#sad too that it was about a terf so the whole thing was about cis men and trans women

[eva-does-her-best]

Saw a post about trans bathroom bans and comparing it to when there were white only bathrooms, and there was a bunch of people saying that it was racist to make that comparison and one person even tried to say that it was racist because intersectionality? Idk what that reasoning was, but anyway, I checked their profiles and-

Would you look at that, none of them were black.

Can people. stop. talking over other minorities? You are allowed to support what the minorities say and promote it, you should in fact do that. What you should not do is act as if you could be their voice, as if your words were theirs or you knew better.

Stop with the savior complex, don't disrespect black voices.

[blubushie]

radfems make me so sad because some of their ideas about things like pornography or how men and women are socialized a specific way due to deep rooted misogyny ARE interesting but then you start hearing them out and they start being transphobic and allergic to intersectionality and it just feels like they havent heard the experiences of any woman that isnt white and cis

and feminist writers that arent radical feminists have talked about these same things that are interesting while having a grip on reality so🤷‍♂️

No literally

I can agree on some things (especially the porn thing—s'why I don't watch it) but then they immediately lose me with the whole "men are inherently bad" and "men" is anyone with a penis so naturally this extends to trans women too. You cannot be a radfem without being a terf, there's no separating them because the core of radfem belief is "males are biologically predisposed to being Bad and will always harm females"

"Allergic to intersectionality" is a new one for me and I'll be using that from now on cuz it's so true

[splitfocusdiopter]

Feeling gender critical about The Craft Legacy (2020)

For my part, I actually quite enjoy seeing horror classics remade by young women directors. I guess I was the only one who genuinely liked Carrie (2013). So I went into watching The Craft Legacy feeling, not exactly excited, but at least a bit hopeful that it would have something fresh and insightful to say about teenage girls and dark powers. But, um, no?

I didn’t necessarily have a problem with one of the girls being trans. The entire movie felt like it was pandering to tumblr children, anyway, so I guess that would have been just another thing there. I’d probably have had no feelings about that whatsoever, but something about the way they handled it – Well, it just absolutely chafed me. Call me a terf, but it did.

The two times the character’s transness comes up are both about the other girls talking about female bodies and experiences, only to be 1) abrasively silenced with ”*I* can’t relate to that” and 2) silenced and chastised and made to apologize and recite ”trans girls have magic too!”. Like what. For a movie trying so very hard to be feminist, how the hell aren’t these girls allowed to talk about their own physical reality amongst themselves for one gd second without being told to shut up? They established that menstruation was something to be mocked and stigmatized in the universe of the movie, so why couldn’t the girls bond over that trauma? Why couldn’t the girls discuss pregnancy and childbirth as things that might or might not be part of their future? How do you as a female writer/director look at all this and think it’s totally fine, woke, enlightened, progressive, as it should be? 

Really, if one of the girls had been a ‘”cis” girl  (yeah, no, I actually don’t believe women or girls identify with their oppression even if they don’t decide to call themselves something else) who for some reason, for example, knew she wouldn’t be able to have biological children of her own? Would a female witch then have pressured other female witches to not even mention the fact that the female body is generally capable of gestation and giving birth? Somehow I just don’t think so. Somehow I feel only a whole-ass entitled male would be in a friend group with females and make them accommodate him instead of genuinely listening to them, supporting them, and at the very least trying to empathize with them even about things that aren’t part of his personal life experience. And that’s just so sad. 

But, of course, they then kind of shot themselves in the leg with the whole “trans girls have magic too!” spiel once it was revealed that indeed David Duchovny was the big bad. “Your creepy stepfather has magic too!” Go figure.

[casperillion]

i cant post the orignial context because i think op blocked me but thats fine, i just want to air my thoughts and tbh if theyre not looking anymore im happier abt that.

to summarise a little bit of what this is abt, i replied to an article that very much implied that all trans men are loud misogynists, especially towards trans women which is not something i agree with. my reasons for not agreeing with this is very much based on my real world and online experiences of growing up in the queer community with many trans people around me. I stated that i dont think that misogynistic trans men (which look, i know they exist, ive met them) should be considered the majority and on top of that it feels very weird to focus so heavily on that when trans men do not hold a position of power over other trans people, especially not systematically.

to be fair to op i didnt explain this as clearly as i could originally since my first response to the article was very much an emotional response.

anyway op told me the world would be better off without me in it and that i should kill myself, that im a transmisogynist, and that im the reason they hate that theyre trans masc. someone else told them to back off bc while they agreed with op they thought it was a bit fucked up to say that, i responded to them and clarified my points and this person also ended up agreeing with me.

op then messaged me privately with this

okay context done here are my thoughts, i'll try to split this up so its a bit easier to read Original point

so for this one, trans men and our issues are very often erased or only ever brought up as an after thought. I dont feel like i need to explain why erasure is bad but the biggest issue i find with this is lack of resources and lack of coverage or even knowledge about the shit trans men deal with in a cisnormativity society.

this article was rough for me to read because it described every trans man that the writer had met as someone who became a loud misogynist and the conclusion was that all trans men were that way, if not openly then secretly. I know this is not the case because i know many trans men and trans masculine people, many of those men are very passionate supporters of trans women, nb people, and cis women. honestly i think these experiences say more about the person who wrote the article than trans men as a whole.

this attitude is used by TERFs to harass trans men who they see as "traitors" and its where i see this sort of thing most often. its very weird to be this focused on this subject especially without discussing how complex being trans masculine is.

its kinda hard to put everything into words, i'll add on more when i remember it later

To the person who posted the article that is now harassing me

im not gonna name them but looking through thier blog actually... made me really sad. they are the type of people that have fallen victim to this kind of thing. they hate men, and they hate themselves even more for being one.

its so sad to me that they see themself like that, its kinda hard to even know if theres a way i can help them, i want to though. even though they were incredible weird towards me.

digression into them being weird actually bc ive been thinking abt it.

they were very quick to judge who i am as a person without knowing anything about me, made a lot of assumptions that arent true. it felt a lot like projection because like?? idk its wild to doubt that i care about my close friends???? you dont know any of us?? you dont even know what community i come from?? i know trans women from like, actually idk the youngest age but roughly from 20 years old to 40+, most of the trans men i know are in their 20s, and i dont even know what the range for nb people i know is because ive met too many and i stopped keeping track. I've lived with other trans people in person of all genres (idk i dont have a better word) , ive volunteered in places where ive met and helped trans women get back on their feet while experiencing financial hardship. as a teenager i was involved in creating safe spaces for trans and gnc teens in my city to meet each other and hang out. less relevant but ive also be outright told by women im close with that they value my perspective when we have discussions about misogyny, actually that was literally 2 nights ago while we were discussing the best way to create a safe space for women and trans fems. obviously op knows none of this but its wild that they just.. assumed so much and decided that my voice was not important or worth listening to.

[manic-pixie-dick-girl]

I am happy trans men and other trans mascs are largely welcomed and celebrated in the lesbian communities I'm a part of. Genuinely. To throw them out and ignore that these people were part of our community until they asked us to refer to them with a different pronoun would be awful. I want lesbian spaces to be a safe and welcoming space for trans mascs.

But. When I see trans masculine ppl celebrated by lesbians like happens in communities I'm in semi-frequently, a little part of me is resentful. Jealous, even. Because I don't see trans lesbians get the same treatment. I don't see cis lesbians holding up and celebrating their trans sisters like they do their brothers. Women like me aren't really visible in lesbian communities I'm in. And that hurts.

Seeing trans men celebrated by lesbians rubs salt into the wound. Because I think where is that excitement for people like me? People who are or should be considered at least as much lesbians as trans masc lesbians? Why do you make space for them, and not us?

I'm not saying stop making space for trans men in lesbian communities. That would be bad. I want more trans inclusivity not less. I am just asking that trans lesbians are helped to feel welcome.

[gulfportofficial]

Crybullying a trans woman into fucking hospital because she wrote a complicated work about trans fem hurt and insecurities and how those get weaponized in a military industrial world which he was too stupid to understand is actually the latest in a long line of Ana Mardoll being a transmisogynist.  And being stupid as well, but the fact that Ana is really fantastically stupid for someone who prides himself on being the smartest specialist thinker on Earth* is not really relevant to this rant. (Warning: rant is in bad English but I don’t care).

Ana is and has always been an “I would never!!!! How dare you hurt me this way!!!! I am a TERF-hating defender of trans womankind!” transmisogynist AND he is still somehow managing to get a contingent of uwus being like “oh poor babu. He is sad and disabled and trans, you cannot bully him for working at a weapons contractor for 15 years even if he DID spend that entire time lecturing everyone else about the horrible REAL VIOLENCE** they were doing by things such as... saying cishet because it might make a cis straight demiromantic invalid and so in order to stop doing VIOLENCE WITH OUR WORDS we should instead say “unqueer”***... like some kind of one-very-stupid-person panopticon tower.”  Actually, “still somehow get a contingent” is redundant. That literally IS the transmisogyny. People will bully the shit out of a trans woman for the slightest thing, especially if she has something complicated to say and doesn’t want to spoonfeed it to escapist babies like Ana “reading is ableist” Mardoll. But they will handhold and defend escapist babies like Ana “French chef stereotypes are dehumanizing racism” Mardoll specifically because they’re NOT trans women. Anyway, since I have hated his work for a loooooong time, I would just like to say that I remember Ana: 

- before he settled on his boy identity, he ID’d for a long time as a “trans woman” and “trans femme” - as in, he was an AFAB person who still felt like a woman, but also felt trans. He did this and did this over again until, according to him, literally told to stop by transfem friends.  - CONSTANTLY centered/centers himself in ALL trans issues, saying things like “TERFS hate trans people like me.” Which like, no, sorry. Yes, TERF shit impacts all trans people. Yes, they do say horrible, invalidating, aimed-at-legislative-restriction things about afab trans people. But their rhetoric about that is about “saving poor misguided girls”. TERFS HATE TRANS WOMEN very specifically. The vitriol, the nastiness, the emailing people’s bosses to out them, making “feminist” websites with photos calling them predators... that’s all for trans women, baby.  - Look, maybe you think this isn’t so bad, but I think it’s self-victimizing shit and I feel like his whole thing of constantly feeling “invalid” and “not queer enough” and other such horseshit means he’s incapable of putting his feelings aside to focus on the material needs of our community.  - Ana is king of tenderqueer shit. You know, being a soft boy baby at age 40+ or whatever. More thoughtful people than I have written a lot about how tenderizing transness to the extent people who do has a lot of run-on effects, including making trans men afraid of the effects of gender affirming care such as hormones; being really racist because being “uwu goblin gender” is really... not always as accessible to anyone who isn’t white; being TRANSMISOGYNISTIC as is relevant here. Fetishizing being a soft smol bean and hating anything hard or critical or big or strong... it’s not a 1:1 but it often has the effect of weaponizing being afab and framing trans women as unwelcome and scary once again, and I think we can see that in how Ana does his thing...   - In that holy shit crybullying itself (what a perfect word for the exact crazy-making wobbling jelly thing he does) being so SAD and SCARED and HURT like a poor little creature who didn’t MEAN to say anything bad he just is not NEUROTYPICAL while a BIG MEAN HURTFUL ELITIST ABLEIST trans woman has made you feel INVALID and TRIGGERED is such a fucking example of this.  Man, I have like years of examples of Ana just being a complete jello-cube of a person but I’ll just vent this here and cease.  * GOD remember when he wrote about how NLOG as a concept should not be criticized because some girls actually weren’t like other girls, such as fat, queer, and disabled girls. Because no girl has ever been fat, queer, or disabled of course. And all of those “other girls” are just a hive mind of skinny straight ablebodiedness. Top feminist analysis, Ana “the little mermaid is an otherkin allegory” Mardoll. 

** HE. WORKS. FOR. LOCKHEED. MARTIN. and HAS. DONE. SINCE. THE BUSH. ADMINISTRATION.

*** Actual example. 

[rinadragomir]

Okay let's talk about it🤗✨

So Cassandra Clare posted that Fairstairs art yesterday or sth where Cordelia was obviously whitewashed. We all know what art was that🤷🏼‍♀️

So people started being mad about which is obviously fair cause it was our first official chot art and that's what we got. What happened next:

People posted these CJ's arts talking about whitewashing. ⚠️As a person who spent LOTS of years being a part of tsc fandom, I remember that these ones were created around 6 years ago, before the first book came out, cause Cordelia was supposed to be a white girl⚠️And that's what i said. Did i support new fairstairs art? No, but if you don't believe me, you can always read what i said.

⚠️Next thing: i defended CJ saying that it's CC who controls how these characters should be depicted.⚠️Why i did it: cause that person spent years and years creating beautiful arts for this fandom, adding those works to whitewashing post seemed weird.

My fault: i focused my words more on protecting CJ. That's absolutely true, i said that new Fairstairs art is a fckn joke, but for some people who also have emotions, my answer looked like I don't care about the whole point of the post. That's not true at all and for that I really wanna apologize.

⚠️Next thing: people who really know me and cared about me showed me some of CJs arts where Cordelia has a really really dark skin and some of her weird answers about "why cordelia always has different skin colour on different arts" (she didn't take it seriously). AND THEN i saw that CJ is problematic. WHITE PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND NEED TIME TO EDUCATE THEMSELVES DUH and i really appreciate those people who just explained everything. Now i know that it was wrong to defend CJ that time.🤝

Was it too late? Of course it was🤗 Did i say that we deserve new versions of Cordelia AND Alastairs flower cards? Yes, and you can find it. Did people notice? Of course not, it's not that entertaining✨💅Happy Hunger Games🤤

Was i stupid when i started talking about CJ when the post was about CC? YES OF COURSE literally no ones surprised)))))

Am i gonna apologize to those 6-7 people i dont even know (lmao who are they really), who started to send 535842 hate asks to my friends (wishing them death of course?) when i didn't even insult anyone? I'm so sorry you were left without an individual apology letter. It will happen again ❤️

Oh and FUN STORY ABOUT ME BEING TRANSPHOBIC, that's really entertaining 👻

For the record: I DON'T CARE WHO YOU ARE, CIS BOY/GIRL, TRANS BOY/GIRL, NON BINARY, SAD SEAGULL you're always welcomed on this page, it's not a cheap drama channel🤗

So remember that day when that fantastic beasts trailer came out? It's a short story:

I, person who never even watched any of these movies (talking about fb not hp), saw that Mads is playing grindewald. AS A HUGE HANNIBAL STAN ( i love this fandom too much, you don't understand), i was like: lmao mads just can't stop playing evil gay killers🤣😭

And i made a post about it (i didn't even tag hp, only mads, grindewald and hannibal)

BUT UNFORTUNATELY I'M TOO FUNNY😌 so it became popular. That day Mads deleted his inst page and i made a post saying: STOP WISHING HIM DEATH, THAT BITCH ROWLING IS ALL YOURS, SAY IT TO HER CAUSE THAT'S WHAT SHE DESERVES.🤬 People started making posts "one note - one terf dies" and one kid tagged me and told their friends I'm a terf and I was UPSET YOU KNOW but again

As a person who spent lots of time here i just know that justifying yourself is a useless thing, cause people see what they wanna see. They don't understand that some might really commit su*cide. (But not me, you can't hurt me if I don't have a soul😌)

👉This post was made for 3 reasons:

1 - to clarify this situation for those who still don't understand what's going on.📍The thing is: some people who follow me now receive million asks where people wish them death, so if you don't feel safe please just UNFOLLOW ME cause I'm worried. And if you stay, please turn off anon asks for a while, people only send hate when they can hide.

2 - explain what really happened, so you can hear it from me, NOT MY WORDS DISTORTED BY OTHER PEOPLE WHO JUST ENJOY ALL OF THIS~~~

3 - I'm done with my uni homework and i can't find any good new kdrama and i love writing😌But honestly, I'm just too worried about people on here that i really care about, SEND ALL THIS SHIT TO ME, NOT THEM, I'M GONNA ENJOY IT OKAY. I'm not afraid to lose followers it's not the end of the world when you actually have rl friends✨

Please feel free to share your thoughts, any opinion is important 🌼

Love y'all~

[bellanoche-oxo]

one of the things that annoys me the most about the whole jk rowling being a terf is when i show my discomfort, hate and sadness to cis straight ppl who love harry potter (and don't care about jk being a terf bc well i mean ppl tend to not care about discrimination when they aren't the ones being discriminated i guess) and they act as if i was exagereting...

like hey do you think that this doesn't hurt me? do you think harry potter has never meant something to me and i'm just an edgy man who likes to shit on things? i loved harry potter as a kid i have so much slytherin merch that i just have hiden somewhere in my house bc i don't want to ever look at it again but i also don't want to resell bc wtf i don't want to spread that shit too, what do i do? burn it?.

when i was a kid i used to admire jk rowling THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS WERE THE FIRST BOOKS I READ IN MY LIFE LIKE i'm like this bc it fucking hurt to see that i spent so much love and energy on a series created by a woman who hates me and those like me and thinks we are predators or evil or something

[gettin-bi-bi-bi]

Hi, sorry idk where else to send this but…. I resent transmasculine people and idk what to do about it. I dont want to be TERF and I was hoping that you could help me “deconstruct” the things that make me resent them. I am aware that most of the mods of this blog are transmasculine and im sorry, I don’t want to offend either of you.

Anyway, I resent them because i feel “betrayed” by them, like they’re leaving women to deal with misogyny alone (and no, it doesn’t help if they’re also “feminists” because they still ran away from the problems women have to face, like catcalling and being more likely to get r*ped). I don’t like that most of them get away with adquiring male privilege just because they’re trans. I know being trans is not easy and not a choice by anyone of any gender identity but it still feels unfair that they get all the benefits cis men get while women still have to deal with being women all their lives.

They also make me feel bad about being a woman (well, i’m nonbinary…. A nonbinary woman, or demigirl. These are all labels i use for myself, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter since I don’t plan on transitioning or changing my pronouns. I’m basically just a weird cis woman). Like, reading posts about them having to deal with dysphoria makes me feel offended. I know it’s not about *me* but I can’t help it. This is my biggest issue actually, rather than being bitter about the potential privileges they might have for being men (or wanting to pass as men, in the case of many transmasculine people). I feel i can get over the other things easier because the disadvantages of being trans are more than the possible perks of it (for cis people ofc. For trans people it’s not the case obviously). Like, posts about dysphoria or happiness because they don’t longer look like women makes me *extremely sad* and also bitter because they have the liberty to be something else that what they were born as.

I hope all of this makes sense and i hope i didnt offend anyone. I don’t know where else to write this that i wont be insulted :(

You know... what you say is offensive but I am glad you are daring to write it somewhere because this is something that you absolutely have to deal with if you don't want to be an asshole!

You have definitely internalised a loooot of transphobic bullshit and though that's maybe not all your fault, it is certainly your responsibility to work through that and change your mindset. You are doing transmasc people a huge disservice AND yourself, too, because to me it sounds a lot like you are speaking from a place of jealousy and insecurity about your own gender.

Other trans people living their lives and talking about their experiences, their gender dysphoria and euphoria, their transition process and whatever does not take anything away from you. If transmasc stories offend you then ask yourself "what is it in those stories that makes me feel so personally attacked? why does this feel like it is about me?" - maybe that's a good way to star, to be honest. You say you "know it's not about me but I can't help it". Well, maybe some of it is about you and you need to work out what it is and find out what that means for you and your gender.

The fact you say you're "just a weird cis woman" when you also say you are non-binary is a huge indicator to me that you struggle immensely with your own gender identity and the whole coming-out process about that. So advice number 1 would be to get help for that. Talk to other non-binary people, try to get gender counselling if that's available where you are, work through these issues of internalised transphobia that you are very clearly also directing at yourself.

And then you have some big ass unlearning to do about the transphobia you have sucked up. A lot of things you are saying are 100% coming from TERF and radfem circles. Point number 1 is that being a man (cis or trans, doesn't matter) is not a bad thing. Men are not inherently bad people, whether they have been assigned male at birth and always identify as a man or they realised later that they are men. This is an immovable fact that you have to accept. Men are not bad (and by extension: women aren't inherently good and innocent.) If you believe that men are somehow worse people than women by nature then you have bought fully into radfem ideology and gender essentialism and you need to keep shutting that voice down.

And the whole idea that trans men somehow magically have male privilege only works under a very simplistic idea of how privilege works. Do you really think that a trans man is holding the same power in a patriarchal society as cis men? When trans men are also often victims of "corrective rape", in many places don't have access to HRT or gender-affirmative surgery or can only legally change their name and gender if they get sterilised. Do you genuinely think this is what privilege looks like? Educate yourself about the struggles that transmasculine people go through. And not just all the negative shit. Also learn about how they understand gender and masculinity. Read their stories and learn what manhood means to them. Learn about ways to be masculine outside of toxic masculinity and see that being a man has just as much potential to be good and beautiful as being a woman.

Trans men don't "betray" anyone by "leaving womanhood". I, as a cis woman, don't feel betrayed by people living their true self and being, living, expressing the gender that they truly are. Trans men are men. And like any person of any gender they have the ability to be feminists or allies, they can be great people or they can be assholes. Every human has the ability to be a misogynist and every human can try their best not to be. This isn't different for any gender. It's a myth (again, created and perpetuated by radfems) that trans men are just ~confused weak lesbians who take the easy way out by becoming men~. If you find yourself believing that narrative then again: you have fallen for radfem talking points.

You need to seriously reflect on where you got all of these ideas about transmasculinity from in the first place. You have got to have picked it up somewhere. I'd take a wild guess and say a lot of that was online (Twitter? Tumblr? tiktok?). Maybe it's time for a radical clear-out of the accounts you follow. Algorithms tend to keep showing you similar things to the content you've already consumed and it's dangerously easy to get radicalised that way. So if you really want to break out of this bigotry - for transmasc people's sake and your own - then think long and good about where the sources are for those beliefs and cut them out! Educate yourself, reflect, reflect, reflect, work on your own gender issues and learn to love yourself and not blame transmascs for your own insecurity.

Maddie

P.S.: I am the only cis person on this blog and of course if any of the other mods want to say something then I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. I also understand if you do not want to chime in though.

[vampish-glamour]

Out of pure curiosity I searched up my URL… found what I was expecting to find lol

As well as blocklists that blogs I interact with were on too lol.

I love this one because I’m glad to be recognized as a certified panphobe :)

I remember this… I reblogged a post about lesbophobia, and because I am in fact a lesbian, I reblogged with commentary on the thing that affects me. And I think I mentioned something about the whole vixenamoric thing and how sad it is that lesbians felt kicked out of our own label and felt the need to make a new one or something… basically I just gave another example of lesbophobia. And the op was like “iM A nOnbInaRy LesBiAn AnD tHiS pOsT iSnT FoR yOu” which was hilarious because a post about lesbophobia by a non lesbian isn’t for an actual lesbian??? Very typical of enby “lesbians” to shun lesbians and talk over us. And transmedicalism isn’t transphobic <3

I love this one too because yes, absolutely, I don’t support people who claim not to be women calling themselves a woman-exclusive label! I’m glad people are picking up on my dislike of people redefining lesbianism.

“GlAm iS A tErF” bitch where 😂 I’m pretty clear about not being a radical feminist, so there’s no radical feminism for me to even exclude trans people from lol. I don’t remember denying a trans vegans “identity” but it was probably a non dysphoric or MOGAI 🙄. AND THE TRANS COW THING OMFG…. As we all know, saying cows probably can’t be trans in the same way humans can be trans, is a popular terf talking point. And I’m pretty damn sure I’ve been arguing that being trans is innate, so idk where they got the idea that I think it’s “laughable” that being trans is innate from. Probably the goddamned trans cows discourse lmao.

“Vaguely denies being a terf”—no, I’ve full stop said I’m not a terf. I’d like to hear these “many terf beliefs” that I apparently agree with that make me a terf. Especially because people seem to think that saying the q word is a slur is a “terf belief”.

And even with the beliefs I hold that radfems may also believe—you can believe certain things and not be part of an ideology. Especially when you don’t agree with the reason why that ideology believes those things.

As far as being cis and having an opinion on trans topics goes… anyone can have an opinion on anything. Yes, even white people with race issues. With trans issues specifically—it’s a scientific matter. It’s not talking about “validity of experiences”, it’s talking about what is based in reality (dysphoric trans people) and what isn’t (“non dysphoric trans people”). And in my case, it’s often talking about how progressive trans activism—as in, the activism that isn’t exactly run by actual trans people so I truly don’t blame actual trans people for this—harms gnc people, especially gnc gay people. How it enforces gender roles (“this little boy likes barbies and dresses so he must be trans!”). How it makes not only trans people look bad, but lgb people too, and ultimately makes us all less accepted.

Sorry for the spiel lol. The last one upset me a bit because it’s just so untrue and honestly offensive.

Anyways… I had a bit of a laugh from these, mostly because it’s so ridiculous that people feel the need to inform people that somebody they don’t like reblogged a post, or that they reblogged from somebody they don’t like. Like imagine if I sent somebody an ask saying “hey just letting you know it looks like a MOGAI reblogs from you sometimes”. Do people really pay attention to this stuff? I don’t.

[janiedean]

Antis are in the r*dfem cult too and it's sad how almost half of an entire generation of young queer people got recruited into that

I mean... the problem is that they infiltrated a lot of spaces when they should have been shut off since the beginning and I really just hope people wake up to how toxic and generally shit they are at some point never mind that they're nowhere near progressive, but the fact that it happened is bad and the thing is that... basically anti-ism and terfism have an entire list of shit in common starting with wanting people to conform to whatever they think is the correct way of thinking, being antikink, being anti sexwork, othering anyone who tells them they're wrong, discouraging critical thinking and mostly wanting to police what people are allowed to like or not, and like that's why all those dumbass posts that were around ages ago like 'ah op was a terf so I'm cp-ing from them so that they don't get traffic' were like the most fucking stupid thing in existence

because like sorry if I go into a rant here but point is: you can't steal stuff from a terf and presume to repost it as an opinion you share because guess what you're still sharing a rdfem opinion which is most likely not harmless - what is going to cp posts from terfs saying all men are a scum of the earth going to accomplish? it's a shit rdfem opinion that you should criticize because it comes from that side of the fence, and it's not like you can say 'ah I disagree with rdfems about trans women/trans people/being gender critical but they're right on everything else' because just that means that automatically they're cutting out of the list of ppl they care of everyone that's not a rich cis(het) mostly white woman and I put (het) in the brackets because then they preach political lesbianism and go around saying wanting to be with men is being brainwashed by the patriarchy and like... that's not a thing you can pick and choose. it's shit thinking. it's like that time I argued with one who said that going back to separate gender schools would be super feminist bc apparently girls performed better in a same gender environment and boys performed worse so it would bridge the gap in society and like

that just shows you don't know how a sexist society works bc if society is sexist it doesn't matter if a woman is more competent than a man I mean didn't the 2016 us election teach ppl anything

separated genders schools means that you don't interact with ppl of the opposite gender your age regularly every day until you're 18 and like... not to be that person but if you don't have friends of the opposite gender then how are you gonna interact with the opposite gender when you're in university? like... all these people say men should be more understanding of women but how can they if they don't talk to any that are not related to them?

where do you send trans ppl in this scenario?

what about lgbt people in general surrounded by possibly homophobic/transphobic classmates?

also those schools tend to be private in general so what if someone can't afford it?

like basically such a thing only favors (in theory) girls who are well-off, not lgbt and I dare say not non-good looking bc I can swear an all-girls school if you don't conform to whatever's the ideal is not the place you wanna spend thirteen years of your life, but hey that's feminist! because we said so! and it sounded good! yeah no, it's not feminist it's like dumbass 50s rhetoric dressed to sound feminist and it's the same for all terf crap - like you can scream that you don't like surrogacy how much you want and it's a thing that should be discussed/regulated, but someone telling me surrogacy is a travesty bc 'motherhood is a fundamental part of femininity' which is what terfs say about it means implying that if you're not a mother you're not a full woman and that if you want to be a surrogate you shouldn't which in one go negates body autonomy (bc surrogacy is also that if someone chooses to do it out of their own free will) and says that any woman who can't have children or doesn't want to isn't a whole woman, which... they might think it's a clever way to say trans women aren't women, except it cuts off each single cis woman who's sterile, every single cis woman who like doesn't want to have kids and on top of that sounds like victorian age bullshit bc what the fuck we spend the entire 20th century making the point that having children was a choice and a woman wasn't useless if she didn't have any and in 2021 we're sprouting this? like fuck that, and let's not even go into the antikink stuff because saying that if you like something in bed then the patriarchy influenced you OR it means you're not okay or whatever then it turns into whatever crap antis say about ppl being sick in the head for writing kink which is like not anything that makes any sense whatsoever and guess what you get sucked in like that and then you turn into the kind of idiot who agrees with trump/the american right wingers that you should have guards at public bathrooms to make sure trans ppl don't access the one of their gender and like.... sure, as a woman I feel so much more threatened by a trans woman using the stall next to me than by idk a guard feeling me up to make sure I'm a cis woman before I can use the bathroom, suuureeee /sarcasm

tldr: terfism is backwards right wing ideology dressed up as feminism and that people fell for it like this is a disgrace but I'm nowhere near suprised that terfs ended up recruiting antis or that antis ended up being terfs, bc it's the same kind of bullshit thinking and if you don't wonder why you're sharing the ideas of someone whose ideas you technically loathe then good luck not getting sucked in into cults like that :/

[bitch-in-a-bag]

can we talk about how the LGBT movement has changed in the past 15 years?

in the light of the events surrounding Chris chan, and people prioritizing pronouns over the rape of a woman with dementia, I think it displays just how... different things are.

i personally feel like it's been co-opted by the more loud and entitled mtfs/ males/penis-havers/whatever pc term exists for the XY chromosome'd, who go too far and aren't reasonably kept in check. I think terf no longer has meaning anymore because it's just become a word we use to silence anyone that disagrees with a trans woman. immediately you're going to call me a terf, I accept that, but please continue reading. I may suprise you. calling someone who's transgender a terf is kinda messed up anyway, and that's exactly why im writing this.

I also think that everyone else (allies, ftms, etc) have followed suit because they've written this messed up narrative that EvErYoNe iS VaLiD. except for trans penis-havers, bc they're the most oppressed and the most valid, actually, regardless of their experiences.

I never used to believe the above because it was always written off as terf shit, and ignoring it kinda benefitted me, but between seeing ftms getting bashed for refusing to follow new "TME" rules as if they aren't trans too, and seeing outrage around Chris chans pronouns, I think it's time to start saying things that may make people uncomfortable. innocent people are already getting hurt by this, and we need to do better. it's time to get uncomfortable.

I want to remind you that perception is both the relying factor, and also the downfall of newer lgbt theory. if my profile were mtf coded, maybe it currently is, you'd call me a self hating trans and I wouldn't be that big of a deal. terfs would probably target me.

if my profile was ftm coded, I would be absolutely skewered for daring to speak out about these issues, even though they do actually affect ftms disproportionately. terfs would try to convince me that being trans is a plague and a mental illness, and to just ~be a cis woman~!

and if assumed cis, I would 100% be assumed radfem terf, and everything I say would immediately be dismissed because of the genuine damage terfs have done. but terfs would still probably flock to this post and berate me for daring to validate trans people At All, because to them, being transgender is a mental illness akin to an eating disorder, and "giving in" to it is "self harm". clearly I don't believe that, so hopefully you'll give me at least some benefit of the doubt.

so, does my identity matter? i have a feeling you'll say yes, because it gives us a good idea of experiences I do and don't have expertise in, and thus room to talk about. but I refuse to directly identify what I actually am because I want the focus of any resulting conversation to be my message and not my self identification. if you read between the lines and figure it out that's just fine, but I would like to be heard first and foremost.

my profile is thus an attempt at being cis female coded, somewhat out of comfort, and that is likely what I'll be assumed to be due to the beliefs I am expressing, even though there is a substantial risk of getting misgendered and dismissed, no matter what my birth sex may actually be. i will give you a hint about my identity: I am transgender, on HRT and everything, and I have been personally affected by all of this. rest assured, this is well within my lane to speak about, and it does matter if you misgender me.

I want you to really think about that. before you respond, really think about if someone saying words on tumblr, talking about their OWN experiences and their take on recent history that applies to themself, really more worthy of being misgendered and harassed than... someone who said they transitioned so they could date lesbians, and then raped their own mother with dementia.

is that fair or just? or is this just a new way of letting people with penises do whatever they want? I personally think it's the latter. we need to hold people like Chris chan accountable without getting caught up on something as minor **in comparison** as misgendering and self identification. Is it sad and confusing that someone who self IDs as transgender became 1:1 with the most dangerous stereotypes that exist for trans women? Of course it is. But it doesn't mean that self identification is suddenly more important than a literal crime being committed.

I would normally dismiss it as a fluke or outright trolling if the evidence weren't so damning that this is in fact a real event that happened. If I hadn't seen this happen to other people, and if I didn't literally know another mtf person who used their dysphoria as an excuse for date rape on multiple occasions and never got any consequences for it.

It's not a one time thing, it's a developing problem that we need to stop before more people have their lives ruined. I can't even imagine how traumatizing and messed up it is for an FTM person to be date raped, by another transgender person no less. When I, an abuse survivor, told people of this MTFs red flags, people violently silenced me. People who didn't know I was trans called me a terf and transphobic. We, as a community, could've protected someone from getting date raped, and we didn't. Trans women can be awful, horrible fucking people, because they are people. Protecting them at all costs is wrong. Protecting them from transphobia is what we should be doing.

That being said, misgendering is still skeevy, and I haven't done anything like raped a disabled woman who is no longer able to consent, or date raped my own partner. if you give a shit about respecting my identity, please use they/them for me. if not, use visual perception and make assumptions that will most likely be incorrect, skew your own argument, and put me on the same level as a rapist, and arguably a fetishist. And I do need to remind you that calling someone transgender a rapist and a fetishist without evidence is still definitely classic transphobia, to the letter, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that.

as someone who is same sex attracted, I also want to bring this up as well.

in the US in the past 15 years, the movement as a whole pretty much went "YEAH BORN THIS WAY" with Lady Gaga, and then jumped ship to prioritize mostly mtfs at every angle. do mtfs need support? absolutely. but they don't need misguided toxic positivity, and that's what it's turned into.

it's gotten genuinely homophobic to the point where actually homosexual people are constantly being erased and demonized via "genital preferences are a fetish uwu", and vulva havers, especially the trans ones, are constantly being told to shut up about their experiences.

as much as you want to deny bioessentialism, its still very much well and alive with newer trans movement sentiments when we classify ftms as not worthy of speaking about their own issues with terms like "TME". it's also incredibly ignorant towards FTMs who pass, but dress feminine for comfort, and get mistaken for MTF, and treated like garbage because of it. They are not remotely exempt from misogyny, transphobia, or the intersection of the two, and it is not anyone's job to tell them they don't ever experience that when they do. Turning ftms and biological homosexuals into our enemies-- especially when the actual cause is transphobia and harmful gender stereotypes-- does nothing good or healthy for our movement.

Dont be mistaken, though, passing isn't the focus or end all be all here, it's the perception of others that ends up drastically effecting your experiences. There are words like misogyny that imply treatment via birth sex, however this too can be reliant on external perception. If an MTF individual either transitions very young, has an abundance of resources to transition, or just gets lucky and passes well, chances are she will experience a lot more misogyny than people may give credit to. inversely, someone who just started questioning yesterday, but lived as a male their whole life up until then, they genuinely cannot speak about misogyny with that much room because they simply haven't experienced it at an accurate enough angle or for enough time to understand it as a repeated and sociological force.

It works the other way as well, though; someone who's known that they're trans for a long time and haven't had the resources to transition, or do not or cannot pass in the eyes of society; these people suffer pain that we don't neccesarily have a word for yet, imo. It makes dysphoria worse and it makes living seem hopeless. And as a community, we deal with this is in a really messed up way by over-validating them instead of solving the core issue at hand. and people who suffer from this, but also acknowledge they can't claim what they haven't experienced, are left with nowhere to go.

And its important to acknowledge these things because they're integral to the over-encompassing trans experience. Instead of lying to everyone and telling everyone they pass/giving out unconditional positive regard, our focus should be making it so that it **doesn't matter if you pass**. that you're still worth respect and dignity if you're transgender, no matter what passing is or what it means to you, and no matter how you present. But also, if you do something awful, you still need to be held accountable, especially if you use yourself, your body, or your trans status to contribute to other axi of oppression.

Transphobia is a word that encompasses and addresses all of that, regardless of birth sex. "TME" shuts that down in favor of only letting MTF's speak. Which is still very bio-essentialist, and I can't help but feel like we've gone full circle.

Once upon a time you couldn't even get married if your partner had the same genitals as you. in the US, this was less than 7 years ago. and if you care about human rights activism, you know damn well that legal modification is not the end all be all. people who are genuinely homosexual are still oppressed, but the trans movement has started stepping on them to make ground we don't deserve. homosexuals are ok and valid. it's not a genital preference, and the prescence of trans people doesn't make conversion therapy sentiments ok, ever.

we've gone full circle, and it's not right.

[rivetgoth]

I had this friend I met in the Hetalia fandom in like 8th-9th grade who was like, a lot older than me (I was like 12-13 when we met and she was like 17 or so), and we were REALLY close for a really long time, we'd talk and call every day and it got to a point where she was really dependent on me in this awful way where she would like constantly threaten suicide if I didn't answer her texts fast enough and shit like that. She was really rich cuz her dad was a doctor and one time she bought me an entire fucking Xbox One (I did not ask for it like... I'd always been a PlayStation gamer LOL) because she didn't have anyone to play Halo with her. My family still has it and uses it as a DVD player/Netflix machine.

Anyway the really batshit thing about this person (BESIDES the fact that she was like, definitely a pedophile who loved shota and frequently sexted me after she'd turned 18+ and I was like 14 and she also had both a bestiality and incest fetish that she'd talk to me about constantly — I was a kid I had no moral concept of anything and just liked being edgy and feeling mature) was that she was like. A chronic liar who constantly faked identities. And for years after cutting off contact with her I would look back and realize that she had faked even more than I had noticed at the time. The thing is, I knew for sure she wasn't lying about her home life -- Her address, what she looked like, her dad's profession, her age, her house, her pets, etc, were all things I had proof of. But when I knew her she was constantly remaking her Tumblr to escape drama she'd start, and she would constantly make side blogs under pseudonyms and pretend it wasn't her (sometimes it would be random shit like aesthetic blogs under different names or ask blogs for characters or smthn, other times it was like, callout blogs for people she had gotten into drama with where she would pretend to be someone else defending her). I assumed back then that I was always going to be in on it, because she would always tell me whenever she made one of these fake accounts, and sometimes she would encourage me to make a new account too as a sort of roleplay thing where we both pretended to be people we weren't... Until I learned that she wasn't always telling me. Every so often, I would become mutuals with a new account who would start messaging me about my interests and strike a conversation with me. Then something would slip and my "new mutual" would admit that they had actually been my friend all along... Which should have made me immediately cut contact because that's weird as shit, but I was young and she was a close friend, so I would just sorta accept it.

She ended up being like, horrifically transphobic. She got run off her blog twice for being specifically transmisogynistic, first insisting that she was allowed to headcanon canon trans women as feminine men and then on her next blog insisting that lesbians couldn't be attracted to trans women. I was still young and closeted and she was one of my closest friends and was constantly messaging me that the situation was making her suicidal and she was just wording things wrong and totally supported trans people and people just weren’t giving her the benefit of the doubt and she was still learning so I tried to just stay out of it without losing her. Then... I came out as trans lol. She stopped replying to me when I first came out and then made a bunch of vents on her tumblr about how much it upset her and about how “using he/him pronouns for AFAB people is triggering” for whatever fucking reason. She told me her “best IRL friend” who she had introduced me to once on Skype but who never logged in again after and who refused to ever do a group call or anything (definitely another fake account) said that it was irrational for me to expect my friends to respect my pronouns so soon after coming out and that I shouldn’t be upset if I get misgendered. Then she apologized but told me my name and pronouns would never fit me. As you can imagine, as a little baby trans kid who was closeted from my family and terrified of even having come to terms with being trans, I didn’t really have a great defense.

Soon she started being really woke like 2014 style Tumblr SJW to save face, she came out as nonbinary and told me in private it was because she felt bad when people called her cis during discourse (she absolutely wasn't nonbinary) and she coined a "new sexuality" that was "attraction only to people you perceive as feminine, regardless of how they identify" -- what this actually meant was "attraction to cis women and not trans women." She ran an aroace help blog despite not being aroace? And made a bunch of pride flags that I still see around sometimes to this day. She would start fights a lot and try to out-woke people and got into a bunch of drama with other SJW types of the day, got into a bunch of drama with TumblrInAction and Mogai-Watch and shit like that, and she claimed for a short while that she had a headmate (FWIW I totally believe DID is a legitimate thing but like. Trust me on this one.) who was transphobic and that it made her so sad, she told me that it was actually that headmate that had been transphobic before, and every so often her headmate would front out of nowhere and misgender me and use really abusive language like calling me a cunt or a bitch or whatever. She started making these "intersex nonbinary" OCs who she would constantly make porn of under the guise that they were representation for LGBT people who were just like, extremely fetishistic cuntboys and dickgirls (they were “intersex” to explain why they could be “girls with natal penises” or “boys with natal vaginas”).

At that same time, she somehow always managed to have these random, very sporadically active trans women mutuals who were apparently amazing friends of hers, who shared some interests with her but also would defend her when people brought up her past, with these long-winded “Well, I’m a trans woman and I think what she said is perfectly justified and everyone makes mistakes and she’s always been a good ally!!” Then one day some trans woman received an ask from her account where she claimed to be a “black trans woman” (she was, of course, a white cis woman) and she freaked out and claimed she had “been hacked by TiA or 4Chan to make her look bad” — I realize now she had just been sending anon messages pretending to be things she wasn’t and forgot to hit anon LOL. Late in all of this she also got into a bunch of hot water for being really antisemitic and saying she didn’t trust Jewish people because they were just like Christians and like, 5 seconds later she came out as Jewish and wrote this whole long sad vent about how she had had internalized antisemitism and then started going by a random Hebrew name LMAO.

In the end the final breaking point was when I found her secret TERF blog, where she had been making posts for months about how trans men are just insecure women who are trying to escape misogyny by stepping on the backs of “fellow women” and using me as a fucking example, and also saying that me not coming out as a trans man had been “basically rape” since she had been SEXTING me when she was 18+ and I was 13-14+ and that it was traumatic to know someone she had trusted was secretly identifying as a man LMAO. She was also obviously saying all sorts of transmisogynistic things, but also had these really bizarre fetish posts about wanting trans women to fuck her...? I confronted her about it and she literally fucking out of nowhere told me that she was in the emergency room with a mysterious illness that might kill her and she was allowed to have her phone but due to privacy laws couldn’t send a picture as proof. While “in the hospital” she deleted the TERF blog and her personal blog. I had known her for literal YEARS at this point (we had met when I was 12-13 or so and by the time we no longer spoke I was a few months from 17), and I was completely stunned to fucking hear this person trying to pull “I’m in the hospital with a deadly disease” at being confronted for some shit like that LMAO. I made a post about it on my public and another “trans woman friend” of hers logged in to vehemently defend her by saying that there’s nothing wrong with AFAB women being untrusting of trans people because female oppression is uniquely traumatic and that there’s nothing wrong with women expressing their sexuality by sexting minors as long as the minor consents and that I was the real predator for “hiding that I was a man” (remember, I’d been a 13 year old closeted trans boy), before never logging in again... 😭 One of the last times we ever talked was when she demanded I refund her for the fucking Xbox and I refused.

Anyway, the long-term aftermath of that is that a few people online (in some random cringe areas of the internet) who archived some of her antics still think that I also wasn’t a real person, since they caught onto how much she lied about too, so they think I was also a sock puppet and I have no interest in clarifying and making myself known to those people LOL. I have no fucking idea where she is now, she deactivated everything after her being a TERF came out. There’s like, so much more to that I could say because I knew her for YEARS and, like I said, she was one of my “closest friends.” Her parents had wildly expensive pure bred designer dogs that she would make Vines of. She wrote Beatles real person fan fiction. For her birthday one year I made her a shirt on Zazzle with an inside joke about one of her OCs... does she still have that? Either way, she was easily the most batshit person I’ve ever known closely online and I will forever associate the Hetalia fandom with people like that.

[firespirited]

hey i was just wondering...have you talked to detransitioned people & a variety? im not trying to be all "DEFEND YOUR ONE LITTLE TUMBLR POST!!!" but you posted specifically to say ""most"" people reidentify as nonbinary, and from the spaces ive sought being detransitioned myself & myself included that...has not been the case in what ive seen. again, just trying to open information up if youre interested in the topic! have a nice day!

Yeah, terf have their own detrans folks they trot out (usually titled "detransition + regret" or "I detransitioned and why you will too"), but there's a whole bunch of others. Actually the last detrans video i watched was promoted by a terf as "female without social pressures in quarantine realized she's been conned by the trans agenda" but when you actually watch the video it's a woman who transitioned socially and with T for 6 years but the acceptance she received from her family and friends and the push from the medical community to get surgery to pass helped her understand she was female but gender non conforming and that's OK. The sad thing about the video and another I saw this last month was that they felt the need to beg for almost 5 minutes to not be used as a case against trans people getting medical care. They just wanted to say that it's complicated and untangling your feelings about gender is a journey. The other thing i'm seeing a lot is people who say they're "Detransitioning" when they're socially transitioned but refusing to go further surgically or medically but i don't see how that applies since what they needed was community support, they got it and now they're doing fine or don't want to go through any pain to alter their body.

The youtube algorithm is designed to love conspiracy videos so it makes searching for 'detransition' a minefield of scaremongering about other people and a few 'I cured my autism/found jeebus and now i'm not trans': try "non binary + transition" instead, unpolished videos of just individuals just chatting to the camera. Look for non white people in the recommended videos and click around, look for stuff that isn't sensationalized with music and editing: you know real people.

I am not an expert but i’ve done an awful lot of reading about gender, rad fems and trans people over the years. If you’d like to share your journey that’s fine, if you want to tell people they’re wrong about something they’ve agonized about,  considered very carefully and will probably have to work for very hard... that’s a whole other thing. And yes most of the detransitioners from long term hormone or surgery chose non binary or gender non conforming or something appropriate to their culture. Some because that’s what they were all along and a few said it was because they didn’t want to pretend that they hadn’t been through a gender exploration, pretend they are fully cis and that box fits just fine. NGL you then end up in a whole new field of masculine and feminine identities with new names like neutrois and masculine of center and a whole new rabbithole awaits.

[vegannaise]

boys deserve love

i started realizing around 16 that i wasn’t cis. i flipflopped back and forth between different nonbinary identities, occasionally wondering (in private) if i was just simply a boy. i was already out as gay, and people already regarded me as a “tomboy”, so that helped alleviate some of my teenage discomfort.

I didn’t date a lot in highschool, partially because i was incredibly intimated by girls, partially because boys didnt pay too much romantic attention to me, and probably a little bit because i had 0 interest in sex all throughout my teenage years.

when i was 17 i had my first “serious” relationship. it was with a boy that coerced me into hooking up with him while i was nearly black out drunk (wow,, what a catch right???!!! thats a whole different story). as sad as this is, i finally felt like my existence was valid. i felt like i had finally achieved this unspoken goal of having someone love me in a romantic way, having someone find me desirable. i was happy for the first time in years.

of course, i was still trans and in the closet during all of this. one night, i was completely swallowed by my dysphoria. i was either on the floor or in front of the mirror crying because of how my body looked. i even ended up giving myself a stick n poke to avoid self harming. Mason (boy in question) was texting me throughout this, i think i had told him i wasn’t feeling good, but i didn’t want to tell him why. he eventually pressured me into telling him what was wrong, and i told him “i dont like my body. i want my body to be a different body. i want to have a BOYS body”.

for just a second, i pictured myself years in the future with a flat chest and stubble and a deep voice, my arms around Mason, who still loved me even though he was “straight” and i had transitioned.

sadly, this fantasy was violently ripped away as soon as i came back to reality. Mason had responded with clear discomfort, saying he wasn’t gay. i told him i knew he wasn’t gay, but wouldn’t he still love me for me??? i would still be the same person, so wouldn’t he still love me????? to which he prompty responded, firmly and bluntly, that if i were to transition and call myself a boy, he would break up with me.

this experience made me go back into the closet for 2 years.

fast forward to when i was 19, i was in a relationship with a transguy. since i grew up in a tiny homophobic town i was never able to date another trans person, and most likely put this person (lets call them...... Pickle) on a big ol’ pedestal because of that. Pickle had been out as trans for almost 5 years, and had been on T almost just as long. they were the first person to tell me that nonbinary people can be trans. they were the first person to actually make me feel seen and valid as not only a trans person, but as a boy.

i ended up coming out to them, in tears, as a transguy. i still felt really confused, i was a boy but didnt really feel connecting to masculinity. i wanted nothing more than to be a pretty boy but recoiled at seeing myself as a Man™. even though that relationship was incredibly toxic, Pickle supported me unconditionally through getting on hormones, they even bought me a new binder. they were the support i had desperately needed.

we had been dating for 8 months when i left town for a few days. something seemed off when i would text them, it felt like something was wrong, but they werent telling me what. Pickle was staying with me at the time, so i saw them as soon as i came back. they said they had something to tell me.

they told me that while i was out of town, they had had a major identity crisis, and realized that she was actually a butch lesbian. of course, i gave her a giant hug, i told her i loved her and that i was so happy she had figured this out about herself. thats when she started talking about us.

she told me that since she was a lesbian and i was a boy, we had to break up; as if this shouldve been obvious to me...... it wasn’t. as she sat there telling me things like “i still love you” and “and i wish things could be different” we both cried. a lot. i still couldnt wrap my head around what was happening. here she was, telling me she wishes things were different so we can be together, why couldnt we just be together as is??? if you want to be with someone, why does it matter if they’re a boy or a girl??? especially when you’ve already been together for 8 months??? it felt like it had a lot more to do with other peoples perceptions of us, it wasn’t because i was a boy, it was because she didnt think she’d be seen as a lesbian dating a genderqueer boy.

the next day i confronted her about this. i was so confused, i had given myself a headache and multiple panic attacks trying to figure out what the fuck i was feeling. she told me that she felt like we should break up anyway, that her realizing shes a lesbian was just “the final nail in the coffin”. i found myself even more hurt and confused than before. id told Pickle all about Mason, how i went back in the closet because i was scared of him leaving me. i told her about all the shame i had accumulated over the course of my relationship with Mason. despite her knowing all this, she still decided to scapegoat our own identities, rather than just own up to the fact that our relationship was falling apart already.

this experience made me question my entire identity, the identity i had JUST started feeling valid in. this experience made me eventually stop taking hormones. this experience made me feel more invaild and undesirable than ever before.

during this time, i started to also ID myself as a (nonbinary) lesbian. i had felt my attraction to men dwindle, and i was grappling with my attraction to women. but more than anything else, i convinced myself that being a boy = being hated. looking “like a boy” = being ugly and undesirable. not only did this feed into terf rhetoric, but its a result of being told my whole life that my worth is directly tied to my level of attractiveness, and that no one would find me attractive if i looked the way i wanted to.

it felt so much easier to stay how i was. all i wanted was to be seen as queer, and since people already read me as a lesbian, i might as well just settle for that, right? at least people would get it. at least people would see me.

i’m 22 now, and ive really only just started to deconstruct these things and unlearn my internalized transphobia and self hatred. about 6 months ago i started calling myself a boy and using he/him pronouns again, and for once i actually feel safe. for once i actually have a good support network. for once i actually feel seen. for once i actually feel loved.

to anyone who actually bothered to read this all the way through: healing is not linear and our identities sure as shit arent. if you’re in the closet right now, or if you’re questioning your gender/sexuality for the first or fifth or tenth time: i see you. i love you. you are so valid in your fear and confusion. the world still actively hates LGBT people, and that internalized fear is so real and deserves to be acknowledged, but please believe me when i say that there ARE people out there who hold the deepest love, appreciation, and camaraderie for you, even if you dont know them yet. your existence as an LGBT person in this world is inherently radical, please don’t ever forget that.

[allthethingswecoulddo]

The Guardian needs to pick a side, and so do the women that transphobes are trying to rally.

You can silently allow these purported ‘feminists’ to speak for you, as they vilify trans people, or stand with your trans siblings to do the real work of bringing down the patriarchy and all the gendered violence that comes with it.

Content warning: transphobia, sexual and domestic violence, TERFs, homophobia & biphobia, racism, far right & mention of Nazis

On 2nd March the Guardian published an article called ‘Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced’, by self-identifying Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF), Suzanne Moore. The article, however badly written and absurd, has a platform. And with a distinct lack of meaningful trans representation or awareness in the media at large, it’s likely that some people will be lured into believing that Moore has credible points to make. The Guardian has rubber stamped this hateful rhetoric and rallying cry for transphobia, and it’s not the first time.

So it’s time for the Guardian, as well as the cisgender, white middle class women amongst it’s readership, who are clearly being summoned to fight in an imaginary war, to pick a side. And those ‘sides’ are not trans rights vs. cisgender women’s rights. Because trans rights do not infringe cisgender women’s rights. You have to pick two sides of history: you can silently allow these purported ‘feminists’ to speak for you, as they vilify trans people and claim that misogyny and sexism is only experienced by those with the ‘ability to reproduce’ (which, by the way, doesn’t cover all cisgender women) or stand with your trans siblings to do the real work of bringing down the patriarchy and all the gendered violence that comes with it.

What follows is an attempt to unpick the slew of shit arguments that Moore strung together in her Guardian article for the purposes of exposing her thinly veiled hate speech, and equipping allies with the arguments to shut down transphobia in their day to day lives.

1. Moore uses the tactics of the far right, by suggesting that trans people and those fighting for trans rights are a threat to free speech.

Far right poster boys in the UK, like Tommy Robinson AKA Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (LOL), have been rallying supporters by claiming that free speech is under threat. He likes to weaponise this argument against Muslim communities and people of colour for the most part, but won’t say no to a touch of sexism, misogyny and transphobia. It’s become a familiar trope, the idea of a snowflake generation, so sensitive to harm that they won’t even expose themselves to a touch of hate speech.

TERFs are not above allying with the likes of the far right to stoke fear and anger in those who’ve felt the burn of sexism, misogyny, homophobia biphobia and who feel a bit baffled by University discourse around safe spaces and no platforming. They conveniently point the finger at trans people, mostly trans women, and say ‘they are the problem, you can’t say anything anymore, they are silencing us!’

In fact, in the States, TERFs have been proven to have organised links with far right Christian groups, and many of the UK groups who (according to Moore, are definitely not hate groups) are funded by the same organisations. So when Moore says ‘Now, I feel a huge sadness when I look at the fragmentation of the landscape, where endless fighting, cancellations and no platformings have obscured our understanding of who the real enemies are,’ I can’t stifle my maniacal laughter.

How brainwashed do you have to be to think that trans people and their allies are the enemy, when you will cooperate with far right racists? Sure, there might be a debate to be had about the effectiveness of tactics like no platforming, but when trans rights are conflated with the concept of free speech denial, the TERFs are knowingly playing into the hands of the far right.

2. She harks back to Section 28 protests as the good ol’ days, when LGBT people knew what to fight for and our collective oppression trumped our differences. The irony is lost on her.

In 2019 we saw a momentous win in the 30 year battle for LGBT inclusion in schools, with the introduction of inclusive relationships and sex education. That wouldn’t have been possible without solidarity across the LGBT movement.

But TERFs have taken this victory as an opportunity to make the exact same arguments about teaching on gender identity as were made by Section 28. The idea that any mention of LGBT people was ‘the promotion of homosexuality’ (a line taken directly from the clause) is echoed in their claims that children and young people are being brainwashed and tricked into being trans. They even organised to try and prevent funds reaching Mermaids, a charity for trans children and young people last year, by mobilising misinformed and hateful women on Mumsnet via the lightning rod of Graham Linehan - who, by the way, compares people fighting for trans rights to those active in Nazi Germany.

We know that almost half of young trans people have attempted suicide. And scumbags like Moore have the audacity to claim they are being silenced? All whilst being published in the likes of the Guardian.

3. TERFs want you to believe that they are voiceless and marginalized. But the fact is, they get a seat at the table, to make decisions about other people’s lives. How feminist of them.

TERFs want you to believe that they are at the vanguard of feminism, being punished for speaking out like the great feminists before us. But as we’ve established, they are supported by well-resourced dark forces, given public platforms, and unfortunately our government is bending to their will in the name of ‘balance.’

During a consultation on gender recognition in the UK last year, Government Equalities Office officials had meetings with activists from Transgender Trend, Fair Play for Women and A Woman’s Place UK. All these groups are transphobic hate groups; one has wished cancer on trans people on their public social media accounts, and that’s not the worst of it. Now the Guardian has shown its true colors, platforming the voices of established TERFS. Does that seem like silencing to you?

In the meantime, trans people get next to no meaningful representation, we see vitriolic trash in the media every day and transphobic hate crime has rocketed.

4. Concepts of sex and gender as binary are weaponised to invalidate trans people. And it harms cisgender women too.

Moore believes that the most radical insight of feminism is that gender is binary but you are allowed to play with femininity and masculinity. Wow, she has missed the point. You don’t have to be a feminist scholar to know that feminism has helped us understand, unpick and fight back against, a patriarchal system of oppression, of which ideas around femininity and masculinity are symptoms. If the goal of your feminism stops at the destruction of stereotypes, you’re probably pretty privileged - because whilst it’s no doubt, essential to women’s liberation, it will not end gendered violence and oppression. 

Gender and sex are both a spectrum - trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people have always existed. This is not, as TERFs would have you believe, a recent fad or phase. The conflation of gender and sex, and the aggressive enforcement of the binary from the very moment of conception is a fundamental pillar of patriarchy. And you are punished, socially and politically if you are considered to deviate from these norms. Moore tokenistically mentions intersex people but fails to acknowledge that right now in the UK, intersex babies are having non-consensual operations at birth so that they will conform more neatly to binary concepts of sex.  

It’s in TERF’s interest to protect the binary because they want, more than anything, for cisgender women to believe their rights are threatened by trans people and that trans rights and cis women’s rights are incompatible. TERFs will have you believe that you should be more concerned with someone’s genitals than their humanity. They seem less concerned by internal sex organs, hormones and all the other facets that make up the narrow binaries of sex; but that would complicate their nice, neat excuse for transmisogyny.

5. TERF’s priority is not the prevention of rape or domestic abuse. It is the vilification of trans people, who are disproportionately affected by sexual and domestic violence.

TERFs seem to get endless inspiration from the oppressors of LGBT people; Moore’s article is littered with a transphobic trope, that paints trans people as predatory. It’s nothing new, that’s exactly what they said about lesbians, gay and bi people during the Section 28 era that Moore seems so nostalgic for. And if there’s one stand out reason you should visibly and proudly reject the rhetoric of TERFs and stand side by side with your trans siblings, it’s this: TERFs promote violence against trans people when they paint trans people as predatory. They are a hate group, they promote violence against trans people.

Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement (pictured above) said ‘I founded the 'me too' movement in 2006 because I wanted to find a way to connect with the black and brown girls in the program I ran.’ Burke is still fighting to center the voices of marginalised survivors as the movement has blown up and focused on cis, white celebrities. In a 2017 article she said, ‘there’s no conversation in this whole thing [#MeToo] about transgender folks and sexual violence. There’s no conversation in this about people with disabilities and sexual violence. We need to talk about Native Americans, who have the highest rate of sexual violence in this country. So no, I can’t take my focus on marginalized people.’

It shouldn’t need spelling out, but we know that:

Two in five trans people (41 per cent) and three in ten non-binary people (31 per cent) have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months. (Stonewall, LGBT in Britain -Trans Report)

The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that 47% of transgender people are sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime.

 More than a quarter of trans people (28 per cent) in a relationship in the last year have faced domestic abuse from a partner. (Stonewall, LGBT in Britain -Trans Report)

Seven per cent of trans people said they have been refused care because they are LGBT, while trying to access healthcare services in the last year. (Stonewall, LGBT in Britain -Trans Report)

Cisgender women must be visible and active trans allies and stand side by side with their trans siblings if we’re going to win. So that instead of wasting our energy having to defend ourselves and fight for the very fact of trans people’s existence, we can get on with protecting and winning rights.

So, cisgender women of Guardian readership and beyond, pick a side. These vile transphobes will exploit their exposure to feed hatred and violence against trans women the whole trans community. Your voice is important, and necessary, to reject their rhetoric, and build a feminist movement of meaningful solidarity. We have so much more to fight for.