#or feminists being labeled as terfs until proven otherwise

[mokeonn]

Gonna be 100% honest here it is REALLY bugging me that it is (rightfully) considered wrong to ask Palestinians if they condone Hamas any time they talk about Palastine, but I often see people question pretty much every Jewish person on this website if they condone Isreal or if they don't post about Palastine on their blog enough or "correctly" they're automatically considered a zionist? How is that okay?

Before the "piss on the poor" website gets to this, I'm gonna make it explicitly clear: this website has an antisemitism problem and it is blatantly clear that a concerning amount of you hate a perceived idea of zionism, that happens just so to include every and all Jewish people, more than you care about helping Palestinians. I'm not Jewish myself, but I shouldn't have to be to call out the antisemitism absolutely swarming in leftist spaces.

If vocal proud antisemites and actual nazis use the Free Palastine movement as an outlet to be antisemitic, maybe we should take some time to address that? Make the movement safe for Jewish people?? Think about why they are using a left leaning cause to be hostile to Jewish people?

[yuribeam]

like as a nonbinary person I don't have beef with nonbinary people of any flavor being/dating lesbians even if they partially identify with or use man/guy/dude/etc I do not care. I'm the same way with woman/girl/etc. and there are some situations where a lesbian will date a binary trans guy and still identify as a lesbian, and they're gonna do whatever they're gonna do. I don't give too many shits about what your relationship looks like individually and how you define it for yourself

what I have an issue with is people insisting that cis and binary trans men are included in lesbianism, and harassing lesbians for saying that as a rule, lesbians are not attracted to men. that's kinda a big part of our whole thing.

assuming we are including trans women in men is shitty, the vast majority of us are not, and there's a specific scrutiny put on lesbians for talking about gender without explicitly mentioning trans inclusion every time that other groups don't get. it's often by cis people, too. if you are jumping to the conclusion that every lesbian is transphobic until proven otherwise, that is lesbophobic.

and accusing lesbians of being trans exclusionary radical feminists for this when, HELLO, terfs have been regarding trans men forever as "lost lesbian sisters." (gross and transphobic) while what lesbians are saying rn is that they would not date and are not attracted to trans men! the same as they would not date and are not attracted to cis men, and it causes real issues, including offline, to pressure lesbians to "open the label."

honestly would not be surprised if most of this shit is actual TERFs trying to pit lesbians against trans men and people who are against TERFs, in some freaky roundabout way to get lesbians back on their side or something.

there's definitely overlap between trans guys and the lesbian community! we have been allies and share many experiences and it's okay for dudes to feel a kinship with lesbians and their lesbian experience after transitioning. I think there's a time and a place for specifically lesbian-only spaces, but like, you can sit with me. we're bros. same with bisexual folks. and we need to keep affirming it is okay, and common, to be bisexual with preferences, or straight and trans, and experiencing/wording your sexuality differently than other people without imposing your personal experience onto everyone else and a commonly understood interpretation of the only sexuality that does not include attraction to men

[qanoor]

ok ok so sophie and i talked. & i feel kind of better, i guess. 

it just keeps coming back to: sophie just cannot be in a relationship with ginny that is completely nonromantic, nonsexual, nonpartnered. and ginny just cannot be in a relationship with sophie that has sexual and romantic ambiguity. the sexual and romantic ambiguity / possibilities of intentions or attractions or whatever bleed into everything and that’s why ginny feels so uncomfortable with any touch at all. meanwhile sophie cannot just separate out her feelings neatly, and in her vulnerability she feels constantly surveilled in a hypervigilant sense by ginny. sophie and ginny have their own traumas and histories and complexities that play into all of this, and honestly i can relate in various ways to both of them, though more with sophie

sophie protests every time i describe it as “unrequited love/desires/attractions” because she thinks that it is more about ginny not being able/willing / being too afraid to create the space for exploring certain kinds of desires/interactions, rather than some kind of inherent lack thereof of such feelings. i’m not really sure always how to navigate this discursive difference, though i also do agree that things aren’t really inherent, but, i don’t know. i said to her, sometimes all we can do in our discomfort is use more rigid terminology/frameworks? i don’t know. it’s so complicated. i can relate so much because of how i’ve policed sophie in very rigid (and abusive) ways because i just couldn’t deal with my own symptomology and traumas and lack of control/powerlessness.

sophie just wants a tenderness, some kind of tender touch with ginny (and she struggles with wanting sex too, but, like, it’s so much worse when there just can’t be any touch at all, like it’s been for a while now, and then every time it seems like that might be changing sophie gets hopeful and then it gets worse again etc etc), and ginny just feels so threatened by touch at all because of all the possible meanings it could contain, all the kinds of attention (sexual, romantic, ??) that could be imbued inside any kind of touch, even something that’s not especially coded as sexual. (and like, of course this intersects/interacts with transmisogyny, for her and for me, the threshold of greater suspicion about trans women and transfeminine people as opposed to dfab people....) 

& i’ve been also thinking a lot about how my suspicion of maleness, and the general dfab/terf suspicion of maleness -- well i was saying to miel the other day, like, we read something into maleness, we make it about maleness, or the idea of some kind of inherent maleness, but what it really is is the patriarchy, it’s misogyny, it’s violence. and so the project has to be to keep trying to figure out a queer masculinity, to queer maleness, right? but of course also this is about constantly, constantly critiquing the idea of inherent maleness. & this is absolutely the core of transmisogyny. that anyone, that someone in their body, can be inherently male. (or inherently female, but that doesn’t carry the same kind of patriarchal violence -- to be considered inherently a victim is very different from being considered inherently a violator.) & to queer femininity and femaleness within a transfeminist framework is also about queering maleness. anyway, none of this is new, intersectional feminists and transfeminists have been saying this stuff for ages, though i probably have worded it rather wonkily or problematically

but i still feel like -- i feel so fucking guilty for how, even after all these years, i just am still so locked into the cisheteropatriarchal gender binary, i’m still so -- i still want so desperately to -- how can i still have distrust for someone (sophie) whose body is almost as intimate to me as my own? how is it that even after this long i still manage to make weapons out of her body to wield against mine? i just want to be able to meet her body with mine, and this is so much also about our own failed/constantly difficult sexual relationship too. i just want to be able to see her body and her history, with my body and my history, without the lens of some suspicion, some grudge, somewhere. 

there is nothing so inherently trustworthy about a body that gets labelled as cis female. nothing. & i know this too, and i know how i automatically sometimes (but not in the same virulent way that i exhibit transmisogyny) start to distrust dfab bodies more when they are more butch, or masculine, or transmasculine. and yet and yet. and the project should not be to reinforce the idea of maleness as somehow inherent to heteromasculinity, but rather to liberate it from it -- because until we can do that then we are still going to be demonizing bodies demarcated as male, and especially those demarcated as cis male, until the “event” of transition -- and what does it mean to demonize a trans woman’s body until she has been officially, or enough, established as, indeed, a woman? and what does this mean for trans women who weren’t always girls or women (sophie was not always a girl)? it’s just. i mean it just, maleness and femaleness shouldn’t be essentialized, but they also need to be deconstructed as categories that still are used, exist in some way -- a trans woman’s body should not be considered a weapon only until she transitions in a certain visible sense, or until she describes her entire trajectory as always female. 

i don’t know, so messy, so much obviousness, so much that i am always having to repeat and learn and relearn and rethink & still so much i don’t understand, so much 101 type basic shit, so much fucking bullshit, i just, i want to be better able to view dmab queer & trans people’s bodies as bodies and not as weapons until excessively proven otherwise (which never even becomes possible because that is an impossible threshold that keeps getting raised higher and higher), but this also means really allowing for the grey space where people don’t know what they are yet, the grey ambiguity of concepts like “male privilege” -- and like, i keep trying and trying and i just. i keep stumbling up against my (relative, complicated, non-inherent) privilege as a dfab non-binary person who doesn’t experience transmisogyny and who also hasn’t transitioned in any kind of visible or medical way (i get read as a femme cis girl/woman) && i just. i need. i just. i have known sophie more intimately than my own skin for so many years now. more than seven years. and still and still. i need so much more from my own skin.

& i wish i could help ginny too, but also like -- there is the space of discomfort, and you cannot intellectualize that so much -- there is the trap and there is your own skin, and what can you do? the vulnerability that ginny is so afraid of, and the things i don’t know, so many things i don’t know, and the way ginny has never really known what it is like to truly be a family with someone but wants it all the same. and the stolen details that perhaps i should not know, and the wondering about whether and how and if ginny has any sexual or romantic desires for sophie or if she just doesn’t want to go there or or, and here again sophie would say, but the point is that it isn’t this thing that can be filtered out necessarily, or i guess ginny conceptualizes it that way but desire is such a strange, funny thing, but also i don’t know fully how ginny conceptualizes it. so much so much i just don’t know. 

sometimes i think that if i could just simply know, even for an instant, the entire historiography of what it means to be in sophie’s skin, just a moment -- and this too for all the people i love and have loved -- and even ginny, too -- if i could just know, and then would i be able to translate? is there a historiography that could even be written, much less practiced? sophie trusts me more than i should ever be trusted. i am forever coming up against my flaws, the ugly thoughts, the intrusions. sophie trusts me like i’ve never trusted my own skin. this is undeserved -- which way? all the ways. i don’t know how to be a body in this world when all there is is the sense of weaponization. i don’t know how to meet her body like the sky i don’t even really know how to meet the sky. i just want to meet the sky of her eyes meeting mine.