#women-speak-up

[stench-core]

I find it a bit strange how it's okay and normal to say trans men have 'afab privilege' but if you say trans women have 'amab privilege', that's bad and wrong and incorrect and also maybe you should kill yourself. strange stuff

somehow trans men were 'socialised female' and therefore can 'get away with being women' but trans women were not 'socialised male' and can't 'get away with being men' cos there's something inherently feminine, inherently queer about them.

though, i spent my whole life being called gay, getting asked if i was a butch lesbian, getting asked if i was a tranny, cos i wore pants [girls!] instead of skirts, cos i wore shirts [girls!] instead of blouses, cos i wouldn't wear dresses and would prefer [girls!] formal wear that weren't dresses, cos i liked bionicle instead of dolls, cos i played video games, cos i swore, cos i liked heavier music, cos my favourite colour wasn't pink, cos i wore caps. i would not say i fit into girlhood at all, actually.

but this masculinity was inherent to me, it still is, i couldn't and can not change it (despite trying, very hard, to my detriment) so i ALWAYS stuck out as being 'too masculine' for other girls. and then i come into queer spaces and i'm 'too masculine' for other queer people - but that's besides the point, currently.

so, currently, when i see people say 'trans women aren't "socialised male," that's not real, they always stick out as "other"' and then turn around and say 'trans men have afab privilege, they can be women to get away with things, they fit into girlhood so well' I can't help but become incredibly fucking frustrated. this is not true and actually it's something we have in common! neither of us were socialised 'correctly' cos we're both trans and raised amongst peers who were not trans!

everything from masculine girls to trans men do not fit into 'girlhood' cos masculinity is not what girlhood is meant to be. this shouldn't be hard to grasp. this is why the 'socialised' concept is bullshit cos it's founded on whatever was forced upon you as a kid and if you don't fit that standard you will not be socialised that way due to, in large part, being fucking ostracised from everyone else. and that doesn't mean there won't be things to unlearn, i know very many trans men who were very feminine for a long time and the opposite for trans women, but someone who clearly cannot fit what's being pushed onto them is going to come off as 'strange' and 'uncanny' to the people who can fit into what's pushed onto them.

but the way people talk about this really highlights to me that yous don't want to consider us trans in the first place - transness is for trans women and not for trans men, socialisation concepts are fake when it comes to trans women but real when it comes to trans men cos they're not really trans, 'amab privilege' would get you branded a TERF or radfem saying it to a trans woman but it's fine to say trans men, trans men have 'afab privilege' cos we're not trans, we're just women. you know until we get a little too rowdy and then we're not trans, we're just men.

maybe i'm just jaded and bitter. idk

[faggy--butch]

Trans men and women tend to get viewed as either disgusting male freaks or perfect feminine female goddesses based entirely on identity and vibes alone, forcing trans men to either detranstion to talk about the issues faced, or shut up and hate themselves and grovel at the feet of their "betters", and trans women are forced to preform the highest standards of femininity or be shunned and live in fear of being cast out and not being "woman enough" facing the constant need to prove themselves to avoid being seen as interlopers. these things are similar, these problems overlap, and yet people go on to pretend that one is the most victimized victim and the other is the "subjector and oppressor" (Interchangeable) and neither can truly understand the other. these ideas being perpetuated by others within and outside of these groups. It drives me up the wall that there are people pretending this helps anyone, that either benefits from the others oppression in anyway. Personally, from what I've seen a lot of it comes out as like gender insecurity, from the inside groups, which is pretty sad, but also extremely frustrating to be lashed out at for being unwilling to accept this gender essentialist false binary

[f1-disaster-bi]

Red Bull suspended the woman who has been:

Harassed by a superior

Had her image dragged online

Been doxed

Has had her case dismissed

Her messages leaked

They are punishing the victim for coming forward.

This is something we see every damn day in the real world, and it shouldn't be so disappointing to me that this is no different but it is.

This sport and some of it's fans have really just shown that 'women matter....until you try speak out against someone we like'.

Some of the things I've seen people say about this poor woman, who probably came forward so others wouldn't have to be subjected to what she was, are horrific and I'm just mad.

I'm mad, disappointed, sad, and just yeah.

Happy fucking International Women's Day I guess.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

M'lady, doth this harlot bother thee?

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[feministfang]

Fuck all the islamic activists like Khalid Beydoun and Fatima Bhutto constantly posting about muslim m@les dying in west or p@lestine but staying silent on the oppression women are facing in islamic countries. Taliban just passed a new law banning Afghan women from speaking outside of their homes or even speaking to non-muslim women. But no word from these "peaceful religion" protesters! The entire world should follow the instructions of these fucktards, boycott whoever they want, unfollow the celebrities they hate otherwise we are labelled as islamophobes. But they can choose to zip their mouths and mock women suffering at the hands of islamic terrorists. Well, i am not boycotting or unfollowing anybody these muslims want me to as long as they don’t protest for the afghan women with the same energy and rage. You either accept that your religion is the most misogynistic one and harming women and speak up on it, or you keep getting silent treatment that you deserve . Call me an islamophobe i am not even denying that i am one!

[pierregaslays]

“allegations ruin men’s lives” idk man, i think christian horner is handling it well enough, he’s still got his job, his reputation, the backing of his equally disgusting team who are confident he’ll ‘bounce back’ as well as half of the drivers on the grid who are spineless cunts and dismissing a literal sexual harassment case but sure, allegations ruined his life

[antiterf]

Tired of people applying concepts of gender and gender hierarchy specifically made for cis people to trans people and thinking we're the problem when we point out that it doesn't fit.

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

sometimes I think I don't have many thoughts or feelings about Ema, but then I think about her returning from Europe after her studies, failing to get the job she's dedicated her life to since she was a teenager, finding out that the man who saved both her and her sister got disbarred for submitting false evidence, being assigned to the prosecutor who got him disbarred, and running to find him only to be greeted by this slippery, silent stranger who won't talk about what he did or what really happened, and who's behaving just like her sister did for years, and I think about how powerless she is to help him because he won't let her, because he won't trust her, just as Lana hadn't for so much of her life, and how he should know better than to do that to her, but he doesn't or maybe he just doesn't care, and I think about Ema who came back full of hope and conviction only for that all to turn to dust in her hands in a matter of days, and I realise I do think about her a lot actually.

[butchmartyr]

few things make me tune people out as virtue signaling dipshits like hearing “CAGAB language is just for intersex people don’t steal”, everyone’s birth assignment was coercive dumbass it came free with patriarchy’s (bio)essentialistic & paternalistic conception of gender

[konigsblog]

toxic!reader who impregnates toxic!könig... they're toxic in different ways, you could say (⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠)

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[vacuously-true]

I keep seeing people on my dash who I KNOW have no ill intent reblogging posts that have a veneer of trans-inclusive feminism without realizing it's gender essentialist trans-inclusive radfem shit. As far as I can tell it's a recent resurgence of the ideology, not something that's stayed constant and I'm only now realizing it, although I'm not certain of that.

So like. Here's a reminder that gender essentialism is bad even when it's trans inclusive. Here's a reminder that "society is inherently about men/mascs oppressing women/fems and the agency and responsibility for that societal structure is always and only perpetuated by the men/mascs" is radfem shit even when it's trans inclusive.

Just because someone's gender essentialism isn't biological gender essentialism doesn't mean it isn't gender essentialism. Just because a post is trans inclusive doesn't mean it's discussing gender identity or societal gender dynamics in a healthy way.

Just because a post is free of transphobia or transmisogyny does not mean it is free of sexism or racism or intersexism or ableism or transandrophobia or exorsexism or homophobia or biphobia or any other kind of bigotry. Just because a post is free of transphobia or transmisogyny does not mean you get to shut off your brain and reblog it uncritically, safe in the knowledge that if it's not transphobic it's a Good Take™.

Pay attention to this shit please you're giving me headaches :)

[tethered-heartstrings]

Happy international women's day <3 you all deserved better

[coochiequeens]

There's something satisfying about when an abusive man is called out by other men. Or at least one man.

Rest In Infamy, You Haunted Castle

Why I believe the Neil Gaiman accusations

By GRAHAM LINEHAN JUL 19, 2024

I only met Neil Gaiman once, at an upscale dinner party where Derren Brown had been hired to do magic tricks like in the old-timey days. Between astonishments, Gaiman and I withdrew to a quiet corner where I pretended to be pleased that he was giving me a signed copy of ‘Sandman’. One of the unexpected advantages of being cancelled is telling people who took part in my harassment what I really think about their work, but this was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, so I said the right things and we went back to being bamboozled by Brown’s invisible craft.

To give credit where it’s due, I later read Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ to my kids which had them simultaneously terrified and hooked, and thanked him for it. Whatever my feelings about his earlier work, he was a real writer, practising his own invisible craft. From the evidence of that book, I thought he was probably a decent person too, an impression that continued until 2022, when we started to get into it over The Issue.

I may have asked why he wasn’t speaking out on behalf of JK Rowling, who was undergoing one of her regular cancellations for refusing to pander to the spoilt brats who loved her books but missed their meaning. A big name like his might have shifted the conversation and given her some much-needed support. He might perhaps have persuaded some of his fans to give the matter another look. This was when I assumed people like him acknowledged biological reality but worried about ‘coming out of the closet’, as it were. It took me years to realise that almost every celebrity mate of mine believed, or was pretending to believe, in the fashionable, American mind-cancer of ’gender’.

But back then, I was still astonished to find that he was a carrier of the virus, the mass delusion that by sheer coincidence, turned up after the arrival of the Internet. Whether it was Bill Bailey or Neil Hannon, Robin Ince or Matt Lucas, Arthur Mathews or Jimmy Mulville, it was always the same story. A sudden cloud of amnesia would form around my celebrity mates, a real peasouper, from which they suddenly could not see why we need female-only spaces, or why unhappy teenage girls will not find a miraculous cure for their woes in a double mastectomy. Far from sharing any of my urgency in the need to stop children from being irreversibly harmed in gender clinics, they instead downplayed, deflected and dismissed. “I never ask you to join in with my animal activism” grumbled Neil Hannon on one of the occasions I begged for his support.

“Couldn’t you pretend women and children are animals?” I thought.

My usual trajectory during these conversations saw me shifting from gobsmacked disbelief to fury and despair. The disloyalty made me angry, but knowing my friends did not care about their own daughters, wives, sisters and mothers was, and continues to be, destabilising in the extreme.

Gaiman went one step further. I can’t find the tweet, so I may be paraphrasing, but he said

"I hope you're kinder if your daughter ever hopes to transition."

I can think of no uglier thing to say to a parent. For girls, ‘transition’ means double mastectomies in their teens, hysterectomies in their mid-twenties, early menopause and a four times greater chance of having a heart attack than males of the same age. To have this decaying goth wish that horror on my daughter was more than I could bear. I wanted to rip his throat out.

Like a pair of grappling cowboys falling off a rooftop, our fight spilled into email. I sent Gaiman this article about the Tavistock. It was clear when he wrote back that he hadn’t absorbed it Like most celebrities in this fight, he appeared to have lost the ability to read.

“As I said before Graham, I hope that you'd be kinder if it was one of your kids who wanted to transition. “

He actually said it again. The piece was right there, detailing exactly what was happening to the children unlucky enough to wander through the Tavistock’s doors, and he chose to repeat that disgusting thing. Why?

That same year, just months before Gaiman was advising me on the value of kindness, a 22-year-old woman (‘Scarlett’ in the podcast) arrived at his Waiheke Island home in New Zealand for a babysitting job. Upon her arrival, she discovered that Gaiman’s wife of the time, Amanda Palmer, had suddenly remembered a sleepover, an appointment the child was apparently eager to attend.

So she and junior drove out of view, leaving the 23 -year-old Scarlett alone with Gaiman for the night. Within a few hours the 61-year-old man, without warning or invitation, appeared fully naked and slipped into the other end of her bath. Scarlett alleges that over the next three weeks, they embarked on a semi-consensual relationship, where Gaiman routinely ignored the boundaries she set. She alleges that he became angry when she would refuse these demands, used a belt to beat her, insisted she call him ‘Master’ and once sexually assaulted her so violently that she lost consciousness.

“… (the sex) was so painful and so violent that I fainted. I passed out, lost consciousness, ringing in the ears, black vision, the pain was celestial, you know, which is a strange word to use, but I couldn't even describe it in language. And when I regained consciousness and I was on the ground, I looked up and he was watching the rehearsals from Scotland of whatever they were filming, I don't fucking know. And he didn't even notice that I was passed out. And you know…there was blood. It was so so, so traumatic, and I asked him to stop. I said it was too much.”

Scarlett is a compelling witness despite, or because of, her contradictions. Certain things paint a picture of consent—she sexted Gaiman, to which he would send careful replies—and she laughs nervously when she talks about the alleged abuse. But when Gaiman’s side of the story is put to her, she turns cold as a knife and shows flashes of fury that she—in her telling—young, inexperienced and dazzled by Palmer and Gaiman’s fame and lifestyle, was used so casually and so brutally.

A few years back, I wrote about becoming a sort of Jessica Fletcher figure on Twitter. ‘Murder, She Wrote” but with paedophiles and predators. “Just as murderers seemed drawn to any location Jessica presented herself, “ I said. “My opining about women's rights and safety on Twitter appeared to attract the kind of men who can't sit still during a spelling bee.”

Among my adversaries was Peter Bright, the Ars Technica writer now doing twelve years for trying to buy two children to abuse. Luckily the children didn’t exist and the parents were actually FBI agents. Our exchange was brief and concerned safeguarding. I’m sure you’re all astonished to discover that he was against it.

Then there was ex-Labour MP Eric Joyce, who argued with me about the safety of mixed-sex loos in schools and was done for possessing the worst kind of child abuse images. More recently, I tangled with ‘Lexi’, who is now serving time for rape.

They all had one thing in common. They couldn’t leave alone those of us who were actively opposing the trans movement's assault on safeguarding, an assault that chimed nicely with their plans for the future. Each was returning to the scene of a crime not yet committed, each picking at a scab on their own character.

In 2018, at the height of #MeToo, Gaiman tweeted “On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close their eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box, and with art, and by listening, and change this world for the better.”

Well said. I certainly believe the women in ‘Master’. During my Jessica Fletcher period (a period which continues) no-one except Gaiman ever mentioned my kids. I think he knew it would cause me distress, and the second time he said it was just a twisting of the knife. Many of my colleagues in the media joined in with the trashing of my reputation, but Gaiman went that extra mile. I believe this is because he is a sadist. I think he is a man who finds pleasure in the suffering of others, and a man who does not see women and girls as fully human.

This was my final letter to him.

Dear Neil

I notice you’re still pretending you can’t read the Tavistock story. If you ever try and lay that curse on my kids again I will certainly share our exchange. Your privileged beliefs are harming children so to paraphrase Will Smith, keep their names out of your fucking mouth.

Thank you for giving me one last chance to say that JK Rowling will be remembered as a hero and you as a traitor to the kids who loved your books.

Rest in infamy, you haunted castle.

All the best,

Graham.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Results from the ‘Who is the tallest MDZS Character poll! Thank you all for voting!

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.