By David Futrelle
So yesterday, I was poking around in the Braincels subreddit, Reddit’s main hangout for incels, and was struck by how often the regulars there discuss trans women.
Some incels like to fantasize about solving their particular difficulty — their “involuntary” celibacy — by hooking up with “traps” (their favorite transphobic term for young trans hotties). But most of the time they’re as straightfowardly hateful towards trans women as any TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist).
Indeed, I was struck by how remarkably similar incels and TERFs sound when they talk about trans women (both generally ignore trans men). So much so that I decided to make this quiz.
[os-widget path=”/davidfutrelle/who-said-it-incel-or-terf”]
I don’t know about you, but I found these very hard to distinguish from one another, to the point that I had to check and doublecheck each quote to make sure which subreddit it came from, even though I was the one choosing the quotes.
So what does this mean? Partly, the quotes sound similar because, well, this is what transphobic hate sounds like. But in other cases it seems as though the incels have picked up certain TERF talking points from reading, or reading about, TERFs.
If you consider yourself a feminist, but your thoughts on trans women are virtually identical to the raging misogynists and ignorant anti-feminists who make up the incel movement, well, maybe you’re not as much of a feminist as you think.
Sources for quotes: Question 1: GenderCritical, Braincels. Question 2: GC, Braincels. Question 3: Braincels, GC. Question 4: Braincels, GC.
H/T — Reddit’s Advanced Search
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I had a suite mate in college who was transitioning from female to male. We did not know this at the time. He was outed during winter break and it was handled very poorly. He left that semester and I never saw him again. This was mid 70’s and at a somewhat liberal university.
Cis woman here, popping up her cis head to say that cis is not a slur. It’s just the opposite of trans. Which these FARTy fools might realize if they’d ever taken Latin at any level.
And on that note, maybe it’s time to make school Latin mandatory again.
Also, @Ariblester: Maybe “fauxminists”? That’s what I’d call ’em.
I came here to have a good time and I’m feeling so attacked right now :<
Brace yourselves. The National Weather service is predicting massive flooding along all major rivers due to a sudden influx of right-wing tears at this announcement:
http://collider.com/thor-4-natalie-portman/
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
I love this http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/thor-4-love-and-thunder-slice.jpg
The title looks straight out of a hair metal album.
The Captain and I each got 2/4. This quiz is really hard!
@Bina:
It would also require them to realize that “trans” isn’t a slur, so I don’t think knowing Latin’s going to help.
Ugh. Got 4/4.
I mainly decided by typos and weird punctuation….
That being said, to chime in on the cis-as-a-slur-thing… I can understand a little bit where that comes from, because I ran across “all cis-people are fucking scum” yesterday once again.
There’s a subset of trans people and their allies that go banding around comments like that at the slightest perceived sleight (in this case, the bwa-sub not agreeing that a trans woman(!) explaining what being mtf means with “born male and then realizing you’re female” instead of saying amab is bad women’s anatomy and then not agreeing that being trans magically changes your biological makeup. Oh, and they had that discussion and cursed at… An agender person.) and sometimes that feels like cis is almost a slur.
That being said – just because a tiny group of people acts like something is a slur does not define it as such. Some people use trans or gay like it is a slur and well, they’re not. And cis isn’t a slur because a group of idiots doesn’t get to decide what a slur is. Society would have to use it that way for a while with majorly negative connotation and society just…. Doesn’t.
It’s a descriptor. Just like trans is. And both shouldn’t hold any information about a person’s worth.
3/4.
The first question was easy, the incel was doing his typical incelery (is that a word?) writing a fanfiction that they were imagining in their head.
The second question has the incel describing a complex situation into a simplified, strawman worldview.
The third question is the same as the second.
The fourth actually trips me up.
Overall a funny little joke test.
4/4 good answers.
My working hypothesis is that TERFs are very invested in looking traditionally feminine, and picked the answer that would have been uttered by a female villain in a movie.
I guess it’s a bit sad that it work.
Can we just admit that Twitter is run by bad people.
@ Bina;
I love it!
Speaking of “love” (and thunder)… I gotta qualify this, as I don’t wanna end up on a Marvel Fan Mob’s pitchfork….
I have some vision deterioration (macular “hole”, to be specific) in one eye, n the other has been damaged since forever, so my vision is blurry…. When I saw the splash of the Thor: Love and Thunder movie, well, between my bad vision and the colors of the graphic, I saw Thor: Love Thunder… AND THOUGHT IT WAS A PORN PARODY….
@Weird Eddie:
RE: Electronics. No, you don’t. My sister-in-law holds that record. I don’t know how she does it. I believe she emits a force field that causes electronics to go haywire.
My spouse then winds up trying to fix them for her.
Absolutely identical. I could swear the same person wrote all of the quotes. But TERFs are “””feminists.”””
Why would trans women want to get with their misogynistic asses any more than cis women do?
@ Dormouse:
It’s eerie when the single most common response from tech support is, “I’ve never seen that happen before…!”
I got 0, but I also didn’t know which one I was guessing for.
Anyone ever notice that when TERFs do talk about trans men it’s always “their teenage girls who hate being a girl so much because of Misogyny that they want to become boys” Like the only Trans men in their minds are 15 year olds. They never can even think of trans men being adults for some reason.
@Lainy
I think that’s a common problem for many trans men. Somehow people staunchly refuse to see them as adults. Even “allies” often end up infantilizing them. It’s pretty infuriating.
@Lainy
One consistency in TERFS/SWERFS/BERFS/etc. that I’ve noticed is that they resist knowledge in favor of theory.
They work out the theoretical nature of something (trans* people, porn, etc.) and latch onto that as The True Nature of Things, avoiding any exposure to facts because those might conflict with Theory.
One memorable example of this was a SWERF who explained who she had worked out how All Porn Is Rape, based on a completely imaginary idea of how the porn industry worked that did not resemble reality in the slightest. But it worked for the needs of her Theory, therefore it was correct and she did not need to do any of that pointless research.
Hey, ignoring facts in favor of an imaginary Way Things Are that supports their bigotries… no wonder it’s so hard to tell TERFS and incels apart.
@Lainy:
Yup. To FARTs, the only mature individual is one who is willing to hammer themselves down to fit the procrustean bed of cis-ness. If a young person comes out as trans, that person must thus be immature and/or “heteronormative” and/or a “gender trender”. A young trans guy, then, would be a self-hating childish lesbian trying to be cool, not a teenager with a thoughtful and realistic assessment of himself as male-assigned-female-at-birth.
On the other hand, FARTs think a trans woman is either a self-hating effeminate gay male, or else a straight man trying to insert his perverse, unwanted penis-energy into female-only spaces. They don’t understand, or don’t WANT to understand, that trans lesbians (and asexuals, etc.) actually exist, and are not a sexual threat to anyone. The few actual trans women they’re willing to accept (grudgingly, kinda-sorta) are those who’ve already gone the full surgical route. But they still won’t accept them as real, actual, no-questions-asked WOMEN. Apparently a transsexual who’s had all her genitalia remodeled is somewhat (with a whole slew of conditions and asterisks attached) legit, but a transgender person who has, for whatever reason, not had all the surgeries, isn’t…
…buuuut they’re not willing to concede that gender-confirming medical treatment is an effective treatment to gender dysphoria, either. THAT problem is just all in the poor deluded “trans-identified” dears’ heads, and if they really wanted to deal with it correctly, they should just accept themselves as persons of their immutable, birth-assigned sex, and stop seeking confirmation…
And they think we’re weirdos for simply accepting trans people for whoever they tell us they are?
And they call themselves “radical”?
I don’t understand how we’re supposed to take the quiz. We’re supposed to be guessing whether an incel or a TERF said it, but each question is just choosing between two different quotes?
@ribblefizz: the directions aren’t very clear. I think the ones that just say question in the headline are the ones aimed at terfs.
@Lainy, Bina – well said. Plus, trans men can be gay, bi, or ace, etc., like anyone else, so it doesn’t make sense that they’d all be “self-hating lesbians” or whatever the TERFS think.
@ribblefizz – I did this yesterday and I also missed what the question was! I looked and it DOES say “For each question, pick which of the two answers came from the Braincels subreddit” but maybe I just didn’t notice it before.
I got all 4 right because I have to put up with TERFs a lot on Twitter and because I research incels for fun guessing games on my podcast, The Violet Wanderers (all trans hosted comedy podcast).
1/4. Welp.
I guess I gave FARTs too much credit and attributed the more obviously crass and blatant statements to incels.
The first one would trip me up anytime, though. The fuck are incels suddenly concerned about women’s spaces now?
And I hope this is a more appropriate thread for this…
@Rhuu, can I again ask about the purported effort of TERFs to de-legitimize ace people in the LGBT+ community?
I’m not asking this out of pure curiosity. I’m asexual myself, and I’m yet to see anything like this in the wild, so I would like to know what to watch out for.