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So, what does that sort of lens miss? Some provisional thoughts:

The simple abolition of taboos across the board really has no liberatory meaning. A society with no adult-child sexuality taboo isn't inherently more liberated than the alternative - just look at Ancient Rome. Of course, many of those early gay people were actually very nostalgic for the non-Christian, more idiosyncratically open to homoeroticism mores of the Greco-Roman world. Regardless, as we can see, adult-child sexuality frequently fits into larger heirarchical models of social organization. One simply has to make the actual argument for why something is good - beyond simply that it rejects a current repression

Is the "Pedophile" socially sanctioned, marginalized, punished? Certainly, just as much as the "Rapist" as a category of person is socially sanctioned. Does that mean that child sexual abuse is? That seems to be much less the case. Child sexual abuse, like other forms of sexual coercion or exploitation, seems common enough to say that it is not fully condemned by society in some sense. Especially taking into consideration the likelihood of allegations of this really only sticking to or affecting disempowered people (see by contrast: the President).

Countenancing the psychiatrically constructed category of the "pedophile" and then arguing for its liberation reifies the modernist categorization method. A comparator might be less something like gay people or trans people, but if the DSM-6 had a paraphilic category called the "rapeophile" - someone who had an inborn sexual identity that meant they could only be attracted to people and have sex with unconsenting sex partners. Even if those put in the Rapeophile subgrouping were truly oppressed (say, diagnosis results in death sentences, no matter one's conduct), this wouldn't have anything to say about the underlying acts themselves. It would merely be an argument against the naturalization categories. It wouldn't really follow that we need to 'destigmatize rape'.

It is true that money and power enables abuse on a grand scale, but the converse is not true— having no money and no power does not make abuse less likely. I think many of us know this from experience. There is no special moral quality to being poor or being oppressed. Oppressed people abuse each other all the fucking time, in families and relationships and friendships. People of color abuse each other. Women abuse each other. Gay people and trans people abuse each other.

Cesar Chavez raped the women and girls of the labor rights movement throughout his career, using worker solidarity as a bludgeoning tool to ensure their silence.

If you say “people in my group don’t do this, it’s the powerful men that do it” then you harm yourself in several ways.

1. You signal to your social circle that you do not hold them to any standard of behavior. You have preemptively pledged loyalty, which means that if they behave objectionably, any objection on your part will mean a betrayal of your community.

2. You mark yourself as socially permissive. People in your social group know that you are, at baseline, unwilling to accept or act on allegations against them. To be frank, this makes you very easy to take advantage of, whether in service of abusing someone else or abusing you directly.

And you harm other people by telling a lie. What about all of the people who have been abused by a person within this oppressed group? They have it reiterated that their abuse cannot be spoken about, for the sake of solidarity.

If you don't want to answer that's fine, I hope you're having a nice day ❤️

The baeddel community, the actual original one not the vague insinuations people throw around at trans women with feminist politics, formed out of early transfeminist politics on tumblr.

For context, it’s important to note that many of us not only were interested in feminist theory but specifically second wave radical feminist theory, both to critique and to do “trans” readings of them. At the time “queering” as a verb was a popular academic discourse in which you would “queer” a text, film, etc to reveal what is missing from something, what if we read this text through not merely a queer critique but as if it was already affirming of queer difference, identity and experiences? What if we read it as an always already queer text?

So in a sense we were taking this academic literature framework and doing our own transfeminist spin. Dworkin and MacKinnon were popular authors to do this to. We started reading radical feminist texts and lesbian second wave feminist theory as if it was always already transfeminist, already affirming, actually from a certain perspective a pro transfeminist text.

This was very unique and frankly avant garde for even the academy let alone laymen on a blogging site. It attracted a lot of young trans women with burgeoning socialist and anarchist beliefs. We read Whipping Girl and felt dissatisfied with its ultimately liberal politics on gender - political revolution and self-abolition became popular ideas.

There was a large feminist community on tumblr for trans women, partially due to the number of graduate students who would share their reading material for a mass audience. This both became the basis for the later abuses as well as the basis for the challenging of those abuses.

Some transfeminists discovered that “bad” has roots in an olde English word for “hermaphrodite” and “effeminate man.” Despite this word (baeddel) clearly referencing people with visible intersex variations, a trans reading was done of it through bad internet entomology and it became proof of transmisogyny being at least a few hundred year old oppression. People even call it a “slur,” despite there being no evidence of it being used for violence which is usually how we define slurs.

This became a rallying call for a subsection of this transfeminist community who began adopting the term. The baeddel community had its own celebrity theorists - b8l (who was accused of race faking by a Black trans woman who met her in person) and unobject. They amassed a large amount of social influence so that when two baeddel members accused each other of rape - those two got the whole community to isolate the victim. Even their own admissions to what the situation was had a lot of holes - for instance, they claimed the victim (Elle) was actually the rapist for “rescinding consent” and even the rapist (Eve) didn’t deny that the victim was restrained while she the rapist held a knife.

But such is it with cult dynamics, even I went along at first. I still feel a great amount of shame about that. I became unpopular with that crowd because I was willing to call them on it. Eventually the transfeminist community pushed them out - too many people knew and saw through the bullshit.

But a lot of people held on - for reasons that seem familiar. This community had for years spread narratives that the only other people you can trust and will love you is this small clique and hush shhhh don’t call out rape amongst your sisters, we are so vulnerable. Everyone else is a transmisogynist monster, you can trust us we won’t let you get hurt. You shouldn’t make criticisms. It was just kink!

Seeing that come back but in a new social context is certainly disturbing. Seeing the problem become much bigger than it was the previous time, also disturbing. There seems to be less pushback than there was before. I think the fact that the Baeddels were very intentionally aesthetically offputting (not in physical appearances to be clear, but in communication style, politics and a general edgelord alternative vibe to their blogs) made it harder for them to gain traction. It also required more work - you at least had to engage with what other people were reading if not reading and producing readings yourself. There’s less barrier for entry which I think has made this new group far more palatable while also being more extreme in what they’re demanding of their followers.

Do they actually respect your boundaries? Are they trying to fuck you the first moment you’re alone when you’ve never had a sexual conversation with them previously? Are they trying to exert some kind of financial influence on you? Does their rhetoric ultimately lead you to isolating yourself socially from others, does it instill a sense of distrust towards the world? Are you told they are the only people who will love you? Is it impossible to provide constructive criticisms or enforce your own boundaries without it being seen as an attack on their personhood?

This is a red flag no matter who it comes from. It is universally true. If you feel like there are exceptions, that it is something that can be exploited by people you thought could trust. This is my advice for everyone in any community anywhere - walk away from anyone who acts like this. These aren’t trustworthy behaviors and I’m not pulling these examples from thin air.

After my experiences in the early 2010s not just with Baeddels but also monetizeyourcat I’m not just not gonna sit quietly while people engage in dangerous behavior and rhetoric or try to spin the Baeddels as actually correct underdogs we should emulate. God no, that was so much stress and anxiety and broken trust. I don’t want any young women to go through that like we either did directly or witnessed around us.

Vetted by:

1. @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi # 151 on the spreadsheet of Vetted Gaza Fundraisers List]

2. @riding-with-the-wild-hunt Here .

Dear friends of Palestine, friends of Gaza and friends of my family in Gaza!

FINALLY!!! We are at 99% of our goal in our campaign to evacuate the living hell of Gaza and rebuild our life in Ireland!

While people post Eid outfits, food, and family photos, my family in Gaza is trying to survive another day of bombs, hunger, fear, and unbearable heat.

There is NO safe place left in Gaza.

The bombardment continues every single day. The explosions never stop. And now summer has turned the tents they live in into literal ovens.

Imagine trying to sleep inside plastic and fabric under a burning sky while drones and airstrikes continue around you.

This is NOT a temporary hardship. My family has lived through this nightmare for more than two years.

Two years of displacement. Two years of terror. Two years of watching their lives collapse piece by piece.

I am in Ireland, studying and trying to build a future, while every day I fear getting the phone call that my family did not survive the night.

We have already come such a long way thanks to the incredible support from friends of Gaza and Palestine around the world. Truly, we would never have made it this far without you.

And now we are VERY close to reaching our final goal.

Our only goal is to evacuate my entire family from Gaza to Egypt temporarily, and then reunite safely together in Ireland.

Please do NOT abandon Gaza and my family because the headlines got quieter. Please don’t stop caring because the world moved on.

Share this. Reblog this. Donate if you can. Help me get my family out alive before it’s too late.

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Maverique!!