Bore da! Sut mae'ch diwrnod wedi bod, fy'n pobl rhyfedd?
Good morning! How's your day been, my strange people?
Why am I here? What is my purpose? Chances are, if you found this blog, you probably follow some of the relevant tags, and you might already be feeling offended. What the hell, you might be thinking, this is no more a cult than being trans! You must be a TERF!
First off, trust me, I'm a trans man. I'm a gay trans man. I'm well aware of TERF ideology, and I'm about as anti-TERF as a guy like myself can be. I'm in my early 40s, and I came of age when Kate Bornstein —who's been out as a bisexual non-binary trans woman since about 1991— was a staple on the pro-trans side of the talk show circuit in the 1990s. I've got some strong and nuanced opinions about the trans and non-binary community: While I do think the WPATH is there for a good reason, I also accept that people are going to do whatever. I'm all for affirming gender variant teens, but I also know that, as someone who masked his own dysphoria from overwhelming parents, there's always going to be the possibility that some gender non-conforming kid or another will feel like they have to swing their pendulum hard in the other direction to make their parents happy —but also, either way, that's more about the parents than the trans community. (As an aside, yes, I know that the Right-Wing hyperbole around the Younger case has been thoroughly de-bunked.) Needless to say, I'm not a TERF, I find their ideology deplorable, and frankly, they're also a cult, and if you want to know more about how they do, in fact, operate as a cult, another YouTuber broke that down pretty thoroughly, and as of the time I'm writing this, isn't even finished on that subject!
Secondly, in spite of regularly seeing accusations from the on-line asexual community, I have yet to see literally ANY evidence that TERF's have a significant "anti-asexual" sentiment amongst their ranks. No, vague claims of such from the on-line asexual community is not evidence of anything more than the willingness to believe something is true, simply because someone else from the on-line asexual community said that it is. In fact, let's use this as this blog's first example of how the on-line asexual community engages in the cult goals of Thought Control and Emotional Control, traits outlined by the BITE Model of cult identification, and put it in the category of a Level 1 Cult, alongside Q-Anon followers, and even TERF's, as outlined by the Cult Gradient.
First off, as the on-line asexual community loves to point out, "just cos someone on the Internet thinks 'demisexual is just normal human sexuality' (or similar) doesn't mean that it is!" so wouldn't it then stand to reason that just cos another person in the "ace spectrum" community says a thing is true, that wouldn't necessarily mean that it IS true? Unfortunately, for the aces, so many people involved in that community are eager to accept that anything another ace says, thus necessarily IS true, especially if it supports the idea that those who identify as somehow "asexual" are being uniquely oppressed. It's considered a textbook cult belief, that the group is being actively persecuted, without any clear evidence of the alleged persecution, or at least if the perceived persecution is not unique to the group —for instance, the Waco compound was not singled out for their bizarre religious beliefs, but they piqued the interest of the federal government due to legal infractions that applied to literally everyone. In spite of the fact that no-one can point to anything on TERF blogs and Facebook groups that would single out asexuals, nonetheless, this belief persists within the on-line asexual community.
Furthermore, the idea that a significant number of TERF's necessarily would put forth anti-asexual sentiments is literally nonsense. TERF ideology rests on the notion that trans women are "predatory men who want to symbolically and even literally rape women," and as an afterthought, that trans men are "poor women who've been taught to hate themselves by the patriarchy." TERF ideology was first formally outlined in Janice Raymond's book, The Transsexual Empire, first published in 1979. Some followers of TERFism completely miss the bizarre satirical angle of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, by the notable schizoaffective-disordered Valerie Solanas, and claim that pamphlet to be a part of their legacy, as well —but here's the funny thing: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto is very easily arguable as a part of asexual community history!
Siggy, author of the blog, The Asexual Agenda, wrote a multi-piece series on "Asexuality and Early Radical Feminism," which I really do recommend everyone read all parts of! For starters, it debunks the popular (in the asexual community) notion that a cerain 1969 photograph was necessarily linking "asexuals" with what would come to be known as the LGBTQ community (of course, looking at the fact that the poster behind the people, in the photo, also listed "straight" should be enough for people to debunk that cockamamie claim, but here we are...) More importantly, Siggy's series does a thorough deep-dive into the links between an asexual identity and radical feminism.
Now, if you're on Tumblr, you're probably kind of young, which is fine. I was once young, myself. I have a lot of young friends (and also a long distance situation with a young man about twelve years my senior [yes, senior], so zip it with any cries of moral panic). What I want to point out, though, is that if you're young, or just inexperienced, you are probably less likely to be familiar with the fact that there are two schools of thought that lay claim to the title of Radical Feminism, and I'm a firm believer in separation of TERFism or the "gender critical" cult from Radical Feminism.
TERFism is something I, at least once referred to as the Daly-Raymond or Daly-Raymond-Budapest School, after Mary Daly, her protégé, Janice Raymond, and Dianic witch Zsuzsana Budapest. I mentioned Raymond earlier, and her 1979 book. What I didn't mention, until just now, is that her book was originally her doctoral thesis and was overseen by her then-professor, Mary Daly. Daly is often regarded as a pagan author, and was at one time regarded fairly highly in the pagan community, but even by the 1970s, other professionals in her field of women's studies and anthropology, were finding issues with her own ideas, as she relied heavily upon Murrayism. Zsuzsana Budapest is another pagan figure, and is best known as the one who founded the primary lineage of Dianic Witchcraft, practiced today. Budapest's Witchcraft is heavily reliant on not only Murrayism, but also the works of Mary Daly, especially Gyn-Ecology, which is just as much of a foundational work of Dianic Witchcraft as Charles Godfrey Leyland's Aradia: Gospel of the Witches (which is... a relatively modern mythology, formed from a composite of sources). The Daly-Raymond-Budapest school of "radical feminism" essentialises the experience of womanhood on the same principles womanhood is seen in "radical traditionalism," being that a woman's identity is defined as one's ability to give birth, and this somehow informs everything that happens to women.
The other group laying claim to the moniker of "radical feminism" is the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school. Shulamith Firestone (who was also diagnosed as being on the schizoaffective spectrum) is the author of The Dialectic of Sex, wherein she proposed a possible future wherein widespread practice of artificial wombs, thus removing the necessity of "biological sex" to the process of human reproduction, and thus assurance of a true equality of the sexes. Andrea Dworkin, a contemporary of Firestone's, built from the underlying thesis of Firestone's book, and went on to write that the notion of only two discrete biological sexes is outdated (something that has, recently, been confirmed by science, but seemed pseudo-scientific when she wrote it in 1971!) and that all trans people deserve access to gender-affirming medical care as a basic public service. Catherine MacKinnon, a friend and philosophical protégé of Dworkin's, has since become one of the most outspoken and eloquent advocates for trans women within a radical feminist framework. Needless to say, the position of the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school of radical feminist thought couldn't be any more different from the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school, especially when concerning the topic of trans people.
TERFism is basically the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school of "radical traditional womanhood" with the paganism removed. TERFism is thus less about the individual experiences of women (and men) and how gender was constructed as a means of social control, and more about a Right-Wing fatalism that insists on a pre-determined role being the presumed nature of all women, and the inverse and opposite role determining the nature of men.
Given that TERFism thus posits the notion that inside all men, which they believe trans women are, is a barely-contained sexual deviant, and thus trans women (again, according to TERFism) are hoping for a way to have an "in" to sexually abuse (cis) women. This certainly seems to take a tip from the anti-sex sentiment within the paragraphs of The SCUM Manifesto, along with taking the most superficial, at best, and overall bad-faith reads of Andrea Dworkin used to mischaracterise her work as "anti-sex, believing that all heterosexual sex is rape" (she never actually said that; what she did say was that heterosexual sex, within the context of pornography and other forms of sex work, is inherently violent, and that this has a ripple effect on society). It's not at all uncommon for outspoken TERF's to mischaracturise Dworkin, for their own purposes, and dipshits like (noted fake goth) Cathy Brennan and Sheila Jeffries are noted as being highly, and quite willful in their ignorance of Dworkin's pro-trans stance, instead preferring to twist a poor-faith read of her works critical of pornography and sex-work as "anti-sex," so as to distort her anti-porn thesis into something oddly against trans women.
Needless to say, the way that TERFism cherry-picks anti-porn ideas, and reads them as being (somehow) fundamentally both anti-man and anti-sex, certainly gives Absolute Zero reason to believe that TERFism has a significant thread that's at all "anti-asexual." If you understand what both Radical Feminism (the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school), and TERFism (the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school) actually are, and what each group stands for and hopes to see in society, the very idea that "TERF's also hate asexuals" is complete nonsense! It's an idea that can be traced to the "asexual spectrum" community on Tumblr, with no real origin from outside of that community —as in, it can't be traced to TERF blogs or fora, it can only be traced to the on-line asexual community, itself, in a bizarre attempt to make anti-trans oppression somehow also linked to any critique —even the most good-faith and not only valid, but sound critiques of the on-line asexual community.
This blatant eagerness to not only spread misinformation, but also to appropriate the oppression experienced by another group is an established cult tactic. This lie, in particular, hopes to manipulate the emotions and thoughts of the audience, make sure not too many (though ideally zero) questions are asked about the claim being made, lest one be accused, or at least thought of being not only "anti-asexual" but also, by extension or association, to be "anti-trans."
While I can accept that maybe a handful of individual TERF's may have voiced anti-asexual sentiments, that sentiment is not at all a part of either TERFism, or actual Radical Feminism. If anything, the twisted reads that TERFism takes from Radical Feminist writers, is very favourable to the 1960s/'70s definition of human asexuality as "one who abstains from sex as a radical political act." That fact is just clear, when you read some of the more Bizarro Logic tweets and blogs from prominent Internet TERF's —they really seem to be sympathetic to those who don't want sex, especially those who are women.
Ergo, TERFism, in general, doesn't hate asexuals. Most TERF's simply don't care about the on-line asexual community, it's irrelevant to them. Further, a significant faction within TERF on-line spaces are —if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly— advocates for asexuals who are functionally identical to the 1960s Radical Feminist definition of asexuality (being one who both a- identifies as asexual, and b- abstains from having sex with others). Anyone who claims that TERFism is somehow also "anti-asexual" is just lying. Maybe they aren't even aware that they're lying, because they never once questioned that claim, but are instead, uncritically repeating it. Regardless of whether or not they're aware of the lie, the goal is the same: To manipulate someone in the audience from asking critical questions about the cultish nature of the on-line asexual community.
