Hot Takes and Burning Questions

[luckyladylily]

I have considered for a long time how to best and most simply explain the critical elements of intersectionality, because I think it is among the most critical of ideas and so many people get it wrong. So here we go.

Intersectionality, at it's core, asserts that identities can not be broken into what we see as their individual parts, in particular when discussing the oppression and prejudice a person faces. Identities are more than just the sum of their parts.

The theory was originally laid out by a black woman to explain her own oppression. In short, she claimed that her oppression as a black woman could not be simply explained as black oppression + woman oppression. She also experienced black woman oppression.

Now, the nuances of the situation are much more complex, but this is the very basic idea. You always have to account for a person's identity as a whole, and not just the individual parts.

Black women are not just "black" + "women"

Black men are not just "black" + "men"

Trans women are not just "trans" + "women"

Trans men are not just "trans" + "men"

You always have to consider the identity as a whole, which may mean there are non obvious aspects of the whole identity that are not readily explained by the sum of the individual parts.

That is the basic explanation. Now let's get into one particular application I think is very important, at least on Tumblr, because on tumblr it has become extremely controversial.

A consequence of intersectionality is that specific kinds of oppression cannot be divorced from maleness. A black man's oppression cannot be explained as "black" + "male" oppression. There are aspects of the oppression black men face that cannot be separated from their identity as a whole. Even if you believe "men" suffer no unique oppression, intersectionality means you can't deny the possibility that "black men" suffer oppression that cannot be divorced from them being men.

This application of intersectionality is fundamental and the application of intersectionality to black men has been accepted for basically as long as intersectionality has been around.

A similar application can be made to trans men.

Now if you don't agree with this model, sure. Im not going to say it is fine because I think you are wrong, but no social model is above criticism. What you can't do is claim that intersectionality is anything else. You either accept that aspects of oppression can be tied to maleness, or you do not accept intersectionality. There is no secret third thing. This is a fundamental consequence of intersectionality as a model.

I think it is important to note that intersectionality did not start as queer theory. The roots of the model are in the study of sexism and racism. This is black feminist theory. And to put a point on it, trans feminist theory has no business trying to warp intersectionality to fit preconceived ideas about how queer identities and queer oppression works.

I believe that twisting well established black feminist theory into an unrecognizable form and then stealing the credibility of that well established black feminist theory by labeling your new theory "intersectional" is racist. We do not get to borrow their credibility while spitting on their work.

Again, if you do not believe intersectionality is correct, or that it does not apply to queer identities, that is an argument you can make. I would recommend you have a lot of very well sourced data backing up a radical claim like that, but no model is above criticism. But don't try to trade on the credibility of black feminists while disregarding their work.

[thewarmvoid]

you don’t have to form your politics around pain and resentment. you can form your politics around love and freedom. you don’t have to convince anyone that your pain is real, it just is. you don’t have to follow people who lead you into despair. you dont have to hang around people who make you feel unsure of yourself. you don’t have to accept it when people tell you who you are. I hope you are surrounded by people who do what it takes to really see you, instead of just invent you and accuse you. I hope you know there’s softness for you in the world.

[json-derulo]

it pains me to say it but the more people talk shit about the women who wear those shorts/leggings with the weird butt seam that looks like it gives you a terminal wedgie, the more compelled I feel to take the women’s side

[json-derulo]

ohhhhhh my godddddddd you saw someone wearing really tight revealing pants in public? should we throw a party? should we invite goody proctor

[json-derulo]

and while we’re at it, I’m done worrying about cameltoe. I don’t have time to be pulling and tugging at my clothes all day. if you can see the outline of my pussy you should say thank you and go about your business

[json-derulo]

SAME WITH NIPPLES!!!!

[json-derulo]

[malwareproductions]

hey. you have to love your trans brothers of color okay. and your trans sisters of color. and your nonbinary siblings of color. you have to okay. its simply non-optional

[oncelerfucker]

I just think that telling a demographic trans people, (a broad demographic of people who are explicitly marginalized and oppressed because they transition from one assigned gender identity to another more fitting gender identity), that they aren't actually oppressed on the basis of their gender identity because they "choose" to be the Bad Oppressor gender, is like. blatantly transphobic.

No matter what way you try to frame it that's what this discourse boils down to. It's an attempt to define a demographic of queer people out of the queer experience, just like every other instance of reactionary transmed and radfem infiltrated discourse targeted at a demographic of queer people on this website in the last decade and a half.

[asterosian]

Fucks me up to think about how trans men’s rights to things like education, voting, employment, etc. are all dependent on cis women having the same rights but trans men’s rights to healthcare access (including gender affirming care and gynecological/reproductive care), protection from abuse (aka access to shelters for DV victims), or even basic inclusion in activism, legal protections, and even fucking language, are not even a little bit cis women’s problem despite cis women often seeing us asking for these things as somehow an attack on them.

I can vote in favor of legalizing abortion. That’s awesome. But they can easily write the law in such a way that only if you’re legally female do you get to have access to abortion. Meaning trans men who legally changed their gender marker can be denied. Or if they aren’t then insurance companies can decide not to cover it because of the aforementioned gender marker while they would have no problem providing coverage for a cis woman. And when trans men try to draw attention to this and beg to be included so that we can have the same rights as cis women, we’re making a women’s issue about men and we’re raging misogynists and gender traitors and TMRAs. Because god forbid we consider that maybe a man might need an abortion too.

[cybergirl-cathy]

Researching narcissistic personality disorder for a story and I'm:

A) finding the description of vulnerable narcissism a bit too relatable

B) deeply disturbed by the underlying message that narcissists are monsters in sheep's clothing who Must Be Avoided and are Incapable of Real Love

I've never hurt anyone on purpose, and I feel overwhelming love for the people I cling onto. My apparent symptoms being attributed to some kind of strawman/boogeyman makes me feel lowkey really scared to open up to people around me. Do I want to seek out a diagnosis if it means everyone will hate me?

Idk folks, maybe we should stop talking about any group of people like they're demons who need to be killed on sight

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Honor is mostly a stupid idea, but at least it creates an ideal within a social milieu that forces people to at least consider good will towards one another, however miniscule. A latent, encoded aspiration to be regarded as a Good Boy. I think a dimension to the barbarism of the present world is the whittling down of any greater meaning beyond one's own goals. The assholes running the world don't even care about looking good to the people in the same room as them. They don't even think about anyone outside the building they're in. This is certainly a symptom of alienation, on a larger scale. There's no real social substrate through which they will face any amount of repercussion for their actions at all, even within their own social sphere. Reputation at least nominally matters in an honor-bound society. Now, in the anti-woke era, reputation is outright flouted. The only thing that matters is raw power.

[e-cryptid-deactivated20180601]

It’s okay to not want to have sex ever. It’s okay to never even try it.

[thefisherqueen]

I was 23 before it even occurred to me that not starting with sex ever was an option. The feeling of relief was so great I actually cried. 

You don’t have to if you don’t want to. You can have a fine live without ever having sex, I promise you. 

[impostoradult]

Also, it’s okay to never date anyone ever. It’s okay to never even try it if you don’t want to. 

I wrote a master’s thesis on intentionally single people, and the number of them that said in various ways, “I didn’t know not dating people was even an option at first” was absolutely tragic. They honestly thought they had no choice and it never occurred to them that opting out was even a possibility available to them.  

People honestly believe these are life experience you are required to have AND THEY ARE NOT.

You can just not have sex. You can just not date people. You can completely by-pass one or both of those things. Neither of those things are required to be healthy, happy, normal, mature, fulfilled, or any of the other bullshit notions that get attached to these things. 

[nycswebhead]

can everyone stop doing crimes in the fucking snow storm. i am not wearing anything under this outfit i am freezing my spiderdick off

[april]

cats are really good at looking at things. very useful

[april]

having two cats essentially means you have a bug and rodent triangulation system. if they are both looking somewhere you know for damn sure there is some unauthorised fucking thing there.

[our-queer-experience]

i’m sure you guys have heard about kansas invalidating trans ids- just so you know it’s not all hopeless

[our-queer-experience]

hi did you know that trans christians spend their entire lives in faiths that try and convince them that on a cosmical level they should hate themselves and for them this would be emotionally fufilling? hi did you know that kansas is over 70% christian? hi did you know that just because you think atheism is the correct and the only thing that deserves respect that doesn’t mean that this isn’t incredibly impactful and meaningful for many people?

[donniehaspronouns]

reblogging this again to bring up that when my grandma said she didn’t understand trans people, and why would they betray the body God gave them, it would have been 0 help to explain to her all the biological and cultural and societal components to the existence of the concept of gender and trans people. You know what did make her pause and reconsider her stance? “Did you ever think that maybe God made trans people on purpose?” And we got to have a conversation about all the interesting things God has made so why wouldn’t God make trans people? And she came out of the conversation with more grace and understanding.

[busket]

both trans men and trans women are punished for our proximity to both feminity and masculinity. people decide when we are men or women based on what is the WORST option at the moment. we both get treated like women only when someone needs to infantalize us or call us bossy, bitchy, stupid, vapid. we both get treated like men when someone wants to demonize and paint us as violent, predatory, abusive, perverted. NONE of us are benefiting from any gendered privilege, because we are always treated like the worst of either gender depending on the scenario. this is something all trans people experience, regardless of agab, both trans men and trans women. so why do we assume that the other side has the opposite experience as us?? why do you think that because your life as a trans man or a trans woman is painful, that a trans person of a different gender must have the opposite experience?? like i just dont get the preschool level understanding of gender like "well boys and girls are opposites so of course our experiences are opposites too" we are living the same transphobia and if you cant see it you need to listen to other people more

[yellow-cat]

the small stinker spends time with me on the couch

[yellow-cat]

[yellow-cat]

the small stinker has a resting angry face

[beggars-opera]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[formerlyanon]

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

[dabouse]

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

[tomboy014]

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

[dabouse]

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

[tomboy014]

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

[digitaldiscipline]

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

[kabretoss]

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

[thebibliosphere]

There are a lot of things I'm sad about in my life. You don't get to go through the kind of medical trauma I've been through and come out unscathed on the other side.

But one thing I'm really bitter about is that I can't remember my wedding anymore. The pernicious anemia took it from me and wiped my brain clean. Except it's not clean, not really. I remember it in patches. Like red wine stains on a white rug that have never quite lifted out no matter how hard you try.

I look at the pictures on my bookcase, and they feel like remembering a story someone else has told me. There's a young woman in a white dress wearing my face, and she looks happy. I'm happy for her. But you can see the strain around her eyes, too. The pain she's hiding because no one with authority believes her when she says her body doesn't feel right. That something is Wrong.

They won't believe her for another decade. They won't believe her until it's almost too late, and it's that lateness that will rob her of her memories and turn them into a wavering rainbow suspended in the fine haze of watery sunlight that occasionally surfaces through the blanks.

There's one memory that's real, though. Solid. It's not my vows. It's not my father walking me down the aisle. (Though those are there, just hazy and dream-like). It's our first dance.

It's the lights dimming around the room as the staff cleared the floor, causing the fishbowls full of white roses and LED lights on the tables to wobble like pools of moonlight against dark paneled walls.

It's the band inviting us out onto the floor and us giggling because we know what's coming next, and no one else does. It's the twang of a banjo reverberating around the room through the speakers, followed by the dulcet tones of Kermit the Frog wondering why there are so many songs about rainbows.

It's us waltzing around the enclosed circle of light, singing to each other out of tune and grinning like idiots as everyone around us starts to laugh.

It's everyone joining in on the song because it's the Muppets, and everyone knows the words. It's 100+ people singing the Rainbow Connection, some laughing, some a bit tearful, because it's bringing back memories. Because it's making a new one.

It's looking up at my new husband through the brain fog and all the pain in my body and thinking, "I want to remember this moment forever."

I don't know what entity was out there listening to me at that moment and chose to grant that wish. I don't know why this is the one memory that stuck while everything else in my brain got decimated into scattered, fragmented snapshots. But I'm so, so thankful it is.

[thebibliosphere]

Happy thirteenth anniversary to us, and all the new memories we’ve made, and all the new ones yet to come :)

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Saw somebody I know share the mugshots of a woman who was purportedly arrested for beating her boyfriend with a belt for not wanting sex. She said "meee I'm not even joking lol." I think about how that's rape. How I've been subject to things like that. Been abused for not providing sex. This isn't the first time I've seen this treated as a joke. I see it a lot, actually. Joking about physically abusing men is an extremely common thing. You don't have to look very far to find it. Even here. There's a particularly high-profile poster that's gained a lot of traction over the past year or so. I followed her early, before I noticed other large and popular blogs cozying up to her. She would post about how she would hit her boyfriends, talking about it like it's just a quirk. She was being honest about it. Sometimes just posting things like "I beat my men." It wasn't super common, but common enough to notice. But she has that sort of chic mean-girl feminist thing going on, so everyone ignored what that really meant and just laughed along with it. I don't think it's productive to call her out. I don't think she's, like, necessarily a piece of shit for it, or deserves to be ejected from the space. By her admission, she has issues she's trying to work on. But it's there, and it's happened, and it's tolerated, even rewarded by the culture on here. And it's not uncommon. It's pretty easy to find a lot of places.

My friend is in a physically abusive marriage. Photos of red marks on their body are saved in my phone. I've thought they were going to be murdered before. The thought has crossed their mind. Their wife constantly accuses them of cheating, among other things, because that's her idea of what a man does. She has stabbed their mattress when she was angry to "see what it feels like." They showed me a tiktok she sent them. It's a woman out in the woods captioned something like "burying him here so nobody will ever find him ♥️♥️". This kind of memetic mean-girl feminist stuff has, as a part of the overall erosion of effective and principled feminist discourse, devolved into truly abusive personalities joking about harming men at its edges. This is rewarded and celebrated. My abusive ex did a lot of the same stuff. Would dig around these quasi-rad or outright radical feminist spaces to essentially find rhetorical ammunition to abuse me over. Then would fall back onto the plucky mean-girl feminist memes when I tried talking to her about the emotional and sexual abuse. I support mens rights to shut the fuck up. Same thing happens to my friend. Doesn't have anything to do with the actual person being hurt. It's just an expression of these gendered resentments. Spending time in communities literally listing off reasons for a woman to be angry at a man, and then taking that out on their partner. Happened to me. Happens to lots of people placed in the social role of "men." It makes a war-like philosophy out of gender. Turns it into an order of violence. Justifies violence.

I recently saw a post going around here about how men suffer abuse so rarely that there's no reason to adjust language about intimate partner abuse to include men. That the suggestion is simply men being big babies and trying to reframe every conversation to be about them. That my experience -- that my abuse on the basis of my perceived manhood, no less -- is literally a marginal experience, an outlier that shouldn't be incorporated in the conversation about other people going through the same things I did. That it just isn't deserving of discussion or concern. And it was being shared by mutuals, long time mutuals, people I respect and enjoy. People who are better than that. This isn't something that makes people irredeemable monsters. I don't want their heads on spikes. But this kind of cruelty is horrifyingly common.

In the end, this is the cost of harshly reifying gender. Resenting men as a class grows into a social infrastructure to justify and even gamify abuse. It becomes fun. It becomes jokes. It becomes blood for blood. There's a perceived justice to the suffering being doled out to the supposed abuser class. And, in doing so, patriarchal masculine standards are recreated and maintained. The abuse is perpetual. Men are belittled for having feelings about the way they're treated, for trying to talk about their emotions, and they are continually expected to simply bear the burden of abuse and not complain. The masculinized body and spirit is a vessel of abuse. This is its purpose.

I wish it could stop.