you can’t fault trans people for finding appeal in separatism when there are literally a very significant chunk of people who use the acronym lgb, talk of dropping the t, and consistently are some of the most transphobic people yet somehow gets a seat in lgbtq+ spaces (and has influenced our movement largely for decades now)..
you legit cannot fault people for not finding appeal in anything outside of having a trans community when the greater community has been like this.
callout post for @yall-aphobes-need-to-stop, asserting that trans men should be allowed to ID as lesbians. this is transphobic, as it’s basing who can or can’t be a lesbian on birth assignment instead of identity as a woman. this attitude is especially harmful against trans women, who are frequently told we can not ID as lesbians because of birth assignment. for context, YANTS is not a lesbian, they are nonbinary and questioning if they’re a trans man as of the time of writing.
[caption: two images from yall-aphobes-need-to-stop’s blog. First image reads: “anonymous asked: men cant be lesbians. yall-aphobes-need-to-stop answered: There are a lot of men who, before they came out as trans men, identified as female and as lesbians. Then, as their identity changed and they realized they were trans men, they held on to the lesbian label.I personally don’t think those people are invalid. Why do you, anon?”
the second image contains the same post as the first, as well as another. Anonymous asked: If you say trans men can be lesbians, that means cis men can too. YANTS answered: That’s not how it works, brah]
I still don’t understand why people are using that second image as “proof” that I’m transphobic, because when I said “that’s not how it works, brah” I was essentially saying that since cis men never ID’d as women before, and they never had any transitional phase between IDing as a lesbian woman and a straight trans man, they literally have zero reason to say they’re lesbians outside of being pure douchebags.
As I’ve said many times before, trans men calling themselves lesbians is conditional. Only in the time period where they’re getting used to their new identity after coming out, around people they have not yet cone out to about their gender identity, or from accidentally falling into old habits.
I have never once said that trans men are lesbians, nor have I said they can be lesbians. All I have ever said or meant was that there are certain situations whereupon they might end up using that word to describe themselves, and it is not inherently transphobic or lesbophobic for them to do so.
i don’t want to get into this but if something isn’t specifically related to being trans, and it would be gross for a cis man to do it. then it would also be gross for a trans man to do it, regardless of how long they do it for. and there’s no ‘transitional phase’ where misgendering yourself magically becomes a healthy thing to do.
i was researching to find citations for my post connecting the history of radical feminism to biphobia but then i found a terf book – Dykes loving dykes by Bev Jo, 1990, and like
ex-het privilege. Ex-het privilege. As in, if you’re a lesbian who ever mistakenly IDed as straight, you hold privilege over lesbians who never went through that. she honest to god claims that gay victims of coercive heteronormativity, hold a fucking privilege for doing so. The idea goes that lesbians can get ‘accustomed’ to straight privilege, and never truly want to give it up
tfw when you’re such a disgustingly biphobic gold star that you claim that like 90% of other lesbians oppress you
the book goes on to talk about a related oppression: most ex-hets are also femmes, who oppress butches by bringing patriarchically-constructed femininity into lesbian spaces. there’s really a chapter on Fem privilege. she writes that being butch is literally the Only way to live authentically as a lesbian.
it straight up compares femmes to the spectre of trans women ‘invading’ women’s spaces, bc femmes and trans women are both fucking slaves to the patriarchy itself apparently
this whole thing is so amazingly lesbophobic wtf? she’s saying that she’s one of the few lesbians in the whole world entirely untouched by patriarchy, and nearly every other lesbian is a fucking Fake. you can just write about your own superiority complex over other women and that’s fucking Radical apparently
i need to lie down for like a week wtf
what does any of this have to do with trans politics….why are they “”“terfs”“”
but i didn’t even talk about trans politics here. i was talking about how fundamentally warped some of your theorists are. here are somequotes, and here’s the whole book online as blog posts. Chapter 3 deals with the spectre of ex-het lesbians, part 2 of chapter 4 deals with how femme lesbians ‘recreate patriarchy’ in their gender expression, and honestly do you agree with any of this shit? have other radfems ever mentioned this book is flawed? that it only serves to make a hierarchy of lesbians? i was under the impression this woman is a pretty influential radfem, do you agree with these theories? lmao do you get that even if trans people didn’t exist, your brand of feminism would still be a reductive pile of shit?
take all the Us Versus the Horrible Transsexuals out of your theories and you’re left with just this kind of holier than thou Gold Star bullshit. honestly god help the self esteem of all the lesbians who get sucked into your politics. you’re left with this radical version of biology where men are biologically evil, where a penis has such a powerful aura that it will discount a woman’s ability to be a lesbian for her entire life. isn’t this straight up the kind of phallocentrism your ideology is meant to be against? because this system focuses on ‘never-het’ women as the most authentic lesbians, who embody a more ‘pure’ version of lesbianhood and womanhood and therefore should earn a privileged space at the centre of lesbian politics, compared to the ‘corrupted’ version of feminsm embodied by lesbians who have ever thought they were straight. “ Once a female has had the experience of being treated as and feeling like a “real woman,” she never loses it.” It’s also written in the book’s introduction also explicitly states that she considers straight and bisexual women to be interchangeable, equally privileged members of an oppressive class of ‘man-lovers’.
You see what this is right? it’s the virgin/slut dichotomy ripped straight from the patriarchy, with no alteration. Touching a dick once in your life apparently lessens the value of your perspective, immediately makes your intentions as a lesbian and even a feminist suspect. it treats patriarchy not as a set of learned ideas and behaviours, but as some kind of permanent, lifelong stain on women’s souls. the author states outright that ‘het privilege’ can never be unlearned. you get that this is lesbophobic, right? just basically, you’re erasing the sexuality of lesbians who come out later in life, outright making them into privileged oppressors? the author likens this to a fucking invasion of lesbian spaces:
’They [Lesbians who have ever dated men] also bring STDs, danger from past husbands or boyfriends stalking them, and dildos and other sado-masochistic sexual practices’,
which are, after all, based on the inequalities and pain in heterosexual/male sex.
this comes from a long passage about how ‘ex-hets’ tend to be more abusive and even less loving than Real Lesbians, caused entirely by past association with men. caused by past what kind of broken ethics system do you need to look through to think this is worth publishing? and, holy shit, i didn’t even start on ‘the patriarchal and oppressive nature of femme lesbians’ because i’ve got no idea where to start there
i am 100% sure calling all trans people rapists and telling them to die is not being gender critical
i can’t believe people are honestly confused about what Straight privilege is and how it’s different from being just heterosexual/hetromantic
example. on one hand, we have het trans women. these are trans women that are attracted only to men. but the Straight trans woman is about 1000 times more rare. there’s an obscene set of standards that are required for a trans woman to get even a fraction of straight privilege to work:
cis passing
completely 100% gender conforming, but careful not to approach hyperfemininity or anything that would call extra scrutiny to her presentation
almost certainly truscum. will have ‘only two genders’ memes up on her facebook
has had bottom surgery, will look down on trans people who don’t want or can’t afford bottom surgery as fucking Deviants
yes that’s right it’s quite likely that it’s completely impossible for a pre-op/non-op trans woman to have straight privilege because that shit evaporates the second anyone can connect you to even a hypothetical penis
not a condition, but the mythical Straight trans woman will generally always hold the one massively outdated and misleading theory about transness being “an intersex condition of the brain”, that an accident of birth Literally put a female brain in the wrong body.
we’re talking ‘50s sexism where Lady Brains are hardwired for nurturing, communicating and shopping. Any modern ideas on gender equality immediately disqualifies you from being the Acceptable trans woman
we’re talking, the girl asking the guy out first being an unmentionable sin. the acceptably straight trans woman has to be completely fucking passive in anything involving sex and relationships
disavowing anything related to being LGBTI or Queer, absolutely no pride in being trans
the other trans women come under the T, but not the Straight trans woman. the T is for trans people who don’t want to be completely normal
trans pride is for people who are being trans wrong. Trans is Suffering
we’re talking about people so terrifyingly determined to be Straight and Completely fucking Normal that they’ve spent their life purging anything not completely gender-conformative about their presentation, and distancing themselves from actually being associated with trans people (this isn’t meant to be a judgement statement bc this is really all for personal safety)
notice how i haven’t even mentioned sexuality yet
but yes, the straight trans woman is completely straight
Totally Vanilla straight. polyam is forbidden. even kink is suspect, because it could mark you as a deviant. the only acceptable kink is like, 50 Shades of Grey style shit where the Dude always Doms and even a blindfold is risqué
I’m out of points but feel free to reblog this and add more Straightness conditions for trans women because all the terms and conditions are frankly astounding if we could count them all up
so. while the het-attracted trans women are capable of homophobia, it’s only the Straight trans women who are capable of benefiting from homophobia by virtue of being accepted into the class of Straights. these are the kind of people who can make homophobic jokes at work to make friends with straight co-workers. the kind of people who get high-fives after verbally abusing someone openly gay or trans. the kind of trans women who, (if white) gets promotions for looking like Everyone Else
and here’s an accompanying list of how to have Straight privilege as a nonbinary person:
you literally can’t wtf
straightness as a concept literally is incompatible with nonbinary identities
It’s Adam and Eve not two gender neutral names
when the fuck have you heard a third option in ‘”marriage is between a man and a woman”
an AFAB nonbinary and a dude is a fundamentally non-straight couple
an AMAB nonbinary and a woman is a non-straight couple
an AMAB nonbinary and an AFAB nonbinary couple is, do i have to say it, not straight
whatever they call their relationship, they’re the opposite of straight
even if they’re completely cis passing
i swear to god some of you people are trying to categorise Straight people as literally any couple with one peen and one vageen
if you don’t know how to categorise sexual attraction without erasing someone’s gender identity then u should probably have a time out with all the other transphobes
i can’t believe i have to tell you this because bi people have been saying this for literally decades but: having PIV sex isn’t the thing that magically bestows straight privilege upon someone. being straight is an identity and a position of privilege and nothing as simple as an action
straight privilege doesn’t land on anyone who doesn’t identify strictly as straight, or as strictly a man or a woman
literally how did we get this far that i need to write a refresher course on this. how did we let this become controversial
basically, remember Straight isn’t just the opposite of being gay. Straight is the opposite of being gay, lesbian, bi, pan, ply, trans, nonbinary, queer, ace, aro. Straight is the opposite of every marginalised gender/sexual identity. that’s why they’re marginalised, as in pushed to the margins in favour of Straightness as the default, the one identity allowed to be normal.
“yes this post 100% includes trans people and terfs can fuck off” nice but one day could you include that in the OP? otherwise terfs and other transmisogynists very easily keep circulating it without that addition. your posts need to be built from the ground up to be hostile to terfs, not just tacked on at the end
Keep police and corporations out of pride 2kforever
I’d rather have cops surround me, than some males who think they’re lesbians and straight girls who read too much yaoi and now consider themselves to be gay men.
Did I mention that all terfs should be excluded from pride too lol
“i’d rather have cops who slaughter/abuse black and brown people at pride than trans women simply trying to live their lives” lmao terfs are wild
TERF: we are here to abolish the genders
Feminist: oh, so we won’t use gendered pronouns anymore?
TERF: no keep those
Feminist: gendered clothing?
TERF: no thats ok
Feminist: segregated bathrooms?
TERF: no those are important
Feminist: so we’re going to do something about the gender binary, yeah? We’re going to attack the idea that gender is intrinsically linked to one’s anatomy, and we’re going to boost the visibility of trans and intersex people, who face the most violent consequences of the sex and gender binaries – yes?
TERF: no
Feminist: then what are you going to do, exactly? What is your plan? How are you going to accomplish this?
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