#when it comes to bigotry and oppression you need to UNDERSTAND

[starlooove]

No it gets me so tight that y’all are like. I don’t wanna say pathetic but the whole “what do we think? Who do we hate? Who are we agreeing with” mentality without critical thought is so fucking annoying. Like I need you to pause and think about ur own emotions and feelings and if ur neutral ur neutral! And that’s not saying don’t ask questions; obviously you should but taking the first answer provided or just agreeing without breaking it down for yourself is kinda fake

[weareuniqueandimportant]

EMPATHY GLAMORIZATION IS NOT ABOUT EMPATHY BUT SUPERIORITY TORWARDS APATHETIC PEOPLE BIGOTRY TORWARDS THEM TYPICAL BIGOT EVIL. SIMPLE AS THAT. IF YOU SEE THEM AS LEFTIST YOU'RE NO LEFTIST YOURSELF. HORRIBLE. THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE ONLY EMPATHY AND BAD TO THINK EVERYTHING YOU DO IS SUCH ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY'RE CLEARLY BEING APATHETIC IF ANYTHING WHEN THEY DO THIS...

COMES TO SHOW BIGOTRY TORWARDS CRAZY AND DISABLED PEOPLE ASWELL AS PARAPHILIA PEOPLE ISN'T TAKEN AT ALL THE SAME AS SEXISM RACISM AND QUEERPHOBIA... OR PERHAPS... LIKELY... THEY ARE ALL THE BIGOTED THINGS EVIL AND TAKE NONE THAT SERIOUSLY... BELITTLING DOWN THEIR PAIN AND DAMAGE...

[captainjonnitkessler]

people on tumblr: OMG Christianity is SOOO bad, all of this sexism and homophobia, it's so evil, DNI Christians! also people on tumblr: if you suggest that women and lgbtq+ people are horrifically oppressed under any other religion and their tools of control are not empowering, you hate POC and especially lgbtq+ or femme POC (to be clear, I agree with you)

I'll start off by saying: I get where people are coming from. When you're part of a minority religious group, you already deal with enough bigotry, misunderstandings, and stereotypes. Even legitimate criticism can feel like just one more person piling on unfairly, and it's perfectly understandable to get defensive about it.

But I'm fucking over it. If you still act like Christianity is the only bad religion, or the only religion that's ever been used to hurt or control people, you are either astonishingly ignorant, or you are intentionally throwing victims of religious oppression under the bus in order to save face.

If you are capable of understanding that Christianity is used as a tool to control and abuse people, you are capable of understanding that other religions are used in identical ways. I don't think there's a religion on Earth that hasn't been used to justify abuse, bigotry, genocide, and all manner of atrocities. You don't get to say that just because you face illegitimate criticism means that nobody is allowed to make legitimate criticisms, and you don't get to act like being the victim of bigotry means that nobody is using your religion to perpetrate bigotry on others.

And as per my last post, it's incredibly damaging to victims of religious oppression to tell them that they're lying or exaggerating about their abuse because "X religion doesn't believe in that", or that it doesn't count because "well a REAL member of X would never act like that", or that they should stop talking about it because "well of course the way you were treated was wrong, but think about how you're making the rest of us look!" It's not okay when Christians do it, it's not okay when anyone else does it. We need to be supporting ALL victims of religious abuse.

[apas-95]

dan olson is generally a good video essayist, but has a consistent and specific problem of idealism. as with other breadtubers, this is usually not a problem when sticking to analysing art, but becomes fairly egregious when trying to discuss real life.

the issue of public schooling existing, under industrial capitalism, to provide business-owners with tax-funded workforce training, is presented as one 'driving idea' that exists in conflict with an equally-influential 'driving idea', of an abstract philosophical good served by education. the fact that one of these 'views' on education has direct material benefit to the ruling class, and thus is directed resources, and the other does not, isn't mentioned, simply that it has been 'winning the ideological battle'. similarly, the issue of low-quality food being provided in public schools is not linked to any actual real-world mechanisms, no conflicting interests, but instead to 'classism', specifically the existence of a 'negative perception' of public schools and poor people.

fundamentally, this is a limitation of liberalism. without a clear class analysis, one where ideas are understood to come from really-existing material differences in positions and interests, there can only be a conception of the ideas themselves being in conflict. without an understanding of the fact that, say, the president of the USA has genuinely different interests than the workers of the same country, the actions that harm said workers can only be understood as being due to either incompetence, or Wrong Ideas. if benefits are underfunded, it's due to the idea that poor people are lazy; if homeless people are harassed at a greater cost to the state than housing them, it's due to a blinding bigotry against them, not the economic need for a reserve of labour. the fact is that the terrain these ideas can affect is defined entirely by the strictly material conflicts they arise out of. you cannot simply Educate the ruling class's bigoted philosophy away, because the philosophy was created to justify the oppression that already existed. the oppression itself must be fought, and for that its basis must be fought - the conflict between different political-economic groups with different material interests.

olson describes the 'ideological battle' between the two 'views' on schooling as one that necessarily must be 'eternal', must continue on forever. the conclusion of the real-world, material conflict that generates these ideas isn't considered. society will stay generally the same, just its ideas will change. it's a position as fundamentally myopic as a declaration by a medieval scribe that there will be an 'eternal debate' over the role of feudal lords in commerce. history has not ended.

[damnfandomproblems]

respond to a reply on this post: https://www.tumblr.com/damnfandomproblems/758279107941466112/fandom-problem-5461-cishet-being-used-to?source=share

"are you seriously equating making fun of a marginalized group to making fun of like, idk gender reveal parties or whatever people in your fandom make fun of cishets for doing? Like I don't mock people based on their sexuality but tell me that you do understand the difference between someone making fun of a marginalized group with a high suicide rate and someone poking fun at straight people.(Also, for the folks making racism comparisons: I'm white and when people make white people jokes about like, white people love avocado toast! White people love yoga and saying buddy! or whatever, 1) I don't mind 2) that's much different than a white person making fun of say, Black people.)"

As a poc, and specifically a queer (cisbi) native american (tlingit) who grew up around cishet white people, when it comes to online and fannish spaces I have noticed that people tend to cross the line from making harmless fun to just straight up expressing and encouraging hatred

While this is definitely a minority of people who believe and act out on these beliefs, there is a problem of people truly believing that cishet white people are all genuinely evil and inherently evil at that, and that the only way to "fix" (cleanse) the world of all problems would to be committed genocide in fandom spaces. They immediately assume the worse and dehumanize and rejected similarities they may share with cishet white people. It's absolutely prejudice and need to not only be called out, but utterly tossed in the bin

I get feeling uncomfortable or even wary of people who appart of the same kind of people who have oppressed you because you are not sure if they too have been indoctrinated into the bigotry, but we live in the modern era, more often then not you'll find that most cishet white people just don't care about poc and queer stuff

Cishet whites aren't responsible for crimes they weren't even alive for, that their ancestors committed. They are far more often ignorant because the education system is shit and has a lot racism/ableism/etc baked into foundation ontop of not really being how to do own research, then they are intentionally malicious and bigoted, and the best way to prevent them from being indoctrinated into bigotry is to just, expose them queers and poc who are chill with them and are willing to educate. Insulting them and assuming they want to hurt minorities just because they're cishet whites is the best way to push them into radical hands that will instead pain queers and poc as the ones who just want to hurt others for being cishet whites, because "obviously" why else would they immediately assume you want hurt them unless they want to hurt you?

Hating anyone for things they cannot control (race, gender, sexuality, etcetera) only breeds more hate. Yeah, don't tolerating bigots, but if genuinely can't stand a certain demographic of people ignore them rather then going out of your way to hate them. Educate if you can, or shut up when talking to people who haven't don't anything to you beyond offend your sensibly for committing the crime of being born a certain way, because otherwise you're just feeding into the genuinely malicious and bigoted peoples hands and making it easier for them to take the ignorant and make them malicious too

Hatred at the end of the day is hatred, sure, it might not be the racist or homophobic flavor of hatred, but it's still hatered. And no one should hate anyone, at least not for the things they can't control (because fuck pedos/rape-philies in general and murders and genuine racists of course, they can all go get shot, don't get me wrong and twist my words like I know some of y'all are just dying to do)

Posting as a response to a previous problem.

[benevolentbirdgal]

In my experience, liberal/progressive gentiles have begun in the past 3-5 years to understand that antisemitism still exists, but with the caveats that they are unable to see it as coming from anybody but white, cishet, nonimmigrant and otherwise non-marginilized people with conservative politics and they feel the need to regard it as a lesser issue than other forms of bigotry.

It's an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) idea in the Jewish community that, from the perspective of history, we're basically on our own at the end of the day. Though I do believe there are righteous among the nations (so to speak), as a population, social justice people have not dissuaded me of this anxiety - everytime I hear "oh x can't be antisemitic because they're [other marginilized identity]" I note that person has decided to write passes for antisemites. When Jews are told "oh but [other form of bigotry] is the REAL issue" I hear the speaker telling me they can't bear to consider us specifically, as a traumatized community in our own right. If I speak up about how another marginilized person inflicted antisemitic harm onto me, I'm more likely to be chastised for presumed bigotry on my end than for the inflictor of antisemitism to be held accountable (I must reflect my own biases, it's presumed bias to ask the same of goyim). The same people who go "uwu punch Nazis" refuse to examine, even in passing, the blood libel in their midst.

People can be right about one thing and wrong about another. They can be legitimately marginilized in their own right while still using systems of oppression against others. This applies to so many things, and antisemitism is certainly not an exception.

Five years ago, I would have told you that progressives don't believe in antisemitism. Now it's a little different - many, perhaps even a sizable cohort, do understand it didn't end in 1945. But what is fundamentally missing is either the ability, on a population level, to examine the hatred within the movements and among other marginilized people and address it with anything resembling the same vigor they do other issues.

[olderthannetfic]

I think most people are honestly reasonable, but I really need fake woke people of any creed to stop conflating everything with their attempt at acting all virtuous. Because I've been seeing more and more of them, calling themselves woke, but only so they can act like they're saviors of the people, and laud themselves as caring and seeking justice.

Everyone has flaws, nothing is black and white. Majorities and minorities can be wrong, right, or somewhere in between. The world doesn't end in at the Western border.

A black person being homophobic isn't suddenly less offensive and homophobic than when a white person is homophobic. A straight person being racist isn't worse than a gay person being racist.

Yeah some of these groups are more privileged, but the perpetuation of negative behaviour in any capacity can not be excused.

Everyone has flaws, everyone can do dumb shit. Reflecting on our, their, whoever's actions is human. We need to do better, not try and reject human growth and understanding, by deflecting away criticisms of harmful actions because the person is less privileged.

We need to keep these logistics tight, and you can't pretend to be woke, but then also erase people's responsibility when they fuck up. Just as we need to call out the system, and the majority, and people with privilege when they do something bad, we need to not loosen the threads or even completely cut them when it comes to marginalized people.

If a black person uses a slur against Asians, you do not get to pretend it isn't bad because black people are oppressed. Or vice versa. If someone uses a slur that isn't theirs to reclaim, we call them out, no matter who they are. Everyone needs to learn, not think that being oppressed means you can do no wrong.

We also need fake woke people to stop excusing people attacking people of their own demographic. No, it's not okay for a gay person to use gay slurs against another gay. No a brown person randomly calling another brown person a slur isn't ok either.

An Asian man insulting an Asian woman for not rejecting him, and then insulting her as not being a good Asian* isn't just sexist it's also racist. A bisexual person calling another bisexual a deranged unfaithful cheating whore isn't just sexist and ableist, it's also biphobic. We can't just excuse it as "internalized" at all either, some times it's not internalized, some times the person is just a bigot. Internalized is in some cases used to almost erase the personal fault of the person's actions, but it should never be used as a be-all end-all excuse for bigotry.

To be woke doesn't mean you get to selectively sleep on select people perpetuating harmful behaviours and beliefs, just because they're less privileged. To be woke means you stand in defiance to injustice and make a stance to make the world better and see the injustices done.

--

Hypocrites are rarely aware that they are one.

[rjalker]

I fucking hate it when people go "oh Progressive™ art gets so much more scrutiny than things Blatantly Made By Conservatives™~! How come my favorite Queer movie gets criticized for being racist so much? How come my favorite author gets criticized for being transmisic so much? It's such a double standard!"

Are you sure it's a double standard? Are you sure it's not just that you think any criticism is too much criticism? Do you understand the purpose behind pointing out criticism and telling people they've done something hurtful? Do you think it would be even remotely constructive to explain to conservatives that they're being racist? Do you understand why people are more willing to educate self-styled Progressives™ about the ways they're being bigoted?

Are "progressive" stories and creators actually "held to a higher standard" or do you just think they should be immune to criticism because the author appeals to people like you in particular?

Someone taking the time to explain in detail why XYZ "progressive" author is racist but not bothering to explain why ABC bigoted authors is racist is not "holding progressive creators to higher standards".

It's assuming that people who call themselves progressive actually care about learning from their mistakes and genuinely want to do good in the world, including unlearning bigotry they didn't notice.

If you're supposed to a be a good person, the thing you do when someone points out bigotry is apologize and do better in the future. Not bemoan the fact that no one sits down and writes a five thousand word educational essay telling the MAGA Don't Tread On Me Republicans where they've gone wrong and how it could be fixed.

I think you people are just insecure bigots who don't like seeing your favorite creators called out for bigotry, so now you have to pretend that they're being uniquely oppressed because other oppressed people are taking the time to educate people about the ways they're being bigoted and hurting people.

And again. You people need to aknowledge the fact that criticizing bigotry from people who say they want to be good people is a hell of a lot more likely to be productive than criticizing the bigotry of people who've openly and happily dedicated their entire personality to being racist and bigoted "to own the libs".

It's not a double standard. It's literally just people trusting that people who call themselves progressive actually want to be progressive.

[wordslikesilver]

Seeing the discourse lately on transmisogyny and coming across new terms like tme and tma being used more than I think I’ve ever seen before because of everything going on had me uneasy, not gonna lie, I always do when I find new terminology from the alphabet mafia because I’m thinking to myself oh boy, more stuff to explain to cis people. Looked into it, it all seems pretty reasonable to me tho for including nonbinary femmes and femme intersex people I’ve sorta just always by default assumed “Trans Femme” was really good given the whole “it’s a spectrum and transmisogyny by definition is talking about the people on the femme side of it who didn’t start there” so admittedly I’ll probably be a grump about changing my vocab soon.

But then I see some new shit in the wake of all this TERF nonsense and bigotry being used against trans women? Detransitioned cis women calling themselves trans women and saying WE don’t understand the concept of gender well? The audacity? Look, changing the labels of a community to be less offensive is something I support so loudly and love and adore. This isn’t that. This is people encroaching on our pride and our identities and pretending the flag we nobly fly, the icon of bravery and unifying love in the face of oppression that it is, isn’t clearly “ours” enough. That it’s something they’re allowed to say belongs to them too so we need to come up with something new to call ourselves when we discuss the pain we face in our lives. Erasing and rewording the definitions of who we are til our identity is gone altogether. Moving the goal posts and telling us to teach everyone a whole new set of labels when the average layman still doesn’t even know that “Cis” isn’t a fucking slur, let alone what it means. Never forget that at your core when you fight against this new bigotry and they try to dance circles around you with their words and misdirect the conversation to stupid shit. Alienation from an already unified identity is a classic means of making it so much fucking harder for the oppressed to have their pleas for basic rights be acknowledged. Never let your people’s pain be silenced by someone pretending to they’re too stupid to know who you’re talking about.

To the TERFs and bigots who find this, and I fucking hope you find this, Trans Woman is not yours to fucking claim just because “gender is a construct and complicated” you will NEVER know the pain people like me have been through. I refuse to acknowledge a claim on my people’s identity because someone managed to misunderstand a concept hard enough and it’s now snowballed into a new form of complicating discussions of deserving basic and equal rights. I have felt the pains a cis woman has felt, I have felt sexist and awful treatment from men, I have been catcalled, I have been stalked, I have been made unsafe, I have been expected to be a mother for no other reason than “all women want them one day” and I have been assumed to be less than a man for some imagined frailty of the fairer sex. I am a woman. We can share that label, I WANT to share that label. We can bond over sapphic love and feminine experiences and hardships we both suffer under a cruel patriarchy. In just the same way, I have never known the pain of period cramps. I don’t have a vagina. I will never have a pregnancy scare and I will never feel the side effects of birth control. I wasn’t catcalled by gross men walking home when I was in high school. I was never sexualized by the media when I was in middle school the way cis girls would see happen to them. I am NOT a cis woman and I will never be one. I grew up as a boy, I lived and I loved as a young man, I saw the world through masculine eyes and was raised being treated as one, I will never pretend I know what it’s like to be a young girl being preyed upon and used by an older man. I will never touch that label because it’s simply not correct at the most fundamental level. I am a trans woman and that made me who I am. After all the people I’ve met and all the experiences I’ve shared, it took time to be so proud of calling myself a trans woman. Holding up the sky would’ve taken less strength of the heart, but now I feel the deepest pride knowing I’ve done something inconceivably harder.

But you, you people cannot take that from me and my sisters. I draw the fucking line at saying you think you have the slightest notion of what it’s like to be transfeminine. To be born in a body that makes people see you as a man from the very first glance, to hear you wrong from the first whisper of your voice. To spend the rest of your life working tirelessly in a fight against your own biology and/or the perception of the entire world whenever it casts its ugly eye upon you. Some of us don’t even have the privilege of fighting those perceptions or the things or own bodies have been programmed to force on us. Some of us don’t even want to have to do anything about how we look because it’s bullshit to have to fight for that basic respect from our peers in the first place and their standards just don’t align with who we are deep down in the first place! Gender is complicated but this isn’t. Have you EVER held your breath in the women’s public washroom and tucked your feet in because you were scared you’d make other women uncomfortable, because you’re not sure if you’re in an accepting space? FEARED what might happen if you step into the women’s change room to put on a bathing suit or your work clothes? Have you EVER been threatened with physical violence and called slurs in front of your own mother on public transit? Have you ever had to tell your doctor you’re ready to drop out of school to show how “sure” (re: fucking desperate) you are to be prescribed HRT? Sure, lots of cis women are on HRT, I treat them as patients all the time. Have you ever had a hot flash at the age of 21 because you were late on your injection? Did you pierce your skin with thin metal once a week for years and years to get the breasts you have? Did your body do irreparable things to your bones and your voice that make it so no one will ever see you as a woman at first glance without thousands of hours of effort, of tears, of sheer fucking focus and fixation on achieving the ideal self you see in your mind and dream of being one day? DID YOU HAVE TO BEG YOUR GOVERNMENT TO LET YOU HAVE THE BODY YOU LITERALLY ALREADY HAD AT BIRTH OR DID THEY NEVER EVEN SO MUCH AS TRY TO GET IN THE WAY OF JUST BEING CALLED MISS ON YOUR GOD DAMN LICENSE? Cis women can’t even begin to imagine the feelings I have felt, building my wings of feather and bones and wax, day after day, dreaming of flying beside my sisters who were born with wings they’ll never fear will melt, all the while remembering the last time someone born in a body like mine flew too close to the sun. Maybe they’ll perhaps know what it’s like to bind them to their back and hide them beneath their shirt, maybe they’ll even have sheered and ripped the bones from their sockets and one day wish they could have them back and sing with the rest of the angels like they used to, but they will NEVER fly on wings like mine, fear the heat from the light that makes life worth living the way I do, fear the same slings and arrows screaming up through the air from down below and even at times from above my head to let me know loud and clear they wanna knock me outta this sky, this sky that’s so beautiful and holy I cry when I touch it, the very first chance they get.

Transphobia won’t ever take the sky from me. My Icarian Wings are made on the foundation of generation after generation of my people who dreamed and yearned to touch the sunlight blue skies and the infinite glittering nights, each of us telling each other, telling ourselves we’ll never fear the light again one day, lifting each other when we fall, soaring higher each time than the ones whose wax melted before we could save them could, warmly teaching each other how to fix our broken wings and freely gifting each other the love it takes to make them stronger for the next flight. Holding each others hands as we dance and show each other how to fly, hand in hand and heart in heart with the angels who call us sister angels. A cis woman having the audacity to flap her never melting wings and saying hers are just like mine, that the name of my people is just a construct so she can say she she’s just like Icarus too, makes me wanna vomit. Pretending she knows what it’s like to watch in terror as all the feathers fall out suddenly in a moment of weakness making her break her bones upon the rocks, listening to everyone around her say “I knew it, I knew his wings were fake, look at him crawl along the ground in the dirt and the mud where he belongs.” Pretending that if two people both have skin, even of a different colour, that since the labels are made up, the sun and society itself will surely treat them the same if the white one calls themselves black.

Transphobia won’t ever take the sky from me. Come and fucking try to take these wings from me and see what happens.

[spacelazarwolf]

Can i ask why people seem to only refer to black and brown people? I'm east Asian, and it can feel kind of bad not really being included in the language surrounding talk about racism. We're one of the groups that faces the most discrimination and hate crimes, especially with how covid started. Me and nearly every Asian person i know has faced racism over our lives and many of us have very pale skin. It feels very alienating to be, in a way, left out of the discussion. I understand that often we're included somewhat implicitly, but it doesn't look like it when the language doesn't represent it.

so before i get into it, i'm giving two caveats: 1. even though i'm jewish and my family and i have had a complicated history with being racialized as non white, i'm still racially white. so while i always try to take into account all the things that my family has experienced and that the people of color i know have taught me, that's still the individual perspective i'm speaking from. 2. i live in the us, so that's the culture and society i'm talking about. it may apply to different places in the west (or even outside the west idk) but it may not so like inb4 "#american centric" bc i am literally talking abt america.

re: your actual question of why people seem to only refer to black and brown people, i think it's mostly used to talk about issues that affect darker skinned people of color, but sometimes used as another variation of "people of color" that's meant to encompass all nonwhite people. i've definitely used it that way before without really thinking about it, but i can see how that could make groups who may not see themselves as being black or brown feel left out of a conversation that still absolutely pertains to them. i think we as a society are currently struggling with what vocabulary to use when we talk about racial issues. there's a bunch of different acronyms and phrases people use, and listing out all the different racial and ethnic groups we can think of always leaves someone out.

but i also think our struggles with vocabulary are caused in part by the way our view of race has become very black and white. especially when it comes to east asians, i think people fall way too easily for the model minority myth + think lighter skin = less oppression, so they think east asians don't need as much advocacy as other groups. but as you said, especially since covid, there's been a massive spike in anti asian racism, and that's something i don't think people are really taking seriously. there's this one scene in station 19 (cw for discussion of anti asian hate crimes) that i feel like addresses this so well. people are afraid to downplay the severity of anti black racism (which is understandable considering that anti black racism has been downplayed for hundreds of years), but they end up gaslighting other racial and ethnic minorities or even themselves about the other kinds of bigotry that exist. and as one of the characters states in the clip, "it's all bad."

and like, as a jewish person, i definitely feel a lot of solidarity with east asians because our struggles are dismissed in similar ways. for those of us who are light skinned, we're often told (in my experience, usually by non black people) that basically our skin is too light for people to care because "black people have it worse." people use any success our communities have had as a reason why what we experience Can't Possibly Be That Bad. but what they're missing is that it's all connected. the same people who are perpetuating anti blackness are likely perpetuating anti asian racism and antisemitism too. you can't get rid of anti black racism without dismantling white supremacy, and part of dismantling white supremacy is addressing anti asian racism and antisemitism. we can't just keep hacking away at one brick and expect the entire wall to come down. we have to bulldoze it all.

[trans-androgyne]

I'm so sick of this. Trans men could be fucking like "lets have a discussion about unsavory attitudes or actions within queer communities when it comes to gender" and a bunch of fucking people INCLUDING OTHER TRANS MASCS are like "wooooooow cant believe youre attacking TRANS WOMEN like that this is obviously bigotry. after all theyve been through?? I am going to assume this mild criticism is about trans women (which you never said it was at all even once) and THEN tell you that because transphobia exists any disagreement with a trans woman means you want her to be HARASSED. I can't believe you think harassment is okay. also even though trans women are poor victims (I am speaking on behalf of all trans women) who you arent allowed say anything in opposition to (I think trans women are defenseless and attack people based on the idea that any criticism is trying to ruin their lives) (don't you know its impossible for a trans woman to ever be treated with respect or have a good life ever and in fact they are all doomed to being treated horribly?) (this is me HELPING trans women by the way I'm an ALLY) and trans men are the problem and somehow even though we're all in the same community Poor Trans Women are so oppressed they would be RUINED by disagreements (I am speaking on behalf of every trans woman and I know not a single one wants to have an interesting discussion about oppression or gender) this is me being an ally btw I could never be transmisogynistic by talking like this. also somehow transphobes check what type of trans you are, if youre a trans woman they hate you and if youre a trans man they say "yay you're a man" and treat you wonderfully because if youre a man youre always treated well no matter what other types of oppression you might face I think of this as being progressive.

Sorry for the long rant(?) I have a lot of thoughts. In summary: some people see themselves as such trans woman defenders that they a hundred percent loop around to infantilising them by implying its too hurtful to have a conversation. I've seen this exact type of behaviour as a trans man when it comes to misgendering. someone slips up and instead of being like "oops I mean he" they go some equivalent of "oh my gosh im sooooo sorry i cant believe I did that to you you probably feel miserable have I ruined your day oh my goodness dont cry ill make it up to you I know you have now become an emotional wreck from the horrible thing I did to you im sorry im sorry im sorry I just need to make sure everybody can hear how HURT you are by one misgendering" this is an example of how "being an ally" loops around to calling you fragile and a literal baby. They make it worse even though theyre "on your side" by implying you cant handle anything and they have to "fix it" because you just would collapse immediately at something maybe affecting you.

On the one hand, I understand where a lot of this is coming from. Trans women do get harassment campaigns started against them for small issues. It’s best not to resolve real problems with specific transfems in a public forum. So many have described the feeling of transmisogynistic hypervisibility as a panopticon and that very much applies in these discussions.

But trans women also aren’t made of glass. And they aren’t immune from making mistakes and causing harm. Making posts that contradict some trans women’s understandings of transmasc oppression is not transmisogyny. Pointing out that something they said or did was hurtful or transphobic is not transmisogyny. People act like this is how you treat trans women with respect and it’s very much not. This is not being “normal” about trans women. They are human beings who yes need some extra care and protection but are also capable of talking things out instead of collapsing into dust at the first sign of criticism. I know not all trans women like being treated this way in the slightest. I hope we’ll be able to find ways in the community to still uplift their voices and mitigate harm done to them without putting them on a high pedestal or shielding them from all criticism and intracommunity discussion that does not go their way.

[atopvisenyashill]

9, 10, 19, 22 🙃

9. worst part of canon

hmmmmmm. while i will say the lack of dothraki/essosi povs is probably worse narratively, i do at least understand why he chose to build the narrative that way (even tho i think the narrative he’s building ultimately suffers for this choice). dead ladies club just pisses me off. why is everyone dying in childbirth. why is the name of ned’s mom not relevant. why did the oldest dayne have to be a man. why do we have no idea when shaera daena daenaera died. george i’m in your fucking walls.

10. worst part of fanon

again it’s just objectively the insane arya stans or the targnation people bc they make their illiteracy everyone else’s problem and have on more than one occasion dogpiled on random artists for *checks notes* drawing a character with a skin color darker than FFFFFF. does anyone know the story of the butch that got got by the french resistance in wwii for being a nazi, or that one lesbian that was friends with hitler? that’s what these people are and it’s not an ~annoying fandom quirk~ it’s just naked bigotry.

if we’re talking “annoying but not problematic” tbh for MOI it’s the king jon truthers, i just can’t take any of it seriously when he’s denied winterfell and a lordship for himself more than once, doesn’t like leading, and is bad at it when he tries! ntm i just don’t feel like it’s narratively satisfying if one (1) targ ends up winning and the other two die. i need all three of them nowhere near the throne at the ending to be happy!!!!

19. you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

hmmmmm. i definitely didn’t think i’d get so hardcore into parent/child incest when i started this blog i’ll tell you wHat. especially when in my humble opinion people get way too into incest ships and act like they’re oppressed for it ajsjs like idk perhaps that is the destiel shipper in me but i’ve spent so long in fandoms where people would be like “if you can’t see anna/elsa lesbianism you’re homophobic” they’re sisters EYE am not the freak here and that’s fine let your freak flag fly but be REAL aksjsj. and now i’m like “stop yelling at me for saying alicent’s sons want to fuck their mom when i’m right” lol. and also having spent so many years going “why do you guys think jonerys is romantic that’s his AUNT” turns out i can get into targcest when it doesn’t involve dany (bc i just don’t think it adds anything to her story!! what she just uncritically follows in the footsteps of her ancestors and the practice which helped abuse and subjugate women in her family forever and fucks her nephews?? for what for WHY)

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

we all know what it is babeeeeee

i also do feel like there’s a distinct lack of smallfolk stans like people will pay lip service but when it actually comes to smallfolk characters it’s all “oh i think davos is boring” “oh i don’t see the point of bringing gendry back into arya’s story” “oh i hate hugh/ulf” “oh robb’s campaign is against a vile evil it’s fine if he marched over some poors” “well mirri murdered a baby so” i’ve even seen “dunk is boring” IS THERE A GAS LEAK IN EVERYONES HOUSES COLLECTIVELY. WHAT HAPPENED TO EAT THE RICH HUH??

[tanadrin]

OK, so this post is going to probably look like I’m critcizing @jadagul quite directly, and I am, but only because he is a proximate example of something I find worth commenting on generally. This does not change the fact that I generally like and respect him, and find him pleasant to interact with.

There is a style of political thinking which seems to have an intuition that the law should work like mathematical formalism or computer programming, with a very close and literal relationship between any act of government (an executive action or an act of a legislature) and the constitutional or statutory text which enables that action. That even if the law is a messy and organic human institution, it shouldn’t be, and in ideal circumstances the whole system would be fairly mechanistic, with little room for human discretion. This line of thinking seems to work itself out in ideas like, “OK, discrimination is bad; but so is the government interfering in private actions; so anti-discrimination legislation is bad, too, in a different way.” Or “democracy is important, but part of democracy is free expression; and how you spend your money is a kind of expression, so limits on how you spend your money when it comes to politics is antithetical to democracy.” Or, in the anarcho-capitalist form I most strongly associate this line of thinking with, “OK, people seem to want a lot of freedom, low taxes, and the government not to tell them what to do; so we can (and should) construct a society where the government does very little--ideally nothing at all--and everything that can be is transferred to the private sphere, to be a matter of contract law and civil litigation. Since government power is very little or nonexistent, and all oppression comes from the government, everyone will be very free.”

This isn’t just wrong in the sense that the law is actually an irretrievably messy and organic institution because all human institutions are irretrievably messy and organic and we’re stuck with them; this is wrong because it is good that human institutions are messy and organic, and it would be bad if they were all purely mechanistic. I know this probably seems like a self-evidently silly thing to say if your intuition is toward the mechanistic and formalistic (and believe me, I share that aesthetic preference a lot of the time!) but it really is true. It is simply not possible for a legal system to reduce all potential coordination problems, political disputes, and breaches of social order to a set of general principles, and trying to would result in either monstrously cruel outcomes, like the ancient law codes that just killed everybody who broke them, or total structural collapse, like that town that got taken over by libertarians and then bears (because the libertarians didn’t understand the specific governance needs of the town, like how regular trash collection kept the bears away).

In particular, trying for this kind of metaphysical purity in your legal system often seems to cause people’s aesthetic preferences to short-circuit their moral ones; and because no legal system actually is metaphysically pure in this way, ultimately neither is satisfied. The thinking seems to go, we want a free and equal society without oppression; but government action is frequently oppressive, especially when it interferes with private business, so we don’t want to have anti-discrimination legislation. So what they get is a society without anti-discrimination legislation, that is also markedly unequal, because it turns out that bigotry just doesn’t go away by people saying “bigotry is bad, people shouldn’t do that.” Or, people want democracy; but they also want people to be able to spend their money how they want (that’s key to the liberal part of liberal democracy), so they don’t want to impose limits on spending around political campaigns. As a consequence, wealth inequalities distort politics by making the only viable candidates the ones who appeal to wealthy donors, putting a whole class of policies that poll really well outside the political pale--i.e., a profoundly undemocratic system where very popular legislation stands no chance of getting passed. Or, people want property rights and healthy markets; commensurate with that, they resist any effort to impose limits on those property rights or redistribute wealth. They get, as a result (and often hand-in-hand with the distortions of democracy that stem from the previous example), a system with a lot of rent-seeking and corruption where fair competition is almost impossible and there are a lot of monopolies that are bad for both businesses and consumers, far from the libertarian utopia of their laissez-faire dreams.

This isn’t meant to be a Chestertonian set of counterintuitive gotchas, where I try to argue that the real democracy was monarchy all along or something, just an observation that you have to look at, and argue from, actual outcomes, and not just what is conceptually appealing, even if you want to further quite lofty and abstract political ideals. Much the same way that abolishing your military does not keep you out of conflicts, if it results in you suddenly getting invaded by your neighbor, or abolishing anti-discrimination law would not result in a freer society, if you have a bunch of racists itching to discriminate against the minorities they don’t like.

I remember a post of Scott Alexander’s once expressing confusion at the idea banks would just decide not lend to black people in the midcentury US, because surely they would stand to make more money if they had more customers, and if they had more customers the banks run by non-racists would outcompete the banks run by racists, and I remember thinking, like, come on dude. There is a whole complex social ecology surrounding race and racial discrimination, which is going to drown out any possible weak effect that you are pointing to here. And he simply could not see it because it was not part of the world he knew, and he lacked the imagination to understand it.

Everything the law touches is like this. Law is not actually, nor can it be, a separate domain from politics, or economics, or private business, or religion, or any other aspect of human life. It is a loose category of thing we have drawn a fuzzy border around, like so much else. And because of the complexity inherent in the problems it presents, trying to decide which policies are best without reference to actual outcomes at best makes you prone to a kind of head-in-the-clouds idealism. But much more often, I think it means people support things actually corrosive to the principles they claim to espouse.

[spidermanifested]

as someone who likes to think hes thought a decent amount about the story of fullmetal alchemist. aka every single day for the past however many years. the thing about the bafflingly prevalent contingent of people who insist that fmas politics are actually very nuanced and leftist is. that i honestly cant figure out what parts of it they even mean?

is it the part where fascism is defeated by war criminal "heroes" who insist that the best way to enact large scale change is to never directly challenge systems, but to infiltrate them and work your way up to the top until you can become the dictator yourself and then tell everyone that actually voting is cool. unless the whole world is about to end, in which case youre allowed to do One coup but then you have to lie to the whole country about what happened and go back to doing incrementalism

is it the part where fascism isnt interrogated realistically as a cultivated product of social unrest, stratification and bigotry, but instead was instituted by a Cosmically Evil Badguy, and all the imperialism and genocide was just kind of a byproduct of that, and if we beat that one guy then everything will eventually be fine

the part where the difference between a Good King and a Bad King is that a good king CARES about his subjects and a bad king DOESNT care >:( but even within the "we need to turn amestris into a democracy!!!" lukewarmly liberal moral framework theres zero discussion of the fact that maybe monarchies are also pretty bad. and the good ending is when the Good King promises to protect the oppressed ethnic minorities in his country but god forbid those minorities actually have any political power themselves

is it the part where the most oppressed ethnic minority in *amestris* is represented by "Religious Terrorist (But Sad)", "Terrorist's Dead Brother", "System-Loving Cop", "Old Lady Who Shows Up Once To Say Not All White People", and "Literally Gandhi. Look At Him Hes Saying A Gandhi Quote"

is it the part where killing people is the worst thing you can do, but if you do mass murder to civilians on behalf of a government but feel really bad the whole time you can still be a good guy, but if you do any amount of killing for any other reason or while feeling an emotion other than sadness youre a borderline-irredeemable monster, unless youre barry the chopper in which case it was funny so its okay (< the only part here thats true)

is it the part where the main character gains the respect of a member of the aforementioned ethnic minority by being racist to him. the part where a black girl has to get scolded by a white girl to realize that stealing is wrong. the part where the only major character to refuse to take part in a genocide is constantly called a coward for doing so by his epic girlboss hypernationalist sister and this is never really challenged. the part where the Sad Religious Terrorist gets guilt tripped so hard about killing 2 people while he was having the worlds most understandable panic attack that he decides hes fine working together with the guys who killed his family, because the System Loving Cop is so heroic, for wanting to do incrementalism, which again, is inherently moral

like the more i think about it the less i get it. this is the most milquetoast "bad things are bad and good things are good" status quo loving political narrative for 15 year olds on earth. where is the super relevant social commentary. because it feels like its just incredibly surface level "the bad guy is like hitler so the author is antifascist and based!!!" 2014 harry potter fandom type nonsense and its REALLY weird that it always comes from people insisting that theyre just that much better at media analysis than all the haters?? and that any criticism must be missing the point. what point. what is the point

[cardentist]

well ! I'm making this post to make a point.

for context, I made this post [Link] earlier, wherein I spoke first about my frustrations with cis people not considering the trans perspective, and Second about my frustrations with me doing so immediately being framed as an attack on trans women specifically Because my frustrations were tied to me being a trans man.

(I do Also consider myself trans fem, but that wasn't particularly relevant to the original post, so I didn't mention it at the time).

this was then followed by an interaction in dms wherein the quiet part was spoken out loud.

1: that trans men Are Not equal to trans women, and that it is taken as an attack on trans women to present them as such (it is not).

2: that the idea that any individual trans man could face harm within the trans community from any other individual is, itself, transmisogynistic because it implies that trans women are capable of oppressing trans men (it does not).

3: that it is Impossible for any individual trans woman to ever speak over any individual trans man, because trans women are women and trans men are men (it is not).

4: that trans women possess some Secret Additional Layer of oppression that no trans man could ever match up to no matter what their individual experiences are, even when that trans man is Also a trans woman (they do not).

5: and by extension, that every single individual trans woman has it worse than every individual trans man in every situation (theoretical or real) no matter what, thus making anything that a trans man experiences Lesser Than by default (do I even need to say anything).

I am going to put the entire conversation (censored) under readmore, but I need it to be understood that This Is Not Hyperbole.

when I say that trans men are singled out and attacked for the simple act of having a voice This Is What I Mean. it is considered by some people to be Inherently Transgressive, Inherently Bigoted, for trans men to consider themselves equals. for trans men to consider their experiences equal.

and so, it is Assumed by Default that a trans man speaking on his own experiences is harmful to trans women Regardless of whether trans women are being spoken on or not.

not everyone thinks this way of course (and the people who Do think this way aren't dictated by gender, this isn't trans mascs vs trans fems this is about bigotry, which anyone is capable of)

but a Significant Enough proportion of people Do, and people don't recognize or realize this fact.

if you feel that I am being hyperbolic, if you've never been exposed to this way of thinking before, if you find yourself Agreeing with any of the points I have listed above, I do suggest reading through this conversation and the posts linked to it.

content warning for a brief non-graphic mention of rape/csa within the linked posts and this conversation.

Me: I know odds are you don't want to hear it, and that's fine you can ignore this message entirely if you'd like. but I Do think you'd better understand what my perspective is if you were to read my response

I do think I Understand where your perspective is coming from, and I get it on an emotional level. but there's a disconnect here where intent is assumed when it doesn't need to be [Screenshot of tags written by anonymous that reads: transandbros (transandrophobia + bros) they think that they can’t be the most privileged in a group because they think trans women have privilege over them. End Transcription]

I am trans masc yes, I am also trans fem, and I don't enjoy assumptions like this being made about me.

Anonymous: i said trans women as in TMA [transmisogyny affected] people. not transmasc or tranfem which can be used by tme [transmisogyny exempt] and tma [transmisogyny affected] trans people

Me: like I said in my response, I want to go on testosterone, physically transition, and then present femininely. I want things like an audibly deep voice, facial hair, a square jaw. I also want to keep my breasts, I want long hair and feminine features, I want to dress femininely and be read as a feminine And masculine person

I also live in mississippi. 

now do you think that if I do that I will walk outside and never ever experience transmisogyny.

Anonymous: also trans men oppress trans women and benefit from transmisogyny. i say this as someone who benefits from transmisogyny as well. i oppress trans women. i experience misdirected transmisogyny as someone w [with] facial hair and a low voice and long hair and tites. And when people in and out of my community learn about my gender and transition, much of tht [the] MISDIRECTED transmisogyny disapears[disappears]. my experience is better in certain situations than it would be for a similar trans women. if tht [that] is a statement you cannot aggree [agree] with than [then] there is nothing to discuss here

there is no way for a trans women to speak over a trans women [I think they meant trans men?] if they are otherwise on [a] similar playing field (white, abled, class, religion etc) thats not what speaking over means. thats like cis men thinking cis women are dominating the conversation when they make up even 30% of the conversation

Me: the post I was responding to was written by a cis person, I asked people to consider the trans experience and spoke about how it was frustrating that people Don't do that. /I/ was the trans person speaking to a cis person, and then it was decided after the fact that I was somehow stepping on trans women's toes by doing so.

Anonymous: okay great. shouldve kept that context than maybe you wouldnt have also revealed u [you] think trans women can oppress trans men

Me: this is why I suggested you read my response, because I don't believe that and I also explained explicitly why I didn't include the username of the original poster (though part of it, of course, is that I didn't want anyone to harass the op) 

Anonymous: i did read ur [your] response thats how i know you think trans women oppress trans men as equally as trans men oppress trans women

Me: that's not really how oppression works? I believe that trans people are able to Hurt Each Other, because all people as individuals are capable of harming each other as individuals. this is not the same thing as oppression, oppression is a systemic power structure that puts one group above another.

what I've said is that I believe trans people are equals, and you think this is a bad thing? 

I didn't even say that trans people are equals In The World As A Whole (though I do believe that), I said they're equals Specifically Within The Trans Community made by and for trans people.

Anonymous: and i wholeheartedly disagree with that! its incredibly clear as a tme [transmisogyny exempt] trans butch lesbian in community with trans women, its incredibly easy to see how tme [transmisogyny exempt] people are privileged over tma [transmisogyny affected] people

including in lgbt and trans specific spaces!!!

Me: so your point is that from Your perspective you have seen the way that people within queer and trans spaces have made you feel othered and hurt people for being trans fem.

my point is that This Is True, I have seen this as well. but I have Also seen people take that exact same energy and point it at other trans people. I have personally been othered and torn down both for being trans masc And for being nonbinary at different points in time. 

I am telling you that you are right, but that people need to be more open to other people's perspectives to get a clearer picture on the over all situation. 

because when we look at Everyone is saying, the truth seems to be that All trans people are torn down for who they are.

why is that a bad thing? what does it hurt to consider that I have also experienced something similar to you?

I Really hope that your point isn't that I am privileged compared to other trans fems after I spoke in depth about being raped by a man and how that's affected me for the rest of my life

Anonymous: no im litterally [literally] saying that amab trans fems and trans women experience another layer of oppression from afab trans people. i litterally [literally] told you i am also an afab transmasc person. why do you transandrophobia truthers litterally [literally] always jump to trauma dumping ! if you want to put it in those terms, you are privileged in comparison to amab transpeople who actually have higher rates of sexual abuse and rape. you are not more privileged than cis people who experience lower rates rape and sexual abuse.

and fuck u for reading me call myself a butch lesbian and calling me transfem so it suits ur argument

Me: 1: I'm sorry I called you trans fem when that isn't how you identify, I thought you'd explained to me that you were tme trans fem like you consider me to be. we're both upset and this isn't really the best medium to hold a conversation with, so it's easy to word things in a way that can be misinterpreted as well as misinterpret things that would be clearer if you had more time to sit on and absorb the information.

I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but I am frustrated with you continuously jumping to the most negative reading of my intentions possible.

to rephrase my point:

"so your point is that from Your perspective you have seen the way that people within queer and trans spaces have othered and hurt people for being trans fem."

followed by the rest of it

2: that's not actually true, there are a few studies that have found that trans mascs over all face similar (and at points higher) rates of sexual abuse to trans women.

(this is a link to a tumblr post, but that tumblr post is a link to a study, I've included This link because it has easily accessible pictures of the relevant graphs).

though coincidentally I've recently made a post that relevant to this exact topic

the point I made there (and the point I'm going to make here) is that saying "This minority group experiences This Thing less than That minority group" isn't useful when speaking to individuals because those individuals have still experienced trauma.

individual people Are Not every statistic about their minority group, and they cannot have their Experienced compared based on those statistics

because Experiences are not dictated by statics. and treating people as if their experiences don't matter because their experiences don't match the statistics is cruel.

the other point being, of course, that using studies like this to try to hard measure the Amount Of Oppression between different minority groups is silly.

these are self reported with relatively small sample sizes of specific locations at a specific time. they're Important to prove that there is a problem, but there has never and will never be a measure of the experiences of every trans man vs every trans woman that we can then calculate and compare.

I'm sure there Are some statistics out there that show trans women with a marginal increase of sexual abuse compared to trans men, just like there are some statistics out there that show the opposite.

what this tells us is not that one group Inherently has it worse than the other, it tells us that trans people experience sexual assault, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed.

3: I find it incredibly distasteful to insist over and over again that someone is not oppressed, that they are privileged, that they haven't been hurt in a meaningful way. and Then refer to them speaking about their lived experiences as "trauma dumping"

if you can't handle frank discussions on the trauma and oppression that trans people experience on a day to day basis then you really shouldn't be commenting on that trauma.

[End conversation]

screenshots of the full conversation can be found here: [Link] I would've made a video to fully prove that these aren't doctored, but I don't want to out the person I was speaking to. they don't deserve harassment

[itspyon]

First it was bitches comparing everyone not liking dreams current trauma being written into a fic and dteam being mischaracterized and lgbtq books being banned claiming both are censorship

Now it’s people comparing sapnap update account updating on kick streams to not boycotting companies supporting genocide

Like when will people wake up

WE HAVE LOST. THE PLOT. IT'S GONE. IT HAS EVAPORATED BEYOND COMPREHENSION

i was talking with some activist friends about kick the other day, and one of them, transgender woman of color, told me:

"i am slowly being able to fund my [ trans ] care because kick 1. actually pushes my channel so i get seen by people and 2. actually pays me. people want to so strongly moralise the fact they don't use kick, when it's so easy to flip around the script by weaponising this platform to benefit the oppressed. you simply have to learn to push past the shock value activism [ love this term ] and see how you can do better by outweighing the bigotry with kindness" ( slightly paraphrased )

and genuinely, in what position is anyone to tell her she's in the fucking wrong ? then people on twitter come and make equals of kick, and not just kick, the MENTION of kick on ANOTHER PLATFORM, and genocide. i'm supposed to take that seriously ?

whatever the fuck you think about sapnap in particular and his deal, that has nothing to do with the fact that you're putting talking about a website that you don't like and GENOCIDE on the same level, without really understanding how heavily nuanced the kick debate is

this shit isn't black and white and i need twitter to wake the fuck up