billionares can't be murdered

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Bonus:

Because this has always been done in Denmark.

The problem is you can’t fully disentangle the role poverty plays in domestic violence, meaning that yes, the risk of this would decline through simple means of financial aid.

but also, as I pointed out in posts prior, the main problem kids who face domestic violence have is the lack of external resources. People are remarkably resilient in the face of hardship (yes even from a young age) when they have a good support network. Unfortunately there is no financial aid for children in these circumstances (at least in the US) and hence no means of finding any support.

once again, systemic issues directly worsen the very problem you might presume filtering out good parents from bad parents through comprehensive screening tests would solve.

Also on that. There is no way to actually predict the hardships a child might face. You might think you’re doing us a favor by making it so that parents with cluster b personality disorders can’t have children, but the truth of it is most cases of child abuse don’t involve any diagnosis of the parent along these lines.

Screening would fail doubly because most abusive people would never admit to having any of the traits associated with these personality disorders, and screening tests would only give them a tool to use against their own victims because not only would they pass these without issue, but they would also wave the results of these tests in front of any and all criticism just to say “I can’t be abusive. Look at my perfect score!”

The only way to tell if someone is abusive is by catching them in the act or listening to their victims. Sorry, that’s just how it is. Now you could move the goal post further and say “okay let’s just make it so abusive parents can’t have custody of any future kids they might have in addition to anyone they victimized previously.” And like sure I guess?

but i also think the “female orgasm demystified” stuff is just as harmful if not misleading. because it’s usually just one specific experience that’s meant to be taken as true across the entire population, and it’s often based on a single anecdotal experience with one partner. This is often weighed against the reality that everyone’s sexual experiences will vary, not solely because of variance in physiological characteristics but also variance in emotional and mental states, someone’s relationship with sex, etc

like one time I saw a vid of some dudes who tricked some guys into thinking they were going to meet up with minors, instead they forced the two dudes to fight on camera. it's voyeurism, it's not about protecting children it's about the good feeling YOU, the viewer, get inside when you watch this happen.

or like I was arguing with some people about CSA being punishable by death. i don't care if child abusers die, let me say that. wouldn't care if they all killed themselves to a person. but there is a REASON child advocacy organizations will tell you that executing convicted pedophiles is a bad idea, and that's because it will lead to more children being killed to hide the crimes of the abuser.

A big problem in queer feminist theory in my opinion (in general, not just in the discourse) is a tendency to treat identity labels as positionality in and of themselves. This frequently goes hand in hand with gender essentialism and extremely deepseated cisnormativity. People will take two groups that share an identity, and then use that to transitively map a certain positionality onto one of those groups by comparison. And generally, the cis, binary perspective is the one being imposed on the other. And if you're not watching for it or familiar with the topic, you might not notice the switch, because of how common it is to treat the two concepts as interchangeable.

But they're not. For example, A cis man and a trans man and a bigender man all share the identity of "man," but they each occupy a different positionality in the world. As in, the way other people perceive them and treat them, and the way they act in response to the world, is different. They occupy a different material context.

A lot of theory by and for trans women has already explored and firmly established this idea, in regard to trans and cis women. We have words like transmisogyny to describe how the positionality of being a trans woman or transfem effects, for example, the misogyny a person experiences.

Many people don't extend this to its natural conclusion when it comes to trans men and non-binary people, though, and justify that with a misunderstood definition of intersectionality. Our shared identities with other groups are used to project experiences on to us that are not actually true–and in doing so, to silence us.

This is what someone is doing when they say things like "of course trans men have male privilege, they're men," "trans men aren't the primary targets of misogyny, because they're men," or "as men, trans men are treated better than trans women." These ideas (setting aside for now the exorsexism of how transmascs who are not men get shoved into this categorization) rely on taking a person's identity, in this case, "man," and making it synonymous with the positionality of another group with an overlapping identity, cis men. "This is true of cis men," they say "so it must be true of all men." Identity (a fluid and internal thing that a person expresses via dialogue with society) is subsumed by positionality (the material conditions a person operates in).

And when you point out that none of those arguments are materially true, they meet you with "so you don't believe trans men are men?" Here, the argument is sort of a reverse motte-and-bailey (is there a word for this fallacy more specific than strawman? I'm not sure), taking one statement, that being "trans men do not occupy the same positionality as cis men" and treating it as synonymous with another, "trans men do not share the same identity as cis men." The strong, obviously hard to challenge argument is rhetorically swapped for a strawman that can easily be knocked down, and it's done by merging positionality and identity into interchangeable concepts with a meaning that they can move between as suits them.

Here, we get the "weaponizing your AFABness" and "misgendering yourself" strawmans too. When a trans man says he doesn't have the same experiences as a cis man, he is stating something material, such as "I need to access gynecological care and being a trans man makes that more difficult" or "I'm targeted by misogyny in my everday life because of how people perceive me." Note that the supposed rebuttals I listed are identity based again. To this argument, if you acknowledge a different positionality, you must be admitting to a different identity. In this way, unique transmasculine struggles are erased by folding the entirety of transmasculinity into, and making it subservient to, cis masculinity. Our experiences must be judged first to see if they apply to cis men before we are allowed to talk about them applying to trans men.

This affects non-binary people too in both similar and different ways. In the overlap, you see people taking the existence of non-binary people who also identify as cis to justify the idea that a certain kind of non-binary person is "cissexual" or "has cis privilege," or something to that affect. Similarly, they might isolate a part of a non-binary person's experience (such as using the pronouns associated with the gender enforced on you) and use it to say the same. An overlap, or even a perceived overlap in identity with a binary cis person is seized on to impose a binary cis person's positionality. Again, the purpose is to erase them, to silence discussion of their unique struggles, and to exclude them from community.

Another way this manifests against non-binary people is in forced binarization. A very, very common non-binary experience is the questions that amount to "are you a boy enby, or a girl enby?" and "are you an enby I will assume to have a penis, or an enby I will assume to have a vulva?" People will assign, or at least try to "figure out," which binary identity you're supposedly closest to. And once they've assigned you one, they will map a positionality onto you based on that (typically either that of a binary cis person or a binary trans person). The experiences that are distinct to being non-binary get erased in this collapse of the venn diagram.

A lot of this, I think, stems from oppositional sexism and overconfident assumptions. A member of one group, lacking insider knowledge on another group, takes the shortcut of simply making their best guess based on overlapping or "opposite" groups they assume they already understand. And then, when members of the group they confidently spoke over say "this is not true about us," the person retreats into that overlap to justify themselves. A binary trans man assumes a non-binary transmasc has basically equivalent experiences to his own, or a trans woman assumes trans men are treated better than her because cis men are.

That's where it often starts, at least, but if someone doubles down on this fallacy when confronted, they may start to believe (or act like they believe) in more and more absurd ideas based in positionality and identity as interchangeable concepts. I think this is the stage you see nonsensical arguments like "trans men have privilege over cis women," "trans women are overall more impacted by abortion bans than trans men," and "non-binary people are cis trenders pretending for attention."

This impacts other groups of queer people too, like bisexuals and asexuals for example. This post is already long and I wanted to focus on gender in particular, though. Intersex people as well, but I don't feel personally equipped to explore the examples there, and I'd welcome elaboration from anyone who does.

I feel like we might benefit from a word for this rhetoric. I'm not sure what it would be, and "positionality" is a bit of a mouthful to make affixes out of. It's also closely tied to intersectionality (as it's essentially a denial and replacement of the particular intersection a person occupies with an allegedly-similar one), but that concept is...poorly used, in queer discourse, as it is. I'm a big proponent of the utility of very specific terminology, and feel like especially as people who face so much erasure that we could use more of it.

None of the studies people use to say one demographic of trans people has it worse/better are studies which make any claims like that themselves. The studies were designed to determine the gap between cis people and trans people. They have conclusions written about how all trans people have statistically significantly worse outcomes compared to cis people. They might remark on which demographic was at the bottom of a certain metric, but not once have I seen any of these studies claim there’s statistical significance in the difference between different trans demographics’ treatments.

We’re talking about multiple dozens of percent difference between trans people as a whole and cis people as a whole in these studies, but people want to go pick out that a particular trans demographic is a percent or three worse off than another and claim the results of the study show that a certain type of trans person has it better off.