do you know where I can learn about baeddels from an accurate point of view?? everything I've found seems to be strangely contradictory and fitting certain agendas, and I'd like to understand better what's going on there.
I don't know if there's one condensed source on Baeddels, but I can help fill in some gaps to the best of my knowledge.
"Bæddel" as a term comes from an Old English slur meant to target "effeminate"/gnc men, people we would now understand as transfeminine, and intersex people. It is the root of the word "bad", quite literally. This was interpreted by some transfems around 2014 to mean that society hates trans women more than most/any other group, and the term was reclaimed as a way of communicating a transfem-centric, transmisogyny-centric worldview and ideology.
So Baeddel ideology is about "centering transfems", but it goes a little deeper than this:
[From this article on Baeddelism, written by a self-described Baeddel in 2017]
Baeddels believe that transmisogyny is under-discussed (which is true) and extrapolate from this two major and deeply dangerous ideas:
Transmisogyny is under-discussed because other trans people, namely transmasculine people, are taking up too much space. Transmascs are their oppressors, and they get away with it.
The only people transfems can possibly be understood by, or safe around, are other transfems.
The first point is problematic because, well, transmascs do not hold the institutional and systemic power necessary to oppress anyone. We are not granted privilege nor power for being trans men.
We can and do participate in transmisogyny, which is absolutely a problem (and it's one I do my best to address in these conversations), but this is lateral aggression. It absolutely causes harm; but it neither aids in, nor benefits from, the systemic oppression of transfeminine people.
Acting as if transmascs are uniquely privileged or are otherwise oppressing transfem people contributes to the existing oppression of transmascs (and again, this is lateral aggression when coming from transfems). In fact, trans men and AFAB nonbinary people face higher rates of lifetime sexual assault and suicidal ideation than any other group- which stems from oppression that is erased and under-discussed, allowing it to continue in the shadows.
The second point is problematic because it very quickly leads to a re-hash of lesbian seperatism, something Baeddels are happy to admit to:
To the extent that “no… young trans women [are] espousing transfeminine separatism” - its true only insofar as it was never transfeminine separatism but lesbian separatism (people get this twisted - it wasn’t necessarily exclusive of cis women & there were cis women who contributed to the theory back in the day) and if we aren’t espousing it its because we’ve implemented it with sufficient success. I, at least, still uphold lesbian separatism [...]
[From this post on Baeddels from one of the original Baeddels, written in 2019]
Lesbian separatism, for those who don't know, is an extremist radical feminist movement that states that women cannot have contact with men without endangering themselves. Solutions to this range from simply interacting with men as little as possible (often including political lesbianism), to forming self-sufficient communes devoid of men, to literally killing all men.
Lesbian separatism is a proto-TERF movement, and something many TERFs still advocate for today. Slapping trans paint on these ideologies does not make them less dangerous, because the problem with TERFism isn't just that they hate trans people: it's that they are a violent and cultish group founded on fear, hatred, and bigotry.
The Baeddel movement largely imploded around 2016/17 when there was some drama and fallout, and one of them was revealed to be fairly abusive (iirc). Still, they left an impact. This post is a compilation of (genuinely horrific) anti-transmasc sentiment found largely on Baeddel tags and self-described Baeddel blogs on Tumblr, all of which is no older than 2018, and largely from more recent years.
If you'd like to dig deeper, the sources I linked provide a lot more information on all of this. It is genuinely fascinating, and it's genuinely important to be able to identify these ideas and why they're dangerous.
I want to leave this off by stressing that Baeddels were a relatively fringe group, and in no way represent all transfems. They caused damage to transfem communities as well as transmasc and trans-androgynous nonbinary communities, and transfems as a whole are our allies in addressing the mess they left behind.
