caffeineandsociety

[caffeineandsociety]

I do truly and deeply believe that in order to lead to a more just future, feminism must, however seemingly paradoxical it may be, acknowledge and really dig into the specific unique ways that women are encouraged to uphold injustice. Not because a group must be perfect or perform the proper penance for their own "sins" to deserve rights, but because refusal to do so is exactly how each popular feminism wave dies - because eventually it collapses into Why We Need To Uphold The Status Quo, But Feministly This Time.

As one major core example, we need to do away with major gendered spaces, because they signal to men and boys that their misbehavior is normal, fine, possibly even inevitable, and will be tolerated. They are victim-blaming on a mass scale. This is not a conclusion that will be reached by many without doing that deep dive, because it's not just a stereotype of PTA Moms; it is primarily women whose job under the systems at play is to rehab fascism and protofascist ideologies from being about war and glory and superiority, to being about comfort and safety and "think of the children" - as the "emotional core" of the nuclear family elevating their own right to comfort over other people's right to live.

This, of course, is then used against women to portray them as weak, cowardly, irrational, and frivolous...

Therefore, any feminism that focuses on separating women from perceived threats (i.e., "all men", especially foreign/"savage"/"deviant" ones) is only going to cycle back to good old-fashioned "uwu protect the poor weak little girlies who can't do anything on their own" misogyny, But Feministly This Time. It's not surprising when it then leads to regression into harder, stricter adherence to gender roles and the gutting of women's and queer rights; that is simply the path of least resistance!

[caffeineandsociety]

The reason that I have zero patience for "but who has it WORST?" politics is that like

It's actually extremely fucking simple and obvious if you look outside yourself for two fucking seconds?

Every marginalized group has it better than the next one in some ways, and worse in other ways. Like. It's really not hard to figure that out-

And pissing contests about "sure but which ones have MORE downsides?" aren't actually ER triage, they're just fucking self-righteous shitfits about who's Suffering More for being in line at the DMV, wasting energy we could be using to make shit BETTER.

[caffeineandsociety]

99% of the different flavors of bad trans intracommunity discourse boil down to "some newly-out trans people are really reckless with internalized transphobia and/or lack of awareness of other trans experiences, but those behaviors are too hard to call out on their own, so I'm gonna use my OWN deeper and more heavily veiled internalized transphobia and generalize the problem to 'trans people of a different gender than me are Not Valid Actually' but I'm gonna climb so far up theory's asshole I'm almost seeing daylight out of its mouth to keep it from being obvious that's what I'm saying"

[caffeineandsociety]

I genuinely think one of the worst things that ever happened to The Discourse is the fact that we seem to have gone from "if you lack these experiences - and maybe even if you do have them - you've certainly bought into some bullshit misconceptions that are used to justify systemic injustice, because those justifications are so pervasive and masquerade as common sense", and kind of...lost the plot due to shorthand abstraction, and now we seem to think that sexism is just an innate trait of men, racism is an innate trait of white people, homophobia is an innate trait of straight people, etc.

Which then flips around to say that anti-racism is an innate trait of POC, and anti-homophobia is an innate trait of gay people, and so on and so forth...

Which puts you in the position of looking at gray cases - examining multiracial people by blood quanta, questioning any queer identities that are even potentially "opposite"-gender attracted and scrutinizing ones you haven't heard of, etc. - to decide which side of the "line" they're just innately on, instead of, oh, idk, LISTENING TO THEIR EXPERIENCES AND POSITIONS, and so you get the idea that a Kinsey 1 AFAB demigirl who's been an active organizer in local queer healthcare access networks and has fought to defend her local Pride events from homophobes and cops alike for 10 years is somehow more homophobic than a lesbian who thinks all queer relationships are allowed to be is hand-holding and flower crowns and Pride should be about putting on a family-friendly show for homophobic parents and all kink is abuse and bears are gross and everyone in a queer space is likely to be a sexual predator, etc., etc.

[caffeineandsociety]

Online social justice discussions have a very bad habit of missing the forest for the trees - and I think in a lot of cases it is, for lack of a better term, semi-intentional.

Like, I saw a discussion of orientalism in white trans spaces. Good, we need to have that discussion.

But then the notes were full of people talking about aspiring to anime aesthetics at all being bad?

Then I saw a post (that was clearly referencing the original post) talking about how...no, liking anime aesthetics, or even holding up anime characters as a transition goal, is NOT inherently orientalism, because even if you're holding these textually Japanese characters up as your transition goal, these are not characters drawn with racialized features; they're a pretty generic ideal and while it shows what a culture values in that ideal (for good, bad, and neutral), demanding that it only resonate with that culture is unrealistic at best and its own kind of racism at worst - which is also true!

But I hesitate to agree with that post because it feels like it's denying that the problem exists.

Like, there are a lot of white transfems who are...really obsessed with the specific maid archetype born in Japanese maid cafes, and Japanese school uniforms in a way that they just don't tend to get about other cultures' school uniforms. There are a lot of white transmascs who are really creepy about specifically Asian queer men and expect them to be some kind of idealized yaoi boys, or who have a weird fixation on Gerudo Link. White queer people of all genders do seem to hold up Asian people, especially men, as some kind of androgynous ideal in general. Honestly, just look at the number of white queer kpop fans and the way they talk about their faves. It's ALARMING.

But, yeah, instead of any of those things, what people wanted to focus on in the notes of that first post was...anime avatars. Catgirls. Things that are definitely influenced by this problem to a substantial degree, but would very much still be a thing in our theoretical world where we've surgically removed all the orientalism. Things that have a particular cultural background that means they're definitely handled in a different way than they would be if there weren't a lot of racist queer people, but that are not INHERENTLY racialized.

For one, it reminds me of the days of 2012-2014 tumblr when the popular idea of how to solve issues of cultural appropriation was hardline cultural separatism on a level that likely gave neo-nazis wet dreams.

For two, there was a second pattern I noticed in those notes: no one was having any kind of revelation about their own circle's habits and ideology and recklessness in there. Most of the white trans people in the notes were talking about aesthetics they found "cringey" in other trans subgroups. Transfems deflecting onto transmascs, and back the other way again. Transmed-adjacent types implying that people who aspire to the idealized aesthetic of anime aren't Real Transgenders.

Because if you reduce the problem to an aesthetic checklist, and not a series of deep-set cultural attitudes that have been, and continue to be in a complex feedback loop with a centuries-long history of international conflict and atrocities and power imbalances, you can avoid any kind of uncomfortable reckoning with your own role in it by just changing your blog theme and looking for new media to like.

And, ironically (but not really), a lot of the back-and-forth got...kinda racist! Bordering on "this could have been a cute post about a mouse but you had to say 'mousegirl' and sexualize it" logic! Framed in such a way that betrays the fact that when you think about these aesthetics and anime the first thing YOU think of is tits and ass and moe shrieks about panty shots and accidental groping, not because, well, yeah, these are common tropes in the more trashy/"lowbrow" anime especially, but because you think that's all that anime - and by extension Japanese pop culture as a whole - is. Because, you know, the Japanese are just such depraved degenerate perverts who will sexualize everything and anything and the only valid anime creator is Miyazaki for proclaiming that the rest of the industry was a mistake (even though he didn't) and the only reason to like anime is because you think the supersonic boob flapping moment from High School of the Dead was intended to be believable and is totally not the least bit silly. [/sarcasm]

What I'm saying is that this issue - like many, MANY like it - is WAY more complex than just a list of superficial aesthetics you're not allowed to identify with if you're not [insert specific background here] and trying to simplify it to that is bound to turn you into exactly what you're trying to avoid, and only paying attention to how it manifests in OTHER subcommunities is a pathway to both lateral aggression AND making excuses for your own biases.

[caffeineandsociety]

Really a lot of bad online queer discourse comes from people only seeing trans women as women when they can use that position to shit on trans men and vice-versa

[caffeineandsociety]

The Democratic party is actually two parties in a trenchcoat.

One party consists of people actually championing positive change (and usually getting ignored by the news for it). This is where you get you AOCs, your Rashida Tlaibs, your John Fettermans - people really agitating to make your life better.

The other party consists of your cowardly centrists, who are the ones to RECOMMEND that everything positive they do be means-tested to hell and back because they genuinely think it's a good thing to shut out as many people from help as possible while recognizing the importance of extending it to people who "really need it", and mostly just recognize that Republicans are mean and unpleasant.

And of course, like all political parties, their ideas DO have overlap and they are not hiveminds - hell, California governor Gavin Newsom has historically been a pretty perfect example despite going more to the cowardly side over the years, for a long time he was firmly in the former party on non-class social issues in the spotlight but firmly in the latter on everything economic, leading to a rather awkward situation where I often hear people complaining about him and I have to figure out whether they mean "his measures to curb homelessness are cruel and counterproductive" or "but I don't WANNA have to pay taxes to fund handouts or be nice to the trannies!!"

So yeah. Between those factors? The lack of bombastic coverage of the good Dems do, the obstruction, AND the fact that yeah, one SEGMENT of the party is every bit as cowardly as some of the reports and attack ads DO say? There's 90% of your problem.

Plus yeah progress is ALWAYS going to be unacceptably slow because of that obstruction, AND both sections of the Democratic party at least mostly give a shit about things like due process and not being authoritarian dictators because they recognize they could be WRONG about many finer details of what's best, there you have the other 10%.

Though I too fucking wish more of them were willing to say "if the rules don't apply to you then they don't apply at all anymore I guess" in specifically times like this. Go on! Throw down!!

[caffeineandsociety]

Yeah that is absolutely not what I was trying to say at all and I'm sorry it hit that way. Like I said, my little corner is tragically fucking full of people who keep slipping down pipelines into full on "if you like pink and lace and painting your nails, congratulations! Regardless of what you might THINK, you're a girl! You can't be anything else. Also all boys have cooties ESPECIALLY trans ones" type gender essentialism. It really was just a matter of simplifying!

Ngl now that we've cleared shit up I'm honestly a little relieved to have been misinterpreted because it tells me this experience is not as universal as I had feared even on this hellsite and I need to continue getting better friends lol

Another thing about different gendered forms of transphobia is, if you're about to say "[xyz act of transmisogyny] NEVER happens to trans men or [presumed] AFAB NBs" or "[abc act of transandrophobia] NEVER happens to trans women or [presumed] AMAB NBs" or "[uvw act of exorsexism/binarism/intersexism] NEVER happens to binary perisex trans people"-

You are wrong. I guarantee you that you're wrong.

Gendered forms of transphobia and intersexism are gendered by PRIMARY target, not by EXCLUSIVE target. Whether because someone misreads your gender, or just because someone feels like using a certain framework, or whatever other reason, people can and DO, regularly, attack with whatever is convenient.

The bathroom predator stereotype was invented to attack trans women, but if a men's restroom is all urinals + one broken stall and there's a trans man who can't stand to pee, do you really think people are going to look at him in the women's room and go "go right ahead and use that toilet unbothered, fellow vulva-haver, you pass the vibe check, love your style, have a great night~!"? No! They're going to be just as shitty to him as they will be to any trans woman they clock! Hell, they'll be just as bad to butches regardless of ASAB, or even just to cis women with features they consider too sharp!

The tragic grooming victim force-transed by Big Pharma stereotype was invented to delegitimize trans men, but do you think the transphobic mother of a 9-year old trans girl isn't going to use it to wrestle her daughter back under her thumb and bar her from taking puberty blockers? Of course not! She's going to hop on that stereotype and ride it into the sunset to spin any way she abuses her kid as "tough love" and "cult deprogramming" and "saving" her!

And intersexism/exorsexism/binarism? Friends, I hate to break it to you, but all trans people are treated as gender-confused freaks who fail at being BOTH men and women, regardless of whether we're actually nonbinary or not - what gender are we? Whatever is convenient to demonize us at the moment, regardless of whether or not it's ACTUALLY part of our identity. Trans men who do not pass perfectly (and in fact many who do) are degendered, assigned "nonbinary" because Real Men Don't Look Like That, and then made into all of those horrible transphobic jokes about nonbinary people really just being the worst misogynistic stereotypes of ditzy bimbo not-like-other-girls girls who just want to be special and are simultaneously incapable of taking anything seriously or accomplishing anything as activists but also SOMEHOW able to overwhelm and devastate the entire community of REAL, DESERVING queers who are REALLY oppressed unlike them. Do we not remember that one Reductress headline? They/Them Pronouns Suddenly Easy For Person Misgendering Trans Woman? Do you think the trans woman being misgendered in such a situation is NOT being cast as the butt of exorsexist, intersexist, binarist garbage?

We're all in this mess together. Bigots don't draw neat lines in the sand that never get crossed, however much they like to say that's their purpose. We should stop trying to do their job for them.

[caffeineandsociety]

the way many people look at intersectionality is using oppressed traits as +1 and privileged traits as -1. then they do math with them. and their math isnt even good

[caffeineandsociety]

re: that other post. i HATE HATE HATE the modern trans discourse thats just "boys versus girls but Progressive this time I Promise ^_^" like you have GOT to be kidding me. its so so so odd to me that people can Be transgender and still come to the conclusion that Bioessentialism is Good actually, cis people are just doing it wrong. come the fuck on. does anyone remember when it was considered STUPID in the trans community to be policing peoppe based on agab. remember when it was embarrassing to Ask what gender someone was before transitioning. im walking in circles i feel ill Hello

[caffeineandsociety]

I am sorry it didn't come across that way to you - and I mean that 100% genuinely. You are clearly bringing context to the table that I - and in fact most people I speak to - do not share. Which is fine and a normal part of life.

However, the experience that I am trying to communicate is that when I experience all these things - as I do - those experiences have more in common and in fact are often harder to separate than the people who, again, treat these things as a rigid taxonomy - which is the attitude I was criticizing - seem to think.

For example, if I'm walking down the street and someone calls me a "thing" or a "classic sideshow freak", and I tell them "actually, I'm not a 'bearded lady,' I'm just a man" (which is only half true but w/e) - I think we can both recognize that their answer to this wouldn't be "oh goodness I'm so sorry sir carry on and have a wonderful day", can't we?

Because at the end of the day what cishet, perisex society hates is deviation from the binary, perisex orthodoxy.

There are differences in the specifics of how they act about that, to different people. At no point did I deny that. But at this point you are just nitpicking something that, again, was ONLY rolled together because the distinctions were outside the scope of this post.

Because what it was addressing - really more complaining into the void about - was a very binarist intracommunity attitude that I have been dealing with extensively. Which I chose to address more or less on its own terms, to meet a certain subset of people where they're at.

Again, at no point did I say that these things are the same thing. I put them together because the distinctions are, I repeat,

Outside. The. Scope. Of. This. Post.

Not nonexistent. Not even FULLY irrelevant! But a hell of a lot more than I was able to discuss in an already long post, and really? Probably would have just confused the kinds of people I was "responding" to-

Namely, the people your beef seems to ACTUALLY be with. The people all over this damned hellsite who are convinced that most intersex labels are a dastardly plot by "the TMEs" to undermine trans women, or that it's cool to misgender people you presume to be cis for liking things that don't match their apparent gender. The people who think it's FINE to let our few legal rights be eroded and let more and more laws targeting us be passed as long as they're nominally aimed at the kinds of queer people they can argue are actually secretly overprivileged "invaders". The people doing "boys vs. girls but totally progressive this time prommy oh and I GUESS nonbinary and intersex people exist too??"

If you haven't been seeing more and more of your friends falling into that shit the way I have, then I am genuinely glad. Conversely, if you've been seeing SO much of that shit that even the smallest arguable oversight sets off alarm bells so loud that it makes you disregard everything else and focus in on that like it's the only thing that matters, then damn, I am genuinely really fucking sorry.

But this does not take away the fact that you are not coming across like you're engaging me in good faith. You are coming across like you just want to play the Oppression Olympics and find fault with a stranger for not expressing their experience and observations as a queer person The Right Way.

Which is, I'm fairly sure, the opposite of what we both ACTUALLY want.

Another thing about different gendered forms of transphobia is, if you're about to say "[xyz act of transmisogyny] NEVER happens to trans men or [presumed] AFAB NBs" or "[abc act of transandrophobia] NEVER happens to trans women or [presumed] AMAB NBs" or "[uvw act of exorsexism/binarism/intersexism] NEVER happens to binary perisex trans people"-

You are wrong. I guarantee you that you're wrong.

Gendered forms of transphobia and intersexism are gendered by PRIMARY target, not by EXCLUSIVE target. Whether because someone misreads your gender, or just because someone feels like using a certain framework, or whatever other reason, people can and DO, regularly, attack with whatever is convenient.

The bathroom predator stereotype was invented to attack trans women, but if a men's restroom is all urinals + one broken stall and there's a trans man who can't stand to pee, do you really think people are going to look at him in the women's room and go "go right ahead and use that toilet unbothered, fellow vulva-haver, you pass the vibe check, love your style, have a great night~!"? No! They're going to be just as shitty to him as they will be to any trans woman they clock! Hell, they'll be just as bad to butches regardless of ASAB, or even just to cis women with features they consider too sharp!

The tragic grooming victim force-transed by Big Pharma stereotype was invented to delegitimize trans men, but do you think the transphobic mother of a 9-year old trans girl isn't going to use it to wrestle her daughter back under her thumb and bar her from taking puberty blockers? Of course not! She's going to hop on that stereotype and ride it into the sunset to spin any way she abuses her kid as "tough love" and "cult deprogramming" and "saving" her!

And intersexism/exorsexism/binarism? Friends, I hate to break it to you, but all trans people are treated as gender-confused freaks who fail at being BOTH men and women, regardless of whether we're actually nonbinary or not - what gender are we? Whatever is convenient to demonize us at the moment, regardless of whether or not it's ACTUALLY part of our identity. Trans men who do not pass perfectly (and in fact many who do) are degendered, assigned "nonbinary" because Real Men Don't Look Like That, and then made into all of those horrible transphobic jokes about nonbinary people really just being the worst misogynistic stereotypes of ditzy bimbo not-like-other-girls girls who just want to be special and are simultaneously incapable of taking anything seriously or accomplishing anything as activists but also SOMEHOW able to overwhelm and devastate the entire community of REAL, DESERVING queers who are REALLY oppressed unlike them. Do we not remember that one Reductress headline? They/Them Pronouns Suddenly Easy For Person Misgendering Trans Woman? Do you think the trans woman being misgendered in such a situation is NOT being cast as the butt of exorsexist, intersexist, binarist garbage?

We're all in this mess together. Bigots don't draw neat lines in the sand that never get crossed, however much they like to say that's their purpose. We should stop trying to do their job for them.

[caffeineandsociety]

I listed those things together because the difference between these things is outside the scope of what I'm talking about, not because I somehow think it doesn't exist.

Also, I am intersex.

What exactly are you trying to pick a fight over here? All I said was a very long and roundabout "we have more struggles in common than way too many people want to think".

The context being the level to which radfem rhetoric and attempts at treating queer labels as rigid taxonomy have completely taken over a lot of queer discussions on this website. I fundamentally do not think we disagree as much as you think we do.

Tl;dr: ...what?

Another thing about different gendered forms of transphobia is, if you're about to say "[xyz act of transmisogyny] NEVER happens to trans men or [presumed] AFAB NBs" or "[abc act of transandrophobia] NEVER happens to trans women or [presumed] AMAB NBs" or "[uvw act of exorsexism/binarism/intersexism] NEVER happens to binary perisex trans people"-

You are wrong. I guarantee you that you're wrong.

Gendered forms of transphobia and intersexism are gendered by PRIMARY target, not by EXCLUSIVE target. Whether because someone misreads your gender, or just because someone feels like using a certain framework, or whatever other reason, people can and DO, regularly, attack with whatever is convenient.

The bathroom predator stereotype was invented to attack trans women, but if a men's restroom is all urinals + one broken stall and there's a trans man who can't stand to pee, do you really think people are going to look at him in the women's room and go "go right ahead and use that toilet unbothered, fellow vulva-haver, you pass the vibe check, love your style, have a great night~!"? No! They're going to be just as shitty to him as they will be to any trans woman they clock! Hell, they'll be just as bad to butches regardless of ASAB, or even just to cis women with features they consider too sharp!

The tragic grooming victim force-transed by Big Pharma stereotype was invented to delegitimize trans men, but do you think the transphobic mother of a 9-year old trans girl isn't going to use it to wrestle her daughter back under her thumb and bar her from taking puberty blockers? Of course not! She's going to hop on that stereotype and ride it into the sunset to spin any way she abuses her kid as "tough love" and "cult deprogramming" and "saving" her!

And intersexism/exorsexism/binarism? Friends, I hate to break it to you, but all trans people are treated as gender-confused freaks who fail at being BOTH men and women, regardless of whether we're actually nonbinary or not - what gender are we? Whatever is convenient to demonize us at the moment, regardless of whether or not it's ACTUALLY part of our identity. Trans men who do not pass perfectly (and in fact many who do) are degendered, assigned "nonbinary" because Real Men Don't Look Like That, and then made into all of those horrible transphobic jokes about nonbinary people really just being the worst misogynistic stereotypes of ditzy bimbo not-like-other-girls girls who just want to be special and are simultaneously incapable of taking anything seriously or accomplishing anything as activists but also SOMEHOW able to overwhelm and devastate the entire community of REAL, DESERVING queers who are REALLY oppressed unlike them. Do we not remember that one Reductress headline? They/Them Pronouns Suddenly Easy For Person Misgendering Trans Woman? Do you think the trans woman being misgendered in such a situation is NOT being cast as the butt of exorsexist, intersexist, binarist garbage?

We're all in this mess together. Bigots don't draw neat lines in the sand that never get crossed, however much they like to say that's their purpose. We should stop trying to do their job for them.

[caffeineandsociety]

Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason people are so reluctant to give up the idea that a boner turns you into a mindless beast with no self-control who absolutely MUST fuck the nearest object of attraction that doesn't put up a fight isn't just patriarchy prioritizing white men's gratification above all else and demonizing men of color and queer men and trans women in one fell swoop, but ALSO because that idea makes it easier to keep up the "random 'mentally ill' monsters lurking in the bushes and dealing candy out of windowless vans" narrative around CSA instead of reckoning with the fact that white parenting culture is abusive as fuck and is responsible for way more cases than scary dangerous strangers will likely EVER be

[caffeineandsociety]

A big problem with communication around big and complicated social subjects online is that it can be very hard to tell the difference between someone using the language and logic of mainstream biases because they still believe that vs. Someone who uses that language and logic to meet people where they're at

[caffeineandsociety]

And the thing is, they're not all Russian in origin, no. Let's not get too xenophobic about it, even while we acknowledge that hey, when a government with an adversarial relationship to another government starts interfering in that country's elections, it's prooooobably not gonna be good for citizens of EITHER nation.

This is also a strategy of US Republicans - ever notice how their preferred strategy has ALWAYS been attack ads? They know you don't want any of what they're FOR, so the best they can hope for is to convince you not to vote AGAINST them.

And of course they don't work without people who genuinely believe them. They don't work without the contingent of people disprivileged enough to be harmed by both BUT privileged enough to SURVIVE both becoming convinced that their experience is universal among The Everyman and maybe accelerationism WILL work this time!

What I'm saying is you are not immune to propaganda and neither are your friends.

Just a thought for the night, but remember in 2016 there were all these accounts that seemed really really telling you all the ways Hillary Clinton was some kind of demon woman, just the worst, and really Trump wouldn't be worse and maybe he'd even be better?

and then it turned out they got banned for being literally Russian agents and never came back because spoiler they were?

does it feel like that all over again? just a thought.

[caffeineandsociety]

Idk chat I just feel like "addicts do not owe you getting clean, bodily autonomy is absolute" and "addicts who do want to recover deserve better resources than the ones we have now that are mostly based in religious guilt-tripping and moralizing" are statements that absolutely can go together

[caffeineandsociety]

Tbh I really feel bad for terfs sometimes.

Like first you have an entire worldview predicated on fear that can never be relieved. The thing is, terfs, like most bigots, don't really hate trans people, exactly - they hate a caricature of a caricature of trans people. The imagined version of trans people they work themselves up into a frenzy over? They fully don't exist in any meaningful capacity! There is NO demographic consisting of people who [checks notes] openly flag themselves as predators by blending gender characteristics in a way that is specifically designed to be offputting to people who are terrified of deviation from the norm. This is a completely made up group of people!! Which means...they never appear, much like how the reason Jaws was so impactful was a result of the fact that for most of the movie you never see the shark - to be a terf means you're just living your life in fear, waiting for the other metaphorical shoe to drop, and it's never going to drop, so there is no release from this tension that can do nothing but get tighter and harsher. The closest you can come is just seeing a normal-ass person doing normal-ass things and TELLING yourself you were lucky to escape with your life!! Hardly a satisfactory sense of relief!!

Second, nobody fucking likes you. Other feminists don't like them, bare minimum because of their incredibly bleak outlook regarding the possibility of a more just future, and because their "feminism" is based in claiming that there's an insurmountable gulf of difference between the ability of a powerful intimidating man and a weak dainty little woman, which is notably the OPPOSITE of what most feminists have been trying to say for decades, and likely also because of their just fucking rancid personality and scapegoating of minorities and racism that's often pretty unapologetically open. Right-wingers don't like them because they're mostly women who value their own bodily autonomy - sure, they want to take autonomy away from OTHER people, so they share THAT goal in common, but no matter how much the terf tries to convince herself that she'll be the Shirley Exception with her fascist "friends", it will never make it true that she will be. "I don't do politics" guys don't like them because they're just so fucking negative all the damned time and no one likes being around someone who sounds like a clip show of Fox News headlines and clickbait security ads because they just cannot shut up about how much they hate and fear a completely imagined group of people. Even other terfs are often testing them to make sure they're REALLY one of them and not a secret "TRA" instigator by scrutinizing their every feature to make sure it's not too "mannish" - which is nothing personal, though; everyone is just scared out of their mind of that imaginary boogeyman, far too scared to notice things like the fact that "we can always tell, they always look like this" and "we can never tell, we're playing the most high stakes game of Among Us there's ever been, nowhere is safe, they could be ANYWHERE" are completely incompatible ideas.

Like every now and then I just think about that one woman who went to a funeral and all she could think about was how much she hoped she didn't have to interact with her completely imagined idea of what a trans woman is, or that one who insisted that a woman would have to be an elite athlete to jump on a rock, and I just get to thinking about this shit and. idk it just seems like a genuinely fucking miserable way to live!!