t disagreeing at all).

In general, as mentioned a bit earlier in the essay, if you disagree, you either have false consciousness or the willful intention to oppress, and so your disagreement isn’t genuine. Only disagreement that comes from a Critical Theory perspective would be genuine, but this isn’t actually disagreement with the Woke worldview, only with superficial aspects of how it is playing out. The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate. Read it again: unless you actually agree, you didn’t disagree correctly (cue Jim Carrey as the karate teacher defending against the knife attacker).

…

Fourthly, the Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible. They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. Not only that, they are willfully so, and their main objective is to defend and spread their hateful ideology in the world. If you truly believe this about the people you’ve been asked to have a conversation with, would you be about to help them do that by giving them a platform and lending your own imprimatur to them? Of course not. Such views are not even to be tolerated, much less entertained, engaged with, platformed, or amplified.

Furthermore, because of the theories of complicity in systemic evils that live at the heart of Theory, such a stain is automatically contagious, in addition to whatever real damage it does to further its advancement into the world. As they tweet, so they are: “ten people at a table with one Nazi is eleven Nazis at a table.” And not only are they supposed to endorse the platforming of that by sharing a stage with people they see this way, but they’re supposed to do it in ways that the dominant system, which is all of those things as well and their guarantor, approves of and advances its own interests through. These horrible ways include civil conversation and debate, which aren’t happening.

To give you some idea of just how extreme they are in their fear of being associated with people “on the wrong side of history,” there is a (somewhat fringe) concept within the Critical Social Justice worldview called “non-consensual co-platforming” (two words, nine syllables, one hyphen). What this concept describes is the following situation. Imagine that a Critical Social Justice Theorist were to publish an essay in the New York Times Opinion column this month, and a couple of months from now, I were invited to do so and did. Now we’re both people who have essays published in the New York Times Opinion column. The logic of “non-consensual co-platforming” would be that the editors of that column did a bad by putting me, a known undesirable, in the Opinion pages where there is also a Woke purist, obviously without having first got her consent to have been “co-platformed” with me in the same publication. (This example is rare, but more common is the same claim made about being platformed to speak at the same conference.) Now, the Woke purist is in the unpleasant situation of having been published in a place that is willing to sully its own reputation later by the publication of some deviant rascal. This is how seriously they take the stain of guilt by association.

…

As a fifth and final point, since this is getting pretty long already, remember that Critical Social Justice activists tell us more or less constantly how exhausting it is to fight this constant uphill battle in which no one takes them seriously (read: fight shadows of their own nightmarish projection). They tell us constantly about the high emotional labor costs of doing the “work” they do (and never being taken seriously for it). To invite them to a public conversation or debate is to ask them to get exploited in this way for other people’s benefit by getting up on stage in a dominance-approved paradigm with a bad-faith moral monster who just wants his opportunity to reinforce the very dominance that exhausts them in front of an audience who not only doesn’t but can’t actually get it, unless they already do. Again, that’s not happening. Even if very handsomely (read: ridiculously and exorbitantly) paid for their “emotional labor” to subject themselves to this situation, the other four points make it a nonstarter (and would drive up the price to basically literally infinity).

In Sum

One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other “master’s tools” is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t.

These principles and values are rejected to their very roots within the Critical Social Justice worldview, and so the request for an advocate to have a debate or conversation with someone who disagrees will, to the degree they have adopted the Critical Social Justice Theoretical ideology/faith, be a complete nonstarter. It’s literally a request to do the exact opposite of everything their ideology instructs with regard to how the world and “systemic oppression” within it operates—to participate in their own oppression and maintain oppression of the people they claim to speak for.

These facts about the Critical Social Justice ideology extend from the microcosm of engaging in debate and conversation to each of those specific “master’s tools” a—science, reason, epistemic adequacy, civility, etc.—every bit as much as they do to the whole system that these tools combine to form: liberalism in the Modern era. This is a system that advocates of Critical Social Justice repeatedly tell us must be dismantled in the sparking of a “critical” revolution that replaces the whole of it, including its basic epistemology and ethics, with Critical Theory.

The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it.

[a-polite-melody]

Two big things that prevent (initially ace, but then it kinda turned into all types of) “discourse” from actually... being a discourse, as in a productive discussion, are 1) that aphobes purposefully use misrepresentations and as dismissive language as possible in regards to aspec orientations, and 2) REGs insistence that they talk about oppression as being ranked (as in you can say who is most oppressed and can rank down to least oppressed in a group of people).

The first is pretty self-explanatory. It’s much easier to get people who are uneducated/undereducated on a topic to agree with you quickly if you use strawmen versions of your opponents arguments to make them seem as though they’re being unreasonable or spreading blatant falsehoods.

This includes things like, instead of saying, “asexuals aren’t oppressed,” which is their real argument, saying, “people aren’t oppressed for not fucking.” At this point, anyone with any cursory knowledge about ace discourse knows that asexuality is not, as a community or “umbrella” definition, about whether or not people have sex. Aphobes specifically use the second statement because they’re using what they can to portray inclusionists as having nonsensical arguments, which is to twist and misrepresent us.

Similarly, I’d place, “cishets aren’t oppressed/cishets aren’t LGBT,” here as well. Cishet no longer is a useful term to describe anyone who has societal power over all LGBT+ and queer people under pericisheteronormative society. That’s what the term was coined to refer to. Now, when someone says cishet, I have to dig to make sure that’s what they mean, because REGs use cishet in a few different ways, and none of them are its original definition. Usually they mean it as, “a person who is cis, het, and aspec,” or, “a person with a fake MOGAI identity trying to be special,” or even just, “someone I disagree with,” as there are many people, myself included, who can attest to the fact that we, as trans and queer individuals, were called cishet simply because we disagreed with a REG.

That second reason is where things get a little more tricky, but also is one of the similarities between different types of REGs, which we’ve used to group them all as exclusionary gatekeepers of some description.

It is in all REGs’ best interest to most always (if not always) talk about oppression as if it is able to be ranked. By ranking oppression like this, or in other words, by doing exactly the opposite of what intersectionality requires, they can arbitrarily determine that certain people who may be highly vulnerable are actually, by their “true” standards, twisting the narrative and stealing other groups’ oppression.

TERFs claim that ‘Males’ are appropriating the oppression of women by calling themselves trans. These ‘transes’, when they claim they are oppressed by cis people for being trans, are claiming that ‘Females’ can oppress ‘Males’ based on sex, or are appropriating our oppression from us.

Truscum/transmeds/trumeds (why do we need so many words?) claim that ‘nonbinaries/MOGAIs’ are appropriating the oppression of trans people by calling themselves this nonbinary/MOGAI identity. These ‘MOGAIs’, when they claim they are oppressed by binary gendered people for not adhering to the gender binary, are claiming that ‘true trans people’ can oppress ‘cis snowflakes’ based on gender, or are appropriating our oppression from us.

Biphobes/mspec-antagonists claim that ‘bihets/etc.’ are appropriating the oppression of LG people by calling themselves gay/queer/not straight when they’re in a ‘het’ relationship. These ‘bihets’, when they claim they are oppressed by the monosexuals for experiencing attraction to multiple genders, are claiming that ‘LG people’ can oppress ‘bihets’ based on orientation, or are appropriating our oppression from us.

Aphobes claim that ‘aceys’ are appropriating the oppression of LGB+ people by calling themselves part of the community for being asexual. These ‘aceys’, when they claim they are oppressed by the allos for not experiencing attraction, are claiming that ‘actual LGB+ people’ can oppress ‘people who feel special for not fucking’ based on orientation/having sex, or are appropriating our oppression from us.

This. Isn’t how any of these things work. There are many different facets to both gender-based and orientation-based oppression. The existence of both oppression against women and oppression against trans people can coexist. The existence of oppression against people who are attracted to the same gender, oppression against people who are attracted to multiple genders, and oppression against people who are attracted to no genders can coexist. Because they’re all separate axes, even if they are all related. There’s interplay between these axes that we can’t ignore, but we also can’t really use any of this to rank oppression. The systems are too complicated for that.

And, beyond that, it’s just. Not necessary to determine who is more oppressed than whom. It’s not doing anything productive. It’s wasting our energy on infighting instead of creating better spaces, collecting and distributing more information, and other much more useful and helpful things that’ll end up benefiting all of us, especially those who are in vulnerable positions. Essentially, I think it’s much better to focus on making life better for the most vulnerable or oppressed of us than it is to determine who exactly is the most oppressed.

REGs go completely against that, mostly as a way to further push respectability politics to keep their optics up. Can’t have anyone too ‘out there’ hanging around when the oppressors we’re sucking up to to get extremely conditional acceptance from happen to glance at us. We need to portray ourselves as sanitized as possible so we don’t upset them. :/ (if you couldn’t tell, I don’t like this)

(Also, inb4 “stop comparing exclusionists/truscum/whatever to TERFs!” I’m not. I’m just pointing out that all exclusionary gatekeepers, of which all of the groups I called REGs are, tend to use very similar language and ideas. And those things did just so happen to originate from radfem arguments.)

[itslmdee]

Fic: No Pride in Exlusionism

This month's theme is 'gatekeeping'. Today's piece looks at gatekeeping within the LGBTQ+ community.

"You're home early," Roger said. Mae sat heavily on the sofa next to him, kicking off her heels. She leaned over to kiss his cheek and then leaned back, staring at the ceiling.

Roger muted the tv. "You okay?"

"I dropped out of the planning committee."

"Why?"

Mae shook her head, took a deep shuddering breath. "This party...Gays for Halloween. I wanted a different name from the start. What does that even mean? Gay people support a holiday that many people think is an American import? Pumpkins in pride colours?"

Roger shifted to look at her. "Actually I can see paper pumpkins in pride colours."

Mae gave a wry smile. "Me too. That's not why I quit. It was Josie mostly, her and Jane and Peter. I was filling up the urn in the kitchen before we got started and I heard Josie talking by the serving hatch. Saying they were so glad John had joined us, an actual gay. She was feeling the committee was being overrun by bihets."

"She said that?" Roger took Mae's hand.

"I had three serious relationships with women before we got married," Mae said. "I'm bisexual. Marrying you doesn't change that."

"I know." He squeezed her hand. "I know."

Mae squeezed back. "Me and Tim and Desiree are all bi. Laura's lesbian but Josie is suspicious of anyone who's ever dated a man though she gives Dan a pass for a past girlfriend. Anyway Jane was giggling and agreeing because I think she fancies Josie - only reason she agreed to be vice chair when Rachel said she needed fewer responsibilities this year. And Peter...my God."

Roger waited patiently. One of the cats wandered over to inspect Mae's discarded shoes.

"I'm not that much older than most of them," Mae said. "But they don't seem to know anything about the history of the gay rights movement. Queer history, except Josie says queer is a slur despite it being reclaimed and used to push for greater awareness. And so they're trying to force out anyone who isn't a gay man or a good enough lesbian. Peter had a lot of opinions on the right kind of trans people who should be allowed to participate. The group has become increasingly exclusionary."

"So you quit?"

"Yes. I will not gatekeep," Mae said. "I will not tolerate bihet being thrown around to try and exclude bisexuals, or cishets to exclude asexuals, or get involved in the dysphoria debate to try and debate the rights of trans people. Josie doesn't want LGBT let alone Q, I, and A. Josie and Peter want L and G and screw everyone else."

Roger sighed. "Maybe there's another group you can join. A more inclusive one."

"Maybe." Mae let go of Roger's hand and got to her feet. "I'm making coffee, want one?"

"Please."

Roger knew Mae had found kinship, friendship, and purpose over the last six years she'd worked with the LGBT+ community group. She'd miss it. But he also knew she was principled and wouldn't regret quitting rather than supporting exclusionism.

"Did you talk to Maggie about this?" he asked when Mae returned with their drinks.

"I told her I quit, apologised that she'd probably have to pick up my role in organising the Halloween party."

"What about Peter? Is Maggie the right kind of trans woman according to him?"

Mae shrugged. "Maggie can take care of herself," she said. "My only regret is that if Peter talks out of turn like I heard him doing with Josie is I won't get to watch Maggie rip him a new one."

Notes and further reading

A lot of this gatekeeping takes place online; people say they've only experienced being excluded from online spaces and not groups in real life. However there are some people reporting being harassed at Pride for being seemingly straight while being bisexual, trans, or nb in a heterosexual relationship. The people who say the A in the LGBTQA is for ally not asexual to gatekeep are probably the same ones trying to gatekeep anyone who doesn't look 'gay' enough from participating in Pride.

"With the advent of queer theory and the launch of Queer as Folk, “queer” became used online as a more concise umbrella term than the full LGBT+ acronym (which, depending on who you ask, is LGBTQQIP2SAA). Today, interpretations of “queer” go a step further, and its acceptance generally splits along generational lines. Many young people — myself included — view “queer” as a term defining all nonstraight, nonbinary identities. “Queer” addresses the fluidity of gender and sexual orientation" - https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2017/8/02/21-words-queer-community-has-reclaimed-and-some-we-havent#media-gallery-media-2

3 Differences Between the Terms ‘Gay’ and ‘Queer’ — and Why It Matters - https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/difference-between-gay-queer/

"The word "queer" has only recently been identified as a slur because of TERFs and exclusionists. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. Queer is the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion." - https://aminoapps.com/c/lgbt-1/page/blog/history-of-the-word-queer/BQ4p_GxRHwu5Xz35RWB31oKMLp8XJ8r7Ybo

Tumblr repsonse to "What does bihet mean" - https://bisexual-community.tumblr.com/post/93798259302/this-probably-sounds-stupid-but-what-does-bihet

On ace discourse and exclusionism on the internet vs in real life - https://medium.com/@meganhoins/the-rhetoric-of-digital-ace-discourse-4a690792f0bc

"According to 2013 Pew Research Center data, about 84 percent of bisexual adults who are in “committed relationships” are with “opposite-sex partners.” Within a broader LGBT community that too often guesses someone’s sexual orientation based on who they happen to be with at the moment, that statistic means many bisexual people get read as “straight”—or, at least, something less than fully queer." https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-bisexuals-feel-ignored-and-insulted-at-lgbt-pride

"Transmedicalism is a term for a wide range of beliefs in the transgender community that are critical of transgender people who haven't medically transitioned and/or don't experience major dysphoria. Many transmedicalists (or "transmeds" for short) focus on gatekeeping....Although the debate has been going since the '60s, it has gained more notoriety in the Internet age, particularly on Tumblr. Transmedicalists may be called "transmeds" or "truscum," while anti-transmedicalists may be called "tucutes" or (often erroneously) "transtrenders." " - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transmedicalism

[autisticlaezel]

As some of you may know, I recently left a Discord server centered around swtor and kotor.

I did this for many reasons, but the two main ones were thinly veiled lesbophobia, specifically in intra community discourse, and lack of mod transparency, specifically regarding how one of the other server members were kicked, and the mods refusing to provide example or evidence of the behavior they accused said member of, as well as low key mocking them by exaggerating their statements.

These things made me feel unsafe which took away the fun of participating on there, and I left with a message in the general chat that detailed this. As it turns out, a lot of other members of this server had felt the same, but had been too afraid to speak up, and when they did speak up about their own discomfort and experiences with lesbophobia on there, it was treated as a personal attack against the mods and derailed into something it was not.

I wasn’t going to bring this drama to tumblr aside from the occasional vent post that didn’t name-drop anyone, but it’s come to my attention that one of the former mods has made a callout post about me and several other people who came forward during the discussion sparked by my leaving, as well as they person who got kicked. I’m not going to sit around and let someone spread lies about me and people I care about on a public platform, and I’m certainly not going to leave the accusations in her callout go unresponded to.

I also want to let you know that this is the last time I’ll address the drama related to the discord server. It’s stressful to me. It’s stressful to everyone else involved. It’s not productive, and everyone gets hurt.

I’ll put my response under the cut as it’s going to be long and screenshot heavy, but for transparency’s sake, this is the callout post in question.

I’d like to start my addressing my distaste for the abuse analogy Irene chose to use in her post. It’s incredibly manipulative, especially considering that several of the people she has chosen to mention have talked to her about their experiences as abuse survivors in the past. As a survivor of relationship abuse (as well as other kinds of abuse), I take offense in being compared to an abuser for standing up for myself and bringing attention to something that’s made me feel unsafe. It’s cruel, it’s a low blow and I’m incredibly angry that she thought it appropriate to make.

I’d also like to point out that she mentions in her post that a lot of people who agreed with her left the server. I’d like to remind everyone that the debate she’s referring to was, in fact, sparked by me leaving due to feeling unsafe, and that a lot of specifically lesbians who felt the same way chose to leave as well because they were being continuously spoken over when discussing their concerns about lesbophobia.

This was painted as derailment of a conversation about biphobia in the server and as well as Irene’s callout post, despite taking place in an entirely different channel, at an entirely different time, without any references to that conversation whatsoever.

This is the message I left with, and I’d also like to point out that this is the only time I’ve addressed any intra community discourse on the server, and that Irene thought that that was enough to name-drop me in a callout post. That said, I do agree with the other people name-dropped on there. 

For the same reason, I’m really confused as to why Irene chose to name-drop Dani in her post. Dani too hasn’t participated in intra-community on the server before I chose to leave, and after I chose to leave, she agreed with me in an incredibly polite and diplomatic way, expressing her own discomfort with the lesbophobia happening in the server.

This is Dani’s reaction to my leaving, as well as the message that she left the server with.

Irene claims in her callout post that we (the people name-dropped) engaged in “the derailing and targeting of a transgender woman with rhetoric and arguments taken from trans-exclusionary radical feminism.”

It’s important to me to point out that the discussions she’s referring to was not about gender, but about the concept of monosexual privilege and why it makes people uncomfortable. That she neglected to mention that in her post, and that she chooses to compare someone asking her not to call them monosexual to terf rhetoric once again strikes me as incredibly manipulative.

I will, however, for transparency’s sake post screenshots of the part of the conversation that any of us actually participated in in full, because I don’t expect anyone to take my word for it.

I’ve also chosen to censor certain members’ names and icons. This is done because I do not wish to place the transgender woman in danger in case this post ends up being read by the wrong people. Her statements are the ones censored with black. The other names censored are censored about they aren’t actually related to this drama, and I don’t wish to bring them into it if it can be avoided. Last I’ve censored Shannon’s icon, because it’s art not created by her, and she doesn’t wish to drag the artist into this either.

Here’s the conversation.

I’m sorry that this is rather long, but I don’t want to be accused of taking anyone’s words out of context, and frankly, I wouldn’t put that beside her.

Next, I’d like to address another claim in her post. She said that, and I quote:

The conversation evolved to the point where a cisgender lesbian told the transgender lesbian woman who was targeted, quoting, “Do you know what it’s like to be shoved to the sidelines of the lgbt community!?!? Do you!!?” And, really, that needs no further elaboration from me here.

Not only does she misquote that someone, she also misgenders them. The person in question, Mac, isn’t cis, and while I’m not sure that Irene is aware of this, speaking on things that she doesn’t actually know is really harmful. This is the conversation that she’s referring to. I’ve chosen to cut out the parts that weren’t the exchange between Mac and the trans woman they were accused of saying that to because there was multiple conversation going on at once, and the others aren’t relevant to this particular point.

Here’s what they actually said.

Irene has also chosen to name-drop Leilukin in her post, which strikes me as very suspect. Leilukin has only addressed intra community discourse in the lgbt+ community to talk about her experience as a lesbian in a country where gay sexuality is illegal. It’s also important to note that she was promptly ignored, and that Irene never addressed what she had to say, and then went to name-drop her in a post about biphobia and terf rhetoric.

This is what she said.

I mentioned my distaste for how Appo got kicked in my leaving message as well. I’d like to clarify what I mean by that, for anyone who weren’t involved in the server or weren’t aware of it happening. Kicking a non-binary person from a server with the accusation of terf rhetoric without clarifying what was meant by that for several days, without providing examples, without consulting the community and without talking to them about it first feels very strange to me.

It felt very clique-y, vindictive and based on a personal dislike for Appo rather them actually having done something wrong.

This is what was said about them in the server after they were kicked.

There were no examples provided of any behavior on their part that had actually been problematic. We were supposed to take the mods’ word for it, without any clue as to whether it was true or not. It’s also important to point out that they never actually said that calling a character hot or declaring a desire to date them was inappropriate, rather, they’d raised concern about the idea of discussing things of a sexual nature in the sfw in general after it was revealed to us that one of the server members was 14.

After several people expressed their discomfort with the liberal use of “terf rhetoric” outside of discussions about gender, this statement was posted.

Despite this, Irene directly correlated “terf rhetoric” (once again, due to a discussion on monosexual privilege) with another member of the server’s lesbianism in private messages to said lesbian (Shannon), while being incredibly condescending. It’s also worth noting, since Irene brought age into her original callout post that this lesbian only recently turned 20 and that Irene is 26.

These are examples of messages that she sent Shannon.

It’s worth nothing here that Irene is a cisgender bi woman, and is here talking over a non-binary lesbian about lesbophobia.

I’d also like to provide a couple of examples as to what the several people felt uncomfortable with in regards to lesbophobia. Unfortunately, a lot of the issues brought up don’t make sense without the context or the fact that they were repeated constantly, but here are some that absolutely do. It’s also important to note that there are several examples of similar behavior in the screenshots from the conversation of monosexual privilege as well as the messages Irene sent to Shannon. Qionnuala is Irene in this case.

Here they are.

As a closing statement, I’d like to say that I haven’t enjoyed making this post. It’s been stressful, it’s been aggravating and it’s been sad. It is, however, important to me to address an attack made on my person by someone with no proof or motivation other than me and others being lesbians daring to speak up about lesbophobia on a discord server.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Refuting Haaretz’s Publisher: Part III

IThe third instalment of my lengthy rejoinder against Amos Schocken, publisher of Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 

Part I is here.

Part II is here. 

In Part II, we saw that Schocken accused the Israeli government of degrading non-Jewish Israelis to second-class citizens by means of its Basic Nationality Law. Does this claim hold water? After all, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had to meet with the Druze community shortly after enacting this law, in order to assure them that the Law did not infringe upon their rights and status in Israel. In addition, many Israeli Arabs alleged that the Law refuted their civil rights, also criticising the “special status”, as opposed to “official” status of Arabic. 

However, when clauses from Israel’s Nationality Law are held up in comparison to other national Constitutions and Laws, we see that Israel asserts similar self-evident truths about her own nationhood in similar ways to other nations. Several articles concerning Syrian nationhood, not called into question on account of Bashar al-Assad or ISIS, mirror those made by Israel. 

Other countries that similarly condemn Israel’s alleged “discrimination and/or racism” have similar Basic Laws. Saudi Arabia asserts itself as an Arab kingdom with Islam as the official (and only) religion, Islam as the rule of law, Arabic (only) as the official language, and Riyadh as its (uncontested) capital. Jordan, whose representatives at the UN regularly excoriate Israel, have similar clauses. According to its Basic principles, Jordan is a Hashemite kingdom, an Arab nation and will not cede any part of its territory as this belongs to the Arab nation. Again, Arabic is the national language, Amman is the capital, and its flag is carefully described. 

Granted, other nations do have several nationalities (Russia and China being such), and several official languages (Iraq), of which some are not indigenous to the nation (Nigeria, Ghana). 

But if Schocken’s contention is that affirming a national identity degrades minority groups to second-class citizens, then why criticise only Israel? Since Haaretz deals with Middle-Eastern affairs (hence the reference to Iran), Schocken should similarly scrutinise and dismiss the Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, etc. Constitutions and Basic Laws as exclusionary and discriminatory. 

These values of nationhood, national self-determination, the right to choose an official language, a flag, to define borders, and protect the rights of settlement for its citizens, are not discriminatory. Rather, they affirm the human right and need for belonging and connection based on history, culture, identity, language, creed, practice, and geography. The Jewish people, just like the Arabic people next door, have the right to assemble, settle, and govern autonomously in their ancient nation. Unlike the Arabic people, the Jewish right to do all of the above was cruelly suppressed for almost 2000 years, and so the Basic Nationality Law reaffirms what the Jews had lost, and what every other nation affirms (including multinational nations like Russia and China). 

(I should also add that Israel’s Nationality Law specifies that the presence and use of Arabic prior to the Law will remain unchanged).

Back to Amos Schocken’s email:

Haaretz is the strongest advocate for an Israel that is a liberal democracy living in peace with its Palestinian neighbors and that guarantees equal rights for all its citizens.

Israel already fits this category. Nothing inside the Basic Nationality Law, even considering disputes over the wording and potential implications, prevents non-Jews from exercising their rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and association. 

In fact, I went onto the Knesset’s website juand they had Hebrew-Arabic education as one of their front line articles. This will significantly increase community cohesion, and is also necessary for Israel’s many fine academic institutions. 

In another example, point 10 of this Basic Law affirms the rights of non-Jews to observe their own Sabbath days. This complements the rights of non-Jews to establish places of worship, observe their religious teachings, speak Arabic (and other languages), and follow the non-Hebrew (Gregorian) calendar. 

These days are a critical period in Israel. Within three months, Israel will once again hold a general election and the next government will be determined. The real issue is whether Israel will stay a liberal democracy, or move further towards a fundamentalist and ethnocentric society.

It seems that Schocken opposes Jewish nationalism. Does he oppose the far more radical Palestinian Arab nationalism, which would see Jews expelled from a future Palestinian State or worse? Indeed, does he oppose all nationalism? 

His own newspaper stands as a testament to the premise of Jewish nationalism: reconstituting the ancient Jewish homeland as the nation-state of the Jewish people. I challenge Schocken to find anything malign or discriminatory inside such a premise. As mentioned before, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated that the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish citizens should not be prejudiced by the creation of a Jewish State. Israel’s society is incredibly rich, and there are many non-Jewish ethnic, national, and religious groups thriving inside the Jewish State. 

Schocken’s insinuations concerning “fundamentalism” are suspicious. What does he mean by this? Zionism is inherently fundamentalist, since it urges Jews to return to their ancient homeland, rather than remain assimilated and scattered abroad. The Zionist case is rooted in history, law, and the Jewish faith-- even though many Zionists are secular. The name of Schocken’s newspaper, Haaretz, refers to how Jews sought to settle and cultivate the land in order to build their state, just as they had done centuries ago, time and time again. So what Schocken labels as a “move further towards fundamentalism” is nothing more than affirming and promoting the essential creeds of Zionism.

Meanwhile, Schocken does not accuse the Palestinians of fundamentalism. They assert that they had a state stretching back to the Roman times and beforehand. This is categorically false. Schocken does not question this. They claim to want a state in which alleged Palestinian refugees (mostly living in Jordan), be allowed to return. They refuse to recognise Israel as a Jewish State, nor Israel’s right to exist. Whilst their Western apologists insist that Jews would be allowed to live with Palestinians, actual Palestinian and Arabic media shows otherwise, with incitements to anti-Semitic murder routine and prominent in political discourse.

 All of this is fundamentalist-- Palestinian Arabic fundamentalism. Yet one may judge for themselves which, of the two, is based on moral right, and which is based on hatred. 

[zolaliz]

Trans v terf discourse:

Hey so I wanted to make a post of my own about the whole terf discourse thing I stumbled upon yesterday and the post I made out of spite today (which I took down, because it was a mistake, and if you saw it I truly, genuinely apologize) and explain a little bit more calmly about the whole thing, about where I'm coming from

Basically I happened upon the account belonging to @/redkatherinee and saw some art that really.. had me shaken up, I guess. It was disturbing, and i felt sick in a way I haven't in a long time. Now I myself am not trans. But I'm going to come out and say that I support trans women, because 1.) I am not ashamed of this, and would never be, and 2.) it's gonna be kinda vital to my whole conversation here. If you are a terf, (trans exclusionary radical feminist for anyone who doesn't know) you might read the sentence before this one and immediately think of my opinion as invalid. You're might (or might not, I don't know) not even bother to read the rest of this. You might start gearing up counter arguments before I even start with my point. That's okay. I am not looking for a fight here. I just want to explain my point of view. If you don't want to listen, if you don't care, if you think I'm wrong, I'm going to politely ask that you don't let me know about it. If you're looking to talk, I'm going to be cautiously open to that. But keep in mind I know the difference between the approaches of someone looking to talk and someone looking to fight. So if you want to send hate or anything else, please refrain. Just as I am going to try to refrain from insulting anybody with this post. Because that's not my intention here. And if I do, I'm sorry.

I'm going to talk about two of @/redkatherinee's art pieces in particular. One displays a witch with a cauldron, with hands reaching out of the boiling liquid, with trans flag bracelets on their wrists. The other displays a women holding a bloodied pie, with eye balls inside it, and a caption that says "terfs literally eat transwomen". Both are drawn in satire. I do believe they were drawn for the purpose of satire, and upon further reading, found out they were drawn because the artist wanted to illustrate how trans supporters and trans people view terfs. Even if they were drawn for satirical purposes, it does not make these images okay. Far from it.

I've always disagreed with terf's stance on transwomen, how they treat them and view them, but I've never seen this hate so openly displayed. Because it wasn't the images that disturbed me, not exactly. It was how I imagined a transwoman stumbling upon them. Maybe this isn't something a terf can empathize with, as some terfs don't see trans women as worthy of empathy, but please try.

If I were a trans woman I would feel beyond despised, I'd feel scared and panicked over how much hatred someone could have to construct those images. To put time and effort into them. The whole thing feels wildly out of hand, but if I had stumbled across those posts as a trans woman, especially without any context provided in the captions, without any context of why the artist drew those (and honestly, even with the context), I'd feel like hiding. I'd feel scared of how someone could have so much hatred towards me. I'd feel angry and start hating in return.

Terfs argue that not all transwomen are good people, and therefore should not be supported. But the truth of this is people can be bad, regardless of sexual orientation, identity, background, opinion. Not all people are good, but that shouldn't mean we stop supporting the ones that are.

For those who say that terfs get hatred and death and rape threats, I am here to say that none of that is okay. Your beliefs do not give others the excuse to be nasty to you. Me included. But you must understand that when you tell others you believe transwomen are rapists and murderers and horrible people, people that don't deserve respect, their first instinct is to lash out (as was mine). It doesn't excuse the behavior, merely explains it.

But you have to understand that this behavior is provoked by someone telling them that their existence is invalid, that it automatically makes them something they may not be. And telling a trans person that they shouldn't exist, that they are wrong, that they are something they aren't- that behavior is inexcusable too.The same way you may feel about people hating terfs, sending them death threats, rape threats, and worse- is what others feel like when they see you excluding trans people and telling people that they don't deserve to exist in the gender they identify with, that they are pedophiles and rapists and murderers themselves. It makes them angry and defensive and scared. It makes them sick and cruel and irrational. It continues the cycle of hate.

But you see the biggest difference between the hate terfs receive and the hate trans people receive is that terfs receive hate because of their beliefs, while trans people receive hate because of their identity. You can change one's beliefs, but no one can change who they are . Trans women are hated because of who they are, their existence, and by excluding them, by targeting them and discriminating against them, you receive hate for your beliefs. Because your beliefs harm others.

Please understand, if you are a terf, in the same way you most likely cannot change your opinions of trans women, these women also can't change who they are. That's right, these women can not change who they are. They aren't men in skirts. They aren't monsters. Because monsters can be monsters regardless of identity or gender, so saying that they are a monster because they are trans is absurd. I wouldn't insult a whole religion for the few who use it to promote hate and ignorance. The actions of some don't speak for the actions for everybody. Everyone, in their own way, is only trying to get by. To live their life as they identify.

Now to people who violently hate on terfs, I was you about six hours ago. Through writing this and after writing this I realized hate isn't the way to approach this. Hate should never be a way to approach anything. Because how on earth do you expect people to even consider your opinion if you approach it with hate? So the telling them to kill themselves and jump off a bridge and die and all that horrible shit, that needs to stop. These are humans, no matter how different their opinions are. No matter how harmful their opinions are. Hurting them back won't help, even if that's your first instinct (as it was mine.)(to be clear though I've never sent a terf a death threat or anything similar). I get it, okay, I really do, but that's not the right way to go about this. This isn't saying that terfs are in the right, or that the hate they receive is anything compared to the decades of discrimination, violence, and worse that trans women have received, but sending them hate won't make the situation any better.

It's exhausting going about it this way and anger and anonymous hate is easier and quicker and makes you feel better- but it won't solve anything.

So to everyone, trans supporters and terfs and trans people themselves- we're all so eager to go at each other's throats, but to take a step back and talk, that could accomplish a lot more. Terfs; maybe a trans woman won't ever be a woman to you, but the least you can do is try and remember that they are a human being. That they aren't defined by anyone else's actions except their own. Trans supporters; you aren't doing the trans people you support any favors by telling terfs to go kill themselves, by calling them disgusting. It comes off badly on the people you're trying to defend. And trans women; I know it's difficult, and I know some terfs won't even give you the time of day- or worse, they do, and they target and harass you. They hate you for your existence, which isn't something you can change (or ever should have to change). So I'm not going to tell you you have to be understanding of people who want you gone, who don't respect you. Talk to them as you see fit, and if they can't talk to you like you're a human, that's on them, and I'm sorry that it being on them doesn't mend the damage done to you by talking to them or being targeted by them.

Respect goes a long way on either end. Stop the death threats, rape threats, suggestions of suicide, exclusion, targeting, and worse.

Hate really doesn't give anyone the high ground. But talking? Talking can help some people reach a middle ground.

[leam1983]

Can I chime in, as a Québécois?

I'll start by saying that the bill promoting non-denominational appearances is one of the most widely misunderstood, misreferred and misapplied portions of our code of laws in recent years. To make sense of a few things, we have to go back to the Quiet Revolution of the sixties.

So. We've just elected the Parti Québécois for the first time, hippies are en vogue and we're jazzed about having our own Francophone university campus. In the years that preceded, the Francophone minority pushed off the yoke of cultural oppression the Anglophone majority had enforced and asserted itself within the province's borders. On the one hand, this is entirely comparable to the Black community's advances, both here and in the US. On the other, our seizing the reins of the province opened up the floodgates for an unfortunate amount of racism and xenophobia. The same people we once counted as allies started to push exclusionary politics. You've heard it all before, just replace America with Quebec and Americans with French-Canadians. For decades, things simmered between the exclusionary branches and the Progressive elite, which mostly kept to Montreal's borders.

Then, 9/11 happened. Immigration targets shifted, with less newcomers hailing from already Francophone parts of the world. Some of the previous regular points of origins also began to lose their Francophone distinctiveness, like Vietnam. More and more people started coming in from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan or India, along with others from the former Soviet Bloc. Countries where English often serves as the dominating second language.

For most of us Progressives, that wasn't an issue. For others, and especially in more remote corners of the province (e.g. Hérouxville), where cultural melting-pots weren't a frequent occurrence, these newcomers were perceived as a threat. What started as memeable material along the lines of backwoods locals displaying the breadth of their ignorance in hilariously full view of the public (my French-speaking buddies will remember the Pineault-Caron saga) eventually became rising concern that made its way to talk radios in city centers. Before long, there was an obvious need to legislate matters before things would further escalate. A few short weeks before the Non-Denominational Bill passed in its first form, we'd already started to see more obvious hate crimes targeting Muslim women.

The public discourse was as polarized as you'd imagine. In practice, the bill was designed in order to alleviate social tensions. Everyone of a religious denomination would be required to keep identifiable tokens to a minimum, at least in public. As you can expect, most groups with headgear or material to carry in relation with their faith had reservations. Things became so muddled a commission was called (The Bouchard-Taylor Commission), where several amongst us locals unfortunately displayed the scope of our ignorance and bigotry. Others stepped up with legitimate concerns, largely regarding workplace-safety issues in very specific cases. If Canada's only Sikh hockey team had to design specialized helmets to wedge on top of their turbans to comply with medical standards, then Sikh contractors or female Muslim phone technicians would be required by law to find ways to make their headdress and protective equipment coexist.

As you can expect, those with legitimate concerns got swamped out by idiots clamoring their need to "protect their kids" or to "protect freedom of speech by guaranteeing an Atheist educational background to their kids".

I'm an Atheist myself, but I'll never condone anyone who thinks unbelief needs to be aggressively defended. Unbelief should be passive and kind by default, but that's beside the point.

The years passed, we saw Bush come on and then lose to Obama, we saw Paul Martin lose out to Stephen Harper and Harper lose out to Trudeau, Pauline Marois' Parti Québécois lost to François Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec - and at the start, the CAQ looked poised to have more of a hardline policy than the PQ. For Legault's first mandate, we saw one or two inklings of that, but the migrant crisis in Syria made any sweeping reforms difficult to implement. The CAQ's initially right-leaning program was barely touched on, largely.

What took those like me by surprise, honestly, was the CAQ rejiggering its cabinet shortly before the pandemic, and appointing Jean-François Roberge as the Minister of Education. If you don't know, Roberge slants left on most sociopolitical issues but takes a hard right like several of the province's intelligentsia, when language issues are concerned. His discourse isn't that far off from Impératif Français', which is that in Quebec, the service industry should primarily be operated in Molière's tongue.

Okay, fair enough, right?

Now, here's the kicker: even up here, most of us dislike his take on Muslim teachers. Most of us have no issue whatsoever with hijabi taking teaching positions. I wouldn't have even cared if some of the headscarf-wearing TA's I've worked with had shown up in full niquab. It's true that you'll find hicks railing against "Bin Ladens" teaching kids, but these are in small, vocal and largely impotent groups.

I'm a Montrealer by birth. I grew up saying bonjour, hello, Sak Pase, Aleikum Salaam and Shalom. I speak French and English and can get through basic pleasantries in Haitian Creole, Spanish, Hebrew, Dari, Farsi and Mandarin. I wouldn't count myself more than bilingual, however, because most of everyone I've spoken to spoke either French or English.

If you're looking at a target to vent, cut Montreal, the Eastern Townships and the Outaouais regions out of the map. I'm a Lovecraft fan and, well, Innsmouth-en-Québec is very much a graspable concept if you've traveled past Rivière-du-Loup. Add to that the fact that industrialization and mass immigration are both fairly recent concepts, and you've got bigoted and fearful unilingual grandparents living beside and voting against their more educated and cosmopolitan grandchildren.

I should know: I love my grandmother to bits, but she unquestionably is one Hell of a black-hearted and bigoted bitch towards anyone who doesn't especially look Caucasian.

So please, don't buy into the trend of packing all of us into Roberge's delusions, I sure as shit don't buy into the fallacy of all Americans being gun-toting nimrods with a hard-on for mass genocide.

Why can’t women just dress how they want ffs