guerrillatech:

left-reminders:

joanofrad:

https://twitter.com/SandyDrawsBadly/status/1271948626001043457

destroyyourbinder:

When people note that “trans children” tend to have autistic traits and that children with an autism diagnosis (particularly natal girls, but also boys) are massively overrepresented in the population that is referred to assessment and treatment for gender dysphoria, many trans people’s (and allies’) response is that it is a kind of dehumanization and denial of agency to claim that autistic people cannot be transgender, do not have the right to seek gender transition, or that they may be vulnerable to being exploited by the transgender healthcare system. Most recently, this claim has come up again with regards to a recent piece by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, where among many other things she notes the enormous increase in child referrals to gender clinics, including a disproportionate number of autistic children, to explain her reticence to endorse the political stances of modern transgender movements.

This is my response as an autistic woman, who was once an autistic child, who is a lesbian with experiences of gender dysphoria and who once wanted to transition to male.

—–

1.

Recognizing our vulnerability to social predation and to cultural systems that we do not understand because they were not made for us is not offensive. As autistic people, it is key to claiming our autonomy as a particular kind of disabled person. We often do not recognize our limitations in reference to greater social systems not because we are “too stupid” (i.e. cognitively or intellectually limited) but because we have different value systems than neurotypical people and hierarchical institutions built for their benefit. Autism is a pervasive developmental disability, and it is a way of being. It is not merely being a “regular person” minus various clinically defined psychological capacities or skills. It is a difference across all domains of life, and as a disability that causes differences in our social and sensory perception it is also a disability that causes differences in what we want and what we care about.

Both those who exhibit condescending “concern” for autistic people and those people who naively defend our right to do whatever we see fit miss this component of being autistic. It is not that we are merely vulnerable because we are missing parts of our decision-making or social skills apparatus. It is not that we are merely being unfairly denied what we want to do, and our autism is immaterial, just some excuse for the denial.

It’s that we aren’t recognized as having wants, only “special needs”. It’s that we aren’t given the skills to know what it is that we want, or that it might be different from those around us. It’s that we are never told how to get what we want in safe and healthy ways, or that there is even a potentially safe and healthy way to get it. It’s that we are deemed automatically pathological and empty of internal experiences as autistic people. It’s that we’re not given any help on how to navigate our deep differences from others and how to navigate being deprived of social resources and networking in a way that doesn’t tell us to just cover it up and deal with it. It’s that most people who dedicate their lives to “helping” us do not care about any of these things, merely that we can be trained to act in a way that doesn’t disrupt the lives of neurotypical people.

Given this context, it is far more insulting to me to insist that having autonomy renders us somehow invulnerable to exploitation than to correctly perceive that we are in fact an intensely vulnerable people. By nature of our disability, we are always on the margins of social resources and social networks, and exercising our autonomy unfortunately often puts us even further outside social acceptability and social protection rather than somehow shielding us materially from the consequences of living a self-actualized autistic life. Few autistic people are prepared for this when they begin trying to make decisions “true to self” in adolescence.

I believe nearly every autistic person is traumatized from the consequences of living in this world and what others do to us. Clinicians do not usually recognize that autistic children and adults can be traumatized, that there is even anything there to traumatize. (Why else could they feel so comfortable shocking us, shackling us, or feeding us bleach?)

—–

2.

I think because we are not neurotypical we often struggle to understand just why a neurotypical person would feel ok excluding us, or maybe even anyone. Many of us autistic people have little impulse to do such things, and if we do, we rarely have the social power to make someone that we’ve cut out of our lives unemployable, unable to access medical care, food, housing, and so on. But neurotypical institutions are set up, from top to bottom, to create hierarchies of value with extreme material difference between the top and bottom. They are set up to stratify the “worthy” people from “unworthy” people.

Autistic people are almost universally considered “unworthy” in these systems, and to the extent that we can curry favor from them we must consent to our exploitation: to entering into a transaction on neurotypical terms, where we can get some sort of worth through providing a “benefit” to this hierarchical resource system which is not made according to our value system or for us whatsoever. This is common to all marginalized people. But it is often particularly poignant to autistic people, who struggle to find community with any social group of human beings. There is no “elsewhere” for us, there is no “home”. We are stuck, as they say, on the “wrong planet”, and the spaceship was destroyed.

The idea that exercising our autonomy would protect us from this world rather than render us more vulnerable because we are refusing to transact correctly or refusing to provide a benefit is utterly absurd. Our autonomy is perfectly compatible with our continued social ostracization and exploitation. It usually coexists with our continued social ostracization and exploitation.

In social skills classes– or just the wild, wild world– you are not taught how to deal with the fact that everyone will hate you for being you. You are taught to be someone else. You are not taught about your native autonomy. You are taught about how to put your hands here or here, how to choose between actions that are condescendingly and ridiculously normal. You are not taught how to take responsibility in a way you understand, that is harmonious to your own values and others’. You are taught to hold yourself accountable for your abnormality.

So forgive me if I do not believe for one second that impersonal, well-funded medical systems that were built off of medically experimenting on intersex children and adults (the nightmares wreaked by John Money at Johns Hopkins) or psychologically experimenting on behaviorally aberrant children (UCLA, where behaviorist torturer of autistic children Ivan Lovaas tinkered with gender nonconforming children alongside conversion therapist George Rekers) have autistic people’s self-defined well being in mind.

And forgive me if I do not think informed consent clinics have autistic people’s self-defined well-being in mind when they’re more interested in rubber stamping hormones while shielding themselves from legal liability than assisting autistic adolescents and adults, who have an intrinsically different way of understanding gendered social norms, navigate the enormous complexity of how to interface with the single most fundamental social fixation of the neurotypical world as someone who will always and automatically fail.

—–

3.

I do not think most gender clinicians even have the first understanding of what it means to be autistic and what this does in and of itself to your understanding of gender and sexuality. What J.K. Rowling said in her piece– a straightforward accounting of facts– is far, far less insulting to me than what Diane Ehrensaft– one of the premier “experts” in the United States on pediatric transgender cases– published in a peer-reviewed journal on autism. In a 2018 letter to the editor reading remarkably like new-age material on Indigo Children, she writes that she likes to call autistic transgender children “Double Helix Rainbow Kids” and declares us “freed” from the restrictions of gender as “more creative” individuals. This article ends with an anecdote about an eight year old autistic female child with limited language use who begins speaking, making eye contact, and relating more appropriately with clinic staff after she is socially transitioned by her family. Ehrensaft muses, ““Could gender be an alleviator for the stressors of autism?”

She is not the only one to pontificate about the magical changes a gender transition brings on autistic children. Norman Spack (the first clinician in the US to use GnRH agonists on gender dysphoric children as puberty-suppressing drugs) claims in a coauthored, peer-reviewed 2012 paper (insults upon insults, in the Journal of Homosexuality) that in his clinical experience the symptoms of comorbid diagnoses–including “problems with social competence”– “decrease and even disappear” with gender treatment. In the same paper, this passage appears:

Although the question of whether gender dysphoria is simply a symptom of an autism spectrum disorder has been raised by mental health clinicians in the field, we feel it is equally worth questioning the validity of an autism diagnosis among transgender youth, particularly of those diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder. Perhaps the social awkwardness and lack of peer relationships common among GID-Asperger’s patients is a result of a lifetime of feeling isolated and rejected; and maybe the unusual behavior patterns are simply a coping method for dealing with the anxiety and depression created from living in an “alien body,” as one patient described it.

Do autistic trans people– who rightfully protest against mainstream autism organizations focusing on a “cure” for autism rather than respectful accommodations for our differences and medical needs– know that very well-connected, very respected, and very powerful gender doctors are claiming that gender transition cures the symptoms of autism? Do autistic trans people– who rightfully discuss the implications of denying that someone can both be autistic and hold a meaningful gender variant identity– know that it is an active clinical debate as to whether or not their  disability and all its struggles is “just” a result of somehow ending up in the “wrong body”?

If they do not, they should know that this is how doctors are perceiving the pervasive issues that the children in their care are having: not as the result of a life-long, stigmatized but eminently livable disability, but as the result of a mystical gender failure that can be medically corrected. That essentially, the disability “goes away” so long as outsiders no longer perceive a problem with a child’s conformity to gender norms. That either an autistic girl somehow is transfigured into a non-autistic child through transition, or more likely, an autistic girl’s autistic behavior is unfitting for her as a girl but not for her as a boy. That the “proof” of pediatric transition’s effectiveness and standard of an autistic child’s happiness is how much the child wishes to participate in neurotypical society on neurotypical society’s terms.

I cannot pretend that this isn’t ludicrously disrespectful to autistic people, or that it isn’t a total erasure of our experience as human beings. To these gender doctors, the fact that a girl might see the world in a different way and care about different things and thereby struggle in a world not made for her does not matter whatsoever, except maybe as a tokenistic “journey” she can go on alongside her wonderfully progressive and affirming doctors. What “autism” is for them is a particularly severe and inconvenient social adjustment problem which can be forcibly corrected through body modifications, should an autistic child or adult rightly note that they can’t do gender right and this is causing problems for them. They are more interested– like in a long history of abusive and even deadly “treatments” for autism– in correcting the problem for them than for the autistic person. How convenient for neurotypical people both the gender incongruous behavior and the social noncompliance  goes away once you medically modify a child to look like the other sex.

I cannot be anything but sick that “increased eye contact” is a sign an autistic child needed medical meddling in the intimate process of navigating and negotiation their sexual and gender development. I cannot trust that these doctors aren’t missing enormous parts of their autistic patients’ experiences, if this is what they are so gleeful to report as a positive transformation and their justification for disrupting and surveilling children’s bodies. What do they think of autistic people and those who are gender non-conforming if they are so willing to believe that existing as a person with a stigmatized disability is actually just a misdiagnosis for the pseudoscientific condition of being a man in a woman’s body, or vice versa?

—– 

5.

It takes many, many years and quite a bit of luck and support for most autistic people to fully understand and come to terms with how their autism affects them and sets them apart from both individual neurotypical people and neurotypical society at large. It takes years– often far, far into adulthood, especially for those abused under a medical model or for those who went decades undiagnosed– to understand the differences between social and non-social aspects of this disability.

It takes years to not resort to chalking up all of your own distress and difficulties to being a “retard”.

I have not met an autistic woman yet who did not have extreme difficulty integrating her autistic differences in values with a broader sense of self that includes whatever version of herself she uses to navigate a world in which women’s values are simultaneously invisible (since she has no right to determine them herself) and nitpicked to death (since it is important she complies).

In a world like this why would it not be difficult for autistic people to know when it is they are being fooled or exploited while participating in transgender communities or while seeking transgender health care? Autistic people– especially those who are dependent on caregivers or health systems for basic care, as well as those who depend on the goodwill of their families, employers, or welfare benefit institutions to remain as independent as they can– have to make continual compromises just to maintain enough acceptability to communicate with the outside world nonetheless do things like “make a friend”, “go to the doctor”, “find a job”.

I do not think neurotypical people understand or care that when I speak or write it is always with a similar effort as with a second language. Language– whether it is verbal or nonverbal, with all the extensive symbology of the neurotypical world– does not ever get to be something other than “translation” for me. As someone with an Asperger’s-profile of abilities who has studied the neurotypical world intensely for years, I have the opportunity to translate in a way that allows others to understand me at least some of the time. Many autistic people who are more affected live in the world which gives “autism” its name, where nobody cares to do the translation for us and we are left totally and utterly alone.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was likely autistic) was fixated on questions about the meaning of communication. About whether a language of one could make any sense, about what it would mean to speak about something hidden from everyone else or perhaps even ourselves. In a famous passage debated vociferously, he wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”

Many have resolved the question posed by this statement by claiming that for fuck’s sake, a lion is a lion, and has nothing to say.

—–

6.

Gender transition appealed to me because it was cloaked in the farcical notion that there was some version of me and my body that could finally speak directly. I never quite understood the whole Adam and Eve story as an autistic child– just don’t eat it!– but if there truly were a serpent’s apple for autistic folks it would consist of this promise: that there was a world where the glass and the fog would dissolve, that we weren’t covered in a repulsive and bumbling slime made of our own desires to understand, that instead of our words and hands glancing off the skin of everyone around us we could do that magic everyone else could and hold someone’s heart in our hands.

I was fooled because like many struggling autistic people, I wanted the problem to be me. Because then it was fixable. I would let them take my only body (which was such a sensory drag) to convert me into one of these blessed transponders that normal people were, receiving and sending all these messages like shooting stars blazing through the unimpeded vacuum of space. Without my femaleness and without the Difficulties That Should Not Be Named, I could send whatever message I wanted to whoever I wanted and it would be received, I could be gregarious, important, sexually compelling; my will and autonomy wouldn’t be stifled by 140 pounds of dumpy, itchy flesh with an overbite and slack hands.

When I imagined myself as a man I didn’t imagine myself like most of the childhood boys I managed to ingratiate myself with, who lisped, repeated themselves, and tripped over their own shoes. I imagined myself as a musician who was absolutely magnetic, I imagined myself as a writer with a legacy, I imagined myself telling other guys they were stupid shits and they could fuck off. I imagined being able to hold onto a football without dropping it, being able to smoke weed without getting a migraine, being able to talk without squeaking or letting out a little drool.

I thought I would finally be a human being with no embarrassments and nothing that could get me bullied in the bathroom between class. I thought when I would say “no”, other people would listen. I would enter whatever mystical world it is that Ehrensaft names, made of messages and meanings, where every twist of word and piece of clothing said something, connected by a fine filament back to that Necronomicon filled social symbology. And it would make sense.

I would become a lion, not a house cat. And the lion would speak. And we would understand him.

—–

7.

It is a neurotypical narrative that this is what transition can do for you, because it is what someone else’s transition does for neurotypical people. A gender transition is magical because it decodes the lion. It unriddles the sphinx. The autistic person must be happier now, because the neurotypical person is happier now. (And who has an empathy deficit?)

But if I have learned to be afraid of anything as an autistic person it is not my own neuroticism and fixations, but those of the so-called “normal people”. Forget double helix rainbows: being an autistic person is like your DNA is a converted school bus trundling through the world in spray-painted glory and the whole world has an HOA. I understand why autistic people who see themselves as transgender see “concern” as the busybody stupidity of the neurotypical world. They aren’t wrong. But it exists alongside other mundane and brutal busybody stupidities, such as grant funding, progressive saviorism, and psychiatric god-complexes.

To understand and resist what the neurotypical world communicates to us about our worth is not to protest back to them in their own language. I am an autistic woman and like many other autistic women I am tired of not only making myself more palatable but translating my existence into something intelligible to outsiders, who are both men and the non-autistic. Radical feminists miss one of these; trans activists and allies miss the other. But I am irrevocably othered from both.

When you are autistic you are taught only one symbolic structure. It is not your own, but it is the only medium you will ever have to communicate with any complexity. More sinisterly, it becomes the only medium we have to communicate to ourselves, the only medium we can use to work around the silent and jumbled parts of our bodies and minds. Am I hungry? It is not always obvious. To ask the question I find myself translating, even when alone.

My fantasy about lions and men was that whatever world a lion lived in and whatever he had to say, he did not need to translate, and especially never to himself. When a lion says something he does not stop to ask if he means what he says or who is saying it. When a lion looks into the water hole and sees his own reflection, he does not need to reconcile anything. The lion does not need to speak to understand himself. A lion is made of teeth and blood and claws and the lion just does.

I do not use the symbolism of transgenderism to explain the little gaps and incongruities that are my problems with gender, with my sexed body, with sexuality. It is not only a language born of neurotypical neuroses and regulation, but it is always and forever fundamentally a translation.

As an autistic woman I have spent my whole life avoiding these dual facts, through both my time thinking of myself as trans and while trying to understand this whole thing afterwards: I am my body and I am not my body. Because I speak, but I do not understand. Because I understand, but I do not speak.

I will, unavoidably, always have to translate to speak and understand. But my autonomy requires that at bottom I must respect the native communication of my own body and mind. I refuse to use force or coercion to get it to talk, to interrupt its silence, to confabulate stories on its behalf, to speak for it using assumptions it cannot confirm or deny. I have to make peace with the fact that sometimes the blanks of my body or the redacted corners of my mind will say nothing. I have to make peace with the fact that translation is always inaccurate, that something is always beyond that constellation of symbols and words. The autistic body and the autistic mind have their own boundaries, and I refuse to believe that exercising my autonomy requires breaking them.

I do not know if J.K. Rowling knows this. I hope you do.

I’m not sure it is, as such.

We need to completely demolish the toxic idea that there are skills, interests or personality types that belong to males or to females.

It’s an open question whether there are any natural differences between girls and boys (as e.g. in experiments adults are more likely to throw babies up in the air or give them lots of cosseting eye contact based just on pink/blue clothes - which influence spacial & nurturing development) - but if there are, they are just average differences with greatly overlapping ranges like ‘female and male adult heights’ say - nothing is exclusive to or belongs to one or the other.

The pink and blue boxes are largely artificial and so will be a bad fit for most, especially disadvantaging girls and women as it includes learning to give rather than take space, be interrupted rather than interrupt…. , but it could be that there are some for whom it’s a particularly bad natural fit.

It would be great if people had the confidence to resist all the ruthless coercive pressures of those boxes and be themselves - and some do. Some others are part way on the journey and do present in a gnc way but do so by pushing away a part of themselves in order to push away the box tied to it. Others still accept themselves including their sex but present externally in an nb/they way to avoid others treating them in a boxed way - that’s how I understand it from listening to a few people.

I’m not sure if that answers your question or even which direction you were coming from in asking - but obv. feel free to continue the conversation here or in messages off anon.

benyw:

catlogicdefiesall:

atheistpagan:

kawuli:

jamyesterday:

tiliatree:

just-shower-thoughts:

Cave woman would have not known about the menopause until the life expectancy increased. Maybe there is another human hormonal change that we are not aware of as we have not reached the particular age it happens.

Totally incorrect! Actually, the fact that human females live past their reproductive life span is responsible for a great deal of human evolution, especially the ways in which we differ from our close ape relatives. This is called the Grandmother hypothesis.

Let me explain.

So the idea that human life expectancy has increased due to modern advancements is a myth. The average life span has certainly increased, however this is not because humans live longer (we have always lived to around 70-90yrs), but because infant mortality has decreased. In other words, modern medicine and abundant access to resources have decreased how how many children die, therefore increasing the average years humans live past birth.

So, Humans have known about menopause since the beginning, and it’s actually a huge part of our evolutionary history. Other apes do not live past their reproductive life span, as their bodies degrade shortly after ceasing to be fertile- evolution is all about how many offspring can be produce after all. Its generally a waste of resources to continue feeding adults who cannot reproduce when fertile adults and children are competing for those same resources.

So the fact that human females live for upwards of 30yrs past fertility was considered an evolutionary paradox. The key is that humans are really smart (sort of). We require a very long time to develop our brains, and so our infants are completely useless- unable to evan walk for a year, much less feed or protect themselves until middle childhood. They require a lot of attention and caring for, constant vigilence, not to mention hours spent teaching them basic survival tasks.

As a result, humans developed cooperative childraising systems, in which members outside of the child’s immediate family are responsible for caring for the young. However, if all the adults are busy raising their own children, no one would ever care for anyone else’s, except the older, not-yet-fertile children (who do assume childrearing roles, but are still developing and therefore are not good at it.) As a result, the females who stayed alive past their reproductive life span, no longer responsible for their own children, were able to care for the children of their children, allowing for their genes to be passed down more successfully. This creates a positive feedback system in which females lifespan progressively increases, since the older the grandmother, the more children the mother is able to have, and the more successfully they will be raised to adulthood, passing on the genes for long life to their children in turn.

This effect however decreased with subsequent generations: it’s less economical to have a grandmother AND a great grandmother taking care of the young. The payoffs aren’t high enough to push our lifespans even higher.

Tldr; humans have always had unusually long lifespans BECAUSE menopause occurs, and this is an integral aspect of our evolution, causing us to be as intelligent and adaptive as we are.

Even better, one of the ways we know about the grandmother effect is because you also see it in orcas! They can live to 80, but generally stop breeding in their 30s. There are three known species that have this kind of menapause– us, orcas and the Short-Finned Pilot Whale (also another very social species).

There’s a really nice explanation on this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/15/killer-whales-explain-meaning-of-the-menopause

So a few years ago I was working with a nutrition project in Mali targeting child malnutrition. A lot of these kinds of programs target young mothers for nutrition education, because women are the ones who cook, mothers feed their kids, makes sense.

Actually, these folks found that it was most effective to target not mothers, but grandmothers. Because in the big extended families most Malians live in, the grandmothers have more influence, so they can negotiate a better distribution of food. Usually, everyone in the family eats out of one big bowl (or a handful of big bowls, because sometimes families are 50+ people). The men always eat first, then the women and kids, so the men get all the good bits of meat that were in the stew. Because “they’re working in the fields more so they need more food.” This is a tricky thing to change, and young women have very little influence over intra-family dynamics. Older women, though, can organize their sons, can talk to their husbands, often control meal planning and budgeting, so if you help them understand that actually, kids need more nutritionally dense foods because their stomachs are smaller, so giving them the leftovers all the time isn’t good enough… then you’re more likely to see actual change in kids’ diets and health.

So yeah, grandmothers are important.

This is a change of direction but there are overlapping reasons why for humans it’s an evolutionary advantage to have a proportion of the population lesbian, gay & bi.

I mean look at human babies compared to other babies. They are useless for years and years - sorry but it’s true. Brain size so needing to be born earlier and all that.

A community making babies is piss-easy. Keeping them alive until they grow up is harder - a human community needs to be very strongly bonded in all sorts of ways - one that is not cross-bonded could split into nuclear het units and survive less.

Evolutionary theory has traditionally been individualist ‘passing on my genes’ but the genes of people who don’t produce their own kids are shared in different combinations with loads of others so being aunts and uncles, or grandmother confers evolutionary advantage compared to a hypothetical het-only group.

‘Reproducers only" does not work.

Reblogging again because the “they all died before forty” thing irritates the hell out of me.

I have been having some thoughts about this very phenomenon!!!

I’ve slowly been drifting away from the school of thought that posits that ALL gendered behaviour is the result of socialisation. This is because I believe we evolved to live a certain way, where males and women would have played different roles within the group.

Firstly, I believe our clans/tribes/groups would have been structured matrilineally (not necessarily matriarchal though), as in; children would have stayed with their mothers, and this is how the group would have grown.

Think about it: would the ‘grandmother effect’ have evolved if women were looking after children who had a decent chance of not actually being their biological grandchildren (i.e. their son’s supposed children)? A woman knows who she gave birth to, and she knows for a fact that any children her daughters have are her grandchildren - she cannot say the same about her son’s children. This is why I think women are supposed to stay with our mothers, sisters, maternal grandmother, maternal aunties, etc.. not go to a male partner’s group. The males of a woman’s clan wouldn’t necessarily have been her father, grandfathers, and paternal uncles, rather her brothers (mother’s sons), maternal uncles and cousins, and any of her maternal grandmother’s brothers. Outsider males would come and go, ensuring a healthy, non-inbred population, but most wouldn’t have stuck around too long (perhaps until the feelings of romantic love ran dry? As in; long enough to make a baby).

So many other thoughts about how this would affect behaviours, and how certain instincts within us - while helpful in a more natural, group-living arrangement - have led to males becoming seemingly more violent, and women being horrifically abused as a result. But I’m so tired rn I can hardly think straight.

Though I will say @atheistpagan I totally agree with you when it comes to gay males, but not bi males/females and lesbians.

I very much doubt that lesbians not having children at all is how they contributed to the overall survival fitness of their family. Although they probably would have had significantly less children than their heterosexual/bisexual sisters, there’s still a biological drive to have a baby that doesn’t go away simply because a woman is gay. A lot of gay women don’t get broody, but then a lot of hetero and bi women don’t either. Imo it’s an individual personality trait, hormonal state, or whatever that drives a woman’s desire to have a baby, nothing related to sexuality. The only difference comes when you consider that a lesbian would have had to engage in sex that she didn’t want, in order to make a baby that she did want, and thus would have had less children overall.

Hmm - not sure. I’m wondering - in the evolutionary history of primates where the (?) social information gets passed on that straight sex leads to babies? - as the signs of pregnancy are weeks at least after the sex. e.g. do chimpanzees know this? - or are the sexual urges and (hopefully) pleasurable reinforcement from doing it (which unlike many other animals is not just at most fertile times so may be more about strong bonding) separate from the urges to want to have a child (but not know how to get one) and move heaven and earth for it when you have one? Did being LB evolve after this or was it always there?

ms-hells-bells:

radicaltomie:

menalez:

menalez:

radjirou:

here is a huge ‘terf blacklist’ some kid made. op is a coward and blocked me, so i couldnt rb. lotsa cool ladies on here!!

i don’t know if i should be offended that im so far down, or if i should feel honoured that i was put right before TYLER OAKLEY (whos apparently now a radfem) and THOMAS SANDERS

my conclusion is the op of that post must be on crack.

oh my god this list has emperor-ing, previously known as war-lesbian. yknow, the transbian that claims to be butch and is big on arguing that lesbians hate trans women if they’re penis-repulsed and/or do not want to interact sexually w males??? the one that constantly goes on about how “cis lesbians need to show their solidarity” and “the cis lesbian community is overrun by terfs” or smth? apparently, they’re a terf now too

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses is also on there. I gave up trying to find myself in this mess that’s passing off as a list though, the kid just really couldn’t be assed to alphabetize it.

on the light side 

WOOH DAS ME BAYBEE

on the not light side, there are a shit ton of minors on that list, as young as 14 (that i know for a fact, but i only know a fraction of those on the list so there’s almost definitely younger)

there is also a page or two that is just full of non radfem actual nazis. they’re classing nazis as “terfs” for no reason. 

also, fucking FIFTY SIX PAGES????? if you had enough time to search and compile FIFTY SIX PAGES then you clearly never leave your house and have no normal person skills or mental abilities. not even my autistic ass would be obsessed enough to write FIFTY SIX PAGES about anything.

Amazingly I’m on this slur list even tho’ I’m a Trans Activist-Opposing Trans-Including Bloke (TAOTIB).

feyre-fireheart-cursebreaker:

haletheheretic:

haletheheretic:

haletheheretic:

So I was in a history major and then dropped out and one of the defining reasons was that historians really like to tell you that you cant add today’s biases into society.

So if were talking about slavery or how women were treated as literal property, we cant make a statement about how that was a bad thing because the times were different.

And as much as I hate to break the hearts of the white only history professors at that school, racism and sexism and homophobia have always been bad.

Like can you imagine being one of like 25 poc in a class of 300 taught by a white man, and that white man telling us that we cant put our “biases” on something like the slave trade?????????? Historical perspective my ass

The history field has a huge white people problem honestly its ridiculous. I know people say that history is just stuffy old white men and they’re absolutely right.

I think the only worse field is philosophy tbh

My history professor, an older white woman, said something that has stuck with me: “Yes, these thoughts feelings and actions were products of their time, but never forget that they are WRONG, and never allow that to temper your feelings towards the perpetrators of these injustices. Hate them. Rage at them in your papers, but study them, learn their tactics, so that you can recognize them in modern people, and stop that shit from ever happening again. Do not allow history to repeat itself.”

feministism:

officialweatherwax:

ohdarnitripped:

notmadeofgold:

weareadvocates:

sapphiredoves:

I’m a lesbian and somehow I manage to walk down the street and not ogle women I find attractive, or cat call or degrade them, or touch them without permission, or interrupt their daily lives, it’s almost as if I’m treating them like human beings despite my attraction to them. What an insane concept.

omg same

We were arguing about dress code in a meeting at work. And while my department knows I’m queer the other departments did not. As people (men) were saying that women showing skin and wearing tight clothes was distracting. I spoke up finally and said.

“I’m attracted to women.”

Everyone turned and looked at me and I was like “uhhh” so I finished.

“I’m attracted to women and I can still do my job. Regardless of what someone in my class is wearing. I can still teach. So why can’t you?”

The men all stayed silent.

I feel God and Sappho in this Chili’s tonight.

This is what I mean when I say that I can’t relate to straight men because their way of being attracted to women is so different from mine. 

Damn! I nearly said ‘not all…..’!

It’s the porn, you know, combined with a sense of entitlement to control.

If they have a self-created porn-induced obsession which interrupts their ability to function in daily life, that does not entitle them to restrict the clothing choices of their female colleagues.

phantomomo:

indicativeof-sideways-escalation:

africanaquarian:

me, learning about the greek pantheon in elementary: wow, I love athena, so brave and smart

me, after reading about the story of medusa: athena is a spiteful, dumb bitch who can’t direct her anger at the right people! wack ass hoe

Me, after learning than Medusas head was used as a sign of safety and female autonomy in women’s spaces because it was seen as a gift from Athena, to allow Medusa never to be harmed that way again: oh dope, Athenas on our side. Kill a man who dares to look upon you with possession in his heart.

Me, after learning that Athena holds herself to the ‘not like other girls’ standard and usuallys sides with whatever the nearest dick-toting diety says: what the fuck what a fake bitch

Me, after learning that most of the media depicting Greek Gods by the ancient Greeks that survives today was commissioned, designed, and made by men, and therefore does not depict female interpretation or telling of the myths, and is probably extremely biased towards a misogynistic portrayal of a strong woman: the canon Athena was in our hearts all along.

What a wild ride

Sexuality has been part of the human condition for millenia.

Being lesbian does not get redefined by the last few years of medical technology available to a handful of rich ppl or ppl in a few rich countries. The rest of the world still exists.

btw I don’t agree with any line of argument that trans men who don’t put themselves through major surgeries and life-long medical interventions are ‘less valid’ than those who do.

btw I don’t tend to label relationships - I would not say a bi woman with a man is in a 'straight relationship’ - I appreciate some do.

I really do not care what ppl get up to in bed or what they call themselves - what I do care about is when that line is weaponised as homophobia against gay men that that they are transphobic for being gay, or more commonly against lesbians as TERFs for not bowing to pressure to consider trans women as sexual partners.

Note: the fact that straight men are NEVER asked to consider trans women as sexual partners is PROOF that these lines are homophobic and misogynist. Nobody has ever given another reason for why this might be so - ppl are welcome to do so.

What do you think? I’ve not yet looked at your blog to guess where you might be coming from.

Understanding especially in the UK is rapidly rising and it will not be long now before we dissolve this offensive ideology and we can all work together to eradicate all forms of discrimination.

An anon ask with a very telling typo….

Sorry I’ve been off tumblr for a few weeks.

I, like many ppl have spent a lifetime being totally committed to eradicating discrimination along all dimensions and achieving justice. That naturally includes opposing the attacks and discrimination against ppl because they are trans/gnc.

Yes I think we should unite.

It’s not that ppl who oppose all discrimination have all just decided to be nasty to trans ppl. That makes no sense.

I can honestly say that the homophobia and misogyny of trans activists is one of the biggest threats to equality that we face. It’s being followed by some fearful risk-averse liberal institutions that presume it is ‘woke’ and 'the trans voice’. Fortunately the UK Equality Act specifically protects on the basis of both sex and gender reassignment (& others) - though some pressure groups distribute false advice about it, quoting 'gender and gender reassignment’ having removed 'sex’ from the list.

Are the activists 'bad people’? Their ideology certainly is very 'bad’. I’d love to find some exceptions (there are some transmeds).

I wouldn’t really care what people called themselves (though appreciate that I could then be criticised for ignoring appropriation) except that, starting from 'trans women are women’ which most trans ppl any many others would agree with, trans activists then go THEREFORE EVERYTHING ELSE FOLLOWS, which pretends sex differences never in any circumstances need to be considered, or do not exist, whereas the truth is that some things being based on sex is no threat to gender identity but is perceived by trans activists/genderists as so.

So to genderists, the hard-wired sexuality of being 'lesbian’ gets redefined as attraction to gender identity (impossible) not sex, and lesbians (never straight men = further proof) are being harassed and excluded as 'transphobic’ for being lesbian. We will never stand by and let this homophobic bullying and abuse groom ppl into it becoming acceptable.

Meanwhile there are plenty of trans ppl getting on with relationships, ignoring this toxic ideology, with trans men hooking up with lesbians and bi women, straight and bi men, and trans women with gay and bi men, straight and bi women, likewise nonbinary ppl of either sex.

A trans man and a lesbian being together is not a threat to anyone’s gender identity.

So to genderists, trans women have the 'right’ to get undressed and changed in OPEN PLAN areas and showers where women and even underage girls are going to be in states of undress. This will always be unacceptable and is a clear safeguarding issue.

Why don’t we have unisex open plan changing areas where people of both 'body types’ might be completely naked? There are obvious (unless you’re groomed) reasons for this - why open plan changing must always be segregated by sex and not on some people’s gender identity.

Meanwhile in my equalities role at a college, every trans student I ever met was absolutely against using the open plan changing spaces in this way (different from toilets/bathrooms) - 'It’s the opposite of passing’ one said.

Those with the almost autistic (I’m an Aspie) ideology of 'they are women so nothing else is ever considered’ are disregarding that discrimination by sex and severe harm to women and girls is a major form of worldwide oppression - so much disregard that they seek to take away the language of this group, replacing it with the misogynist 'vagina-havers’ and worse. We will never accept this bigotry. Will they next tell trans men they must not go to a gynecologist but to trans women they should?!?

Please note it’s not a competition, language always has words with different meanings that can be contradictory, it depends on context. In the paragraph above where I say 'women and girls’ I’m using the original meanings based on sex; when above I say 'trans man’ I’m clearly referring to his gender identity - the world does not fall down.

Either you think the above genderist offences do not happen or are just by a minority of hotheads - plenty of evidence to the contrary including the lack of 'woke’ voices against it - or maybe you have been groomed to think such hate is acceptable and correct - OR perhaps you now agree with the increasing numbers of us, especially in the UK, that something needs to be done to stop this ideology so we can genuinely work together.

Please do highlight it to me if you can find anything in my posts which is 'seriously hurtful’ to trans ppl rather than just offensive to misogynist and homophobic activists - I can make mistakes and may have worded something badly.

Please let me know what you think - reblog, DM, another anon ask if you prefer.

We seriously need to grow past this dangerous hate ideology, and together eradicate all forms of oppression.

left-reminders: