Literally losing my mind yall ran another transfem off this site for merely suggesting someone might have possibly been transfem. Making every logical leap you have to to transform "this person may have been trans based on x" into some evil statement. And its so hypocritical to see people saying "we should be talking about gaza instead of this" when 1) i have seen two entire posts about Aarons username and approximately a million calling some transfem every name in the book for simply saying that it's possible and 2) no one who suggested that he might have been trans ever stopped talking about the ongoing genocide in gaza. Yall have learned nothing from this last month and it's vile.

Y'know, if a formerly well-behaved straight A student suddenly starts almost not passing their classes and crying all the time and getting into trouble, maybe the default conclusion from every authority figure should not be that they are lazy and simply need to pull themselves together. Maybe instead you should give them stimulants or HRT or let them kill their parents and see if one of those three things resolves the issue.

narcissus at the pond

WAIT THE REFLECTION LOOKED BACK AT THE END

the what

There is a peculiar trend on here of waxing poetically about the poor trans woman of the day who got harassed into complete social isolation. It's often written with this ingratiating self-pity about how "we failed her" for believing the lies and fabrications of an obvious harassment campaign. All while half of the trans women here were talking about how it was baseless harassment from the start. It reminds me of the way people talk about eg. deaths around them from poverty, suicide, etc.—"if only I helped them"—when they never actually had any intention to. A preemptive attempt to skirt any ex post facto consequences from admitting you had sided, whether publicly or privately, with bigoted harassment not two days ago.

Yes this is about the most recent woman pushed out (Viv), but it's also about every time this happened before. And it's about how it happened to Rita-Avery-Roxy too. Her past presence and harassment here has virtually been reduced to "that poor woman who we failed" and a comforting "love every trans woman [...]" aphorism you can use to cheer yourself up whenever the next trans woman gets socially murdered.

The self-pity is pointless and irritating, and it doesn't garner trust from those paying attention. Its not a problem to talk about the details how yet another person was harassed so horribly they were coerced to leave—just keep the feelings of personal guilt and self-pity to yourself, please.

a few possible predictions for what people who participated in or cosigned this brigade will do

expecting primarily 2, some of 3, a little 4, a little 1, and a hopefully small amount of 5, probably only from actual right-wingers but we'll see lol. who knows tho. i hope it's just all 1 but i'm not stupid

Notes in reply to this:

I think one of the othr reasons ppl find it disgusting to wonder if sum1 commited pol sui was a less out tfem, cd, femboy, etc(u can be out to a small group nd still hav them not tell/b drwnd out by media coverag) is not only about denying sum seeming "claim" by tfems(in an idpol sense), nor just about denying the reality of tmisogyny nd its effect on ppls ability to cum out nd how that might lead to suicidal action(even with w/e added beni thr might b from it being politicized and publicized)

But is about ppl tryn to maintain the legitimacy of the political action as being done by a sane political subject(citizen) and not by someone who has mental illness(read as distress from closeting or tmisogny in gen or the less admitted and prob more common belief that bein a tfem is inheritly tied to or just str8 up is mental illness.)

Mental illness, neurodivergence, madness, w/e u wanna call is ubiquitous in our society and is perpetuated by the way our society functions. While thr is nothing inherently radical in madness, the othering that is at the heart of conceiving and perpetuating madness is a political(oppressive) act. This is used as a tool against everything and every1 in an attempt to delegetemize their desires and actions(from the smallest to the biggest.)

The death of sum1 if they r tfem is not inherently less political bc u think were all bat shit. We are often driven to suicide by transmisogyny. Those deaths are political! Every death, from dying in ur bed of old age happy surrounded by friends and family to hanging urself after decades of tmisogyny, to oding in sum flop, is political!!!

Every death is political, yes especially suicide.

I didn't spend 25 years fucking around with terfery to deconstruct and critique it just to have people come along to say "but they saaaaay they hate men so that's why they hate trans women" with approximately negative analysis to back it up.

You can't just look at their words, you have to look at their actions. Really you have to look at everything they say, not just the parts that support what you want to believe. Hell, Janice Raymond herself outright acknowledged that trans women are female and aren't male socialized. Just ask @taliabhattwrites. Or rather check her twitter for her live read of The Transsexual Empire.

Also, terfs are not the primary source of transmisogyny.

Stop trying to put men at the center of women's oppression.

This is not an exaggeration in the slightest, by the way. Sister Janice Raymond and her Transmisogyny Bible are the product of a deeply Catholic ontology of bodily purity, treating "medicalized intervention" as something akin to blasphemy against the "wholeness of spirit".

Crucially, in order to promulgate this argument couched in pure vibes and quackery that TERFs somehow passed off as feminist scholarship for decades, Sister Raymond, one of the most transmisogynistic individuals to ever have lived, acknowledged that trans women change our sex. She also said that we do so because we failed male socialization.

Now, this doesn't mean that she considers us free of the taint of maleness or doesn't happily contradict herself when she feels it's more expedience to libel us as one gender rather than the other--Raymond is, after all, a rabid transmisogynist--but it bears noting that if you actually read the Transmisogyny Bible, the book that contains basically every modern Gender-Conservative objection to trans healthcare and trans people, you will read, in its very first pages, an acknowledgement that trans women bodily change their sex.

That popular discourses about trans women have drifted so far to the right that many people who consider themselves progressive and allies to trans causes go around saying things like "Nobody is saying you can change sex" (an anxiety about sex's immutability I covered in more detail here) and also treating 'male socialization' like an inescapable taint that all trans women are marked by, that we have to actively unlearn as though we were indistinguishable from cis men and led highly privileged cis lives prior to the moment of transition, indicates not merely that Sister Raymond in some sense achieved a total victory, but that the consensus on trans women in the mainstream has become thoroughly devoted to denying us womanhood in any material sense.

That is to say, denial of recognition--one of the very foundations of transmisogyny--has become an inextricable part of trans politics, especially towards trans women.

Someone added a tag saying that terfery grew out of the lesbian separatist movement and I want to offer a correction: Terfery grew out of the feminist movements of the 70s. Sandy Stone was herself a lesbian separatist and thanks to Janice Raymond she ended up leaving the movement. It was not inherently transphobic or transmisogynist, and it wasn't separatism's goals that led to her leaving. It was explicitly transmisogynist opposition to trans women.

Robin Morgan's pathetic address that was effectively just a frothing rant against Beth Elliot's presence is one of the earliest examples of a polemic against trans women and trans lesbians as we are familiar with it in its modern incarnation.

Robin Morgan was also married to a man whom she described as an "effeminist f-slur" and whose presence in the feminist movement she justified and encouraged.

So one of the first examples of a rabid TERF gnashing her teeth about "trans lesbians invading the lesbian feminist movement" was a woman married to a man saying that men have a place in the movement but trans lesbians don't.

These people have always been exactly like this, which is to say: Fucking pathetic and devoid of either intellect or principles.

interesting to see users that were very much spreading callout posts or just straight up calling trans women pedophiles start posting about how important it is to defend trans women. fuck off for real

genuinely fucking disgusting to me. and the ones that pretend to give a shit about trans women of colour while spending all their time harassing "white" trans women like fuck off forever

Why do these people think we're unable to draw correct inferences and come to correct conclusions and what are they really angry about when they furiously reject the fact that Lilly was a semi closeted trans woman?

It's truly disturbing how this is one of the things that prompts people to be really disgustingly transmisogynist. Like the very idea that Lilly was a trans woman is simply unbearably horrible to them and somehow tarnishes her legacy and her final actions. Which is simply not true but it's something one could only believe if one thinks there's something shameful and disgusting about being a trans woman.

And the verbal abuse they hurl to try to silence this blatantly obvious truth really gives it away, the language of disgust and revulsion they use. Truly showing their bigoted asses to us.

Any trans woman who expressed revulsion and contempt for @epistemophagy and others seeing who Lilly truly was really should sit with and work through why she went along with this honestly disgusting and blatant display of transmisogyny. Why she agreed that it's disgusting to think someone might be a trans woman. What that says about how she views herself as a trans woman.

Also people who call this "headcanoning" need to put their entire head out of their entire ass and pull their ass out of fandom for five minutes. We're talking about a real person.

I'd really recommend skepticism for anyone reading about what happened with Bushnell's self-immolation coming from social media. The source for the claims that Bushnell was a closeted trans person comes from DJ Muel, a politics streamer, and DJ Muel doesn't provide any evidence to support those claims.

Simply put, you shouldn't trust a politics streamer further than you could throw them, and that's before we get to the question of whether or not it's respectful to widely broadcast the private life of someone who has just died.

DJ Muel states clearly that Bushnell was closeted and trans, which means (if the claim is true) Bushnell did not come out publicly before their passing. If someone doesn't choose to come out of the closet before they die, that doesn't make it appropriate for any of us to out them.

Sure, there will always be scuttlebutt about it, but spreading it around like reporting on news and making it an active part of an ongoing cultural conversation is a violation, not good journalism.

There are two scenarios here:

If DJ Muel is reporting false information, which could mean that he's lying or is just repeating misinformation, then he *is* misgendering Bushnell while also spreading misinformation about them in the wake of their death via political protest.

If DJ Muel is reporting accurate information, he hasn't provided any evidence to support his claims. Even if he had presented such evidence, it wouldn't excuse violation of privacy inherent in broadcasting someone's private life to make your own political point.

It's bad reporting, no matter which way you cut it.

I consider Muel credible because, while I am not previously familiar with him, prior to the publication of his statement I had verified that the Twitch account LillyAnarKitty, the one Bushnell used to stream her martyrdom, was active in, at minimum, Muel's Twitch chat (it was also active in two others but it was most active in Muel's). Muel's knowledge is firsthand. I do not think pointing out that he's a politics streamer is particularly convincing — streamers are an untrustworthy group of people but the reason why isn't "every single statement they make is individually untrue". I don't see a reason to doubt him on this one.

Further,

How much joy is a reasonable amount for a trans woman to show before it becomes explicit.

I wish I didn't know that Fallon Fox actually had a middling career in women's MMA and lost to the only fighter she went up against that had a positive win/loss record.

I wish I didn't know that orbital rim fractures are one of the most common injuries in MMA.

I wish I didn't know that Veronica Ivy's world record was specifically set in the 35-39 age bracket.

I wish I didn't know that her record was beaten three months later by a cis woman.

I wish I didn't know that those two trans girls in Connecticut bombed at regionals, and that the only reason they broke so many records at their school is because the school was severely lagging behind the rest of the state.

I wish I didn't know Lia Thomas' name.

I wish I lived in a world where when my supposed "allies" saw headlines that say "trans woman crushes a woman's skull in mma" that they didn't respond with "okay well maybe the bigots have a point this time".

Maybe, if they didn't always respond that way, I wouldn't have to know half of the things I know about other trans women athletes.

Maybe they would stop seeing women like me as a problem to be solved.

Damn that would be nice.

Transmisogyny is a form of fascist entryism within the trans community.

the social conditions which precipitated a misogynist backlash in the greater culture exist in the queer community, too, and it is foolish and arrogant to pretend that they don’t

There is arguably a sense in which current queer politics aren't simply not immune to misogynistic cultural currents, but in fact based in reaction in their modern incarnation.

Much of queer discourse is suffused with a masculinism that considers feminism to be gauche and outmoded, rooted in an acceptance of patriarchal construction of gender that positions man-as-autonomous and woman-as-dependent. In its eagerness to leave behind the specific sex-essentialist, cultural feminist politics that overtook and sabotaged the radical feminist movement in the 1980s, modern queer politics has repudiated lesbian feminism so utterly as to regard lesbian identity itself as reactionary, casting the desire to challenge society's androcentrism as conservative in some sense.

A lot of queer discourses try to place queer identity on a spectrum with manhood, taking up the liberal-feminist project of 'rehabilitating' manhood, trying to 'transform' or 'reform' it by 'redefining' it in contrast with a (perceived-)'restrictive' patriarchal definition of it. Queer men are presupposed as individuals who disrupt and undermine an 'outdated' idea of feminism that posits all men benefit from patriarchy, and queer politics seeks to 'expand' manhood in a manner that encompasses all the variegations of queer existence. This is deceptively benign for some, but becomes obviously and harshly contradictory when trans women are regarded as 'regressive' for not wanting to exist on a continuity with queer men, similar to lesbians who imagine themselves as apart from patriarchal androcentric imperatives.

(One can imagine how sharply antagonistic this becomes in the case of trans lesbians in particular.)

There is a sense in which this approach is doomed at the outset. Patriarchy has never restricted manhood as much as it purports to, and evolving the definition of how counts as a 'man' through history and culture has been a routine part of the recuperative patriarchal project. Such politics are easily reclaimed into sociatal androcentrism - that's where they stem from, after all.

Right, considering the current state of corporate politics on this site, and that it seems that only those affected seem to be actively speaking on the matter, it is up to I, the only fucking cishet on tumblr, to drag this out to a wider audience.

REBLOG IF YOUR ACCOUNT IS A TRANSFEM SAFE SPACE.

We need to show these higher ups how much we truly value them.

including the weird weird trannies

is your blog a safe space for freaks, deviants, cringe failgirls, transfems you find personally annoying, transfems who are Loud and Opinionated, is it safe for all of us ?

Always! 💙💚

is it safe for girls with kinks you hate? Is it safe for girls who've fucked up before? Is it safe for the messy ones, the inconvenient ones, the gross ones, the ones at the fringes? Is it safe for a trans woman even if she's called a pedophile? Is it safe against callout posts?