you know that uncomfortable feeling where every masculine person that was afab in mainstream media, HAS to absolutely have a "oh I LOVE feminity actually omg I am such a woman hippity-dee do I love womanhood dw I'm not ONLY masculine I'm not a MAN and if I wanted to be a man that was just my insecurity at being a woman because I am a WOMAN and wanting to be a man is BAD because IM NOT and my entire character arc will be about realising how much of a woman I really am, how wrong i was to be masculine and the story will end with me growing out my hair and wearing more feminine clothing, this will be unilaterally treated as a good thing by the narrative"
I think that as a community there would be a lot less infighting if we all accepted that cis people see us as transgender first, and whatever gender we identify as second. (if at all) That out transness, to cis society, puts us in an entirely different class of people. We are all so othered from our cis counterparts that we cannot meaningfully operate in the world as cis men and cis women do.
and it's maddening and invalidating and even dysphoria inducing but it is the truth. and only by accepting this truth can we free ourselves and come together as one unified community.
This is very obvious if ever you’ve helped someone gain knowledge about transness from their cis position where they weren’t necessarily bigoted.
I use my dad as an example a lot, but it’s because he’s a good one lol
He would call trans people just “a trans”. And when he wanted to be more specific he always floundered around about it. “A trans… uh… ma- or wait… a trans wom- er… a trans who was x gender but is now y gender.”
It’s weird from the perspective of a trans person, because like… you’ve described they transitioned from one to the other. There’s probably an obvious one of those things they would want to be called. But, then again, if you don’t know how these terms work, is this about what the person wants to be called or about how they transitioned? MTF and FTM put what the person transitioned away from first, and so maybe that’s the one that’s important to highlight when you call someone a trans [whatever gender].
Even people who aren’t necessarily vehemently bigoted, just have absorbed things they’re even actively working on unlearning, will tend to, in the beginning of the process at least, still just see us as “trans”, and not necessarily register what way to gender us.
(updated) 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 who experience potentially harmful kinds of attraction, 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 paraphiles, and trying to have a nuanced and compassionate discussion on child abuse and people who are pedophiles 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.
This post has been updated to more accurately reflect the issues at hand, and the terminology used to discuss them.
A note on language & the whole thing
Terminology for this whole issue is complicated. Pedophilia is often conflated with child sexual abuse, but as we will get to in this post, most child sexual abusers are not pedophiles. Pedophilia is simply attraction to children (exclusive or non-exclusive, as some are also attracted to adults). The term "pedophile" is extremely loaded for most people. The term "MAP" is seen by many people as a term used by pedophiles to try to rebrand and seek social acceptance.
Attraction is not something that people choose. There is no evidence that I know of that people who experience attraction to children can force or coerce themselves into not experiencing that attraction. I am a firm believer that thoughts and feelings themselves are not moral and cannot be morally judged, only the actions people choose to take. There is no evidence that I know of that social stigma against people who feel attraction towards children, simply for being that way, actually helps anyone. It only increases social isolation, depression, feelings that one is inherently evil and that abusing children is inevitable, none of which do anything to prevent actual child abuse (which, again, is perpetrated by many non-pedophiles). Further reading will be linked at the bottom of this post.
In this whole discussion, I feel the terms "pedophile acceptance" and "pedophile liberation" are thrown around by people of various different opinions without ever actually being defined. What do we actually mean by acceptance? Are we talking about treating attraction as neutral and humanizing people who are attracted to minors as members of our communities who are just like us, capable of great harm and great healing? Are we talking about normalizing adults having sex with children? Are these two ideas necessarily linked? How can we tell when someone is using Definition A as a cover to advocate for Definition B?
Suggestrogen has not helped in this confusion, as we will see. The reason I am bringing this up here, at the beginning, is to establish tha:
I will be using the term minor-attracted person/people primarily in this post. Previously, I advocated for "people with pedophilia," but thanks to others, have come to realize that this language is generally not preferred because it is very medicalizing. Many people are comfortable being called pedophiles, but others aren't, I feel like minor-attracted people is the most neutral, humanizing, and covering-all-bases term for this post.
The language used here is not just about the words. It is about the conceptual framework behind the words. When talking about pedophilia, there is so much emotional and cultural energy swirling around this. Understanding why this is such a nuanced issue requires not just using the right words, but understanding other's points of view and being able to make others understand the worldview behind adopting a more humanizing, morally neutral view of pedophiles. You really have to thread the needle of connecting with people, understanding their worldview, and presenting yours to them.
This doesn't change the core issue I take with suggestrogen's posts, but I have edited parts of this post to better align with this improved understanding of the issue and the terminology being used.
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 can 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 ridiculous and, again, obviously inflammatory.
As I mention above, the term "MAP" itself has controversy surrounding it. While has been used by academics and individuals alike, a lot of people do not have even that basic context, much less the context of the conceptual framework behind the shift. I understand the point of saying that there is no terminology that will magically escape the stigma. But this point only really makes sense if you already understand "MAP" as a good faith attempt in a specific context. If you are talking to people who do not understand that, and do not understand why stigma against pedophilia might be bad in the first place, all they are hearing is "there's no good way to escape the stigma of being someone who wants to abuse kids!" which is not very convincing.
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 increased my concern about how she is approaching this:
Again, I think using terminology you know the majority of people will be upset and offended by is not helping the case here. She is someone with a large platform. This will be many people's first real engagement with the idea of destigmatizing pedophilia. And I do not think jumping straight into "my pedo friends" is the best way to present that to those folks.
I think the backlash against her is proof that this choice did more to get people fired up and angry at her, than anything it could've done to help humanize minor-attracted people and educate about stigma against paraphilia being harmful and counterproductive on all sides.
Now, I don't off-the-bat disagree with her on ageplay or fiction, or even necessarily on medicalization. A lot of people who are not attracted to children engage in ageplay and write dark erotica with these themes (including but not limited to survivors of CSA themselves), although I am not an expert on pedophiles and whether engaging with these is helpful or harmful for them and the ultimate goal of not hurting children.
(Also, the rape kink comparison isn't quite exact: people with rape kinks do not necessarily have a sexual orientation where they want to rape people, most want to play pretend raping someone in a consensual kink setting. Most people with an ageplay kink are not actually attracted to children. So there is a difference in experience between non-MAPs with dark kinks and minor-attracted people. But I still see her intended point about play and fiction.)
This anonymous friend is correct! As alluded to before, it is generally agreed by experts in this area that most people who sexually abuse children are not attracted to children. Notably, that Vice article was incredibly easy to find, and immediately gives people context for why "pedophile" and "child abusers" are separate terms. I think it was a bad choice to not provide any sources here.
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. A pedophile acting on pedophilic desires will be doing something harmful to someone.
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 minor-attracted people.
Why this focus on comparing the desire to transition (specifically the desire to transition to living as a woman) and a romantic/sexual attraction to minors? Why does suggestrogen/her friend need to keep insisting that these are easily comparable, completely ignoring the material differences? Like, you can make the point this friend is making (being a pedophile 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 NO pedophile 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.
We simply do not need to claim this in order to make the point that minor-attracted people are not inherently dangerous monsters, or that we should not refuse to be friends with them! We don't need to deny that this has very much happened. Especially since there is simply no way she doesn't know that many people have trauma from child sexual abuse and would obviously react strongly to her posts, and that they have every right to have an uncomfortable reaction. Again, this person does seem genuinely to be trying to understand her point here, and their concerns are pretty understandable.
Even if I disagree that people shouldn't be friends with others because they are attracted to minors (something they cannot help), they are not wrong that the sentence "I am friends with several pedophiles" is going to be viscerally uncomfortable for people! You have to be prepared for that if you are assigning yourself the role of spokeswoman for pedophiles! Did she never think to prepare for the inevitable criticism this would get her before taking up this banner very publicly?
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 explain why certain language was preferred and why there is no perfect terminology, you could've actually been citing sources on minor-attracted people and child abuse. You did none of that, as far as I can tell.
You made posts that were obviously inflammatory. 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 zoophilic people 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 even the most stigmatized paraphiles 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 "pedophilic people 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.
Further resources on pedophilia:
The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges by Tenbergen et al
Self-Identifications, Sexual Development, And Wellbeing In Minor-Attracted People: An Exploratory Study by Brian Cash
Pedophilia and DSM-5: The Importance of Clearly Defining the Nature of a Pedophilic Disorder by Fred S. Berlin
Is Pedophilia a Sexual Orientation? by Michael C. Seto
Preventing Sexual Abuse: Perspectives of Minor-Attracted Persons About Seeking Help by Jill S. Levenson and Melissa D. Grady
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.
Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.
“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”
it's actually so funny that all you need to do as a female athlete to be immediately disqualified is being good, because everyone knows women suck ass at everything and if a woman is good at something that's unnatural. hashtag feminism hashtag protect women.
uterus mysticism is weird to me, besides all the bioessentialism stuff, because like. Dude it’s just an organ. Imagine if we did this to the gallbladder or kidneys.
Divine feminine is stored in the appendix actually. appendicitis is just the Virgin Mary trying to break through to you. Never get your appendix removed its mother Mary speaking to you.
If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.
Words cannot express how insidious these types of posts are, and how distressing it is to see them become so commonplace. I’ve seen variations of this exact joke at least a hundred times on insta, all with hundreds of likes and shares. I cannot emphasize enough how these types of posts are the exact same as those ai generated videos of angry snap recipients, or made up stories about crazy feminists. This joke is just one of many targeted attempts to do four things: Normalize ableism and make people wary of suicidal people, Further the stereotype of queer people being weak and unstable, further the even more specific stereotype of the “cringe, weak” transmasc or nonbinary person with a weird name, and ultimately divide the community. The kind of things described in this post did happen, but nowhere near as frequently as is described, and mostly during the national mental health crisis of the pandemic. This is cherry picked propaganda, meant to make people say “I’m not like them. I’m normal, I’m strong, i fit in. I can’t be associated with this group.” All in all, as a community we have to be more vigilant against these types of blatant attempts at sowing discord and crush them at inception.
I think we need to talk about a specific type of exorsexism, where someone's personhood and gender are reduced to pronouns.
I'm talking about referring to people as "a they/them", "a they", "a he/they".
It's something that's not typically done to people who prefer (or are assumed to prefer) a single normative pronoun set. You can actually encounter a sentence that includes "he/theys" and "trans women" next to each other like this:
I don't know how to name this phenomenon yet, but I think it's fucked up.
soooo apparently "tme" means having a vagina now. This makes complete and total sense. Very useful framework./sarc
Also the presumption that everyone with a penis is "tma" and all "tmas" have penises is wild. Do tme/tma users not know bottom surgery exists 😭😭 or do trans women become "tme" the second they get bottom surgery. This is why I hate these fuckass terms. Like why not just say "trans women" and "non trans women" if that's what you mean not "tme/tma" and "having a penis/vagina"
edit: oop is a trans woman and presumably uses she/her. respect that. also terfs fuck off im genderfluid and proud
"But at least if you're TME, you're more likely to be believed"
record scratch sound effect
what
this is just blatant rape culture abuse apologia 101. like this is an ACTUAL MRA talking point, that "females are believed when they're assaulted", just fucking wrapped up in a slightly less offensive sounding bow. what the fuck
If you’ve ever had the privilege of calling a trans person by their chosen name for their first time in real life it will genuinely change your life and I’m being so serious.
Had a friend (let’s call her Maddie) who didn’t exactly try to pass, whose parents weren’t supportive, and didn’t really have other irl friends. Claimed to “not care about her name or pronouns, so I should just call her by her ‘real name’ (birth name). And I did. For a long time, I did, because she never told me she used anything else. One day she asked for my insta and I added her, and I noticed her displayname on there was “Maddie”. I asked her about it, and she said it was just a “silly online name”.
Later that day we went to the movies to watch that new Captain America film. I cringed the whole way through, while she waffled on in my ear about “comic-accuracy” (I love her, but she’s a nerd.)
‘Maddie, I’d love to hear this after it’s over but please let me listen to the dialogue.’
She looked like she was about to cry, and I thought I’d made her sad by essentially telling her to shut up, but then she smiled and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much joy come out of a single person from such a simple thing to say.
Later I dragged her to the makeup store and essentially role-played as a straight couple with an apathetic boyfriend so she could pretend not to want to be there while I explained what everything did, dropping the man voice I’d been trying to hold in public for years just to yap about different lipstick shades like a valley girl.
And I went up to the register with her, and she was practically shaking when she handed one stick of eyeliner to the woman behind the register and she commented on how nice it was for “him” to be buying me something.
And we played it off, until we walked out the store and made a dash for the family-bathroom where I did her eyeliner while she cried and giggled and took a million pictures of herself and wiped it off and tried to do it herself over and over until it looked decent and then she hugged me so hard I nearly cracked a rib.
I can’t really explain what that afternoon meant to either of us. She and I drifted apart after a few months because meeting up became really hard, but still I remember that day like it was yesterday. I think I’ll remember it forever.
Spread trans joy. It’s the purest thing in the world.
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