a collection

this post is actually a really brilliant, if unintentional, illustration of how white supremacy profits from racism.

it's pretty simple. first, white supremacy consistently hypersexualizes Black people. second, any element of Black culture that it can't suppress - like musical genres that reach mainstream popularity with white audiences - it labels as hypersexual and violent, and therefore as dangerous.

and third, it co-opts liberal concerns, like the objectification of women, and uses that as a weapon.

it kills two birds with one stone. part of the beauty of demonizing Black culture with a slew of tactics like these -- concern-trolling about "the state of female rap," cherry-picking a screenshot of "the top female rappers" to paint a landscape of fake scissoring videos as far as the eye can see -- is that it implies that the same system isn't forcing white women to meet the same misogynist standards.

misogyny and white violence get hidden by covering them up with the illusion that, for example, rap videos are the central location for misogyny in music.

the best part is that the entire music industry, which obviously, blatantly, is controlled by white men, gets absolved.

yes, the post above for example, calls out "the industry." but by targeting "female rappers," it plays into the tired demeaning of rap and Black culture in general. it samples recognizable passages from the same old song, and plays them without any irony or analysis.

"Unlike “WAP,” which had Cardi and Meg performing seductively and wet for an unseen audience behind the camera (which I’ll never read as a straight performance to begin with, but sure I’ll play along) — scissoring is a uniformly queer act. It is not designed for male approval, in fact it’s based in an ownership of sexuality and sexual pleasure that exists outside of cis straight men at all."

The Top Female Rappers in that screenshot, Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, have both been out as bi for literally years. They both routinely get erased and rewritten as straight, by both straight and gay people.

this post is actually a really brilliant, if unintentional, illustration of how white supremacy profits from racism.

it's pretty simple. first, white supremacy consistently hypersexualizes Black people. second, any element of Black culture that it can't suppress - like musical genres that reach mainstream popularity with white audiences - it labels as hypersexual and violent, and therefore as dangerous.

and third, it co-opts liberal concerns, like the objectification of women, and uses that as a weapon.

it kills two birds with one stone. part of the beauty of demonizing Black culture with a slew of tactics like these -- concern-trolling about "the state of female rap," cherry-picking a screenshot of "the top female rappers" to paint a landscape of fake scissoring videos as far as the eye can see -- is that it implies that the same system isn't forcing white women to meet the same misogynist standards.

misogyny and white violence get hidden by covering them up with the illusion that, for example, rap videos are the central location for misogyny in music.

the best part is that the entire music industry, which obviously, blatantly, is controlled by white men, gets absolved.

yes, the post above for example, calls out "the industry." but by targeting "female rappers," it plays into the tired demeaning of rap and Black culture in general. it samples recognizable passages from the same old song, and plays them without any irony or analysis.

vibes. this is not a joke. it’s literally vibes.

when you look at someone and find them attractive, you don’t know what genitals they have or what gender they are. you might assume, but you don’t know. you are going off aesthetics and vibes.

another reason it’s all about the vibes is because it’s very common for queer men to mostly be attracted to other queer men, and queer women to be attracted to other queer women, and just queer people in general seeking each other out, based on the aesthetic and cultural tells we’ve curated over decades (centuries even.) we’ve gotten really good at finding each other.

though honestly, and this may be a hot take, i don’t think sexuality is about initial attraction. i don’t think it’s about who you look at on the street and think is hot. otherwise any lesbian who saw a femme twink on the street and accidentally thought he was hot and vise versa would probably be bullied by the internet into identifying as bi.

i think it’s about what kind of person you see yourself with and what kind of dynamic you want to have with that person. are you a femme who absolutely loves the idea of settling down with a nice butch? are you a trans guy who sees yourself connecting mostly with other trans guys? are you a gay guy who loves bears? what do you like to do in your free time and what other demographics tend to be into that? clubbing? roller derby? dnd? what kind of sex do you most enjoy having? do you prefer not to have sex? do you prefer sex without the expectation of romantic attraction?

as in, Female-Exclusive Bisexual FEMale

as in, what TERF culture has long treated as "the only good bisexuals."

imagine having your Supportive Community be so lowkey hostile to you that you have to preemptively tell them, bssically, "it's okay! i too am only available to Females!"

i did a quick google for "radfem bisexuals" to get an example. and oh god, i'd forgotten that """bihet""" was a thing

that post is from 2014 but i don't think it's gotten any better.

maybe there's less open "discourse" about it currently, idk. but the prejudices are deeply rooted, going back to the start of the radical feminist movement.

i stumbled across someone's screenshots of a 2003 paper about it by Josephine Ho....

Hard for me to see "heterosexuality is an option!" as a loss. But I've read a different paper about it, that described how Sheila Jeffreys/the Leeds Feminist Collective really pushed the idea that straight and bi women were traitors.

That they couldn't be real feminists, would never really be able to do the true work of the movement, because they were giving some of their energy to men.

(Even if you assume that all of someone's energy should be going to feminism, not to self-care or anything else, it's still wild to assume bi women will necessarily and constantly be with men. Which is what eventually led to coining "febfem.")

The point of the paper, though, was that the feminist movement HAD been starting a conversation about consent. And enjoying your sexuality. And what feminist sexuality even looked like.

And because early radfems were so successful in promoting the idea that lesbians were the ultimate, real feminists -- that straight and bi women were "traitors" -- that conversation totally stopped. Within feminism, it didn't start up again for decades.

The bi community did have an active, ongoing discussion about what feminist, consensual, joyful sexuality looked like. A lot of the leaders of the bi movement have been sex educators. There's still an org called San Francisco Sex Information that does sex education online and by phone, which was founded by Maggi Rubenstein (the grandmother of the bi movement) and was a hotbed of bi political organizing in the 70s and 80s.

But it was generally in the form of safer sex outreach and anti-bias education. Not specifically something within the feminist community, which wasn't really a safe space for bisexuals.

If that sounds like I'm exaggerating...

This essay is from Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions. (a 1995 anthology that's available online for free at Open Library.)

The 1990 Northampton "controversy" it mentions is when the local Pride parade added "B" to its name, in 1989....

And the next year, radical feminists took over the Pride committee, removed the "B," and firmly stated that bisexuals could march with the straight people. As allies only.

Bisexuals weren't allowed back in until 1993, when the radfems involved got burnt out on organizing the event and left.

See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.

* Reducing white supremacy, specifically in early 20th century Germany, to antisemitism: This is a common trope in the Nazi movement, and one which has continued into the present day.

By stereotyping Jews as controlling money, education, and the media - and today, government as well - and as being effete, perverted, and genetically inferior - they could blame us for, and associate us with, everyone they wanted to eradicate.

We became a larger-than-life shorthand for people with disabilities, for queerness, for every infringement upon gender norms, for communism... for every imagined crime against Christianity and whiteness and normalcy.

Never forget that Hitler took his guidance from American eugenicist literature, and American genocide of Native Americans.

* The eugenicist damning of "people who are... mentally ill."

Never forget, either, that Hitler began his genocide with autistic kids, and then other kids with disabilities.

He hated mentally ill people as much as you do. He agreed with your implication that these were the deranged, useless dregs of society. The weird, delusional people who drag others down into their bizarre fantasies.

White supremacy is very clear that these people are the freaks that society should be shutting down and shutting up -- the ones who are spreading their diseased thinking through an overly tolerant liberal media.

* We are the way the Jews spread that corruption. They don't care whether it's through The L Word, or Pose.

To Nazi ideology, this is how we are intrinsically linked with Jews.

And just like brunette half-Jewish Hitler, just like the Log Cabin Republicans even, lots of us are willing to buy into the overall ideas while we firmly draw a mental fence around one or two specific sub-sub-groups.

The attempt to separate trans people, "LGB people who are not mentally ill," and Jews, is a weak attempt to stay out of the gas chamber.

Buying into so much of the overall ideology without realizing it -- you're harming even that weak attempt.

* sex fetishist autogynephile dissociated trans trenders

Your entire framework for thinking about any of this is exactly the same as theirs.

Begin with the premise that not all human lives have equal worth.

That not everyone really thinks and feels things. Not everyone should be in charge of their bodies and decisions, because they're not smart enough, not capable of the same kind of thought, or not morally sound. (Or that human worth can be measured in some other way, like the production of wealth or children or culture.)

Take a group.

Mentally label the entire population of that group as less-than. Less human, less worthy of their lives, less worthy of basic respect, of the assumption that their actions reflect genuine thinking and feeling, than you.

Having established that premise, use the criteria you've chosen in step one to explain why that group is human waste. And/or why that group is a danger to others/society.

You all pretended uninucleus was an inclusionist, when she didn't think aces were queer either. You all spent MONTHS ignoring that one TERF six or seven years ago, who was literally grooming exclusionist minors and sexually assaulting them. And up till about four years ago, I maintained a blocklist here with literally hundreds of exclusionist TERFs.

I finally gave up when it became obvious that the only thing that happens, if you ask an exclu to call out a TERF, or point out that a non-TERF exclusionist reblogged from a TERF, is that the exclusionist gets mad and blocks you.

Doxxing lgbt minors my ass. There's a reason you don't have receipts for any of this stuff. Name one "LGBT minor" who has ever been doxxed.

In 2017, when jennyslateswife ran a MASSIVE smear campaign trying to claim that all aces and inclusionists were pedophiles, exclusionists actually DID doxx vaspider. And contacted the synagogue where they were converting to try to get them kicked out. Which was their trans teen daughter's only safe community.

She was calling vaspider a "pedo apologist" for liking an unrelated post by someone else on her list. She had lists and lists of "receipts" like that.

They're all debunked at @agreatdebunkingeffort.

There’s exactly nothing wrong with enjoying “problematic” themes in fiction, and the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can get on with doing some actual activism.

Anyone who read that and thought, "you're implying that queer people are rape fetishists!" is... not interested in hearing from or supporting survivors.

Anyone who thinks that pointing out the similarities between exclusionists and TERFs means you're calling exclusionists TERFs is... not interested in hearing from or supporting trans women.

Even after YEARS of collecting exclusionist TERFs, and LOOKING for inclusionist TERFs (there are none, it doesn't make sense to them)... and watching exclus claim they call out their TERFs, then watching them just get angry and block me if I point TERFs out to them....

I'm still dazzled by how determined they are to go straight to "if you say my arguments or tactics are similar, you're saying I'm a TERF."

And worst of all, how often the cis ones then go, "and that's transmisogynist, because there are trans women exclus!"

"Adjacent" my ass lmao

Op do you not know about transitioning or like...

What am I saying. Terfs don't consciously believe in transitioning. They just fight against it like it's the only thing they DO believe exists

(It's also tagged with the statement that op doesn't know if she could be friends with "an aroace kweerio."

And you know what's really wild?

What you shouldn't do is read information from terfs uncritically. Because they aren't just sharing misinformation about trans people. They share misinformation about all kinds of things to do with gender, especially with womanhood.

They basically have conservative politics dressed up in feminist language.

Not the political goals, like making it impossible for trans people to use public bathrooms, or (effectively) to be in public spaces, at least for any longer than it would take to need a bathroom.

Just the underlying beliefs and concepts.

For example, it's hard to convince someone trans-supportive to support bathroom laws.

It's much easier to convince people that "some people are porn-brained, and it's only people with dicks." And then to get them to "some trans women are porn-brained."

If someone accepts those two premises, you can show them stuff about porn that fetishizes femininity, and introduce the (very long-debunked and still in use) medical claim that trans women are just straight cis men who get off on femininity and/or crossdressing.

You might have to start with the idea that there are straight cis men who get off on that. But a lot of people can make the leap themselves to the media stereotypes that imply that's what trans women are.

And the people who don't make that leap can still be convinced that letting some/all trans women use the women's room means letting straight cis men put on dresses and sexually assault you in the women's room.

And then you're at bathroom laws.

This is just a single example of how TERF posts make a lot of their premises sound really convincing.

In other words, we're asking you to engage MORE with these ideas.

Don't just reblog them. Fact-check them first. As in, look for specific numbers and incidents they're implying exist, and google those. See if they're correct; find out where they're using outdated or twisted info.

Google the feminist arguments for porn, or whatever the post happens to be about, as well as the ones you're reading against it.

so I did a search for the phrase.

turns out it's something TERFs reference all the time. they're still joking "sounds aphobic and possibly terfy."

like no fucking shit this is terf safe. show me one terf that doesn't think she knows more about other people's sexual attractions and experiences than they do. That's at the core of most terf concepts.

"If I find what you're doing to be weird or distasteful, it's OBVIOUSLY either because of trauma or perversion!"

sometimes queer joy is queer cringe—to you. just like virtually all concepts, “cringe” is in the eye of the beholder. sometimes the way other queer people express themselves escapes you bc of a variety of differences between you and them. age, experience, ethnicity, region, religion, ability, etc. but ultimately, they are queer and so are you. do not put them down.

i don’t care how stupid you think their little tv show or mannerisms or pride merch or lingo or pronouns or whatever is/are. we are all queer in our own ways. i’ll admit, even i’ve criticized other queer people for, idk, projecting onto spn men or smthn. but whatever! let them! let them experience their own queer joy in their own joyful queer bubble! i do things as a result of my queerness that others might find ridiculous and “cringe” too!