Hi, sorry if this is something I could look up somewhere else but I'm not sure where to look - I've seen a few girls talk about the Baeddel cult and that it fostered sexual abuse, but what actually happened? I've never seen details and it seems like a good idea to know about details since we've got another cult situation on our hands now (isff & friends) and knowing details is good for recognizing patterns of behavior.
If you don't want to answer that's fine, I hope you're having a nice day ❤️
The baeddel community, the actual original one not the vague insinuations people throw around at trans women with feminist politics, formed out of early transfeminist politics on tumblr.
For context, it’s important to note that many of us not only were interested in feminist theory but specifically second wave radical feminist theory, both to critique and to do “trans” readings of them. At the time “queering” as a verb was a popular academic discourse in which you would “queer” a text, film, etc to reveal what is missing from something, what if we read this text through not merely a queer critique but as if it was already affirming of queer difference, identity and experiences? What if we read it as an always already queer text?
So in a sense we were taking this academic literature framework and doing our own transfeminist spin. Dworkin and MacKinnon were popular authors to do this to. We started reading radical feminist texts and lesbian second wave feminist theory as if it was always already transfeminist, already affirming, actually from a certain perspective a pro transfeminist text.
This was very unique and frankly avant garde for even the academy let alone laymen on a blogging site. It attracted a lot of young trans women with burgeoning socialist and anarchist beliefs. We read Whipping Girl and felt dissatisfied with its ultimately liberal politics on gender - political revolution and self-abolition became popular ideas.
There was a large feminist community on tumblr for trans women, partially due to the number of graduate students who would share their reading material for a mass audience. This both became the basis for the later abuses as well as the basis for the challenging of those abuses.
Some transfeminists discovered that “bad” has roots in an olde English word for “hermaphrodite” and “effeminate man.” Despite this word (baeddel) clearly referencing people with visible intersex variations, a trans reading was done of it through bad internet entomology and it became proof of transmisogyny being at least a few hundred year old oppression. People even call it a “slur,” despite there being no evidence of it being used for violence which is usually how we define slurs.
This became a rallying call for a subsection of this transfeminist community who began adopting the term. The baeddel community had its own celebrity theorists - b8l (who was accused of race faking by a Black trans woman who met her in person) and unobject. They amassed a large amount of social influence so that when two baeddel members accused each other of rape - those two got the whole community to isolate the victim. Even their own admissions to what the situation was had a lot of holes - for instance, they claimed the victim (Elle) was actually the rapist for “rescinding consent” and even the rapist (Eve) didn’t deny that the victim was restrained while she the rapist held a knife.
But such is it with cult dynamics, even I went along at first. I still feel a great amount of shame about that. I became unpopular with that crowd because I was willing to call them on it. Eventually the transfeminist community pushed them out - too many people knew and saw through the bullshit.
But a lot of people held on - for reasons that seem familiar. This community had for years spread narratives that the only other people you can trust and will love you is this small clique and hush shhhh don’t call out rape amongst your sisters, we are so vulnerable. Everyone else is a transmisogynist monster, you can trust us we won’t let you get hurt. You shouldn’t make criticisms. It was just kink!
Seeing that come back but in a new social context is certainly disturbing. Seeing the problem become much bigger than it was the previous time, also disturbing. There seems to be less pushback than there was before. I think the fact that the Baeddels were very intentionally aesthetically offputting (not in physical appearances to be clear, but in communication style, politics and a general edgelord alternative vibe to their blogs) made it harder for them to gain traction. It also required more work - you at least had to engage with what other people were reading if not reading and producing readings yourself. There’s less barrier for entry which I think has made this new group far more palatable while also being more extreme in what they’re demanding of their followers.
The cutesy innocent aesthetic is in and I guess that’s easier for people to swallow than a bunch of gutter punks hurting each other. At least the Baeddels weren’t trying to get the community to accept rape and pedophilia as a general practice. Their issue was rape culture when it did come up but they weren’t the types to demand no call outs of any kind to any one, just when it affected their friends. Which is far more typical than what we’re seeing now which is just open acceptance of pedophilia and a zero tolerance policy towards criticisms for rape.
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