Mel

If any of you want a definition, adandrophobia/adandromisia, as described by @technicoloranarchy, is:

* The hatred of and discrimination against people transition towards manhood and/or masculinity

& most people do not critically engage with the western construct of "religion" itself! people just take for granted this post-euro-enlightenment model of what religion means. which is where you get, at the worst, people criticizing "religion" who clearly genuinely do not know anything about any religion other than christianity (whatever kind they were raised with) & some vague half-facts about judaism and islam.

its also like. at the same time as (people living as) women have historically experienced religion as a tool of patriarchal control, it has equally been a feminized sphere of life. just in the western eurasian world, from the ancient mediterranean societies to medieval saints and nuns, people living as women have found personal existential autonomy and direction from their spiritual traditions, and cis men have viewed them negatively because of it. plato complained about how all the shrines in Athens were set up by women, but this was also a means for women to exist in the public sphere, to find meaning in their personal concerns and feelings and perception of the world, to connect with not just other women but also men and others who were similarly touched by these traditions. in late 19th-century southern Italy, facing the imperialist violence of the Risorgimento and brigandage wars, peasant women organized their communities in explicitly socialist and explicitly Catholic ways (from here):

A wave of popular unrest washed over Sicily at the close of the nineteenth century. In town after town, peasants mobilized labor strikes, occupied fields and piazzas, and looted government offices. While the island had a long history of revolt, this marked a new era of social protest. For the first time, women led the social movement and infused the struggle with their own mixture of socialism and spiritualism. The activity began in the autumn of 1892, in the towns surrounding Palermo, in the northwestern part of the island. In Monreale, women and children filled the central piazza shouting “Down with the municipal government! Long live the union!” After attacking and looting the offices of the city council, they marched toward Palermo crying “We are hungry!” waving banners with slogans connecting socialism to scripture. In Villafrati, Caterina Costanzo led a group of women wielding clubs to the fields where they threatened workers who had not joined the community in a general strike against the repressive local government. In Balestrate, thousands of women dressed in traditional clothes and also armed with clubs marched through the streets, demanding an end to government corruption. [...] In Piana dei Greci, thirty-six women were arrested after they occupied and then destroyed the municipal offices, throwing the furniture into the streets. [...] They celebrated the founding of the group as they would a religious festival, with music and food, and wove their political and spiritual ideologies together in their speeches. In the words of one woman, “We want everybody to work as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and their children. We should all be equal. . . . Jesus was a true socialist and he wanted precisely what we ask for, but the priests don’t discuss this.” [...]

the extreme patriarchy of the Catholic church still existed, and was still immensely harmful to many people. but existing alongside it was the lived Catholicism of peasant women whose fire for socialism was lit by their belief in God and Jesus and Mary. in all cases these people living as women could be depicted by as superstitious and irrational and driven by emotion and bodily sensation, not the proper logical rule-driven faith of the patriarchal state. which is another example of hyperobjectivity!

YES!!

take eugenics. while obviously one can find religious influences in eugenics, ultimately it is a sinister and harmful ideology that is also emerging from positivist science. there have been, and are, plenty of atheist eugenicists. plenty of people justify misogyny and patriarchy through appeals to biology.

& they are of course still wrong (because misogyny is both objectively and subjectively deeply flawed) and eugenicists arguments also heavily involve subjective interpretation, they just heavily downplay if not deny that their subjectivity is subjective. religious misogyny also denies its subjectivity is subjective but relies more on subjective knowledge than objective knowledge. & as described above - religious misogyny does this to women's and queer spirituality!!!! this is hyperobjectivity in a different format than typical positivist hyperobjectivity. in a hierarchical, dominance-based system there always has to be a loser, and in hyperobjectivity, the subjectivity that we cannot ever fully deny gets projected onto whoever has the least power.

by focusing so much on "religion" as the root cause of social problems, it actually obscures how people's and communities' worldviews can be shaped in ways that support oppressive social systems and even relationship dynamics. the reason hyperobjectivity is used by such systems is because this mode of meaning-making allows you to have final say over what is and isn't possible in other people's minds, and that restricts their ability to resist harm and injustice. historically the attempts to mandate atheist in a leftist context have involved massive systemic injustices and the perpetuation of these dynamics, just in a different context. meanwhile, in leftist contexts more dedicated to challenging patriarchy and the state, actively producing socialist theology is often massively helpful with getting working-class and rural people more class-conscious and invested in revolution.

like just on a pragmatic level, you can go on about how any example of religion/spirituality being used for socialist ends is just people "eking out a place for themselves" and its an exception that proves the rule etc. but practically you are going to be alienating many working class people by acting that way, and making them feel dismissed and condescended to and disrespected by leftists. its the same with approaches to female separatist, anti-sex work approaches feminism: you alienate a lot of the women and queer people who need to be radicalized against patriarchy the most. that spirituality has been involved in a number of mass protests and uprising throughout history (see also: the Civil Rights Movement in the US & Thomas Müntzer's role in the German Peasants' War) should suggest its role in revolution is a lot more than "sometimes the poor delusional religious proletariat manages to do something slightly radical with religion, but that doesn't change anything!"

and for all of yall that are still figuring it out or aren't getting the support you deserve:

You cannot be saying this when “read Whipping Girl” has been used as a flat-and-outright, on its own, dismissal of people speaking on transmasculine issues for at least six fucking years now. You cannot continually throw a text at a community, and one which the author has self-reflected as being weak in its assessment of nonbinary and transmasculine issues, as a way to shut them up and not expect them to point out why that’s flawed and call them transmisogynists.

This reads an awful lot like victim blaming to me, “Shut up because this thing says you should. No, don’t talk about that thing’s flaws and why those flaws should maybe make us re-think how we’re treating you because we’ve outright stated that we’re treating you like this because of how your experiences are dictated to us by an author who has criticized her own work for doing such. You’re a transmisogynist if you don’t like how this one trans woman who said she would change some of how she would talk about trans men in her work if she could do it over is describing you in that work she criticized herself. You’re only doing any of this because you hate trans women in the first place, and not because trans women are being wielded as a cudgel by a whole bunch of people, not only trans women, to silence you.”

And it frames the “stop throwing this text at us to tell us to stop talking about the oppression we face. It does a poor job of representing more than the absolute most privileged of transmasculine experience while universalizing that as the idea of how all of us experience the world,” as being just as harmful as, “shut up about the oppression you face.”