#former radqueer

I am no longer in the pro-para/lolishio/proship/radqueer community (it all blurs together, really). Three years ago was when I made the decision to leave and to receive professional help. I completely disconnected from social media and took a very hard look at myself. I didn't realize how disgusting I truly was. I became a part of this community when I was a teenager. I was confused, scared, and ashamed of the attractions and addiction to this stuff. The reality is that if you made a ven-diagram with proshippers and pe*os, it would be a circle. "Reality is separate from fiction" becomes hard to believe when you see people calling real girls "lolis", using pizza emojis, and saying they have "no limits."

I wasn't just a "radqueer." I was a mentally ill person who wanted to be loved in a world of so much hate. I needed help, and I'm so glad I'm finally getting it. I'm upset when I think of the much more healthy life I could've had if I got it sooner. Equally, I am upset at the loneliness I feel now. I have left the "cult" but at the expense of losing all my friends.

I really wish I could find more people like me on here. I dream of having pro-recovery friends who just get it. I want to be understood. I want people to recover with. I want to be loved.

You are not a "traitor."

You are not transphobic.

You are not "betraying" anyone.

You have the right to leave communities that no longer serve you.

You will find a safe space where you feel comfortable.

You are loved.

CW: mentions of grooming, sh and paraphilia.

I am NOT a cult survivor (expect for rqc, which will come up later) but since i was a thirteen, i have been interested in cults. Which "side" you are on, take a seat and a good look at the traits of a cult:

The pure thought, the concept of trying to justify harmful behaviour and thoughts (yes, thoughts can be harmful. For example, you wouldnt say that a person who feels no distress thinking about killing people would be any less mentally ill than a person who does, yeah?) Is very cult-y to me.

"We just want appectance! We just want peace! Our beliefs are valid!"

The whining bounces through the walls of the giant box, echo filling the space of the mob yelling.

Its all an echo chamber.

This is where my experience comes up... or should i say our experience?

As someone who is a CDD system (questioning polyfragmentation and being a ramcoa survivor, medically regonized but not yet diagnosed), our alter Solar was both groomed by our abusers and later groomed online (we were collectively victimized, but Solar holds those memories. Those groomers were radqueers.).

Most of their existence, he thought that harmful paraphilias were a normal part of life and totally appectable and something to be proud of. She caused our system many drama situations, got us deeper into a manipulative and co-depentent friendship and frequently stalked radqueer communities and idolized them. They also antagonized people in-sys, often reaffirming intrusive thoughts, triggering flashbacks and manipulating vulnerable alters into harm the body for pleasure.

Recently, Solar has taken accountability of harming our system, no longer thinks that paraphilia is normal and is aiming to recover. He feels like her whole "life" has been wasted and is struggling with SI, overcome with regret. But one thing they do not feel is shame for leaving these echo chambers. He will not feel shame for being a survivor. She will not be licking the boots of the very same people who took advantage of them. They are a survivor of the rqc. Suck it up.

Conclusion:

From personal experience, radqueer community and people associating positively with it are an ouroboros. Only talking and taking sources and advice from each other, ingnoring and demonizing critics (for example, Hushypuppy) and mental health professionals and often, destroying themselfves. Its no secret that radqueers are extremely mentally ill and isolated people, looking for a community and appectance.

Where there's prey, there's predators. Malignant people will join these communities for the purpose of hurting the mentally ill.

Are you a radqueer reading this? Now, listen very carefully. I understand that you may feel conflicted, paranoid maybe angry? Maybe you're trying to cope with humor by laughing at my post? I understand your denial, but i need for you to listen to me.

No person should be left to succumb into a swamp with no bottom.

GET OUT. While there's still time and hope for you. Especially if you are underage "chronologically". These people are not your friends, they are victims and their abusers. They dont care about you or your mental health. Log off. Talk to someone you are close with. Family, friends, teachers, psychologists, therapists... Seek real connections and listen to the opinions of people outside of the internet. Even if its hard. Even if it hurts. Caterpillar needs to struggle to become a butterfly.

Remember, Radqueers arent punk

Punks do NOT encourage

Cultural Appropriation

Ableism

Abuse Of Any Kind (Yes Even Your “Con Abuse”)

Racism

I am a cult survivor, I have been one far before I was in the radqueer community. As a cult survivor, the radqueer community IS a cult. If you've never been in the community, and have only been an outside observer, it's understandable that you wouldn't realize this, but claiming radqueers are "just assholes" is a slap in the face to people like me who have been permanently traumatized by them.

Here is a commonly used model of how cults work:

If you go through every single point in this, the radqueer community checks almost every one of them. People have already pointed this out many times before, however I will explain it again for people who haven't seen those posts.

(Skipping over ones that don't fully apply or that I haven't personally experienced. Most of these are pretty brief because I don't think anyone will read an entire essay for every point)

Rigid rules - radqueers force you to include everyone and everything, and never question what you're accepting lest you get labeled as "not a real radqueer" and harassed. You must accept any and all predatory relationships, or you'll receive the same treatment as "antis". If that isn't "rigid rules", I don't know what is.

Rewards and punishments - you coin a term people like, or make an "I love pro-cs" post? Everyone likes you, praises you, sends you asks telling you how amazing you are! You dare to question anything about the community? You get cast out, banned from servers, harassed, sent death threats, and doxxed.

Dependence and obedience - radqueers make their victims believe that this is the only community that will accept them. They say that every other community will hate them for their identity, and this is the only "real radinclus" community. This causes people to feel trapped there, or in other words become entirely dependent on the community for validation and support. They convince people that if they leave, or do anything wrong that causes them to be forced out, they'll have nowhere to go. This forces them into obedience for fear of being left all alone and being completely abandoned.

Deception - this one is very, very obvious. There's a reason why radqueers label themselves as "radically inclusive", "pro-consent", "pro-bodily autonomy" - they are not just saying these things because they don't understand what they mean. They're intentionally using uplifting, inclusive language that sounds really great and supportive to deceive people into joining them. This is also why they use emoji codes, so other radqueers will recognize them but people who don't know what radqueers are will be lured into their trap.

Propaganda - pretty similar to the above. They label everything as "radical inclusion" and tell people that they have to support all these things to be "truly inclusive". They make cute flags and emoji codes to make grooming, abuse, racism, ableism, and transphobia seem cool and fun, to further lead people into their trap. By definition, propaganda is "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view". All these cutesy emojis, symbols, flags, and terms are propaganda.

Discourages access to outside sources of information - radqueers constantly say that all science, psychology, and medical information is "biased" and "bigoted". If you provide them with any information on how what they're doing is wrong, they pull out any number of excuses and then tell their "friends" how bigoted and exclusionist the source is. This makes it seem like radqueers are the only reliable source of information, and anything else is untrustworthy.

Insider/outsider doctrine - this is painfully clear with how they refer to everyone who disagrees with them as "antis". Even if you're just an outside observer, you pick up on this quickly.

All/nothing, good/evil, us/them dogma - once again, they refer to anyone who differs even slightly in opinion as an "anti" or "anti in training", and the second anyone decides to question why they're literally supporting nazis and blackface, they get labeled as an "anti" and "horrible person". They play the victim any time they get told that what they're doing is wrong, while crying and complaining about how much they're harassed and about how "mean" and "rude" anti-radqueers are.

Feeling chosen or special - radqueers very obviously convince themselves that they're so unique and special, which is why terms like transship or transhasapetcat exist. They want to seem really cool and special, and make completely normal things into obscure, "special" identities, like calling yourself translivesintheuk instead of just saying you wanna move to the UK. As someone who's been in their servers, they hoard identities like this because it makes them feel temporarily special and unique, which makes them convinced that what they're doing is right.

Guilt/manipulation - radqueers do this all the time. When someone says they aren't sure if they support something or not, radqueers immediately get all teary-eyed and upset, claiming that the person would be "basically an anti" if they decided not to support it. I've even seem someone cry and complain over being rejected by an anti-transnazi radqueer and claim that it was "ableist" that the person rejected them. Everyone defended and comforted the person who was rejected, immediately siding with them for fear of being "ableist", saying that it was wrong to be against literal nazis. This is very clear manipulation and guilt-tripping.

Phobia indoctrination - phobia indoctrination is where people in the cult make others terrified of leaving for fear of being hurt, killed, etc. As I've explained earlier, radqueers try to scare people into staying by saying that if they leave the community, no one will ever support or love them, and they'll never be accepted outside of it. People who went into the radqueer community after being anti-radqueer know firsthand how awful the harassment, doxxing, and death threats from radqueers are. People in the community who have doubts are very clearly too scared to leave, and people who don't have doubts have been convinced that no one will ever love them except for radqueers.

RADQUEERS. STOP. CALLING. YOURSELF. PUNK.

YOU'RE NOT PUNK. YOUR FUCKING WEIRD.

If you support identities like Transnazi or Transcancer or Transabled or whatever the fuck your not punk. Punk is about disability rights, religious rights, anarchy and not being a fucking asshole.

I recently left the radqueer community

Hello, My name is Peyton and I recently left tje radqueer community I've kind of wanted to get this out of my system but I don't have anyone I feel like I can talk to this about so I'm making a Tumblr post.

Now I am an adult (19) leaving the community and I joined the community 3 years ago when I was 16. When I initially joined a community I was very vulnerable I didn't have many friends I felt like I didn't belong anywhere and I was pretty miserable. I'm autistic and I'm also a system and have NPD and another big one is I have a restrictive ed (relevant) I also struggle quite a bit with masking. Due to my struggles with masking I got bullied quite a bit at school and even more so when I started expressing my queer identity by doing things like putting nonbinary pins on my bag the bullying just made me become a less social and more online.

Are they became increasingly online and I would also spent more time here on Tumblr. And this is where I found the radqueer community at first I was sceptical of it but the more I looked through tags and the more I saw the community I felt kinda good about it and eventually decided to join it because I felt like this could be the only place I could truly be myself and not get bullied and it was but I didn't realise this place was doing way more harm to me than good.

Now when I mentioned the restrictive ed would be important this is why it's important this community has a big sense of be able to do what you want with your body regardless of what it is if it's your body you should be allowed to do whatever you want which I do agree with to an extent but this includes things like encouraging sh to people if they want to do that or encouraging eds to people if they wanna do that encouraging people to kill their selves if they want to do that and at the time I was very against the idea of recovery so I mostly use this community as ways to validate myself and the disorder, I used this mentality as a way to encourage my disorder with the fit well it is my body and if I want to harm it I should be able to which only hurt me more mentally and physically in the long run. When I was radqueer I also did just stop trying to make connections in real life because I wanted to be online every day I wanted to be engaging with the community all day so I would mostly be on discord or Tumblr because I wanted to interact with people that thought like me even though I didn't agree with a lot of people's ideology I just got addicted to the feeling of feeling valid and wanted it for once because I wasn't used to that and I needed it once I got it I needed it.

A lot of people in these spaces were Pro-C I have never been pro contact I was always anti contact and I would spend a lot of time blocking pro contact people and reporting them but being in a community with so many of them did genuinely stress me out I just wasn't willing to leave for so long because I felt like when I leave I'm gonna be lonely again which to some extent yes I kind of miss the community because it is hard to leave something that you spent three whole years of your life in and then not miss it because I do but at the same time I don't want to be in a community anymore where the only thing that comes out of it is harm towards myself to other people, I do not want to be in a community where a cultural appropriation is normalised and ideologies such as "transnazi"is normalised or how normal pro contact sending people for harmful paraphilias are I can't be in that community anymore.

And yes being a system did kind of make being in this community easier for me to rationalise in my head. The way I saw it is well it might be good for us because different alters may have traits that we can't bodily have like wings or animal features and I would be like well that could be transids and either for them to express themselves which it immediately I understand the logic I had at the time but I also understand it's not the best logic anymore I was just desperately trying to rationalise why I was in this community at the time. Now we do have alters that are and always have been very anti radqueer and those are mostly protectors which should've been taken as a sign earlier than it was we do have some altars that are still attached to the community but collectively we are deciding to come away from me and try to recover from it as being in the radqueer community brought so much stress on us as a system and some level of trauma which has led us to split more which of course we don't want to do but we were in denail about that being because of our splits for so long.

Yes I did support transids and admittedly I did use some because I thought anytime I felt bad about myself or something I wanna change that would just be me being trans that thing and I did tend to use a lot of these (none like transrace or transabled but I did support thoes unfortunately).

And I feel like I've only recently left it hasn't even been a whole week but I have been questioning leaving for a few months I just didn't wanna get threats over it because some of these people did support doxxing in some of the discord servers I was in but now I have got to the point where I can't take it anymore and I feel like I have to leave because this community has done nothing but damaged me and it is damaging other people to this day and the one thing I'm worried about if I keep seeing this community on TikTok I found it on Tumblr on accident but TikTok it scares me because that app is largely kids and it is an algorithm based app meaning all it really takes is one mention of sans undertale or whatever and it will just be on random non-related fyps and expose kids to the radqueer community and with how prevalent things like grooming are in that community this can only harm people. And I really really really hope that people can wake up and see this and more people can be aware of the community before it's too late.

I have had some experiences with being groomed whilst in the community I guess to normalise it more when I was 16 because I was so so vulnerable it was probably not that hard honestly to groom me and they probably saw that I was pretty much groomed into believing all this was normal and it wasn't harming people when it was it was harming me and it is harming others and not the best forming things or talking but I did just wanna get this out of my system this is just a rant (I don't wanna go into grooming details too much it is quite triggering for me).

I might make some more ex radq posts and go a bit more in-depth about it on my blog this was just something I put together because I really just need to get these thoughts out just cause I don't feel like I could tell anyone in real life this or that I would even in the community and I just had to get it out.