TERFs are not unfairly labeled. They are labeled thusly because they actively refuse to recognize the rights and identity of trans women. Personal preferences or attractions do not in any way have to detract from another individual’s gender identity. You say “same sex attraction” and “not being inclusive enough to the other sex” and these alone illustrate that you view trans women as not being women. Which means that you have categorized people based on your own desires, and not along the lines of what is productive or beneficial to the world or others.
The population of women on earth contains tremendous variety. Let us say for the sake of argument, that you are only attracted to brunettes who are tall and thin, or blondes who are curvaceous. You prefer that “type” among the population, but you don’t then say only those who match your preference are women. You don’t point to every woman in the world but the ones you like and dehumanize them, call them infiltrators, mock them, or accuse them of being men “muscling in” on a female space. Women who don’t match your ideal are still women, and perhaps you don’t prefer that type or that sort or that look, but you have no right to question their femininity, just as no one else has the right to question yours.
The way you have addressed the topic of the TERF label–outlining it as if it is an unfair slight against you, when in fact you appear to have earned the moniker, remind me of how racists sound. “Oh poor us, I’m so upset! I don’t think the races should mix, and I have a right to say that, but when I do I’m unfairly labeled as a racist! I don’t hate black people! I just don’t think they should be spending time with my kids. And it’s so unfair that black people can talk about black pride, when I can’t say white pride without being labeled a racist.” Well, now…see here…that is precisely what makes a racist–the predisposition to see others as being lesser or different simply along the lines of skin color. Lesbians aren’t being victimized by trans women. Lesbians aren’t being secretly undermined by trans pride movements. Your dislike of or division from trans women is drawn very simply along the lines of “They’re actually men and isn’t that disgusting?” and has absolutely nothing to do with them. Your perception and your selfishness are preventing you from being at peace with others and allowing them to be at peace with themselves.
You have the ability to make someone else feel accepted and loved, and all it requires is
that you try and see things a bit differently and expand your
definitions. Instead, you’d rather be small and keep the world strictly
categorized in all these tiny narcissistic packages, when in fact, there
is vast complexity to all of it, and you have no business playing the
gatekeepers of femininity. Those constructs don’t have gatekeepers. You
don’t have the right to play one because you happen to be a “woman” who
also likes “women” and so of course, is the only authority on what
constitutes “womanhood”.
When you exclude someone, you are excluding them. Plain and simple. You are keeping them out. That’s you. Doing that. When you don’t have to. You can simply stop. It’s not as if you’re the only one who sees a universal truth. It’s actually simply a case of you refusing to change your own mind. Life is too short and too complicated to be the playground of your ego. You are not entitled to define everyone else for them or tell them which spaces are theirs. And frankly, you’ll be dead some day quite soon and are spending far too much energy on such mindless discrimination.
So, I’m afraid you’ll get no sympathy from me, no matter how you try to phrase your pathos. I routinely switch genders at will. I dress according to my desires or my personal feelings at any given time, and more than once I’ve encountered TERFs who believe me to “actually be a man” “pretending to be a woman” or gay men who think I am a trans man. I have no sympathy for rudeness, for exclusion, for a breech of simple decorum. I have been called every name in the book, and all because of the inaccurate perceptions of others. I find such behaviors disgusting and truly on e of the vilest attributes of humanity.
If you cannot accept trans women as being women, albeit women to whom you aren’t attracted, then I have very little respect for you as a person. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve learned all I need to know about you. So unless you’re willing to rethink that position, you can see your way off my blog.
We accept people in my little corner. In fact, acceptance is the entire purpose of this blog.
I might also mention that expanding your notion of “woman” does not in any way detract from your own femininity. Including trans women doesn’t make you less female, in the same way that including gay marriage in the definition of marriage in no way detracts from the sanctity of the act. These are merely excuses to denounce others.
Via sending asks to the actuallyadhd blog to tell them “No, special interest is just for autistic people!”Again.
Can it stop at some point, fellow autistic people? Can it please stop? I am autistic and have ADHD. Am I supposed to alternate what terms I use depending on which I think it’s coming from? (Spoiler: Neurotypes don’t get separated in brains that way).
As I said last Augustwhen about an incident of language gatekeeping: “It tells people that we are not a community that welcomes people… It tells many people who are wondering if they are autistic that we are a community who will not welcome them. That may make them afraid to approach us, or learn more about autistic community and autistic culture... [This] is not what I want people to think of the community I love and fight for.”
So: is this is really the preeminent battle to be having with people – other disabled people? ADHDers in this context, who are often in fact what are known as autistic cousins anyway – a decades-old term that refers to someone “who is not NT, is not quite autistic, but is recognizably “autistic-like” particularly in terms of communication and social characteristics.”
There are plenty of things to critique about the ways parts of the broader disability community interact with each other. I would recommend stopping to seriously think about whether this is one of them.
– freddie mercury was a self-identified gay man and not bisexual
– people only think he was bisexual because he wrote songs about women (obviously because he was the frontman of a rock band in the 70s and 80s – one of the biggest bands in history) and because he publically dated a woman once, who he constantly referred to as his best friend and later broke up with because he wanted relationships with men
– the idea that he’s bisexual is maintained and aggressively argued by people who cannot fathom that a man can be worthy of respect and admiration while not liking women. straight people call him bisexual instead of gay because it’s an easier pill to swallow for insecure men who like the band
– when his bandmates and close friends say that he’s gay or that he literally told them he was gay himself you should trust that more than your own uninformed judgement
– forcing the bisexual label onto him is purposeful gay erasure and homophobia
and that’s the tea
it looks like tumblr ate my response to this watery bitter tea so in a nutshell:
he said he was bi
if you think bi people don’t call ourselves gay as shorthand for straight people who don’t believe bisexuality exists, you’ve missed every bi blog here that endlessly says “I’M SO GAY” when a hot celebrity comes along
people continuously tell bi people that we’re either straight or gay. Freddie Mercury got it too; one ex girlfriend insisted he was gay, another one insisted he was straight. lady gaga gets called a straight ally all day long, the advocate called Anthony Rapp gay on its March 2018 cover, it. is. constant.
he said “Love Of My Life” was about Mary Austin
and Mary said they broke up because they grew apart when Queen got big and he was always either out touring, or out rehearsing
he dated other women, like Rose Pearson
even his obituary said he was “a self-confessed bisexual”
and I’ve never, ever heard a straight person acknowledge that he was bi. they insist that he was gay because they don’t believe bisexuality exists, and you believe it because they starve all of us of representation
and lastly: can you fucking imagine how pissed-off you would be if you had to deal with this shit your whole life, you managed to get it into your obituary that you were bi, and people still refused to believe you and took your friends’ word over yours
(unsurprisingly, OP is an exclusionist)
(Also I refer to my partner as my best friend too O CRAP MAYBE I’M SECRETLY STRAIGHT)
When I say ‘dykes’, I mean ‘dykes’. As in: people who identify as dykes.
In the post you’re refering to I made it quite clear that I was writing about dykes I know and when I speak of these dykes I won’t erase or sanitize their identities by using a mainstream, tame, deradicalized word that denies the words they specifically chose for themselves to emphasize their identities and their struggles as queer marganilized working class proudly-perverted revolutionary DYKES.
Keep your fucking respectability politics to yourself.
Hmmm. Interesting post!
Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.
did he really just say “proudly-perverted”
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)
When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn.
I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history.
But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?
The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.
Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.
It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives).
Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this.
And we gotta call it by its name:
It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).
We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.
These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.
I’ve been thinking about this lately too.
The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.
Let’s start calling it what it is.
I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc) Discoursers as the social conservativesof the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.
Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited andconditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics.
Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.
And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.
It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.
It’s fine to identify as pansexual if that is what you’re most comfortable with, and there’s nothing inherently bad about it, but it’s pretty hard to deny that “pansexual” getting big as a term has a really fucked up biphobic and transphobic background, considering that it basically got popularized on the internet as “we’re more progressive than bi people because we actually loooove people for who they are, not just their genitals, also we’ll fuck trans/NB people too,” and it really, really shows in a lot of discourse and slogans from pan bloggers, and the mogai crowd. I’m not surprised at all people have finally lost patience with this shit
I’m pansexual because I see people who are nonbinary, trans, bisexual, homosexual, etc. I see them as people. But hey, I guess I’m disgusting for that.
that’s you
this pansexual discourse is not necessary bc bi just means two or more while pan means all it’s not discriminating bi it’s just something people identify by so the better option would be to delete this post bc its entirely unnecessary
Nah
you drinking some reading comprehension juice is necessary
If I could ask only one thing of the community, it would be that we stop arguing over what ‘bi’ and ‘pan’ mean. they can have heavy overlap – they can have the same fucking meaning, even – and still both be valid identifiers. I identify as bi but others might have the same attraction experiences as me and identify as pan. it’s fine! they are both fine! can we stop arguing about this please? especially people who are neither bi nor pan???
To expand on this, my revolutionary idea includes
people who identify as bi not defining what it means to be pan
people who identify as pan not defining what it means to be bi
You can define why you identify as bi or pan without including an explanation for why you don’t think the other identity describes your experience
this post is my big ‘fuck you’ to the people who respond to someone IDing as bi or pan with ‘but why don’t you identify as [the other orientation]?’
it’s seriously screwed up that bi and pan ppl are being pitted against each other like this, as if our experiences have to be completely different for both labels to exist. As though if it turns out we have even slightly overlapping definitions of bi and pan, only one (1) orientation label will be allowed to continue being used
Don’t ask people why they don’t identify as pan if they say they are bi
Don’t ask people why they identify as bi if if they say they are pan
If I could ask only one thing of the community, it would be that we stop arguing over what ‘bi’ and ‘pan’ mean. they can have heavy overlap – they can have the same fucking meaning, even – and still both be valid identifiers. I identify as bi but others might have the same attraction experiences as me and identify as pan. it’s fine! they are both fine! can we stop arguing about this please? especially people who are neither bi nor pan???
This is so weird to me because I knew very, very butch girls in middle and highschool who dated guys.
Yeah, this idea that butch and femme are specifically about “rejection of men” seems really new to me. I mean, there were always “political lesbians” around, who were all about “rejection of men” but in my experience they didn’t tend to be especially masculine or feminine. They tended to be new agey in a Mary Daly kind of way and didn’t seem especially sexual.
In contrast, when I first started lurking on butch/femme websites I distinctly remember articles like “the straight butch” about the life and experiences of a, well, straight woman who considered herself butch. Right alongside articles by lesbians. Where nowadays I’m sure that person would be deemed a trespasser.
Or like… back around 2009-10 or so, my exgf and I called ourselves “a butch/femme couple” and like… had usericons with images of butch and femme leatherdykes, and labeled those icons butch/femme rather than stag/doe or the like even though we’re both bi.
We weren’t incredibly loud about it, and digging into someone’s Lj icons to yell at them WOULD take a bit of effort, but… we were in some pretty big communities. You’d think someone would have said something, if people really cared.
I don’t know when this arose but I suspect it can’t be older than 2014 or so.
My dad’s a classic motorcycle guy, and that whole community is full of straight leather-clad butch women. As was the music scene in my old town, which was particularly metal and punk oriented. When I shaved my head back then, barely anyone raised an eyebrow. And then there’s pretty much every blue-collar job I’ve had, some of the women I’ve worked with will be feminine as fuck on the weekend, but a good portion of us use the work boots as day-to-day shoes.
I know I’m in my mid 20s but about 80% of the butch straight women I know are over 40. This has always been A Thing and honestly I’m just not sure if it’s deliberate ignorance or that the bulk of the people who claim otherwise have had especially white collar/suburb/upper middle class lives, but I’m inclined to think it’s the former.
Yeah. I’ve known a lot of bi leatherwomen and… maybe I was in The Dumb Hettish Kink Scene but im pretty sure we all considered some of them butch.
I’ve said it before but I honestly wonder if this started as a terf thing. Like… the sudden popularity of butch women seems to me to go hand in hand with people saying “the transcult pressures our wonderful handsome butches to think they’re men!” Where from what I understand, the really intense Lesbiany Lesbians thought of butches as patriarchy bearers before this sudden Save The Females thing started happening.
Today on Twitter I have seen several tweets about the accounts of people who identify as queer being suspended for posts where they talk about being queer…
For “using a slur”.
This was absolutely forseeable. This is 100% what “just so you know, IT’S A SLUR” aimed at people using the word queer to describe themselves and their activism was leading to.
I’ve seen “gay” used as an insult in my life WAY MORE OFTEN and YET
Worse, there’s reason to believe that these Twitter accounts were suspended because alt-righters and Nazis reported them for using “queer” as a way of getting revenge for all the Nazi accounts that have been suspended lately.
What did I keep warning about? What did I keep saying? That if we keep ‘problematizing’ words that living, breathing LGBTQ+ people use to describe ourselves and our reality, we’d end up where they would be used against us by precisely the individuals who hate us the most. Something that would have never happened had a term’s reclaimed status been respected, instead of people constantly screaming that it’s a slur, in any and all situations.
THIS is why I keep saying “let people talk the way they talk if what they’re saying isn’t malicious.”
THIS. RIGHT HERE.
If the word “queer” triggers you (or “queers,” “queerfolk,” “queer community” and other plural forms)…
…get yourselves a word replacer and Fucking. Stop. This. Shit.
Which also means that we now can’t advertise 90% of LGBT+ anthologies on Twitter. Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Hashtag Queer…Queer is in the title of MOST of them. Which should be enough proof that it’s not that much of a slur to a lot of us, right?
I did some quick research. At least one of the accounts has been reinstated. Is this alt righters or did somebody unleash a badly-coded bot? Either way, they need to get their head out of the sand and use more nuance.
Today on Twitter I have seen several tweets about the accounts of people who identify as queer being suspended for posts where they talk about being queer…
For “using a slur”.
This was absolutely forseeable. This is 100% what “just so you know, IT’S A SLUR” aimed at people using the word queer to describe themselves and their activism was leading to.
I’ve seen “gay” used as an insult in my life WAY MORE OFTEN and YET
Worse, there’s reason to believe that these Twitter accounts were suspended because alt-righters and Nazis reported them for using “queer” as a way of getting revenge for all the Nazi accounts that have been suspended lately.
What did I keep warning about? What did I keep saying? That if we keep ‘problematizing’ words that living, breathing LGBTQ+ people use to describe ourselves and our reality, we’d end up where they would be used against us by precisely the individuals who hate us the most. Something that would have never happened had a term’s reclaimed status been respected, instead of people constantly screaming that it’s a slur, in any and all situations.
THIS is why I keep saying “let people talk the way they talk if what they’re saying isn’t malicious.”
THIS. RIGHT HERE.
If the word “queer” triggers you (or “queers,” “queerfolk,” “queer community” and other plural forms)…
…get yourselves a word replacer and Fucking. Stop. This. Shit.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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