#and coming from a community where my feminity was denied

[many-but-one]

Trauma Informed Biases and TERFs

In light of my ex-best friend being outed as a TERF, I think I want to have a series of discussions. Mainly about the biases that we (community "we") can have and that trauma and biases work hand in hand, and how we cannot allow trauma-informed biases impact our decision making or critical thinking skills, but also a bit about my experiences as a trans man and how being trans yourself doesn't mean you automatically escape transmisogyny. (Spoiler alert: while I'd never say I was transmisogynistic in action, I was in some part biased due to my past traumas, and having a transfemme partner and seeing the way she's treated by others just for existing had to make me rethink everything I understood about what it meant to be a trans woman, which has made me a better person--and I believe a better partner, too.)

First, I'm going to talk a bit about trauma-informed biases. As trauma survivors, we all have them. For example, we were primarily abused by white, Christian men. By all accounts, when we encounter a white, Christian man, we are immediately wary of his intentions. Often without even knowing him or trying to know him, we will already assume he's just like our abusers deep down. While that may sometimes be true, more often than not, a white Christian male who hasn't done much self reflection and growth will mainly just be misogynistic to various degrees and probably not understand the weight of his privilege. That doesn't automatically make him a pedophile who tortures kids like our abusers were.

Branching off from that, and narrowing it down, we get to the meat of the problem, which is men. We have met and known cis men who are by all accounts nothing like our abusers, in fact, the exact opposite. They are sensitive, they are caring, they know their privilege and use it to uplift the voices of their female friends. They are avid supporters of the queer community even if they aren't a part of it. While they are sometimes misguided, they are also always open to learn more and be corrected and change. There are good men out there. However, this doesn't make our bias towards men change. We were hurt by men, we know others who have been hurt by men. People both AFAB and AMAB have been harmed and subjugated by men for centuries, so it's not like it's coming from only our experiences with men.

However, this is where the problem lies. While it's okay to be wary of men for our safety, outright hating ALL men is where it gets dicey. That's where radfem ideology will suck people in, specifically AFAB people. They feel wronged by men, they have been hurt by men, so of course in their mind, men have to pay in some way. Feminism on its own sets to destroy the patriarchy and keep everyone on even ground, whereas radfem ideology often trickles into spaces related to that vengeance aspect of men needing to pay for what they have done in some way. And truly, I can understand. From the bottom of my heart, I can understand. I want the men who hurt me and hurt my friends to pay too. Vengeance (or justice, as many would prefer to call it) is a tantalizing concept, even if only in theory due to how shoddy the justice system is at actually bringing any justice to survivors' lives.

And when an AFAB person enters a radfem space, they will immediately be in danger of developing TERF ideology. This is what happened to the aforementioned friend. Most people will already know who I'm talking about. I think they started in a good place, but the biases that they already held within them were taken advantage of, and they let their trauma-informed biases take root and allow them to follow that TERF path. For the record, they still deny being a TERF, but as everyone has already seen, they most certainly are. TERFs will *rarely* actually self-identify as a TERF, even if they are spouting the most clearly TERF-ridden ideology known to man. The reason for this is because TERF is a "bad word" (rightfully so) and the baby radfems out there who are trying to avoid becoming a TERF are going to start by avoiding anyone who self-identifies as a TERF. Which of course, is not what TERFs want. They want baby radfems to feel welcome and not immediately shun what they teach them, because TERFs do eventually want those anti-TERF baby radfems to eventually become TERFs just like them.

[As a side tangent: I know I sound like I'm calling TERFs predatory in the way I describe their tactics, but I'm going to be completely honest in the way I believe a lot of TERFs utilize cult tactics to find new radfems or radfems who are on the fence between feminism and radical feminism and get them to join their cause. If you examine the BITE model (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion)--what is often used to define a cult--it's very clear that TERFs WILL use emotion-based tactics and manipulative tactics to get baby radfems to join their cause, and once their thought processes get changed and they lose their friends who don't jive with those beliefs, they get stuck in the echo chamber. And then they'll get pressured to believe more and more extreme things with the threat of ostracization from the "in-group" for not agreeing. And if someone has already lost all of their friends for joining this in-group in the first place, where else to go but to stay? See what I'm getting at, here? While they may not be as damaging to their own members as some cults, they DO cause a threat to others, namely transfemmes. People in power who share those beliefs make laws that distinctly work to harm transfemmes, e.g. JK Rowling providing massive amounts of funding towards anti-trans legislature.]

So how does this relate to trauma-informed biases? How do we get from disliking or hating men to becoming a TERF? Well, because TERFs utilize bioessentialism as a weapon. They reduce everyone down to the parts that they have (or were observed to have) at birth. While a TERF may not outright say "everyone born with a penis deserves to die" they WILL outright say things like "well, I just think AFAB people ("real women") should be allowed to have spaces that are only for them, you know? They shouldn't be forced to be around women who aren't AFAB" (if they will even acknowledge that trans women are women at all, more often they consider trans women to be men masquerading as women or accuse transfemmes of outright trying to invade women's spaces to hurt them). This is especially apparent in the lesbian side of TERFdom, where they try to use the justification of "not being attracted to penises" to explain that trans women shouldn't be allowed in their spaces. Which, to be completely honest, I do think it's fine to be attracted to certain genitalia and turned off by other people's genitalia, but you also shouldn't let that guide you toward completely excluding trans women from lesbian spaces. You can just choose to not date trans women and call it a day. Is it pretty lame to reduce someone to a set of parts and only date someone based on a set of parts? Yeah, it is, but you're within your rights to date who you want to. You just shouldn't exclude them from the entire space altogether based on your preferences.

For the record, I used to be part of this group of people right here. There was nothing I had against trans women, I was just extremely terrified of the parts they have due to my past traumas, and I didn't want to make a trans woman feel like I was afraid of them for the parts that they have. I didn't want my fear of sexual situations with her to ruin whatever romantic attraction we could have, and I was certain for a long time that this would be true forever.

Until I met my current partner, who is a trans woman.

I'm going to segue into how being a trans man (technically we are genderfluid but we usually present as a trans man to most people) doesn't automatically mean you cannot hold biases against trans women or even be outright transmisogynistic, and that while I do believe trans men have their own slew of issues related to being trans men (such as being perceived as a traitor to your AGAB, or the first time you get clocked as your correct gender but not in the gender affirming way, in the way that the women that you have always held so much community with think you're a cis man and are afraid of you. That's a tough one to come to terms with, personally, and is also why our system tends to lay within the "butch lesbian/faggy trans guy" section of transmasc, so that while we definitely do get clocked more often, it also helps the women we care about so much in our communities know we're not cis. Because no, our goal is not to be to be as cis as cis can be and so our gender ambiguity that we express does us a lot of favors while also opening other doors for trouble, like harassment for appearing as a faggy trans guy or as someone who's clocked as a lesbian) they are a completely different ballgame than what trans women have to deal with on a daily basis just for existing as they do.

Things I've learned about trans women's experiences that I never knew before:

-They may never be able to fully pass and that puts them in danger of harassment or even death for the rest of their lives

-if they come off as too loud or too intense for someone, they will immediately see them as a danger even if the transfemme in question is one of the kindest human beings you've ever had the pleasure of meeting

-if they don't talk in the somewhat-stereotypical "quiet, demure, trans girl" voice or for any reason dress in a more butch or non-hyperfeminine style, they are going to be seen as a threat despite any actions they will have done to prove they are not a threat

-if a trans woman likes to be around kids, some people are going to immediately assume they're a pedophile. This one deeply saddens and disgusts me more than I can even describe

-if they are talkative or ask a lot of questions about something and they come off as a little too pushy or are socially awkward/autistic, people are going to immediately assume they need to be afraid of her despite there being no evidence of that being a conclusion that needs to be jumped to, or they may label her as "creepy"

-if she decides not to opt for sex change surgeries then she's clearly just a man pretending to be a woman, if she opts for sex change surgeries, she's a trap. Same for if she passes well or not. If she passes well, she's a trap, if she doesn't pass well, she's a freak

-people will assume she's always trying to manipulate them in some way, as mentioned above. If she passes well, she's manipulating them and tricked them (usually for sex, but could also happen in a romantic situation). If she tries to disclose that she's trans early on, she might risk out on them leaving her just for being trans and not actually getting to know her as a person

-if she's into sex or hypersexual and comes off strong, at best she might be labeled as pushy or creepy, at worse she may be labeled as a rapist

-additionally, trans women are extremely fetishized, but once she has autonomy and is seen as an actual person and not a fetish object, all of that attraction goes away and she's seen as a trap or gross or whatever other vile concoctions people have come up with to describe trans women in a sexual light.

-many, many more things that I couldn't even begin to list in this post.

All of these affect a trans woman every single day. She's at nearly just as much if not just as much at risk of attack as cis women are. She's much more likely to hear the word tranny in a negative context than a trans guy is. While a trans guy could get called a tranny, sure, they're significantly less likely to be attacked or even killed for being trans. Trans men are often labeled as "confused little girls" which is infantalizing, yes, but trans women are often labeled as creeps, rapists, or manipulative/evil people. Imagine what that does to a person's sense of self? Their self image? Even if she's never done anything remotely that bad, she's going to be labeled that anyway.

And gods forbid she ever does anything that could be seen as kinda "weird" or "bad"--not in the morally reprehensible sense. I mean like she cheated on someone or she does drugs or she says something a little tone deaf ten years ago. Trans women are forced to live life on their tiptoes for fear of being told they are evil monsters. I've seen with my own fucking eyes someone who I thought was an ally to transfemmes (they were dating a transfemme!!!) who immediately demonized another trans girl because she was socially awkward and autistic. Tried to make assumptions that she must be abusive to her partner, tried to claim that because of one interaction with this girl, they already knew that she had antisocial behavior (which I find funny that she says this to us, someone who has significant ASPD traits), which to me alludes that they believe she could be manipulative and hurtful. All because she was a bit awkward in a social gathering! I was appalled and disgusted by this, and it really opened the door beyond what I'd heard from my partner already the types of things that trans girls have to deal with from people that are within their own community that they should be able to trust.

So what does this have to do with not letting our trauma-informed biases rule the way we think about others? I'll keep it as simple as possible with this little flow chart:

Someone (usually AFAB) has trauma with men -> they hate men -> they join the feminism movement -> they veer into radfem spaces because of how vocal radfems are about hating men and they feel they are justified to believe this because of the harm men have caused them personally -> they become a TERF because radfems see people as a set of parts rather than what they actually are -> TERFs spread hatred and vitriol towards trans women in particular -> that hate and vitriol leaks into the LGBTQ+ community because a large number of TERFs are lesbian cis women -> trans women are unable to feel safe even in their own communities

Trans women deserve to feel safe in their own communities. You can be the biggest trans woman supporter ever and still not be a good ally. I thought I was a great ally to trans women before I realized that I was equating trans women's struggles with my struggle as a trans man. And until you really understand what they go through and see it with your own eyes, you may never truly realize just how difficult it is to exist as a trans woman AND you may realize you had biases you didn't even know you had. Existing as a trans man =/= existing as a trans woman. I didn't even realize I had any bias towards trans girls until I realized that I had decided (rather young I might add) that I wouldn't date a trans girl because of the fact that she was AMAB. I didn't realize how much this completely screwed up my view of trans women until I examined it under a microscope, AFTER I fell in love with a trans girl. I don't want y'all to feel like you have to fall in love with a trans girl to understand their struggle and to question your own biases. (though I will say, dating a trans woman has been the best relationship of my life, I love her so much).

Examining your biases and understanding what is trauma-informed and what is an actual issue is paramount. Being wary of cis men is kind of a given, considering the amounts of violence cis men do upon people and have been doing upon people for hundreds upon hundreds of years, but you can't let yourself get into the rut of outright hating cis men just because you've been hurt by cis men in the past.

Interestingly, I've also been abused by cis women, though rarely in as violent of contexts as cis men. I've made myself look at that under a lens too and it made me realize that I greatly distaste old women, and for me, especially if they are 50 and older--though some parts of my system also struggle with any woman older than her mid thirties. I will almost immediately assume an old woman doesn't have my best interests at heart, though it's different than with cis men. While I may assume a cis man might violently assault me in one form or another, I typically have different assumptions with older women and it's definitely something I'm going to have to also examine under a microscope and try to pick apart to really understand if my assumptions are based on verifiable truth ("all old women are bad," like the "all men are bad" assumption) or based on my traumas. My traumas are my own personal truth, but I can't let that affect my relationships I have with men and older women for the rest of my life. Or I could end up a TERF, or like one of those people who were happy that old people were dying of COVID. What a miserable way to live, you know?

-Delphine (she/her)

[cosmics-beings]

i remember some tfp fans were really mad when people drew tfp starscream super feminine and stuff and it's like, find something else to get mad about. in a fandom where a lot of the male characters are literally feminized by fandom or just flat out seen as women then why was it just a problem to y'all when it was HIM who went thru it.

[gatheringbones]

[“Coming out was very lonely. I had very few friends. Most of the adult lesbians I knew were alcoholics, chronically unemployed, prone to violence, self-hating, apolitical, closeted, cliquish. Lesbians hated each other. If you found a lover you stopped going to the bar because you could not trust other lesbians; they would try to break up your relationship. My first woman lover went into the military, where she turned in other lesbians so she would not be exposed. One of my dyke friends got a job as a supervisor in a cabinet-making company and refused to hire lesbians because, she said, they were unreliable employees who were disliked by the other workers. The only thing that seemed worse to me than the apolitical lesbian community I came out in was the strangulation of pretending to be straight. I came out only because I could not go back; there was no place for me to stand in the het world. I was driven out.

Moving to San Francisco improved things somewhat. There was more public lesbian space there—six bars instead of one. But it did not alleviate the loathing with which my family viewed me. Nor was San Francisco in the early seventies any sort of gay utopia. We had no gay-rights law, queer bashing was a frequent event, and everyone had lost at least one job or been denied a place to live. It was a relief to be surrounded by other lesbian feminists, but only to a point. Bar dykes and feminists still had contempt for one another. Feminism rapidly became a way to reconstitute sexual prudery, to the point that it seemed to me that bar dykes were actually more accepting of and knowledgeable about the range of behavior that constituted lesbianism. In the bars or in the women’s movement, separatism was pretty much mandatory, if you didn’t want to get your ass kicked or be shunned. Separatism deteriorated into a rationalization for witch hunts in the lesbian community rather than a way for women to bond with one another and become more powerful activists. The lesbian community of that decade did terrible things to bi women, transgender people, butch/femme lesbians, bar dykes, dykes who were not antiporn, bisexual and lesbian sex workers, fag hags, and dykes who were perceived as being perverts rather than über-feminists. We were so guilty about being queer that only a rigid adherence to a puritanical party line could redeem us from the hateful stereotypes of mental illness and sexual debauchery.

What did I gain? I came a little closer to making my insides match my outsides, and that was no small blessing. The first time I met other dykes I recognized a part of myself in them, and knew I would have to let it out so I could see who I was. For a time, being a lesbian quieted my gender dysphoria because it made it possible for me to be a different kind of woman. That was an enormous relief.

For a long time, I hoped that by being strong, sexually adventurous, and sharpening my feminist consciousness, I could achieve a better fit between my body and the rest of me. Lesbianism was a platform from which I could develop a different sort of feminism, one that included a demand for sexual freedom and had room for women of all different erotic proclivities. I had a little good sex and discovered that I was not a cold person, I could love other people. It was as a lesbian that I began to find my voice as a writer, because in the early days of the women’s movement, we valued every woman’s experience. There was a powerful ethic around making it possible for every woman to speak out, to testify, to have her say. But there were always these other big pieces of my internal reality that lesbianism left no room for.

The first big piece of cognitive dissonance I had to deal with, in my second coming out, was S/M. I date my coming out as a leather dyke from two different decisions. One was a decision to write down one of my sexual fantasies, the short story that eventually became “Jessie.” At the time I wrote the rough draft of that story, I had never tied anybody up or done anything else kinky. I was terribly blocked as a writer. I kept beginning stories and poems that I would destroy. I have no idea if they were any good or not. My self-loathing was so intense, my inner critic so strong, that I could not evaluate my own work.

So I decided to write this one piece, under the condition that I never had to publish it or show it to another person. I just wanted to tell the truth about one thing. And I was badly in need of connecting with my own sexuality since I was in the middle of what would be a five-year relationship with a woman who insisted we be monogamous, but refused to have sex with me. So I wrote about dominance and submission, the things I fantasized about when I masturbated that upset me so much I became nauseated. Lightning did not strike. As I read and reread my own words, I thought some of them were beautiful. I dared show this story to a few other people. Some of them hated it. Some of them were titillated. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. The story began to circulate in Xerox form, lesbian samizdat. I found the strength to defend my story when I was told it was unspeakable or wildly improbable.

In October of 1976, I attended a lesbian health conference in Los Angeles and went to a workshop there about S/M. In order to go to a workshop, you had to sign a registration sheet. I was harassed by dykes who were monitoring this space to see who dared sign up for that filthy workshop. On my way, I had to walk through a gauntlet of women who were booing and hissing, calling names, demanding that the workshop be canceled, threatening to storm the room and kick us all out of the conference. The body language and self-calming techniques I had learned when I had to deal with antigay harassment on the street came in very handy, but how odd it was to be using those defenses against the antagonism of other dykes. Their hatred felt like my mother’s hatred. I am so glad I did not let it stop me.

When I got home from that workshop, I knew that I was not the only one. Not only were there other lesbians who fantasized about sadomasochism, there were women who had done these things with each other. I decided to come out again. If there were other leather dykes in San Francisco, they had to be able to find me, so I had to make myself visible. This meant that I often did not get service at lesbian bars, or I was asked to leave women-only clubs and restaurants. I was called names, threatened, spit at. I got hate mail and crank calls. But I also found my tribe. And because I had already experienced my first coming out, I knew we were not going to be an ideal, happy family. I could be more patient with our dysfunctions, and see them as the result of being scared, marginalized, kicked around. Being a leather dyke took me another step closer to dealing with my gender issues. I could experiment with extreme femme and extreme butch drag; take on a male persona during sex play. I gave up separatism because I needed to take support from any place where it was available. Gay men already had a thriving leather culture, and I wanted to learn from them. I also wanted to have sex with them. It still wasn’t okay as far as lesbian feminism was concerned to be bisexual, to be transgendered, but I could bring those folks into my life and make alliances with them. I could defend them in print. There was even more good sex, and people who loved me and received my love despite the fact that it was dangerous for us to show ourselves to one another. I faced my sexual shadow, and she bowed to me and then danced beautifully in profile against the white walls of my consciousness. My writer’s voice was unlocked.”]

pat califa, from layers of the onion, spokes of the wheel, from a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories, 2000

[marzipanandminutiae]

The post about "we need feminism because there's a men's rights movement in LGBT" is from radfems. "Baeddelations" has a pinned post about being a baeddel, "men's rights" in this context pretty much means trans men speaking about being trans men. (I'm not denying issues in the community but I know you've wanted it pointing out when you've missed dogwhistles before, and the post is all very thinly veilled references.)

I did some looking into this, because I was not familiar with the term "baeddel."For anyone else who didn't know: It's an Old English word generally meaning "effeminate or castrated man" as far as I can tell, and some transfem people adopted it primarily back in the 2010s (although some still use it, like the user in question). Baeddels in the modern sense claim to focus on transmisogyny and trans women's issues...but as you say, some can lapse into prejudice against trans men. To the point where, while it doesn't seem like they ALL hold that view, it has become one of the most prominent things about the movement. Kind of like radfems and transphobia. The poster in question seemed, when I looked through their blog, to come down in the middle- there were some comments that raised my eyebrows, but not as extreme as things I saw on other blogs.

I went back and forth about what to do re: the post in question, though. Because I don't want to be associated with hatred of trans men, since. You know. I don't hate trans men. However, I do feel that the modern left, and even the LGBT community, believes misogyny has been fixed and refuses to examine the undercurrents thereof that women in these circles still struggle with.

(Trans men can be misogynistic. NB people can be misogynistic. Anyone can be misogynistic, and the community letting misogynistic people off the hook because they're not cis men, or the expectation thereof, is a real issue that I have witnessed/experienced IRL. Shoutout to the trans guy who insisted I let him do everything for me out in public, and got mad when I didn't want to, because it "made him feel more masculine" so I should apparently just shut up and act helpless, for example.)

(There's also been a lot of "not all men" going around in response to women expressing frustration with the bullshit we face for our gender, which is like. Come on. I thought we all figured out in the 2010s that no-one sensible is talking about LITERALLY all men; we just shouldn't be expected to water down our anger to make men comfortable. Tacking "but what about trans men?" onto that doesn't negate the entire rest of the conversation.)

I disagree that the post is "all thinly veiled references" because it looks like most people reblogging it are like me- folks who aren't familiar with that term but feel that there's a still a misogyny issue in progressive and queer spaces. However, because of the association with a specific movement I am not part of and largely disagree with an apparent key point of, I will be deleting it.

Do not mistake this for me recanting my personal sentiments on the matter. There is a misogyny problem in my community, because the misogyny problem in broader society remains. Trans men and NB people are not exempt from being misogynistic. This needs to be talked about, and it is deeply frustrating to me as a queer woman.

Do I even have to say "this is not for t*rfs?" Well, just in case, it is Not. Fuck off.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

It really hurts me to see things like racism and islamophobia in feminist spaces. I find a lot of women who hold these beliefs are actually well meaning, (for eg. They'll direct racism towards whatever foreign men are known to abuse women of their ethnicity, or they'll spread messages of islamophobia because the religion is known to hallow traditions such as child marriage, physical abuse towards women, and the execution of women for perceived crimes such as unfaithfulness to their partners and/or promiscuity.)

What ladies who do things like this fail to take into account, is that we are currently still living in a patriarchal society. If you direct hatred towards men, fine. But once you begin directing hatred to men of a particular community, it becomes less of an issue with men and more of an issue with that whole community, since men are conventionally seen as the representatives of whatever communities they are in.

Yes, I know this is usually not the intention, but the actual result is just further oppression directed towards the women within these communities. If want to say 'men'. SAY 'MEN'! Yes, they fucking suck! They've done it all! But you begin derailing whenever you say 'Black men. South Sudanese men. Hell, even if you say 'White men' you are oppressing black people. South Sudanese people. White people.

Feminism is about protecting women, not just your women. If you exclusively want to protect your women, in my opinion that would make you a nationalist and/or a blatant racist. That's fine too. But I do think it does misrepresent actual feminism to prospective sisters when you actively speak out against the communities they are a part of, much less when you support its oppression.

To be honest, I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that. I have no doubt whatsoever that outside of feminist spaces they shit on women of colour just as much as they do on men of colour. They just don't do that directly here (as much, anyway, because some of them definitely do) because they know they're less likely to get away with it.

Plenty of women here have said that men of colour don't get a pass for being misogynistic, and that men of colour crying racism against white women for being wary of them as well as white men are denying male violence. So the radblr racists pretending that we value anti-racism over fighting misogyny is not accurate.

Like "men of colour are just as dangerous as any men; facing racism doesn't stop that" is a factual statement. The second you try to claim white men are safer is when we take issue because no the fuck they are not. For white people to claim men of colour are safer is racist because it's infantilizing, romanticizing, noble savage bullshit. To claim that white men are safer is the opposite side of the same racist coin.

With that being said, yes, there are societies where women are treated worse than in others, but to act like that's a condition of being black or brown is inaccurate and gross. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. were further along with women's at one point than many western countries.

What we should be seeing it as is a warning: if it can happen to them it happen to us. No, not because of immigrants but because men having been doing this shit to us all around the world for millennia. And women have always fought for their rights. You look through the history of any society and you find that progress is not a straight line. Women gain rights for a time and then are pushed back down.

My nana warned me never to think it couldn't happen in my own country. The USA is a perfect example of a country sliding backwards when it comes to women's rights and that is mostly being done by white men. White men who, as it happens, LOVE telling white women they need white men to protect them from the raping black and brown men. Meanwhile white women are mostly raped by white men. And white men let those men go free and blame the women for it.

And, you know, the racists of radblr could easily see this if they chose. They don't because they don't want to. While they make accusations about our priorities, it's they who prioritize being racist over feminism.

[genderkoolaid]

transandrophobic people are so out of touch. I was a football (soccer for americans) fan who developed a small following as a female football fan who knows a lot about niche football history. I defended football fangirls who were targets of sexist remarks, and I had arguments with sexist cis str8 male football fans who try to deny my "street cred", my painstakingly collected knowledge.they called me a bandwagon gloryhunter and shit . you know what happened when I came out as a trans man to my friends in the football fandom, 90% of them are cis str8 male? I wasn't celebrated as "joining their team". I was blasted for saying "I'm not cis" because apparently my "friend" thinks cis is a slur. I LOST ALL MY FRIENDS. I was still sent surveys and such that want to interview female football fans. I felt unsafe using he/him pronouns or being masculine because this supposedly woke publication only accepts women and nonbinary people, as if being a trans man gets me any clout in the football scene (it really does not). I decided the healthiest thing I could do was to DISAPPEAR from that account. I LEFT SO MANY OF MY FRIENDS. I have not watched or followed football in YEARS because I had so much trauma from the fandom. And even women's football fans, who are less bigoted, only know Baby's First Feminism where only cis and str8 women and men exist, and that men are always oppressors and women are always oppressed. And this crap story doesn't even mention my Asianness and non-USness and disability. screw transandrophobes.

I'm so sorry you had to go through that. When your transness is undeniable (like after coming out) it poisons the well of whatever male privilege you might get around transphobes. Its so fucked up that you were driven out of that community and I wish you the best.

[riverofrainbows]

I get kind of really annoyed with how much some people focus on and how much they ascribe to "female socialization", as well as how universal they apply it, especially in regards to trans men and transmasc people.

I do think that there is some aspects worth discussing of this, but like i said not in the way these people do it.

"Ooh everyone who is afab has these same experiences, we all know how it feels to (be harrassed, be catcalled, have our clothes policed, be told we're not as capable, etc)"

And like yeah probably a lot of people that are perceived as women have some of these experiences. Sexism and misogyny do exist.

But not all of us? And not all experiences? And while we're at it, not all trans men/trans masc people even grew up perceived as women if they came out as a child.

And they always take it to the next step that therefore all afab people share this communal trauma of men, which is where the radical feminism and terf ideology comes in.

This also relies on the assumption that all "female socialization" and "afab experience" is shaped by misogyny perpetuated by men. A lot of misogyny is perpetuated by women (for example the rampant diet culture that is especially put onto children perceived and raised as girls). A lot of strict gender roles for girls and boys are enforced by women, since the majority of child rearing is still done by women. Sure more men are misogynistic, and it's more often men who perpetuate street harrassment, yes. But that is not the only part of daily life.

And the next part is the assertion that "female socialization" that is put onto a transmasc person is then also internalised by that person. If you hear "girls should do this" but you know you're not a girl, you will not internalise it the same way a girl will. There is a bunch of gendered messaging that people will subconsciously absorb in some way, and yes how someone is treated in daily life affects them, but trans people will always have a different experience than peers assigned the same gender at birth, and even cis kids will have, sometimes strongly, varying life experiences. The middle class christian white cis het able-bodied neurotypical female experience that terfs and radfems trout as universal doesn't exist, neither for all women nor afab people, nor at all.

And whenever they try to draw on that supposed "universal trauma of men" to spread their ideology, to shape discussions and claim certain transphobic statements, it really stands out as odd to me because the emotional manipulation through reminding people of trauma or bad experiences they had doesn't work on me, so the base for their following argument doesn't exist.

I have had very little bad gendered experiences in my life. And i know i am somewhat just statistically lucky, because i know it does happen to people I'm not denying that. But i have very little negative impact of that proposed "female socialization", nor much of such a socialisation at all. And not in a tomboy 'my father taught me how to repair cars' way, i did learn how social rules apply to me while i move through the world perceived as a woman/girl and my parents also gave me information on that. But i never had much of what is usually claimed as part of growing up as an afab person. My parents never put gendered expectations on me. Never restricted my food, or forced me on a diet. Never policed my clothing, never policed even the style of clothing. When i started to dress masculinely after i realised i am trans, they never bat an eye even before coming out. They gifted me whatever was on my wishlist, both feminine stuff and remote controlled race cars (and mostly books). I have never been told i am less capable of anything, i actually always heard, from everywhere, that girls can be whatever they want, and that you can be a girl however way you want (and i never heard similar messaging aimed at boys in the scope of gendered messaging i witnessed. I was aware of sexism and that that's why it was especially aimed at girls, but i never heard any of that supposed already plentiful messaging directly told to boys my age). Our period products are and were always out in the open, my father was never weird about it and went with me to my first gynaecologist appointment. I would walk through the apartment half dressed in underwear to ask him to close my dresses. I never had many bad experiences with boys growing up, mostly because i also didn't know any boys; I went to an all girls school, i didn't have any friends so that included boys, i mostly just read books (and my parents never policed or even commented on what books i was reading. My father also recommended me his favourite scifi books, since i always loved fantasy and scifi). Most bad experiences growing up were with girls, through bullying and the girls in school finding me weird due to my autism and because i wasn't really girly or easily connected through girl experiences (i also thought I had internalised misogyny when it was just dysphoria). Most medical bad experiences were with female doctors and medical personnel, including two female gynaecologists. I have had a gross sexual comment made to me twice in my whole life. I never had a bad experience while dating because i have never dated anyone. The closest i have come to dating i did not have any particularly bad gendered experiences, nor really bad ones at all, just awkward experiences.

What i am trying to say with this is that i never experienced "the communal afab trauma" and i know that terfs and radfems are full of shit and purposefully ignore intersectionality and nuance, as well as don't actually care about women.

I did notice and experience some negative effects of sexism and misogyny in societal messaging, like the oversexualisation of female characters, awareness of gender stereotypes and strict gender roles, also i recently noticed i always buy tight or even slightly too tight clothing due to the way womens clothes affected me (that i wore until a few years ago). I am also acutely aware of the gender disparity in healthcare and medical research that is absolutely appalling. I am a feminist and I know that sexism and misogyny exist (and affect others often more than me) and i advocate against it wherever it's possible for me to do so. But i do not share some universal female/afab experience and most definitely not some "female socialization" the way terfs and radfems and those who are sipping the radfems juice claim the world works and try fo force onto trans people (especially transmasc people) in order to perpetuate transphobia of all kinds.

(because in the same vein, some mystical "male socialisation" does not apply to trans women and transfem people in the way terfs and radfems claim, nor does it exist the way they claim it to)

[fatehbaz]

KN:  [...] I think what is sitting in my heart at this moment is how to hold this together: a will to do things otherwise and build things elsewhere, in ways that keep sight of power – and yet refuse it as totalising. This might be what María Lugones meant when she challenged us to work beyond “the logic of power” in her theorisation of/toward decolonial feminism. [...] What Lugones proposes (insists!) is not an abstract theoretical musing, something to be puzzled out by refracting ideas through frameworks. Rather, it is something to be done – a practice that we envision and embody because we must. [...]

KH: [...] We are also drawing on a longer history of thinking about radical pedagogy (hooks, Freire, Boal and more – including many unpublished practitioners). [...] [S]ituated as we are within colonial extractive institutions, what is our relation to knowledge? We can think with Michel-Rolph Trouillot about how this relationship – which is invested with power – is obscured, as knowledge travels, enters, and circulates within institutions [...]. How do we make choices about what we share? As we move through the business of knowledge production, do we ask ourselves: who needs to know this, and why? Trouillot says, “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” How can we keep the roots of meta-structures of domination and extraction clear and visible to ourselves, and at the same time work, as Chandra Mohanty says, as “insurgent” communities within our institutions? How can we develop working practices which honour the engagements we have with the peoples, lives, histories, ideas that we work with?

KN: Yes, we are coming to a shared concern: what does it mean to work “beyond the logic of power” and build “insurgent communities” within extractive institutions? What does that require of us? In other spaces and times, I’ve named academia and Higher Education as explicitly neoliberal, shaped by capitalist ideals to the extent that (successful) teaching and learning yields subjects who reproduce the prevailing order and the violence that sustains it. I know that among us, we follow Paulo Freire and bell hooks in refusing that logic, and instead insist that education can be otherwise – that knowledge cultivation and sharing can move us toward “critical consciousness” (conscientização) and practices of freedom. [...]

---

KN: So the question is definitely one of method – how exactly do we work in these ways [...]? In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten catch us with this claim: “THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY IS A CRIMINAL ONE.” [...] Instead, Harney and Moten invite us into fugitivity:

[I]t cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

“To be in but not of.” This is to accept that our labour might be captured or extracted (even willingly) by the institution – that we might “be beneficial to capital” – but to do our work beneath the surface, refusing to serve its logics by “disappear[ing] into the underground.” This is a space/time of the future, where we are learning, building, nourishing, creating, and preparing for a new order. [...]

---

KH: [...] Through them, I am also asking: can we meet each other in other ways? At a morning MA seminar [...], I began our session with a quick warm up game taken from the methods of Augusto Boal [...]. It encouraged members of the class to look at one another, and to lead by paying attention to and reading non-verbal cues. At the same time, it occurred to me that the exchange was still being shaped by other power dynamics, including race, physical appearance and clothing, and dis/ability. For a myriad of reasons, people don’t necessarily always want to be seen, or known. [...] This approach to learning involves grappling with discomfort and learning to de-centre. Teaching students to de-centre themselves – by asking who is known? who is know-ing? who is know-er? [...]

---

KN: These are worlds we can build and inhabit – they hold what was, what is, and what will be. They are spaces of secrecy, criminality and solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release. They are sites of study and strategy, offering care, love, nourishment, and pleasure. These fugitive worlds are where we meet and dream together – where we hold each other up when the doing feels too much, where we take turns carrying the weight. They are not ephemeral, but rising and receding according to our needs and careful judgement/s of the moment. We can be there learning, agitating, disrupting, growing, and laughing – and at the same time here, rising to the surface to steal what we can.

I am starting to understand how we might create these worlds with people we meet through the extractive institutions we work in (but are not of) – on picket lines [...], in classrooms and hallways, at protests and workshops – in time that may be “stolen” by virtue of the systems and norms that define criminality, but in truth is reclaimed, re-purposed, and re-valued. Finding our communities can be an act of recognition, seeing/hearing/feeling/sensing yourself in another (even if a fleeting glimpse) or something more radical: recognising “[…] that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly.” I think this is partly what leads us toward decolonial and anticolonial feminist praxis, pedagogies, and thought: the belief that when we work in antithetical ways we are also in motion toward each other.

---

Words of: Katie Natanel, Kanwal Hameed, and Amal Khalaf. “Toward a Liberation Pedagogy.” Kohl. Volume 9 Number 1. Special Issue: Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries. Winter 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[aftonfamilyvalues]

I genuinely need therapy, because my mental health is so bad like I trauma dump a lot and I don’t mean to and have a lot of compulsions and addictive behaviors and lack community… i act compulsively a lot. I need to sleep but I’m scared to and don’t really know how to let go/don’t feel safe enough to sleep, I’m constantly afraid of being violated, but it seems like for good therapy you need to pay out of pocket. I’ve never had a therapist in a clinic that wasn’t mediocre and project misogyny onto me and stigmatize me and judge me and make me feel worse, some have flat out been malicious and when I gave them feedback they didn’t like, they will blame me for their bad behavior and gaslight me. A lot of them have invalidated or even minimized my experiences being abused, even sexually abused. They’ll be distracted. I’ve spent a lot of time doing emotional labor (I think a lot of therapists are codependent.

I think a lot of women are socialized to give care but there’s a lot of misogyny in mental health. I was searching for feminist therapists on psychology today, just to see if maybe I could vet out someone who focuses on women’s issues because my trauma is a woman’s issue… I don’t need a therapist gaslighting me as to why I can’t get over my trauma and trust men, that’s not why I’m in therapy to heal so that I can jump into a relationship, I get so panicked when therapists do that because it’s so devaluing.

A lot of them aren’t grounded in reality, like when it comes to male violence and how the system works and ironically a lot I’ve had to explain how narcissism works… and one had never heard of negging; j feel like these are things a therapist should know. It seems like their only purposes is to label and perscribe medications and a lot actually don’t know how trauma works it’s bizarre?

I search and I see “kink positive.” This shit makes me want to die, like kinda feels hard to heal and find connection in a patriarchal system. I feel like I’ll never get out of poverty. Im going to be 32 in April and just now going to school, kinda feel like it’s hopeless hoping I can heal and have the life I want like it’s endless 😅

I’ve only found radical feminist spaces and actual feminist spaces helpful but I try not to trauma dump, sharing trauma in therapy is weird.

Since I’ve been around 4 I’ve wanted to die, I’d be terrified telling my mother I wanted to go home. She hated me for being a victim and denied any sexual abuse and acted so clueless; I blacked out most my childhood and she laughing shared with me that when I was 4 I was crying about wanting to go home. Like I was suicidal at 4 years old and I always hoped that would change but it only gets worse the older I get but then I’m also scared of dying.

Not sure what the point is when things keep getting worse; how do you find “your people” like sane people? I miss when feminism meant something, most people are untrusty.

It’s always felt like hell on earth and Tbh sometimes I miss being delusional and believing in god and heaven.

im sorry youve had those experiences. i think theres a strange over saturation of therapists nowadays. maybe not directly, but of people who really shouldnt be therapists. im thinking of the types of people ive seen want to go into/have gone into therapy and really, so many are not the types of people who should be trying to help others with their issues. i mean, my friend was forced to go to therapy in high school and the only feedback the therapist ever gave was "yeah, your life sucks, id hate to be you"

a lot of them dont really focus on healing but rather "fixing" especially with women. they dont want to validate you, they want you to be "normal" per se and to go back to be useful patriarchal cogs. i think theres a problem on therapists not recognizing where peoples trauma comes from. how can you help someone whose problems stem from poverty if you dont understand how poverty works? from misogyny and patriarchy? from racism? from homophobia? from the establishments which are built upon and utilize these oppressions? the worst are the ones indoctrinated by these systems, that work to strengthen them, like the "kink positive" ones you mentioned. all theyll do is push traumatized individuals, mainly women, back into traumatizing situations.

but overall, i dont really know how to answer your question. ive always had a sane dependable immediate family to fall back on. but there are people out there

[cios-correct-opinions]

so you’ve never spoken to a radfem in your life

im only answering this as a way to make this info publicly available btw any other asks within this vein will be deleted. just so yall know ahead of time

anyway

i actually have spoken to an unfortunate number of radfems in my lifetime, sadly. on varying levels of the indoctrination scale. all of these experiences have been largely negative based solely on the fact alone that their "goal" was to "save" me or w/e and "show me the error of my transgender ways". as if that's ever in good faith when used in any other argument w any other minority esp within the queer community ever lmfao. so understandably, they were quite distressing, especially when i was a kid.

here's the thing.

even if i weren't trans. even if i weren't nonbinary or a trans man, or in some alternate universe where i am AMAB, a trans woman/transfem. i'm still black. i know bioessentialist bullshit, where it comes from, and where it leads, intimately.

there is a reason why, even if individual radfems themselves deny this and/or aren't willing to engage in this behavior, largely, groups/organizations/whatever tf terms they're using to mask the fact that they're a violent hate group radfems use which are founded by and/or primarily made up of radfems self-identified or otherwise, are often seen or discovered to be in cahoots w white supremacist/n-zi/fascist/other racial "superiority" based regime fundamentalist/traditionalist groups. there is a reason. and it is not hard to see.

radfems are almost word for word in some cases simply re-packaging n-zi/white supremacist/KKK/race essentialist/facist/etc groups' ideology/"science"/teachings/misc. assorted bullshit under the sparkly guise of "feminism" and "female liberation" or "lesbian separatism" etc etc

it surprises me exactly not at all that radfems either dont care or arent aware or arent willing to address this issue. i expected that from those sad losers who are intent on blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, who insist that they aren't at all in any way responsible for feeding into the systemic oppression that is the patriarchy in reality, who insist that everyone BUT themselves examine their behavior/beliefs/etc.

who believe that the patriarchy would magically disappear if all those "Evil Male Penis-Havers" (heavy sarcasm) were simply systemically slaughtered(*) because it is easier for humans, historically as a species, to pick one group of people to call the Other, the "Them", and blame their problems on Them, and "if we just got rid of Them (code for: queers, black ppl, jewish ppl, native american ppl/indigenous ppl worldwide/disabled ppl/mentally ill ppl, etc etc the list goes on and on and fucking on), all of our problems would go away too!"

i expected this from them. cool. fine. they're easy to block bc they make it obvious who they are from their incredibly visually unappealing and often straight up inaccessible, but nonetheless telling, blogs.

i'm just disappointed in the supposedly anti-radfem crowd, esp my fellow trans and nonbinary folk n other queers, who blindly follow the radfem ideology, and then when it is pointed out to them, regardless of how kindly it is done or how nicely or privately etc, unfortunately often react defensively instead of being willing to listen. that's what upsets me and makes me sad more than anything.

like yeah radfems also upset me and make me sad at times, esp when i get unwillingly exposed to their bullshit bc it makes my head hurt with how stupid it all is. but im far more upset n hurt when ppl who should be by all means on my side, are more willing to side w the ppl they claim to hate rather than listen to me when i talk abt yknow. my life experiences.

(*)(i mean. that alone, no matter how you package it, is genocidal. the fact that they want AMAB/people they label as AMAB whether theyre "technically correct" or not, folks to be subjugated in ways which ultimately lead to their eventual "eradication" so as to "liberate" the poor suffering AFABs who can't fight back any other way (again heavy sarcasm), is, no matter what the reason, genocidal. they want a genocide)

any terfs and/or radfems of any kind who interact w this post will simply be blocked on sight. im not about to waste my precious time and energy debating w yall. just do me a favor n stay away from trans folk irl and online, yall hating us does not mean abuse towards us is justified esp when the ppl ur harassing are strangers to u. like cmon man. if someone specific in ur life is causing u grief maybe talk to them abt it personally, dont do that shit where u bother random trans folk or harass them for some strange reason for "daring" to exist while trans (heavy sarcasm, we r clearly not in the wrong here but yknow, these ppl are apparently already unable to understand this so -shrug emoji-)

[magnoliamyrrh]

I thought radical feminism opposed hijab

dont worry, no offense taken lol, i dont mind ppl just asking questions, and youre far from the first to ask me abt this. if anything tks for asking lol ive been wanting to make a post abt this on this blog, just hadn't gotten around to it

so. this is going to b a long and tangeled one. my opinions and feelings on hijab are quite complicated and conflicting and they have been so for years, and i think its important that i say a)in all honesty by this point i dont know what my stance is 100% and im not going to pretend otherwise b)i dont think my opinion is the most important on the planet when it comes to this discussion c)opinions among islamic feminists are not uniform on this topic d)i consider myself to be heavily leaning twoards radical feminism, and i engage w the community bc at least youre still allowed to talk abt shit and ill take women who are critical of everything under the sun than women who cant discuss shit; however i wouldnt say im a full on radfem, moreso an orbitor whose mostly on board

i really dislike the way liberal feminism, both from outside of islam and liberal feminism imported into it, approaches this topic. theres a billion nuances and things to touch up on in this discussion which i wont even get to; none of this starts and ends at "choice." and to start and end the discussion at choice is to miss out on any historical, social, psychological, or even religious analysis - how are we to speak of choice when so many muslim sisters believe that an all powerful god is commanding them to do something? this is not choice the way the liberals wish to understand it. also, i always said that i dont think covering is a feminist thing to do really - just bc a woman chooses to do a thing dont make it feminism all of the sudden

it is true that hijab is historically tied to sexism, this is undeniable. in islam it came about mostly after the death of muhammad pbuh; at least, it became more common. the quran is not specific when it tells women to cover. it was also the influence of other cultures and religions of the period which had an affect on islam; orthodox christianity, zoroastrocism, etc. it is indeed true that the hijab is entangeled with patriarchy and patrilinial systems - while it may be about modesty, this modesty exists in a male benefiting system in which the woman is expected to be modest (and sexually "pure") outside of marriage - so that males, in a patrilinial system, may know that a child is theirs. in a way, it was a way to mark a woman as private property; slave women, sex slaves or not for example, were in many cases not allowed to cover their heads, because they were public property, not private - which considering the shit ive been through, i do find to be deeply uncomfortable and angering. its also the case that the wearing of the hijab was often split among classes; at times only higher class women would veil for the most part, at times only lower class women would, depending on the place and time.

now, knowing this, and not denying its origins. its also important to understand that hijab has also taken up other meanings, and has functioned differently through time and cultures.

there is something to be said about its practicality in the place where it originated and where it is still warn, which is the middle of the desert. muhammah himself pbuh for a time grew up among the bedouins. if we look at the clothing of the nomadic peoples of the deserts of north africa and the middle east, its not just the women who are covered; the men as well often cover everything but their eyes. bc in a place with burning sun, sandstorms, winds, and biting cold during the night, this makes sense. i can also say after living in a desert for a bit over half a year, having essentially a thin blanket to wrap yourself in and shield yourself from the elements is actually quite nice. if we look at traditional saudi clothing today, men also wear essentially robes and cover their heads. if we look at ottoman clothing, the men would also often wear robe-like clothes, or both men and women would wear shalvari, loose harem pants;;; theres also something to be said about veiling, or the covering of the head, not being a unique thing to women in many cultures, within islam, and outside of it, from a cultural but also a spiritual perspective. if we look at orthodox priests and monks for example, many wear very similar clothes to nuns. if we look at the sikhs, the men cover as well as the women. etc. if we look at traditional romanian culture, it was also undignified for a man to walk around with his head uncovered (though by a hat and not a veil).

there is something to be said as well abt the veil not functioning the same in many places and cultures. so much of the discourse around muslim women and ~oppressed muslim women circles around the veil, and this has been so since the dawn of conflicts between the west and east - this endless fascination with it, with either demonizing or sexualizing it; youd think the entire islamic world revolves around it. in truth there are islamic societies and cultures in which it doesnt matter that much, in which some women wear it and some dont and some or most wear it in a way that is not "proper" according to some (turbans hands and neck showing jewerly loose veils etc - thinking particularly abt many places in africa but theres plenty of others). there are places in which the veil has become moreso of a focus as a direct result to colonialization than it was before; partially bc when someone invades your country, disrespects your entire culture, and bans you from doing shit, when you get rid of them you're going to double down. but again, there have been and there are plenty of places in which it wasnt... that big of a damn deal. i always love seeing old photos of the balkans for example, bc its just..,, niqabis, hijabis, women wearing traditional clothes but not covering, women wearing western clothes, niqabis wearing western clothes but only covering their faces,,, all together

im not denying the origins of the veil, nor am i denying that on many of our sisters it is pushed; i am not denying that this is an issue. i fully stand by our sisters who are against it, completely or not, i fully stand by our sisters who hate it, i fully stand by muslim and exmuslim and culturally but not religiously muslim women who dislike it or have had traumatic experiences with it - and i wish their voices and concerns and frustrations werent so buried by this whole damn "choice" discussion. it is clear that changes have to be made, that it cannot be forced, neither by threath of violence, neither religiously and culturally by telling women and girls that they have to or else they are sinful, undemn, going to hell, distracting men, or whatever the hell else. we have to completely do away with these concepts; only then could veiling be a truly free choice for a woman. we have to analyze and critique how all these concepts that surround so much of this - purity virginity modesty etc - are in retrospect sexist. we have to look at how modesty in islam is prescribed for both sexes, but it is most often only the sisters who have the rigidity of hijab forced onto them, while muslim men feel comfortable wearing shorts and taking their shirts off, etc, and noone ever really calls them sinners, tempters, undemn, sluts, etc. we have to question how much it matters at all how we personally feel about the veil, if in material reality we are still doing what men want us to do - to not question this would be to fall into the same trap that the postmodernists fall into

at. the. same. time.

the issue of hijab and feminism is deeply entangeled, as i mentioned earlier, with imperialism, colonialism, islamophobia, and racism. this whole rhetoric that the muslim woman must be unveiled to be liberated is an old one, one which predates feminism. example, the forced unveilings in algeria - where as far as i understand the colonizers had to first get women to veil in the first place to then unveil them; they are the ones who made this a focus. what france is doing right now - banning the hijab in public buildings under the guise of "liberating" muslim women - is an extension of this imperialism, this racism, islamophobia, sexism etc. this idea of "liberating" muslim women - from their own culture and religion by enlightening them with the western one - is one that has been used as justification for invading entite countries and wrecking havoc, and the veil has always been a primary focus in this. this has come from both western feminists, but also from western men - who didnt give a single shit about sexism, they didnt give a single shit about the sexism they were committing against their own women, but they suddenly cared abt sexism when it was abt liberating muslim women (of colour) from evil muslim men (of colour)

there is also something to be said abt the hijab being taken up throughout time as a symbol of anti-colonial resistance. per example many muslim women started veiling after both 9/11 and after what happened in palestina, as a symbol of resistance and pushback etc. i do think this is an important aspect to remember and a part of this conversation - that in the west, and outside of it, some have taken up veiling particularly as an act of defiance, and a symbol of solidarity with our fellow muslims. this is technically part of the reasoning for wearing hijab too originally, so that a woman may be known as a muslimah by her fellow muslims - the veil is indeed an identifier among ourselves, but also a target which paints us as clearly muslim to others. i also think its important to point out that there is nuance in who and why and how some women choose to veil; there are those who indeed start veiling completely agains the wishes of their families, husbands, community, etc - and this makes the discussion of hijab both in the west and outside of it more complicated, bc then, by doing so, we are not necessarily even conforming to expectations, if that makes sense.

while the hijab may be part of islamic patriatchy, it is also at the same time the anthises of western patriarchy. there is a quote which goes, about algeria and the niqab, "the colonizer is frustrated by the woman who sees, but cannot be seen." in the western world, where a woman is expected to show herself, to be sexy, to be beautiful, to always be covered in makeup and get plastic surgeries so that she may be attractive to men, to have her beauty and sexisness always to be consumed by any man (and women who refuse to do so are demonized and seen as lesser), a world in which billboards with half naked women are everywhere and sex appeal is used to sell any god damn thing, etc etc etc, it is true that the hijab stands in opposition to this - a refusal to make oneself and attractiveness avaible to the eyes of men. in a world in which a woman is so judged by her beauty, to show nothing but your eyes and hands, and nothing of your shape or beauty, is indeed in opposition to what western patriarchy wants or expects (also not just the west tho, plenty of eastern countries who have taken up these sort of expectations for women: south korea an example). reminds me of a niqabi i know on youtube, whose husband never saw what she looked like before they got married - this woman indeed has the certainty that her husband did not get with her because she was attractive or sexy, but because he genuinely cared for her and her personality, who she is, bc he had no damn idea what the woman he committed himself to looked like. but this frustrates the western man, who thinks he is entitled to see any womans beauty whenever he may please. he is not.

one of the reasons why i still wear it, is less to do with modesty, and more to do with, i hate men seeing me. i spend my childhood being bought, sold, raped, endlessly used and sexualized by males. when i was a preteen men started catcalling me on the streets in romania. etc. i dispise, i truly do, men having their eyes on me to any extend whatsoever, i truly do. to me, it is comforting to have a big veil i can wrap myself around in, whose folds i can dissapear in, with which i can cover my face and the shape of my body. its comforting to wear niqab, bc it means no man is seeing any part of me much, and thats the way i like it. i don't consider this dissappearing from public life - im very much still there, and my loud ass mouth which always gets me in trouble v much means i dont dissappear lol. its a way to be in public without having to worry that any man can see my body, think that i have a nice ass or my hair is beatiful or whatever the fuck else. im also lol deeply traumatized and brain damaged, and maybe autistic, and i get sensory overload easily at times. its also comforting to have essentially a thin blanket to wrap myself around in whenever i want bc of this, i find it to be very grounding and safe feeling. i also like that when i veil, most men understand to keep some distance from me and not touch me, which i appreciate. now. thing is. i shouldnt have to dress any sort of damn way for men to not sexualize me, men should know to keep their damn eyes off of women etc, but. they dont. at the same time veiling truly isnt some sort of ultimate escape let me make that clear - men will sexualize anything and everything, and there are plenty who specifically sexualize the veil. a woman could walk around almost naked, or she can walk around in full niqab and chador; there Will be men who will sexualize her, sexually harass her, assault her, agress her, or at the very least judge her. because theyre pigs

i also still wear it bc its a cultural thing, and this matters to me. when i first started veiling at 14 it was partly to do with spirituality, partially to do with this. i didnt come to america by choice particularly, and ive done a truly bad job at assimilating into its culture - when i did try, it left me with much self hatred and shame, so. yea, at some point i snapped out of that and decided the whole assimilation thing wasnt for me. ive had a habit of dressing traditionally for years, and starting to veil when i was younger was a part of that - even though i am uncomfortable with how this tradition has affected some of the women in my family, and the way i was exposed to it when i was younger - i saw it as something i was, lets say, reclaiming. now, i dont think "reclaiming" the veil is much a feminist thing either btw, i think it is at best perhaps neutral. but it has mattered to me for years as a symbol of both culture, a connection i share with my grandmother and grand grandma, the older generations who were less western, and a symbol of resistance to the expectation and pressure of assimilation. also. lets look at another part of traditional clothing which has sexist origins - jewerly. in the balkans (and many other parts of the world) the jewerly of a woman was her security; if her husband died, or divorced her, etc, a woman would be able to sell her jewerly to survive (this is also why historically women are given jewerly as gifts in many cultures). the jewerly also signified her social rank and "worth" - in the context of weddings (in which a bride price would be payed to the brides family by the husband in an often arranged marriage, aka, she was sold), the woman or girl would often be adorned with much jewerly which had not only spiritual and cultural significance, but it was meant to display the wealth of the families and the worth of the bride, as if she were some precious item bring bought and sold. even so - even with the sexist entangelments of traditional jewelry - im not going to stop wearing that, either; nor do i think traditional jewerly has to be forever entangled in its origins.

and i still wear it bc of spiritual reasons; as said earlier, many cultures and religions have taken up covering as a spiritual thing, for both men and women. i do find that personally it grounds me and reminds me of a series of responsibilities that i have, and it is a constant reminder of the presence of divinity (or the divinity in everything etc). also growing up i always just thought it was beautiful, even when the rhetoric pissed me off, i always wanted to look like one of those orthodox saints. the virgin mary, maryam, had style, thats all im saying

.... no. the choices i am making do not exist in a vaccum of individualism, and im fully aware of that, and ive been going back and forth on what exactly it means to wear hijab for years. but if wearing hijab is a part of islamic patriatchy, i have to wonder if taking it off while im in the west, even as a act of solidarity with our sisters, would not be further feeding into the very old imperialist idea that the muslim woman ought to unveil in order to be liberated and free - as if the west is any less sexist, as if the expectations placed on women here arent also a damn nightmare. none of these "choices" exist in a vaccum, and i very much feel caught in the middle, and no, i dont have some singular answers or solution or opinion on any of this. i really dont

i also think there is something to be said about, there are different ways of going about, lets say, reforming what the hijab means and how it functions, which do not neccessitate its full dissapearance. in marocco for example the younger generation has been switching between wearing hijab one day, and not wearing it the next. this already breaks expectations and some of the values and ideas that surround it, and it normalizes it in a way which makes it just another item of clothing, rather than something that has to be strictly followed, or that has to do with a womans worth and purity or this super important thing. and again, there are many places in which the hijab is warn in a nonstrict manner, taken off, put on, worn loosely, worn with short sleeves or showing the neck or jewerly or whatever - which is also what i do. i think this may be a middle path to this issue to take

i also would like to touch up on briefely on the purdah - the sociatal segregation of the sexes, practiced in islamic cultures as well as hindu ones, and some others - of which the hijab&niqab are a part of. i have written abt this in this post; while the topic is complex, i do not believe the purdah has to be inherently sexist, and rather, id prefer if society was more sex segregated than it is, just in an egalitarian way - partial segregation as far as im concerned allows for a level of saftey and sisterhood for women, in the best cases

so. uh yea. idk probably a lot i didnt get to and this probably wasnt the most clear reply - all this to say, its a nuanced and complex issue which i do not have some sort of solid standing on. and which, again, among islamic feminists is also not a uniform issue. while i cant remember off of the top of my head whose written on this, there is an islamic feminist tag on this blog that you can look through, and you'll come across the names of many authors who have probably at one time or another touched up on it. theres also somewhere there a post with pdfs to several books, which may be a good place to start farther looking into this if you are interested. im sorry if this wasnt a super satisfactory or clear answer, its just an honest and complicated one

[vitos-ordination-song]

Being a Le Guin expert means constantly being annoyed at people’s takes on her, people who just don’t get it or people who haven’t read enough of her writing to know what she was about. Particularly when it comes to feminist controversies with her work, I’m constantly banging my head against the wall.

First you get men getting up at arms at any sign of potential feminism. Just makes ‘em defensive. One academic lecturer said he didn’t like Tehanu because it was “preachy” (no follow up). I listened to three different podcast bros say the misogyny in The Dispossessed was exaggerated. This is all from the last 10 years of course, whereas Le Guin was born in 1929. I promise you that a concept like “women are natural inferiors to men” is not something she made up but in fact possibly something she heard stated verbatim growing up. (I was born in 1997, and I don’t think I’m from a representative population since I was raised in a conservative evangelical community, but I also heard such things stated in childhood.) I wish I lived in these mens’ worlds where portraying such attitudes in fiction is “going a bit far, even as social commentary.” Equally I’ve seen men get hot around the collar when there’s “bad guy” males. Le Guin tended to steer clear of simple villains, but in Tehanu and a couple other of her works, there are truly sadistic men, at times sexual threats. Any men fragile enough to get upset by that are sad to me, especially because Le Guin also wrote a female pedophile in one of her novels and never shied away from “bad guy” women. There’s a kind of disbelief I see from people (often men but not just them) when it comes to Tehanu, like it’s unbelievable that there could be such obsessive abusive misogynists. Again. Welcome to the real world. This shit happens.

The author Kim Stanley Robinson said he disliked the later Earthsea books for being too didactic on feminism. I somewhat get what he means and I don’t think he’s a misogynist himself. I also agree that Le Guin was bullied into being defensive of her feminism; she was attacked by other women for being a married with kids, which is just pathetic behavior. It made her a bit edgy for a while, and then she doubled her efforts to be woman-centered. This had the occasional consequence of didacticism, there’s a couple moments in her later writing where I go, “okay, I get the point,” but her points are never bad. Where I disagree with Robinson is in whether she actually rectified wrongs in her writing. Frankly some of her early works read as male chauvinist, she later stated she was a woman pretending to be a man simply because she thought that’s how a writer should be. In many cases her feminist turn was much needed, though it’s true that even her early work is more complex on gender issues than people give it credit for.

Then there’s people who read a single of her works and write her off as a gender essentialist. It’s really frustrating because it’s like people aren’t able to engage with a text except for how much it validates or invalidates them personally. People who’re “against the gender binary” will see a work which depicts a realistic, materially based gendered social system and take issue with it just on the principal that people in the story have assumptions about men and women. What exactly is wrong with writing a story that way? It’s not as if Le Guin herself believed in fixed gender characteristics. It makes me think of a post I saw a while back that was like, you can’t be free to experiment with gender until you acknowledge how we are enslaved by our biology. Of course our biology isn’t simple either, but the point is, we can be pro-trans, all for gender non-conformity, questioning of even the existence of gender, without denying that gender as a concept was borne out of biological sex, and that historically sex/gender have taken on many meanings and significances. Authors are not required to write disclaimers explaining themselves, and honestly it’s an insult to the nuances of Le Guin’s writing to pretend that she was some kind of close-minded old-school feminist.

Finally there’s the dumbasses who will complain about the lack of “girl power” in her novels. I see this sort of thing a lot actually, not just when it comes to Le Guin. When I was a little girl, I always wanted stories about awesome women who could save themselves/others, since I had previously been psychologically disempowered through passive narratives about women. But I’m an adult now so I like stories that are a bit more mature. The Earthsea books, when they begin to focus on women’s narratives, don’t just become “women act like men and it’s awesome.” It’s not about women being wizards or anything like that, though there’s examples of literal empowerment. It’s about women’s values destabilizing the world of men and a balancing of the previously unbalanced gendered social system, which was very much in need of doing and aligns with the themes of the series. I want to slap people who say Tenar “doesn’t get to do anything” and “is helpless” in Tehanu, as if she isn’t one of the strongest and most dignified characters Le Guin ever wrote. It’s an entire novel of her caring for a child everyone else fears, fending off a world which is hostile to her, and maintaining her wits when malicious forces are trying to steal them from her. But I guess since she didn’t like, cast a fireball, it’s not feminist enough. It’s also not a “feminist hot take” to shit on the entire concept of being a mother and wife, keeping the household. You know how that’s a lot of what women have done throughout history? I mean, in no way does Le Guin discount how marriage/motherhood can be a cage for women, but is it really anti-feminist to say that there’s something to respect in traditional women’s work? The novel also acknowledges the value of both “respectable” women (wives and mothers) and “non-respectable” women (witches who never marry and often contribute a great deal to their community despite being marginalized). At this point I’m just ranting about Tehanu, but it’s not only my favorite Le Guin but probably my favorite novel of all time and it drives me wild how much people misinterpret it.

[menalez]

1) When I said "the side that puts lesbians over bi women" I meant radfems who center their feminism around lesbians (which is not wrong at all before you jump at my throat accusing me of lesbophobia again)

2) And all of my rant was directed at the entire side of radblr that displays such behavior. I am not putting words in your mouth. I am talking about a legitimate issue on here. All the things I ranted about are not all accusations aimed at you personally but radblr in general.

But I remember approaching you before about the one woman who sparked up controversy on here about lesbians and you did tell me "it's just one lesbian...."

3) You don't take any lesbophobic shit but you sure as hell tolerate prejudice against bisexuals and also police on their experience as bisexuals (that bi male called you out on that and you weren't even able to come back with a response).

4) You also did say "it's not my job to police on how people express their anger at homophobia" as a defense for desisapphic. Do you realize how much you sound like racist white women who don't care about how they speak about moc when talking about misogyny faced by woc?

5) "I love how you implied that I could not a be CSA victim"

Where did I imply that? Literally where? Me pointing out rape culture perpetuated by a radfem is implying that you couldn't be a victim? Ok ma'am.

6) "Biphobia is an individual prejudice" yeah well I don't use the word "biphobia" yet because I haven't yet found any argument that biphobia is actually "bi"phobia and not homophobia and misogyny. But it's not an "individual" prejudice. A huge chunk of the community deals with the prejudice. That's what I am trying to say. It's something a lot of people deny. And again this isn't a personal accusation thrown at you.

7) And again the same person reblogged from you saying that her not believing the csa victim is not "as bad" and that he's actually lying. Why? All because he posts about bisexual experience?or because he's male? Man I know rape against men is rare but csa against boys is much more common. And csa in general is much overlooked by society. This is the 2nd time this has happened and I hope you're not ignoring that on purpose.

And this is doe the radfem who did accuse the csa victim of lying- fuck yourself if you think csa is not as damaging and severe as homophobia and you can be excused from it. I don't trust feminists like you at all because as much as you claim to fight for women it's only a matter of time till you throw us under the bus as well just for calling out on your bs. You would rather let a victim suffer instead of shutting the fuck up about people's trauma.

8) "All I said was that behavior is something that can be shown by any group and not just lesbians"

Yeah which is why I included straight women in my rant too. The problem isn't that bi women are overwhelmingly blaming lesbians for their problems. Straight people are homophobic obviously and nobody expects much better from them. But bi women do expect more empathy from lgb community. And the problem is that all issues that bisexual women come up with about their ipv or SA or anything else (without even mentioning the sexuality of the perpetrators) they are immediately accused of lying and faking.

Similarly I pointed out the hypocrisy of the same people who say bi women target lesbians but deny that lesbians (or gay men) aren't doing the same against the bisexuals (the "faking their sexuality" point is what I am referring to).

This is not just an issue of prejudice against bisexuals but homophobia and especially misogyny. Amazing how there are radfems who stand up sm for Amber Heard and simultaneously fail to see her trauma as one of the results of the unique prejudice faced by bi women.

you mean this? me saying someone whos not a radfem is not a radfem and saying a lesbian saying misogynistic stuff will immediately be criticised n result in lesbophobic generalisations whereas bi & het women being lesbophobic is generally ignored?

or this one? bc neither of these posts are me saying "only one lesbian ever has ever used this sort of terminology" and its p obvious to me that thats not what i was saying either.

anyways "lesbians that put lesbians over bi women / radfems who center their feminism around lesbians" and then point 2 is u saying ur ranting at lesbians prioritising ourselves even tho its "not wrong at all" to prioritise lesbians. which is it? and if its not about me why did u rant at me in accusatory manners lmao?

weird about the bi man bc once again the entirety of what i said was "hmm good point" to one post and me saying "yeah the lesbian masterdoc contributed to this" ....so again, where did i dictate anything about bisexual experiences? the bi man yall are happily tokenizing came to my dms not long after to apologise to me and said that he shouldn't have been placing the blame of what others are saying on me. we came to an understanding and left it at that. so im gonna ask again, what experiences did i dictate? bc i myself said absolutely nothing and was even arguing my perspective in the notes of the same post. what prejudice against bisexuals did i tolerate btw? bc last time u and others were hassling me for taking issue w someone calling women dicksuckers but apparently not enough bc i wasnt hating on lesbians while doing so.

"Do you realize how much you sound like racist white women who don't care about how they speak about moc when talking about misogyny faced by woc?"

wow amazing, youre equating a lesbian of colour venting about bi women being homophobic to her to racist white women being racist to moc?? please tell me what privilege do lesbians have over bi women?

i dont think you know what an interpersonal prejudice is or what i meant by that. it doesnt mean its just one person. you seem to have comprehension issues.

im not bothering with the rest of your bullshit rant. im once again asking why youre directing your complaints with some lesbophobia sprinkled in at me instead of the people you actually take issue with. "this OTHER PERSON said something and im offended ur not offended by it! so heres a whole essay from me about it!" is the stupidest fucking shit you people keep directing at me. i have a life and id rather not sit there dealing with you complaining at me for not complaining at other people. go deal with them yourself since you take issue with them but maybe you guys should stop viewing me as your personal attack dog, im not ur pet that u can call onto to attack the people u cant converse with urself. im not your personal customer service employee for u to direct ur rants at and demand refunds from. and i dont take kindly to being intentionally and repetitively misconstrued by some righteous ass that wants to rant at me for not going around fighting lesbians and justifying lesbophobia on their behalf. don't message me again or i might IP block u bc this shit is annoying and pointless.

[dozcogic]

Existentialism vs Chasms

Ism: a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement.

I have been living with the type of limbo relationship that is making a new way of culture. That has been teaching me how see the world, as I have beautiful eyes in judgment. Existentialism is a philosophical understanding of consciousness that needs to be addressed in contemporary and futuristic context.

It is not hard to understand, but it is something that keeps on going because it is a “practice” of realization. There are no wrong answers in your approach, however there is one factor that makes it meaningful: people consider it in their reasoning. Though life naturally preaches the denial of such grilling and outspoken conversation, the world still relies on its simplicity to make sense. 

It’s a dry spell, especially coming from someone with energy higher than it. You’re noticing something that is not significant. Those that do not exert energy to realize something are in the benefit of society because they do not waste their propaganda on misidentified energy.

Syntax is my form of denying the sickness of being existential. It’s a form of OCD. It prevents normal thinking.

It’s my form of maturity and independence. It’s the conversation I have with myself when noticing I am not a kid any longer, but a full grown adult with the spirit of a child. It’s the overwhelming benefit of being alive.

There is no need to notice mediocre things while studying existentialism. The significance is finding something that relates to one’s self and being comfortable in the relationship. Finding a meaningful story to expose the long winded character is the goal of doing such an event to prevent one from becoming stuck on being futile and simple minded.

The real form of existentialism that is not presented and is well stacked in wealth is connecting with individuals. That shows the nexus for dramatic profiling and identification. This is an expectation that is a given in society and has no rule book or directions to succeed.

As a kid, you want games to define your existentialism. However as I grow up I am seeing work, responsibilities, and accolades define your existentialism. As an adult it should be about protection and systemic research.

Where you make community is where the plague of existentialism is void. How one makes community is the question of progressional success. It must be maximized in proficiency to avoid the issue of existentialism.

People praise you for giving updating the topic. It is a dead topic, in the fact that it repeats death. This is why you need to contribute.

words that end in ism:

activism

alcoholism

anarchism

antisemitism

atheism

autism

baptism

cannibalism

capitalism

colonialism

communism

conservatism

criticism

cynicism

extremism

fascism

feminism

heroism

idealism

imperialism

journalism

liberalism

magnetism

materialism

mechanism

metabolism

modernism

mysticism

narcissism

nationalism

optimism

organism

patriotism

plagiarism

populism

prism

professionalism

racism

realism

schism

secularism

sexism

skepticism

socialism

symbolism

terrorism

tourism

vandalism

[discyours]

Sort of connecting to the last answer we can say that oppression women face is solely based on their sex or its more nuanced you think? i ask cause I often hear trans people talk about how it’s the ”feminine looking” people who are oppressed so trans women are just as much as cis women (and trans men are excluded from it, here i also heard they find out how much harder it is to get by in society as a man opposed to being seen as a woman)

The nuance is in the fact that society did not arbitrarily decide that it dislikes femininity. The hatred of women (female people, the childbearing sex) came first, the hatred of things associated with us, people who look like us, and men who "lower themselves to our level" came later. And the fact that most misogynistic men didn't study the history of female oppression to find out why, exactly, they're supposed to hate us. A subconscious belief that women are less competent than men doesn't have to have anything to do with whether or not we have a uterus, even if that belief did originate from a society that's formed this association through pushing us into a role where we're really only considered to be well-suited for giving birth and raising children (as pushing us into that role leads to the only people who are capable of creating new life to do more of that, and that ultimately benefits men).

Then there's the matter of passing, how common it actually is (near 100% when you put in effort according to some of the trans community, absolute 0% according to some gendercrits, both groups are incredibly wrong), and how many parts of life are actually affected by that. I passed very consistently when I was trans and did find that I was treated a lot better when people thought I was male (which is what pushed me towards feminism in the first place). That absolutely gave me an advantage over more female looking women, but it would've done jack shit to improve my access to things like birth control and abortion (luckily not a lot of restrictions on those where I live). In fact some trans men find that they have less access than cis women do, because insurance won't cover it after having their gender marker changed. Passing trans men aren't generally at risk of being cat called but can end up in incredibly dangerous situations if they're arrested, even without getting their gender marker changed. It's complicated. Same thing goes for trans women. Both passing and non-passing trans women can be discriminated against, though for different reasons. There's aspects of growing up male that may benefit them even after they start passing (the ratio of trans to cis women in software comes to mind), and there's parts of female oppression that will never affect them like abortion bans. There's also parts of life where you don't need to pass at all to experience different treatment, ie signing a work email with a feminine vs masculine name will likely affect the way clients respond to you even if you don't remotely pass (which is interesting for me to think about as a detrans woman who still uses a masculine name).

So yes, there's a lot of nuance. And I do wish people would get better at dealing with that fact. It doesn't need to be a competition who suffers more, and we don't need to deny that trans women can be affected by misogyny in order to be able to acknowledge that it's still rooted in sex-based oppression.

[tamaradoubraomonibeke]

“Theory is an unfortunate term. It suggests something that is unreal or unproven, and of little consequence except to those who like to read long winded books, engage in intellectual discussions and write long academic essays. At the end of the day, design’ is all about the visual, isn’t it?”

Without a consideration of these four (PEST0 areas then, yes, design is purely visual – and arguably completely irrelevant and self-serving. Far from asking ‘what’s the point of theory?’, we should be asking ‘what’s the point of design without an understanding of how it works?’

From “Visual communication from theory to practice Jonathan Baldwin/Lucienne Roberts.”

Honestly, I prefer theory over practical. Growing up in Nigeria, most of the graded work consists of research and theory rather than practice. It’s been difficult for me to implement this into my work as I’m focused on submitting substance at the end of the deadline rather than 

The problem is, I’ve had difficulty maintaining my schedule to do appropriate research.

This is my overview of my projects this semester using the PEST.

CHSX Viscom -

The political - Transportation policies, Production policies, Sales policies, Taxes

The Social - This can help customers to feel a sense of empowerment.

The technological - When I was designing the site, I was looking at sustainable sites to get reference. Innocent drinks and bohoo had the saving energy toggle. This can indicate more energy is saved through the screen darkening. Innocent even took out some of it’s photos (bohoo being a fashion brand that’d be difficult for shoppers). (I know bohoo basically contributes to fast fashion, it was just a reference to how I could take the good aspects (we humans need to start focusing on the good even in the bad)).

The environmental - During this project, the idea was to build a sustainable brand. Sadly, every brand wants to be sustainable but the question is, is this to fit into a new trend or to actually make a change? In this case, the brand is making a little change with creating new sources of food. When you have to physically create or see your food grow, there’s also less inclination to waste. It can also spark aspiration to perform more sustainable activities. Thus, it can be said yes. It just depends on how much impact the brand actually does.

D and AD -

The political - Production policies. (I don’t know what really goes into it)

The social - The interactions between the audience is one that appreciates art and visuals.

The technological - The reason my output focused on a fantasy land is not for bias. It’s to show IMAX is more than showing how cool their tech is (It’s to show IMAX can produce the most stellar quality across all forms of film including 2D). In the sense of using 2D, I want viewers to focus on the environment and nature. Technology is cool but so is nature. If we focused more on that rather than tearing down the world, half of the environmental issues will be solved.

Visual Identity

The political - In general, I try to disengage from political views (they can be contradictory from other’s and causes heavy dispute. There’s corruption everywhere but some will deny it as they are gaining from it). I will still talk about my personal views and how I could’ve implemented into my visual identity. (I stray from those views being in my works too so that will change in the future.)

The Social - I won’t say I’m a feminist (feminism entails equality of the sexes. Unfortunately, knowing the biological composition of a ciswoman, I know it’s not the same and therefore, I strive for equity as women all around the globe suffer too much). 

Also, in general, these problems cannot be solved by the underdogs (or the underprivileged). Only those who are privileged enough can finally decide it’s to stop being discriminatory.

There’s also being a Christian and trying to convey my belief. Coming from Nigeria, where it’s multi-religious country (mostly Christian, Islam and Traditional worshippers), I do believe people can believe in whatever they want. However, there’s so much anger against the church that it gets hard to get your point across.

The technological - Technology is slowly killing us. I do try not to utilize my phone when outside but I believe the Netflix documentary “The social dilemma”, talks so much about the unseen damage of AI. The issue with trying to reduce technology use-age is the best way to reach the target audience is through the Internet. In general, we tell ourselves we’ve developed as a world but there are too many issues caused from the net. This may be controversial but aside from the environmental issue, the Internet has manipulated us to be smaller than we are. We could be doing so much! To the point we aren’t seeing the bigger issues and having more polarizing ideas. In the past, people expect us from this time to have flying cars! Instead we have depression, anxiety, increased suicide rate, polarization, hyper individualism and the list goes on.

The environmental - Everyone says one of the ways to curb the environmental issues such as pollution is not buying from fast fashion and there are underpaid workers. (This is easier said than done when you have the financial means to purchase other clothes) This can’t be solved by simply not buying from fast fashion. The companies need to be held accountable and should find new sources of producing these materials. Recycled materials made to other clothes can help. The workers being underpaid, that’s a political issue and as stated before, those whom gain from it must be given a reckoning how detrimental this is.