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Yes exactly. like, I get people getting frustrated with terms being used in non academic ways, and I respect both lux and veal, but this is projecting a non academic understanding of class onto an academic context. if you are doing research you have to define variables, that's just like... a basic tenant of science as a method. sociologically, these terms are not stagnant or binary. class is not just a marxian economic construct, and arguing that sociologists use it that way, is kinda bad actually. We don't use it that way, almost every professor and researcher uses finer methodology than brute force binaries like those in the examples, many use qualitative methods, like interview, ethnography and network studies or likert scales, sliding scales and multi-variate analysis with quantitative studies. Now are the tankies and TRFs using it that way? no, not at all. they aren't even doing sociology, they are misusing social science with out doing the actual leg work. But, genuinely, It does us a disservice to misrepresent and dismiss academic discussions of these things as if that is the end all be all of how they are used intersectionality and analysis of people on different dimensions of social stratification (classes as short hand), are not incompatible, in fact that very theory is predicated on it.

i think you misunderstood what i was saying. i don't think breaking things down into class is the end all be all of society and i 100% belive in intersectionality, i'm just saying that as a sociological concept, class is usefull to seperate different identities (gender, race, sexuaxlity, sex, etc) and analyze how they're individually oppressed if that’s the goal of the study/paper/essay.

i dont think class is a useful tool to analyze gender or race because it is binary, you are either bourgeois or proletariat, you cannot be both or outside of this binary

you cannot sort people like classes

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People talk abt the erasure of high support needs autistic people among autism communities on here and that's extremely important but also it honestly feels like people have straight up forgotten that autistic people have Needs. Like needs of literally any kind. I have literally watched people pooh-pooh the idea that autism is a disability (calling it a "metaphorical disability" as opposed to physical disabilities which are "real"), have seen countless memes where the punchline is "autistic person has a common symptom or trait of autism", and you just see a bunch of people talk about how they're super autistic but conveniently are never seen as weird or unlikable and never have meltdowns or lash out and have zero trouble understanding sarcasm or jokes or social cues and hit all their life milestones at appropriate times and aren't lame loser virgins like the rest of you shut-ins. Like it is just extremely common to mock and harass autistic people for displaying very typical autistic traits. There's a point where "dismantling stereotypes" becomes "not actually recognizing the things that make autism autism" and we've really reached it it feels like. As always just a stunning lack of compassion for people who are disabled in ways that disable them and not disabled in ways that are cool to you

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Anti-intellectual attitudes are on the rise on social media, the billionaires who run these apps are banking on people being uneducated or uninterested in education slipping from their fingers. So now is a good time to invest time into following accounts that teach you things, engaging with their content, and most importantly LEARNING.

Communal learning is inherently anti-fascist. Give them hell.

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Remembering the time I was asked to remove 'intersex' from my discord bio by the mods of a furry discord server because "this is a sfw space and that includes bios too" and I got so fucking mad I chewed out one of the mods and was promptly banned for "being rude and disrespecting the mods"., As if my personhood as an intersex man hadn't just been reduced to a fucking fetish porn trope and deemed too inappropriate for teenagers to see in my bio.

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😳 <- this emoji but without the blush or romantic connotation. im not blushing im staring you directly in your fucking eyes

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And none of these people are willing to do more than record it on their cell phones. It's your duty to unarrest someone if you see them getting arrested. Be fucking brave, please.

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The Republicans have decided we no longer need bees and are defunding the USGS Bee Lab. Please tell your friends, your representatives, local beekeepers, crafting clubs, your classmates, and everyone who has ever seen a bee that this is happening and that the Republicans are behind it. Scream about this. We in the professional bug world make fun of the bee people for having some of the only consistent funding and support in the whole field, but now even that is going away. Write it on your car. Tell someone at the store. Email your professor. Make a tiktok. Draw it on the sidewalk. Do NOT let them sneak this by.

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if being hard on yourself worked, it would have worked by now

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"trans men/mascs transition out of oppression and towards privilege" is a terf talking point and it will never be progressive.

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I can't remember who shared this screenshot from Talia Bhatt's book, Trans/Rad/Fem, but it was this.

Well I found out from a GoodReads review of Talia Bhatt's book that most of the stuff in her book are just her Substack articles.

I read a Substack article she wrote about Stone Butch Blues. The stuff written in this screenshot are about Stone Butch Blues.

The entire Substack article is so sickening and vile that it hasn't left my mind and I need to make a post about it.

"I Read It: The Sublime Lesbian Feminism of 'Stone Butch Blues"

Before I talk about Talia Bhatt's article, if you don't already know, Leslie Feinberg is the author of Stone Butch Blues and this is how Feinberg has described his gender and the pronouns that ze uses.

Talia Bhatt exclusively uses she/her pronouns to refer to Leslie Feinberg in this entire article

I'm assuming that Talia Bhatt simply didn't look up anything about Leslie Feinberg - it's clear that she didn't when you read her article anyways, which we'll get into in a moment. So I'm giving Talia Bhatt the benefit of the doubt, but it's still something that needs to be pointed out because it is an example of explicit misgendering and transmasc erasure. Like, this is actual erasure - Talia Bhatt does not acknowledge Leslie Feinberg's transmasculine identity at all! Like I said, maybe she didn't know, but I expect more from trans people to actually look into the author behind Queer literature like this.

Let it be known that the experiences and feelings that the main character in Stone Butch Blues, Jess, has are meant to be based off of Leslie Feinberg's own feelings and experiences. So, assume that talking about Jess means talking about Feinberg as well.

The first couple of paragraphs in this article are mainly doing a generalized summary of the book, or at least talking about some of the stuff that happens in the book, and they aren't really worth going over, so I'm skipping over them.

Now this is the first thing I read that completely shocked me and disgusted me.

"She acquires a prescription for testosterone, masculinizing her face and figure, and saves up for an off-the-books top surgery, shedding the breasts that have plagued her since puberty with the sexualizing gaze of heterosexual desirability."

This made me feel sick, honestly. All I could think about when I read this was how disgusted I would feel if somebody described my transition this way and that this is exactly how TERFs talk about transmascs and trans men. It's fucking disgusting and it makes me feel as sick as I do when I see horrific transmisogynistic descriptions of trans women.

This is genuinely no different from how TERFs talk about us.

This is from the infamous book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier.

If you happen to be unaware of this book, it's a book that is filled with nothing but TERF rhetoric and general horrific transphobia specifically aimed at trans men/transmascs (and non-binary people, mostly non-binary people who were assigned female at birth).

Moving on with Talia Bhatt's article, she begins to say this:

What?

What did she just say?

Strange - why do so many of us relate to them then? You literally said so yourself. You literally said it's strange how this book has gained such popularity and notoriety with trans men and transmascs (as well as non-binary people).

And before someone says it - obviously "not all trans men!" relate to any of this. Plenty of trans men would say that they don't relate to any of it! Plenty of trans men would even agree with Talia Bhatt here!! So obviously "not all trans men" relate to Leslie Feinberg, the experiences/feelings described and talked about in the book, Feinberg's own experiences in general, etc., but plenty of trans men/transmascs DO!!!

Literally I do! Literally it's Leslie Feinberg's experiences and feelings. It's a lot of the experiences and feelings that many friends I've had throughout my life have had. It's the experiences of a lot of trans men and mascs.

And you don't get to fucking decide that it isn't!

TERFs do this to us all the time. They dismiss our trans identities and completely erase them, dismissing us as not really being trans, as basically being cis.

This attitude is pervasive within the overall Queer community as well. It's a big part of the reason why transmascs and trans men who might not "pass" (to them) (or might not even want to pass), who might look feminine, who might be non-binary, who might identify as women or really have any kind of multigender/complex gender identity that isn't ""binary man, basically literally just a cis man"", are often called things like "transtrender" and "theyfab."

Talia Bhatt's article ends like this.

The ending line might be an incredible quote for trans women and transfems.

But as we have known, Leslie Feinberg - and by extension, Jess from Stone Butch Blues - is transmasculine. Ze does not exclusively use she/her pronouns, and using she/her pronouns exclusively is explicitly misgendering.

Overall, this entire article is an entire misrepresentation and complete misunderstanding of Stone Butch Blues, butch identities, transmasculinity identities, and Leslie Feinberg zerself.

And it is transmasc erasure, plain and simple.

If the infamous "trans men are corrupting our girls" book and the book that claims to be reclaiming radical feminism and applying it to trans people sound almost identical, then it goes without saying that this book needs far, far, far more criticism than it seems to be getting.

Radical feminism can never be trans inclusive. It cannot be changed to apply to trans people. It cannot be reclaimed at all in any way.

I hope to see people reading this book and pointing out any flaws with a transmasculine perspective and/or understanding of the oppression - the erasure, invisibility, the feelings we often have - of trans men and transmasculine individuals.

Because it seems like everyone is loving this book and absolutely spreading it around as something good, and even if the premise of reclaiming radical feminism to apply it to trans people wasn't a bad idea in the first place, this alone is bad enough.

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So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

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"read whipping girl" i have and personally i think that while Serano has a lot of valuable insights and analysis, her writing is ultimately mired in her very specific perspective as a white binary trans woman in the american west coast queer communities. this leads to her theory on other groups falling short(not to mention getting snagged on some of the authors underlying biases), especially regarding racial dynamics. Serano herself has acknowledged this, stating that Whipping Girl was meant to be an autobiographical snapshot of a very specific time and place, and that her writing leaves a lot of gaps that should be filled by the relevant perspectives of other minorities. ultimately i think that the book could've benefited a lot from engaging more with existing literature on intersectional feminism, especially black feminist writers. at the end of the day i think that the book has a lot of good pieces but has such a limited perspective that the whole fails to be truly and fully intersectional, and in my opinion Serano has a lot of bias that i dont think shes fully interrogated and it drags her writing down, but hey, thats academia for you

anyway, now that you know i have the required context, what part of whipping girl did you want to discuss further?

.......

ah. i see. you didnt actually want me to read whipping girl, you just wanted me to shut up and agree with you

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I think the "Too often these days..." quote is a good one but why do I keep seeing it applied when talking about neo-users. Why do you think neo-users are anjoying? Huh? Why are they cringe? Or embarrassing? How is that not really also just a harmful ass mindset to be walking around with? Why are groups, who often are nonbinary, annoying to you in a way that you have to use that quote when defending their rights as queer people?

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People really need to learn the difference between “can use misogyny to hurt women” and “have systemic power over women”.

Because guess who is a big wielder of misogyny to hurt women. Other women. And while sometimes there’s systemic power going on there (ie. if it’s paired with say, racism, for example), there are plenty of cases of misogyny simply being used as a tool to hurt women nearby proximity-wise. And so theres plenty of using misogyny to hurt women that is not a wielding of systemic power.

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The most sinsister thing i've seen is how people have been insisting for years trans men can't have chasers because its a "trans woman thing"

Like idk who needs to tell y'all this but just because you don't listen to other people and only care about your personal experience and issues doesn't mean others don't go through similar things