#lesbian does not equal terf

[pa-pa-plasma]

wait so you're telling me this whole time i could've just said "stop being racist" & racism (at least among white people) would instantly disappear? why didn't i think of this sooner

[faggy--butch]

I think that trans men & mascs do directly challenge gender heirarchies by existing. The same as nonbinary people challenge the existance of the gender binary and trans women challenge the idea of people seeking status by transitioning to a "lesser" position, trans men challenge the idea that this heirarchy is static and exclusive and a lot of the assumptions of what it means to belong to a group within this heirarchy. And trans men aren't transitioning to gain status and oftentimes do not gain status in the least, which proves a fallacy in the idea that "man" is a coherent class that universally gains privilage and power and people would only transition to gain that power

This is really well put! The idea that trans men transition to gain status is actually a part of transandrophobia, and butchphobia actually. The butch flight, the lost lesbians, the idea that we're gender traitors, it's terf ideology.

So part of our issue is that we are seen as trying to get one over on people, of gaining male privilege because of course being a man means oppressing other people, masculinity is seen as oppressive, so we are either tryin to escape something or want to hold power over others, while at the same time, in reality, we lose our status as cis women as like, breeders for the next generation of white babies (this is specific to white trans men obviously)

So yeah, we challenge heavily the gender hierarchies, that to be a man means to oppress, and if that's not our manhood, if it's not what we want, then what IS manhood? what does it mean? And that scares people.

I will also say that "woman wanting to become men and taking our place" has already been a fear mongering tactic for YEARS. It started in part when women entered the work force. The "Equal rights equal fights" thing, This is all transandrophoia and butchphobia.

[0w0tsuki]

It really is disheartening to see how desperate transmisandry bros are committed to find SOME WAY, ANY WAY to call transfems who disagree with them TERFs. Like when it first started off it was lazy, dismissive, and just showed that they really had no idea what they were talking about. But then they doubled down and kept attempting to rebrand to try and spin it as progressive. Like it's this Holy Grail of trans andro theory that if they unlock it then they will be able to win all arguments forever and be able to shove any Transfem they don't like out of being able to describe her own oppression.

Like first it was drudging up the term beaddel from nearly a decade. A long dead group of "the one time a group of transfems were genuinely being awful" and mystifying them to warn about secretive "trans lesbian separatists" (literally a term based on "lesbian separatist". A term coined in the SCUM TERF manifesto) trying to sell you "radfem koolaid"

Then they thought "well it might work if we changed the E to an I" and started saying that any transfems using TME/TMA terminology were sex essentialists (even though it's not. Cis men and women are also TME) and "TIRF's" when literally no self respecting trans woman calls themselves that. The few people that do identify with the term TIRF are TME'S who think the trans people who are made with them "don't know how to read" instead of you know, recognizing their ideology is still rooted in bio essentialism.

Then they tried various tactics of redefining TERF. From "all trans people are equally targeted by TERFs and it does harm to say their primary target is trans women" (They see trans men as lost little girls and they want them to detransition and be "saved". They see trans women as violent predators, a threat to women by virtue of existing, and want us DEAD. These are not the same) to "actually their bigotry stems from a hatred of men!" (Actually most TERFs are trad wives. They constantly ally themselves with anti feminist movements. And one of their most prolific members posie parker infamously asked "fathers with gun" to walk into women's restrooms to kill trans women)

Then it was trying to delineate radfeminism from TERFism. Even though just referring to themselves as "radfem", just the same as "gender critical" was a part of a rebranding effort by TERFs themselves when the term TERF got widely recognized as a member of a bigoted hate group. Any "cis radfems who aren't TERFs" that they talk about are just TERFs who think the term is a slur. But that doesn't matter to transmisandry bros because it allows them to hold those terms as two separate things and more importantly as "something separate from TERF but functionally the same to label trans women as"

And now apparently it's "radical transfeminism"? Which come on. You aren't even trying at this point. It's honestly sickening how devoted the group that sells itself as being for "TransUnity" and "stopping the infighting" is so determined to find a term that will allow them to shut out and exclude any Transfem they don't like.

[mitziholder]

I was watching another gc lesbian asking about how butch and femme are different than performing gender, and all the comments were like "you need to go and experience lesbian culture and hear about people's experiences and why butch and femme are important", stuff like that. To me it sounds very similar to how TRAs fight tooth and nail to defend prescribed gender roles because it's "literally their identity" and taking away their autonomy and community how they socialize based on these roles. Long standing and commonly accepted socialization roles aren't immune to criticism imo. I look forward to more dialogue about this though this is just an observation I had

yeah, it is just one part of a general trend I’ve noticed in gc/rad-adjacent spaces, which is the relatively superficial change that a lot of self-identified gc feminists undergo in Becoming GC (or “Peaking”)

you take something stupid (ignorant and uncritical appreciation of Queer and Trans History) and, with very little consideration of the underlying processes which led to that thing, you switch it out for something equally stupid (ignorant and uncritical appreciation of Feminist and Gay History)

what you have then is a group of people who are still ravenously, violently protective of the things they perceive as sacred/unimpeachable representations of their culture... only it’s radfem/gay culture instead of stonewall.

>To me it sounds very similar to how TRAs fight tooth and nail to defend prescribed gender roles because it's "literally their identity" and taking away their autonomy and community how they socialize based on these roles

obviously anyone behaving like that does not have a very strong sense of self. so, if you threaten to “take away” their cultural Script, they don’t know what to do, because merging one’s identity with a cause or culture breeds a painful amount of personal investment in how it works and how it is perceived. this results in coping via:

a) attacking anyone who criticizes it (even in the most sympathetic manner)

b) digging heels in and resolving to ignore that it is not and never has been perfect

if they do eventually wrap their heads around the fact that their idols were human beings with a mix of good and bad ideas, it has the potential to drive them completely insane... thus the so-called terf-to-trad pipeline, symptomatic of the immaturity/malleability common in people who latch on to social movements in an effort to avoid thinking for themselves.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Like when it comes to radical feminism, there are generally two tenants to it that are important to the conversation

Sexism and the patriarchy (and usually by extension, men) are the primary and most important oppressor that impacts women, beyond all others.

The only meaningful liberating act for women is the removal of the patriarchy's presence from women's lives.

These do not inherently contain transmisogyny, but these are by themselves potentially dangerous ways of looking at the world. Radical feminism does not necessarily prescribe any specific way of dealing with the patriarchy, either through is dismantlement or replacement or by simply engaging in separatism.

This leaves a lot of room for extensions of feminist thought, and its part of why radical feminism inevitably splintered into different schools of feminist thought as well as schools in reaction to it. Radical feminism is where you get concepts such as the political lesbian, the crusade against kink and sex, the demonization of butch lesbians, amongst other things. It represents a potentially broad range of attributes a feminist could be, and this means that a lot of not so great people identified as one.

In the modern era, you tend to only find the most traditional radical feminists who still identify as one. They're almost always separatist, very vocal about their dislike and distrust of men, and generally do not find other vectors of social oppression (racism, classism etc) meaningful to engage in. They tend to be very vocal about the importance of the sanctity of women's spaces (see: separatism) as well as usually quite sex negative.

Where transmisogyny mixes in here is specifically in the idea that trans women are not women, but men who are trying to infiltrate women's spaces for nefarious purposes. We are saboteurs, thieves, and predators all in one. A lot of the older TERF literature is almost comically evil, like to the extent of calling us necrophiliacs, but its been tempered in the time since then. Transmisogyny fits extremely well in radical feminist ideology, because radical feminism does not see any other oppression as meaningful, including transphobia, and is overly concerned with the removal of patriarchal influence, making it often somewhat paranoid.

It stands in contrast with liberal feminism is that it generally does not think internal reform is even possible, but also lacks the general angle of equality and systematic justice that later schools of feminist thought have.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real, and that every cell in the human body is sexed, and that a man is as likely to become a woman as that chalice of wine is to become the blood of Christ during Mass (apologies, Catholics).

You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?

One by one, atheists are falling at the altar of trans. This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is ‘utterly confused’, decreed his angry apostates. Biology ‘isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow’, they said. This hippyish belief that humans can pick their sex from a multicoloured smorgasbord is entirely an article of faith, of course, not science. Behold rationalism’s turncoats.

We’ve witnessed Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s best-known scientist, bow to the creed of gender-as-feeling. In a TikTok video he said ‘XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient’ when it comes to reading someone’s sex, because what people feel matters along with their biology. So someone might feel mostly female one day but ‘80 per cent male’ the next, which means they’ll ‘remove the make-up’ and ‘wear a muscle shirt’. Sir, that’s cross-dressing; it does nothing to refute the truth of chromosomes, which absolutely do tell us what sex a person is. As destransitioner Chloe Cole said to Tyson, you’re ‘confusing basic human biology with cosmetics’.

We’ve seen Matt Dillahunty, a leading American atheist, promote the mystic cry that there’s a difference between ‘what your chromosomes are’ and your ‘gender identity’. ‘Transwomen are women’, he piously declares, perhaps keen to prove that while he might be fond of bashing the old religions, he has not one cross or blasphemous word to say about the new religion. Well, no one wants to be excommunicated from polite society.

Stephen Fry is another godless lover of science who appears to have converted to the trans belief. Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee and others who were once noisy cheerleaders for rationalism are likewise strikingly reserved on this new ideology, this devotional movement which, among other things, invites young women to submit themselves to bodily mortification in order that they might transubstantiate into ‘men’. Seems like something a rationalist should question.

Then there’s Humanists UK. Even Britain’s most influential God-free organisation has thrown its lot in with the Flat Earthism of the post-sex ideology. It entreated the British government not to change the definition of sex in the Equality Act to mean ‘biological sex’. Why? Because some people have a mysterious inner gender – soul? – which apparently counts for more than their biological sex when it comes to the question of which social spaces they should be allowed to enter. Forget biology, forget science; make feeling king. Some women resigned from Humanists UK over what they viewed as its abandonment of ‘compassionate, scientific [and] rational’ principles in favour of the unreality of gender subjectivity.

Witness the treachery of the atheists. Yesterday’s warriors for rationalism are now footsoldiers of postmodern delirium. The religion-bashers who came to prominence in the 2000s now pray to the gods of gender correctness, whether from fear of cancellation or because they really have had a Damascene conversion to the idea that feelings override reality; that scientific truth must sometimes play second fiddle to our flattering of the self-esteem of men who say they’re women, women who say they’re men, and presumably mere mortals who claim to be God. After all, if Dave with his dick and five o’clock shadow can literally be a woman, why shouldn’t Gary be the Second Coming? Subjectivity rules, no?

The rationalist bluster of the New Atheists was all sound and fury, it seems. The minute a real struggle over reason exploded into public life, they vacated the battlefield or joined the other side, crying ‘transwomen are women!’ as they went to signal their fidelity to the new faith. It’s easy to bash the old religions, especially Christianity. Newspaper columns, invites to literary festivals and conference halls full of the fawning godless middle class awaited those who said: ‘Jesus walking on water? As if!’ The consequences of deviating from the trans ideology are far more severe. Columns are taken away, invites evaporate, the middle classes will gather to scorn not cheer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some public atheists value their reputations more than rationalism.

What makes their desertion of reason even more galling is that they’ve done it in response to a neo-religion that really is harming the young. Fundamentalist Christians might try to convert gay kids out of their homosexuality, but this new religion mutilates them out of it, by transing young lesbians into ‘boys’ and gay lads into ‘girls’. Faith schools might promote zany miracle stories to their pupils, but this new cult imbues kids with far more disorientating beliefs about 72 genders and girldick and lesbians with penises. The old religions frown on blasphemy, and so does this new one, with its treatment of any ‘denier’ of its theological criteria as a social leper. Especially if the ‘denier’ is a woman: yes, this religion also hates uppity women. And yet it is at this moment, with all this unfolding, that some rationalists take a break from rationalism. It is moral cowardice in the garb of social justice.

Others go further than to criticise the complicity of some New Atheists with modern unreason. They say these godless agitators are to blame for the new madness. In chasing God from society, in further weakening the church, they ‘created a void that a new, dangerous ideology [has] filled’, says Tim Stanley at the Daily Telegraph. Kill God, get trans. Which means that even Dawkins, TERF-ish as he is, is partly culpable for the lunacy he now laments.

I think there’s something in this. But the problem is not that the New Atheists made a ‘void’ that others rushed to fill. It’s that they actively helped to foster the very hyper-atomisation that underpins an ideology like transgenderism. With their promotion of the post-God and post-humanist belief that human beings are nothing more than genetic machines, bundles of DNA in a pitiless world without meaning, the New Atheists contributed to our era’s great, tragic retreat of the individual from the social world into the self. From the external world of connection and engagement into the diminished universe of genetic determinism, bodily transformation and jealous cultivation of one’s own narcissistic virtue.

So, yes, there is a line from Dawkins to trans. Dawkins’ contribution to elite thinking was colossal, especially with his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He made evolutionary biology mainstream, the idea that we humans are not as special as we thought. Our universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’, he once wrote: ‘DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’ Dance to its music. The most striking thing about Dawkins and other neo-Darwinists was not their atheism, said the great moral philosopher Mary Midgley, but their ‘fatalism’. In The Solitary Self, her stinging critique of the new evolutionists, Midgley rebuked Dawkins for his depiction of ‘helpless humans enslaved by a callous-like fate-figure’. Only his fatalistic view was more deadening than that of Ancient scribes, she wrote, because this time the ‘cosmic bully’ controlling our fate is not a ‘pagan deity’ but ‘a chemical, DNA, a part of our own cells’. ‘Like other organisms’, she lamented, we’re seen as ‘lumbering robots ruled by [biology]’.

The Dawkins view grew in influence in the 1980s and 1990s. It was given expression in the soulless technocracy of the New Atheism. It merged with other atomising trends of our time – the decline of social institutions, the rise of a culture of fear, and, yes, the withering of religion – to exacerbate a view of the individual as utterly alone, a genetic creature more than a social one, ruled not by reason but by instructions sent by our DNA. ‘Biological Thatcherism’, Midgley called it.

And here’s the thing: if we are our biology, and that alone, doesn’t it make sense that individuals who want to change themselves would feel the need to change their biology? If we dance to the music of our DNA, doesn’t it follow that people who want to become something else, something different, will have the urge to change the music of their DNA? In short, there is a link, surely, between the post-1970s reduction of the human being to mere genetics and this new millennium’s fad for trying, however forlornly, to alter oneself at the level of genetics. Taking hormones, cutting bits off, removing testes, removing ovaries, injecting, mutilating, pursuing a ceaseless, pitiless war against one’s very biological essence. That the trans movement, and identitarianism more broadly, treats the body as the sole site of change should not be surprising in our era of biological Thatcherism where there is no society, no morality, no good, no evil – just bodies, stardust made flesh, all following genetic impulses. There is a close relationship between the modern ideologies of atomisation and the fruitless infernal war the young now wage on their own bodies, on their DNA prisons we’re all told we inhabit.

Perhaps Dawkins is the grandfather of transgenderism. I jest. But I do think we need to wriggle free from this clash between biological determinism on one side and self-destructive biological ‘liberation’ on the other. Biology is real, but it does not control us. You cannot change your sex but you can change your circumstances. That, however, requires that we go beyond both the biological Thatcherism of the new sciences and the neoliberal self-regard of identity politics and rediscover our place in a world of other people and other ideas. We’re social creatures, not ‘lumbering robots’ to be controlled or, worse, carved up and replaced with new parts.

------------------------------------

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now.

[angelbambifemme]

The "femcels" and "female manipulator" people are completely insane to me. Babe, it is not a flex to proudly admit that you're abusive and manipulative lol

I often find too that "femcel" is synonymous with "terf"

Funny how that works huh.

I may be a lesbian, but I don't *hate* men. I actually have quite a few male friends. Hell, even a few straight ones alongside bisexual ones. I genuinely enjoy the presence of my male friends and I'm not on the constant thought that they're going to assault me at any minute, nor do I even think for a second that they have a crush on me secretly. Even the single ones.

By the way, dismissing sexual assault or rape by saying "Eugh, it's just men being pigs like always!" just makes it completely impossible for that individual man to take responsibility for his actions, cause it's apparently just "the norm" and therefore should just be disregarded as "boys being boys" and not "this man is a rapist"

Sure, I understand being a woman or just general feminine person that fears men because statistics show that man on woman rape is more common, but this doesn't automatically render *every* man a rapist, nor does it make them responsible for another man's predatory actions. It also frustrates me how much women raping men gets invalidated and disregarded because "he probably wanted it" because she is a woman. This is not fucking true. Just because he's a man, doesn't mean that he necessarily craves the attention of women every second of his life. This goes the same for women abusing men; whether it be emotionally, mentally, or even physically. They're called "girlbosses" when they're really just being an abusive piece of shit for no good reason.

The way that women breeching their boyfriends privacy is such a normalized thing is honestly disgusting, too. If a man simply doesn't wish for his girlfriend to check his phone and go through his messages, it's automatically assumed that he's cheating or having an affair. If it was the opposite way around and a man did this to his girlfriend, he'd be shamed and called a red flag. BOTH are red flags. If you're so insecure that you feel the need to violate your partners privacy because you're so worried about them cheating on you, then that just goes to show that you do not trust your partner and therefore don't love them that much. Relationships require TRUST, and if you cannot trust your partner; you should never be in a relationship.

I don't allow my girlfriend to go through my phone without permission. She doesn't allow me to, either. No, it's not because we have anything to hide or we're cheating; we just have boundaries and respect for each other's privacy. I personally have extreme trauma with my privacy being violated as a child in the name of "protecting" me and "monitoring" me. Now I don't feel safe to leave my phone or any devices on in the same room as someone because it makes me stressed out to think that they may look through my photos, messages, etc and see things that weren't meant for them. I.e private conversations between friends where they may be venting or spilling private information that they intended for only you to see.

My partners are both completely understanding of this and don't look at nor go through my devices without explicit permission from me.

Anti-man rhetoric is so highschooler-core and I wish it'd stop. Grow the fuck up. You're not cute for being an abusive, manipulative dickhead. The women who say "all men are rapists and and abusers" I just wanna ask, how come all of my straight, single male friends haven't raped, abused or assaulted me? 🤔 How come they're very normal human beings whose only thoughts aren't constantly about having sex? How come some of them are asexual? 🤔 Gee, really makes you think...maybe you should just try having male friends who aren't abusers. Problem solved.

Misandry is just as disgusting as misogyny. Both are equally bad. Period. Fuck femcels.

[opinated-user]

i'm going to ignore for a second how LO has shown that she's just as gender essentialist as any other terf, in both her own works of fiction as in reality, or that she has even defended a radical feminist that SWERF use as their foundation for their nonsense. those things do contribute to the why i call out LO as terf adjacent, but let's put them aside for a moment. why do people call you a terf when you're a queerphobe or when you generally treat queer people as the enemy to take down? because terfs are the one weaponizing queerphobia in a real world sense.

this picture was used as an illustrative example of "lesbian being pressured by trans woman to have sex", in this infamous articles from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385 terfs are currently using queerphobia as another way to create division in the whole community. once they have managed to convince enough people that queer should be erased, who do you think is going to be next? but not everyone is from the UK in the first place, which would be a moot point to make because do you think terfs care about that? they only see you legitimatizing their position that nobody ever should be called queer, that queer is a bad word to use, that the people who call themselves and their community queer are bad selfish people who want to force you into accepting their identity. it doesn't matter if you're from the US, Canada or any other place, they'll use that as further proof that they're right and that other people who also "force them" to accept their identity are equally as bad and should also be erased. take a guess as to who that could be refering to. as a sidenote... do you really think the UK is the only place in earth with terfs? it's where they're the most prominent and have the most political power, that much is true, but terfs exist everywhere and sometimes they do get to have an impact if given the chance. why do you all think there has been an increasing number of anti trans law in usa? why do some states have outright banned drag performances? let me be clear about this. not being queer is fine. don't wanting to be called queer is fine. correcting people who call you, you individually, the person, queer is totally valid. as long you respect the right of queer people to exist and understand our need to have our own queer community, because we'll always have that as human beings that we're, we can all coexist no problem. but queerphobes like LO don't do that and it's disgusting to even pretend so. she has made post after post about how we, queer people, are self hating morons who are beneath her. she has told anons writing to her about how they should change the name of their identity. she has actually said that "people who reclaim queer should choke". she has made an entire video full of misinformation with the express purpose of convince people in general that they should never use queer, ever, and comparing the people who do with the most hateful horrible kind of people you can meet. i have a whole tag called "lily orchard is a queerphobe" because she has done this so frequently, so blatantly and so obviously that i'm actually baffled that she thinks she's foolling everyone by reducing her hatred for us as simply "don't liking to be called that word." anyone can visit that tag and see that it goes a lot harder than that. i don't know OP, but if all they ever said was that they don't want to be associated with that word because of personal negative experience with it and never said anything about queer people as a group or as a community, then yes, it would be wrong to immediately call them a terf on that basis alone. that's not the case of LO, as i argued above. she might not be exactly the same as a terf... but does she ever make their work a little easier by normalizing their ideas.

[bumblebeerror]

I feel like one of the main sticking points for people when it comes to aro/ace orientations is that they don’t consider partnering with someone one isn’t attracted to to be a legitimate relationship in itself.

Lemme explain.

As an aroace, I feel net zero attraction to anyone in particular with regard to the “partner” type of relationship. I still love fully and openly my friends and family, I still find beauty in people. I’ve dated several guys and daydreamed about far more women and non-binary folk.

Romance and sex are both awkward and uncomfortable to me. I’m not good at them despite trying, and I dislike viscerally the idea of being involved in sex.

But just because romance and sex don’t come naturally to me and feel generally out of my depth, doesn’t mean I didn’t love those people I daydreamed about or dated. It doesn’t mean I wanted that relationship any less - Nor that I loved them any less. More than once I felt comfortable in saying I could happily marry and live the rest of my days with the people I’ve loved.

Sexuality and Romanticism don’t necessarily denote the specific type of people one could be compatible with. A lesbian, sexually/romantically attracted to women, can be a lesbian whilst being partnered with a man. It may not be common! But a partner doesn’t denote one’s sexuality.

The same way a bisexual doesn’t become straight when partnered with someone of a different gender, nor gay/lesbian when partnered with someone of the same gender. Actions don’t equal sexuality/romanticism - they are just sometimes products of them. Gender and sexuality are both fluid and can change - maybe they don’t, maybe they do, but loving someone doesn’t really involve their gender, does it? Surely you’ve loved people who you weren’t sexually or romantically attracted to, friends and siblings and parents and family.

And I think that’s the real sticking point for people. And I also think that’s why so many who are viciously aphobic are often Terfs and transphobes and “gold star” lesbians/gays. The idea that attraction isn’t action and the fluidity of gender and sexuality are things that threaten those group’s worldview.

[kotoneshiomiofficial]

its so funny because if you saw a few lesbians saying something transphobic and you went and wrote a post saying "lesbians are all terf cunts and the community is incapable of self reflection" people would say Hey what the fuck. You cant hate an entire demographic of people just because of what a few individuals say. but its totallyyy fine to say that about ace people. completely fine to say every single one of us hates gay people and none of us belong in the community. its funny because you people are allegedly my friends but you regularly reblog "jokes" that are literally just Lets Laugh At The Stupid Acey. Ha Ha Aplatonic Is Such A Dumb Word Your Just Coworkers LOL. do you understand that asexual doesnt mean i hate sex i hate any mention of anything sexual and i hate you for being gay? all it means is i dont feel any inherent need to have sex thats it. same thing for aromantic i dont hate literally any mention of love i just dont have the drive to date people. ever since i came out ive been beating my head against a brick fucking wall trying to get you people to understand that im your equal and a human being and my experineces and isolation from my peers is just as genuine and real as yours. my attraction to women is just as genuine as someone who does experience sexual attraction. what the fuck do i need to do to get you to realize im human? that im equal to you? how do i get you to understand that? how? fucking how?

[singularsoldier]

One of my biggest complaints about lesbianism on this site is that I haven’t seen a remote whisper of similar discourse surrounding gay men.

Heads up, a lot of this is ranting/venting so im probably gonna repeat stuff or not make a ton of sense in some places:

Like, a man was married with kids before realizing he’s gay. Okay, cool. You’re still gay dude. A man dates a boygirl person. Still gay who cares. He thinks a female celebrity is stunning. Duh! Look at her! But the second a lesbian is inserted into those exact scenarios, its a race to micro label and argue over what she can call herself.

Previously married with kids, dating a boygirl, thinks a male celebrity is hot, all of these are used against the lesbian identity and can be boiled down to elementary “eww you have BOY cooties” which leads into terf territory. Its a rehash of gold star lesbianism and ultimately shames lesbians who were unsure of their identity or found themselves in comphet relationships for safety/lack of support. Hell, its shaming lesbians for even thinking a random person is objectively hot bc they ID as a man.

Moving on, a similar thing happens when someone who previously ID’d as gay/lesbian realizes they’re attracted to multiple genders. Even if its just romantic for one and sexual for the other, the gay person is ultimately seen as bisexual. No further questions. The lesbian? Once again, its a race to label and argue.

This is where “bi” lesbian loses me. I don’t see anyone calling gay men bi gays for being in those previous scenarios I listed. A bi guy who only dates women and sleeps with men is bi. End of story. Not a peep about being a bi gay. I have, however, seen multiple definitions of bi lesbianism that include those exact examples. A lesbian got exposed to BOY COOTIES so now they can’t call themself a lesbian.

Or, rather, a woman only likes men romantically but since she isn’t dropping her panties for him, she’s still a lesbian. Is she only bisexual if she has sex with men? What if she only dates girls and sleeps with guys? Does that make her a bi straight? Once again, the second a woman enters the equation, everything goes out the door and we have to argue about Person Who Doesn’t Have Sex With ____. Why is being bisexual regardless of how it presents a bad thing? I haven’t seen anyone give a solid reason other than “i dont wanna be bi” or parroting some kind of terf rhetoric.

Adding to that, in a lot of the discourse, it honestly feels like bigender/multigender people are being used as a gotcha. Like I said before, a gay guy dating a boygirl is just a gay guy dating a boygirl. A lesbian dating the same person? “They identify as a boy!!! You clearly like men!!” which, ultimately, ignores the full scope of that person’s identity. They aren’t just a boy in the same way they aren’t just a girl. I guarantee no one would jump down a gay guy’s throat and say “ummm ACTUALLY she says she’s a girl so she makes you not gay”.

The same gotcha issue comes about with trans people. It’s as if saying “I’m not attracted to men” equals not calling a trans woman a woman. I only ever see terf accusations float around when a lesbian makes that statement. Never when a gay guy says he isn’t attracted to women. If your first thought when hearing that is “well they MUST be talking about trans people” then you have a problem, and anyone who actually refuses to date someone bc they’re trans is the actual exclusionist.

Gay and lesbian have a region of gender identity that falls out of bounds. A lot of people do. Yet the level of discourse over everything I mentioned is drastically different between them. God forbid a lesbian say “oh I dated a gay once but realized I wasn’t attracted to men”. They’ll get called a terf, an exclusionist, and every name under the sun. If a gay guy said the same about a woman? Two notes and its gone.

[caffeineandsociety]

Sexism is genuinely fascinating in how uniquely reversible it is.

Yes, broadly speaking, under a patriarchal system, when all other things are equal, women get the shorter end of the stick. We know this. This shouldn't be controversial or disputable. A white man will be treated by society as Better than a white woman. A man of color will be treated as higher on the hierarchy than a woman of the same race and ethnicity. Between a man and a woman with the same disability, making the same complaints, the man is likely to be taken more seriously - partially because, thanks to "man up" standards, one might assume (correctly or otherwise) that he waited longer to complain, because that often IS the case, but mostly because sexism says that women just love to complain for no reason all the time.

But when all other things are NOT equal?

What if you have an abled woman and a disabled man? Well, then it's a complete toss-up as to which factor "wins" - maybe the misogyny wins, because, psh, come on, women are SUPPOSED to serve men, quit complaining and hop to it, he NEEDS you to completely give up your entire life to bring him things on demand, how ableist can you be to say that maybe he should have a support system that's more than just you if he needs more than one person can reasonably provide, or maybe even actually do the physical therapy his doctor recommended so he can get back to being able to do something for himself once in a while, as his condition SHOULD allow? Other times, the ableism will win out - and when it does, it has its own sexist bent to it. He needs to Man Up and stop whining all the time. He's failing the million dollars test because his lung disease turned rhinovirus or RSV into pneumonia? Oh, waaah, waaah, cry harder about your Man Cold. It often uses feminism as an excuse - no, he's not asking for his actual disability-related needs to be accommodated, he's just being an entitled dude who thinks women exist to bend over backwards for him, because that's ALL men do, right?

This is why we see so much bullshit infighting in queer spaces over Who Has It Worse based on gender, when ultimately, when you stop trying to play the oppression olympics, what we have here is an illustration of how thoroughly arbitrary it is. Gay men are treated as more of a threat, because a huge aspect of homophobia is straight men being afraid gay men will treat them the way they treat women - but lesbians are treated as thieves, yanking away something straight men are entitled to. Why does it matter which is "worse" when it gets both groups killed, with significant frequency? Queer spaces have a problem with treating women as a lesser "support class" to men, and it's worth addressing, but not at the cost of downplaying how queer masculinity and maleness is, in fact, treated as some kind of horrible threat, and that constitutes a major chunk of the grounds on which queer people are oppressed. Never mind when trans people come into the picture - society doesn't know what to do with us! Regardless of what direction we're transitioning in, society just treats us as whichever binary gender is more convenient to demonize us at any given moment! In fact, so do exclusionists within the community! And as it turns out - sometimes, it's more convenient to demonize us as men.

But the real proof of where all of this comes from, the most reliable place for the dynamic to be reversed, is when it can be invoked for racism. Show me a white woman butting heads with a man of color, and - while I must disclaim that this is not a 100% hard and fast rule, I might be surprised, because extrapolating society-wide dynamics to EVERY individual interaction is part of how you end up with terf logic - I will almost certainly expect her to pull something in line with a power structure that oppresses him on gendered lines. This is what Karenism was about, before the internet bastardized it into being just a generic name you call any woman who stands up for herself - a Karen is someone who will, simultaneously, pull a "don't you know who I am!?" and "how dare you, you horrible brute, trying to take advantage of a poor defenseless woman like this!?".

A Karen is the kind of person who will call the cops on a Black or brown man minding his own business and say he threatened her.

Note that yes, she will absolutely do this kind of thing to a Black or brown woman, but the dynamic will often be different. I do not mean to erase that. But for the purpose of this post - discussing specific dynamics that reverse the typical "men are higher on the ladder than women" rule - we're specifically examining what happens when, say, a white woman claims a Black man whistled or "leered" at her. What happens then? Maybe he gets shot by the cops. Maybe he gets lynched - sure, that happens less often than it used to now, but anything is only illegal if you get caught. Maybe his life just gets ruined by a whisper campaign. Maybe nothing happens to him, but her story is used to continue the idea that Black and brown men are "bad hombres" who need to be chased out of this country or at least heavily policed to keep them in line. Regardless, there is a very strongly gendered aspect to this - accusations of sexual violence are believed without a second thought when it's a white woman making them against a Black or brown man, and this has a massive body count. We know that false accusations of sexual assault are very few and far between compared to unreported sexual assaults - but we often fail to acknowledge just how many of those false accusations are made up for racist reasons.

Not only that, but I must also briefly call out that I've seen white girls on this very supposedly progressive website claiming that Asian men are "basically women", when they're not calling out all men of Japan for being violent repressive pedophilic perverts.

That's because ultimately, the patriarchal standards that we have are a tool of white supremacy. That's it. That's all there is to it. What they mean and who they apply to can be twisted around at a moment's notice to uphold some other aspect of the system. The "natural strength" that it superficially insists that men innately have can be twisted to become a threat, if it threatens the rest of the system. The supposed "inherent weakness" of women can be twisted around to become a cudgel - upholding the dominance of the Great Male Head of the Household is, under this system, nearly the only thing that wins out over "protecting white women".

It's all white supremacy all the way down.

[gnometa233]

Whats the difference between a lesbian who medically transitioned and a trans man who medically transitioned? Like I say as someone who has been both.

Some lesbians base our sexuality on gender, some on sex, and most people a mix of the two factors. But that doesn’t exclude trans women or trans men from lesbianism just because they are excluded from some lesbians

This answer's way too vague because when you say a "lesbian that has medically transitioned", are you referring to a trans woman who has medically transitioned or a trans masculine person who has transitioned. I'm gonna assume you meant the second one.

So the thing is...trans masculine lesbians aren't men. Physically, they may look like trans men. But nonbinary people can look like whatever. Would you say that a gender conforming nonbinary afab is no different than a cis woman? Would you say that an androgynous cis man is no different from a GNC nonbinary AMAB person? Hell, would you even say that about cis lesbians who just naturally look barely any different from cis men?

Yes, the physical lines may blur because there's only so many traits a human can have. But gender still matters. At least for me, when I see someone very feminine presenting, I do feel attraction. But if I find out that person is a feminine cis man/trans man at the beginning of their transition journey, that attraction immediately goes away. Because I'm gay and literally not attracted to men in any capacity

Also saying trans men can be lesbians is terf rhetoric. If you genuinely believe that, you are siding with the terfs and think trans women shouldn't be lesbians. That is an unavoidable fact.

Lastly trans man does not equal trans masculine. Personally I do take issue when the two are used interchangeabley because they're really not the same and I'd rather people use them side by side (or just talk about trans men when they need to)

[t4tstarvingdog]

i think one of the reasons terfs and radical feminists are sooooo aphobic, and more specifically acephobic, is because they feel threatened by the idea that action does not equal attraction. they can hem and haw all day about there being no nuance to homosexual attraction as long as they don’t recognize that it’s completely possible, and even common, to have sex for the hell of it. just to get off. for some variety. and that attraction doesn’t need to be a factor for that. but the reality outside of online spaces is that gay people and lesbians have sex with each other for fun all the time. sometimes even with a flavour of attraction in there. because let me tell you there’s plenty of women i’ve seen and liked because i thought they were men and plenty of men i’ve liked for the way i thought they were women

[auxfem]

ok heres the thing that's driving me a little insane: two of my siblings are firm believers of gender identity ideology and they are both in their mid to late twenties. as if that's not bad enough, my sister has recently said she's nonbinary. this was not a shock to hear because she has a couple things with the nonbinary flag on them that she hasn't bothered to hide; I figured it was only a matter of time before she said something about it. it really irks me though, as anyone on radblr can imagine. ive always been closer with this sister than our other sister, so for her to declare she's nonbinary, it feels like she's trying to erase the bond that we've had as sisters. especially considering how the two of us together contrast with the other women in our family. I'm a lesbian and she's bi; our other sister and our mom is straight, the two of us quit the religion we were raised in; our mom and our sister are still devoted members. it feels like I'm being shunted off into the side of the family that's not progressive. my mom and my oldest sister are the only ones in the family who are still part of the religion we were raised in (there's also my dad, but he is a PIECE OF WORK that I'm not getting into rn). us siblings who have left the church have had extensive discussions amongst ourselves about how fucked up the church is and how much we hate it and we complain quite a bit about our mother's involvement in it. we never really talk about how we feel about our other sister still being involved in it but we all know it's weird she's still part of it too. there's also the different dynamics in that she's our sister and our mother is, well, our mother. so we all know that they are willingly part of this organization that is regressive, and that's... honestly it's fine, our mother is and always will be how she is, and we know our sister has a good heart and tries to be a better kind of Christian. so for a while we had this dynamic of the women in my family: the two youngest daughters who realized for themselves that religion is not for them, in part because of who they can't help but be, and the mom and the oldest daughter who realized for themselves that they want to continue to be mormons, and we know this about each other, and we still love each other. it was equal, two and two. plus another two: my brothers. so if my sister is nonbinary, what does that make it?now the majority of the women are the unprogressive cultists, and on the non-women side, there's the progressives. oh whoops, there's also me, the ONE woman who isn't part of the misogynistic, homophobic, psychologically abusive religious cult. i also suspect that my "nonbinary" sister and older brother are suspicious that I hold "TERFy" beliefs, so can you see how it feels like I'm going to be shunted into the "not progressive/Bad Woman" section of the family? especially since my mom and oldest sister are just going along with how they've been raised and what they've known their whole lives, whereas I should know better because I got out, I see the other side, I know how awful it was is being oppressed as a woman and a lesbian. so then what will they think of me if I tell my sister what I really think of her being "nonbinary" if they believe in the TERF boogeyman?

[pruning-the-minds-garden]

One more reason why "Cis men DNI" bothers me

First, I understand having a DNI list, I really do. Your boundaries are your business, and you owe no one an explanation for them. If you want to use this or keep using this, go ahead. This post is just my reaction to seeing it. I'm not tagging anyone or calling anyone out by name, and that's intentional. It is about the practice, not the people doing it.

I see this said a lot and the specific context in which it bothers me, for this reason, is on NSFW posts by, for, and about lesbians. What gets me about saying that particular thing in that particular context is that it is akin to saying "yeah but trans men aren't really men though so they're okay. They're feminine enough that I'm not bothered by their presence." There is something deeply troubling to me about that notion. If you are bothered by the presence of men, then you ought be bothered by the presence of trans men equally to all others. Alternately, if you aren't bothered by trans men then you aren't categorically bothered by men. Pick one.

I also think that thinking that it is a categorical "cis vs trans" thing is its own issue. There are a lot of trans men who are way more overtly masculine - especially those who feel the need to be demonstrably so - than a lot of cis men are (than I was, when I identified as a man), so drawing that line as though you can clock a person as cis or trans with perfect accuracy is... a bit of a red flag to me. It says you have in your mind a definite image of what a trans man looks, acts, and sounds like and that image does not allow for them to be whatever and whoever they want to be. The same is true for cis men. You know who else routinely thinks they can clock trans people with perfect accuracy, who thinks they know what trans people look like? Transphobes. TERFs. I'm not saying you are one, because clearly you are trying to include trans men in what you are doing rather than exclude them from it... but even the act of drawing the line carries ethical baggage with it, and I think you need to think about that.

I dunno. Maybe it is just something I need to unpack more and ultimately I'm the one in the wrong, I'm 100% comfortable with that possibility. Maybe not. But, it's a thing that bothers me and so I thought it worth speaking up about so we can talk about it.