#transfemininity is one of the if not the most feminist thing in the world

[lettucedloophole]

hi, I'm a trans feminist and I've been saddened by the lack of feminism in many of my communities. I'm wanting to follow more feminists on here but honestly it's a bit terrifying because so many people claiming to be feminists or trans inclusive are not remotely so and will throw you under the bus in the blink of an eye, if not slowly spread insidious essentialist ideas about gender that hurt everyone but especially those like me.

as a former terf (from your bio) I was wondering if you have any signs, green or red flags, for people and bloggers in particular, regarding radical feminism that may indicate some form of more subtle terf-y beliefs so I can keep an eye out from them, as typically I stay far away from terf spaces for the obvious reason that they hate me, but I've noticed there's some mixing in more rad fem spaces that can be very hard to disentangle, but I don't want that to stop me from engaging with feminism for again, obvious reasons.

also if you have any trans feminist or trans friendly feminist bloggers you'd recommend, especially transfeminine ones, that would be really cool too.

ty for your time! have a great day

hi! not gonna lie its difficult out here 😭 you're dead on that most ppl claiming to be trans-inclusive or feminists are not remotely. i follow people and then have to unfollow when they post or like something strange still ...

i would say chiefly, follow your instincts. as a trans person, especially if you're tma, if you're getting bad vibes you are probably correct. if you're not in a space to deal with bigotry then don't worry about giving the benefit of the doubt, avoiding feminism online won't revoke your feminist card but i know looking at feminism online can also be very healing when dealing with misogyny uh Everywhere so i'll give some other tips.

- the classic "look up trans on their blog before you follow." depending on what type of blog they are, it can be kind of suspicious if they never mention trans people. and then you can very easily weed out the obvious transphobes with this too.

- i would say some red flags are using the adjective "natal" (as in natal women), referring to cis women's oppression as sex-based while trans women's as. Not sex-based, and buying into "trans women are male socialized" rhetoric. this may seem kind of obvious but even if a person doing this identifies as a tirf they're revealing a clear lack in understanding of what transmisogyny is and how trans women exist in the world. this is often how people think before fully deradicalizing, but a lot of people also just begin here or never leave this mindset.

- avoid guys who talk about transandrophobia 🥶🥶 this is a specific thing bc speaking about transmasc issues in itself is obvi good and not bad but sooo many transmascs will try to pose their issues in opposition to transfems and try to do a "well but does transmisogyny exist really because i am Also tma" thing. usually these guys are gonna come out with some real fucked up talking points about trans women because they think they're oppressed by them 🙃 the term "transandrophobia" has kinda been overrun with people like that from what ive seen but ppl can use "anti-transmasculinity" and still mean the same things yk. you have to use your judgement a bit but once you're familiar with them it's easy to spot them out

- this is less of a tip and just a heads up but even blogs who themselves r trans inclusive or profess to be, or are run by a trans person, can still rb terf blogs, i probably have sometime as well though i try to avoid it and i'm not saying you have to avoid that but it's just a common thing, so if that bothers you you should look for a page that's more in the trans community or another community

- honestly the radfem tag is a cesspool and even the tirf tag can be Questionable 😔 it's going to behoove you most probably to just look for transfeminist and other sorts of patriarchy-averse individuals lmao. i looked at the transfeminism tag for the first time today (don't know why I hadn't sooner actually) and it's good! there's some stray weird posts but definitely better than the rf tag on here 💀

i would rly just recommend you check out some blogs, follow them if you think they're neat, and unfollow if you want to later on. that's generally what i do and i've followed some cool people on here from it :]

i don't have as many recommendations as i would Like to give but that's not to say there isn't transfeminists out there. they're just in their own circles. don't feel like u need to settle for terfy tirfs or antifeminists because you can find ppl you feel kinship with!!!

- i really like @taliabhattwrites ! she has a substack where she gives good insight on feminist issues, not only transmisogyny but lesbian issues as well. she also writes EPIC fiction about lesbians and trans women 🙏🙏 has taught me a lot over the years

- shey're not active rn, but i've really liked looking through @transmisogyny-explained 's blog. very informative and good to either unpack transmisogyny in yourself or perhaps help others do so.

- @leftismsideblog mostly talks about youthlib, but when she does talk about gender, they r Correct lol

- if u have a twitter, this is a must-- FOLLOW BLOOMFILTERS. they are so incredibly kind and smart and the mixing of that compassion and intelligence in a person is just bound to make Good Takes. she is an icon

i hope this can kinda help you and stay strong out there :')) it's rough but im rooting for u 💪 my asks or messages r always open if you need some help or just someone to talk to. i hope u have an awesome day too!!!

[ghost-orion]

i am just. so mad. about the transmisogyny/transandrogyny talk

like. okay. "transmisandry doesn't exist because 1) transmisogyny is the intersection between transphobia and misogyny and 2) misandry doesn't exist so 3) transphobia can't intersect with misandry"

okay. so.

transmisandry is not the intersection between transphobia and misandry. transmisandry is the term used by transmasc people of all genders to discuss our oppression. yes, transmisogyny is the most common way transphobia rears its ugly head, but there are issues that affect a lot of transmasc people and not a lot of transfemme people.

definition of transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny which affects trans women and transfemme people.

transmisandry is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny which affects trans men and transmasc people. (i can't find a term which would correlate to trans nonbinary people, sorry. discrimination against nb people is definitely real though.)

if you don't like the word, come up with a better one. "transmisogyny exempt" and "transmisogyny affected" does not work in this case. yeah i'm exempt from the intersection of transphobia and misogyny as it affects transfemme people. but that's not an appropriate word to use when i'm talking about me being questioned for doing anything that isn't masculine enough for other people. it's not appropriate when i talk about my past s.assault. it's not appropriate when i talk about how i have difficulty trusting cis mspec men when they tell me that they toootally see me as a man. when it's embarrassing to be rejected from ""the brotherhood"" when trying so hard to fit in with them. when i simply am not allowed to do things men do, because in the eyes of others, maleness is inherent and more powerful, so i'm basically "lying to try to make myself look male better." when i'm denied gynecology appointments. when i'm forced to be in the female ward and ridiculed for it at the same time. when i am completely invisible or just ignored, because i'm not a scary enough target for people who target trans women. like those are things that are transphobic, yeah, but it is specifically because i'm transmasculine, aka "trying to be a man," because as someone seen as a woman, i'm infantilized and laughed at for thinking i can achieve something in a sexist world, especially something so big as maleness itself.

okay. when i am infantilized to the point of not deserving something so inherent as maleness, then i really don't think it's just "both sexism and transphobia" man. when a guy at work looks at me, his eyes see, yes, an insane girl, but also a weak boy on the bench in gym class who was not picked into the boys' team because he was too weak to be a real boy.

there's also something to be said about trans men and transmasculine people being all thrown in the same bag with nonbinary people who don't present masculine nor transfeminine, cis lesbians, regular ol' stereotypical feminists and also just women who aren't girly/womanly enough, as like, these weirdo snowflakes thinking that "girly whining will get them anywhere". yes, it is clearly misogyny, but also the crossing over into "masculine territory" is like, a specific kind of misogyny. is there any talk of that? genuine question btw if you have recs, i would love to hear about them.

[rotationalsymmetry]

commenting on without reblogging (which is taking a lot more willpower than usual):

Sometimes trans people with weird identities latch onto a way of describing that experience that is problematic. They encounter the term "two spirit" and it seems to fit but they're not native american and they don't have the context to fully and accurately understand what that means. Or they use "transgender" as a gender identity rather than a modifier of a gender identity. Or they use outdated language. Etc.

(Or, in this case, an afab person feels like a trans woman. What does that mean? I don't know. But I sure hope she figures it out. I too sometimes identify more, in specific ways, with transfeminine people than with people who share my assigned gender at birth. Specifically, and I don't think this is what this other person was saying, I'm about 100% sure that if I was born into a male body I'd identify as a crossdresser, because as it is I want to be seen as masculine (or at least not actively feminine?) in my everyday life and feminine for sex, and that's a common enough thing for amab people, and I've never encountered anyone else expressing that as part of their sense of who they are who is afab. Maybe there are more people like that, maybe it gets just written off as "well, I'm a feminist, of course I don't want men sexualizing me in my everyday life" idk. I don't think it's just that though. And at this point I'm sure that gravitating towards femininity in a sexual context isn't just socialization, it's actively part of who I am, at my core, in a way that not all people are.) (There's an older book called GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary that I strongly recommend for anyone who finds themselves resonating with this. It's nearly 20 years old and from well before the modern idea of "nonbinary" crystallized.) Trans people (and people who aren't entirely sure if they're "really trans" but whose identity is more complicated than "100% and exclusively identify with the gender everyone else thinks I am") have the right to try to figure out what their deal is, and figuring it out is more important than using the precise right wording for our own experiences. That isn't to say you have to grit your teeth and ignore it when a trans person says something painful, but it does mean that before you step in and tell them they're wrong, you should check yourself. Do I know this person, and do I have the sort of relationship where they'll welcome feedback from me? Am I sure about the correction/call out I want to make? Can I do it with compassion? Am I able to differentiate between what this person is trying to say and how they're saying it, so that my criticism comes across as "phrasing!" and not as "you are bad and wrong for talking about this/for having the identity you have." I got into a weird online fight with a cis person online one time for trying to express that bisexuals should be able to explain our orientation in words that make sense to us, and some of my words came out in a way that was Not Great because there was context I didn't understand. But my concept was right: bisexuals (and m-spec people who use other labels like pansexual) should have their ability to express feelings and thoughts about their own identity, that that should be given a higher priority than using the exact most PC language. (This is also an issue for intersectional identities: class and educational background, english as a second language, developmental disabilities can all create barriers to using the "right" language.) That's also the case for trans people looking around for the best way to explain what they are in a world that is fundamentally hostile to trans people and doesn't want to give us words to explain ourselves. The last thing trans people need is to be shouted down and told to be silent by our own fucking community. To be told that unless we can say things perfectly according to someone else's standard, then we shouldn't say anything at all. Again, not to say you can't ever call someone out for questionable/problematic language use. But be kind. And don't suppress people's attempts at self-exploration and self-understanding, because that's more important than getting the words right. (I mean, technically I can't determine how important it is for non-indigenous people to keep our hands off culturally specific terms? But I don't think the occasional non-binary person misusing the term "two-spirit" as they're trying to figure out what they are, is the worst problem here.) (Plus...sometimes people aim for

cultural appropriators and hit people who are actually from the culture that is supposedly being appropriated. It's a concept that has to be handled with some finesse, and balanced against the basic principle of "be careful about telling other people they're doing it wrong.") (And no, I still don't think that a bisexual getting told they're wrong for expressing their orientation in terms of genitals* is more important than a bisexual figuring out that they are bisexual and communicating that, in whatever words come most naturally to them. And I still don't think a bisexual telling a family member or whoever "I'm bisexual, that means I'm attracted to men and women, I don't switch orientations every time I switch dating partners" is remotely a problem. It's not the most precise language. And some bisexuals are not attracted to both men and women. But someone who doesn't get what bisexual means is also going to have difficulty understanding nonbinary people, and it often makes sense to have those awkward conversations separately, and the person with the confused relative gets to make that call, not the entire freaking internet.) (Also, it is so bad that whenever I want to have a conversation online with bisexuals about bisexuality, we invariably get derailed by the great bi/pan wars and how bisexuality should be defined and I hate that, that actively interferes with us understanding ourselves and finding community, it is not OK.) (*This does happen. There is a hugely popular FB group nominally about bisexuality, and whenever a bisexual expresses their orientation in terms of genitals or uses language that implies that there are only men and women, that person gets dogpiled by dozens of other group members. Even when it's eg a post about coming out to that person's parents, or something else vitally important to that person's personal life. A situation where that person should be centered, and using the exact right language for another marginalized group that happens to overlap a lot with bisexuals should not be. This happens. And it's wrong.)

[femmeimplications]

New vulnerabilities emerging in the world of femme

One area only recently being available for study is the use of the internet’s impact on society. Never before has there been such use of social media like today.; through this newly emerging area. opens examination into the intertwining collision with our understandings and perspectives of gender and gender expressions. There has been a steady increase in the discussions on queer feminineness within social media sites, such as here on Tumblr (Blair & Hoskin, 2014).

The term “selfie” first appeared in 2002 on an Australian online forum and is considered a self-portrait taken in the technocultural context of smartphones and/or front directed cameras typically posted to social media platforms in a public (Schwartz, 2020). For many there is no forethought about these now normalized photos, however, some scholars are beginning to link a cultural value and meaning behind selfies. Often linking to a sense of stigmatizing self-portraiture behind the screen of the one who posts and where these stigmatic ideologies are coming from (Schwartz, 2020). Unsurprisingly, the posting and responses to selfies have began to be tied to gender and gender expression in relation to how they are judged within their domain (Schwartz, 2020).

Femme has been conceptualized many ways (for a better understanding I recommend reading some prior blog posts!), in its most simplified understandings, it is a descriptor (primarily rooted in an identity understanding) where a queer person presents themselves and acts within a traditionally feminine manner. However, for femme to more so stand on its own, it relates to the normative, dualistic, binary conception of gender identity; there is a unique focus based in subverting these feminine founded expectation in which women must face purely for being women (or binaurally feminine). Femme as a theoretical framework supplementary provides a link to the concept of vulnerability (Schwartz, 2020). Vulnerability is feminized in society and is equated with a sense of devaluation which transients’ across any and all genders (as identity and within expressions) and sexual identities (Blair & Hoskin, 2014.; Schwartz, 2020). Distinctly, feminine shapes of ‘vulnerability’ are due to our societal tendency of linking feminine connotations with things like weakness, softness, dependency and subordination. All of this ties into the notion of femmephobia, which is a discrimination mindset that focuses on the devaluation and regulation of femininity (Blair & Hoskin, 2014). 

With this in mind, one study took the conception of femme selfies which allowed them to view responses to social media posts within this context of vulnerability as constituted by corporeal openness, psychological openness, and an openness to the other (Schwartz, 2020). Observing the behaviour need that is made by individuals social human needs, it created these vulnerable openings. Using the social substructure that is created within the femmephobic framework, one can see how an overt expressing of emotions or the desire for interdependence can be understood in terms of pathology and further becomes feminized: for example the notions of, “crazy,” “clingy,” or “needy” (Schwartz, 2020).

Schwatz (2020) views femmes taking, posting, and sharing selfies of themselves as an act of facing vulnerability by laying bare not only their faces and bodies (demonstrating corporeal openness) but their experiences and emotions, too: demonstrating psychological openness (Schwartz, 2020). Tackling the underlying hypothesis that vulnerability is one of the critical axes of femme internet culture (Schwartz, 2020). By basing the findings on six-months worth of online ethnography (ie. the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures) of femme internet culture on Instagram (Schwartz, 2020). As a participant-observe, Schwatz (2020) used their own research-based account to provide a description, an introductory explanation post, and  then specifically followed other femme accounts focused on intersecting marginalized identities, like radicalization, disability, fatness, and transgender identities  (Schwartz, 2020). Totalling four self posts which were posted on the research account acquired 79 followers and followed 114 users, Schwartz then interviewed seven femme Instagram account/operators additionally, continuously recording many other relevant posts that they came across (Schwartz, 2020). The seven interviewees were from a range of backgrounds including racial, ableness/sanism abilities, and a range of classes, sexual orientations, and gender identities (Schwartz, 2020). 

*Importantly, they (the 7 interviewed) all posted femme centred posts/selfies, not always of themselves.*

This study was approved by the Office of Research Ethics at York University, and there were some interesting findings (Schwartz, 2020). In terms of corporal vulnerability, there was a base connection between vulnerability and visibility in femme Instagram culture, femmes used selfies to illustrate femme aesthetics; this is important due to the insight is then offered into what “femme” means  (Schwartz, 2020). In regards to the psychosocial vulnerabilities, the various experiences and emotions portrayed by those interviewed and additionally in the postings of the selfies themselves (Schwartz, 2020). The conception of the femme selfies allows femmes to have a sense of strategically accessing vulnerability, navigating some of the politics and builds on their voices and input in the discussions of femme aesthetics within/through social media usage (Schwartz, 2020). Schwartz (2020) study provides implicit insight into how these Instagram influencers navigated femmephobia and/or femme-bashing they faced within their virtual context.

“Celebrating the transfeminine body in this way [openly positing] while simultaneously naming the violence it endures is [I personally note this as a form of absent-minded agency] both an act of femme representation and a way of transforming vulnerability into an act of resistance to transphobia, cisnormativity, racism, and femmephobia (especially as they explicitly attribute this violence to cissexism and transphobia)”

By solely posting femme peoples, therefore, is a sort of political action and utilizes the feminist strategy of laying bare one’s body and lived experiences; connecting these experiences to larger social ~and systemic~ systems as mentioned in this quote (Schwartz, 2020). By connecting these individual’s experiences within various and intersecting systemic oppressions is how selfies become political and most importantly powerful.

[dsm-v]

Hello! I’m nonbinary and I’m trying to research how different religions and their texts support and affirm nonbinary people. If you would like to, could you point me in the direction of some things to read on this subject pertaining to Islam? If not, then feel free to delete this. Thank you!!

Hello friend! Thank you for asking me, I am always very willing to share the extent of my knowledge on Islam with others. I will begin to say that your area of ponderance is very interesting and something that there definitely needs to be more dialogue and scholarship on, so I’m glad that there are people who are asking these types of questions. I don’t know if this research you mention is mostly for your own reference or for something like a research project but either way I hope I can help! 

From my understanding and my experience, Islam as is most commonly practiced and observed is a very binary religion in the context of gender. If you were to attend Friday prayers at a large Sunni mosque, for example, women and men are usually segregated (with women relegated to inferior spaces, sometimes not being permitted in smaller mosques at all) and sometimes there are even separate entrances for men and women. It is hard enough for binary trans people to find a comfortable place within Islamic and Muslim spaces, so I can imagine (and I know) that it is much harder even for nonbinary people. This is not to say that nonbinary people like me and many others haven’t found space for themselves within Islam and in Muslim communities, but that overall the most information I’ve found pertaining to LGBTQ or gender- and sexuality- diversity and nonconformity in Islam has been focused on binary identities and experiences. 

I know that this worldview is deeply rooted in the foundations of our religion, as well. For example, in the Quran, chapter 78 verse 8 reads “وَخَلَقْنَاكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا” which, to my understanding means something like “And we have created you in pairs”. The Quran also refers to this idea of things being made in “pairs” in ch. 36 verse 36 and I think in other places as well, including addressing at times both men and women or males and females. I am not a scholar of Islam so I also don’t know the original context of all of these verses but to my understanding the main idea is that things have been created in pairs, by God, who is unpaired and unlike anyone or anything else. So, beyond (perhaps unintentionally) enforcing this idea of a binary world, I think this idea has more to say about the concept of tawhid (the oneness of God), and that the diversity that exists is a reflection of the oneness and uniqueness of the creator. 

It is important to remember that the Quran is a text that originated in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century, and the Hadith (recordings of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) and sunnah (the corpus of hadith and the otherwise generally accepted “tradition(s)” of the Prophet) were compiled in the few centuries following the death of the Prophet, so the worldviews and ideas perpetuated in these primary sources may not necessarily align with how we understand the world to be today. This is not to say that these texts are wrong, but that their originally intended audience is different than their current audience. So, it is important that we also understand that the framing of your question may be significant in that we can’t necessarily be looking backward in history for something that we have defined and constructed in modern terms. We can speak of nonbinary today because we currently understand that binary gender and the corresponding baggage and rules are largely constructed socially and culturally, and because we are beginning to acknowledge (in our culture and society, at least) that there are options outside of these restrictions. These may not have been ideas palatable to people 1400 years ago, especially without digesting a fair amount of yet-to-be articulated gender and other poststructuralist theories. 

But, gender and sexual diversity were recognized and recorded in the early history of Islam, even if we are to be hesitant about using the term nonbinary for these things. For example, there are hadith and other texts that refer to and speak about people described as mukhannathun (مخنثون), effeminate ones, people who we might today, in our terms, describe as trans women, effeminate gay men, or perhaps somehow otherwise transfeminine individuals. I have also seen ahadith (hadiths) that refer to intersex individuals, but the treatment of these individuals in these ahadith also seem to reinforce binary (and patriarchal and sexist) views, as these opinions (which albeit, came from a really fundamentalist and misogynistic website) dealt with: can the person grow a beard? do they have breasts? can they sit down to pee? how would someone else categorize them? and then they sort of said “well if you can sit down to pee and you have breasts even if you have ambiguous genitalia then you’re a woman”. Again, I may be conflating how intersex has historically been treated in or thought about in this religion with how the Muslim community currently addresses these things, but it is clear to me that throughout history and presently, there is great pressure for Muslims to conform to binary sex and gender roles.

Much of this pressure stems from the perpetuation of and belief in really flawed rhetoric such as the idea that keeping men and women separate will reduce the incidence of sexual violence (hint: it doesn’t). These ideas also stem from historical communities and circumstances which are quite different from our own. I am not arguing that the world is presently some wonderful place for women and queer individuals, but when we analyze the history of Islam, we can see very real and rational reasons why what are today considered sexist and outdated (and they are) systems came to be in place, such as the “guardianship” (walayah) system or the concept of hijab/veiling, which were originally ways to protect and preserve the rights and wellbeing of women, but which in many cases today they do just the opposite. 

I don’t really know of any sources pertaining to nonbinary and Islam per se, but there is a plethora of information out there on Islam and sexual and gender diversity. The discussions held within the contexts of Islamic feminism / feminist Islam also address some of these issues such as problems in our communities with sexism and misogyny, which ought to be fundamentally unislamic, as in Islam, every person has the right to their own relationship with the divine, and no one person is deemed more valuable than another. Just as a man is not worth more than a woman, an individual with a binary gender should not somehow be fundamentally better or more valid than a nonbinary individual.

I also want to point out that I have been speaking mostly as a historian and addressing some of the (a)historical perspectives that are found within Muslim communities regarding these “areas of concern”. As we know, the history that we have never tells the whole story. The fact that we do have sources from very early on that speak of gender and sexual diversity, though, tells me that these people have existed in Muslim communities for as long as there have been Muslim communities, and that while we have likely been systematically underrepresented, misrepresented, or eliminated in the stories told, that there has always been room for diversity, ambiguity, and to an extent, non-conformity within Islam. I know that presently even within my few years of being a Muslim and the handful of years studying Islam beforehand, I have seen really an explosion in visibility and acknowledgement of LGBT, queer, nonbinary, asexual, and other stories of Muslims who may not necessarily fit within normative expectations for how a Muslim “ought to be”. So even where there may be silences or a lack of acknowledgement or support for us in our foundational texts (the Quran and the hadith/sunnah and other traditions that we are taught as being “Islamic”), Muslims are making inclusive spaces and communities, and we are going back and readdressing and rereading these texts and evaluating how we have almost always been fed the misogynistic, sexist, patriarchal interpretations as the “truth”. A few scholars/academics I can think of off the top of my head who are especially adept at offering these conversations include Kecia Ali, Scott Kugle, and Amina Wadud, certainly among many others, and it is definitely my belief and experience that “the average Muslim” is much more “progressive” or accepting than one may expect. 

I apologize for the long-winded and probably confusing and somewhat-off topic essay, but I sincerely hope that this has been of some help and that you receive the information which you are seeking!

[argentconflagration]

wondergirrl said:

what is this about. anti what?? am confused please aid me VonBond

This is pretty long and I apologize, but I feel like I need to go all the way back and talk about TERFs, for reasons that will hopefully soon be clear.

As I'm sure you know, TERF stands for 'Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist'. There are still TERF communities within feminism, but generally speaking, TERFs are far less numerous and their ideology has far less sway than it used to have. Part of the reason for this was people going out of their way to proactively explain why TERF arguments are wrong before their fellow feminists encountered TERFs, which made it a lot harder for TERFs to spread their ideology.

Which is great! But I think that for the most part, feminists have argued against the transmisogynistic aspects of radical feminism, and to a lesser extent the sex-worker-exclusionary aspects of radical feminism (SWERFs), but kind of failed to see the coherent whole that TERF-flavored feminism belongs to, what sort of thinking causes it, and why it's wrong. "Being anti-TERF" nowadays has largely been reduced to stuff like putting "no TERFs!" in blog descriptions and popular posts, and it rarely takes the form of scrutinizing TERF logic to understand how they went wrong and how we can avoid making similar mistakes against other people. Which is why I'm writing this now.

(I've tried very hard to articulate what I think are two distinct flaws in thinking that seem to me to give rise to just about every TERF position, but I do feel like I'm not quite right on the money, so if anyone has better ways to say these two things, I'm all ears.) In general, TERF positions are the result of 1) rigid, black-and-white, binary thinking and 2) ignoring people's consent, especially their 'yes'es. Take transmisogyny: they believe that trans women are men and therefore oppressors. Now, this belief is readily debunked by observing the world, but TERFs have divided the world strongly into oppressors and oppressed, and have a lot of rhetorical tools to dismiss and ignore anything said by "oppressors" or that seems to favor "oppressors". And because trans women are "oppressors", they justify violence and harassment that ordinarily common sense would never condone.

A lot of other central TERF positions have to do with ignoring people's 'yes'es. Sex workers say, "No, this line of work isn't without its problems, but I want to be empowered to address those problems, not kicked out of my livelihood." AFAB trans people say, "I'm not a woman, I'm another gender, and I want to transition." Subs (in BDSM) say, "I enjoy being submissive." Heterosexual and bisexual women say, "I want to date and/or sleep with men." And TERFs' response to all these people is, "That's just your internalized misogyny talking." (And when these people fail to stop wanting the thing they want, TERFs decide that they've taken the side of misogyny and are now valid targets for harassment.) TERFs don't pay attention to people's stated wishes and what they actually are or aren't consenting to. Instead, they decide what women must want, or what wishes would best further the cause of feminism, according to their views of feminism and patriarchy.

Which brings me, finally, to antis. Antis come from two main sources, and one is the anti-kink/anti-BDSM/anti-porn aspect of TERF-style feminism. The other is, as ridiculous as it sounds, ship wars. Ship wars have existed since the beginning of fiction, of course, and what's going on right now is that some people in fandom harass others using the intellectual framework laid out by anti-kink/anti-BDSM/anti-porn radfems. The targets are usually people who ship things (or create/consume other content) that's dark or unrealistic. (E.g. if you ship an abuser with his victim, that content is either going to be dark, if they have an unhealthy relationship, or unrealistic, if they have a healthy relationship. This also often includes non-ship-related dark content like characters getting killed.) The harassers believe themselves to be morally superior to their targets, based on the justification that "no one could really enjoy this content unless they were either enacting oppression or internalizing oppression".

This is particularly obvious when they talk about survivors of abuse and trauma. As you might know from debunkings of the "violent video games" moral panic, dark themes in media tend to be a way for people to emotionally process horrible things that happen in real life. There are lots of ways this plays out, according to the specific needs of the individual, but to speak from my own experience, taking things that were inflicted on me nonconsensually and fictionalizing them -- bringing them into a context where I have complete control -- is really important to healing and growing past that experience. Now, everyone, no matter their specific experiences, has fears that they might choose to process through fiction, but survivors of abuse and trauma are necessarily people who have experienced some of the worse things the world has to offer. Antis' response to this is the same as TERFs' response to people who want or need things that are politically inconvenient for them: "That's just internalized oppression." "That's an unhealthy coping mechanism." "You're taking the side of oppression, so it's okay to harass you."

Antis tend to have other beliefs that are inherited from radical feminism. For example, like TERFs, they tend to conceptualize heterosexism as "homophobia, which also hurts bisexual people because they're attracted to the same gender" rather than "heterosexism hurts people of non-heterosexual orientations in a variety of different ways". As such, they tend towards aphobia, biphobia, and nbphobia. Many of them are aphobes/exclusionists, and they tend to support a short list of acceptable non-straight identities (e.g. "LGBT") rather than accepting categories that are loose or flexible like "queer", "LGBT+", "QUILTBAG", etc. I've also found that, even when acknowledging NBs, they tend toward rhetoric that puts people into two categories based on their gender, like "men vs women/NBs" or "women/transfeminine people vs men/transmasculine people". Again, they have very binary thinking, and disregard people's stated wishes not to be put on one side of a gender binary.

They also have a particular way of talking that leans toward bullying and ideological abuse. They tend to interact with anti-antis even when they're not in a place to do so in a non-harmful way, and tell people who disagree with them to go kill themselves ("drink bleach", "jump in a fire", etc.). They tend to overuse words like "gross", "nasty", "scum", "garbage", etc. that provoke a disgust response, and generally exaggerate wildly ("literally advocating for child abuse", that kind of thing). There's a distinct lack of emphasis on anything that could potentially break the grip of black-and-white thinking, such as recognizing gradations of harm, or weighing the harm of something against the benefit it has.

I don’t want to go overboard and replicate the exact same patterns by implying that “calling something you don’t like ‘garbage’ is supporting ideological abuse” or anything like that. At the same time, I'm pretty sensitive to all this stuff, and pick up on it easily, even when I would rather ignore it. I can't stand to see people harassed for something as trivial as their taste in fanfic, and I also tend to be particularly vulnerable to ideologically abusive rhetoric because of some of the stuff I've gone through. An easy way to avoid interacting with people who harass others for their dark fic (or who support that framework of moral inferiority) would be to hang out with people who create and consume dark fic. But I actually find most of that content stomach-turning, so I wouldn't want to hang out around people who are posting it and talking about it all the time.

tl;dr: To avoid “TERFs minus (most of the) transphobia”, I might try hanging out with people who like fucked up fic, but I don’t want to do that because it would be unpleasant.

[fairplayforwomen]

  Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared. Lesbian erasure is real. As a lesbian myself, I’ve noticed friends who of course want to be LGBT friendly and show their solidarity by sharing LGBT links. But without knowing it they are sometimes inadvertently sharing and supporting an ideology that is contributing to the erasure of my own lesbian community. This guest post is a must-read for all lesbians and anyone who cares about us. 

Nic Williams.

  Guest post by Iwantmycommunityback

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few days in particular about transactivism and lesbians and thought I might try to put some of it into writing, partly to try to make sense of it and partly because I still keep seeing people refer to the ‘LGBT’ or ‘LGBTQ’ community and equating transactivism with lesbian and gay rights.

I think the most obvious impact of transactivism is on young lesbians being encouraged to identify as heterosexual transmen and to subject themselves to damaging medical treatment, the effects of which they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. I think Janice Turner’s article in the Times already covers that issue very well (here).

One of the problems for young lesbians (in addition to the rise in lesbophobia particularly among the young) is that, when they reach out to ‘their’ community, eg join an LGBT group for support, what they get isn’t their community at all but something very hostile.

Gender critical feminists will be familiar with the idea of trans-identified males co-opting women’s identities, women’s rights, women’s spaces etc for their own ends but there are other forms of appropriation going on, particularly in the (former) LGBT ‘community’ (including transsexuals themselves having been co-opted by people who don’t have body dysphoria and who marginalise them as ‘truscum’) . For lesbians, in addition to the appropriation of womanhood, I think the two main additional identity appropriations that cause problems are:

  Transbians

These are heterosexual biological males who identify as women and, therefore, as ‘lesbians’ and have hijacked our community (support groups, social groups, bars, forums, you name it) and believe that lesbians should be open to having sex with someone with a penis if they ‘identify’ as a woman (see ‘the cotton ceiling’). This group has widened further e.g. including ‘transfeminine men’ and men who identify as a woman part-time (so get to walk through life as a heterosexual man but just ‘identify’ as a lesbian for a few hours to access a lesbian group or lesbian club night where they are of course the most oppressed person ever and must be centred at all times).

As well as being included in our groups, they are held up as examples to us. For example for International Women’s Day one group had a talk from an ‘inspirational woman’ who was a biological male, who hadn’t had any surgery, was dressed as a bloke (not that that should make any difference.), had a bit of stubble going on and identified as non-binary (pronouns something like ‘zie’) not as a woman. Like, not only could they not find an actual woman who was inspirational enough to fill that spot, they couldn’t even find a man who was prepared to say they were a woman. Stuff like this is being funded by charity grants intended for women and for lesbian and gay people.

Don’t quite believe it? Here’s just a random selection of biological males who identity as women found on the lesbian section of some well known on-line dating sites…..

‘Queer’ straight trans allies

This is pretty much a consequence of the above. For those who don’t know, queer is now used as an all-encompassing term for anyone who doesn’t identify as a heterosexual “cis” person. However, it is also preferred by certain people over terms like lesbian, gay and bisexual because it does away with what are considered the rigid boundaries of ‘gender’ and sexuality e.g. Homosexual, lesbian and gay meaning being attracted to the same sex, bisexual as being attracted to ‘both’ sexes. This allows people to reject these categories and the idea that there are two sexes.

Take, for example, Lily Madigan who is a biological male who has now come out as a lesbian and is dating a woman. Let’s presume for a moment that this woman (let’s call her Chloe) is a) a biological female b) and a passionate trans uber-ally. Chloe is a bio female who is dating a bio male with a penis who wears a pink hoodie and identifies as a woman. Say, before that, Chloe was dating a bio male with a penis who wears a blue hoodie and is, therefore, a man. Maybe in her next relationship, she will date a bio male with a penis who has purple hair and identifies as ‘genderqueer’. Therefore, Chloe can now say that she dates men, women and genderqueer people, including both cisgender and trans people. Therefore, she is a queer or pansexual woman.

Along with the transbians, these ‘queer’ woman become involved in what was formerly the lesbian and bisexual women’s community. However, these trans uber-allies have a lot of views that are contrary to the interests particularly of lesbians. They believe that lesbians have ‘cis’ privilege and also that lesbians (along with gay men) are the most privileged people in the LGBT community. They believe that lesbians are narrow-minded and transphobic for only wanting to date other biological women and oppress transwomen who can’t break through the ‘cotton ceiling’ of their underwear.

I’m not even sure when this stuff started because, like most of us, due to the blurring of the meaning of words, I just didn’t see it happening. A lot of the main online websites, blogs and forums for lesbians started to change, with different women running them and, over time, a shift in the tone – lots about trans inclusion and more references to being ‘queer’ and open to relationships with anyone, about how some people (the lesbians) had privilege in our community and should prioritise these other people, less representation of butch women (despite the talk of blurring of gender boundaries/genderfluidity) etc.

It was only years later, when someone who knew the women who had been running one of these websites was talking about who they were and who they were in relationships (bio females in relationships with bio males, basically) that the penny finally dropped with me.These were straight women appropriating our identity and lecturing at us and marginalising us in our own community.

This blurring of the language enables them to do it – but even in cases where you can see it for yourself (e.g. if you are looking at what is clearly a straight couple, who you know will be read by everyone they meet as a straight couple, even if the guy is wearing a bit of eyeliner) you couldn’t say anything because now it would be transphobic to say that he wasn’t a woman (or genderqueer or whatever).

      Why aren’t lesbians speaking out more?

It’s no always easy to spot what’s happening

Firstly, I think it takes a while to see what is going on. This for a number of reasons including the deliberate blurring of language, the shutting down of any discussion or even thought on the issue through the repetition of mantras such as transwomen are women and the misrepresentation of this issue in what we consider to be ‘our’ trusted (LGB) news outlets, organisations, websites etc. We also might be relying on our positive experience of and friendships with traditional transsexuals without understanding how much the trans movement has now changed (traditional transsexuals are often demonised in this new world order too and called truscum). There is also the tendency to conflate trans with gay issues when they are not the same at all. From my own experiences of coming out and being oppressed on the basis of being different, I know its so easy to automatically feel solidarity towards and feel angry about any oppressed group, especially if you are being told that other views are ‘anti-LGBT’ and coming from ‘anti-LGBT’ organisations.

  Many lesbians aren’t aware things are different now

Some lesbians aren’t really that involved any more so aren’t aware of what is going on. Many lesbians will have accessed the LGB community, lesbian support groups, lesbian/gay bars when they first came out, when they were looking for a relationship, in times of difficulties etc but are now happily settled in a relationship and don’t feel the need to access those resources. They will still have their lesbian ‘community’ but that will mean texting their friends Sarah & Jo and Claire & Debs and arranging to meet up at their (straight) local pub for the evening. Any involvement with the wider LGBT community will be more minimal like maybe watching the Pride Parade once a year or occasionally reading something on an LGBT website about some awful transphobes who are attacking the LGBT community. They will think back to the transsexual people they knew 10 – 15 years ago who were nice people who just wanted to get on with their lives.

  Young lesbians have no where to go

3) Young lesbians these days are more likely to be identifying as transmen rather than as lesbians.  For the few who do, they lack access to a real lesbian community which could introduce them to an alternative to the current discourse. They have little opportunity to discuss shared issues, learn from others’ experiences and have other lesbian women on their side. Young lesbians who aren’t accepted or feel isolated in their school, family, community etc will seek out an LGBT youth group and this community they reach out to will heavily endorse the transactivist agenda as part and parcel (and absolutely central) to their identity. Where else do they go and how do they know that there is anything else?

  Nobody listens to lesbians anyway!

4) The low status of lesbian women within the LGBT community also stops some speaking out.  I don’t think people outside are really aware of how much misogyny and in particular hatred of lesbians there is from some gay men.

  There’s a big personal cost to speaking up

There are big risks to speaking out for women. These risks are increased if you are a lesbian as it is coming from your ‘own’ community and being a lesbian puts you under suspicion of being trans-exclusionary (ie penis-exclusionary) anyway. If you run a lesbian business or events, you can’t risk being anything other than pro the trans agenda or they will destroy your livelihood. And I’m sure most of us have seen the threats and actual violence meted out to those who dare to disagree. There’s also a fear about just broaching the subject with another actual female lesbian because you don’t know how many of you are onside so it’s a risk. From tentatively raising the issue with a select few, I do know lesbian friends who have got concerns about this but we are very cautious and tentative about saying anything to other women because of the risk. The bigger stories like the closure of MichFest and the men wielding baseball bats to keep the lesbians in check on Women’s Marches and Pride Parades are just symbols of the way we are being policed. This is now what happens to what is left of lesbian events, lesbian-run businesses etc, if we don’t keep in line.

    Our lesbian voice has been diluted from within

Finally, simply, as I’ve explained above, another reason some of ‘us’ don’t oppose or seem to actively support transactivism is that not all of ‘us’ are actually ‘us’. As lesbians step away from the LGBT ‘community’ and more ‘lesbian and queer women’ emerge from the two groups referred to above, an increasing proportion of ‘us’ are actually a subset of heterosexual men and women who loathe lesbians and support the transactivist agenda – but, because of the way language is being twisted, you’d never know that.

    Lesbians are an endangered species. I want my community back! Last week I read a post on MumsNet that is so good it just has to be shared.

[mediocrequeerpoetry]

From TERF to Trans: How viewpoints change over time

Figuring out my gender identity was not the spiritual, transcendent experience that it’s frequently marketed as. For me it was more like “Oh fuck, not me. First I’m kind of gay, now I gotta deal with this shit too?” Figuring out who I’m comfortable as, who the people around me are comfortable with me being, and who the people that beat people like me to death are comfortable with me being; it’s a balancing act.

Gender-nonconforming people, trans people, and LGB individuals all understand that they cannot fully be themselves. Not all the time, not as expressively as they want to. Figuring out the balance with which you are able to retain comfort in your own skin without being disowned, harassed, or killed is an art. It will take some trial and error. It will make you nervous. If you’re me, you’ll experience raw thrill from minor actions that now seem to hold some sort of potent magic. You will stare at every face, read every expression, judging, determining if you are safe even as your heart screams its freedom just because you decided to wear eyeliner today.

If you’re worried that you’re like me, you should be. It’s quite worrisome. It’s also quite beautiful, and that’s the important part. You know fully and completely that you live in a society that will always push back, you will see the long road ahead to respect, dignity, and equal rights, and you will balk. It looks far too hard to blaze this trail. Every comment on the internet reminds you, every errant glare, every casual-and-maybe-even-not-malicious misgendering. But if not you, then who?

We are constantly reminded that some things are worth risking safety and security for. If you feel a deeply unsettling dissatisfaction with your current gender expression, you will need to come to terms with the fact that your happiness is mutually exclusive with the life of relative privilege that you currently lead.

You will need to be brave. Because being the way that you are in the place and time that you are does not lend itself to cowardice. You will need to stay in the closet sometimes, maybe even most of the time depending on where you are, but the freedom in moments is the sweetest taste you’ll know. Presenting your gender to the world is taken for granted by people for whom it comes easily, and its power is overwhelming.

Your body will not cooperate. To be more specific, cultural and social tags attributed to your body and its parts will not cooperate. But you are not less your gender because of the parts that stick out. Even if everything sticks out, you’re valid and no matter how many greasy trolls there are out there, your gender is yours. It’s not just that we refuse to change but we CANNOT change. Understanding that your non-binary identity is a central and not secondary aspect of who you are is important to retaining peace and awareness in your life. You don’t need to transition, but you can. You are in control.

My opinions have changed over time (no shit). When I was in high school I was a militant TERF, or Trans-excluding radical feminist. This is someone who takes opposition to gendered oppression to a toxic extreme, maintaining that trans people all need to cut that shit out and get back in their gendered box because they’ll be damned if they let a bunch of gross men colonize womanhood and infiltrate femininity. These are the “feminists” you hear about who take their hatred of men so far that they refuse to acknowledge the identity of those who “betray their gender” and who propagate other discourse with the aim of dropping the ‘T’ off the end of ‘LGBT’.

In my developmental psychology class we had a unit about transgender youth, and thank god we did. Twenty minutes into a documentary about trans kids, I indelibly understood that nobody chooses this and I had been denying basic human rights, vocally, to easily one of the most victimized groups in America. My world was shaken.

When confronted with evidence, overwhelming Frontline documentary style evidence, that your worldview is wrong, you have two options. You can attempt to understand the new, empathize and deconstruct, grow your world and acknowledge your past prejudice with the distaste and mindfulness that you acknowledge all the times you accidentally or unknowingly hurt people.

Alternatively you can close your mind to this evidence. As is plainly evident in the current political climate, people do not want to leave their bubbles. Millions can and do willfully ignore irrefutable scientific truth in favor of their own ignorant biases. Stay away from this mindset, or you’ll find yourself lost in a world of inclusivity and actively railing against real people who deserve your respect. This mindset is why TERFs join forces with ultra-conservative actors including neo-nazis to express their prejudice. Ignoring the reality of the world will cause you to act against your own self-interests in ways you never could have imagined.

I didn’t understand, not right away. I maintained for years past this that a non-binary label was a “political choice” intended to contest the rigid gender binary, since feeling like you’re a mix of genders is the basic state of being for most people. I didn’t understand that the way I feel is not strictly speaking normal, that most people don’t vacillate between male and female identity like I do. I didn’t understand that being non-binary is only a political choice because of the sheer opposition to it that is endemic to our country and culture.

I should have listened more, and if I hadn’t stumbled upon the realization that my gender is not rigid I easily might have gone years or decades holding disrespectful words and attitudes over my close friends who don’t feel comfortable within the binary. Please trust us when we say we can’t change. The only thing you need to do to be a good person is listen.

Helpful labels:

-transfeminine

-gender fluid

-AMAB (assigned male at birth)

Preferred pronouns:

-she/her

-they/them

-Don’t beat yourself up about it

[frabjous-fragment]

a critique of lesbian discourse from a nonbinary perspective

(saw something that upset me enough to want to get my opinion out there, so here i am, turning to my tum blur dot com poe eh tree blog to engage in lgbt discourse. happy pride)

I am an agender person designated male at birth. I consider myself pansexual with asexual characteristics, but historically, I have mostly been romantically involved with people who could be painted broadly as transfeminine. Because of this, binarism that tries to divide me from the lesbian community has always stuck out to me more. I hope to illustrate to people who will keep an open mind how the dismissal of individuals identifying themselves as bi lesbians is rooted in binarism.

This carrd seems like the most comprehensive and mainstream formulation of the argument I could find, so I'll go down it point by point. Before diving in, though, I want to point out that the author, an asexual and nonbinary dfab lesbian, feels so strongly about this issue that they operate a blocklist of people who identify as bisexual lesbians on Twitter. Bear the fact that people feel strongly enough about the issue to draw lines in the sand through the community in mind, as we dissect the causes, effects, and purposes of this issue's hot button status.

tl;dr: There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

"Lesbian is not an umbrella term." It's not surprising to me that the carrd opens like this, since the entire argument requires this prior, but the formulation here is actually very weak and even concedes things that weaken it further. "These simplifications of people's sexuality were grown out of as queer people started to create labels and spaces that more accurately described them." Buckle up, because most of the rest of this post rests on this very loaded throwaway sentence. This is a simplification of the truth and overlooks some pretty unfortunate history. The fact of the matter is that bisexual and asexual people were included in the discourse of the gay rights movement from the very beginning. The Asexual Manifesto was written in 1972, and Donny the Punk, founder of the first LGBT student movement, identified as bisexual (recorded in writing earliest in 1972- incidentally, when he discusses his break with elements of the gay liberation movement, due to his treatment after falling in love with a woman in 1970). Therefore, the argument that people simply used weak terminology like "homophile" in the early days because there was not more specific terminology available to people lacks something. The cruder truth is that it was all people needed for compatibility, to go to gay hookup spots, make friends, have sex, and maybe find a long term relationship. Bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and further subcommunities arose with the rise of gay identity politics, and conflicts of interest within it. Who would these conflicts of interest be revised out of our community's history? The answer is simple and unfortunate- sexism. Donny was far from the only individual met with the sentiment that he was a gender traitor- lesbian separatism, an unfortunate reaction to real issues the early gay movement had with representing lesbians, swept through lesbian spaces in the 70s, devastating bisexual and transgender women and bolstering the nascent bisexual and transgender movements. By the end of the decade, TERF queen Janice Raymonds included "testimony" from other bigots against two named trans women existing peacefully in lesbian spaces, in her hate screed The Transsexual Empire, quoting another TERF's writing as saying "I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy ... as a real woman." This is an obvious appropriation of the language of personal rights to justify bigotry, judgment, hate, and exclusion. All manner of feminists and lesbians have attempted to whitewash the darker sentiments of this period by dismissing the proponents of radical, genocidal propositions like Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto as "just venting" or "fringe lunatics". (To not get too into it, Solanas went back and forth on whether or not her work was satire, in a manner I find eerily similar to what reactionaries do when they put 'this account is satire' on their Twitters.) This is easy to prove incorrect; non-buzzword, actual, political misandry had reached the highest levels of feminist leadership and academia. Observe what one of the first professors of women's studies in the world, Sally Miller Gearhart, had to say on "the male question": I) Every culture must begin to affirm a female future. "The future is female" is a phrase that has been effectively neutralized and recuperated by less radical elements, which I am all for. It is vague enough to work to better ends than the next two points by itself. II) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. Here it becomes more clear that, in the minds of many prominent feminists of the 1970s, women would have to be supreme over men. There isn't much of another way to interpret the statement that women must bear all responsibility for humanity. III) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race. How would this be done? The only answer is eugenics through selective abortion imposed by the state, and genocide. Clearly, even from just a perspective of women's rights, this is inadmissible to anyone who is genuinely pro-choice on the

subject of women's bodies, even though this is not a situation we usually think of. The very suggestion of this is fascistic. Make no mistake that the modern sentiment against bi lesbians is not rooted in the same fascist gender essentialism. One denies that "benign" anti-bisexual and anti-transgender sentiments still predominate in lesbian and gay communities at your own risk. Not only are you speaking over the lived experiences of people like me, you are speaking against the statistics. Not only do incredible majorities of 88.5% of gay men and 71% of lesbian women, compared to 48% of bisexual and similar people, still exclude trans people from romantic and sexual considerations due to the subliminal sexism they learn from both mainstream society and their LGBT communities, but surveys show that gay men and lesbian women respectively distrust bisexual men and bisexual women's attraction to them and affiliation with their communities. (Also widely*... couldn't resist pointing out the common eggcorn.) "Lesbian used to be the term that described all sapphics, but isn't anymore, and that's a positive thing. Having more specific labels has allowed for people's bisexuality and pansexuality to not be erased in common language, and was a step towards getting rid of the pressure for people attracted to multiple genders to 'pick a side'. The emergence of terms like 'bi/pan lesbian' and 'bi/pan hetero' reinforces the notion of needing to 'pick a side', and obscures the common definitions of all the sexualities involved" This is that concession that I mentioned earlier. Credit where it's due, it's an elevation of the discourse to actually admit this when other people won't even do that. But it again ignores why these pressures exist, and incorrectly presupposes a demand for terminology that could be argued to be divisive without looking into why such a demand exists in reality. In a world without these terrible and stupid issues of sexism, people would simply say "I am both gay and straight" and everything would be dandy. Nobody has ever called themselves "bi/pan hetero" and I'm almost not even being hyperbolic. It's not an identity community. Proposing this just sets up the writer's argument that the terminology of "bi/pan lesbian" (and its more accurate parallel, "bi/pan mlm", which I have seen- putting aside my qualms with the limitations and binarism of xlx terminology even when the left operator is nb) divides the bi/pan community. This is the same logic battleaxe bisexuals who view the pansexual label as biphobic and attack people they see as bi (and yes, pan people are also bi by definition) use for their argument that the pansexual label divides bi people, when the only people that I see it "dividing" are the same people getting pissy about trifling points of queer theory that nobody else cares about for no proven reason. In real spaces, nobody tries to get bisexual people to line up on one wall and pansexual people to line up on the other. Pan people do not engage in biphobic discourse. The issue is empty; a non-issue. This it shares in common with the bi lesbian discourse, where the issues are not directly with the communities under fire, but instead vague, abstract, unsubstantiated and unfalsifiable notions of "omg you'll make the straights think [blank]!!" It seems like a theme where, even within LGBT, majorities attack their negations and accuse them of being divisive for asserting themselves and asking for some solidarity in return for the solidarity they provide in the community; you see this with asexual and trans people as well, but that's not what this post is about. Since the entire argument is built on this first point, I could honestly stop here, from a logical perspective. But people have strong emotional responses to the subsequent points, and without going through those, people will change "is not" to "ought not to be" and carry on.

"Making Distinct Spaces for Different Sexuality's Unique Experiences is Important." Around here is where the carrd really starts to resort to trying to twist truisms against their opponents, and on the briefest reflection this doesn't work. The idea that the term "bi lesbian" erases the distinction in between bi women and lesbian women seems to me to commit a category error by defining lesbian women as exclusively homosexual women and then pointing out the obvious truth that these women are distinct from bisexual women. The truth is, bisexual women and lesbian women are not categorically different in really any way other than their relationship to heterosexuality, a distinction easily expressed by- you guessed it- the label "bi lesbian". To reiterate and combine into earlier points: There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

"Woman Aligned Nonbinary People are Included in Lesbian Attraction". Another truism. Let's move on to the single clause of the single sentence that contains the actual argument- "implying otherwise by wanting to separate that attraction into a new label is enbyphobic invalidating lesbian attraction" So, hi! As a woman aligned nonbinary person, I am here to tell you that this is not correct! I think this is a lot easier for dfab nonbinary people and dmab binary trans women to say than is it for dmab nonbinary people like myself to say. When your identity is as arcane as "I am not a woman but I identify with women because I am of a marginalized neutral gender", a lot more people decide not to take you seriously. If you take out the bolded words, this statement becomes correct, so we're going to focus on them. The only people saying anything about non-binary people not being included in lesbianism by default are the antis and the radfems they unwittingly serve, who actually do believe that point and see it as a good thing. But unfortunately, as a dmab nonbinary person who does not get sorted as a woman under binarism, my experience has been that I am already excluded from lesbianism in practice. If you get sorted as a woman under binarism, good for you! But to say that all lesbians do is obviously incorrect, when you consider all the budding trans women who still have beards and face largely similar issues in the lesbian community. To say that this state of affairs is fine is harmful to trans people; to say that this is different from what people like me face is arbitrary, and arguably binarist. Sapphism needs to look deeper than the surface and accept a foundation built on ties of solidarity and identity with no tests of purity.

"Having a Lean or Strong Prefrence Does Not Make You Any Less Bisexual". (Preference*, firstly.) I am not sure what this truism is doing here. Even many bi lesbians would agree that preferring other women is not what makes them lesbians, their membership in the lesbian community is what makes them lesbians. Refer to the above point; each community should be built on nothing more than solidarity and identity.

"Lesbians Don't Have Attraction to Men or Men-Aligned Nonbinary People, Even When on the Split Attraction Model". Here it is, the Big Chungus of arguments in the bi lesbian discourse. This is one that is seen often that people feel very strongly about, and probably the most contentious, since the implication that bi lesbians facilitate abuse of lesbians seems to motivate how a lot of people feel on the subject. Who has the power here? The insinuation that bi women have more privilege than lesbians is silly and biphobic. Clearly, it's the abusive men who have all the power in this arrangement. So how is the presence or absence of bi lesbians going to change what abusive men, who don't believe in sexual orientation, let alone care about it, decide to do? It can only change the excuses they use, which are chosen at convenience. This is a trick that patriarchy has played on us to get us to attack each-other instead of the enemy. For such a common and spicy point of rhetoric, I'm surprised I didn't write more against it here, but I really feel that the argument against it is that simple. I'll add a personal note here, and say that the dismissal of the divergent opinions of people sorted as males under binarism, alleging that we're "rapey" and want to appropriate things that aren't ours rather than participate in solidarity, is incredibly harmful to those of us who happen to be lesbians, even by the strictest trans-inclusive definition.

"Trans Women are Women". Truism. This is by far the weakest point. Nobody is advancing "bi lesbian" as a trans-inclusive label, though as I said above, it's a statistical fact that bisexual people are much more trans-positive than homosexual people, and therefore, as a transgender person, I tend to feel more welcomed around them. Of course, that's not a categorical distinction, but an unfortunate tendency.

"A Lesbian isn't Less of a Lesbian for Previously Dating Men". Truism. This is a stronger point, but only because it is closer to real rhetoric supporting the idea that bi lesbians are "real". Bisexual women will answer the question of "would you be open to dating a man again?" in the affirmative, and homosexual women will answer in the negative. Some members of the lesbian community do not completely rule out the prospect of dating men, even though it is not something they currently pursue.

The above are the reasons why the community should not fall into the bi lesbian discourse, and the refutations to its arguments. In order to be in full solidarity with fringe members of our sub-communities against bigotry, we must not fall into needless categorical division of groups when our interests are the same. There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

[jessicakehoe]

How Alok Vaid-Menon is Making the World a Safer Place for Everyone

It’s Friday night in Toronto, and The Garrison is packed with a motley crew of people with angular haircuts and septum piercings—the kind of crowd one might expect in attendance at Venus Fest, a feminist music festival that aims to remove toxic male aggression from live music environments. We’ve all assembled here to watch a South Asian drag queen named Manghoe Lassi gyrate with a comically oversized fake blunt to Bollywood music. The air in the club is nearly unbreathable, spiced with the ubiquitous scent of Santal 33 and generous base notes of body odour.

After Lassi finishes stripping down to her pot-leaf nipple pasties, Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming performance artist (who goes by they/them pronouns), arrives onstage dressed like a futuristic prophet attending Coachella, wearing a blue spandex crop top and matching pencil skirt that reveal a thatch of body hair, a Frida Kahlo flower crown adorning their magenta locks. After a moment of silence for the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, they proceed to launch into a rapid-fire act evoking the violence that trans people face on a daily basis and, in the same breath, throw shade on Ariana Grande.

By the end of the show, Vaid-Menon is visibly in tears and at least one person in the audience has passed out. I feel as if I’ve been shaken out of complacency so hard that I might wake up tomorrow with whiplash. It’s hard to reconcile the garrulous figure onstage with the soft-spoken, thoughtful person I met one day earlier.

“I never was able to consent to the various sets of stereotypes around gender and race that were ascribed to me, but with my outfits, I found I could interrupt those logics.”

Vaid-Menon ushers me into the lobby of the old Victorian home that serves as their crash pad in Toronto. They’re clad in a mix of colours and patterns that conjures the cacophony of a Jackson Pollock painting: a flowy earth mother tunic, zebra-print pants, a splotched ’80s-print skirt and door knocker earrings—finished off with a vibrant swipe of coral lipstick. For Vaid-Menon, whose tag line is “not a girl, not a boy, just me,” style is one of the most important weapons deployed in their ongoing crusade against the gender binary. “I do a lot of what the world calls ‘power clashing,’ but clashing denotes dissonance, and I don’t see it as that,” they say. “I’m trying to tell a story of mistaken dissonance—of harmony that is waiting to be recognized but is suppressed.”

Mistaken dissonance is perhaps the most succinct metaphor to describe the activism that is Vaid-Menon’s life’s work. “People see me as a failed man, a failed woman and, increasingly, a failed trans person,” says Vaid-Menon. Yet nothing about their self-presentation is a failure. As a non-binary transfeminine person, they have the ability to cast off stifling gender categories with the same ease one has when discarding a pair of ill-fitting pants in a change room—it’s every bit as intentional. “I never was able to consent to the various sets of stereotypes around gender and race that were ascribed to me,” they say, “but with my outfits, I found I could interrupt those logics.”

View this post on Instagram

here are my top 10 #streetstyle moments of 2018! so hard to choose! comment with your fav # 🥳🥳

A post shared by ALOK (@alokvmenon) on Dec 19, 2018 at 9:57am PST

As the author of the poetry book Femme in Public, Vaid-Menon has been touring around the world for the past three years drawing attention to the plight of visibly-gender-nonconforming people through their unique brand of comedy, slam poetry and music. “I cannot isolate Alok’s writing and poetry from the fashion, visual art, activism and performance aspects,” says Umlilo, one of Vaid-Menon’s contemporaries, who is based in South Africa.

Vaid-Menon’s father, Ramdas Menon, says Vaid-Menon wasn’t always fashion-forward, describing them as a “normal kid” who could be gregarious or introspective depending on their mood. “I always understood gender to be an obstacle to style,” Vaid-Menon explains, but they now view clothing as a site of political possibility. In 2013, Vaid-Menon began performing poetry onstage with Janani Balasubramanian under the moniker DarkMatter. Vaid-Menon began to dress up for performances but found that the act of exploring creativity through clothing felt so good, they began to cultivate a studied appearance offstage as well.

“I have a ‘boring section’ [in my closet] for when I just want to operate from point A to point B without getting harassed. But that section is getting increasingly smaller,” says Vaid-Menon. When tasked with wearing a gender-conforming outfit to an ex’s wedding last year, they showed up in a pair of banana-print pants.

View this post on Instagram

as the year comes to a close i will be sharing some of my highlights of 2018! first up is the 2nd gender free fashion collection i designed in delhi with @adrianne.ayao ! (stay tuned: we are already hard at work for 2019 collection). comment with the # of your fav look !!! also we have some of these as prints in my online store if you’d like one (link in bio)

A post shared by ALOK (@alokvmenon) on Dec 17, 2018 at 10:54am PST

In 2017, Vaid-Menon began to design their own clothing as a way to imagine what they would wear if they didn’t have to face violence, sketching out a flamenco-ruffle dress and a pink baby-doll dress with exaggerated bell sleeves. Right now, the clothing is strictly non-commercial, but Vaid-Menon dreams of a brand reaching out to collaborate on a gender-neutral capsule collection that doesn’t look like an assortment of beige-coloured flour sacks.

“Alok manages to straddle this fine line between a fierce warrior goddess that can be intimidating and a gentle clairvoyant spirit that is approachable,” says Umlilo. But by simply existing and living their truth—a.k.a. “being hairy as fuck and wearing makeup”—they are creating a sense of social possibility for others to do the same. “If there was ever a person able to express what I feel and put it into words, it’s Alok,” Umlilo continues. “There’s a raw honesty that their work has that manages to transcend space and time and express all the ancestral cries of sisters from yonder.”

“I’m still trying to figure out why my fabulosity threatens people. I think that at a fundamental level, people have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set them free.”

“At the core of it, I’m trying to challenge the international crisis of loneliness,” says Vaid-Menon. Growing up, the only characters on television they could relate to were cartoon villains like HIM, the lobster-clawed, falsetto-voiced villain of The Powerpuff Girls. Vaid-Menon displays a rare willingness to be vulnerable in public, a human quality that’s beginning to feel en­dangered in the age of Instagram, when most people choose to present a highlight reel of their accomplishments for the world to fawn over. Vaid-Menon’s poetry performances and writing workshops often double as group therapy sessions for participants. “When your job is to cry in public to hundreds of people who tell you ‘good job,’ it just kind of reinforces that you’re on to something.”

Photography by Bronson Farr

Despite Vaid-Menon’s inner power and strength, their self-expression is not a welcome sight for everyone and is often the target of cruelty and violence. “I’m still trying to figure out why my fabulosity threatens people. I think that at a fundamental level, people have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set them free.” But Vaid-Menon perseveres, partly because they are a pioneer and partly because they see no other way to live. “When non-binary and gender-nonconforming people critique gender binarism, it’s not just because we have selfish interests or are some angry minority of people. It’s because we’re trying to create a world that is more just and inclusive for everyone.”

View this post on Instagram

HOWDY!!!! today’s forecast is so cold outside but so fire 🔥 inside! excited to be making magic & photo shooting with my glam squad @double_d_production today!!!✨✨✨

A post shared by ALOK (@alokvmenon) on Nov 25, 2018 at 7:54am PST

Back at The Garrison, Vaid-Menon performs their wild and rancorous mix of political commentary, decrying the tribulations of irritable bowel syndrome and calling for a Hilary Duff 2020 presidential campaign. Like in a church, the set is punctuated by audible “mm-hmms” and scattered applause each time Vaid-Menon makes a salient point. By the end of the show, my mind drifts toward something they mentioned the day before: “I want to create irresistible images of what freedom can and does look like.” Onstage at The Garrison, that is exactly what is happening.

The post How Alok Vaid-Menon is Making the World a Safer Place for Everyone appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

How Alok Vaid-Menon is Making the World a Safer Place for Everyone published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/