#if the people the alt right target are telling terfs there is an issue

[burning-sol]

“we gotta talk abt how you're sleeping with the enemy rn (the alt right)"

bestie no rfs aside from the conservative “gender critical” “feminist” larpers are doing that bc get this.. the alt right hates actual feminists 😭 and lesbians, woc, etc, which many of us are

also that post wasn’t fucked up it was funny lmao

DATE ME RIGHT NOW FR!!!!

[impunkster-syndrome]

oh yeah totally not transmisogynistic for you to create a callout-style smear campaign against a trans woman for TALKING ABOUT TRANSMISOGYNY. the screenshots that are supposedly “proof” of “transandrophobia” are literally just pointing out that transfems experience discrimination that transmascs don’t. your insistence that she is somehow dangerous or harmful IS TRANSMISOGYNISTIC. please just THINK about what you are doing!!

So it's transmisogynistic to point out that a transfem is extremely fucking toxic as a person and is being transphobic towards a demographic that had supported her when it came down to photomatt's transmisogyny? That is not transmisogyny. She doesn't get to be bigoted to other trans people due to trauma as a "reward." Her being trans does not immediately make her not transphobic ever to other trans people.

She calls transmascs MRAs for speaking of issues that impact us (Surprise- transmascs do experience misogyny as well. You act like the instant we realize we are transmascs we don't and become immediately passing as cis.) when real MRAs hate us and consider us women. She thinks we are at fault for TERFs targeting us due to vulnerability and should be punished for it. She supports baeddels that have a history of being anti-masculinity. Tell me how that is not transphobic. It would be the instant that you swap out transmasc for transfem in your eyes, so how is it not transphobic for her to do to us? Is it not transmisogynistic to have a double standard that allows anyone deemed women to be flawless and incapable of wrongdoing or bigotry for being women while men are always evil?

Making people aware of someone's transphobia is not a smear campaign. You sound like the alt right fucks who get mad they experience consequences for racism when you claim that.

You really going to go up to bat for someone who thinks they should get a free pass on suicide baiting and says that cohost staff enforcing their own rules about it is transmisogyny? That's literally trying to twist a situation so you're the victim when you're actually the one in the wrong in the situation. Someone can be a victim and experience oppression, but that doesn't mean they are flawless or always good people.

Bonus: She blames transmascs for her being ran off the site and not staff's refusal to actually do anything about the harassment and wrongful community labeling plus photomatt's transmisogyny. So she thinks transmascs are 100% the same as the TERFs that want us killed.

Predstrogen, if you don't want people screenshotting your rancid transphobia and history of bigotry, stop thinking it is magically acceptable to do to other people. You're literally supposed to not be on this site anymore. Just fucking look away. I do this for archival purposes. My FP deleted xis account for you and supports all your baeddel shit. I never saw a transmasc not support you while the photomatt stuff went around. I spread the word and support a case of legal action against tumblr for the bigotry and paywalling of accessibility. You're being intentionally ignorant of the people who have supported you and then spitting in their faces. Also funny how she shows usernames from other people but not my username and more of the post. Almost as if my points here actually get under her skin and she doesn't want people coming to my blog to see the full post.

[jbird-the-manwich]

Did you see Technocoven a few weeks ago? It was an online witchcraft convention organized by Prim. I went to it because it sounded cool and interesting. While the con did raise some money for charity, there wasn't really any substance to anything in the panels. I'm a beginner practitioner(almost 4 years) even I could tell that most of the panelists only had surface level knowledge. I now realize the entire thing was probably an add campaign, but I still wish it was better.

I didn't see it. I know very little about this person. I haven't had the errrr.... pleasure of engaging with her content to such a degree.

All I know is what I saw, which is that she apparently resurrected an antique beef that I only really learned about in real time as it was falsely leveraged to convince most of witchblr that myself and therainshallmakeadoor are terrifyingly awful, notorious racists.

In the words of the now defunct eclecticwitcheryafoot/luxatemnox we "went after people of color and dont like being called out"., who supported this claim with screenshots that do not even display such a thing occurring.

I assume I've been targeted because my shitposty pagan roasty num nums perhaps have hit a bit too close to home, because I've made the unforgivable mistake of making shitposts about spooky community issues and "let me sell ya some witchcraft, fellas" types pretty much as long as I've been on here.

Oh, and reblogging from the wrong people, who, I guess by her allowable number of degrees of separation between bloggers that have ever expressed distaste for this apparent pattern she has, 2 - 4 degrees is too close and so you must be also conspiring against her.

Six months ago I couldn't tell you who she was. Still really can't. But I am now officially down to shitpost forever about this new archetype of the pagan community, the Pink Dictator, that I have had the pleasure to experience first hand.

I'm not the only person on here who has this same story. You're deemed unfit to walk the earth by prim, she strikes you down with extremely unspecific allegations of racism, ableism, or any other ism. It really doesn't matter if the ism even fits the person in question.

If I have ever said anything to offend POC, I am absolutely open to having that conversation and am down to dismantle systematic racism. I won't deny the validity of good faith attempts of eliminating the community of racists, because they are out there.

I'm totally on board against nazis, terfs, anti semitic people, racists, cultural appropriators, etc.

But it's being made out like I'm not. Same with Briar. (Therainshallmakeador)

Anyone who is honestly reasonable and has been following either of us for any length of time or interacted can surely attest to the fact that we have never been seen expressing any sort of alt right, kkk, master race, white-patriarchy-ass-sucking bullshit. Racism is bad.

-Isms are usually bad. Everyone is in agreement.

But we were basically just smeared with accusations of extremely unspecific microaggressions, as has apparently everyone who has ever pissed her off somehow, as shown by the deluge of other bloggers coming up to post about their similar experiences.

I dont know the specifics of the antique beef, but everytime she beefs with anybody it seems like it's always "these people want to HURT ME, these people are AFTER ME these people are CURSING ME because they're racist and ableist and elitist and I'm just a young pagan witch who doesn't DESERVE THIS and these people have organized into this CABAL and they've launched a HARASSEMENT CAMPAIGN and I'm taking a HIATUS because of the STRESS of these people HURTING ME, AND THESE PEOPLE KNOW WHO I AM and I'm IN REAL PHYSICAL DANGER."

And.... holy shit, dude.

I'm sure as fuck not after her, seems like she is not in a good place.

I dont really know the specifics of her beef with me.

All I know is one day I woke up and myself and therainshallmakeadoor were marked as "notoriously" unsavory racists.

Literally, like weirdly cropped screenshots of literally nothing meant as a racial attack on anyone were being circulated. Maybe still are. I have no idea. I know yall are tired of hearing about this. So am I. I was going to work on a knife for my friend today. I'm not an ex fan or a consumer of her content. All I'm going to have to say if I'm asked about her, is way too many words to say that she is a liar, because that is really the only thing that I know about her.

[lazywitchling]

You know what’s scary? I came to tumblr in the height of fandom blog vs hipster blog, when superwholock was first getting started, before Disney had a choke hold on the entertainment industry, back when it was fun to get really really into tv shows and base our whole personality on what media we consumed. Looking back on it, it was... not a great way to be, but goddamn did it save me.

Not like in a dramatic “saved my life” way, but I mean.

I could go back on my main blog and find my pro-republican posts. I could find my anti-trans posts and my “well okay, gay people can be gay at home, but I don’t want them out where I can see them.” I could find those. They’re back there, years ago in my archive. Because that’s all I knew. That’s all I heard. My community - I mean my real life one, my local area, my friends, my church group, everything around me - is very... monoculture. There aren’t a lot of people around here who don’t look like me, have the same economic background as me, raised in the same beliefs I was... it’s just a whole lot of carbon copies of me. So I thought... “ew, how can someone be gay? That’s gross. They’re going to go to hell.” Because what the hell else would I think? That’s all I knew! And I thought “that boy wants to be a girl? What’s wrong with him? He should see a doctor.” And I thought “why do some people not go to work and the government just pays for them to eat? That’s not right. They shouldn’t be lazy like that.”

And then fuckin’ fandom. It wasn’t fandom directly, but when I got really into a show, I’d follow so many blogs that posted about it. Fan art, discussions, gifs, episode recaps, ask blogs... and inevitably, some of those blogs would drop the occasional political post. Mostly about how we needed marriage equality in the USA. And I thought “well. I don’t agree with that, but their fandom content is good, so I won’t unfollow them.”

It’s how I got exposed to more and more people. People who didn’t think like me. People who didn’t think like my parents. And they weren’t just political posts, sometimes it was just blogging. An artist I like would post about finally getting started on T. He was so happy that he was finally getting T. And I started to think things like “well, she— I mean, he sounds happy. So I’m happy for... him.”

More people. More stories. And I slowly stopped thinking about other people as political issues or religious problems, but as just... people who were trying to live their lives.

It was slow, and it was rocky. I still participated in church discussions that involved phrases like “hate the sin but love the sinner”. It made sense... until college, when I was face to face with people who weren’t like me. Looking at the man in my theatre troupe who was talking about his partner, I couldn’t make the “hate the sin, love the sinner” mentality work. I just couldn’t. I knew I was supposed to, but I just knew that trying to say “he’s a good person, but he just needs to stop being gay” didn’t work at all. I couldn’t hate what he was without hating who he was. And I just couldn’t, because he was my friend, dammit!

Marriage equality passed. My Facebook feed turned into the proverbial wailing and clothes-tearing from my church friends. And I very slowly... very quietly... started to post the “let’s remember that we shouldn’t hate other people” stuff. The very subtle nudging, still Christian-focused stuff that was juuuuust starting to lean left. Not too over the top, not overtly in support, because I was supposed to be one of them, a member of the church, I had to play along with the mentality.

Playing along got exhausting. Someone would deadname Caitlyn Jenner, and I’d consider for a moment that I should just let it go, that I should just pretend that it was fine. But... what about my artist friend? Would I be okay with someone deadnaming him? No, I would not. And if I was pretending I was onboard with deadnaming Caitlyn, would I have played along with deadnaming my friend? Just so I could fit in and be comfortable? So I corrected them. Her name is Caitlyn.

I learned to listen to more people. I learned why “I don’t see color” wasn’t as good a mentality to have as I thought. I learned that “feminist” wasn’t a dirty word, and it also didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I slowly learned that I was one. I slowly learned, and still learn, how to further expand all the things that covers. I learned about intersectional feminism. I learned about white privilege. I learned about so much and so many people because I was actively listening to them, I was hearing their stories, and I cared about them, wanted them to have good lives, wanted them to be able to make choices about their own lives without people like me saying “I know better.”

I learned about myself, too. At twenty-six years old, I figured out exactly why I was always so baffled when my friends talked about sex like it was this big important thing. Surprise: asexual. A second surprise a few years later: somewhere on the aromantic spectrum as well. (Where? Idk. I’ll tell you when I figure it out myself.)

The point is... it was less than a decade ago that I was exactly the type of bigot that gets chased off everyone’s blogs. I was the everything-phobe, the one who would specifically vote against any type of aid, because bootstraps, amiright? I was a whole-ass bigot. Bitch, I owned a confederate flag ring, and I’ve never lived in the south. (It’s in a landfill somewhere now.) I only learned because I first heard from people not like me, and then I learned to listen. I participated in communities that were diverse, not because I wanted the diversity, but because I wanted the content. The diversity was a side effect. And it’s what saved me.

And it fucking terrifies me how close I could have been to being some alt-right and/or terf radical new-nazi or whatever. Because if I had got on this site about two years later than I did, I’d have been caught right in that echo chamber of radfems and nazis preying on anyone they can get their talons in. I was so close. And now I see these radfems pop up in my notes, and it’s like... that could have been me. That was me at one point. I had the ideology, I just missed the identity of it all by a few years.

I don’t have a “byf” list on my blog for a reason. I don’t go through my followers and weed out the terfs and the nazis and the bigots. If they’re in there, fine. I want them to see my words. I want them to hear from someone who doesn’t think like them. I want them to hear from someone who used to be like them, but then learned (and is always learning) to be better.

And yet when I see them in my notes, I’m obliged to weed them out. I feel guilty when it’s a young girl who has clearly been targeted by the radfems on this site, teaching her that she’ll be stronger if she hates everyone they tell her to. Of all the people on this site, she’s the one who I most want to keep out of the echo chamber. But I also have a responsibility to make sure the people who follow me, the people who I follow and reblog from, don’t get caught by the shrapnel. A radfem liking my post just means I have to pay closer attention to what I say and make sure I don’t fall back on old mentalities. It keeps me accountable. But a radfem in my notes means she’s in the notes of my friends, in my reblog chains. And it is my responsibility not to turn a blind eye when people around me can get hurt.

But goddamn, if ever there was someone who needed a community outside of that circle of bigotry, it’s that fourteen year old girl who proudly calls herself a terf. And I really hope she finds one. I really do.

[toycarousel]

I've had quite a few issues with terfs myself, even though I'm not trans (I'm an afab demigirl). I tend to stand up for trans people, so I've gotten into small spats with terfs, but they end up turning around and calling me a man, "who's pretending to be a woman to prey on other women". So, I tell them I'm not a man in any way, and they block me.

Yikes, yeah, I’m not even surprised, and I wish you hadn’t been forced to experience any of that shit, Anon.  : ( The people terfs attack the most are, ironically, women and woman-aligned ppl.  Doesn’t matter if a woman is cis, trans, any birth assignment.  They attack all women (sometimes under the thin veneer of calling those people “men”, regardless).  

Like, for instance, I see terfs constantly attack cis women who don’t agree with them, bisexual cis women, and I also see them attack young cis girls (usually to convince them that the only way to be a truly good person is to become a political-lesbian/lesbian separatist), and I see them attack any and all trans women and trans feminine ppl, ofc.  As far as men go, they will target trans men and/or nonbinary masc-aligned ppl.

And yet I’ve literally never seen a terf attack a cisgender man, no matter how misogynistic and powerful the guy is. 

I suspect terfs are all too busy targeting more vulnerable populations of people.  And that’s the difference between them and general (actual) feminist ideology.  Most feminists will speak out against the injustices committed by people of all genders, and the systems that make those injustices so common.  

But terfs don’t actually give a single shit about women who aren’t part of their cult.  They will literally ally themselves with alt-right misogynists (incels, neo-nazis, etc.), in their quest to hurt transgender people.  They’ve left the feminism aspect of feminism completely behind.

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Okay so I 100% agree with that one post about lesbiphobia being used by anti trans, anti bi, and alt right (mostly white) lesbians to discriminate against bi and trans women, but like...queer IS a slur. It has historically been used as a slur, and yes slurs can and should be reclaimed. My personal issue is just when people use a reclaimed slur as a blanket term to refer to the whole community.

Okay, but just saying “queer is a slur” misses the fact that much of our language is slurs we reclaimed. Maybe it’s not specifically reclaimed itself, but does anybody remember just a few years ago when gay became such a big insult particularly with teens that a whole generation with us grew up hearing gay only as derogatory, even though it’s also forced on us as an umbrella term (gay rights, gay pride, gay marriage)? And the “queer is a slur” crowd doesn’t seem to care about how we had to hear gay being applied to us and get used to it, even if it had (or even still has) negative connotations for us?

Queer is unfairly targeted because of its open-ended acceptance of people to identify as such and bring us together under one, simple label. Other reclaimed terms do not see nearly the level of vitriol and backlash with people telling others “you’ve got to tag your identity” and “you’re not allowed to call yourself that around me”. Most reclaimed identities people use see a lot more respect in letting people actually reclaim them. (A campaign that seems to have largely stemmed from the terf crowd, which has been an extremely effective tactic to cracking us all apart.)

No worries. If you don’t identify as queer… then when we use it as a ‘blanket’ term, we’re not including you! Queer only includes those of us that identify that way! You’re certainly under no obligation to reclaim it or use it yourself! I would never want to force you to be uncomfortable that way. But I often use queer because I don’t identify with or feel connected to the “lgbtq+ community”, so putting myself in a position where I talk about the community in those terms feels fake and disconnected. Which is weird because sure, we’re really all talking about the same group of people in general, but I am queer, so I feel much more comfortable talking about the queer community.

~Mod S