boymoding strategy guide

it’s nice seeing other people starting to open their eyes to what i’ve been saying for a while in that the current use and proliferation of the term “gooning” is an outright tool of fascism

the second “gooning” stopped referring to a specific sexual practice and started to be used as a replacement for “masturbation” we needed to kill it immediately and sadly we didn’t

if you call someone a “masturbator” in a derisive way you sound like a fucking mormon but suddenly you switch to calling them a “gooner” and you’ve created a way to express the same puritanical beliefs around masturbation that is not only palatable to the average person but the attached underlying implications of the term make people way more susceptible to adopting those beliefs themselves

leftists need to fucking stop using the term “gooner” right fucking now

demonizing human sexuality and treating masturbation and sexual activity as deviant and disgusting are straight up fascist tools and it’s startling how successful this aspect of it has been the last few years

someone at work told me 'oh, just ask chat' when i raised a casual question and i asked what she meant and she said 'you know, chatgpt' like im an idiot. and i should get an award for the fact that i did not start snarling and biting and killing

i know everyones justifiably mad right now but do you wanna get madder? i work at a school. a teacher said this to me.

im glad this version of the post is making rounds now. the amount of casual ai use i see some teachers do these days is disgusting and they genuinly dont see the problem with making school assignments for children using chatgbt, and even encourage them to use it themselves. school is about teaching kids how to think and they're taking that away from them. this is a sickness and we should be calling it out more so people realize the damage they're doing

i subbed a 7th grade class a few months ago and i gave them a written assignment and they had to use their textbook to find answers and weren't allowed to copy the text, they had to rewrite the answers in their own words. a simple thing i was taught as a kid. i banned the use of ipads and phones for the duration of the class.

50% of the kids couldn't find the many of the answers, even though they only had one chapter to read. the other 45% didnt know how to rewrite the answers in their own words. only 5% finished the assignment properly. they asked me repeatedly if they could ask chatgbt. almost all of their handwriting was on 1-4th grade levels. i struggled to read most of it.

this isnt their fault. the school system is failing them. the adults are failing them. 'we're evolving with the times' we are losing our ability to think for ourselves, and its all thanks to the system being set up. we should all be angry. why aren't we more angry

butterfly-sapphic

It requires a level of intelligence to articulate anger and push back against oppression.

Anyway kids today are not being taught vital skills. Which could mean nothing.

it's exhausting to see constant TMA/TME discourse that fundamentally does not understand intersectionality. Transmisogyny affected, TMA, describes someone who cannot leverage your assigned gender to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. Transmisogyny exempt, TME, describes someone who is able to leverage their assigned gender in some way to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. They are not identity labels; they describe a person's relationship to transmisogyny.

these labels also do not categorize people as ontologically "victims" or "oppressors". everyone, including TMA people, can wield transmisogyny and everyone can wield it most effectively against TMA people. just as cis women can perpetrate and enforce misogyny against other cis women, so too can trans women leverage transmisogyny against one another. however, given the relative lower social status of TMA people, we are less able to advance their own social standing by leveraging transmisogyny. Caitlin Jenner is both TMA and openly transmisogynistic, but she is less successful in advancing herself compared to TME people like Marjorie Taylor Green. this is similar to how cis women can wield misogyny against men (like suggesting that an fashionable man is inherently less masculine), but a similar criticism from another man will generally be a more potent attack.

oppressions can look similar: racialized women, particularly black women, are often degendered in ways which superficially resemble transmisogyny. for example, Michelle Obama was mocked for having supposedly "mannish" features. to the extent that transmisogyny might have impacted her, she was able to mitigate it by leveraging the fact that she was assigned and conformed to expectations of women. she was unable to leverage her race to deny the full extent of this public abuse because degendering is a tactic empowered by both racism and transmisogyny. a black trans woman who is similarly degendered cannot leverage TME privilege because of her gender assignment at birth. both people are targeted and harmed in some way by degendering, but one is more able to mitigate that harm due to being able to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

in a similar example, Imane Khelif was subject to simultaneous pressure from transmisogyny, racism, and intersexism. because she is TME, she could leverage her gender assignment and was not barred automatically from competing in women's events at the summer Olympics (an option unavailable to TMA athletes facing similar scrutiny). she also enjoyed an outpouring of public support in favor of her continued participation, whereas TMA athletes received little sympathy or support in the press (in fact, the event that prohibited them was hailed as especially inclusive for lgbtq+ athletes). however, she was still pressured sufficiently by racist and intersexist policies to undergo invasive medical procedures and to publicly reveal medical details that she might have preferred to keep private. the fact that Imane Khelif was subject to other systems of oppression in no way disproves the validity of transmisogyny because she was able to do the thing that defines being TME: she leveraged her assigned gender to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

in Kimberlé Crenshaw's formulation of intersectionality, she describes the unique marginalization of black women. unlike white women, black women cannot leverage their race to mitigate the impacts of racism. unlike black men, black women cannot leverage their gender to mitigate the effects of misogyny. thus, black women are demonstrably subject to a unique synergy of white supremacy and misogyny (misogynoir) from which others are able to exempt themselves to varying degrees and by various means. the same formulation can be applied to TMA people, who are unable to leverage either their gender assignment or social identity, to mitigate oppositional and traditional sexism, thereby rendering us uniquely vulnerable to the synergistic oppression of those forces. (and of course, we cannot forget that TMA people can also be subject to other discrimination from which they cannot exempt themselves; TMA people can also be variously racialized, disabled, poor, intersex, and so on.)

great tags from @futchlingg

I'm glad the tone i struck was accessible to you. I'm going to continue to be very generous right now: this response is transmisogyny. one of the kinds of privilege that TME people experience is getting to be judged as individuals whereas TMA people are always judged collectively. TMA people should not have to be as precise, nonjudgmental, and even in tone as i was in this thread. i chose to put in the effort to explain things in these terms, but i did so because when TMA people like me aren't, we get taken with the worst possible faith.

if a cis woman wrote a post like mine about the ways in which men leverage misogyny against her, it would be obviously misogynistic for someone to reply "oh thank goodness. i never really got feminism because they're always just so bitchy about men". this would be the case regardless of who said it or what their proximity to misogyny is. the same is true here: i made a long post with very precisely chosen language, and this reply contrasts me against all those other, apparently uncouth trans women who don't haven't decency to be nice about our oppression. (if you know trans women like that, please send them my way. they sound based.).

TMA people do not owe any deference to TME people's feelings when talking about our oppression. y'all can get away with shit on the regular, usually against us, that is far crueler than incivility. TMA people shouldn't have to make posts that are hundreds of carefully chosen words long with step-by-step logical constructions from first principles and real-world illustrations whose relevance is spelled out on exacting detail. this was a high effort post and WE DON'T OWE THAT TO ANYONE. we shouldn't have to do that every time we want to talk about the fucked up things that happen to and around us, especially not to TME people who benefit from doing those fucked up things to us.

(and if you think my reply here is veering into incivility, let me invite you to examine why it is that you're feeling so defensive. let's internalize and practice those analytical skills which i described apparently so well in those first canonically non-bitchy posts.)

a common (and exhausting) misconception seems to happen around the word "exempt". let's be clear: transmisogyny isn't just "misogyny that happens to trans women". transmisogyny is a social force which influences *all* people which posits that differently gendered people are intrinsically different in some meaningful way and that one gender is in some way socially superior to another. the ways that we construct, define, inscribe, navigate, and relate to gender are all influenced by transmisogyny. if getting to wield misogyny without consequence is the carrot of patriarchy, then the threat of faggotization for being too great a failure to one's assigned boyhood is the stick. I've seen transmisogyny described as the psychological lynchpin that holds patriarchy together. some people can leverage their gender in some way to mitigate the impact of this force, but it is a fundamental part very sea that we all must swim in.

the same can be said for other marginalizing forces. temporarily nondisabled people can experience negative consequences of ableism, but feeling burnt out from an excessive workload is a fundamentally different experience when not fully exposed to ableism. for instance, you might have your exhaustion taken more seriously by your doctor if you are not yet disabled and consequently receive better medical care. a straight man might be mistreated if others believe him to be gay, but he's dealing with one moment of interpersonal bigotry rather than an entire lifetime of being under threat (for example, his right to the social and financial benefits of marriage are far more guaranteed than they might be if he was gay). and so on.

TME people experience transmisogyny but they are not its primary targets and can exempt themselves from scrutiny and mistreatment by leveraging their gender in some way that TMA people cannot. one pernicious way that this happens is through a kind of affected incompetence, positioning themselves to always be seeking education from TMA people about transmisogyny and offering shallow rebuttals and critiques such as the images attached (which they may not even consciously recognize as such). this positions TMA people as bearing the expectation of answering and clarifying on demand and being held to account for all the other TMA people who have come before her.

like i just spent nearly a thousand words giving the piss easiest "intersectionality 101" and you're complaining that the language is unclear or flawed in some way that precludes your understanding or prevents you from internalizing what you've just read, complaints which would be irrelevant if you just read the first paragraph again in which the terms were defined in clear, simple language. if this is your response, you are exactly who i was complaining about from the beginning.

tankie-transfeminist

This is transfeminism!

my take on the "can trans men be lesbians?" thing is that i would never ever comment on a stranger's identity and i would never tell someone i don't know what they can or can't do but also like. come on. if you're explicitly choosing to be a man you can get mad when women don't want to date you.

if you're going into a space where there are women explicitly saying "I do not want men involved in my romance" and you are actively identifying as a man you cannot get upset when they don't want to date you or are uncomfortable with you being there

i also deeply empathize with every trans femme lesbian who has had to watch her existence debated and been seen as a pervert for loving women see most of the lesbian community go "oh yeah you have a vagina, you have the Unbreakable Woman Bond that means we are connected forever" and get a little frustrated about that

Also: do you think a cis man could be a lesbian without identifying as a woman? if not, and you think trans men can, i think you're just speaking from bioesstentialism and maybe don't really think trans men are fully men in the way cis men are

i'm remembering that trans man/lesbian i knew who was mad the girl he was seeing ID'd as straight its like damn maybe you don't really see yourself as a man.

as humiliating as it is to repost myself from a light-mode-user's reddit screenshot, i cannot allow this year's zenquish to go uncelebrated.

celebrate my favorite holiday with me, my friends.

if the emperors of rome can add extra months that actually fuck the calendar up i'm allowed to add a new month that lasts 0.0000 picoseconds

the last holiday that hasn't been commercialized