#ask tator

You're good.

So the thing about Terfs is that they come in all shapes and sizes but the one thing they have in common is that they do not believe in or hate Trans individuals.

There are a few major talking points that can help you easily spot a Terf:

Believes in the strict rules of only two biological sexes existing (in humans. Some Terfs give animals a pass for some reason.)

Believe that Trans people are either faking, pretending, confused or sick for being Trans.

Believe that all Trans Woman are just predators dressing up like woman to attack/harm Afab woman. (Assigned Female At Birth. So someone who was born with a vagina, ovaries & a uterus. or at least one of those.)

Believe that people can't possibly know they are trans until they are 'older & not a child', which leads into their unwillingness to teach about trans bodies, intersex people and queer medicine as a general concept to kids.

One thing to note is that Terfs come in all shapes and sizes. You can find a Cishet Terf who loves Trump and JKR, but you can also find a Queer Terf who only believes in Gays & Lesbians being accepted into the queer community who vehemently hates Trans people.

It's all just about not accepting/allowing Trans people to exist.

I obviously don't know everything there is, but here are some common words/sayings used by Terfs:

Female (never using Woman/Girls for individuals and only reducing them to their genitals), Radfem (Radical Feminist. It's been co opted by Terfs), Biological Sex, "Only two genders.", Gender Critical, Transgenderism, Real Woman, Body Mutilation, LGB/LGB Aliance, Womanhood, "You're taking rights away from real woman", "You're making a mockery of womanhood."

(Additional Note: Terf ideology is very very heavily rooted in White Supremacy. You can have Terfs of all races, but the people who are most effected by these ideologies are Black Trans Woman, who are killed on the highest rate of any queer person.)

There's honestly so many but just remember this: If someone believes that your identity as a Trans person is: Inherently wrong, predatory, evil, or taking away rights from other people? They are a Terf and do not respect your life.

It doesn't matter if they "have trans friends". If they believe in Terf rhetoric? They do not want you to exist. They support laws and actions against you that will lead to your death or destitution because the people who make the laws that they support are also the same people who want you dead.

Terfs are not your friends.

Terfs do not deserve spaces in our communities queer or not.

Terfs do not care about you or your existence.

Terfs. Do. Not. Belong. In. Our. Spaces.

If this is about the sexually suggestive photo I was trying to share then I think you don't understand how age of consent works in most places for suggestive photography, seeing as the person in the photo was well above the age of 18 and it was taken as a photo-shoot for an artist.

But either way, you don't understand how censorship works and who it hurts or why going against art isn't going to help any minors or get rid of any pedophiles.

Pedophiles don't need 500 year old anime dragon girls, they have fucking criminal rings of real children who are actually getting hurt and being taken advantage of. So if you think you're little gatcha has any merit then I highly advise reading up on how censorship hurts minority people the most.

It's part of the terf rhetoric to get kids into feeling normal about excluding anyone who doesn't fit their ideals. They've successfully infiltrated fandom spaces as of a while ago because people people didn't call it out or put a stop to it when it was happening and now you've got full on adult antis who are just terfs in queer clothing leading the masses of kids to turn on their own in order to weaken the entire community.

You aren't wrong with assuming that specific fandoms were some of the major downfalls of what we had going for us, but the answer is definitely more nuanced than that unfortuntely.

I've had a lot of time to sit and think about the subject of the post I made, and I genuinely think that the true answer to the downfall of Fandom as a whole, is social media.

I hate to sound like That Old Person at a ripe age of 31, but that is my honest answer.

I myself did not get a phone until I was 18 years old and was able to buy one for myself, a little sidekick that let me text my friends when I wanted to hang out, but that wasou f about it. I didn't even get a home computer in my house until I was about 13 years old because we were fairly poor and didn't really need it for anything other than emails and bills.

The first thing I discovered on the computer was Neopets and Gaiaonline, two 'gaming' websites (I'm not assuming your age, but I'm going to talk as if you don't know about anything I'm speaking of just in case other people read this who do not know about it.) that focused heavily on dressing up your avatars, mini flash games and forum role play. The hottest social media at the time was Myspace and it wasn't until I got into Highschool that I even ended up making one.

There were no real algorithms that fed you 'content' on a front page outside of the things the people you followed posted, no way to get fed news ads unless it was in the sidebar where ads were usually placed, and there was no instant updates to every person's lives both small or famous unless you went looking for those updates yourself on google.

Now we have social media that is both forcefully placed in front of you in the form of genuine 'content' in both long and short form on absolutely every platform you can imagine. This isn't even going with the discussion that talks about ads on the TV and how for decades, America has been putting more and more emphases on pharmacy ads on TV and extending commercials to the point where people would rather pay 10-40 a month on streaming services to access movies and TV that might not exist at the whim of the streaming services, than watch cable tv with ads lol

Anyway, when Fandom first began its slow descent into madness, it was about the time that the new style of social media began to get big (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tiktok, etc) all places that were designed and created to make you want to See More.

I'm not one of those people who are like "We have no more focus because of social media arg!" but there is a grain of truth to the fact that, if you are fed bite sized pieces of bee information at a faster rate, it's harder to get yourself to slow down and actually delve into a topic further without incentive.

We have catchy news headlines that people read and never take the time to look into the matter further, we have facebook posts where people make crazy claims and no one verifies to check if it's true because that takes time and effort and understanding of how to perform basic search tasks and reading comprehension to ask the right questions, we have instagram breaking the concept of art and life experiences into bite sized, perfect square windows of moments to make your instagram feed look pretty enough to have thousands of followers, we have Twitter that has always been somewhat of a fast websites, but is easy to spread misinformation around on at light speed, Snapchat makes photos disappear, never allowing anything you do to be permanent unless someone manages to save it, Vine and TikTok made attention sinks were it's so easy to just get lost for hours of time into maybe not useless, but an exhaustive stream of information that encourages doing the same finger action for hours on end.

Marvel/MCU/Disney whatever we want to call it, including all the other major production companies, are just one symptom of a bigger problem. They've ridden the waves of instant gratification and people's inability to think outside the boxes for years, but unfortunately our primary source of entertainment in a world that wants to kill us all the time and keeps us inside the house more often, just happens to finally align with the companies and programs that are designed to squeeze more and more out of us until we die.