#we actually manage to deconstruct compulsory heterosexuality

[seductivejellyfish]

gonna take a bit of a swing at a hornets nest here but: whenever you have in mind to write a post about, or you read a post about, "amatonormativity," I really suggest stepping back and asking "how would this post change if I replaced 'amatonormativity' with 'heteronormativity'/'compulsive heterosexuality'? Are the societal pressures or privileges described actually applied to homosexual relationships at all, or in a way resembling how they are applied to heterosexual relationships?"

A lot of us live in relatively wonderful pockets of the world where it can be easy to feel like gay relationships are thought about in a way that is close to equivalent to straight ones, but the fact is I have never once seen any discussion of 'amatonormativity' that was not a discussion of heteronormativity. It is true that there are immense societal pressures that seem to enforce 'romantic' relationships, but in reality they enforce heterosexual relationships of a particular sort, and we flatted our ability for meaningful critique when we act like the forces at work are a societal prioritization of romantic love, and not the patriarchal structure of compulsory heterosexuality and all its implications for maintenance of the patriarchy.

[trans-advice]

Hey, for the past 5 or so years I have privately identified as nonbinary or not conforming to any gender, and even recently requested that my boss and coworkers use they/them pronouns. About a month ago I stumbled across a "gender critical" blog and started reading it. I know it's a bad idea to engage with trolls, especially when it will impact your sense of self, but I felt restless that my existence was being debated and wanted to hear the other side. Now I am feeling confused (1 o 2 asks)

I’m feeling confused and gross, wondering if all this time I have been actually working against my own feminist beliefs, or if I’m just being naive and getting indoctrinated. Like,I worry about me being a female who simply didn’t subscribe to gender stereotypes, tricking myself into thinking I"wasn’t like the other girls". I have also been wondering about what it means to identify into an oppressed group, and why we can’t talk about it without being dismissed as a dumb TERF. (1 o 2 asks) Thx

— Eve: CW: long post, possibly rambley, could’ve used better editing, transphobia, “gender critical”, recuperation, discussion of “terf” politics, recuperation of liberation movements, politics, oppression, rape culture, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist,

So basically I have tried for almost 4 weeks to write a response detailing this stuff. however it’s gotten too unwieldy. i tried to condense it, but this was as close as i got. it’s practically like 3 drafts back to back. I couldn’t figure out the differences & when i saw similarities it seemed significantly different enough. so I’m not editing any further. here’s a mindvomit. i wish i had this more polished but I can’t do that & i didn’t get a response.

however I’m going to make a history book recommendation, a referral to gendercensus2020, and i need to emphasize that these are much more like personal beliefs & not generally the tone of this blog which aims to give advice & positivity, while this is inherently political, the good bad & ugly. and there are trans people of various persuasions so I don’t want alienate them. i dissecting some ideologies that are transphobic, how they became that, how they got recuperated, and how you can find the same concerns being addressed. I’m answering this because it totally makes sense to me that this is asked in good faith & I want to respect your concerns & show that there are better methods of liberation activism that are trans affirmative, or at least must become & develop into such.

So I’m going to recommend the book “Transgender History (Second Edition)” by Susan Stryker, which I have put on our blog’s google drive account, so hence a link. It goes into the historic common ground between the feminists & LGBT+ peoples. It also gets into historic movements. And on top of that, the first chapter is literally a list of terminology deconstructing gender, which is also helpful for analyzing topics feminism analyzes..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvCwNvCJ_EiDmOer4zS8SbFGz4m-WDJ1

another thing you need to know regarding the label lesbian back in the day is that it was a catchall for any woman who didn’t have sex with men. now granted, this was a cisnormative understanding, but basically lesbians included celibate women, asexual women, and of course bisexual women in addition to gay women.

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money to have sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (granted, communities cannot be monoliths if they want to be ecosystems, like any movement label there are different interpretations made by members of it, and therefore there are some strands that uphold a homonormative appreciation for conversion therapy. perhaps a middle ground for understanding how that happened is that joke about macho sexuality purity “if a man masturbates with his hand, he’s using a man’s hand to get off, then it’s gay.” granted, there was of course a political/economic reason to this, but still, it seems in terms of history that this joke was considered actually legitimate.)

“lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included ace, celibate & gynephiliac women. part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married which I’ll detail a few paragraphs from now. (while this next thought could be incorrect because I did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, I think the vestiges of those economic pressures are basically the gist of “comphet”.) the goal of political lesbian as well as lesbian separatism was to build an economy/get money that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, via marriage, pregnancy etc. so basically in an effort to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

however these networks ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. it makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210] >

birth control helped to liberate women & that accommodation/handicap for reproductive health disabilities (disability is merely inability to do something that’s Normative. so if having a uterus, pregnancy/menstruation/having breasts etc aren’t considered normal, which is especially common in a patriarchal society for these examples, then it’s disability.) It should be said that due to the desire for bodily autonomy to regulate our own body parts, as well as a desire to manage our fertility & sterilization, the transgender movement has a lot in common with feminism’s female-as-disability movement.)

it should also be noted that before the medical transitioning became accessible that us trans people relied a lot more on social transitioning than medical transitioning. it should also be mentioned that the medical procedures are available & used by cisgender people too.

that being said, since both cis females & transgender women were denied birth control etc, there was a very intense fear of impregnation happening & trans women going back in the closet not only to get money under patriarchy but also because life raising a kid is hard. like if you’ve ever seen “the stepford wives” & look at how the ally husband betrays his feminist wife, then that should clue us into how a lack of birth control scared us.

the problem with the school of feminism that emphasizes physiological sex over gender identity (in order to deny the existence of trans people with female-organs or not) is that it doesn’t account for birth control & how that’s affected the landscape, the economy etc, the revolutionary impact of birth control basically. it also ignores that trans people & cis women feminists have the same goals when it comes to getting freedoms about reproductive rights & bodily autonomy. therefore it ends up being transphobic & wanting to run back into the times when we didn’t have abortion access because they want to hurt us.

That being said though, we need to have birth control & more in order to help liberate trans people too, so if somewhere doesn’t have birth control, then we’re not doing well either because it’d pay a lot more to be transphobic (which of course it doesn’t now when we have birth control & various medical & other technologies). i think what I’m trying to say is that similar to disability accomodations clashing with each other, if we of the women’s liberation, the trans liberation, and the gay & lesbian liberation, and the bisexual & ace liberation get stranded then we’re all doomed. granted we might be doing that due to defensiveness with hostility similar to how in the 1980s feminism got very conservative in USA & how some transgender people get spared in systems with strict gender conformity & anticolonialist values, it’d be wrong to say that all our liberations are in conflict with each other. they can be mishandled, but ultimately, safety still tends to favor cisheteropatriarchal people. internalized patriarchal thinking is like internalized queerphobia, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that it is relatively easy for transgender people especially nonbinary people to find gender critical discourse somewhat appealing. Here’s why: TERFs & Gender Critical discourse is agender-normative disability discourse regarding reproductive health & other AFAB organs. (a disability is being unable to do things that society considers normative. so if you can’t drive & your locale de facto requires it, then that’s a disability. also in usa you’ll find that pregnancy & disability are the main things welfare programs prioritize. a pregnancy can be harmful, but can be easier with the right monitoring etc. which again is the same with disability.)

the problem though is that they then insist on misgendering you as one of the binary genders based on objectification of your body (specifically, “morphology”). point being, because you feel dysphoric over being misgendered as something nonbinary as being mislabeled as cisgender, this implies that you are indeed transgender.

https://gendercensus.com/post/612238605773111296/the-gender-census-2020-is-now-open

—

Now to be clear, there are historical economic considerations that made the decisions to specialize on the intersectionality of cisgender AFABs, but the economy & technology has changed. Basically marriage back in the day was economically necessary because there was effectively no birth control available. Therefore, to get child support etc, required getting the father to pay the consequences. However, marriage was very much a chattel property institution, marital rape was still legal, and women couldn’t get credit etc in our own names.

#

At the same time, similar to birth control being unavailable, hormones & other procedures for medically transitioning trans people were unavailable as well, which meant social transitioning & wardrobe etc were the main methods of affirming our gender. however, we sometimes got lucky & had a doctor write us a note affirming our gender & sometimes we got even luckier & govts accepted this. this however required getting labelled sick & begging doctors to give us treatment & getting money for this since insurance companies etc still discriminated against transgender people even when we agreed to have our gender identity situation labelled as sick & medically necessary. (similarly insurance companies still refuse to cover abortions & so do some doctors & hospitals.)

#

So this meant that AFABs were concerned about getting hijacked via impregnation. Because of the patriarchal economics of the whole thing, people were afraid of “the stepford wives” repeating itself in their own lives, where the mind can only handle what the ass can stand would mean trans women would go back into the closet.

#

Granted, that’s a bit misrepresentative of trans women & trans people because trans people & cis women who can get pregnant do have a lot more in common. we take the same meds, go to the same clinics, menopause etc gets taken due to distress over how our bodies work, etc. then again, how would trans AMAB people have gotten the money for child support?

#

historically & still to this day we basically had to beg doctors for the ability to get hormones to get a surgery to get a gender marker change & so on, which granted, what we trans people had available to us varied from locale to locale because it required collaborations of trans people, doctors, and the local govts & especially their police stations. again, before roe v wade abortion providers were super underground & secretive & there were specialized units at police stations for hunting down patients & providers under the charge of “murder”. it’s the same dynamics.

#

seriously trans people & people with bodies that can get pregnant, menstruate, menopause, etc, we go to the same clinics! women’s health clinics take trans patients, planned parenthood takes trans patients, do i need to go any further on how trans people & feminists have the same interests regarding reproductive health?

—

as for political lesbianism:

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money before having sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (i’m not sure what the conditions were like surrounding not piv sex among the straights, and therefore what the likelihood of avoiding piv sex was. I do know that rape culture was much more heavily normalized than it is now.)

“Lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included: - ace, - celibate - bisexual - gay women. Part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married, (while this next statement could be incorrect because i did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, i think the vestiges of those economic pressures such as weddings are basically the gist of “comphet”.)

The goal of Political Lesbianism as well as Lesbian Separatism was to build an economy that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, such as that of marriage, pregnancy etc. In efforts to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

However these networks, (partly due to lacking radicalization) ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. It makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> “The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210]”

[witchofeindor]

Yeah, I know these are all freebies but you've already done the more interesting ones lol: 2, 10, 14

Thank you!

2 - what character do you hate the most + why?

Before I answer this I’ll just say that I hate Silas, Marco and Bob deeply too but since 1) their horrid actions are not woobified 2) they got just the right screen time and never compromised other characters’ screen time 3) they’re actually interesting characters (Marco’s and Greg’s dynamic of a narcissist raising a caregiver is a particularly interesting one in my eyes), they are not my top hated character.

That title belongs, as y’all probably have guessed already, to Nathaniel.

Why? First of all, he’s BORING AS FUCK, super bland, and beyond that very badly done deconstruction done in 3 mins in 3.13, he adds nothing to the tropes he was born of, contrary to literally any other on the show, all of whom are not only deconstructed, but also have such depth to them beyond the tropes they were born of.

All characters feel like real ppl, and that’s why I also always managed to feel their pain, with Nathaniel he’s just. boring. and not only that he doesn’t feel like a real person, he just doesn’t feel like a consistent character at all. Season 2 Nathaniel is nothing like season 3 Nathaniel, and season 3 Nathaniel changes from ep to ep but not in a realistic manner like all other characters.

Second, he’s SO vile and all of his actions were completely woobified even though in reality, they would so fucking destructive and petrifying. He sexually harasses his employee in an enclosed space where she can’t escape him and it’s passed off as ‘hot’? He orders a hit on an innocent man just so said employee, who is at that moment very unstable, would sleep with him? He destroys an innocent man’s, a man of colour at that, business just bc he’s upset he can’t have said unstable employee and ruining ppl’s lives apparently cheers him up and like, that’s supposed to be normal. We are supposed to be ok with his behaviour. We are supposed to feel sorry for him bc he has a saddish back story or whatever (literally half of the other characters on the show grew up in emotionally abusive households, yet their toxic behaviour is never justified). His relationship with Rebecca is beyond destructive for her (and one day I WILL write that post I promised explaining why out of all her relationships, that’s the one that makes me most uneasy), yet the show erases all of the red signs till last moment. And even then the show touches on only ONE aspect of why that relationship is so toxic, and not on all aspects, which is SO FRUSTRATING BC 1) they did such a great job calling out the toxicity in previous relationships, ‘Shit Show’ covers almost all issues grebecca had (except for Rebecca’s exploitation of Greg) & ‘We’ll Never Have Problems Again’ covers almost all issues joshbecca had (except for maybe Rebecca’s manipulation of Josh). 2) The show took deconstructing toxic tropes as its mission, yet they did a VERY poor job with this one. They won’t even burn that ship to the ground. WRITE NATHANIEL SLEEPING WITH NAOMI YOU COWARDS.

He’s a blatant misogynist and a bigot in general yet all of this is overlooked. He has no legit reason for us to feel for him (and no, a sad back story does NOT work - give him redeeming qualities!!! give him non malicious motivations! give him a will to change his destructive behaviour if you want us to feel sorry for him, and if you don’t - then don’t try to fucking force us to feel sorry for him).

He is abusive, manipulative, murderous, creepy, misogynistic like woah, sexist, ableist, racist, anti-semitic etc., represents the (white) patriarchy in person yet all of his behaviour is completely woobified and whitewashed. 

I could go on and on but I’m too tired, to summarise I hate him bc 1) HE IS BORING 2)  HE STEALS TOO MUCH SCREEN TIME FOR ZERO REASON WITH ZERO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT 3) HIS DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR IS COMPLETELY OVERLOOKED AND EVEN ALMOST JUSTIFIED BY THE SHOW 4) HE IS SO VILE 5) STOP BULLYING ME INTO LIKING HIM, RACHEL AND ALINE, HE IS NOT (yet) WORTHY OF MY SYMPATHY. 6) STOP TRYING TO CONVINCE US HE’S HOT OR WHATEVER, HE’S NOT. 7) STOP GIVING HIM SO MUCH SCREEN TIME WHEN THERE ARE FASCINATING FEMALE CHARACTERS RIGHT THERE!

That being said, I don’t think he’s irredeemable, he’ll redeem himself in my eyes if only he leaves Rebecca the fuck alone.

10 - who do you want Rebecca to end up with? 

Either single or with a woman (preferably Valencia). I don’t want her to end up with a man (and even if she does, it cannot be ANYONE we’ve seen so far) bc I feel like it’d contradict one of the main themes of the show - which is exploring women’s happiness outside the world of men, so having her end up with a man, implies that a woman’s happiness cannot be complete without a man and that’s some nasty ass patriarchal bullshit. 

That being said, I recently realised that almost all of Rebecca’s relationships with men were exploitative, and the one that wasn’t (well, at least not her being exploited) was absolutely angsty, dysfunctional, unhealthy and toxic. So even though I want her to end up single (or with a woman), I also want the show to make an important note that she’s capable of having a healthy relationship by its end (as well as worthy of one), but she just doesn’t feel like she needs a relationship to be fulfilled. It’s like a bonus if it happens in the future, but Rebecca does not feel she needs one.

14- anything you wish the show would do/do differently?

All of the second half of season 3, basically. Ideally, Nathaniel would have not been a character, but even if we were forced to have him as a character, he would have not been promoted to a season regular and his season 3 arc would be limited to the revenge arc + later office exchanges with Darryl. It’d be nice to have Nathaniel unlearn toxic masculinity via Darryl and that way I might have actually not hated seeing Nathaniel on the show. (Might. I’d still find him boring, bland and dull, but then at least I’d be more accepting of his role on the show, since having such a toxic male unlearn his toxic masculinity by a fatherly, loving man who embodies healthy masculinity would be an important message to send).

But what bothers me the most is 

1) how they ignore consent issues - I would have the sexual harassment of 2.11 acknowledged right away, and I would definitely have Rebecca talk to her therapist about 3.04 and have the therapist make her realise she was taken advantage of and stop blaming herself. 

2) I’d NOT woobify Nathaniel’s destructive behaviour and show it as is, and I’d also address EVERY toxic aspect of his dynamic with Rebecca and have that ship COMPLETELY burnt down to the ground, at least as well as they sunk grebecca. 

3) Valencia would get a coming out arc, including a song about compulsory heterosexuality, to which Heather would reply chillaxly with ‘Cool, I’m the bi to your lesbian, then’ and it would make Rebecca reconsider her own sexuality, and then she’d come out as a bi with a ‘Gettin’ Bi’ reprise, to a different tune, one that suits her personality better.

Thank you for the ask!