yt queers, do better thx

Do you want a better world, or do you want revenge on those you think aren’t doing enough to improve it?

Do you want a more just world, or do you want to see bad people suffer merciless punishment?

Do you want a less oppressive world, or do you want the reins of power for yourself?

we cry "the innocent women and children" to appeal to the masses, to try and force their sympathy, but the men and boys are innocent too.

I have seen sons crying out for their mothers, their fathers, their siblings. I have seen them break down at the loss of their families. I have seen them cling to their dead and grieve.

I have seen fathers cradle their dead children, seen them kiss their faces and hold their little hands. I have seen them faint with grief when asked to identify the dead. I have seen them carry their sons and daughters. I have seen them fasting to provide what little they can for their families.

I have seen men and boys digging through the rubble with just their bare hands, I have seen them comforting strangers, playing with children, rocking them, hushing them, even if the face of such imminent danger. I have seen them cry, seen them grieve, seen them break down into each other's arms, seen them be selfless, beyond selfless, becoming something I don't have a word for.

I have seen the men who are doctors refuse to leave their patients, even when they have no medicine or supplies to give them, even when they're threatened with bombings. I have seen fathers who have lost all their children pick orphans up into their arms and proclaim them their child so they are not alone. I have seen men and boys digging pets out of the rubble.

So theres this really exclusive club that you can only be born into, and the rules of the club say: "Only the Super Special Members of the Super Special Club can have the Super Special Stuff. You can't have the Super Special Stuff because you're not Super Special🖕!!" And failure to comply with these rules can get you mocked, villinized, beaten, or killed- That's hegemonic masculinity. It's the enforcement of misogyny and colonialism through exclusion.

Being trans masc inherently fucks with this power system. By claiming maleness, manhood, or masculinity we prove that they are not exclusive to the Super Special Members and that all the Super Special nonsense is just delusions of grandeur.

Trans femmes do this in the other direction. Proving that femininity and womanhood are desirable and valuable even over their alleged 'superior'.

The struggle against hegemonic masculinity is not exclusive to trans mascs. Like I said in another post about this topic; It's a battle that's shared between POC (BIPOC especially), all women, and queer people of all shapes and shades.

Our existence as human people undermines the power of Man(tm) as a social class.

so what im getting is that we should rethink the “indigenous people have a concept of Nonbinary” and instead maybe contemplate the reason we are erasing spiritual and cultural practices in order to think of nuanced cultural histories within the ‘queer identity’ when in fact many of these ‘third genders’ are people who do not conform to the WESTERN patriarchal framework of OUR ‘gender roles’.

Indigenous scholars have a right to be listened to and PARTICULARLY I note the fact that many of the Indigenous roles termed ‘genders’ by are either 1) amab people performing specific cultural or religious practices, 2)  cultural terms for homosexuals, where western scholars have defined homosexuality as evidence that these people are at least partly taking on the role of ‘the opposite gender’, or 3) groups of women who have taken vows of celibacy and chastity to lessen their own patriarchal oppression.

are these examples of ‘trans people have existed throughout history’ or is it more that ‘sex-based social roles appear differently in cultures across the world, and spiritual practices of indigenous communities should not be shoeboxed into western Queer Theory at the expense of their complexity and religious significance’?

because its sounding an awful lot like categorising sworn virgins as ‘trans men’ erases misogyny, berdache and sipiniq as a ‘third gender’ erases indigenous spirituality and custom, and calabai as ‘trans women’ erases the fact that western colonialism has persistently pushed homophobic categories onto Indigenous men that do not conform to Western gender. gender is a social construct - and here it seems as if western queer theory has ‘constructed’ indigenous spirituality and diversity in social roles as a ‘gender’.

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‘Men are the real virus’

‘Retweet if you hate men’

All of these are examples of transphobia; specifically, they are examples of transandrophobia

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It doesn’t matter if your intent is to target cis men

The powerful and abusive men who hold the highest status under white Christofascist patriarchy won’t hear you, but your trans masc and trans men friends will

‘Misandry doesn’t exist’ is missing the point & ignoring the gender hierarchy that exists under white supremacist capitalism

Misandry exists but it doesn’t harm cis/white/abled men because society is structured to cater specifically to them

It does harm Black men and trans men

If you believe that misandry doesn’t exist in any way, shape or form - your analysis of it is flawed, because it doesn’t take into account the structural gendered violence that impacts minority men

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Examples based on specific axes of oppressions - single & multiple axes all work to dehumanize minority men:

Trans - ‘not real’ men, denied healthcare

Black - inherently violent/dangerous, targeted by the carceral state

Disabled - not deserving of housing, healthcare, education

The word transandrophobia gives us language to describe the unique gendered aspects of the oppression(s) faced by (multiply) marginalized men

You are allowed to have whatever emotions you want. No one can control your emotions. Emotions are healthy responses to things.

You are not allowed to have behaviors that are harmful just because you have certain emotions. Your behaviors are what you can control, and they are far easier to control than your emotions.

You can be jealous about someone or their talents until you turn green, but it is harmful to yourself and to that person if you try to sabotage them because of it. You can be so angry you can literally feel your temperature rise, but this does not give you permission to rage at others.

you may be sex-repulsed; that doesn’t mean sex is dirty and bad. maybe you were bullied by teenage girls; that doesn’t mean teenage girls are a force of evil. perhaps a villain in a work of fiction reminds you of someone who abused you; that doesn’t mean people who enjoy that character or that fiction are abusive. your feelings about those things are absolutely valid, and it’s not right for people to tell you you shouldn’t feel that way. but it’s also not right for you to act out against others based on those feelings.

that instinct to generalize served our species well when we were hunter-gatherers living in small bands in a hostile wilderness. you nibble a delicious-looking berry, you throw up, you know that berry is BAD and you make the yuck face whenever you see it so the other hominids know it’s a bad one. but in the modern world, in the information age, there are so many complex things you might encounter, you’re going to have badfeels about a lot of things that aren’t actually across-the-board bad.