#because then it only takes one different experience and what recourse does that trans person have?

[uncanny-tranny]

About that thing re "trans men dont know what its like to be seen as predatory", I feel like everyone in the lgbt community generally agrees lesbians are treated as predatory by str8 women, gay men are treated as predatory by str8 men, I (as a trans man) used to think I was a lesbian and went throught life as one. Accordingly I was treated like I am predatory. I am now a gay men, and accordingly I am treated as predatory. On top of that, cis gay men treat me as predatory (scawy transes trying to get them to have sex w a vageenay boohoo) and women treat me as predatory every time I open my mouth about sharing some of their experiences (because me needing iuds at the obgyn inherently means I, as a man, inavde their man-free space). Literally all queer people are constantly treated as predatory by cishet society at large, everyone knows it and keeps saying it and is talking about it because its no secret and everyone is aware of it.

But the second the convo turns to how terfs hurt trans men? Suddenly, we have no idea what its like to be treated as predatory and suddenly the world sees trans men specifcially as helpless little girly victims.

And honestly? Even if it were the case that trans men and transmasculine* people were solely infantilized... it's still harmful. I was initially bringing up that because it's like... I guess the only narrative people want to hear about our suffering, I guess, because it's easier to digest. It's easier to look at it and write it off as, "well you're just infantilized, show me a real problem," and that's the issue - it's twofold. It is simultaneously the need to relegate the experiences of a diverse community into one box and then say, "well, it's just infantilization, who cares when [x] issue is more dangerous" afterward.

It is frustrating, at best, to not be heard. And I've found that so many people aren't just infantilized... I think a lot of queer people are, I don't think it's unique to us. However, people are almost surprised when trans men and transmasculine* people open up more, in my experience.

It's definitely more complex to include more trans experiences with transphobia and the intersections of things like rascism, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, misogyny, ableism... but it is still important. In fact, it often informs in addition to how trans people are treated. Transphobia doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it often doesn't exist alone. That is why we need to have these complex discussions.

[gateauxes]

the war on gender terror

At this point in my life, the presence of mostly-white liberal feminism is inescapable. While I'm excited to see more people taking baby steps to a radical analysis, largely I am frustrated. On the other hand, involuntary exposure to popular feminism is the reason why I'm noticing a trend in it. Here's my report from where I'm standing: the liberal feminists don't know it, but reactionaries are trying to scare them.

Reactionary feminist projects begin the same way as any other reactionary project - concern trolling liberals over topics at arms' length from the main goals of exclusion and domination. With regard to reactionary feminists the progression of topics are well-known: women's sports & 'human trafficking', then domestic violence shelters & kinky porn, then policing gender-segregated bathrooms, defunding trans healthcare, and opposing sex work of any kind. I've been watching a pessimistic thread emerge in liberal feminist (and radical!) circles which I believe has been pushed into place by reactionary feminists. This bio-pessimism places women into a perpetual state of victimhood that can never truly end due to the essential rapacious nature of men. If this seems like the same shit the second-wave lesbian separatists were peddling, that's because it is. What I want to question is how today's essentialist pessimism differs from its initial appearance.

RADFEMS ARE OBSESSED WITH DICK

Reactionary feminists have not dispensed with a religious-conservative perspective on the power of the penis - and by extension they imagine women identically to how the rest of the right views women. The penis, apparently, is the mechanism by which rape becomes possible. Therefore, any engagement with a person with a penis is a grave risk. Vulnerability is a mistake if you might be dealing with a rapist. The MeToo movement activated an enormous public forum about how incredibly prevalent the violence is, but I now see it used as a tool for re-framing this prevalence as a biological reality. (MeToo, even without being used as a tool, was ineffective at acknowledging that violence is perpetrated by all sorts of people). An explosion of survivors talking openly about violence as an unacceptable status quo has been infiltrated by reactionary feminists who whisper that this is the fate of all women, always. The new bio-law absorbs the third wave's progress in acknowledging diversity of experience - right up to the point where it would be forced to note that sexual nature, like categories of racially-dictated nature, is a myth.

This pessimism rooted in the power of the penis is hypervigilance beyond a realistic assessment of risk. (I also blame true crime podcasts and the media in general) This is not the careful awareness of one's surroundings which comes naturally to many of us. What I'm describing is avoiding going out at all, because of statistics on sexual violence which may not even reflect the risks in the neighbourhood. This, for instance, is purchasing and insuring a vehicle for the express purpose of avoiding public transit. I frequently notice that popular discussion of domestic violence neglects to mention the disproportion of violence toward people with disabilities, asserting that all of us have identical risk. Ultimately, this is the justification for a culture of exclusion as the only recourse to the ever-present threat of men. The fortress must be defended, and the enemy could be anywhere.

BUT HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GET LAID?

I do not want love or children, so my interest in sex is purely recreational. I have been told this is not in line with my female nature - I stand before you deviant and happy. However, anyone attracted to men must grapple with the contradiction of desire and very real risks. I support caution, and even precaution. My concern is with a bio-law that requires a baseline of suspicion if one is to survive, the assumption that one is always a moment away from violence. To be explicit, how am I supposed to have fun when I am letting the enemy penetrate my figurative fortress?

I think this is why kink is such a problem for reactionary feminists. The only way to make the horror of sleeping with the enemy worse is to find that some people like to confront, satirize, and role play the power dynamic. To choose recreational pain or literal bondage flies in the face of the notion that a woman’s lot is to be in constant pain, and to tolerate penetration as a miserable necessity. The reactionary feminist must sleep with one eye open, aware that her biology has already sealed her fate, and mitigate vulnerability by excluding the threat, since she can’t defend herself (biologically speaking). This is why trans women can’t stay at the domestic violence shelter, this is why you should worry for your life if your boyfriend watches kinky porn. As with vanilla dating, there are true risks - and reasonable precautions. But kink is about play with vulnerability - there is no room for play under the martial law of bio-pessimism. By hijacking post-MeToo popular feminism, reactionaries can reinsert the bone-chilling suggestion that it’s all rape, all the time. All the men want kinky sex, because it’s the closest they can come to hurting women the way they secretly wish to. According to this logic, the only way to safely navigate the risk is constant surveillance of men, the self, and any woman who could be a traitor. He’d better not be watching kinky porn, you’d better not be watching kinky porn, and the women in the kinky porn are either hapless victims or remorseless collaborators. Once we have arrived at this point, it’s obvious why the next step is a crusade against any pornography, and a mission to ensure that kink is understood as something men want and women tolerate. 

How can reactionary feminists get this done? By linking the prevalence of trauma with the increased visibility of alternative sexuality & gender, from kink-at-pride to polyamory to transcending assigned gender. They ask, do you feel uncomfortable when you see all this change? We’ve all been traumatized - who do these people think they are, flaunting a lifestyle that feels wrong to feminists like you? You should trust your gut, they urge. Perform a little more vigilance to be sure you’re safe. If you find yourself unable to open a dating app or sit next to a man on the bus without feeling deep dread and revulsion, that’s vigilance, and realistic given the state of things. Any - and most - men mean women harm.

REDPILLS AND RADFEMS BELIEVE THE SAME SHIT

Incels hate women, reactionary feminists love a certain kind of woman. This distinction is relevant, especially since incels pose a physical threat to women in general whereas reactionary feminists only attack trans people, black athletes, sex workers, the wrong kind of queers, kinksters, child athletes... Despite their own active hostility toward many types of women, reactionary feminists hold up incels/redpillers/the far right as evidence of the threat that all women live under. There is no doubt that women face misogynist and antifeminist violence. Reactionary feminists are are far from the only ones highlighting this. What’s worth investigating are the given reasons that a target is vulnerable, and what should be done to mitigate risk in the future. In these, an incel and a reactionary feminist are in perfect harmony. Instead of a realistic assessment of risk at an individual level, or an assessment of group dynamics that allowed a survivor-victim to fall through the cracks, both parties will insist that all women are simply unsafe at all times. This notion suits a reactionary feminist’s goal of closed-rank suspicion, and an incel’s dream of terrified submission. This perspective neglects to really ask why things turned out the way they did, because that’s not the point. Whether women are innately inferior or innately vulnerable, we must travel in flocks if we want to survive. The reactionary feminist offers herself as the shepherd, having assured the flock that the enemy is close at hand. Women cannot, of course, be a pack of wolves. Members of a wolf pack work cooperatively but diverge at will.

THE WAR ON GENDER TERROR

The cumulative effect of this mindset and focus is a miserable hypervigilance, which is further hostile to any who are not miserable and vigilant. We know this scrutiny well from living inside a war on terror, which resulted in a vast expansion of state power to exclude, surveil, and punish. Because they have not abandoned their desire to dominate, reactionary feminists would like to do the same along the lines of gender law. Exclusion requires a concrete set of criteria by which a person can be marked acceptable or unacceptable, and there is trouble when a person shifts between the two. Whether you’re an immigration agent or an officer of the gender police, you’ve got to demonize those who shift, and shifting itself. Special attention should be paid to possible ulterior motives. At the overt end, this looks like the myth of the predatory trans woman and the slavery-complicit sex worker. However, these will not be widely accepted until the audience is made nervous by less ridiculous threats with a basis in reality. Sex trafficking is real, and pickup artists really do share tips online about how to pick up, manipulate, and coerce women. However, alarmist chain-mail suggesting that ‘gang members’ are stealing women off the street via box trucks does not reflect reality, but rather supposes that the threat could be any construction worker or labourer with a truck. Given the way people of colour are disproportionately represented in blue-collar work, the implications of this racially-biased hypervigilance should be obvious. The rapid dissemination of information (true or false) online is useful when stoking fear of ulterior motives. Genuine desire to spread a message that could save another woman fuels the sharing of partially-true and emotionally charged statements. Given the existence of incel and pickup artist subcultures, it seems believable that most men could have consumed advice on how to covertly film during sex, or remove a condom without being noticed. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant - the thing to do is be cautious. No matter how they seem, anyone could be concealing their motives. It begins to make sense to suspect a male social worker, or police bathrooms. Furthermore, failure to agree to this assessment of risk is evidence of insufficient solidarity with the rest of the female sex. Solidarity is imperative, given the horrors made visible by feminists who just want to protect women. Inaction could suggest complicity, and asking for a source on a claim is indicative that one does not believe victims. An avalanche of scorn awaits those who ask questions out of turn. the terror cannot end until the defenses are fortified and the infiltrators exposed. As footage of atrocities is replayed during news coverage of foreign occupations, the danger inherent in womanhood must be grimly acknowledged when we consider stepping out into the world.

WHAT IS MY POINT?

Reactionary feminists cling to the second-wave notion of sex and gender as stable categories by which most oppression can be measured. For reactionary feminist strategies to be accepted by a popular feminism informed by intersectionality, popular feminists must at least partially believe in the inherent vulnerability of women or the base instincts of men. While this sentiment was more readily at hand during the second wave of feminism, third wave feminism resists homogenizing by sex, race, or class. While white liberal/popular feminism has an embarrassing tendency to acknowledge intersectionality only out of politeness and/or use it as a cudgel, even performative acknowledgement is a ward against overt essentialist dogma. For this reason, reactionary feminists must harness movements like MeToo, incel attacks, and further misconstrue actual misogynist violence to encourage hypervigilance against terror. The war on gender terror perverts the desire to confront diverse facets of misogyny into the pursuit of covert internal threats. The war compels commitment to defending the home front. A feeling of perpetual vulnerability is the perfect environment for the proliferation of exclusionary strategy. We must feel our goodness and our weakness to the core. Fully enjoying relationships with men, sexual diversity, and private moments of peace are collateral in pursuit of remaining ever-vigilant.

[weather-witch]

Maybe we could find common ground if you knew what we stood for.

It has been a while since I was sufficiently frustrated to sit down and write a bit by bit response to a piece of writing, but here I am baffled at how utterly misunderstood our position as gender critical feminists is. However, it is not my frustration nor my bewilderment that has me writing this tonight after sitting in Auckland traffic for over an hour. Nope. It is a pathetic skerrick of hope I have that if people who have expressed so much hate for us can be so fundamentally wrong about what we stand for then perhaps if they learnt the truth we could find just a little bit of middle ground.

Gotta love a trier, right?

The piece is What is ‘Gender Critical’ anyway? On essentialism and transphobia by Danielle Moreau — hopefully I can help her find out.

Transphobes are having a moment in Aotearoa. Attempts to pass a bill allowing transgender people to change the sex on their birth certificates without having to go through the courts have been met by vigorous opposition from a small but well-organised group of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) or — as they would rather be called — ‘gender critical feminists’. These activists, who probably number in the dozens rather than thousands, have been joined on social media and petition websites by a large contingent of overseas allies, most notably from the UK. In the process, we have learned of the existence in that country of a trans-exclusionary subculture that has been radicalised by, of all places, the parenting forum Mumsnet.

First of all, thank you. Our campaign to halt the BDMRR Bill and sex self-identification was hard work and I appreciate that you could see how well organised it was. However, the persistent myth that we are two ‘TERFs’ in a trenchcoat is as ever totally inaccurate. Likewise, the conspiracy theory of an army of Mumsnet poms wielding cups of tea and scary opinions is laughable. We are in contact with gender critical feminists in the UK though…and Canada…the United States, Australia, France, South Korea, Portugal, Argentina, Nigeria, and more. There is an international community of gender critical feminists because we are all fighting a lot of the same battles. We support each other; commiserate, celebrate, and share resources. We are just like any other community.

It may be a good time, then, to examine what being ‘gender critical’ actually means.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. The TERF label is at least partially descriptive, since exponents of this ideology are certainly trans-exclusionary, but it may be too generous to suggest that they are either radical or feminists. Feminism is a big tent, but it is hard to welcome into it a group so dedicated to returning us to the values of the Victorians.

Feminism is at its roots (that’s where the name Radical Feminism comes from by the way) gender critical. Past iterations of feminism were entirely gender critical, but there is little that can be said to be gender critical about third wave feminism. This is why gender critical feminists reject it. We prefer the radical analysis of our foremothers. Radical does not mean wild or extreme it simply refers to “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something”. It is about stripping everything back and analysing the nature of female oppression. For gender critical or radical feminists our “central tenet is that women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class.”

What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism. The concept of gender essentialism is practically timeless, and reaction to it is key to understanding why feminist theory exists in the first place. Gender essentialism is the idea that there is an innate, immutable ‘womanness’ or ‘manness’ which expresses itself in what we consider ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’. It posits, for example, that women as a group are naturally more caring and empathetic and men as a group are more aggressive and clever, and — crucially — that these gendered qualities exist inherently, without societal influence. Another key aspect of essentialism is that it is often, but not always, tied to bodies and ‘biology’. So, because a lot of women give birth, gender essentialism associates childcare with women because they are biologically ‘destined’ for it.

I’ll ignore the incorrect use of the word radical for the rest of this piece and move on to the extraordinary claim that we are dedicated to “gender essentialism.” Not only are gender critical feminists not gender essentialists, we are actually the complete opposite. In our CRITIQUE of gender we are more accurately described as gender ABOLITIONISTS. There is nothing immutable about gender. It is not innate. Rather, based on thousands of years of socialisation, survival, hierarchy, and oppression, gender is the set of stereotypes and roles that we as societies have imposed on the sexes. A more accurate moniker for gender critical feminists would be “sex essentialist”. That is because we believe that it is our biological sex and our biological sex alone that makes us women. It is not the gender stereotypes that we are socialised to associate with womanhood. It is not the “empathy” or outward expressions of femininity like how we dress or style our hair. Our POTENTIAL to become pregnant is a core part of our femaleness and it is central to a lot of the experiences women have in common. I say ‘potential’ because not all women want to or are able to get pregnant. However, it is society’s perception of us as potential ‘breeders’ that brings with it some of our most acute oppressions around bodily autonomy and biological functions.

I am going to take my refutation of the assertion that gender critical feminists are “gender essentialists” a step further. I contend that it is in fact proponents of gender identity ideology who are gender essentialist. After all, it is they who think gender is so innate that someone can be born in the wrong body. They conceptualise gender as a kind of soul that exists as separate from the biology of the person. Is it not terribly gender essentialist to suggest that a man who feels an innate sense of ‘womanness’ because he is (perhaps) empathetic, nurturing, gentle, sensitive, and presents femininely, must actually be a woman? Because no man could possibly possess those characteristics and present in that way? Rather than embrace the feminine man or the masculine women, gender identity ideology would have them switch place to ‘match’ their gender identity to the ‘appropriate’ sex.

Destined for it?

Feminism’s first wave, popularly associated with the suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bought into gender essentialism in a big way. This wasn’t entirely their fault, for several reasons. They were heavily influenced by the dichotomous Victorian concept of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women — men in the world, women in the home — even if they tried to reject it in some limited ways. ‘HOUSEKEEPERS need the ballot to regulate the sanitary conditions under which they and their families must live… MOTHERS need the ballot to regulate the moral conditions under which their children must be brought up’, said the New York Woman Suffrage Association in 1915. The suffrage movement was more broadly linked to things like the temperance movement, and the temperance movement used essentialist ideas about women and their caring, empathetic natures in order to influence politics and get alcohol banned. (Alcohol was a huge issue for women mainly because they had so few other legal rights, and so drunk husbands could beat and rape them with no real recourse. We know now, unfortunately, that alcohol is not the thing doing the raping and beating.)

I have nothing to dispute here, but I will just point out that the history of the construction of public toilet facilities specifically for women is a fascinating part of the opening up of the public sphere to the female sex class.

Another reason for the first wave’s reliance on essentialism is that reliable contraception had yet to be invented. If you are not familiar with feminist theory, the cause and effect may seem quite tenuous here, but it is difficult for anyone to conceive of non-gendered, unfettered humanity if you are forced into a brood mare situation from young adulthood. As a result of these factors, among others, the first wave had painted itself into a theoretical corner with its essentialism. Buying into dichotomist ideas about gender used by patriarchy since time immemorial meant accepting hard limits. It meant accepting inferiority and never being able to achieve true equity.

I don’t agree that first wave feminists “relied” on gender essentialism. The realities of their sex (as you point out with reference to the lack of contraception) and the gender roles they enacted were simply all they knew. They weren’t using gender essentialism. It was the framework in which they existed and in fighting for a place in political life they were only beginning to peel the layers off their oppression.

With few exceptions, the second wave of feminist theory questioned and rejected gender essentialism. One of the important aspects of why the second wave was different from the first wave of feminist theory is that by this stage reliable contraception had being invented, accepted, and come into wide use. People were, for the first time, able to divorce their existence from sexual reproduction. Linda Cisler, in 1969: ‘different reproductive roles are the basic dichotomy in humankind, and have been used to rationalize all the other, ascribed differences between men and women and to justify all the oppression women have suffered.’ Feminists argued that social influence was the primary reason we assumed women were such-a-way and men were such-a-way; that men had written nearly all the history and psychology to that date; that patriarchy created hegemonic propaganda based on binary essentialist ideas. Second-wave writers were exhilarated by the newfound theoretical power to refute their inferiority, and you can feel it emanating from their engaged, emphatic, often uproarious writings.

In this paragraph, you see the beginnings of the gender critical movement. We as a movement identify far more with second wave feminism than with the convoluted nonsense that has followed. Cisler’s quote neatly encapsulates our true position on sex and gender. This is gender critical theory.

The second wave did, of course, get many things wrong. It tried to use its new powers of analysis to make ‘womanness’ many different things, theorising that women were a ‘class’, or ignoring voices that dealt with racism. Many of its ideas weren’t nuanced. Being associated with their bodies for their whole lives, and exploited within those bodies, gave some feminists from this era problematic ideas about sex and sexuality. There was also a subculture of hippy mysticism that associated the female reproductive organs with purity or power.

It is bizarre and, I cynically think, intentional that this idea of gender critical feminists as only white keeps getting rolled out. Believe it or not, when founder of race critical theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term ‘intersectionality’, she used it to analyse the intersections of sex, race, and class, and this analysis is a core part of gender critical theory. This piece by Dr Holly Lawford-Smith explains really well what intersectionality really is and what it isn’t. We understand the ways race and class make us different while analysing how as a female class our lived experiences are unique from our male counterparts.

Call me a hippy, but I love celebrating the wonder of the female body. The world we live in is a jumble of phallic one-up-manship. The male is everywhere; our architecture, art, cultures, everything! Phalluses everywhere! I love that second wave feminists decided to do a bit of collective self love. As females we are pitted against our own body from day dot and I fail to see what is wrong with celebrating its power. To be honest, it is a bit of fun too. Having shared iconography that represents shared realities is a wonderful part of bonding as a community of any kind.

However, although feminists with uteruses or vaginas wanted to know more about them — because that knowledge had been systematically hidden or controlled by ‘men of science’ — they rejected being defined by their bodies. Binary gender essentialism was, in sum, not the primary theoretical view of second-wave feminists. In fact, second-wave theory laid much of the groundwork for our current, welcome conception of a society-wide removal of a restrictive gender binary. Karen Sacks wrote in 1970: ‘For women to merely fight men would be to miss the point. The point is to change the social order …. Perhaps for the first time in human history we are faced with the possibility of a pan-human, non-exploitative society.’ By 1986 Judith Butler had taken the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to their logical conclusion: ‘it is no longer possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to biological necessity … it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender.’

Women still don’t know enough about our bodies. Research and funding for male bodies and medicine far outstrips that for females. Simply compare the money and care that has gone into developing erectile dysfunction medication to the relative void of information on the debilitating condition endometriosis which affects approximately 10% of women. The true form of the clitoris and all its glory were not known until shamefully recently either. We have every right to be obsessed with learning about our bodies; there is so much yet to learn.

Judith Butler has a lot to answer for. Her post-modern, deconstructive anarchism is at the heart of the worst parts of gender identity ideology. Please tell me you aren’t going to quote Foucault. However, that particular quote is one of her more benign. She is right that as women we should not be valued primarily on our biological ability to bear life. Our lives need not be dictated by breeding, however, that does not erase our bodies. It does not erase the fact that society still treats us in certain ways because of their perception of our ability to become pregnant. We are still oppressed in many ways because we belong to the sex class of female.

TERFs ultimately tie rights to body parts. Their approach seems to be that, because women were originally oppressed to some extent because of their bodies, their rights should be forever tied to qualities within those bodies, when in fact the precise opposite is true. Their reactionary ideology, with its obsession with binary gender essentialism, is actively harmful to all genders. TERFs aren’t even calling back to the second wave — they’re calling back to the first wave. Their ideas are over one hundred years old, and they aren’t good ones.

This is a bizarre conclusion to draw. But I’m glad I got to the end without having to read a Michel Foucault quote so, thank you. I have a question for you, Danielle. A genuine one.

If not because of our bodies, our sex, why were and are women oppressed?

It is our bodies which have always differentiated us from men. It is the fact, as you say, that before contraception we spent our lives pregnant and in the home. It is our bodies and our potential to become mothers that sees us valued less in the workforce (as well as gendered sex stereotypes). It is because we are female that we are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence, but rarely the perpetrators. It is because we are female that in some parts of the world little girls have their genitals mutilated, are married off to men, and deprived of education. I am terribly and genuinely confused as to what you think sexism, female oppression, and male violence are, if not based around our respective realities as members of our sex classes. What is feminism for if not to liberate the female sex class?

This does not mean that any of this oppression is our destiny. However, we simply must know what we are fighting for and against if we are to effect change. Sex is WHY we are oppressed. Gender is HOW we are oppressed.

I really hope you read some of this at least. I’m not telling you how to think, I’m telling you how we think. You have seriously misunderstood our position on things that seem to form the basis for why you hate us. It is your choice if you wish to still paint a picture of us as the antithesis of decency, but I wanted to make sure you’re at least hating us for positions we actually hold.

My Twitter DMs are always open for respectful, confidential conversation. I welcome questions and hope that maybe some of you who are afraid to be seen engaging in taboo subjects with blacklisted people will feel comfortable to reach out privately.

We need to talk to avoid further misunderstandings.

[yetanotheranarchist]

Another non-binary rants on Tumblr.com

I don’t know that I have anything worth while or new to add to these conversations. That’s how I feel about most things though. I want to write about stuff but I always feel like nothing I write is anything necessary or new put into the world. Perhaps its a bit narcissistic for that to even be a concern of mine, but It is

   I have known I’m non-binary trans for right around a year now, but as per most peoples experience with these things. A lot of shit from my past makes a lot more sense when I look at it through that lens. I have always been different than “the other boys”. But that’s not a new idea for other trans/queer people, and not something I feel like I need to explain right now.

   The only reason I’ve decided to write into the void today is because I have felt lost for a while and don’t know how to get out of that feeling. As you can guess from my name, I’m vehemently anti-capitalist.Unfortunately that does not allow a person to not participate in our capitalist society (trust me right wingers, if I could I would). I went to college for my first (real) year last year and it went fucking terribly. My mental health has not been good for a very long time but it got to the point where I could not just keep dealing with it on my own and I got on an SSRI in hopes that I would be able to feel some motivation to do anything at all again... It did not work.

   I failed like half of my classes iin the second half of the year out of a disinterest in doing literally anything let alone going to class everyday and doing what felt like pointless homework. In high school, I took advantage of a program that allowed me to graduate with my diploma and my Associates degree. So, I had to pick a major almost right away at my “real” college. I love political theory and everything surrounding it, but as I learned more it became harder and harder to see any point in getting a political science degree when just about all of the good paying jobs I might get after graduating would be at places I am ethically opposed to.

  Now, I’ve been at home for about a year, taking a break from college because even my parents could tell that it did not go well for me. I’ve done some therapy, switched to a new SSRI and tried to get motivated to continue living and it still hasn’t happened. I just don’t want to live the life that the world wants me to. A part of this that I have not really grappled with outside of just thinking about it 24/7 to myself is my transness. I think I really want to go on HRT and I live in a state that would make that reasonably accessible (comparatively speaking) but it would require telling my parents about all of this. They aren’t outright bigots but they are pretty conservative and it terrifies me to my core to tell them anything about my queerness. I live in a small town with not many recourse for queer folks, and as a result I did not feel comfortable telling my (former) therapist either. I need to do something, I hate sitting in my house pretending not to exist but I just have no direction and no idea how to find one.

Thanks, internet void, for allowing me to type my frustrations out to no one and also possibly everyone simultaneously

[rotationalsymmetry]

Since I'm stuck thinking about this anyways,

Why I Don't Like Radfems (remix #527)

I'm trans. I support trans women. End of story.

I'm kinky. Radfems think kink is bad. This is a problem for me.

(Also, radfems can be weird about women/afab people who aren't women but who radfems think are women, having sex with amab people? I, yeah, take that kind of personally actually. I, a bisexual, am not incapable of consenting to "straight" sex just because society rewards heterosexuality, OK?)

I support sex workers, and sex workers generally want decriminalization. Radfems want to ban sex work, either directly or by punishing the clients but not the sex workers themselves -- which, if they'd listen to sex workers, they'd learn that this still makes things more dangerous for the sex workers themselves.

I'm in favor of people picking their gender expression for themselves. Women who want to dress feminine should be able to do that. (Also women who don't personally prefer that but want to live smoothly within society.) Women who want to dress masc or androgynous should be able to do that. Historically radfems used to be against butch/femme expression in the lesbian community, and currently they've shifted to "butch/femme" terms are for lesbians only" which is a fucking weird take OK? The world will not end if you just let people, lesbians and otherwise, dress how they want and choose the terms that they think best describe them. (And if people want to do some things in their relationships that resemble heterosexual relationships, so the fuck what? Live and let live. Not everybody needs to be doing things the same way; a butch/femme couple with strict roles can peacefully coexist with a femme/femme couple, a butch/butch couple, a butch/femme couple where the femme is the breadwinner and the butch takes care of the household stuff and occasionally likes to wear a skirt just for a change of pace, etc.)

There is in practice a tremendous amount of overlap between radfems and aphobes, and I support ace/aro/whatever people and understand them to be valuable members of the queer community.

Also, the word queer. There's a whole thing around that. I'm on side "not gay as in happy, queer as in fuck you" in no small part because I'm not gay. Like y'all won't let me have that term. So yeah. I like the term that thinks that my "straight" or "passing" aspects don't negate my non-straight ones. I like the term that could mean gay or could mean bi or could mean trans or could mean ace or could mean some non-Western understanding of gender and sexuality and you have no idea which one I mean.

In my admittedly not that extensive experience of reading what radfems have to say about their beliefs, it is my experience that radfems lie through their teeth. And, ok, every movement has some dipshits in it. But...that sort of dishonesty and willingness to play dirty in general seems more pervasive in terfdom/radfem politics than in other groups, from what I can see.

Anyways. I was raised liberal and still hold to a lot of liberal values, like tolerance and being willing to listen to people with different opinions from you. Good values. So it pains me to refuse to openly engage in dialog with people who disagree with me. But I think that this is one case where it's the best/least bad option. If you interact with my blog and I can tell that you're a terf or otherwise a radfem, I'm blocking you on sight, no recourse no chance to talk it out. On the off chance that someone reading this does actually want honest dialog, I recommend star-anise's posts on the subject. I believe she's done with responding to asks on this subject though so don't send her asks. I'm not sure I know anyone who's up for talking it out right now. Please respect people's boundaries. You can read stuff without interacting with it and post separately to your own blog. This is... a painful and exhausting subject for a lot of us, and people who are otherwise willing to discuss in good faith have been worn down by trolls and assholes.

[queernuck]

Bodies in Transit: Transition and Detransition in Assemblage

To understand “transition” and “detransition” one must understand that these two terms denote far more than any particular means of being, or any particular event, but rather construct a means by which a certain measure may be given to the structure of womanhood as the central polarity of gendering the body through the apparatus of the sexed body: effectively, these are two ways of relating to a body that is sexed and gendered, that experiences these two as part of a sort of syncretic invocation of the idealized body, the ideological body, and that the object-at-hand in fact is far more complex than any semiotics of transition or indeed of detransition can be immediately described as being. This is specifically because the violent demarcations in question require that one accept the measuring of sex and gender implied by transness, at least as a means of relating the two, even if one’s ultimate goal is to reject this separation and instead act in a sort of unification between the two. This measure is a sort of consciousness that I would not call false, just as invoking Cartesian dualism is not “false consciousness” merely for the invocation. 

Rather, it involves the arbitrating structure at hand causing a certain turn, forcing it to be developed within the relations at hand, out of the body, through the collapsing and restructuring of the body into transitioned-or-detransitioned. Furthermore, these structures can be used in order to develop a critique of trans-exclusionary radical feminism based in its understanding of what kinds of bodies may be included in womanhood, the material positionality that womanhood implies, the way that gender presents woman as in-relief, inverse, as phallic rather than possessing the phallus, and that effectively one finds the same holdings yet again in radical feminisms that do not acknowledge transness as a measure between sex and gender. 

First, one must mark out that this discussion overlaps with a great deal of other ones, surrounding the concept of the “closet” and how that relates to passing, stealth, any number of readings-of-the-body. To describe someone as “passing” often points to a different sort of experience than that of a person who is “stealth” although the latter is implied by the former, and the former may be found in the latter. To get into the intricacies of “passing” as a measure of the body is to, effectively, proscribe a range of gendered experiences and performative acts so wide that it cannot be measured in a single discussion. Rather, sketching out a line of flight along which one “passes” is marked by the transition Badiou describes from “being” into the “event” where one can hold “passing” as a way of being but it only becomes an “event” when one successfully “passes” as the gender one presents as. More comprehensively, the implication of “stealth” is that one’s “being” has been totalized, entirely overcoded by passing, to the point where one effectively has lost the marker of being a trans woman, one has simply become a woman. Here, the “event” of being “outed” can become even more dangerous than before, such that “outing” a woman in this situation is an intentionally and inevitably violent act. It does nothing to change the understanding of the woman at hand as a woman, but rather the becoming-imperceptible of becoming-woman is turned toward an all-too-perceptible change, a shift in what one can be, must be, and thus is required to be.

Effectively, to consistently “pass” one must restructure one’s body in certain ways, one must adopt certain limitations upon one’s self in order to not give certain tells-of-transness as part of a larger course of action wherein this becoming-woman is a prerequisite to becoming-imperceptible. Of course, this is continually reflected by the structure of man: the trans woman who is otherwise unknown, the trans woman who perfectly hides herself until the moment of unveiling is the structure by which transness is appropriated into heterosexual desire: even if a trans woman does not “pass” she can be read as such in order to create the structural narrative referenced here, can be imagined as such until the libidinal flows become ones of regret, of anger, of abuse. Here, the structures of the woman’s body become ephemera to throw back upon her, to realize in brutalization of her body, are part of how she is realized within the space of womanhood as having an improper sort of measure between the gendered body and the sexed one. It is not that there are two bodies, but rather a hyperstatic suspension of the body between the two, a crucifixion upon the structure that splays the body out in order to allow it to be remeasured. 

Thus, if one does not pass completely enough, one may forced to “detransition” for some time, until one can effectively access the further resources for at least achieving a pitiful recognition from more liberal-minded structures of encounter, so that one can achieve the basic stability implied by a job, housing, so on. Trans women are frequently forced to live in this fashion, to live with a persistent experience of dysphoria that is only made more violent, more disparate by how unflinching it is. The intentional violence of transmisogyny will still be perceived, is still a danger even without active participation in “transitioning” but it also implies a certain act of recognition absent the process of “detransitioning” at hand. This may come at a certain point in transition where the differentiation of the body, the becoming-woman reflected in the gaze, must be covered up, must be refused, the actions of hormones obtained surreptitiously and relationships on terms not made public are part of a larger means of navigating toward becoming-woman while denying the process as part of a potential creation of the self. 

Conversely, the use of the same in regard to butch lesbian subjectivities, the description of “detransition” as a process that rejects the identity of the “trans man” and instead embraces butch identity, is one that requires a great deal of deconstructive reading in order to become coherent, as its appropriation by numerous different readings of trans bodies makes it a highly contentious space of discursive interplay. The assemblages of detransition are part of a turn from multitude into one, one into multitude, a sort of “nothing” that is a conspicuous-nothing, the named nothing, a presence of absence that is realized only through the process of detransitioning. For some, it is simply changing identities after having lived as a trans man for some time, or perhaps even merely giving up identification as a trans man. Others find it in identifying as a lesbian while retaining the body they have “transitioned” into, finding it to their liking as a lesbian, and finding it to the liking of plenty of other lesbians, as well. Still others take measures to change their body such that the process of “transition” is reversed, undone, effectively signified in reversal, in order to create a body that has either reverted or retransitioned toward a certain sort of body, a body able to exhibit certain performative tendencies. 

In part, this experience must be understood as speaking from a structural inadequacy that is expanded, resided in, violently destabilized by the process of becoming-butch: it is becoming-woman, becoming-animal in the Deleuzean sense of these terms and transitions, in the molecularities of becoming, but the fundamental way in which it creates a rabattement upon lesbian identity, how it acts as a simulacra of a performative that does not exist, a mirroring of an identity-counterpart that is precluded from existence in that it wills the lesbian phallus into being: it is an identity that, taken within the larger structure of lesbian desire, stands in relation to womanhood and conventional ideation of the lesbian as for-man, as displaying a certain performativity of sexuality in absence of the man who will provide the signified absence, butchness stands as the equivalent to a man that cannot be, that never was, a simulation of an unsimulatable man specifically because such a man cannot be, a man cannot be understood by these structures. 

Thus, butchness is contemptible, is part of what makes lesbian identity legible only as nullity, as a complete degendering and desexing of the woman’s body that reduces it to denatured object, object of scorn, object of absolute rejection. That inserting the measure of transness and transitioning to a trans man is sometimes taken as a recourse, sometimes sought as an alleviation of dysphoria, should not be taken as a preclusion of transmasculine identity as a genuine position, should not be used as part of urging detransition as an absolute political necessity. This requires a measuring of personal relations to the body, the attenuation of the measure between sex and gender to a dualist and moreover ideological-qua-idealistic posturing which does little except essentialize sex further. 

All of this, as a signification of a certain tendency, has been claimed by certain radical feminists in order to leverage a critique against an absent group of trans ideological forebearers, in a fashion which confuses neoliberal acts of appropriation for the genuine holdings of trans people and the ways in which they attempt to reckon with the measure of transness imparted upon them. Detransitioning, for butch women, often signifies either a sort of satisfaction with their body at a certain stage in transition and in turn restructuring this process, this measure of sex and gender, into one that is labeled as “detransitioning” or a realization that the dysphoric experience they had was in fact part of how the realization of a sort of denaturing and nullification intrinsic to the creation of lesbian identity echoed in their own traumatic experience, and thus became part of what they sought to eliminate through transition, only to realize that in fact it was never a desire for transition they harbored. 

This should not be taken in-itself to signify the impossibility for radical means of understanding for trans men, and if it is used as such then it is a reactionary means of understanding a group that is so often marked by vulnerability, a group that is often misunderstood intentionally in order to create a sort of gender solipsism claiming itself as gender separatism. Instead, the space in which trans women realize “detransitioning” and in which former trans men realize it must be differentiated simply because these are two radically different structures of measuring the body, measuring its relation to already present means and mirrored-means of “becoming” and thus the two must be appropriately reckoned with one another.

For trans women who detransition, who do not transition, for butches who use transition-articulated resources to alleviate dysphoria, for trans men who detransition, these experiences all must be welcomed as part of articulating how the stark Oedipal structures of gender impart themselves onto bodies.