A Shrine

instead, insult his intellect and self-control. tell him you can see his personal bias, that he's clearly projecting. tell him his beliefs are emotion-based, irrational, or sentimental. if he says stuff like ""unborn children"", tell him he's using emotionally charged wording unnecessarily and that it betrays he's invested and can't see things objectively. tell him he's resistant to facts or logic, that what he's saying is tautology, a logical fallacy, of course if it is (point out which one). tell him if he's affected and angry, he can take his time to respond. tell him he sounds too chaotic because he was clearly angry typing it up and maybe he wants to reword? do armchair psychiatry. ask about his relations with his mom.

My first reaction was to be confused by the idea of "envy" bc I didn't see anything unattainable there. Any woman who wants to put on a silly mismatched outfit and do a silly dance can easily do that. The only unattainable thing happening in that video is its subject being male.

Which, I promptly realized, is the entire point of "gender envy" that no one who uses the term dares to say out loud bc it gets worryingly close to implying there's privilege in being born male. Women are coveting the freedom men have to style themselves any which way they please, where little touches of femininity here and there are actually fun because they're an optional little extra flourish to spice up the pageantry of a costume rather than an exhausting checklist of obligations, and any resulting sexualization is fully intentional and firmly tongue-in-cheek. Basically men dabbling in unconventional outfits involving bits and pieces of femininity represent everything that libfems wish compulsory femininity was for themselves when they defend it, with all the tired old lines about how fun and creative it is that you can tell even they don't actually believe.

(tags courtesy of @discyours)

I hope it's alright to piggyback on this bc 1) same here, and 2) I realized I got distracted while writing the original post and totally forgot to touch on this aspect. I didn't entirely finish my thought about why this coveted male display of boisterous and lighthearted self-expression feels so out of reach for women, but you pretty much nailed it in one.

Everything women do is cringe by default. Men even made helpful categories in order to be as specific as possible about all the ways they think women doing things are cringe: gamer girls, VSCO girls, e-girls, horse girls, there's a derogatory label for all stripes, no matter what her interests are and what she's passionate about. The only way to be a woman who's funny and charismatic, and have people actively want to be you (as a show of genuine admiration rather than fetishistic possessiveness at least) is to not be a woman at all, is what the message seems to be most of the time.

@plexusuterovaginalis From what I've seen the painter is receiving support from trans women. One has thanked her "for her courage", another posed next to the painting with a middle finger raised and the caption "genius". More still are laughing and think it's completely appropriate.

Other TRAs send support for what they believe is an understandable reaction to "terf violence" (which, strangely, hasn't killed anybody). A lot of them are reporting Marguerite's account in "retaliation".

When another person pointed out how often Marguerite is subjected to death threats, and she was now only adding to them, the painter replied "Too much is never enough!"

Valeries face has a blowout which I'm pissed about (I forgot to double expose it, but I have 4 screens right now and was planning on consolidating it to 3 anyways so I'll be fixing it tomorrow) so it will not continue for anyone interested in the white on black

When Q-theorists look at a conservative religious woman, dressed in modest, feminine clothing, a woman who is under the thumb of her husband’s control, a woman who has been indoctrinated in to a religion that divorces her from the agency of her power of creation, a woman who works day and night in the home to serve her husband and children, whose entire existence is secondary to the men in her life, they do not see an oppressed person. They do not see her suffering. They see a woman who is in her correct place, they see her as “cis.”

When Q-theorists see a woman performing a high degree of feminine beauty standards–capitalist manufactured standards–and self harming through hook up culture, desperately seeking a sense of value and approval through beauty and how many men will want to fuck her, they do not see an oppressed person. They do not see her suffering. They see a woman who is in her correct place, they see her as “cis.”

Q-theorists do not look deeply in to the internal lives of women. They do not analyze how harmful capitalist beauty standards affect women’s sense of self worth and self love, how all the patriarchal roles that many women will accept with a smile on their face (in order to survive–women who eschew femininity are all too often cast out from society) truly affect our experience of the world. They see the smile and take that at face value. They accuse those of us who speak out as turning women in to victims, and they claim that victimhood dehumanizes women. 

Yet, we feminists are women, and we know these experiences ourselves, because we have lived them. The Q-theorists exist for the purpose of preventing women from uniting around our shared experience of oppression, so they must deny that our experiences exist, or that if they do, they are isolated, personal, and not political.

When women want to organize around the harm done to our bodies under patriarchy, they use obscuring language to deny us a sense of class consciousness, and all in the name of social justice. But in the end, they serve the interests of male supremacy by doing so.

Feminists criticize gender as an artificial social construct which exists as a caste system to oppress women, and must be destroyed. Q-theorists insist that gender is a spectrum, a playground, and an ethereal innate facet around which one’s self identity must be built. Only a class privileged within such an axis of oppression could view gender in such a manner. Gender is the tool of male supremacy which is used to validate women’s oppression.

So who is the “cis woman”? She is an imaginary being without a soul, without an internal life, without inner conflict, without humanity. She is a zombie who blindly and happily accepts her role under patriarchy. She is the submissive and breedable stereotype that fascists want all women to be. She only has a voice in Q-theorist spaces when she is agreeing with the status quo, and when she disagrees, she must be removed–because the Q-theorist space does not exist to support her.

The decline of women’s rights correlates with the rise of Q-theory, because the Q-theorists have used obscuring language to overtake women’s spaces, so that now, there will be no space where women are free to organize against our oppressors. We are told that our oppressors can speak for us, that they are us, but we are not them. That they are all real women, that they know everything that we know, they experience all that we experience, that they can speak for us, but we can not know what they know, we can not experience what they experience, and we can not speak for them. Differences can only be acknowledged between us when it suits their narrative and their power over us in what should be our spaces, and differences that highlight our oppression and our struggles must be ignored. We women are once again relegated to a lower status, once again having our voices silenced in favor of dicktatorship.

What It Means To Be A Woman – Transgender Perspective

My therapist asked me what it means to be a woman and this stumped me because I couldn’t seem to answer it without validating sexist gender roles and societal norms. If I were to say it’s how you act, how you think, or the things you gravitate towards I would be no better than the people who try to put us in a box and make us feel trapped. I instead though maybe it’s about how you want to look…

what they literally cite as their source:

they organized a march for women’s day denouncing the erasure of women. they were against congress passing a gender identity law (that would allow trans people to change their sex on their birth certificates in a straightforward way) before they addressed the demands women have been making for decades, especially with regards to abortion and the high rates of femicide in the state of mexico (one of the most dangerous for women in the country).

they also decided to set up tents outside congress to demand reproductive rights and were met with state violence (tear gas etc) and hostility from the general population. several women were threatened and/or physically assaulted (by congresspeople as well as civilians) while police watched and did nothing to stop it. trans collectives started protesting outside the building several days later, pressuring congress to pass the gender identity law. some of their members also harassed the feminists, including an underaged girl.

since then, they have continued to suffer sexual and physical harassment as well as derision from the press while they continue to demand their rights.

mutha: it’s disrespectful 

me: not wearing a bra is disrespectful to who 

mutha: in general 

me: and…? i don’t kno who that is 

mutha: 💥🔫 

me: 😬