Radical Feminist Identification and Blocking

There had been some attempts to open it on a cross-posting platform early on, and I don’t think it’s off the table that we’ll return to this blog at some point (assuming Tumblr doesn’t implode first) but right now real life is occupying way more time than there are hours in the day and unfortunately this blog was always a fairly intensive project.

I have hopes of coming back here and picking up where we left off but I know better than to make any concrete promises about how that might go.

This blog has been closed and inactive for like a year.  How high are you right now?

Thank you! We are glad to be back, however temporary that return may be.

Because of the upcoming tumblr purge of sex workers, such as ourselves, on December 17th, we have opened a Dreamwidth account to cross-post our work and migrate to as necessary.

You can find it at https://rfidblocking.dreamwidth.org/

My apologies for the color scheme. I’m currently focusing on moving our posts over, and will handing skinning and themeing at a later date.

XOXOX

We've been looking into some form of alternative platform since the blog was mistakenly purged. We'll be notifying you as soon as we have one established.

Infinite things are possible. It's possible for someone to be convinced they're not really trans by transphobic loved ones, or for them to choose to closet themselves because it's preferable the alternative for whatever reason. It's also possible they really weren't trans, but a lack of language or positive support around their questioning experience made them vulnerable to the idea that because they're not trans no one can be. It could be something else entirely.

Like I said. Infinite things are possible. Your friend is the only one who can really make that assessment, and maybe it changes over time or with certain influences, or maybe it hasn't really changed but the manifestations will. The reality is that if you're really invested in the autonomy of every person, including your friend, you have to give your friend the chance to be the expert on themselves.

Since it's now "ex-friend", I take it that this will no longer mean supporting them through their self-discovery and any changes that may occur for them. In this case it just means letting yourself off the hook for trying to save them from what you perceive as them being forced to closet themselves. You're not responsible for proving to them or yourself what your former friend ~actually~ is, because that's something only they can decide. For now, just take care of yourself and let yourself focus on what is right and needed for you, rather than on why your friend may have made their decisions.

There are two possibilities.

The first is that you are a troll, in which case fuck off.

The second is that you are a genuine, well-intended transphobe. If you honestly believe you are capable of instantly and correctly identifying any and all people’s birth-assignments, then you hold a lot of dangerous, incorrect assumptions about trans people.

In whichever case, we aren’t “that kind” of blog. We examine radical feminist rhetoric and influences. We do not provide advice on how to identify your own gender or sexuality. There are other blogs specializing in that sort of advice.

XOXOX

+ Mad Max Fury Road clip. Max points offscreen and says, “that’s bait.”

If you want to make a submission, just make a submission.

XOXOX

🌸 Yazminx 🌸

PS: In the unlikely event that you actually are who you say you are, and not just some anon playing pretend, please feel free to submit one of your posts that you are concerned about, through the submission page.

ETA / Correction: The anon turned out to actually be bisexuelledoe, who is a radical feminist.

2. -posts, why not just do it with slashes so that if they are a terf they don’t attack, and if they’re not you don’t leave them prey to terfs and misinformed activists alike?

++++

That isn’t how tagging works.

The tags we put on a reblog do not decide if a post appears in a tag or search on Tumblr itself. They only decide if a post appears in that tag or search on our blog.

Only the tags on the OP decide which tag the post appears in on Tumblr. Only post’s original content determines in which searches the post will appear. What happens in reblogs stays in reblogs.

Now, let’s discuss the main issue you raised. What protections do we owe to the people who support our eradication?

It is tempting to say, “none.” That is neither true nor fair. The protections we owe such people are those which we are able to give.

The first protection is to not put people on blast. We do that by writing RFID posts in reblogs. Reblogging limits exposure to radical feminists. This is because it does not affect tag presence. Original posts, even with “slashed out” URLs, are indexed by Tumblr. They appear in tags. They appears in searches. This creates more exposure.

So, what else do we owe people who empower those who want us dead? Do we owe them silence? Do we owe them our complicity? Our submission? Should we allow their mistakes to go unremarked upon, and uncorrected?

Or do we owe them a chance to recognize their mistakes? Do we owe them the opportunity to learn and grow? A chance to improve themselves? To learn the impacts they have? To understand the consequences of their actions?

Mental illness does not excuse bigotry. If someone is under guardianship for an inability to control themselves or their actions, we can direct our criticism to that guardian. Otherwise, we direct our criticism towards the poster. To do otherwise would be to deny a mentally ill person’s autonomy because of their illness.

Similarly, no matter how often someone says they hate radical feminists, they can still spread radical feminist ideology. Hating radical feminists does not excuse supporting them.

Though by mistake, they still support political movements calling for our death.

There is a persistent belief we are “calling out” people and want our followers to attack them. This is false.

In our RFID posts, we point out common rhetorical patterns, hoping those patterns become less common. We see a disconnect between what people say (“I hate radfems”), and what they do (support radfems). We explain how we identified the disconnect. We identify other, similar disconnects in their rhetoric. We explain the most likely way the disconnect formed. We explain the consequences of that disconnect. We discuss how to avoid making a similar mistake yourself.

Note that nowhere in that list do we abuse, attack, harass, bait, or target others.

Unless a blogger self identifies as a radical feminist or a TERF, we go to great lengths to separate the label from the actions. We strive to be as neutral as possible to the people whose works we are studying.

These are protections in our control. But the actions of radical feminists, harassers, and abusers are not in our control. We no more set abusers to abusing than we set you to send this ask. Everyone involved made their own choices.

XOXOX

🌸 Yazminx 🌸

PS: While we don’t block people on this blog often, we encourage everyone on this godforsaken website to set their boundaries. If the work we do here is upsetting to you, please block us. If you want to prevent us from having access to your posts for a critique, please block us.

If you are being targeted by harassment campaigns, please block everyone who so much as breathes a rude sounding breath in your direction.

This is a little fast for us. At least buy us dinner first.

I don’t know how to explain to you that caring about the bodily autonomy of women includes, by obligation, caring about defending women’s rights to self expression and body art, as well as caring about protecting women from mutilation.

I know that someone, somewhere has taught you that “give women control over their own bodies” means not letting them control their own bodies, but you’ve really got to break through that hypnotic state and get your shit together.

Also, the way “radical feminists” use radical is specifically an act of what I tend to refer to as “radfem colonization.” They took a word that means something, stripped it out that meaning, use it for something else, and then hide behind the history of the term as proof that their actions are valid. It’s a type of historical revisionism that is especially common among radfems.

There is not, in fact, anything radical about telling women that they are not allowed to do what they want with their own bodies.

Thanks for playing.

XOXOX

Yazminx

Cupcake. Darling. Sugarplum. Sweetheart.

I know it’s going to hurt. I know that. You’ll have to be very brave.

But please, for the good of everyone involved. Take your inferiority complex and your loathing of disabled people, and shove it directly up your own ass.

I believe in you.

XOXOX

🌸Yazminx 🌸

Since we are not homophobes, due in part to our relentless support of gay people of all genders, and our continuing commitment to making sure fuckers like yourself don’t successfully redefine “lesbian” to mean “bigot,” I suppose we are all immortal.

I am a little worried for your life expectancy in this hypothetical world of spontaneous homophobe die-offs, though.

How fortunate you are that it’s only a hypothetical world, and you don’t have to suffer the consequences of your actions.

XOXOX

Alas, the only people who hate lesbians on this blog are people such as yourself, who feel the need to equate lesbian identity to toxic, hateful bigotry.

But if you’re lucky, and good, and committed, perhaps some time in the dead of winter a cheerful butch will climb down your chimney, give you a sack of coal, and explain to you basic kindergarten ethics.

XOXOX

🌸 Yazminx 🌸

As I am sure you heard, this blog was caught in tumblr’s (frankly completely fucked) “purge.”

It would appear that our appeal has been processed and approved!

We were lucky. A lot of our peers (sex workers, artists, trans folks, queers of all stripes) have not been so fortunate.

If you were also caught in the purge, keep filing your appeals. It looks like appeals processing is happening again.

As of this posting, we have multiple complete backups of this blog. If you are interested in making your own backup copy, you are welcome to do so using the python script tumblr_backup.py. You can find the script and its instructions here: https://soarcodes.tumblr.com/post/167635534629/backup-tumblr-blogs-2017

If and when pillowfort returns to action, we will be making a pillowfort group where we will crosspost most of our content.

XOXOX

We'll likely keep the back up blog for in case anything like this happens again we'll be able to give y'all news, but for now RFID blocking is back up safe and sound! We're going to take stock for a couple of days see if there's any damage, and get back to work soon! Thanks for sticking with us!

TW: Sex Trafficking, CSA

Is this a good site or bad site? I know some ‘think of the victims’ initiatives are targeted at sex workers.

Link.

About in case you don’t want to go to the link:

TraffickCam enables you to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms you stay in when you travel.

Traffickers regularly post photographs of their victims posed in hotel rooms for online advertisements. These photographs are evidence that can be used to find and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. In order to use these photos, however, investigators must be able to determine where the photos were taken.

The purpose of TraffickCam is to create a database of hotel room images that an investigator can efficiently search, in order to find other images that were taken in the same location as an image that is part of an investigation.

TraffickCam was created in 2015 by the Exchange Initiative. The Exchange Initiative is committed to combating commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Their mission is to provide resources, information and networking solutions to combat sex trafficking in the United States.

The Exchange Initiative was created by Nix Conference & Meeting Management to empower individuals and organizations with real resources to help end sex trafficking. Nix Conference & Meeting Management is one of just 13 U.S. companies and 43 worldwide honored as a 2014 Top Member by the internationally recognized Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct (TheCode.org) for their exceptional work to integrate child protection practices into their business.

End submission.

Begin Response:

Okay, so as far as I can tell, this is going to be a bit of a mixed bag. On the front of it, this is a fantastic idea. The assertion that being able to identify hotel rooms and other such locations in the background of trafficking photographs is deeply critical to finding victims and that needing a comprehensive database of such locations is very true! In fact, law enforcement typically has a database of such comparisons in order to try and catch repeat offenders or people who use known locations.

HOWEVER.

Let’s think for a moment about the definition of “trafficker” under most USA law. (sorry to our international followers, I am far less familiar with how this would work under other nation’s laws).

People routinely convicted of “trafficking” include significant others, landlords, relatives, friends, employers, and coworkers of consensual sex workers. And even if we ignore that, the fact of the matter is that sex work is a crime, so if peple can identify where you’re committing the crime, they can find you.

Basically, the positive of this is that this project can absolutely help identify locations of trafficking victims and allow law enforcement to significantly increase their success rates at identifying and rretriving trafficking victims and their traffickers. The negative is that once any technology or information is out in the world, you no longer have control over how it’s used and legal history shows us that it will likely get used to target consensual sex workers and their support systems, as well as any other sort of “criminal” that the police want to identify the locations of (for a worst case scenario, think identifying places sheltering undocumented immigrants or activists on the run).

Is the positive enough to outweight the negative? Does potentially stopping more traffickers from doing their shitty, awful, monstrous business outwweigh the lives and livelihoods of the sex workers, activists, and other such “criminal” undesireables who will likely get caught up in the net? Honestly, I don’t know. It would depend entirely on how ethically the database was used, how successful the law enforcement agency in question actually is at treating trafficking victims well oncec “rescued”, and what sort of regulation there is on who can access the database and why. In theory, it’s a fantastic idea that shouldn’t on it’s own do any harm, but the reality is that when you live in a hierarchical surveillance state that tends to abuse, murder, and maim it’s undesireables and malcontents, helping the surveillance state to surveil better is not typically a fantastic idea for black, brown, immigrant, political, or queer members of that society, let alone for people who are criminalized on top of those things.

It’s not a solid comforting answer, unfortunately, but it is the truth. I think one would have to decide how comfortable they are, personally, with contributing to an increased accuracy of surveillance states around the world (because don’t forget, this tech will absolutely be used internationally).

The fact of the matter is, that for as long as we live in a world that trends towards punitive punishments as opposed to pre-emptive resolutions, tools like this will be a necessary part of the puishment and justice process. Preventative measures are far more successful at reducing trafficking and abuse, but they are also a) sometimes more expensive, b) under researched, c) major ideologiccal shifts, and d) would need to be predicated on the idea that even people who do “bad” things might not be bad people, and that’s a hard and bitter pill for most of the world to swallow. We’re not likely to see preventative measures embraced widescale any time soon, and in the mean time, we still need to identify and protect victims of trafficking and abuse.

Here’s te hard and fast rule you can use to determine if an anti-trafficking group is coming from a real place of understanding though. Do they support, at some point in their timeline of advocacy, total decriminalization? Because the reality is that the only way to guarantee that trafficking victims are able to be more successfully, accurately, and appropriately rescued and proptected is to ensure that they cannot, under any stretch of the imagination, be prosecuted for their having been trafficked. And as long as sex work is criminal or illegal or anything shy of utterly decriminalized, that will not be the case. Now there are plenty of pro-decrim organizations which also promote meantime-measures that are designed to reduce damage now while we work towards the massive ideological shift that would be decriminalization, and those are still often good organizations. Harm reduction is not a bad thing, as long as you don’t claim it’s the inly thing we can ever do.

I hope that helps a little.