scraping resin out of pipe dreams

Other TERFs/Gender Critical feminists are more forthright about their positions - that trans women are sexual predators, that they aren’t women and therefore don’t belong in women’s spaces, facilities, or services. They openly speak about wanting trans women dead, castrated, or institutionalized for their “mental illness.” They form websites to out trans women to their families, workplaces, and communities and to bully trans kids into suicide. They refer to trans women as “SCAMs” ( Surgically and Chemically Altered Males), as “cocks in frocks,” as “mutilated males” who only seek to keep Real Women™ from enjoying women’s solidarity.

it enrages me and we dont know what to do. they hide behind their online aliases, show up to women centre meetings (who are inclusive of trans folks/trans women) and live tweet, and go on hateful tirades.

this happened recently, and has happened months before, and i feel really frustrated and helpless in how we can even address this. engaging with them feels pointless as they simply block you if you respond online. there is literally no interest in finding understanding and having a meaningful working analysis of feminism, decolonization and anti-oppression.

so how the fuck do we hold these people accountable? when i share this information to folks on the “Left” we are met with “wow that sucks,” and thats it.

fake solidarity abounds while our most marginalized folks face direct forms of violence, death threats included.

One of the things I find most enraging is that these types (and I agree they're usually SWERFs too) take every opportunity to try to delegitimize indigenous gender systems because they are inconvienient to terf ideology. The idea that what we now think of as trans people have always existed, that they didn't just spontaneously form in the last 40 or so years, that they occupied positions both within and outside of a gender binary, seems to be quite a threat to TERFs.

They start from the faulty premise that gender has always been universally oppressive, and that women have always been oppressed. When indigenous folks try to point out that our gender traditions are different, that they not only include many examples of what would, in current language, be thought of as queer and trans identities, but also had plenty of gender fluidity and many examples of egalitarian or even matriarchal societies, the response is a variation of "....nuh-uh!"

We're accused of politicizing our history, of romanticizing it, of not really understanding it. When none of that works they just claim we aren't really indigenous, because clearly these middle class white women understand our bands and families better than we do. It's frustrating, it's insulting, and it strips us of our already fragile cultural legacies.

For sex workers, there are no legal protections against discrimination, should we become associated with our current or former occupations. Current and former sex workers risk losing their housing or being refused service by landlords, property owners, and co-op boards. Sex workers are also often unable to transition to other work. I worked as an exotic dancer and then a Craigslist call girl on and off until 2007, and when my boss at my new job as a public school teacher became aware of my career history, I was eventually fired, and I couldn’t get another job in elementary school education in spite of my education and teaching credentials.

Current and former sex workers can also lose custody of their children. Finley Fawn is a cam model—a taxed, legal profession—who has been fighting for custody of her six-year-old son since April of this year. According to Uproxx, Fawn was served with an emergency order to remove her son from her home after her ex-husband told authorities that Fawn was an unfit mother because she had let their child learn too much about her work; he alleged their son had “shared details with him about his mom’s job.” In 2008, a tantra provider lost custody of her children to a man with an extensive documented history of domestic violence. According to the parenting blog Mommyish, in 2013, former sex worker Tanaha Koontz lost custody of her three children to the abusive husband who Koontz claims sex trafficked her during the course of their relationship.

Then there’s the devastating case of Petite Jasmine, a Swedish sex worker whose children were taken away from her due to her involvement in the sex trade. Jasmine was an outspoken sex worker’s rights advocate, arguing against a system called the “Swedish model,” which criminalizes the clients of sex workers but not the sex workers themselves. In spite of a documented history of abuse, Jasmine’s ex-husband was granted full custody of their two children, leaving Jasmine with supervised visits. During one such visit in 2013, he killed her in the social work office.

Those who view sex work as incompatible with motherhood often cite a concern for the children’s safety. They conflate issues related to poverty with sex work—unstable housing, food insecurity, and erratic incomes, for example—even though sex work can often be the very solution to these economic woes. People also assume a relationship between sex work and addiction, but the idea that all sex workers use drugs is a myth. Perhaps the only legitimate concern having to do with explicit relationship between sex work and a child’s safety is the fact that individuals working in prostitution are still being criminalized, so these women tend to be incarcerated or face arrest, which can mean having their children sent to a relative or taken under the dysfunctional care of the state.