trans women ‘pushing’ dick onto lesbians is such specific phrasing it only reminds me of school giving you dozens of hours of lessons on how to Just Say No to drugs otherwise a dealer will hunt you down and peer pressure you into meth
Tag: TERFism
do i know any trans people who haven’t housed someone in need? who haven’t themselves had to beg to stay housed or keep food on their family’s table?
almost without exception, every trans person i know is either jobless, precariously employed at minimum wage while navigating daily discrimination, or meticulously policing every single movement and word in their workplace to maintain stealth.
the people i know who aren’t in that position are, largely, working in gay and trans resource centers. they’re working for you, or people like you.
how can you look at some of the poorest among you and tell them that your main concern—as a leftist, as someone who believes in the women’s liberation, in the gay power—is that they have too much healthcare?
are you human? are we?
if you have the same views on sex and gender as the trump administration you maybe shouldn’t call yourself a radical
the etymology of the word “troon” is really fucking funny to me because like, obviously the way terfs use it in this website is because they’re afraid to use the other more common t-slur for whatever fucking reason most of the time, but what it was actually meant to originally mean was a portmanteau of “trans” and… “goon”, goon as in, the term used to refer to members of the Something Awful forums… and like, the word was coined by a trans woman there to refer to people in the forum’s big trans megathread and it only gained popularity when it was seized on by Something Awful’s vibrant community of uh, offsite permabanned neo-nazis who despite being banned were still obsessed with Something Awful (they went through several websites under names like SASS, The New Effort and Something Sensitive), and they used the term specifically in their creepy stalker threads dedicated to trying to doxx and harass transgender Something Awful posters. Basically TERFs are legit so fucking unintelligent they’ve decided to seize on a word that literally only neo-nazis used before them, a VERY specific community of neo-nazis associated with the Something Awful community in fact, and you know, the fact the word moved from an explicitly fascist context to a supposedly “radical” “feminist” context… well, it kinda tells you where and with whom TERFs hang out!
pure:
pure:
pure:
Lel I just learned a radical feminist group that got attention in the media for transphobia a while back was actually a front for a Christian fundamentalist organization.
This is well researched:
Also I said a long time ago that Christians are beginning to use secular arguments to try to justify their attempts at establishing a theocracy…and people on both the left and the right are hand-feeding them this kind of approach.
Wow it’s almost as if actual radfems wouldn’t work with right-wing conservatives
I wish that was the case, but it isn’t…
Cathy Brennan, a radical feminist, collaborated with a Christian fundamentalist group called The Pacific Justice Institute to fabricate a story about a transgender teen who allegedly harassed other students. That claim was debunked by the directors of the school that the teen attended.
And now’s a good time to replug this piece.
This is an except from an article entitled “Christian Right tips to fight transgender rights: separate the T from the LGB″ by the Southern Poverty Law Center, posted on October 23rd, 2017. I recommend reading the entire article. It details how some radical feminists have actively collaborated with Christian fundamentalists, how some Christian fundamentalists are using radical feminist arguements to push for the religious traditionalism they want the country to adhere to, and it expands upon some of the events referenced in the first article I mentioned in the original post.
[Meg] Kilgannon [a member of a Christian fundamentalist group: Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County] identified a wide coalition of potential allies outside the Christian Right who could confront trans friendly measures. Here’s her advice on how to draw them in:
“Explain that gender identity rights only come at the expense of others: women, sexual assault survivors, female athletes forced to compete against men and boys, ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty, economically challenged children who face many barriers to educational success and don’t need another level of chaos in their lives, children with anxiety disorders and the list goes on and on and on.”
The list could almost read like a manifesto for intersectionality, if it weren’t for its exclusion of some key groups, most notably transgender people themselves.
For Kilgannon, an example of effective coalition building [among the Christian Right] includes the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), a group that unites religious and non-religious women to oppose transgender rights. The co-founders of the group are sexual assault survivor Kaeley Triller Haver and lesbian activist and radical feminist Miriam Ben-Shalom, who was discharged from the U.S. Army for declaring herself a lesbian in 1976. This started her decades-long battle against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
In 2016, Ben-Shalom was disinvited from being the grand marshal of the Milwaukee Pride parade because of her views on trans people and support for so-called “bathroom bills,” which would deny people access to public restrooms and other facilities that match their gender identities. Ben-Shalom claimed to Fox6Now in Milwaukee that “my fight is ensuring that women are safe from the pretenders who might use the trans issue to get in and hurt somebody,” a popular talking point on the anti-LGBT right as a justification for anti-trans bathroom bills.
The group, according to Kilgannon, is mobilizing seemingly progressive rhetoric to oppose transgender rights: in the group, she says:
“The feminists make eloquent arguments that gender identity really is the ultimate misogyny and the erasure of women. And lesbians in the group are concerned that trans and masculine girls is a form of lesbian eugenics.”
With little transparency on its website about who and what formed the group, HATAC might simply be a secular-facing iteration of the same anti-LGBT agenda that has driven the Christian Right for decades. Hands Across the Aisle sent a letter to Ben Carson, director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, speaking out against the inclusion of trans women at single-sex women’s shelters. Revealingly, the letter’s co-signers (which include Meg Kilgannon) also include Michelle Cretella, the current president of the American College of Pediatricians, an anti-LGBT hate group that pumps out junk science on LGBT people, including attempts to link homosexuality to pedophilia or claims that LGBT people are a danger to children.
The attempt to depict the pushback against nondiscriminatory measures that include transgender people as a feminist struggle (an ironic fact for a movement that often derides feminism) was also embraced by other panelists. Cathy Ruse and Peter Sprigg, both senior fellows for the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council embraced this rhetoric. Cathy Ruse, who gave the opening speech of the panel, declared:
“Now what about girls? Did you know that feminists are at odds with the transgender movement? Last year a prominent feminist published a compendium of article under the title of Female Erasure. The subtitle is: what you need to know about gender politics’ war on women, the female sex, and human rights? What is the impact on girls who are bombarded with gender transition messages? In their young minds, do they hear that being female isn’t good enough?”
Peter Sprigg, who peddles myths linking homosexuality to pedophilia and has hinted that homosexuality should be criminalized, also wrapped his intervention in feminist rhetoric, commenting that:
“It’s particularly ironic that as our culture has developed where there is a greater range of choices, of activities, of careers that are available to men and women, boys and girls than there ever was before. And it’s really kind of ridiculous and almost retrograde to assume that we have to identify somebody’s gender identity on the basis of their activities or preferences.”
In many ways, there are possible allies to this pivot toward anti-trans secular movements: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, dubbed TERFs by some activists, have made waves in recent years. Some TERFs have reclaimed the term and redubbed themselves PERFs, penis-exclusionary radical feminists. Their rationale is that people who are assigned male at birth can never experience the same conditions as women do, and still hold on to their male privilege. (The latter becomes harder to prove in the face of the discrimination experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people.) As reported by Political Research Associates, trans-exclusionary feminists “may actually be guilty of drafting [the Christian Right’s] talking points, adding fuel to the fire of this dangerous anti-trans frenzy.”
And another damning thing said by Meg Kilgannon, excepted from the article Values Voter Summit Panelist: ‘Divide & Conquer’ To Defeat ‘Totalitarian’ Trans Inclusion Policies which was published on October 19th, 2017. It also references the events discussed in the previous article I linked.
Kilgannon said secular arguments can reach a more diverse audience. Feminism is generally a dirty word among Religious Right activists; at the Values Voter Summit, Dana Loesch declared feminism “dead.” But Kilgannon said that the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition—which describes itself as a group of conservative and progressive women that rise above their differences “to oppose the transgender agenda”—includes feminists who argue that gender identity is the “ultimate misogyny” and “erasure of women.” She said lesbians in the group are concerned that “transing masculine girls is a form of lesbian eugenics.” Citing shared opposition to gender identity, pornography and prostitution, she quipped, “I had no idea we agreed on so much.”
pseudo-leftie terfs will be all like “you don’t have a materialist understanding of gender!!! why are you analyzing social relationships of power and production? only genitals are made of matter!”
materialism is about exclusively referring to things by virtue of their physical properties and then getting confused as fuck as to why humanity assigns more value to a few metals more than others, and the more confused you are the more materialist it is
terf materialist just bumbling around like a fucking dumbass, trying to explain why diamonds are so expensive based solely on a chemical composition analysis:
“this is bullshit” she says
“this is just fucking compressed coal”
trans woman: *genitals are used against her to ridicule her, humiliate her and very often as an excuse to enact direct violence against her*
cis man: *genitals are seen as completely normal, often even as a sign of power. will never suffer any kind of humiliation for having them except perhaps if he loses a size measuring contest with his friends*
“woke” “feminists” engaging in genital preference discourse: “These two are exactly the same”.
hey terfs
as a trans guy Born as A Female Wombyn Natural Born Walking Vagina Uwu id like to go on record to say that the people who advocate for the use of “people with vaginas” over “female” or “women”
are
people like me
not trans women
it’s me and other non-women with Natural Wombyn Vaginas who have vaginas and aren’t women
it’s us
we’re the ones who don’t want to be called women when discussing the genitals we have
me! and people like me!
you can stop scapegoating trans women about this now you complete damn buffoons now stop being disgusting
Don’t reblog trans women’s selfies if you’re not actively blocking terfs when they follow you
If your support is putting us at risk it ain’t worth shit
so my housemate and i were talking last night about terfs because i’ve been getting some more harassment, and she brought up how terfism is really a conspiracy theory, and a very unbelievable one at that.
i mean, it’s literally absurd on the face of it. they believe that almost every trans woman (with the exception of those they groom in their communities) is part of a vast deception, one that’s been variously going on since Nazis, Stalin, or ancient greek necrophiles “invented” trans women. that every single trans woman is actually on some level secretly a man, whether consciously or not. that every single trans woman is lying about the self-reporting of the abuse they’ve experienced. that everyone who is allies with trans women, has a trans woman family member they’re supportive of, is dating a trans woman, etc, is actually delusional and being decieved by this giant secret army of a bunch of men spontaneously giving up their entire lives to enact a conspiracy just to be able to appropriate from women (something that men are already freely capable of doing). it means believing that every single lgbt+ kid and ally who actually, like, understands the way gender is socially constructed is actually being misled into collectively believing a mass delusion. and it means believing that somehow all of this was caused and propagated by a group that ostensibly has almost no social power at all, and that it is being perpetrated against the majority of people on earth. all of these beliefs fly in the face of sense, demanding a suspension of disbelief that would be absurd were it not for the prevailing transmisogyny in our culture. and day-to-day, it’s blatant and obvious that we are suffering, so that too must either be a hoax or a trick we are also playing on ourselves.
there’s just nothing plausible about terfism; the only reason its wild claims are listened to is because there’s such a widespread animosity against trans women that people will accept just about anything (again, there are hundreds of thousands of people on youtube that think we’re reincarnated babylonian demons or whatever). it makes terfs feel special, like they really get the world in a way other cis women don’t, that they, unlike other cis women, understand the Real Danger, and they can build a community out of reassuring each other constantly about the crazy distorted TroonWorld they live in. like any other conspiracy theory, it draws in people who feel alienated and disempowered, and gives them a quick access to a kind of feeling of social power built by their constant volley of hatred upon the lives of young girls. the adrenaline kick out of reblogging to prove someone wrong by tacking on an unrelated gotcha, probably knowing on some level the traumatic effect their constant harassment has and getting a sadomisogynistic kick out of that too. screaming again and again, “your words are irrelevant because all i can think about is your genitals.” because clearly this is all about projection and transference: the chance to enact the most violent misogynist disparagement on an emotionally safe target, a target the terf can convince herself deserves every bit of harassment and hate.
is it really even about us? is this “trans conspiracy” actually about us, or are we just the convenient targets for a series of women working theough the way their understanding of patriarchy attached to body forms rather than gender; people who felt traumatized and isolated and wanted to be part of a special community where they could feel like they have special insight; narcissists who don’t realize they never actually respond to what trans women say but just react to key words like an algorithm? people who could work themselves up into believing there is a worldwide conspiracy of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people spontaneously giving up their previous life in order to secretly infiltrate womanhood, and that everyone else who knows them and sees the experiences of their lives is just being decieved or deluded? in other words, is the situation of terfism the sort of thing we can only understand when we entirely imagine it without the actual trans women who are being targeted, as a psychotic stage play acting out traumatic patterns inside a terf’s mind? after all, where do troons and trannies and transactivists and all these images of terror come from? from inside the minds of terfs…
so perhaps we give them too much credit when we frame terfism as a response to our existence. we have existed as long as gender has; terfism is new. maybe it’s a psychological response against the women’s liberation movement that ripped the curtain from in front of patriarchy’s machinations of social construction. maybe j ray and mary daly and the others just couldn’t deal with facing the void that is patriarchal reality, so they affixed to a simultaneous hatred of trans women and patronizing contempt for cis women who support trans women, to set themselves apart as the ones who, in gazing a little south of their navels all the time, could somehow find the true feminine mystical power / political analysis, unlike all these others and their complex problems. likewise, the rising “sjw” discussion of misogyny and gender on the internet has produced a slew of young women who can’t accept fully deconstructing the patriarchal worldview, and fall even harder into weird bioessentialist stances than oldschool terfs. again, trans women here are not what is being reacted to. trans women are a target onto which terfs fixate, but what they respond to is patriarchy, and they channel it’s energies against us. we are just the victims of their trauma narratives.
all of which is to say, maybe part of the reason it’s so impossible to get through to a terf even when you’re obviously right is because none of us have anything to do with this, except being the target of the violence. terfism is about the psychology of terfs, and how they react to learning about the structures of patriarchy. we are just objects for them to use in their narratives amongst each other. i doubt they really do care if they succeed in bringing a full-scale genocidal purge against us, because we’re not real to them, and our lives could never matter to them in even the most basic human way (which is part of why they consistently treat actual men better than us). they are just using us, and until the culture of misogyny changes there’s little we can do, especially when they seem incapable of reading and actually understanding a single sentence that we write.
“is it really even about us? is this “trans conspiracy” actually about us, or are we just the convenient targets for a series of women working theough the way their understanding of patriarchy attached to body forms rather than gender; people who felt traumatized and isolated and wanted to be part of a special community where they could feel like they have special insight; narcissists who don’t realize they never actually respond to what trans women say but just react to key words like an algorithm?”
🍓🧀 (archive) 