Having a strong but flawed sense of justice makes someone vulnerable to incel ideology.
When something unfair happens to them, they notice it immediately. They wonder how others can think it's okay, because it's so obviously cruel. But then, when they're praised while someone else is treated unfairly, they don't notice for a long time.
This happened to me several times involving my teachers. I've always had a problem with authority. I had several teachers punish me because they believed a rumor about me, because they wrongly accused me of something, or because I misunderstood them. And any attempt to explain myself or complain that they're being unfair led to them punishing me for disrespect. Since I saw clear evidence that I was going to be punished no matter what I did, I thought that I might as well be as disrespectful as possible. If I'm going to suffer either way, I might as well make them suffer too, even if only a little.
Because my math skills caused me to be seen as "smart", I had other teachers praise me and put down some of my classmates by comparing them to me. Because they were praising me, I thought of them as my favorite teachers. I only recently had an epiphany that those teachers were assholes.
If I wanted to start an activist movement to fight back against authoritarian teachers, I'd have to target both of those groups of teachers. If I insist on fighting back against the teachers who abuse me but I support the teachers who praise me and abuse others, then it would make perfect sense why I'd have no supporters.
If you want society to become more just, you have to acknowledge that sometimes the victim of the injustice won't be you.
And that's a major problem that incels have. Incels likely do face injustices. Maybe they're bullied constantly. Maybe they're asked out as a joke and told that they're delusional for thinking it was even possible for someone to like them. Maybe they relate to characters on TV who exist only as laughing stocks. Maybe their parents forced them to conform to macho standards that they failed at. Maybe they struggle to socialize and everyone just keeps assuming it's easy. But when the injustice affects someone else, they don't see it. And that's why they're unable to get anyone to join their fight against the injustice. They want people to care about the injustices that affect them while ignoring or even upholding the injustices that affect others. And naturally, no one is going to do that. If everyone has their own unique ideas of which injustices matter and which don't, it's not possible for any activism against those injustices to happen.
#Is this also terfs #Or a certain subset of xtians who desperately feel like they're being prosecuted alllll the time
This is far more of us than we like to think. I'd peg it as one of the major causes for leftist infighting, especially in online spaces.
The Christian persecution complex is partly this, but it's also ensconced in their core beliefs: they're God's army fighting to save the world from Satan, therefore they expect to be attacked by Satan. When the worst thing that happens to them is gay people wanting wedding cakes or college tutors giving their assignments a fail grade for consisting of nothing but unsupported assertions of their own beliefs, that must be Satan's latest weapon of choice.
TERFism is Marxism applied to human reproduction, as I have argued elsewhere. That TERFs now align with the Right just illustrates the basic principle that political alliances are formed around shared hatreds, not shared philosophies.
For the record, she actually abandoned the movement BEFORE they all got whooping cough, but abandoned it too late. There’d been a breakout of measles in her area that caused her to reassess, and she and her doctor had already drafted and started a catch-up vaccination schedule, but her kids caught whooping cough just before it could be started. Then she wrote a blog post for The Scientific Parent explaining how she and her husband had come to wrong decisions in the first place, how they changed their mind, the consequences they suffered as a result, and asking other parents to please vaccinate their kids. And now she’s an activist for destroying the misinformation of anti-vaxxers, and reaching out to anti-vaxxers because she’s understands their fears but knows their kids deserve better.
She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.
Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”
She understood the consequences and still put herself and her story out there.
You know what, it does take a big person to admit they were wrong so publicly and work to undo the harm. I believe I made fun of her in the past, but timemachineyeah changed my mind.
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face, until I realized they totally would, and they will eat your face, too!” warns defector from the leopards-eating-faces party
#really important actually#like. it’s so important that we allow people to STOP voting for leopards eating faces#because if you attack anyone leaving the leopards eating faces party when they realize it’s bad#the only support system they’ll have is the people who want them to come back to it#you have to make it possible for people escape instead of considering them forever tainted and impure and inherently evil
The #1 trait of anti-vaxxers is not “they’re stupid” or “they fell for propaganda” but “they don’t know who’s safe to trust.”
The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.
So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
This is… not reassuring.
And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.
There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.
They need to trust that, even as the medical industry dismisses a whole lot of womens’ concerns, in this particular area, they’re right.
Add in the consequences of having a significant portion of your social support network tied up in a particular worldview, leaving it, much less openly condemning it, is really hard and means losing your community support. In a world where the system can’t be trusted to pick up that slack, Moms can’t afford to risk the change - until the cost of staying clearly outweighs the coat of pushing back, not just in general, but for their kids.
Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.
Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.
Get this into your fucking heads. Kindness and compassion and one might even say “love,” are strategies, not just vague fluffy inoffensive emotions. Cruelty will never save us.
A) If we believe someone is wrong, we have no reason to believe that they can simply "educate themselves." With what tools? I hate the "educate yourself" and "just google it" thing because that presumes they will find the more or less correct thing you want them too.
"I trust you to educate yourself without further guidance, even though you've already landed on something I disagree strongly with" is such a weird pair of ideas to hold.
and
B) I don't think it's any individual's job to educate people *personally*, but it is a movement's job to have resources that individuals can point people to.
and
C) It is fundamentally not the same amount of labor as doing the education yourself. I have 3-5 Jewish websites I send people to when I Just Cannot. There are books, websites, advocacy organizations, and a host of other resources. Saying hey, I think you should read x book or check out y website to learn more is emotional labor, but it's not the same as burning hours of your own time with someone who you find Deeply Incorrect.
and
D) If you send people to educate themselves without further guidance, they can just as easily find your opponents' materials. And if the "it's not my job 2 edukate you" was snide or aggressive, they're going to be primed against your side while they consume People Who Disagree Materials.
Actually I've decided not to leave this in the tags:
#we used to say “google is free”
#remember when google would tell you the truth?
#can confirm this is a major barrier to people engaging with progressive ideas
#similar is “issue x is not up for debate”
#this does not stop people debating it
#it just removes our voice from the discussion
hello leftist tumblr user. you are about to make a post about abortion or pregnancy. if you use the word “woman” or “she” to refer to those affected by the aforementioned topics, the saw trap go- and they’re already dead
Pornography remains an important part of queer expression! Queer people deserve space to explore/express their sexuality. Rejecting the expression of sexuality because some people do it in an exploitative way or get addicted would be like closing the Stonewall Inn because they were run by the mafia at one point or because they sell beer which can be addictive. Sexuality is an important part of the queer community and stopping queer people from expressing that is a form of oppression. Queer people deserve to enjoy their sexuality without shame!
Porn can and does exist ethically. I am so grateful to know queer sex workers, and I love not only them but also their work. I'm not ashamed of the ways queer porn has been a part of my development. I am so grateful for works from Elana Dykewomon which includes explicit sex or erotica from authors like Kathryn Moon who express sexuality in a beautiful and emotionally powerful way. Shutting down human sexuality is not something I am interested in engaging in.
"masculinity is empowering and dominant and femininity is degrading and restrictive. there's no humiliating way of being stripped of chains" i want you to look women of color & disabled women in the eyes and tell them this. that there is no humiliating way to be stripped of your womanhood.
people are reblogging this again so I wanna add that on top of women of color and disabled women you can also just talk to trans men&mascs and nonbinary and intersex people raised female about this.
it's very funny to me whenever people who insist they are the final voice for Trve Feminism and have such an accurate understanding of misogyny, also completely ignore how much the cover-up of the violent policing of failed womanhood plays a role in patriarchy. babe stop believing everything the patriarchy says!!!!! IT IS LYING TO US CONSTANTLY!!!!!!!!
thoughts on the whole suggestrogen defending pedophiles thing
TL;DR: The things she has said on pedophilia is beyond simply discussing the non-existence of thoughtcrimes or advocating for more compassionate, humanizing approach to people with potentially harmful paraphilias, and goes into territory I find genuinely concerning. That being said, it is vital that we do NOT let this poison us against sex positivity, being reasonably supportive of people with paraphilias, and trying to have a nuanced and compassionate discussion on child abuse and people with pedophilia that helps defuse this incredibly powerful cultural moral-panic bomb. I include a few resources for non-punitive, humanizing justice for people who have abused others at the very end of this post.
Putting this under a read more so I can ramble as much as I feel is needed (and boy did I). Obvious major trigger warning for extensive discussion of pedophilia and child sexual abuse, although no specific details on any acts of abuse themselves; there is one reference to zoophilia which links to a post that does mention an actual act of it.
Who is suggestrogen?
She is the user formerly known as isuggestforcefem. If you have been following me or generally engaged in the transandrophobia-discussion-sphere you probably have heard of her, her anti-transmasc tendencies, the issues surrounding a kink-based joke blog coming onto non-kink posts with kink suggestions, etc. I am not going to rehash all the discourse surrounding her, mostly because I do not make it my business to keep up with drama surrounding popular transandrophobic bloggers. But the main thing to know is that she, by virtue of being a popular transfem meme blogger who became very outspokenly anti-transmasc, helped popularize and normalize anti-transmasculinity, and her (now repeated) blog deactivations have made her something of a martyr in certain spaces on Tumblr.
Disclaimer: If it wasn't obvious, I do not know everything about this woman or this situation. Take everything I say with a grain of salt; this is the situation as I best understand it as of making this post.
What's this about her defending pedophiles????
First, I should say that her blog is now gone (the current suggestrogen is a different and seemingly much cooler woman), and I believe beforehand she deleted many of these posts, and I have only seen screenshots of these posts rather than reblogs. So it is hard to verify for 100% certain that she made these using the wording shown in screenshots.
That being said, those defending her have not claimed that the screenshots are faked, but rather are defending the points made in them. This gives me confidence that these screenshots do depict real posts she made. These are not my screenshots, but ones I have collected from others. If anyone with more reliable sources for these posts would like to provide them (such as reblogs of the original posts), please do.
These are the first two that I saw:
This is, frankly, inflammatory to the point I had a hard time believing she was serious or that these were real when I first saw them.
But, as it seems that she both is and that they are, my second reaction was to try and take a step back.
This is a very popular trans woman who has been inflammatorily transandrophobic in the past, making some pretty outlandish statements. It would be very easy to run away with this out of sheer confirmation bias. And given that I, on my own blog, have tried to approach the issue of paraphilias and harm and thoughtcrime with nuance, I wanted to try and read these in reasonable good faith. These posts could be interpreted as badly-worded but genuine attempts to discuss the way that pedophilia is used as a flashpoint for moral panics. We'll get back to what I mean by that later. Now, even in this reading, comparing this to "drop the T" is pretty outlandish and, again, obviously inflammatory, and I don't think there's any need to defend the term "MAP" when "people with [condition]" is already the standard way to discuss disorders and paraphilias in a non-stigmatizing, non-dehumanizing way.
But again, people don't always communicate their points perfectly or even well. I could still see how this could be read as a very messy way of trying to talk about a genuinely important, very complicated issue.
However, upon looking in further, there are more posts which add more context and increased my concern:
First of all, "pedo friends" is a really weird way of saying this. I don't think being friends with someone with pedophilia is inherently bad. But this use of "pedo" and "MAP" are immediately off-putting; if she wants to advocate for treating people with pedophilia like people, again, why not use the already popular format of person-first language? Why try to reclaim such charged language you must know will set people on edge and make them averse to your point?
I don't off-the-bat disagree with her on ageplay or fiction, or even necessarily on medicalization. A lot of people who don't have pedophilia engage in ageplay and write dark erotica with these themes (including survivors of CSA), although I am not an expert on people with pedophilia and whether engaging with these is helpful or harmful for them and the ultimate goal of not hurting children.
Now, this post is also not wrong in that "pedophile" isn't synonymous with "child abuser." It is generally agreed by experts in this area that most people who sexually abuse children do not have pedophilia.
Where we diverge sharply is on comparing this to treating "trans women" as synonymous with "misogynistic rapist." A trans woman acting her desires related to her gender is not inherently doing anything harmful to anyone; there is nothing inherently harmful about transitioning, there is no logical flow from "feels like a woman, wants to be recognized as such" to "misogynistic rape."
Someone with pedophilia acting on pedophilic desires will be doing something harmful to someone; it is inherently harmful, as an adult, to engage sexually with children, and there is a logical flow between the desire and that outcome if it is followed.
And conflating these two is, once again, extremely inflammatory. It is only going to harm trans women and any point to be made on humanizing people with paraphilias.
Why this focus on comparing trans people (specifically trans women) and people with pedophilia? Why does suggestrogen/her friend need to keep insisting that these are strong equivalencies, completely ignoring the material differences? Like, you can make the point this friend is making (having pedophilia is not the same as being a child abuser, having certain thoughts, no matter their contents, is not the same as acting out those thoughts, stigmatizing paraphilias is unhelpful in the long run) without making weak comparisons that would obviously get people upset.
This is the one that really gets me.
The anon here gives her the perfect opportunity to clarify any of her statements in more detail. They seem sympathetic to her as a person and to the points she is making.
But her response is just ridiculous. She completely avoid actually engaging with anon's concerns and elaborating on her points, and just goes to "um as if pedophiles would ever fuck a child!!! YOU are the problem!!!" as if that makes any goddamn sense. Literally the article I cited early on how most child abusers do not have pedophilia, also mentions that "pedophiles who do abuse tend to have higher numbers of victims than other kinds of (non-pedophilic) abusers" while clarifying that many never act on their attraction. So like. clearly some "pedos" (to use her term) do, and denying that is absurd and ruinous for your credibility.
Her response is just outright, objectively incorrect. If she really wanted to discuss the nuance of this issue, she could've taken this ask as an opportunity to clarify and respond to these criticisms. Instead, she just made yet another inflammatory statement. And in later posts she proceeds to self-victimize:
Girl. Be so goddamn fucking for real.
You could've engaged with already-existing discussions around paraphilia, you could've helped advocate for language like "people with [disorder]," you could've actually been citing sources on people with pedophilia and child abuse. You did none of that, as far as I can tell.
You made posts that were obviously inflammatory, and used obviously loaded language and comparisons. You made no attempt to prepare for the obvious criticisms people would react with. You wasted opportunities to clarify what you meant and respond to those criticisms by doubling down on your inflammatory statements. You orchestrated a situation in which you would get a massive amount of blowback and now act like you are a helpless victim when you straight up didn't need to do any of this.
And I don't and can't know her intentions here. Likely none of us can. I do not know what is going on inside her brain and I am not going to accuse her of being a pedophile because of this.
That being said, if I am going to read anything into this, beyond what she herself claims is the purpose of these posts? It seems most likely that this was a situation she orchestrated to get attention and pity. Maybe it's because I've been watching a lot of videos on internet scams & dramas, but I don't think this is out of the question. She's already become a big name, has all of these people tripping over themselves to defend her and treat her like a poor sick kitten.
Importantly, there is already a lot of talk on Tumblr about the aggressively transmisogynistic banning practices. And I wouldn't be surprised if she enjoys being the centerpiece of this talk, getting to be the face of the Victims of Tumblr Transmisogyny and drawing attention away from trans women & transfems who have far less popularity than she does, who are far more negatively affected by this shit. And, as we have seen when she last got banned, people are all too eager to immediately pin the blame on transmascs & "transandrobros."
And since she is a trans woman and since Tumblr's moderation system only ever bans people who go against TOS if they are Black or transfem or personally annoy the CEO (often the first two are synonymous with the latter), all she has to do is say some outlandish shit, get banned, and then have people mourn her and lambast transmascs for "socially murdering" her.
This is all speculation, of course. But I think it explains why she made such obviously inflammatory statements and just. Didn't try to meaningfully engage with the criticism that any reasonable person would've seen coming a million miles away. The only thing I can imagine she gets out of this is the attention and pity, and she would be far from the first mildly popular person with a cult of personality on the internet to do some weird shit for attention and pity.
Regardless of her intentions, though, I think the bigger cause for concern is the fact that people have rallied around her. The same sort of people who have doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on their anti-transmasculinity, even when it gets trans women harassed and misgendered, even when it involves transphobic slurs and repeating misogynistic arguments about "AFAB privilege", even when they have to ignore actual data about anti-transmasc violence and discrimination, even when they end up mocking survivors of attempted murder and fetishizing the abuser.
I think that context is relevant, because it speaks to a general social trend of people who seem to revel in purposefully inflammatory posts which they justify as being grounded in vital transfeminist theory, and anyone who disagrees with their purposefully offensive behavior just hates trans women and doesn't think trans women should be allowed to be imperfect or messy or problematic. Which is a dangerous co-opting of actual transfeminist theory that, at best, inflates the egos of a few microbloggers, at worst contributes to a polarized environment that destroys community and creates fertile grounds for high control groups, in a political climate where trans people worldwide are extremely vulnerable.
Okay, now time for nuance
I think this post by @hapalopus illustrates, through an experience with people with zoophilia in the therian community, why suggestrogen's rhetoric is concerning. Particularly I appreciate this paragraph:
That said rejecting people for their paraphilias alone is also not a good course of action, as it causes them to seek community with other paraphiles. If you push a person with paraphilias away from their support network, they will build their own support network. This happened with all the people who left Therian-Guide in favor of Therian Underground. The only thing that has helped the zoophilia problem in the therian community is to welcome people who struggle with zoophilic attraction and, rather than telling them that they should embrace it, encourage them to redirect onto adjacent material, like anthros, fantasy creatures, plushies, etc.
While I think I've made my opinions on suggestrogen's takes quite clear, I am also concerned about people's negative reaction to it.
I have made my feelings on "thoughtcrime" very clear on this blog. I do not think thoughts carry any moral weight, or that people should be morally judged for the thoughts or feelings they have. I think it is vital that people with even the most stigmatized paraphilias be seen as real, complex people, deserving of compassion and understanding, capable of growth and change, deserving of community, and not as inhuman monsters. I think seeing child sexual abuse as a fundamentally mundane and human tragedy, born first and foremost out of power dynamics, does far more for the victims than treating it as an act of pure incomprehensible cosmic evil that can never be washed away.
Not only does this increase the weight of stigma on victims, and prevent communities from actually grappling with the presence of abusers within themselves, but this highly emotionally charged understanding of child abuse acts as a reservoir for moral panics. As long as this is a topic that goes unexamined, as long as we treat our gut emotional response to this topic as too holy to criticize, it will always be a powerful tool for fascists and authoritarians and bigots of all kinds.
Suggestrogen is at best making a somewhat valid argument in a very, very bad manner, and at worst co-opting a valid argument for her own purposes (whatever those may be). What's dangerous about this is that people have a tendency to unconsciously shape their own opinions in reaction to what people who disagree with them have said.
I do not want to see people using this situation to spiral into a moral panic about paraphilias and thoughtcrimes and needing to suss out anyone with Suspicious Sexual Interests. That will get us nowhere. I do not want to see people reacting with hostility to someone saying "thoughtcrimes aren't real" or "people with pedophilia deserve compassion" because of this.
I feel like, within the sphere I tend to engage with re: transandrophobia and related topics, we have done a pretty good job talking about issues relating to sex and kink and harm with nuance and compassion. I do not want to see that wrecked because people see suggestrogen's inflammatory takes and simply adopt the exact opposite of what she said. It is more vital in situations like this (where things are messy and morally complex and there are bad faith actors and a lot of intense emotions are swirling around) to take a step back, remind yourself of the values you have consciously chosen to hold, and approach this carefully. There's so much rising extremism and black-and-white thinking in our world; let's not follow suggestrogen's lead and contribute to it.
For those curious about the broader topic of transformative/restorative justice and how it relates to people who have abused others, I recommend:
The website TransformHarm, which hasn't been updated in a few years, but still has an extensive archive of articles on this topic, including those written by survivors of abuse
This list of resources on perpetrator accountability by the German-based Transformative Justice Practitioners Network
(linked on the above page) the work "As If They Were Human: A Different Take on Perpetrator Accountability," which had a big impact on me when I first read it. From the foreword:
[T]he title of this zine is a reference to how I feel perpetrators should be treated: as if they were human. Because they are human. The mainstream portrays perpetrators as hopeless cases, who care about nothing in life other than power and control. While it is certainly clear that those who sexually assault, abuse, or rape others do care quite a bit about power and control, it is disingenuous to declare that those are the only things they care about. As with all humans, humans who are also perpetrators have many desires and wishes for their lives. […] Instead of taking an aggressive, confrontational approach and shutting a perpetrator down whenever they veer from accepting the dehumanizing story that is supposed to define them, Augusta-Scott's approach helps the perpetrator understand how the abuse conflicts with other wishes the perpetrator may have for their life: love, respect, intimacy, companionship. In this way, people who work with perpetrators on accountability no longer become police, but rather collaborators in ending the abuse. I feel that radical community accountability efforts could learn a great deal from this alternative approach.
Like, there's a conversation to be had about how the demonization of "The Pedophile" has been a contributing factor in how fascists have sought to oppress and commit genocide against marginalized communities, including queer identities.
But holy shit fuck she is making the dumbest possible argument about it. And I sincerely hope she is forever nuked from this hellsite.
The less I have to see her trandrophobic ass the better.
Oh, and the less she has the power to whip up harassment squads to send death threats to anyone who acknowledges trans men are human beings, the better
Like, there's a conversation to be had about how the demonization of "The Pedophile" has been a contributing factor in how fascists have sought to oppress and commit genocide against marginalized communities, including queer identities.
But holy shit fuck she is making the dumbest possible argument about it. And I sincerely hope she is forever nuked from this hellsite.
The less I have to see her trandrophobic ass the better.
To this woman, pedophiles are "vulnerable community members"
But trans men should face a blanket judgement for all transmisogyny.
Also the dishonesty of "i didnt SAY pedos are part of the lgbt community". No, you just made a direct comparison saying that not supporting pedophiles is "essentially the same rhetoric" as the transphobic "LGB without the T" movement.
puppyboy bf that sits at my feet when that im on the couch and goes brainless while that i run my fingers through his hair to keep some attention on him while that i talk to our friends.
I know I just restating the point of that post but respecting religious freedom will sometimes require you to respect someone's belief that religious beliefs are categorically untrue, and there are a lot of people who are unable to handle this, and even more people who think they agree with this but haven't really grappled with what it means.
Something that a lot of religious folks don't seem to realize the extent to which non-religious people, more than any other religious minority, are expected to walk on eggshells around other people's beliefs at the expense of their own for the sake of social decorum, in a way which no one else is expected to do with theirs.
To name a bit of an example I have personal experience with. When I was mourning my cousin a couple years ago, I was constantly faced with the situation of people trying to comfort me from a religious perspective.
And whenever this topic comes up, the conversation is always about how "you have to be mindful of their intentions, they're trying to reach out to you and comfort you in the way they know, they're being nice, you have to appreciate the effort they're making, you have to meet them where they're at and appreciate their attempt to help you". Which is what I did, of course. In this situation, replying to their attempt to comfort you with any reminder that you don't believe in this stuff is considered a big social faux-pas that will make you look like an asshole. And to an extent I agree, it can be rude and needlessly combative.
But somethin I feel it's conspicuously absent from any conversation surrounding this type of situation like. Any interrogation of *why* is going "sorry, I don't believe in any of this, this means nothing to me" considered a bigger social faux-pas than trying to comfort a grieving person with religious beliefs you know they don't hold.
Why, even when you're literally grieving, the onus is on you as a non-religious person to be mindful of other's worldviews and tread lightly and meet them where they're at and not contradict what they believe in and never the other way around.
It's also pretty damn infantilising to religious people to be like "oh they are soft uwu babies who can't step back and relate to you and this is the only way they know how to reach out!" No they aren't. Religion doesn't make someone stupid. People who do this are either dicks trying to use your grief to convert you, or they're genuinely well-meaning and caring people to whom it simply hasn't occurred what their words mean because everyone is expected to walk on eggshells around them, and would change their behaviour if it was pointed out the same way that someone using unintentionally insulting language changes their behaviour when it's pointed out. The way "respect people who have different beliefs than you" has turned into "be sure to baby those poor helpless religious people who don't mean to upset you but they just don't know any better and can't learn with their soft sensitive vulnerable religious brains!" is absurd.
my mom died and i will never talk with her again. when people try to comfort me with the concept of an afterlife reunion i feel more alone than ever: my loss is PERMANENT. the pattern of atoms and electrons that she was is permanently disarrayed. eventually i will follow her into that disarray as my own arrangement of being comes apart and other things use the pieces for other lives, but i will not meet her again when we are both gone, because both of us will be nothing.
my grief is for this simple, final, irrevocable loss. the time my mother was with me is over. religious people need to learn what an indignity, what an insult, it is to try to comfort a grieving friend with a sweet, pretty, and utterly false version of the universe that their friend doesn't live in.
What do you mean by "radical intersex liberation" is that like radical feminism
No.
The general goals & beliefs of Radical Intersex Liberationism:
The belief that gonochoric sex should not be understood as a discrete unchanging binary but rather a bimodal distribution of associated anatomical traits. There are no objective sexes (other than self-identification), only clusters of sex traits. Most individual sex traits can be changed, and any number of sex traits may naturally appear outside of the two most common (perisex) clusters.
Enshrine the bodily autonomy of intersex people into law around the world, end all nonconsensual cosmetic procedures done to intersex people — preserve and extend the right to become sex variant to any and all, make transsexual healthcare acessable to anyone who wants it.
Abolition of AGAB as a practice, and the cessation of all forms of legal sex identification— it only exists to marginalize sex variant people and conformant (non-queer) women. Gender should only exist as a form of self-identification.
Reworking the medical establishment's views of sex variance as a problem requiring treatment. Change medical protocols to reflect the reality that sex variance is healthy, normal, and preferred for some people. Prioritize treatment of sex variant patients for things that impact their physical health rather than attempting to correct their appearance to fit pericisnormative standards.
Reject the teleological stance that intersex and trans people "should have" been sex conformant— Promote the understanding of sex variance (voluntary: physical transition AND/OR involuntary: intersex development) as a whole and fully formed way for humans to exist, rather than an aberration from what is "correct" and "normal" (perisex/cis).
The complete decoupling of sex (bodily traits) from gender identity (mental traits), as these things are unrelated. Their linking is purely a social construct.
Complete normalization of visible sex variance.
Abandonment of the words "male" and "female" with regards to anatomical descriptions. These words may still be used in self-identification, but not in a biological context.
It blows my fucking mind that people will read this and still call intersex activism a cryptoterf radfem movement. As if actual TERFs aren't literally appalled by all of this, including the "gender abolition" variety of them. I get literally the nastiest fucking asks from TERFs every other day only to be called one by perisex trans people.
Being intersex and loud just pisses off everybody, doesn't it.
look i'm just not convinced that the TERFs three key positions, "we hate men," "we hate trans women," and "we believe trans women are men" are unrelated
No, this post describes a position that TERFs hold. This post is anti-TERF.
Do TERFs actually hate men? It seems like they just hate trans women.
You may be confusing a more garden-variety reactionary for a TERF. I encourage you to search the word "moid" on this site to gain a better understanding of how the average TERF feels about men.
Does this imply trans women and men are under similar levels of threat from TERFism?
Not even a little bit.
What's the point of making a post like this?
Generally it is good to develop a theory of mind for your political enemies and to say true things instead of false things.
So… you’re an atheist and you don’t see any transcendent meaning in life. Meaning the quote was actually entirely correct
the point is that there's no need to be sad about it! the idea of being sad that Catholicism is false is such a bizarre concept; if it was real we would be obliged to overthrow it immediately or die trying.
but in practice I don't think many people could give a reasonable definition for "transcendent meaning" anyway.
If Catholicism was true, we would absolutely not be obliged to overthrow it at all. In fact, we would be obliged not to do that. Catholicism being true would mean that its ideas of morality and ethics would also all be objective facts, and overthrowing it would be ontologically and objectively evil because right and wrong in this hypothetical are necessarily entirely determined by the will of the Christian God as established in Catholicism.
doesn't really work that way; the reality of the Catholic god and miracles and stuff doesn't mean that if it tells you bad stuff it's automatically good, even the Ancient Greeks could see through that.
The ancient Greek religion was a lot less dogmatic about it than Catholicism. The Catholic God is not just some guy with powers, he is the manifestation and origin of ontological goodness.
so were the Greek gods! at least to some extent; there's no real definition of goodness a god can assert that is "ontological" in any deeper sense than "I will punish you for disobeying it".
You're doing that thing where you try to engage with a hypothetical without being able to engage with the hypothetical. You don't seem to grasp that if religion were true, then it would actually be true and your beliefs would be false. You can't engage with the hypothetical without being able to imagine what the world would be like if your beliefs weren't true.
If God were real your opinion of morality would not matter. It would be incorrect. It would be like you having the opinion that pi should be equal to 4 or that carbon should have one electron. Morality would be an "is", not an "ought". It would be part of the laws of physics. There is no amount of argumentation you could make about what things should be that can change basic material facts of reality and if God were real, morality would be a basic material fact of reality. Whatever definition you had come up with for morality that said God was in the wrong, that definition would be incorrect. Because God would be real and it would be a fact about the world that he was real and a fact about the world that he created it and a fact about the world that he objectively defined what morality was.
Also, "If there was a guy who could make you suffer for eternity if you pissed him off, and could make you happy for eternity if he liked you, and literally all of existence was his means of figuring out what to do to whom, it would be our obligation to piss that guy off. Also he is definitionally more powerful than you and you cannot possibly ever impede or resist him in any way because he defines reality. Yeah that guy. We would be obliged to piss him off in exchange for accomplishing nothing." I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there!
Well, no. If God were real, that would make His preferred code of ethics part of the factual structure of the universe in a sense, but that wouldn't mean that we would have to agree that this code is "right" in a deeper sense. If God says that suicide is immoral, that doesn't mean that suicide is wrong, it means that God is wrong.
If God is real, he is definitionally not wrong, and if you disagree with God you are definitionally not correct. You are saying that 2+2=5. Because God created every aspect of reality and what he says goes.
To be fair this is a bit of a definitions game. In our athiest world the word "morality" or "good" does not mean a Transcendent, Objective Law built into the foundation of the universe, one that reflects the ontology of the human soul, etc. It means our subjective understanding of ourselves and others and what we think is right for them. It is loose, contextual, and based on a combo of consensus & individual reflection.
So in a world where God In His Most High is truly reigning, there is this new concept - The Good - where that is obviously objectively true. You can't debate God's structuring of the universe. But you can think it is bad. You can use your subjective judgement, individual reflection, and observation of the collective human experience to think The Good is extremely shitty and needed a few more drafts before launch. Those don't magically become the same thing. And hey, in modern Catholic theology with its strong commitment to idea of human free will, they definitionally aren't!
Now if other aspects of Catholic theology, namely Heaven & Hell, are true then you probably aren't going to do any pushback against The Good. You should want your own behavior and that of others to align with The Good, you would never rebel against it, babies dying would be awesome for those babies because living on earth is stupid and they get to be automatically happy in heaven forever, etc. You would do your best to help everyone get into heaven and minimize the hell descent rates.
But if I am still endowed with free will I am going to observe that this God clearly didn't design a universe with the best interest of humans in mind. Catholic theology is simply contradictory - it claims that is true and then mocks it in the next paragraph. It is perfectly congruent to observe the failures of The Good vis a vis subjective human experience.
(And yes, you probably could design a religion that doesn't have this contradictory tension, where if it were true everyone would agree it is both The Good and also good. That just isn't Catholicism. And ofc this "depends on your Catholicism" since the religion has radically changed over the centuries)
Asserting an alternate universe where Catholic morality is objectively true seems to me a bit like asserting an alternate universe where there's another integer called "fleeb" between 8 and 9, that is not the 8 or 9 we know. Like this is a string of words you can assemble in the English language and put "what if" in front of, but that doesn't mean it's a coherent idea: under any coherent system of mathematics the integer after 8 has all the properties of 9 and it doesn't matter what you call it. "Fleeb" is 9, or it doesn't exist.
Similarly, we can postulate a universe where the spiritual claims of Catholicism are true, but that doesn't mean these claims produce self-consistent morality or ontology the way Catholic theologians seem to think they do; like many spiritual traditions that have accumulated piecemeal over centuries, and have been shaped by social and political and philosophical pressures, Catholicism contains a lot of contradictions and outright absurdities papered over by the studious application of dogma, and it seems extremely implausible to me that there could exist a state of affairs where all of that stuff can be true in a consistent way.
You can accuse someone of not engaging with the hypothetical, but the problem is that the hypothetical is incoherent. Much like with "fleeb," we have to change some part of it in order to make it work even as a hypothetical, because it is founded on deep misapprehensions about how the universe works.
Multiple things can be true at once. Transmisogyny can be a vital term for some of us to communicate the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that we face. But others may experience it more complicatedly or severely, as in the case of transmisogynoir. And for others (e.g., certain nonbinary people, trans male/masculine-spectrum people), misogyny may intersect with transphobia in different ways that aren’t adequately articulated by transmisogyny. This doesn’t necessarily make transmisogyny “wrong”; it may simply mean that we need additional language.
