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RMH
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sheepfilms
roma★
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occasionally subtle
Keni
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Andulka
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Mike Driver
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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macklin celebrini has autism
One Nice Bug Per Day
Claire Keane
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Game of Thrones Daily
tannertan36
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@umbridge-against-shipping
sure is interesting how the free market/free speech clowns approach to freedom never extends to sex or sex related topics huh
sex workers getting kicked off platforms they created? every credit card processor refusing to allow porn related transactions? not being able to say the word sex lest the Algorithm demonitize you and yeet your content into the abyss?
nahhh the real free speech problem is that i can't force people to listen to my hate speech :'(
bringing this back for no specific reason
I love to witness the development of Snater behavior during this pandemic. They seem to have increased in numbers because they're spending more time online. Generally, they've been more aggressive in public discussions. Still, weirdly enough, it doesn't escalate the same way anymore. The worst thing I've been called is a whore. I've gotten one rude anon that told me I have no talent. So I guess this is a long way of saying there's been progress?
I have an absolutely wild theory about this that involves how the 2020 election is unravelling and how snaters are coping with that but that’s a story for another time and place.
....I want the story my dude
Well since we’re out and out talking about this kind of thing now lol... I’m going to put this on my main account so I don’t have politics all over @dastardly-lemondrops . Also, CW mention of bullying, sexual assualt. Okay. So this year we’ve been having primaries, right? For context, I’m an anarchist, I believe radical unions and mutual aid etc are the most effective way to do politics, I don’t put a lot of stock into who is or isn’t president AND I’m on twitter.com.
Elections stress me the fuck out. It’s like watching a professional wrestling tournament but it’s not fun and the heel wins every time. The other thing that made this time really stressful is how many leftists who normally might participate in nonelectoral politics got very invested in uh... slightly to the left of center SocDem, Bernie Sanders. Now... Bernie’s okay. It’d be cool if he won, I’d’ve voted for him, but believing what I believe, I was not putting a lot of eggs in that basket, and I def didn’t start tweeting about Bernie/the campaign. But I do tweet about the IWW, about anarchism, about leftist stuff in general. So here’s what happened. As soon as Biden became the presumptive nominee, and legitimate criticism of him (his record is right wing, imperialist, racist, and he had to drop out of the 1988 race for plagiarising a British MP’s speeches, not to mention the other thing) started coming out, something happened. Twitter folks who were strongly invested in any one of the centrist candidates turned into vicious bullies, focused more on attacking people to the left of them than supporting Biden. It wasn’t about how much they liked him--it was about how much they hated us. Calling us abusive, mysogynists, immature, tamtrum-havers, sending us open death threats, accusing us of being Russian bots, accusing us of being secret Trump supporters, saying our media (lefttube, leftist podcasts) is inherently problematic and should be Cancelled. Even those of us who had never been ‘bernie accounts’. And those who are? And then there’s the fact that the same people who were saying this in December
are now saying things like this
It occured to me at some point... these people act exactly like Marauders Stans. Putting more time and energy into attacking the Snapedom than supporting the thing they ostensibly care about? Making content about how terrible and awful Snape is instead of making fanfiction/fanart about the characters they supposedly like? Appropriating the language of identity politics and oppression in a completely twisted way to try to shame and scold us? (Snape is an incel nazi! Snape fans are abuse apologists! Snape supports rape culture! Snape was RACIST and James was DEFINITELY a POC and uh Snape was a nazi) Dismiss any flaws with the person/character they like as illegitimate and pettiness? (It’s not that they sexually assualted anyone, it’s that YOU’RE an apologist/Russian bot!) Just... fucking feeling entitled to send us death threats and then call US the bullies? Talk openly about how terrible and awful we are while they base their entire identity about attacking a group who is just trying to do our own thing? And then I thought about the fact that yeah, many Snape fans are leftists. And... Marauders stans/Harry Potter fans as a whole are painfully in line with the right-of-center liberalism expressed by the VBNMW crowd. Hell, you SEE those people use terrible Harry Potter analogies for politics like there’s no tomorrow. (Cheeto Voldemort? This is like when Umbridge did the thing? Elizabeth Warren IS Hermione Granger? Beto O’Rourke IS Harry Potter?) And then... yeah, I noticed right around the time that the Roni ramped up and Bernie suspended his campaign... Both the Biden Bros and the Marauders stans went completely the fuck out of their minds. So here’s my theory. Not all Biden Bros are Marauders Stans. But I think it’s possible that like 80% of marauders stans are incredibly stressed out right now because not only are they fightin the good fight, hatin Snape and his fans on Tumblr. They’re over on twitter, fighting a war on two fronts, bullying left twitter.
Maybe this is completely unfounded. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that they fuckin act that way. But whew doggie, they sure have the same energy/tactics.
Okay *taps microphone* I am about to give my own take on this specific situation. You dont have to agree with me, and please keep in mind I also enjoy some of the marauders such as Sirius and Remus as characters when I am posting this. But here goes- the reason there is a correlation between "Biden bros" and Marauderstans who harrass Snape fans is because the relationship between the marauders and snape in the canon of Harry Potter is actually a strong metaphor for the relationship between liberals and leftists in real life.
Part 1 of ????
Those who stan the marauders uncritically claim that the marauder's are the actual good guys, and credit them with a lot of heroism surrounding the events of the war. But when you analyze the text, you will find there isn't much evidence of them taking direct action to make the wizarding world a better place. Im not talking about James potter dying, I'm talking about actual action here. They support the system in place in the wizarding world despite its many prejudices and injustices, and dont seem to question or critique those things just like liberals. This is probably because for the most part they are benefiting from these systems. They didn't do much to help people, especially when they were younger and harmed people with less power and privilege than them just because they existed. The types of Marauder stans who harass the snapedom are in staunch denial of the wrong things that these characters did did because they buy into the manufactured identities that the marauders in canon present themselves with: they're attractive, they're popular, they're rich, they make claims about what heroes they are without giving altogether much evidence to back that up. But the evidence doesn't matter, because the pretty words and appearances are all the marauder stans want to hear. Just like liberals want with liberal politicians.
Part 2 of ????
So, it is pretty obvious that Severus Snape did a lot more for the direct benefit of the wizarding world than the marauders, based on what we actually SEE in canon. This can be found in his actions but not his words.
Severus doesn't have the image that the marauders have, as we all know. He is poor, and not conventionally attractive, and doesn't conform to a lot of societies expectations of a person. All of these things make him unpopular as a character, both in the world of the story AND outside of it in fandom.
But another thing Severus Snape does is highlight and often literally calls out the inherent flaws in the way the liberal wizarding world is run (such as him getting angry at dumbledore for using him and Harry, which was really the first time anybody had been critical of the careless use of lives in the pursuit of maintaining the status quo) and condemns the ways that those who have privilege abuse their power. This makes sense, he is a very radical boy after all.
Part 3 of 4(???)
Even with the post mortem "triple agent" reveal, I dont think the Harry Potter books really go back on the narrative that snape is bad for the reasons I've stated above. The anti fascist actions he took and eventually sacrificed his life to do, and the many lives that he saved throughout the years doing so (which can be directly pointed out in text) are erased because he does not perform civility or bow down to authority. Just like we as leftists have our contributions to workers rights such as the creation of the eight hour work day erased, and are condemned as "just as bad as fascists" because we aren't "nice" to people like Elizabeth Warren.
It is my belief that marauder stans get so angry at Snape stans for the same reason that your general liberal gets angry when a leftist says that Joe Biden won't change anything in America because he is part of the same system that oppresses us all. They are uncomfortable and angry that those who have the appearance of being good and who they were told by the forces in power (i guess in this case jkr) are good might actually not be so. That these characters might actually support a system that is flawed and harmful to many, a system that does not work and only causes the evil that was defeated to manifest again, and that these characters actively benefited from that system. That somebody who didn't perform civility, who didn't conform to society, who wasn't beautiful or rich or charming, someone who was RADICAL, was actually the one who was right.
Part 4 of 4 (which is really just like an epilogue or something)
So I've been sitting on the last part of this post for a couple of days, because I knew there was more I wanted to say... but didn't know how to say it. All I really want to do is encourage yall on tumblr.
What you are doing is important work. You are preserving the story of Severus Snape as one abour commiting making a better world despite all adversities or past mistakes, instead of letting the liberals obfuscate a powerful story about redemption and radical action. You're taking the words of a bourgeois liberal and saying "fuck that, we do what we want" and using the world that she created, the world we are all familiar with, to tell stories of queerness, stories of trauma, stories of radical leftism. It may "just be fandom", but reading a story can change the way a person sees the world.
Sometimes the Snape hate might get to you, and you might feel like it would just be better to be quiet. Not to get too personal, but there have been many times in my life where my voice was silenced. I didn't think anybody would want to hear what I had to say, and how my experiences made me think the world should be. Now I am learning that I was wrong, and that my voice has power. Maybe power I'm not used to.. maybe power that scares me sometimes... but that doesn't mean I'm not going to use it. It matters too much.
You have that power too comrades. So keep speaking. Keep writing, or drawing, or theorizing or shit posting or whatever way you feel is right. Keep telling our favorite slytherin dude's story, and not taking shit from anybody. It's what Severus Snape would've wanted.
Also in the spirit of Severus's radic, I encourage you to get involved in taking some radical action to make the real world a better place, not just the fandom one. Covid 19 is still very much a threat.. but that makes it all the more important that we support each others in real, material ways. Find people in your community to organize with or provide mutual aid to, or join a union. If you want to know more about the things I'm talking about im going to drop some educational links and organizations that work towards goals I really believe in below.
Links:
https://crimethinc.com/2020/03/18/surviving-the-virus-an-anarchist-guide-capitalism-in-crisis-rising-totalitarianism-strategies-of-resistance
Let's protect ourselves and each other from the threat posed by the virus and a social order that never preserved our well-being in the firs
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/
https://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/five-ways-you-can-engage-in-mutual-aid-now/
http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
https://socialistra.org/
https://www.genstrike.org/
https://blacksocialists.us/
https://blacksocialists.us/
EST. 2018, we are an organization of Black Americans who believe the workers should control the means of production in a democratic and dece
people will see the word “anime” then just completely abandon all critical thinking skills and say the stupidest shit imaginable
“name me one anime that doesnt sexualize minors or is gross about women at any point”
did you know that there is literally thousands upon thousands of anime out there and not just the ones youve heard about via memes and that anime is literally just. animation made in japan
“Consent is insufficient.”
Run from people who say this shit. Anyone who wants to take away your agency is not someone who has your best interest in mind.
Every time I see it, it’s being used to say that sex workers, or aces, or some other group, can’t consent.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is, “I get to decide whether or not you consented.”
Which makes sense, honestly. Because in the context of actual sexual assault, that’s what the abuser wants to believe.
It’s the belief of someone who wants power over other people.
It makes sense that this idea would be just as attractive to people who want to control other people’s sex lives metaphorically, ideologically, as to someone who wants that on a literal and physical level.
I came upon this “gem” today: “If you’re bisexual but don’t see yourself marrying a woman , you’re straight, bye! Thats like a girl who likes sex with women but has'nt ever had sex with a man calling herself a lesbian knowing damn well… its just sex, she still sees herself romantically ONLY with men. Sex doesnt really determine your sexuality . But hey, Im just someone on twitter. Don’t just say “I’m bi”, “I’m les”, when you’re only looking at it from a sex POV. Relationships are a part of it too. That’s all. This for the ones who wanna fuck women but couldn’t fathom DATING them or having ANY sort of relationship past sex. I love all my bisexuals who wholeheartedly love women. The ones that just wanna fuck on women… I hope your car gets towed.“
@vergess @tenitchyfingers @robb-greyjoy @autismserenity
Please comment. I hate every word here. Some people have a disturbingly warped idea of human sexuality. If you are queer only when you enter queer relationships, a good chunk of gay man would find themselves magically straight.
Oh, this is the same old Sex is Evil argument that people use against anyone who isn’t sufficiently Pure.
Aromantics aren’t queer because they don’t feel love. Bisexuals aren’t queer because they’re ambiguous sluts. Trans people aren’t queer because they’re just using gender as a fetish.
It’s the other side of the belief that asexual people aren’t queer because they don’t have enough sex.
It also ties in with the Christian presentation of sex as immoral or sinful, such that sex is only Validated when it’s performed in the right circumstances. For a variety of Christian sects, it’s “sex between a married man and a married woman for the purpose of reproduction.” For radfems it’s “sex between two cisgender women in the context of a commited romantic reationship.”
Anything happening outside those confines is immoral, possibly rapey, definitely sinful, and possibly even criminal.
You can basically hear the “I was raised by US American protestants” oozing off of every word. There are anti-sex types everywhere in the world, of course, but the most condescending shitheads are almost exclusively people operating within the USA’s sex-is-evil climate. We basically live in an abscess of self loathing, and loathing for anyone else who we think is most satisfied with their lives than we are.
like honestly you count as an "anti-anti" because it's not even about fucking ships. It's like how gamergate is about "integrity in games journalism" It's about imposing purity culture on people and shaming people who like or support anything they don't like, and if that doesn't work and a person refuses to accept/agree with their bullshit, they get labeled either a pedophile or pedophile apologist. It's not about shipping. Frankly, I don't think it ever was.
… okay, that actually makes sense to me. Like, the actual logic doesn’t make sense, but at least I understand that this is Tumblr’s Gamergate. That means there’s no logic to it at all and I’m free from even attempting to have a logical discussion.
I mean, yeah, p much. It’s not ACTUALLY about the thing they keep saying it’s about, therefore any argument you try to have with them about the thing they SAY it’s about is doomed to failure.
Because it’s not actually about that. It’s about something else entirely.
It’s about policing the sexuality of AFAB and queer people and imposing Rainbow-hat-wearing Conservative Christian censorship on fandom. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think I follow - because a lot of this really sounds like the language I grew up with in the Southern Baptist church - but please do elaborate, if you’re so inclined.
I have a whole tag on this, actually–Conservative Christianity In A Gay Hat–because I’ve been watching from the sidelines, growing increasingly disgusted, for the last two years. So… this got a bit elaborate, and I’ll try to put a TL;DR at the end :)
I’m cismale, and I’ve been apologized to by an anti that targeted me on the assumption that I was a woman. But I’ve only gotten harassed a handful of times. Meanwhile, my AFAB and queer fandom friends get harassed nearly continuously for daring to write darkfic, for writing queer fic, etc. And having lived through Strikethrough ‘07 myself, the rhetoric that is used by ostensibly progressive antis is literally indistinguishable from what Warriors For Innocence used back then.
Summarizing in broad strokes, there are a number of factors at play here, because Antis are a predominantly Tumblr-specific social movement.
You have Tumblr’s Web 2.0 design, which pushes outrage, polarization, and misunderstanding through various avenues (undated and out-of-context posts reblogged where the OP might have apologized or been misunderstood, to give one example). It’s also a non-delineated, unmoderated, amorphous space, without any form of barriers between public activism and private entertainment, which blurs the line between the two and causing conflation between them. For an example of that, I’ve recently seen a whole Discourse on “Anne Frank as bisexual representation!” being excitedly discussed by non-Jewish people, as if she was a character in a fictional work, and not a living breathing child who died in a concentration camp.
As a sub-part of Tumblr’s activism culture, it is worth pointing out that that culture itself is inherently performative, as opposed to substantive. While many people are activists offline, and Tumblr is good for raising awareness of issues, in the social space, there is that competition for “Wokeness” as part of the social environment, not the activist goal.
On top of that, a large number of the people on here are already marginalized socially and politically, lacking influence and power and institutional control over their own lives, being POC, LGBT, or something else that is actively Not Heterosexual White Christian Cismale Capitalist. So there’s an impulse to want to assert control over what spaces you have power over, even if that control is ultimately destructive.
Furthermore, Southern Baptist-style Evangelical Christianity has grown in cultural influence over the last generation in the US, as the US’s culture has taken an extreme rightward shift after 9/11. And American Christianity in general, and Southern Baptism in particular, have a fixation on the sexual as uniquely sinful, and this has bled massively into the overlying culture. (I moved to Germany just over two years ago, and there was one culture shock moment that I particularly recall; I was in the grocery store before New Years with my then-fiancee, now spouse, and walked past a calendar display–and nearly gave myself whiplash. Because there were the Playboy and Playgirl nude calendars, right there… where the children could see them! *exaggerated gasp* Mind you, the four-year-old walking past with his parents didn’t seem traumatized, but imagine the reaction if that was on the calendar display in any US grocery store). And while many antis do not identify as Christians, that anti-sex acculturation is still there, along with the rest of the various cultural baggage that comes with Conservative Christianity.
So mix that all together and you have:
A marginalized group of disenfranchised people
…who have been brought up in this extremely puritanical mindset
–A mindset that is happy to censor expressions of AFAB sexuality in particular
Which is operating in a social space that conflates actual activism with performative actions
…as part of those performative actions, target the people they can reach, because they can assert control over them.
…Does not understand the difference between public activism and private entertainment, much less the niche that fandom operates in, and the impulses towards shipping wars has not gone away
And sees, in this amorphous space, the production of media that they dislike and that does not meet their standards for sexual purity.
So what started as “I don’t like this ship” turned into a “this ship is disgusting” turned into “you’re a sexual deviant for writing it and I’m going to Call You Out For It!”
Because they fell back on the rhetoric and mindsets that they were acculturated with–AFAB sexuality is bad and should not be expressed or explored, and there’s no delineated private space in which to engage in that exploration (except AO3, which is why Antis hate it). And since they’re operating in the Tumblr sphere of “wokeness”, they reach for the tools they know, the language of progressivism and performative bullying, in order to dress up and rationalize that reactionary agenda.
TL;DR:
Yes, it it totally Southern Baptist Rhetoric about How Sex Is Uniquely Sinful and Sexual Purity is the Most Important Thing, dressed up in progressive clothes for the visit to Church Tumblr Wokeness, having snuck in through shipping wars and wanting to censor AFAB sexual exploration and expression, with the same target list.
Much like how most New Atheists (the “Rational” racist fedora-wearing misogynists) are so busy rejecting Jesus as their Personal Savior without bothering to examine the rest of the cultural baggage that comes with their upbringing and thereby conflating all other religions with the specific flavor of Christianity that they’re rebelling against, Tumblr antis are also so busy Trying To Be The Most Woke and forcibly censor the production of content they find objectionable that they aren’t examining the cultural origins of what they find objectionable. Because while black-and-white good-and-bad mindsets don’t map to the grayness of the real world very easily, they are very simply and energy-efficient for the possessor. (And this is why I say “Be Careful Who Defines Your ‘Good’”)
(P.S. I know that a lot of this is familiar to you, @vaspider, due to you experiencing the same policing in a different context, but I figured that laying it all out as one piece would be best for general clarity).
terfs are reblogging ur post bc it’s terf rhetoric, just because you dabbed on the slightest veneer of trans acceptance doesn’t change that
Bi and trans zines from 20-30+ years ago are infinitely more radical and important for LGBTQ+ liberation than any radfem’s or exclusionist’s Tumblr posts of today.
You can’t change my mind.
The entire tumblr (and society too, lets be real) thing about shaming people for weird and uncomfortable things that turn them on just feels so fucking pointless and mean-spirited.
Psychologically speaking, we KNOW that arousal isn’t something people have control over, and we KNOW that it isn’t linked to morality, and that people’s brains deal with fear, trauma, and just SOCIETY by processing that shit into something we can handle. Aka, sexual fantasies. Like, that shit is KNOWN.
So if it’s not anybody’s fault, really, what they’re into in terms of fantasies, then what’s the point in making those people feel shame and self hatred about it? It just feels like purity culture wanting people to hurt, with no other purpose besides a holier-than-thou belief that anybody with uncomfortable kinks “deserves” to hurt.
me a real leftist who is definitely not a fascist: degenerate sex freak cumbrain disgusting freaks
Femme bi women married to men still have stories about queerness to tell that are worth hearing.
i dont wanna discourse on main but please dont call bi women femme
Kiss my ass and then fuck ALL THE WAY off.
Guys I love that you got energy to fight Biphobia, but Bi women have a term for feminine bi women! It’s Doe! So it’d be Does or Doe bisexual women
If people want to use those terms, that’s totally fine. However. Those terms were invented within the last 5 years by some rando on Tumblr who was caving to pressure from lesbian exclusionists. Meanwhile, bisexual women have consistently self-defined as butch and femme for almost a century now.
This isn’t just lesbians saying bisexual women can’t start using a word we’ve never used before; this is them saying that a bisexual woman who’s been monogamously married to another woman since before it was legal has to STOP using an identity she’s had for decades, because sometime around 2014, Tumblr decided these terms were “lesbian-exclusive”.
I invite you to take a look at this history of butch/femme and bisexuals in lesbian communities, and also look at the notes on this post where I’ve asked multi-spec women to weigh in their opinions on using doe/stag/tomcat. (Spoiler: Opinions range from one “I guess they’re okay if they’ll make lesbians stop yelling at us” through “They’re kind of cute but they make no sense and nobody knows what they mean,” to “doe is absolutely not how I feel as a femme,” “Stag and tomcat are both used for hypersexual and predatory straight cis men, so no thanks,” and “I’m a person of colour and do you KNOW how racist it is to describe us as animals?”)
And actually? “Butch” and “femme” have never even been WLW-exclusive or LGBT-exclusive. They originated, and continue to be used, by totally straight people. So there’s no use closing the gate after the horses have all escaped, in my opinion.
So what do you think the odds are they actually would “make lesbians stop yelling at us”? Because I’m betting slim-to-none. I don’t think the whole butch/femme “controversy” is really about the words at all. I think there’s a more deeply-rooted issue of “do bisexual people belong in the LGBTQ+ community at all?” (as if the B isn’t literally right there) and this attempt to disinherit us from our own history and vocabulary is just a part of that. I think if we give ground here, the people doing this are just going to find something else to yell about, and then they’ll just keep doing that until they silence bisexuals entirely. And if they never manage that, they’ll never stop yelling.
Worse than that, honestly. Like, not only would bisexuals face a ton of crap, but I’ve looked into some of the people pushing this agenda, and they want to take it into even creepier places, like:
“Butch and femme HAVE to be identities and relationship roles, it’s LESBOPHOBIC to use them to describe a spectrum of gender presentations or aesthetics.”
“Butches can have identities of their own, but someone’s femme identity doesn’t even exist if she’s not in a relationship with a butch.”
This is stuff I have NEVER heard from lesbians IRL. They’re fringe ideas and I frankly think it’s healthy for people reading those blogs to be exposed to a wide variety of disagreements and alternatives. So I have no interest in ceding ground when I believe I could be doing actual good by going, “The adults running that advice blog you follow do not have a complete hold on the truth; it is entirely possible to disagree with and defy them.”
Reblogging for that last part, because WAY more people need to know what the agenda behind this rhetoric is.
This is classic, cut-and-paste 70s lesbian separatist ideology. AKA what we now call TERF ideology.
Like all of their rhetoric, it’s about reinforcing the gender binary and applying it everywhere, in the most toxic ways possible. It’s incredibly simplistic second-wave feminism, weaponized.
(Like denying femmes any identity outside of their relationship to butches. Which is identical to denying women any identity outside of their relationship to men. Or the flip side of that: the TERFs who insist that butches have the capacity for “male violence.” Nobody is ever really going to be good enough, in TERF culture. That’s why they get into things like gold star discourse.)
TERF rhetoric doesn’t start with “trans women aren’t women!” It starts with separating everything into rigid categories.
Women good, men bad. Cis good, trans bad. Lesbians: the best, because that’s “women loving women.” Bisexuals: if men, bad bc men. If women, only good as long as they reframe their lives as “women living women;” otherwise, are traitors to all women. Straight women: give their energy to men, therefore bad. Gay men: bad bc men but good bc gay; terfs generally ignore them until they can be useful in an argument. Pansexuals: foolish mogai microlabel types, see “Bisexuals.” Nonbinary ppl and a-specs: imaginary bullshit, mogai microlabel fools with internalized homophobia, just wanna be oppressed so bad, mock them upon sight.
The vast majority of TERF rhetoric is dedicated to locking down lesbians’ political space, history, and especially, language.
Every historical figure that anybody thought was bi/pan, or a trans man/nonbinary, has to be ruthlessly established as a lesbian, that THOSE people are BAD for trying to take away. Every term that they can police, they have to police in the most faux-PC way possible.
You can’t say “queer,” because it harms lesbians by taking away resources that could be theirs if this were still the gay and lesbian movement. You can use any other slur that belongs to you, but not that one.
You can’t be, or even say, butch or femme, because those are terms for how two women together should be, and if you might be with a MAN, they cannot possibly apply to you.
You can’t say corrective rape, even if the people who came up with the term say it’s for everyone, because only lesbians can be raped as a weapon against their sexual orientation. (and, if convenient to the argument, gay men, who arguably experience it a lot more if you read stuff from NGOs opposing it - but obviously, really only lesbians, lest that point be raised.)
This shit is always, always a warning sign that it stems from TERF arguments. And that’s a problem because it strengthens their culture. It normalizes their arguments. It leads people to buy into more of them.
A lot of the people pushing this shit say we’re wrong they’re not TERFs, they’re TIRFs. By being trans-inclusive radical feminists, they fix their source of hatred not on the penis, but on the male social role; thus trans men are bad for embracing maleness, but trans women are good for rejecting it. Some mild butch-femme is allowable but only in the strictest of women-only lesbian-separatist spaces. So it’s absolutely the same shit, but they jump up and down about how different their packaging is.
My friend Sean is trans, and his first experience with the LGBT community when radfems tried to recruit him at 18. I don’t think he really clicked with them, but he says he knows several trans men who got duped into relationships with older radfems when they were questioning pre-transition teenagers, and were severely pressured not to transition to male because that would be “antifeminist”.
This rhetoric doesn’t just harm people outside the movement. It also harms the people who join it, because they’re subjected to intense pressure to deny any sexual urges or gender feelings that are “incorrect”, and are encouraged to let theorists and community members make their most intimate and important personal decisions for them.
There are people who infiltrate LGBTQ+ spaces, treat us like we’re part of a trend they want to get in on, and openly mock our identities anytime they talk about us. The kind of person that sets out to corrupt and damage spaces that you’ve worked hard to make safe for others and to protect.
They’re called TERFs. They’re called exclusionists. They’re called transmedicalists.
They infiltrate our spaces to recruit other people to their ideologies.
They think that LGBTQ+ people expressing themselves is the same as someone cashing in on a trend.
They mock any identity different from their own.
They corrupt our spaces such that some people in the community are no longer safe in those spaces.
Out of their own sense of fear they attack us and become the very thing that they are afraid of; monsters that attack people to feel safe.
That’s why it’s really important to understand how serious of a problem this is and how hard we have to work to protect people from them.
Just Anti Things: *takes a deep breath* no one is saying that fiction doesn’t affect reality besides your strawmen that you pull out whenever you want to pretend to argue with real people without actually putting in effort. of course fiction does have some effects on reality but it’s more complicated than the way you’re making it seem and also mass media has much more of an impact than someone’s obscure fanfic. please name one fanfic that has had the same sort of widespread impact on millions of people as popular books, movies, and tv shows. and no, pretending that my immortal made people think that vampires are real or even people just quoting or making jokes about my immortal does not count. thank you and goodnight.
Antis are the reason we sometimes say that fiction doesn’t affect reality.
See, we know that fiction and reality have a very complex relationship in which they influence each other. The thing is, it’s not a 1-1 ratio of what happens in fiction then happening in reality.
However, antis are either willfully ignorant of this nuance, or they completely lack the ability to grasp it.
So, because y’all were insisting on being massive dumbasses with no reading comprehension, we had to dumb down our discussions.
So, when we say things like “fiction doesn’t affect reality” we are dumbing down what we mean because when we try to explain with actual nuance y’all suddenly have the reading comprehension of rocks.
Seriously, if we say “fiction affects reality, but it’s complicated” y’all just see the “fiction affects reality” part then scream about how we know we’re being pedos because we... Ship 17 and 19 year old fictional characters together?
So a lot of the time it’s shortened to “fiction doesn’t affect reality” to mean “fiction doesn’t affect reality in the way that you claim that it does”. So maybe stop being willfully ignorant assholes who only read what you want and we can have more nuanced discussions on the matter.
Now y’all have gotten to the point where even that doesn’t penetrate your purity-cult brainwashing so we’re back to saying fiction affects reality but not the way you mean. But if you see somebody saying “fiction doesn’t affect reality” I guarantee there is a 99% chance they’re just trying to dumb it down to the level of understanding you are willfully projecting. Don’t want us to talk to you like you’re 3? Then fucking act like you’re old enough to have an intelligent debate on the matter. If you aren’t old enough to grasp the nuance to the discussion, you aren’t old enough to be in the discussion in the first place.
(Disclaimer: If you honestly struggle with the concept, I’m not targeting you--I know there are a number of reasons people may struggle to grasp a concept. If I have the spoons, I’m happy to try and explain it in different ways to help with communicating what we mean! This is specifically directed at the people who refuse to even try to understand at more than a surface level, if that. Or people who know they don’t understand and struggle to try understanding but still insist that they want to be involved in the matter despite knowing they lack the understanding to have an informed debate/discussion/opinion on the matter. There’s a lot of stuff I won’t comment on because I know I don’t understand it well enough to be informed, for example. There’s no shame in saying you don’t know enough to get involved!)
fiction can impact your pre-existing biases (such as racism irt the point made about rise in sympathy for the KKK) but it cannot make you, a person that was never attracted to children, suddenly wanting to groom some kids because you read a fanfic in which one or both of the characters is under 18. this is the nuance. i, for one, think fandom frollos are being deliberately obtuse.
The idea that bi/pan/multi-spec people are only queer when we’re in queer-enough relationships does so much damage. Like I don’t think people imagine how that fluctuating identity shit works when you’re a real person in real relationships.
Imagine if your memories, your identities, your experiences, your way of seeing the world, is only valid because of the gender of the person who fucks you occasionally. Imagine if people literally believe that if you get dumped, that literally changes and diminishes you as a person, erases everything that happened to you, and takes away who you are. It makes you fundamentally less important, less capable of solidarity, less deserving of empathy. If the person you’re dating dumps you, you don’t just lose them; you lose an entire community.
Like, it’s hard to find LGBTQ+ people to date fundamentally, because we’re a smaller part of the population; and then of those who are potentially into you, a lot won’t date you because you’re bi, like they literally go “Oh you’re cute. Wait, you’re not 100% gay? No thanks.“ So 90% of the people who want to date you are a different gender than you. And if you let that happen–if you date one of the 90% of your dating prospects–then you’re a traitor, you’re turning your back on a community that’s turned its back on you. Your entire history doesn’t count. It’s turned to smoke, invisible, impossible to wrap your hands around.
Like you have to imagine how much more vulnerable “your relationship determines your sexuality” makes m-spec people in appropriately queer relationships. We aren’t in charge of our identities; our partners are. In this view of us, a vital part of who we are is held in the hands of a very small number of people who have decided, for the moment, not to be biphobic. They are the ones who validate us. Do you know how much power that gives them over us? How much shit I’ve seen m-spec people put up with because they’re dating a gay person and who else will ever put up with them?
And maybe then you’ll understand why we want to be understood as whole people whose identities remain stable regardless of who’s fucking us this month.
Supporting disabled people in theory is really easy, but when people are actually faced with behaviour caused by disability they’re a lot less supportive
It’s almost like everyone wants the good person points that come from claiming to support disabled people, but don’t want to go through the effort of actually supporting us in any meaningful way
