3) even beyond the not-yet-TERFy radical-feminist origins of these politics, TERFs have an ongoing, successful campaign of infiltration into lesbian and queer spaces. I'm genuinely scarred by this as it occurred on Tumblr. those TERFs who are holding down the idea that lesbian sexuality is morally pure still inherit the general crypto-Catholic, heterosexually-sourced, conservative revulsion of sexual and gender-variance, particularly in its transmisogyny- and [F-slur] stigma-constrained forms, or the whole population of sex workers.
lots of online queer folks have fairly TERF-adjacent worldviews. there's no getting around this. it's worth noting, too, that TERF politics are standard-issue bigotry filtered through feminist language, and it takes active work to detect bigotry that doesn't affect you; the fact that feminist-101 concepts are weaponized against gay men by gay and trans people for whom [F-slur] stigma is not a personal experience is unsurprising.
a potentially 🌶️ political thought
@Kat another good example of this shit is what i see the 'zero waste' movement increasingly becoming
my disabled, diabetic ass is never going to go 'zero waste'. not unless i have an autoclave and someone invents a way for me to check my blood sugar without any testing strips etc. but 'going zero waste' is What You Do If You Care About The Environment! fuck nuance! fuck the lives of disabled people who might not be able to just compost everything!
relevant to that: gay men are considered "frivolous, unserious." so camp jokes are consistently stripped of any "serious" or "challenging" content they encode. this is still homophobic when gay people do it
I really fucking hate articles and shit that are like, "Democrats, urban dwellers, and gays, I live in a red state, let me tell you what it's like for the folks out here. Let me explain to you how they feel, and how they came to their opinions."
Motherfucker, those people represent the dominant culture. They're the narrow minority every media company and politician caters to. We are all already all-too aware of what they think and feel and we're tired of them being centered.
so, likewise, an adult trans woman gas been taught all her life how a woman is to act. her cishet brother learned this as well, or else he could not be correctly sexist to his partners and to the other women in his life.
and if can be 'clocked' by others and is either not perfectly-accustomed to a feminine role, or is merely gender non-conforming (remember how it's cool when women are GNC? trans women too! no bullshit!), is NOT treated by her peers as a man. Instead, she is subject to female socialization in the most brutal form, and inflected by other axes of oppression she experiences — ableism, saneism, misogynoir, lesbophobia — and her experience of the world gets *less* harsh the harder she is to 'clock' and the more she acts 'like a woman'.
to act like this process is overridden by her childhood, in which it is asserted without evidence that she must have been treated 'like a boy,' is to abdicate one's responsibility to be intelllectually honest and stand with the oppressed
The article goes on to point out Snoopy's ambiguity in particular, but I do not feel it comes to a satisfactory conclusion.
Trans, guy of center, well over 18.
I'm in tech and it feels weird.