#queer feminism

[wolfbirdgirl]

IDC what anyone else says, becoming more of a transfeminist has only made me MORE convinced that transmasc people have it hard too. it is one of the axioms of feminism that women are allowed to aspire to the aesthetics of masculinity as long as they never actually achieve it, and for men to aspire to femininity is sacrilege. and you see that in the way media portrays transmasc and transfem characters. Transmasc characters are always trying to be masculine as a front. they talk with deep voices, hang out with "the guys". but they are never allowed to actually achieve it. they can never be muscular. they can never be assertive. they can never have facial hair. They must always be short and soft. Conversely, trans women must NEVER have any hint that they are AMAB. they also cannot have facial hair, or body hair. Their voices must always be high and lilting, but in that way that's immediately clockable so no one could mistake them for a ""real"" woman. they cannot be strong or aggressive or anything even vaguely associated with men. Or, alternatively, if they're transfem nonbinary, they're just gay men with colorful hair, since everybody knows gay men are basically just women already. And of course, masc lesbians aren't real, don't worry straight men. a butch is just what you call a conventionally attractive woman wearing a sports jersey. At the end of the day, queer people of all types are accepted only as long as we can be relegated to the category of "Feminine but weird". That way, none of us can ever be any threat to the sanctity of the Holy Masculine. None of us are men or have anything to do with men. And while we squabble over who has it the worst, the patriarchy lives on.

[boreal-sea]

I'm going to say it again:

"Men are dangerous" is 100% patriarchal rhetoric.

The patriarchy does everything it can to train men to be dangerous. It creates a toxic version of masculinity that only profits and privileges men who choose to be dangerous. It does everything it can to put men into positions where they can be dangerous.

Which means that danger is artificially constructed.

Men are not dangerous because they're male. Men are not dangerous because they're masculine. Masculinity and manhood are not dangerous things.

The dangerous version of masculinity sold by the patriarchy is a social construct that can, in fact, be opted out of. Men and masculine people can construct a masculinity that is not toxic, that does not promote violence, that is centered around healthy relationships and communication and helping others.

Building a healthy, vibrant vision of masculinity is absolutely a part of feminism. I'm not saying it needs to be done by women - do not twist this into a claim that I'm attempting to burden women with remaking masculinity. Men can be feminists. Men who are feminists are eager and willing and actively taking part in the act of ripping masculinity away from the patriarchy and reforming it into something new.

[tekra-brings-the-rain]

One of my problems with white feminism is the fact that it doesn’t focus on dismantling systems of exploitation, but instead aims to be part of those structures, creating a concept of ‘winning’ at the capitalistic power system, which is designed to oppress. For example, female CEOs are often used as an example of success, which is basing how ‘feminist’ an organization/person/society is by how well it/they perform under capitalism.

This can also work in other ways as well, such as with queer and trans representation centering those who are successful only in a way that follows the path laid out by the current system.

All liberation will only work if you leave the capitalistic framework.

This kind of feminism had its place in history (think the suffragette movement) but we need to move forwards for meaningful change.

[our-queer-experience]

i just found this awesome source- they’re called grabbing back and they’re an intersectional feminist website full of articles on all sorts of feminist topics with the goal of making information from essays to word definitions to interviews with black and intersectional feminists. im currently looking for a dictionary deffiniton of medical misogyny and they were the first that pop up and they look awesome. unfortunetly they dont have much about trans men and mascs within feminism, or antitransmasculinity/antibutchness, but they look fairly recent and that’s kinda something i’ve come to expect. go check them out!

[starport-rodeo]

the barbie movie honestly changed me as a person. the message of never truly being able to genuinely feel good about yourself because it’s always either too slutty or too prudish, too skinny or too fat, too happy or never happy enough. i have never felt comfortable in my own skin or pretty enough to try hard to impress others. but let me tell you, i’ve never felt so happy to walk out in public in my little pink skirt and brightly colored makeup to see a movie about a doll in the real world. finally understanding my feminine side and embracing it for the first time in a really long time without giving a shit about how others will see me.

[bog-bitch]

Heartbreaking: The Feminist Post You Were About To Reblog Was Made By a TERF

[escarghosted]

[queenofthecats]

Just wanted to say, I think I’m on the wrong side of tumblr. Why do some of y’all act like lesbians are drooling but forcing themselves not to sleep with men and male aligned people?

Lesbians are not into men, we are into: cis-women, trans-women, non-binary people, gender-fluid people, and labels similar

We are not into: men (trans and cis)

(Some lesbians have crushes on fictional men, but not real men. I’m not talking about them)

Guys, y’all don’t have to use labels, it’s ok not to. It’s ok to not know, or to feel like a label doesn’t exactly describe you. You can go by queer, but please stop using the term lesbian. You can create new terms and everything, but this was originally made for non-men to describe their attraction to non-men.

Some people feel comfortable with labels, not everybody wants to be outside of the label. I respect you guys who don’t go by labels, so please just respect people who do.

It’s completely okay to not have a label, or to create a new one. You can go by queer, and that’s okay.

I like having a box for me to relate to other people, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Just please respect lesbians space.

It feels lesphobic to identify as a man and still call yourself a lesbian, or to date men in the present and do it? Not everybody is attracted to men, this is the label that represents that. Please respect us. Maybe a different term would fit for you, or again, you don’t have to use a term. Can y’all please just stop trying to include men in lesbianism? This is the whole point of being a lesbian. You’re not a lesbian if you’re not a non-man liking non-men. You’re either a straight guy or bi/pan or just generally queer.

[boreal-sea]

Fellow queer folks who associate with masculinity, butchness, and/or manhood at least part of the time:

We're subverting something really big: the patriarchy itself. The concepts of masculinity, manhood, and privilege. Our existence is extremely disruptive to the status quo.

That's going to cause a lot of friction. We are asking people to unlearn the entire male/female & man/woman binary of privilege. Many people are trying to force us into the way privilege works under the patriarchy and that simply doesn't work, because we don't fit into that framework. This is why people are trying to assign a hierarchy of privilege to trans people based on whether or not they "present masculine" or "present feminine", or trying to flip privilege based on sex assigned at birth to be the inverse of how things are under the patriarchy, etc. They're just reinventing the patriarchy and gender binaries though! None of that makes sense from a queer perspective, but breaking free of the mindset of the patriarchal gendered privilege hierarchy is difficult!

I know none of us signed up to be the vanguard of a social revolution, but we're in this churning ocean together, so we've got to stick with each other.

This message is for all kinds of queer folks! If you feel this is for you, then it is for you!!

[fuzzyleapfrog]

Das wäre nett.

[pumpacti0n]

[activistwitch]

Leaving Meta, find me here on Tumblr, BSky and YouTube

Following Mark Zuckerberg statement concomitantly to the instalment of Donald Trump as 47th President of the USA, I cannot in good conscience continue to be counted as a Meta user and be part of the numbers they sell to advertisers. Therefore I aim to leave Instagram and WhatsApp by the end of 2025, having already left Facebook and Twitter / X in the past.

As a person living at the crossroads of multiple marginalisations (Fat, Queer, Autistic Immigrant Pagan of Colour) I thought it was obvious how taking up arms in witchcraft means rebelling to the system, means activism, means planting the seeds of revolution. We plant seeds of trees we might never sit in the shade of and that's ok.

While individuals might still disappoint this expectation, the more I learn the more I think witchcraft and community, -not just socialism per se- is the antithesis of capitalism. Caliban and The Witch by Silvia Federici Is definitely re-radicalising me.

With Trump getting ratified as US president for the next 4 years and already seeing the insanity of Project 2025 in action with Meta getting rid of fact checking and Diversity programs being ended, I urge you to understand and take action from little as educating yourself.

Capitalism, Billionaires, anything for profit including Healthcare and keeping homeless going even when ending it would cost governments less are all part of threats used to force anyone who has to work for survival to bend their head.

capitalism is NOT the natural system and is constantly enforced with violence YOU are at the receiving end of. Billionaires concentrated media ownership to serve you the same news to tell you to hate on those lower than you and prevent class consciousness and solidaritty.

Billionaires and the Right in general have internal tolerance for each other as long as they all worked towards oppression. On the left side we manage to get divided. I implore you to find class solidarity and redirect your efforts towards the break down of capitalist slavery.

Activist Witch - Ysha (she/they)

on Tumblr activistwitch.tumblr.com

On BlueSky activistwitch.bsky.social‬

On Youtube youtube.com/@ActivistWitch

On Ko-Fi ko-fi.com/activistwitch

[satedsaint]

hearing from young people that they get infinitely more respect when they're seen as a man and experiencing that myself when perceived as male vs female and also experiencing the scorn given to people who are sexed as "female" but appear to be masculine or even just gender non-conforming.

seeing people come away with the idea that this is a natural state of being and the reason we do not comply with sexist and misogynist stereotypes is not because they're not true but because we're not women. the idea that there's this majority of cis women who ARE women and possess some feature or characteristic that makes them Woman, not female, the idea that it's their choice to participate in systems of gender, the idea in some cases that it's their fault for the harm and abuse they experience under these systems of gender and heteronormativity. "well she dated a man she must have known what was coming." disdain for people regarded as "women".

hatred towards anyone of any sex who breaks the gender and sex binary and disrespect towards anyone attempting to work all of this out. the many trans people i know telling me it's not as simple as "trans man" or "trans woman" but the effort it takes to explain that is always too much so they must present a simplified version of themselves, within the boundaries of gender, in order to participate in society. and i sit here and wonder how we're ever going to get out of this

[lezbi0nic]

It's always kinda funny to me when ppl say stuff like "why aren't feminists talking about THIS!" and the bad thing they're referring to has 100% been discussed by feminists before lol

[ftm-wear]

For real: Passing

“In the simple sense, a portrait of a man shows us the man as a picture – that is, as a flat piece of paper with clusters of tones from a light-sensitive emulsion. [The portrait] shows the man sitting at a piano. In a more complex way, however, […] as a brilliant man, or a profound man […]. The more complex ‘as’ requires interpretation.”

-Terry Barrett

The portrait Barrett describes also shows the man ‘as’ a man, but this no less “complex ‘as’” for him seems to be beyond interpretation. It is part of “the simple sense” of the photograph. He takes for granted that there was “a man” before the lens, that this man is now shown as a “flat piece of paper,” and the complex process of photographic signification only goes so far as to occasion different interpretations like “brilliant” or “profound man.” In other words, gender is what’s real in this photograph. In the passing moment captured in the photograph (therefore in a sense no longer passing), what’s passing is the depicted. Just like there remains something real in photographs for viewers, a stubborn reality-effect, gender attribution in Western culture still attempts to read pronouns off bodies, despite the linguistic turn, feminist and queer theorizing, surgical and hormonal bodily modification, intersex activism, and all kinds of gender-bending and transgressions. Passing for real, gendered realness, certain “kind of truths about gender” are still more often than not indispensable to entering the sphere of subjectivity and recognition. In order to be able to discuss how these issues pertain to FTM-bodies in transgender photography in chapter 3, some preliminary conceptual groundwork is needed.

The term passing as part of U.S.-American everyday parlance and as a concept in American Studies discourse originated with racial passing, and has since in both discursive arenas been applied to other presumed ‘stable’ (essentialized) identity categories “including class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as gender.” While all of these passings are passings, they are not identical. Passing as a conceptual term, I am arguing, needs to be explicitly fine-tuned to its specific applications, and is unproductive, if all passings are thought of as analogies of racial passing. Henry Rubin alerts us to the multidimensionality of the “economy of realness” when he writes that

[t]here are so many ways to participate in the economy of realness, even if your body is not white or your sexuality is deviant or your size does not measure up or you cannot afford to keep your wife at home.

The need for fine-tuning then emerges not least because one might be a transsexual woman also passing for white. Many theoretical concerns and observations doubtlessly apply to various forms of passing, for instance that “both the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction.” Consequently, the following discussion of passing in relation to (trans-)gender will at times both draw from more general considerations and lead to insights that might be transferable. But this is merely coincidental to my main purpose here of fine-tuning passing to an analysis of FTM-bodies in transgender photography, and explicating which questions, answers, or problems it might raise.

Consider the following quote as an example of sweeping or simplistic generalizations from certain forms of passing to all:

In the most general way, it is passing when people effectively present themselves as other than who they understand themselves to be. […] Who they understand themselves to be deliberately sidesteps a more complicated discourse over Who they are (and who or what determines who we are anyway?) or even the less complicated Who others see them as or even Who they have become. Passing never feels natural. It is a second skin that never adheres.

In relation to trans*, Kroeger’s journalistic working definition is exceedingly useless even at first sight. For transgender subjects at least, passing more often than not means precisely presenting as “who they understand themselves to be.” If in a ‘classic’ transsexual narrative, “[p]assing means to live successfully in the gender of choice, to be accepted as a ‘natural’ member of that gender,” passing is prompted by a desire to “feel natural,” or at least to enjoy the privileges that come with it. When Kroeger claims that passing “never feels natural,” she assumes that something else does, and overlooks the ways in which relations to ‘the natural’ can be vexed and uneasy, partly because they are also a matter of outward recognition and acceptance. And while transgender passing might, as e.g. the title of Jay Prosser’s seminal book Second Skins attests, be construed as a “second skin,” it is then usually the first skin that is seen as having failed to adhere in meaningful ways. Apparently, the “more complicated discourse” of the relation between passing and being that Kroeger wants to sidestep cannot be so easily evaded. Following the theoretical unraveling of any “reality of gender” by Judith Butler and others, it has become clear that

“[t]here is no ‘other’ side, no ‘opposite’ sex, no natural divide to be spanned by surgery, by disguise, by passing. We all pass or we don’t, we all wear our drag.”

SOURCE