Weiszklee

Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.

Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.

From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.

To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".

The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.

Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?

Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.

Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III. An associated app offers matchmaking.

"If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."

Also these:

"This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."

"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."

"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."

As did the ending:

Unfortunately, this post was made by someone who does use the term transandrophobia (although its not my preferred term)! as does at least one of the additions above, and as do many people in the notes. if you agree with this post and think it is "real transmasc activism," i promise you there is PLENTY of transandrophobia/anti-transmasc theory that you would find really compelling. I actually only started using the term myself after finding a trans woman who was outspoken about supporting the word as a way to discuss anti-transmasculine oppression.

If you want to know more, my pinned is a FAQ on the subject. Even if you disagree with what i say here, I think you would find it interesting. I include many links for further introductory reading, including this post and this post where I go over some common criticisms of transandrophobia and my responses to them. I've also recently been posting some quotes from Emi Koyama's Transfeminist Manifesto, which aren't directly related to the term itself but I think are really important for understanding what transfeminism needs to look like, and the issues with how people today (especially on tumblr) imagine it should look like.

The idea of using misandry in a feminist manner is not a brand new one, either. Sophie Lewis, a great feminist writer, used it in her essay on heterofatalism, Collective Turn Off:

But today, in popular feminism, the unfruitfulness of the ‘androcide’ and ‘exodus’ positions has given way not to a revival of the communist dream of sexual liberation but to a widespread stance of misandry-lite characterised by martyred resignation to the dismal quality of heterosex [...] Note, while a majority of heterofatalist misandrists online today seem to think they are trans-affirming, their position not only requires erasing trans men altogether, but also all trace of trans women’s lived experiences as men, regardless of those women’s own self-understanding. Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.

She also references this article by Sophia Giovannitti, who also uses misandry in a feminist sense:

The thing is, the popular misandrist left discourse, perpetuated by straight women, has almost nothing to do with sexuality, but everything to do with gender. Like political lesbianism, this Political Heterosexuality is not concerned with actual, felt sexual orientation or relationships—it’s concerned with the reifying of binary categories at the expense of a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition.

Additionally, it has been used by Black feminists, such as F.D Signifier. He's used in multiple places but here's an example:

As much grief and pain as many men can present within and outside of community, I understand we still also need to resist the urge to be "ironically homophobic or misandrious" as soon as it's time to take issue with a man within or outside of community. This of course does not give boys and men carte blanche to act like assholes, or center themselves in situations where it's not necessary. It just means that we all need to be more proactive and gracious to each other and focus on the whole of the problem. as much as one could muster at least

The term "misandry" is not forever spoiled by use by MRAs; feminists can and do use the term to add further nuance to their feminist theory and activism, especially when it comes to discussing marginalized men whose manhood influences their marginalization in important ways.

None of this requires ignoring misogyny or positioning misandry as simple "the boy version of misogyny" that functions in exactly the same way. The term can be quite useful in describing certain trends in attitudes and behaviors, and can be particularly important in feminist self-critique. bell hooks, while I don't believe she ever used that specific term, wrote about the dangers of anti-male attitudes in feminism to feminism at various points (see Feminism Is For Everybody and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love). Transandrophobia / anti-transmasculinity theory has always been in conversation with the works of Black feminists and feminist theorists who pushed for greater inter-gender and inter-movement solidarity. It is important that we talk about this issue in feminist, queer, and trans spaces, and there's really no reason we need to let this term belong to misogynistic MRAs.

And the thing is, I know very well that there will never be a perfect term. Because with transandrophobia, no term has ever been "good enough" to avoid anti-transmasculine backlash. The resistance to discussing anti-transmasculinity, and anti-masculinity in general in feminist and queer spaces, will never be solved by finding a Morally Pure Word to discuss it with, because people simply do not want to discuss it.

This is why participating in the backlash to transandrophobia will always be harmful, even if you do want to see more discussions of anti-transmasculinity. The criticisms of the term are by and large not done in good faith, and even those that are are frequently clearly undereducated in what the term actually means. The backlash against transandrophobia has always been apart of that anti-transmasculine "snowballing" you described. This is not to say people have never had valid fears about the term, but it has only gotten to such a point because anti-transmasculinity is something we all internalize and it has been allowed to go largely unchecked in queer and trans spaces for years.

If you want to see more people discussing the kind of things talked about in the posts above, you need to make your peace with the term transandrophobia, because it is the people who use that term who have been the ones most outspoken about the need to talk about these issues before anyone gives us permission or finds the Perfect Word that no one will get mad at us for using. We need to move beyond the linguistic squabbling and take seriously the issues actually being discussed: pay gaps, interpersonal violence, sexual assault, suicide, reproductive rights, misogynistic legal structures, etc.

Contributing to the backlash against transandrophobia fundamentally means contributing to the movement of people who will silence this discussion no matter how perfectly it is worded or how serious its topics are. You don't have to personally like the term transandrophobia, but without it, you would not even be seeing this post that you yourself found impactful, and the term has never, ever been as much of a problem for our community as the reactionary, radical feminist backlash to it has been.

And this backlash has not spared anyone; I have seen multiple trans women talk about being harassed, having people insist they aren't real trans women, that they are lying men, that they should kill themselves, purely for supporting the use of this word. There is so much misinformation out there on transandrophobia and I really do hope you take some time to look into this posts I linked and at least consider them seriously.

This is me saying "people have panicked about how X new technology is poisoning the earth and giving us all mega-cancer" for as long as there have been new technologies and if we got rid of every new technology that people panicked about we'd have to get rid of solar, wind farms, 5g towers, and power plants - not that we'd have any of them, because we'd have gotten rid of electricity a hundred years ago.

Maybe data centers are really bad! Maybe they really are causing huge amounts of pollution! Maybe they are putting too much of a strain on our water supplies and electrical grids! Certainly it seems like a bad idea to put them in drought-stricken areas!

But if that's the case I expect there to be hard evidence of that and not just a bunch of people freaking out on the internet about how they're raising the surrounding temperatures by 20 degrees when they absolutely are not.

I think we should do environmental surveys and I think we should regulate the hell out of the IT industry and make sure it's not negatively impacting our communities and I think we should strengthen our electrical grid with clean energy so that it can handle our ever-increasing need for power, but I also think that we all really like being on the internet and we are gonna need data centers in order for us to keep being on the internet. I don't think insisting that nobody ever build a data center again is a good goal to have.