three meals to anarchy

But let me throw a slur right here in the middle real quick.

No, see, I'm marginalized, so it's perfectly fine that the oppression I face gets expressed in supremacist terms and slurs.

it's different when i do it

I've suffered in ways other people haven't, you see, so it's fine for me to lash out in response without concern for collateral damage. But when others lash out in response to their own hurt and I'm collateral damage, that is absolutely not okay and should never happen.

Part of being an ally to me is accepting that you will constantly be collateral damage. I don't believe I should have to worry about where I'm aiming because I'm marginalized, see. And that's oppressive. So it's okay that I don't carefully aim my weapons because I've struggled so much.

Yes, that means I probably will spend all of my time hitting those trying to be my allies rather than anyone else, but that's not my fault. They should know to stand between me and my oppressors when I want them to and then move out of the way when I'm ready to attack. If they don't move, it's not my fault they got in the way of my attack. They probably deserved it anyway, because standing near me means they are actually oppressing me more than the people they were attempting to help me guard against.

The reason people like me don't have any allies is because everyone hates people like me. There's no other possible reason. If you're unwilling to work extra hard to isolate yourself from most everyone like you so you can stand next to me and get shredded by my attacks all the time, you clearly harbor unexamined bias against people like me.

Here are a couple more slurs, clearly presented as a joke only accessible to others like me. True allies will appreciate my jokes and agree with my attacks on them. People like me are inherently better than people like them and society's real problem is a failure to see it. Once people like me rule the world and people like them are subjected to oppression and discrimination, everything will be better. The only true allies are those who accept their inherent inferiority.

Just to make sure everyone is aware of the stakes of this discussion, I'm going to now call back to someone widely recognized as a Great Thinker who also happened to be like me. But I will only use material that supports the supremacy of people like me, because engaging with the entirety of said Thinker's works would mean I'd have to accept that all of my slurs and supremacy aren't actually the way forward. And I don't like that part.

Because it's different when I do it

Finally, I will end on an additional admonition to my allies that if any of this bothers them or they find it uncomfortable, it is 100% their fault. My actions and words are fine. If they seem like they aren't, it's because you don't understand me. What you have to realize is that my intentions are what's important here. So you have to read between the lines to grasp what I'm getting at, but only where I want you to. Sometimes you must read my literal words with as little subjective interpretation as possible. Except when I'm being metaphorical. And occasionally the same words will demand different approaches based on when you read them.

But you? Your intentions never matter. In fact, the actual content of your posts is mine to determine. When I feel like your words should be taken literally, they should. And when they should be taken as metaphors or dog whistles, they should. What you were thinking or feeling when you wrote the words is immaterial. My feelings and thoughts as I read them are paramount.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

For a little tech in the 70s-90s:

VCRs came in in the 1970s. Like most tech, it started out VERY expensive and was not in most homes until the prices came down. VCRs had VHS tapes. The VHS tapes were pretty massive-- about an inch in thickness. Before that was the U-Matic. After that were Betamax (which looked a lot like the VCR tapes) and Laserdisc. Laserdisc looked like giant DVDs. In my house, we did not have a VCR until the 1990s. We were poor. Before that, we could rent a VCR at the same place we rented videos. We only did this a few times a year because who the hell could afford that? It was just for films that were really special, or for special occasions or big deals. When I broke my wrist as a kid, my mum rented a VCR and the film Return to Oz for me. It was a big enough event that I do remember it-- it must have been quite expensive for my parents to splash out like that, actually. (Also there wasn't really an easy way to check the reviews for films you rented, so there were usually surprises. Like we had no idea Return to Oz started with Dorothy going to a mental institution and it got weirder and darker from there. (watch Sinead's funny video about growing up in the 1980s with films like Return to Oz with no quick way to check how suitable films were for kids). And you could ONLY record subtitles onto something on a VCR if your tv was already showing the subtitles. And not all tvs did that.

if you needed to film something, you could not just pull out your phone. You needed a camcorder of some kind, which were not widely available, and you had to be quite well off, especially the earlier it was. If a family had one of these babies in 1983 (the year they were introduced), they were FLUSH. And the camcorders were pretty heavy and the film tapes didn't really hold much. Like all tech, it shrunk both in cost and weight/size as time went on, but these bastards were pretty heavy, glitchy, difficult and expensive when they first came out.

If you couldn't afford one, you could hire one from shops-- usually either electronic shops or photography shops. Say your kid is getting married in 1983. Only professionals really had them, then. Or really flush people into gadgets. Generally, you hire a photographer who brings their fancy camcorder to film the whole wedding (and charged you for the access to the camera and film), or you rent a camcorder (+ insurance) from the electric shop and buy about 50 tapes because they could barely hold much at all and you had to change it quite frequently. You would buy the tapes from the person you hired for the event-- but you couldn't watch it unless you had the right devices and the right connecting cables to set it all up. Nah, the tapes would go into a box and not be watched once until you finally could afford a camcorder in the 1990s (and turned off twenty minutes later because you can't really see anything and it's boring). If you paid a person a LOT of money they could convert the content from these camcorder tapes onto VCR and then watch them from your VCR. If you had one.

You couldn't just pull out your camera and take a photo and see it instantly on a screen. Most immediate you could do was a polaroid, and you'd have to wait for that to develop instantly. So, you had to have a camera of some kind-- no phone. And that required film, different lenses, different light flash bulbs, and that film needed to be developed. Polaroid film developed quicker, but it was a lot more expensive. If you were flush or very dedicated in this hobby, you had a little closet or room that you converted into a black room to develop the photos you took on your camera. This required a lot of materials, including pretty dangerous chemicals and large machines used to develop. But most of us took it to the chemist to be printed-- and it was still pretty expensive. I actually worked at a chemist in the 1990s and would print people's photos-- but by then they did have machines you could load the film roll in-- it would develop the photos, print the negatives and print the photos from the negatives. IF the machine worked, it would take an hour. But most of the time, the machine would jam half-way through and you'd have to deal with whatever tech failure it was, so the 'one hour photo' -- at least where I worked-- was more like 90 minute photos. Or, if you wanted higher quality or specialised paper, you would take it to an actual photography specialist store. If you wanted a really nice camera, you had to pay for it. There were point and click cameras, but they were generally pretty crap, were often pre-loaded with cheap junk film, and they often locked up or didn't really work properly. Black and white film was cheaper when I was growing up until I'm guessing the 1990s, when colour film became the norm. At that point most of the people who used B&W film were very dedicated hobbyists or pros, and so it became a lot more expensive.

AND YOU NEVER KNEW IF THE PHOTOS OR VIDEOS WERE GOING TO TURN OUT. You couldn't just delete them and take fifteen more. You took what you took, and hoped it was usable.

I think it's genuinely lovely when people set things in the past, but do always do your due diligence and check what tech and things were available and what would have been completely normal for your characters when.

I'm writing a story set from 1947-1951. I have created an obsessively absurd amount of data and website links and folders on the tech, what food was popular, what was being rationed in Paris, what was being rationed in London, what words were popular when (another tip-- always check etymology websites like https://www.etymonline.com/ and https://www.oed.com/ to make sure you're not using words that were not used when and where your stories are set.

Before we learn about trans feminism, we need to learn about feminism. Does it include us? Not often. Is it all trash? No.

We need to learn about the history of sexism and the struggles people with uteruses have to be seen as more than property. We need to be able to empathize and realize that we are co prisoners, not enemies.

I think this hatred of trans men and denial of their pain is rooted in a lack of understanding of feminism. We spend so much of our energy suffering, and trying to find help and community (which is good), that we stop being able to understand other people's problems (which is bad).

It's also rooted in the top down system. The biggest feminists tend to be the most privileged, so they see ultimate privilege man as the default. You can add black or trans or disabled to him and he becomes more oppressed.

Kimberle Crenshaw thinks of things the opposite way. In her 1989 intersectionality essay, she describes a room where everyone is trying to get out by the ceiling. She says that white feminism wants to put a ladder down from the ceiling to the bottom. Only the people near the ceiling (more privileged people) benefit. They might not keep building the ladder. They might fight over it. What she is doing is building a staircase from the bottom to the top. Everyone gets out. (Her essay is much better than my bad memory attempt to explain it. Go read it.)

Cis and man and rich and able and white and etc. can't be the default. They are already the way we see the world. We need to look from the bottom up. If we help the most vulnerable people, we help everyone.

Example. We make law that says no discrimination against women. That doesn't help Black people.

Versus we make law that says no discrimination against any marginalized person. That helps everyone.

The people who hate trans men see it as them stepping up on the ladder, and trans women stepping down. This doesn't reflect what happens. And it isn't helpful to fight over who has it worse because we're just fighting over the ladder.

We need to build the staircase. We need to build the stairs according to what everyone needs. Laws against trans discrimination. Laws against racism. Laws against body discrimination. Laws for bodily autonomy. Laws decriminalizing sex work. Converting hotels into shelters so homeless people can stay safe and not have everything stolen from and have showers. Universal basic income and healthcare so people are never hostages. Etc.

Intersectionality, at it's core, asserts that identities can not be broken into what we see as their individual parts, in particular when discussing the oppression and prejudice a person faces. Identities are more than just the sum of their parts.

The theory was originally laid out by a black woman to explain her own oppression. In short, she claimed that her oppression as a black woman could not be simply explained as black oppression + woman oppression. She also experienced black woman oppression.

Now, the nuances of the situation are much more complex, but this is the very basic idea. You always have to account for a person's identity as a whole, and not just the individual parts.

Black women are not just "black" + "women"

Black men are not just "black" + "men"

Trans women are not just "trans" + "women"

Trans men are not just "trans" + "men"

You always have to consider the identity as a whole, which may mean there are non obvious aspects of the whole identity that are not readily explained by the sum of the individual parts.

That is the basic explanation. Now let's get into one particular application I think is very important, at least on Tumblr, because on tumblr it has become extremely controversial.

A consequence of intersectionality is that specific kinds of oppression cannot be divorced from maleness. A black man's oppression cannot be explained as "black" + "male" oppression. There are aspects of the oppression black men face that cannot be separated from their identity as a whole. Even if you believe "men" suffer no unique oppression, intersectionality means you can't deny the possibility that "black men" suffer oppression that cannot be divorced from them being men.

This application of intersectionality is fundamental and the application of intersectionality to black men has been accepted for basically as long as intersectionality has been around.

A similar application can be made to trans men.

Now if you don't agree with this model, sure. Im not going to say it is fine because I think you are wrong, but no social model is above criticism. What you can't do is claim that intersectionality is anything else. You either accept that aspects of oppression can be tied to maleness, or you do not accept intersectionality. There is no secret third thing. This is a fundamental consequence of intersectionality as a model.

I think it is important to note that intersectionality did not start as queer theory. The roots of the model are in the study of sexism and racism. This is black feminist theory. And to put a point on it, trans feminist theory has no business trying to warp intersectionality to fit preconceived ideas about how queer identities and queer oppression works.

I believe that twisting well established black feminist theory into an unrecognizable form and then stealing the credibility of that well established black feminist theory by labeling your new theory "intersectional" is racist. We do not get to borrow their credibility while spitting on their work.

You can tell because the basics of intersectionality are quite simple. An hour or two of study starting from Wikipedia is good enough to give you a working understanding of the model, and that is if you want to be thorough. That's all it takes for you to get the basics of arguably most important idea in critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory in the past 50 years.

But clearly many people have not done this minimal task and instead have decided to base their understand not on well reviewed sources, but on absorbing the meaning from context and random posts on tumblr. And people on Tumblr lie like mother fuckers. Constantly. Especially when it is self serving. And that's really the trick, these warped and outright incorrect models of intersectionality are really convenient. They play so well into what so many people are mad about, give blanket permission to stop thinking and go with your gut instinct, and they sound like something that might be called intersectionality, so people don't look any closer.

These people also often demand sources for anything that doesn't confirm their preexisting beliefs, as had become common in Tumblr. But not for things that confirm what they believe. That is how you know it's willful ignorance - they know that sources are important in theory, but willfully selectively apply that idea to challenge ideas they don't like and conveniently don't challenge ideas they do like. It's one of the major reasons I rarely bother with sources on here, especially not when it's easy to independently look up. Very few people on here actually care about sources, 99% of the time they just demand a source as a way to call into question ideas they don't like. They are not actually going to study the source and consider the ideas. I rarely talk about obscure cases where a source is not readily avaliable to anyone who wants to look.

So we have deliberate liars coming up with alternative models of intersectionality, and willfully ignorant people following these deliberately self serving models. The part that really gets me is that none of them want to admit they don't believe intersectionality is correct. No model is above criticism, but these people are too big of cowards to actually criticize the model. None of them have the conviction to actually stand behind what they believe, instead choosing to hide behind the credibility of intersectionality, knowing that calling them on their bullshit is difficult because people on Tumblr typically care more about what is popular and self serving than what is true.

This! More than anything the bit that horrified me watching this whole shitshow develop was when trans men of color said “you people are misunderstanding intersectionality” and white trans women said “you don’t care that I’m white, you just hate me for being a woman.”

As much as I wince at some uses of the term “white feminism,” any feminist who says “you just brought up my whiteness for no reason” repeatedly to multiple people is…

…the paradigmatic example of white feminism.

Being a very metaphorical thinker, the image of a butterfly came to mind. This beautiful thing that grew out of something else. No longer what it was before, but something new and wonderful. A continuation, a becoming, a realization of self.

I turned to my wife and said "you do not mourn the caterpillar".

It just made them happier

Our main concern was how other people would treat them and we wanted them to know that we were firmly in their corner

But they were still the same kid

Researching trans and non-binary stuff also unlocked my own gender journey but that's unrelated

But my husband, who is as cis as they come, was like "yeah that's the same kid"

"Trans people do not have the same experiences of internalizing gendered teachings as cis people, because even before we come out our transness influences us"

Yea!! 👍 woohoo

"...by which I mean even before we came out we were always innately boys/girls and therefore naturally were only internalizing the ideas about our Correct gender about ourselves. So actuallyyyy ☝️we are not (agab) socialized we are (gender identity) socialized."

???????????????????

Okay so like

A. This is engaging with the knock-off TERF version of socialization way too much. It's actually, really, super not how this works. You're ascribing too much legitimacy to an approach to gender and socialization that is genuinely incoherent, because it's bio-essentialism pantomiming faux-sociology. It's just more essentialist boy-brain/girl-brain shit. Which brings me to:

B. You are participating in some essentialist boy-brain/girl-brain shit rn. But doing it where you have the Right Brain. This is not the validation you think it is.

We are going from "trans people have nuanced experiences navigating gendered teachings" and into some mystical "I only subconsciously absorbed messages directed at my latent identity in a completely exclusive, binary way, because of some innate, pure gendered impulse which had complete and proper discernment onto knowing which messaging and experiences society treated me with were for me or The Other. So anything directed towards me because of my agab was water-off-a-ducks-back, I did not take it personally, and it had no lasting effect, therefore did not impact my gender-psyche. Because my True Gender warded it off.

Because of that I was actually socialized Correctly, with all the Correct implications on how that effects my behaviors and thoughts, because men and women integrally are/think/act differently and I'm like that but the correct one ✨✨✨ yay ✨✨"

C. ...nonbinary people who????? Whats that

It's like. This is coming off like you are terrified of being invalidated right now but this is not a validating rebuttal. Or realistic. It's not even this black and white for cis people? There are so many issues here.

I guess I'll put it like this.

If there is a trans person who grew up as their agab, lived as cis for decades, totally gender conforming, completely internalized what society said they were supposed to be like according to their agab, were taught specific behaviors and ideas because of their agab, and took those on as a part of their self perception, like really did live thinking they were a girl/boy for a long time- then one day began to question their gender and only then realized they weren't their agab? They're still trans, and still valid in their identity.

Like, there still would be nuance to their historical relationship with gender, it wouldn't be without trans influence long before knowing they're trans, but they could totally have internalized any degree of agab targeted teachings from the start and had that influence their perceptions of themself and the world, and that fact is not invalidating their identity or dooming it.

In fact, that's not unusual at all? It's normal for stuff like that to have some kind of impact on us. The obvious fact being ignored here is that at any point we can call these ideas, behaviors, and teachings from past experiences into question, and reevaluate our relationship to them- and you know what? Cis people do this all the time too. Their ideas of what their gender means to them changes, they experience new dimensions to it, they reject old ones. It's all complicated and affects us in personal, ever evolving ways. Socialization is an ongoing, lifelong process. One thing of many that TERFs ignore.

Being influenced in some way from living or being raised as our agab is nuanced for trans people but it is real, and completely denying any impact from it comes off more like dysphoric insecurity than anything else to me.

Which I don't want to be totally unsympathetic to, it is a fear born in reaction to transphobic attitudes like that of TERFs, and a world which treats out agab experiences as tainting us and invalidating us.

I also feel this kind of thinking is an extreme response to what is really needing to be communicated- that you experienced things differently than cis people of your agab, that it isn't a simple binary "male" or "female" socialization you lived. There really is no one universal "male" or "female" socialization, especially for trans people, and trying to fit us into one and is not ever going to be truly reflective of our variable circumstances. I think that's extremely important to acknowledge.

But saying you purely and exclusively experienced the secondhand socialization of your gender identity is not communicating that reality, neither is it saving you from invalidation. It's building a mythology for yourself still set upon that same strict gender binary, which was made to exclude us.

The thing is, having a mixed gendered experience is literally okay, that's extremely normal trans shit, and TERFs are just plainly wrong about what they think those experiences imply.

Because gendered socialization isn't some bullshit where how we grew up makes us have permanent, terminal boy-brain/girl-brains, that our minds just calcify into for eternity. Acting as Proof to why The Two Genders are fundamentally and distinctly Different, as we are irrevocably Separate and rigidly assigned forever and ever...

Whether we are perceived as a girl or a boy, our behaviour, options, opportunities, and knowledge are artificially limited in ways we have little to no control over, as a direct result of our perceived gender.

I didn't get to opt out of being subject to a blanket ban on [children perceived as] girls playing contact sports in school. I didn't get to ignore "mistakenly" not being entered for higher exams by a teacher who believed that [children perceived as] girls don't excel academically. I couldn't force my parents to let me choose my clothing and hairstyle when they didn't trust me to make the appropriate choices for my perceived gender.

You don't get to opt out of the expectations and restrictions forced on you ever since you were first swaddled in a blue or pink blanket. Even if you deliberately act outside of what is permitted based on your perceived gender, it comes with an acknowledgement that your behaviour is a transgression: something that has to be hidden, something that may carry the weight of shame, something that may come with consequences.

"Trans people do not have the same experiences of internalizing gendered teachings as cis people, because even before we come out our transness influences us"

Yea!! 👍 woohoo

"...by which I mean even before we came out we were always innately boys/girls and therefore naturally were only internalizing the ideas about our Correct gender about ourselves. So actuallyyyy ☝️we are not (agab) socialized we are (gender identity) socialized."

???????????????????

Okay so like

A. This is engaging with the knock-off TERF version of socialization way too much. It's actually, really, super not how this works. You're ascribing too much legitimacy to an approach to gender and socialization that is genuinely incoherent, because it's bio-essentialism pantomiming faux-sociology. It's just more essentialist boy-brain/girl-brain shit. Which brings me to:

B. You are participating in some essentialist boy-brain/girl-brain shit rn. But doing it where you have the Right Brain. This is not the validation you think it is.

We are going from "trans people have nuanced experiences navigating gendered teachings" and into some mystical "I only subconsciously absorbed messages directed at my latent identity in a completely exclusive, binary way, because of some innate, pure gendered impulse which had complete and proper discernment onto knowing which messaging and experiences society treated me with were for me or The Other. So anything directed towards me because of my agab was water-off-a-ducks-back, I did not take it personally, and it had no lasting effect, therefore did not impact my gender-psyche. Because my True Gender warded it off.

Because of that I was actually socialized Correctly, with all the Correct implications on how that effects my behaviors and thoughts, because men and women integrally are/think/act differently and I'm like that but the correct one ✨✨✨ yay ✨✨"

C. ...nonbinary people who????? Whats that

It's like. This is coming off like you are terrified of being invalidated right now but this is not a validating rebuttal. Or realistic. It's not even this black and white for cis people? There are so many issues here.

I guess I'll put it like this.

If there is a trans person who grew up as their agab, lived as cis for decades, totally gender conforming, completely internalized what society said they were supposed to be like according to their agab, were taught specific behaviors and ideas because of their agab, and took those on as a part of their self perception, like really did live thinking they were a girl/boy for a long time- then one day began to question their gender and only then realized they weren't their agab? They're still trans, and still valid in their identity.

Like, there still would be nuance to their historical relationship with gender, it wouldn't be without trans influence long before knowing they're trans, but they could totally have internalized any degree of agab targeted teachings from the start and had that influence their perceptions of themself and the world, and that fact is not invalidating their identity or dooming it.

In fact, that's not unusual at all? It's normal for stuff like that to have some kind of impact on us. The obvious fact being ignored here is that at any point we can call these ideas, behaviors, and teachings from past experiences into question, and reevaluate our relationship to them- and you know what? Cis people do this all the time too. Their ideas of what their gender means to them changes, they experience new dimensions to it, they reject old ones. It's all complicated and affects us in personal, ever evolving ways. Socialization is an ongoing, lifelong process. One thing of many that TERFs ignore.

Being influenced in some way from living or being raised as our agab is nuanced for trans people but it is real, and completely denying any impact from it comes off more like dysphoric insecurity than anything else to me.

Which I don't want to be totally unsympathetic to, it is a fear born in reaction to transphobic attitudes like that of TERFs, and a world which treats out agab experiences as tainting us and invalidating us.

I also feel this kind of thinking is an extreme response to what is really needing to be communicated- that you experienced things differently than cis people of your agab, that it isn't a simple binary "male" or "female" socialization you lived. There really is no one universal "male" or "female" socialization, especially for trans people, and trying to fit us into one and is not ever going to be truly reflective of our variable circumstances. I think that's extremely important to acknowledge.

But saying you purely and exclusively experienced the secondhand socialization of your gender identity is not communicating that reality, neither is it saving you from invalidation. It's building a mythology for yourself still set upon that same strict gender binary, which was made to exclude us.

The thing is, having a mixed gendered experience is literally okay, that's extremely normal trans shit, and TERFs are just plainly wrong about what they think those experiences imply.

Because gendered socialization isn't some bullshit where how we grew up makes us have permanent, terminal boy-brain/girl-brains, that our minds just calcify into for eternity. Acting as Proof to why The Two Genders are fundamentally and distinctly Different, as we are irrevocably Separate and rigidly assigned forever and ever...