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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.

Content warnings: Rape, abuse, discrimination, transphobia, specifically transphobia against trans men.

One such example of the rapist and abuser tactic of being a prolific blogger and kind of a keyboard activist who wrote a lot of posts about how trans women are integral for trans women and you can only trust trans women was (sigh) monetizeyourcat AKA MYC. There are still some old posts up on my blog about her. Literally from back in the day people who knew her:

1, 2.

One other was “b8l” who was one of the original “baeddel bloggers.” Here’s a short retrospective post explaining who the baeddel bloggers were. Here’s a longer one, more detailed and in-depth on their ideology and has more sources. If it seems odd that i’m bringing up things that happened in 2014-2015, reading through that last post kind of makes it more clear that even movements that people can claim are “over and done with” have connective tissue to today.

All of the perpetrators I just mentioned fucking Posted Through It in the most egregious ways. Nobody willingly took accountability, people had to fucking proactively kick them out of their social circles and it took significant time and effort.

But there is one thing from the original post that I do think it’s necessary to expound on: The socioeconomic context of this. Because beliefs don’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does sexual abuse and rape. These things don’t simply happen because of “evil individuals,” even though I think it’s OK to describe rapists as “evil” because of what they did.

Transfeminine people, especially youth, are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Why is this? Because they are often abused or ostracized by their own families, and in places like the USA where there is practically zero social safety net, accepting an offer to join a sketchy housing situation by an older person in the same demographic as you is more likely. This kind of thing does not only happen to transfeminine people of course. But afaik it’s statistically slightly more common.

The other thing that makes us vulnerable to abuse is because we are feminized subjects in society. By “feminized subjects” i guess you could say “Treated in a woman-like way.”

Unfortunately, if you’re a woman, you will not only be treated as a woman by men, but also other women.

So, it’s a double-struggle, involving both transmisogyny and capitalism, at bare minimum. I don’t really know what this kind of struggle would look like for an ultra-wealthy trans person, so I’m mostly speaking about the working class here.

My reaction to this fact is not, of course, to say that people who merely don’t experience transmisogyny are a class of enemies. I know and have known trans men who are ardent feminists. Where, I say, is the ruthless criticism of parents who abuse and abandon their own children? Of religious leaders, politicians, and business owners who spread hate? And, lastly, if someone’s “found family” is an abusive found family, why can’t we criticize that?

In the current economic order, “found family” has basically the same inherent problems with its power dynamics as one’s “original family.” If you don’t make a significant portion of the household income, if you don’t own the house, if your name is not on the lease of that apartment, you may actually be an extremely vulnerable subject within your own household.

This is due to the current mode of economic production in society. And who maintains that mode of production?

The real and primary enemy, the particular class that is the biggest obstacle for transfeminine people, all trans people, all LGBT+ people, and the entire working class, is the fucking bourgeoisie. The capital-owning class.

But back to domestic abuse.

It’s not a sign of a socially coherent community if your town (or your state, province, county, parish, etc) has an intermittent exodus of LGBT+ youth out of it. That indicates there is something deeply wrong with your entire society.

I don’t look at places that were recipients of queer exoduses and managed a half-baked truce like, for example, San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and (sigh) Seattle as success stories. Rather, they became the sites of new forms of immiseration, even as they (and other cities, and some entire states) were held up as some kind of safe haven. Speaking generally, working class LGBT+ people in the modern era have historically had a slightly better time in cities as opposed to small towns, but a safe haven where you can’t afford the rent and have to live out of your car isn’t very “safe” in practice.

Note that one of the things that people (correctly) note as an indicator of some degree of safety is the presence of local laws against discrimination and the presence of the designation of “hate crimes.” But these have some inherent problems with them, such as the fact that if you are dependent on your abuser for income or housing, you kind of can’t accuse them without your life being turned upside down.

So, with all this in mind, one of the important things to consider about anyone’s political views is “Who benefits from believing this?”

Tone policing is when someone ignores your argument because you were emotional about it. It is not tone policing to ask someone to reflect on / update their words while sympathizing with your point, because the words you said are materially harmful in some way.

For example: It is materially harmful to paint people as being transandrophobic because they aren’t transmasc, that’s similar to how the TRFs and radfems and incels happened. The people asking or suggesting that you try naming the group by action (transandrophobes) are NOT “tone policing” you, they are pulling you back from a hateful pipeline that if you aren’t careful, you will entrench yourself in, just like those other groups. You will remove anyone’s ability to show allyship to you, so helping pivot the anger is an act of community.

Be willing to accept being checked by your community, or you may not have one.