something else i've been thinking about a lot in the past couple days in regards to the amount of rampant transmisogyny within the intersex community on tumblr is how the most recent wave seemed to start with just a few users and their mutuals who were openly posting this kind of stuff and inciting harassment campaigns against trans women, but how so much of that rhetoric has spread pretty wide into many different parts of intersex tumblr, and also is often the first introduction to intersex topics for people questioning intersex on here.
and to me, that makes it very clear that a lot of this stuff has been happening in smaller and bigger ways for many years before this, and that many of the intersex users on here who might have claimed to be transfeminists at one point have not bothered to evaluate the ways in which we might be complicit in perpetuating this kind of shit within the online intersex community.
i'm thinking about the amount of interactions i've had with intersex people on this site who will privately say to me "well, i agree with what you're saying about xyz tumblr user, but I like their other intersex posts" or "well I can't say anything about transmisogyny on this blog because I'm mutuals with one of their mutuals and i don't want them to get mad at me" or "the intersex community is so small, i can't afford to alienate people by speaking out against what this person is doing" or people just reblogging posts claiming that terms are historically intersex exclusive without bothering to do a basic search of whether or not that's true. or several other examples I could give of ways that people are spreading this rhetoric or participating in harassment campaigns under the guise of plausible deniability. i'm also thinking a lot about all the intersex transfem friends i had on here who have now deleted their blogs and who have been basically de facto exiled from other intersex groups that they used to be a part of, and how we now just connect in other ways online because they were facing so much harassment on here.
sometimes it feels like the main discussions on here that involve intersex topics seem to have shifted so far away from real life discussions of intersex experience and instead seem to mostly just be about intersex identity as a rhetorical concept. and in particular, people trying to find ways the concept of intersex identity can be weaponized to attack transfeminist theory.
I'm also reflecting on how so much of this shit isn't new. I remember back 3 and a half years ago when mod Stev and I made an announcement in the (now mostly inactive) intersex discord server associated with this blog saying "Please don't use the word/concept of transandrophobia or transmisandry in this server; here's four sources and a long explanation of why this is the guideline if you want to keep engaging in this space" and how big an upset that was at the time and the amount of hate we got for that from some people. I'm thinking about how there was a known transphobic intersex tumblr blogger who got so mad about me calling her out on her transphobia that she deleted her blog back in...i want to say it was 2021? and despite that, she came back this year for a while and got popular again incredibly fast, in part because of the ways she was openly spreading terf rhetoric.
the intersex tag on here seems to me like the worst it's ever been in terms of harassment and intra-community violence in the six years this blog has been on tumblr in a way that is also concerningly bleeding into some of the irl intersex activist spaces I'm in. and i think that if the tumblr intersex community doesn't start actively speaking up about the shit that is going on right now and actually confronting the people in our community who are posting hateful rhetoric and harassing trans women that it is just going to get worse. especially when it comes to transmasc people in the tumblr intersex community who have been silent or actively posting this kind of thing, (and to be clear, i'm saying that from my positionality as a tme intersex person--this is a critique that i'm including myself in here.)
i don't really know how to end this post except for to say that i do believe it is possible to have a movement for intersex liberation, built on the principles of intersex justice that works to build resources and community and safety. but i don't think that can happen without actively (to quote the 10 Principles of Disability justice) building a commitment to cross-movement organizing and leadership of the most impacted. and that i don't think there's any way we will have a movement for intersex liberation without transfeminism.
