like as a trans woman I have felt massive demand to make myself sexually and romantically available to men and that demand has been institutionally enforced by therapists and outdated diagnostic models of transsexuality as well as broader cultural notions which demand heterosexuality as a prerequisite for womanhood. As wittig explains, to be a woman is to be heterosexual, which is why to be a lesbian is to be labeled by men as dyke or not-woman. That structure of compulsory heterosexuality for women is 100% imposed on trans women, in really acute and intense ways. The liberation of trans women cannot be separated from lesbian liberation.
Another thing the crying discourse is making me think about—probably more controversially than the other things I said is:
Sj communities have understandable reasons to exclude people, BUT exclusion is almost always experienced as painful.
What I mean is: you know that guy who doesn’t get let into the no dudes allowed feminist online forum and yells about it, or the cis person who seems weirdly aggressive about following people who have “don’t follow if ur cishet 🌈🌈🌈” in their byf, or whatever?
Im gonna defend those people for a second. I know, I know.
We tend to classify those people as “entitled” or at least as “nosy”—why are they obsessed with finding out what we talk about when they’re not around? Ugh privilege amirite ew!
But the thing is… exclusion is something humans experience as painful usually. We experience it as something like rejection or shunning, and being rejected makes us get Emotional.
Like, I remember years ago I looked through someone’s online store. The person who ran the store also ran some kind of online forum for wlw. It didn’t ban bisexuals, BUT it insisted that any bi woman who wanted to join was required to reject sexual interactions with men and promise they would never again date any.
I didn’t really understand this at the time. My mind went “what would be so different about me than other bi women that I can’t even talk to them? How can anyone promise never to date a gender they’re attracted to ever again?”
And I couldn’t think of an answer. So I emailed and asked “what’s the difference between someone who has dated men and chooses no longer to do so and a bi person like me who has (at that time) never dated anyone?” And the response I got back was of course that I was being entitled and trying to barge into peoples space.
And the thing is… I didn’t get it. And most of tumblr would side with me on that I think: that’s “biphobic.” (In quotes to say the thing has A label not to claim biphobia is not real.)
My emotions—my feelings—were: “what possible secrets could exist that bi women can’t even hear lest the Lesbians be cursed?”
And the thing is… exclusion isn’t always inappropriate or wrong. Excluding white men from the lesbian woc dance makes sense.
But being excluded feels painful, and I’m pretty sure it feels that way whether the reason you’re excluded makes sense or not. Humans are hardwired to want to join groups, and to feel uncomfortable when groups push them away.
So… I don’t know. Sj isn’t always bad. But I sometimes feel like sj says “if you’re excluded and you get defensive, it shows you are entitled”
When the more I think about it the more I suspect it’s “if you’re excluded and you get defensive, you’re perfectly normal, but quite possibly also annoying.”
Well, like, the other thing is that this particular dynamic is one where the people doing the excluding are positioning themselves as moral authorities.
Suppose I’ve grown up thinking that feminism is the moral authority on gender relations and that the patriarchy is evil and pervasive.
How am I going to react to being told that I need to be excluded from feminist spaces, especially if that exclusion is based on a part of myself I can’t change?
As far as I can tell the canon SJW response is that in a patriarchal society there are already plenty of existing spaces for the privileged, but if I’ve really bought into the idea that the patriarchy is evil then it no longer has the capacity to comfort me psychologically.
“Come on, the evil people we’re trying to stop are still there for you, so why are you whining?”
Like, imagine someone who is expelled from a Christian Church, and the pastor has this conversation with them,
“I don’t know why you’re so damn needy about getting back into our Church’s good graces, there are lots of religions out there. The Church of Satan is right down the road, I know they’ll take you in.”
“So… So you’re saying those other religions aren’t so bad, and that there’s lots of paths to God?”
“Oh, no the Church of Satan is deeply heretical and you’ll probably be going to Hell if you join, but the point is that you can join them if you need a church so badly.”
I hadn’t specifically thought of that but yeah.
“White people are colonizer devils and you can’t trust a thing they say. Don’t listen to allies, they’re idiots. Listen only to us! Wait whoa whoa who said we wanted you around!? You think you’re allowed in here? Go hang out with your ugly sexist men and your latte drinking Beckys! …wait, you don’t want to? Why not? Oh boo hoo.”
I think expecting people to change their dating habits to join a freaking internet forum is entitled. That’s an awful rule.
I can see this from both sides: both that it’s painful and terrible to be rejected and excluded, but also that sometimes a group needs exclusive spaces.
I don’t know what the solution is, except being kinder and more welcoming to allies. Have spaces where allies are allowed and welcomed, interact with allies in these spaces.
That’s really the only solution I can think of too, deflection through “well we won’t see you tonight, but we all hang out over here together on Thursday though!” or the like.
How and when do you communicate with allies and how do you treat them? If the answer is never it might be worth thinking about why that is.
I’m not going to say separate spaces are NEVER good, but… the experiences I’ve had in them have pretty much all been disappointing and full of bitterness.
It’s entirely possible that the identities I don’t have are precisely the identities that get the most out of separate spaces, but I’ve personally very rarely seen ones that don’t get ugly.
The questions of “what are masculinity and femininity”, what does it mean to identify as a gender, and how can you say any aspect of a gender are “good” or bad or how can you say there *are* aspects
Like, if you assign the “protector” role to men as a positive attribute, is that sexist and does it remove agency from women? If you assign grace, beauty, and caring to femininity, is that stereotyping?
Or can we say that each person is a mixture of masculine and feminine and we can all identify with our different sides? What do masculinity and femininity mean? How do we want to define constructs and apply them?
no.
No what you’re like a super thick condom i can’t even feel the discourse through you
“He fails at the simplest gestures of courtesy, from walking in front of the queen of England to his refusal to fly the flag at half-staff after John McCain’s death. At a listening session with survivors of a school shooting, he needed a note card saying “I hear you” to remind himself to pretend to listen to them. Curiously, Trump’s social autism is the source of his appeal. A Pew survey found that what Trump’s supporters like most about him is his personality, not his policies. They like his personality more than his policies for the same reason that men like the sex scenes in pornography more than the plots: Vulgarity is the point.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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