tiny but mighty

anyway here’s spade’s yearly update: i’m a trans guy aroace lesbian. yes you can also call me a straight guy. yes you can also call me a lesboyan. he/him lesbian. i am still also aroace. fun fun fun!!!

i’m pro-mogai and pro-bi/pan lesbian. i’m pro-any queer identity claimed in good faith.

when i started this blog in uhh? 2015? 2016? i was still pretty exclusionary despite claiming to be an inclusionist. i was still in the process of leaving behind truscum/trandmed ideology and i still held onto some bigoted beliefs. like asexuality wasn’t a spectrum and pansexuality was just bisexuality under a special label and other queerphobic beliefs. i even hated the word queer LOL. i also frequented in radfem spaces.

ANYWAY some people might not know this but ace discourse was actually popularized by a group of aroace radfem women who frequented in truscum spaces in 2012/2013 (i was around when the word “truscum” was coined! originally it was just trans guys telling other trans guys that you can’t ID as an ftm lesbian!!! GUESS WHAT I AM NOW LOL) that i used to be a part of. we called ourselves “asexual elitists” and basically all the ace discourse points argued are directly parroted from there. they’re just old truscum and radfem arguments repackaged and reworded.

cool have fun see you next year. glad to say that my several years of unlearning problematic beliefs has finally paid off and i am now officially someone that 14 year old me would hate!

anywhoo i’m gonna talk a bit about some positivity.

i used to absolutely loathe the fact i was aro. i would only let people refer to me as ace, and only mention i was aromantic if i HAD to separate my romantic and sexual orientation for whatever reason.

i still mostly refer to myself as ace and let it just be assumed my aromanticism is innate in that single descriptor, but i’m not ashamed of it anymore. 

i’ve had one crush, and the horrible throw-uppy feeling that lingers for months that comes with it was enough for me to wish to go back to being 100% aromantic during that whole process. it’s traumatizing, to not have control of yourself and feel like throwing up and avoiding someone you really like.

the feeling passed in february(or january? december? i can’t remember actually) and i found myself thankful for that, and glad i no longer felt those intense feelings for anyone. honestly? it’s something i never want to feel again, and i’m glad i haven’t. and if i begin to, i’ll make sure to stop it immediately.

i was desperately wishing to be aromantic again and no longer feel that crush, that having a crush sucked and other aromantic people who felt the self-loathing that i did were not missing out on anything. it’s truly a rush of everything at once and a loss of rationality.

but it passed, and i found myself once again thankful to be aromantic, to not have these feelings, and to never want them again.

i mean, it happened once and it can surely happen again in the future, but if i find it happening again– this time i won’t let them grow out of confusion of what they are, i’ll make them stop as soon as i recognize them.

You can’t separate out polyamory and kink and queer communities overlapping history into neat little, mutually exclusive time lines because you think kink is yucky or because you have some weird hate torch you’re carrying for polyamorous people.

The three communities developed together, symbiotically, and still overlap in many of the same ways today.

To exclude kinky and poly points of view from queer discussions is ignorant, ahistorical, and a byproduct of an assimilationist outlook that ultimately only rewards cis, white, monosex, middle/upper class, perisex, abled WASP types who try their best to look as straight as possible while throwing everyone else under the bus for their own benefit.

let people not be affiliiated with kink community holy shit it’s not inherently linked to queerness and I dont want anything to do with it because ive gotten nothing from kinky people. 

also i dont know how you can call wanting to seperate oneself from a harmful movement ‘assimilationist’ like yall got the big guns on your side, go to any pride parade and its a bunch of white guys in leather. even in hetero society kink is mainstream and ‘vanilla shaming’ is used against women to harm us. 

A bunch of sex negative folks who erase the benefits poor folks and people of color got from the shared history of kink and queer spaces, while spreading radfem beliefs regarding kink and sex that were designed to manipulate, and control, or ostracize and slander women they found unacceptable (especially sex workers).

Alternatively, my enemies are people who remove specific blame from an abuser and place it on an entire community. Which is a form of abuse apologism that allows abusers to harm more people and often leads to victim blaming.

also nice second time today someones out here calling a TWOC a radfem lmaoo how the fuck does kink benefit people of color i dont feel benefitted at all 

Like y’all do realize terfs have a lot of talking points that aren’t specifically “trans people should die,” right?

One of this talking points is that, unless you’re having sex a way they like, you’re dirty or abusive or brainwashed.

This then spins into sex worker exclusion.

The fact of the matter remains that the kind of queer history that people want to erase is the “messy” part that benefitted the working poor and POC.

Leather bars specifically were spaces where queer people could gather. And as certain parts of the queer community started to assimilate and become as heteronormative as possible (rich, white, cis, monosex, perisex, Christian lesbians and gays who would rather be accepted by straight society by throwing “weirder” queers under the bus than helping their fellow queer folks) these spaces remained a safe haven for the less acceptable parts of the queer community. The dykes, the trans folks, the poly folks, the working class.

By denying this, you paint an inaccurate version of history. You paint a version of history that supports assimilation into cisheteronormative societies. You paint a version of queer history that’s convenient for terfs because it allows them to act like they themselves didn’t ostracize a large portion of the community, while also allowing them to dictate what someone else’s proper sex life looks like.

There’s no problem with you not wanting to engage with kink. In fact, if kink is part of your trauma, I would deeply encourage you not to, as it’s clearly painful for you.

What you don’t get to do is call an entire community of people abusers. What you don’t get to do is paint an inaccurate queer history. What you don’t get to do is come onto a post about the factual shared history of certain spaces and say that your personal experiences supersede everyone else’s as well as history’s.

By sayin all kinksters are abusers (which is both a radfem AND a Christian fundamentalist calling card) you are being disengenuous and shifting the blame from specific abusers to entire communities. When you shift the blame from specific abusers to an entire community, the response goes from “that person shouldn’t have committed abuse” to “that victim should have known better than to go near abusers.” You are contributing to victim blaming.

And by claiming that all kinksters are abusers, you are in fact silencing queer voices. Your silencing the voices of queer kinksters who have nothing to do with abuse, you’re silencing the voices of queer kinksters who have previously experienced abuse, and you are silencing queer kinksters who may engage with a certain kink as a form of abuse coping.

There would be no problem with you speaking about your personal experience.

But that’s not what you did.

You came onto a post about shared history and called a bunch of people you don’t know abusers.

And then you used your identity to try and escape reprimand. And you did nothing to address how what you’re saying comes from shady rhetoric that harms victims.

Also I haven’t extrapolated jack shit. Sex negative attitudes come from radfem and Christian fundy communities. Call a spade a spade.

Here’s a neat Wordpress article discussing some of the things I’m talking about:

https://complicatingqueertheory.wordpress.com/community/bdsm-communities-and-the-intersection-of-queerness/

I know it’s popular press, but if you’re truly interested in sources and not just screaming down people that disagree with you I’ll gladly find some academic papers backing me up.

I don’t have a tendency to just keep whole ass bibliographies on hand. Nobody does.

Race fetishization as a kink is a problem. HOWEVER that’s not what I’m talking about (if we’re going to discuss people bringing things into this argument that were so far off base as to be irrelevent lmao)

What I was talking about was what happened when rich white monosex cisgender wasp-y lesbians and gays decided assimilating to a cisheteronormative, racist society was easier than helping other queer people. Which is when they pushed every queer person that didn’t meet that description, every kinky person, and every nonmanogamous person to the fringe for their own benefit.

But I don’t expect you to touch on that since you only seem to be interested in pushing swerf rhetoric while dodging blame using only your identity as the reason you shouldn’t face disagreement or repercussion. Because there’s no way a marginalized person could be bigoted. There’s definitely no reason we talk about intersectionality or internalized phobias. /s

“I have reasons for being an assimilationist it’s not safe to be out”

So you… want to… hide who you are to belong to a society that hates you and force others to do the same?

Lmao that’s the shittiest defense of assimilation I’ve ever seen.

It’s kinda sad actually.

“Things aren’t safe so I’m gonna do to myself and other queer people exactly what mainstream society did to me rather than fight for or support the people fighting for a world where we can all be safe.”

also sex negative doesn’t mean what you think it means. you linked your shitty article, ill link mine https://www.rebelcircus.com/blog/what-it-means-to-be-a-sex-negative-feminist/ 

So you… want to… hide who you are to belong to a society that hates you 

yes

and force others to do the same?

no

#jesus to just so blatantly admit to wanting to be like mainstream society?

yes

#have you no care for all the people thats literally going to kill?

the people thats going to kill is me. i don’t know why safety isn’t a valid enough excuse for you. 

and you know what, on top of the safety thing, being an outsider is fucking exhausting. Nowhere did I say everyone should assimilate, but im getting the impression youre gonna say it’s bad for me to choose that on a personal level no matter what. and i dont need to be lectured down to, im aware a lot of that is internalized transphobia and i have complex fucking feelings about it cuz im a sentient human being so sorry if i don’t share stuff you have no business knowing publically 

you know what i mean its a fucking trade off, you wanna understand how hard it is for trans women to choose between being true to ourselves and not being murdered for exactly that, heres a good starting point

When you enforce those decisions on other people and become misogynistic, queerphobic and arrogant in doing so is when you become wrong.

The people assimilation is going to kill us everyone. It’s detrimental as a philosophy to every queer person. It is WHY queer suicide rates are so high.

I’m not cis. I’m not straight. I’m visibly queer. I’m a rape survivor. I’m nonmanogamous. Don’t sit here and preach like you’re the only one who suffers.

And you STILL are sitting there happily insinuating I’m a rape apologist without a single god damn bit of proof, so I don’t give a single FUCK what your article says.

Anything that puts you in a place of thinking you know why someone is having a certain kind of sex better than they do, especially if the overall attitude is that girls are just too stupid to know and those nasty libfems are rape apologists… is terf rhetoric. Womp womp.

Essentially what they are saying is that to protect themselves they much weed out the bad/percived bad actors. And then used Contrapoints video “the aesthetic” to make that point, completely missing what Contra was saying at the end of the video

(btw content warning for heavy internalized transphobia/misogyny, gender essentialism) but at the end of the video both sides of her dialogue say that they should just hang out and chill because no matter how much Justine thinks performing femininity matters, the cis will still use both of them against each other, because they don’t really care they just need fodder, a reason to shit on trans women, and they will use other trans women as that fodder

The Blair white clip at the end really shows this message: that this right wing token trans woman always felt as if she had to do damage control for the lefty trans women who wouldn’t act like her, wouldn’t act right, and that’s what this person (in the thread) is saying is good praxis (its actually not)

It’s respectability politics 101, matched with some pretty insidious antisexualism, saying that they don’t need to include kinky and/or polyam people into their praxis because it would make everyone look bad, it would get me killed, trying to control the loud/different people as if transmisogynists will not find another reason to kill you

Trying to control/shame/exclude people who are dismantling misconceptions and hierarchies because it makes you uncomfortable is actively trying to uphold that hierarchy, and when you exclude and shame kinky and/or polyam people you are upholding heterosexism

respectability politics is always about upholding the oppressive status quo, it’s about fighting the louder left, and the only other group that fights the left is the right

This person is sliding right into radfem rhetoric in all the traditional ways, having a percived enemy that is dismantling your way of life and the belief that you can do anything to stop your oppression by changing another oppressed person’s actions

Most noticibly: thinking that con noncon and raceplay are the sole reasons why rape and racism exist today, when in reality like most kinky roleplay scenes they are just personal (and consentual) reflections of the world around this person, it doesn’t cause rape or racism the same way that fiction doesn’t cause it, because imo even the most “hardcore” scenes are just fiction, someone can safeword and the book is closed, no effect on society today

But because it’s a smaller target and easier to destroy, once they do it feels like something was accomplished, they destroyed racism and rape in the world, and book burning really does make the world a better place

first of all thats not why i linked contras video, I said why in my post which you blatantly ignored. 

you know what i mean its a fucking trade off, you wanna understand how hard it is for trans women to choose between being true to ourselves and not being murdered for exactly that, heres a good starting point

yeah so go off i guess

i also never said anything about polyam people, who i don’t have a problem with. 

“thinking that con noncon and raceplay are the sole reasons why rape and racism exist today,“

as someone who experiences racism why the fuck do you think i would imply that?? that makes no sense 

me: *laughs nervously in asexual*