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By David Futrelle
So-called “Gender Critical” feminists — that is, the artists transphobes formerly known as TERFs — like to fantasize about removing the “T” from LGBT, severing trans people from the solidarity and support of the broader community of which they now are a central part.
But some in the GC crowd want to go much further, effectively removing all the letters except for the L for Lesbian. Consider this highly upvoted comment from the Gender Critical subreddit painting gay men as slavering predators who’ve supposedly ruined the movement with their sexual obsession.
“The worst mistake lesbian women made was allying themselves with the gay male movement,” GCMAdamXX begins.
“Gay liberation” was only ever about unfettered male sexual desire. The first riots were about the police raiding sex clubs (where prostitution was common). Stonewall itself was a known hangout for underage boys to sell sex to closeted businessmen. Sylvia Rivera himself was only 17. His lover Marsha Johnson was 26.
FWIW, every source I found online that refers to the two trans activists describes them as “friends,” not lovers, but why let the mere facts dissuade you when you’re trying to portray female trans activists as gay male pedophiles?
Within a year of the first AIDS cases the cause and the vectors were understood, and yet gay men fought to keep the sex clubs open and resisted using condoms. So AIDS kept spreading. Because men refused to give up their sexual “liberation”.
It took a lot longer than a year for people to understand what was going on with AIDS.
Now we have drag queen story time peddling this shit to children.
Apparently reading stories to kids while dressed in drag is equivalent in GCMadamXX’s mind with pedophilia and knowingly spreading AIDS.
Gay liberation has always been about male lust. Trans is just an extension of that into ever creepier realms. Including pedophilic realms.
Bullshit.
Lesbianism is about liberation FROM male lust. It’s time the L split from the G as well.
Presumably bi men — and possibly bi women? — would be excluded as well due to all the “male lust” involved in bisexuality.
A quick tour of GCMadamXX recent comment history on Reddit reveals that she has similarly strong feelings on a number of topics.
She’s really, really into women making babies.
The acme of HUMAN experience is the creation of another human. That is correct. Every other thing humans have ever achieved has been driven by the desire to reproduce or improve the odds of survival for offspring or relatives. …
Until we recognize our power and learn to wield it we will never be free.
In another thread she waxes poetic about women and their wombs:
Literally what matters in this world more than the creation of life? Everything you believe about being a woman is a lie told to try to control us. We are the goddesses of this world. Not only can we create life we can create more goddesses. We are eternal and powerful.
As much as she loves the baby making thing she’s not so thrilled that men are a part of it, and would seemingly prefer it if the world were free of most men beyond a few sperm donors. She sounds more than a little like a MGTOW dreaming of a world in which flesh-and-blood women are replaced by compliant lady sexbots.
Males are dispensable and most are superfluous to the continuation of the species. Females are not.
She doesn’t think men should be watching porn:
Combine a dating app with a porn blocker. For every month a guy doesn’t watch porn he gets to contact one woman. If he stays off porn for a year he unlocks the whole site. Women would pay for this.
But she herself sometimes indulges in a little porn-watching — and her favored genre of the stuff is a little surprising:
I try not to watch porn at all but when I occasionally slip, I watch gay porn. You’re so much less likely to find someone being horribly abused in the m/m scene.
edit: I’m not a gay male LOL
No, we didn’t think you were. And she’s not a lesbian either. Despite her strong opinions on LGBTQ politics, and her general low opinion of men, she’s evidently a straight (or possibly bi?) woman with a husband and kids
Regardless of her furtive interest in m/m porn (which she nonetheless thinks should be eliminated from the face of the earth) , it’s doubtful she’s be a good fanfic author as she is probably the least erotic sex-describer I’ve ever run across, at one point describing the penis as “something through which small gametes are excreted.”
HAWT (NAWT).
Oh, and she’s a fan of JK Rowling with has very definite opinions about the proper management of wizard schools:
Trans kids WOULDN’T be allowed at Hogwarts. The stairs to the girls’ dorms turn into slides if boys try to use them.
Wait, what? So she’s assuming that the stairs are making their decisions after scanning the students’ genitalia and not, say, by looking at how they present themselves to the world? That’s more than a little creey.
The inside of the Gender Critical mind is a deeply weird place and I’ve had enough of it for the day.
H/T — Thanks to Zinnia Jones, who reposted the “drop the t” comment to Twitter.
Unfortunately, based on JK Rowling’s recent comments, that’s not an invalid assumption.
I’ve seen this stuff on my Tumblr, and apparently Harry Potter itself is problematic:
– There’s a thing where Hermione was deemed delusional for wanting to free some race that was said to enjoy being enslaved
– The series is likely eugenicist (i.e. the Longbottoms)
– The series is likely anti-Semitic (descriptions of Snape, goblins and Goldstein)
– Transphobia (as exemplified here and with the gendered changing rooms allowing girls into boys’ rooms but not the other way round)
I never got into the thing, but for different reasons; I now think these are good reasons for people to avoid HP, but I’ve never really cared about it since it didn’t appeal to me.
@Karl
Beat me to it. I was going to say the same thing re: JK Rowling.
Anyway, whenever anyone says feminists hate men I point out that that’s not true. However, unfortunately fake feminists like Ms. GCMadamXX (the name seems to be the TERF equivalent of infamous white nationalist Redditor WhitePride_1488) are doing their best to make feminism look bad.
I’m desperately hoping GCMAdamXX is a troll, because her posts seem too cartoonishly silly and outrageous to have been written sincerely. If she’s really the person she claims to be, then I don’t know what her deal is.
@personalpest
Poe’s law. I guess it could be a troll, but there are sadly people who are that ridiculous and extreme.
And because it would make TERFs extra sad, whenever I think about Poe’s law I’m going to think about trans* porn star and activist Chelsea Poe. They especially hate her.
Ugh. Political lesbians
If there were any doubt that JK Rowling is a TERF, here she is making it plain as day referring to a recent court case: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/19/jk-rowling-trans-row-court-ruling-twitter-maya-forstater
Somehow it’s not bigotry if it’s directed towards trans people.
Also, the Horsehoe theory seems to hold very strongly with the extremes of the TERF (and as in this article E everything else) worlds. I’ve seen lots of TERFs with an animus against Bi people (especially bi men) before, but I’ve not seen them targeting gay men in the same way before.
A lot of TERFs seem to think that cis gay men are their natural allies and that we’ll hate trans men as much as they hate trans women. And while there certainly are cis gay men who hate trans men, afaict most cis gay men don’t really have trans men on their radar at all. (disclaimer: I’m more or less cis so my knowledge of how trans men experience spaces originally intended for cis gay men is limited)
@Bakunin
If she’s trying to be a political lesbian, she’s not being very consistent at it, seeing as she’s married to a man.
@Leum
One fallacy of TERFs is their belief that all lesbians think like them re: trans* women. The majority of lesbians I know are supportive of trans* people and are probably rather offended that TERFs purport to speak for them (at least, I would be annoyed if hate groups claimed to speak for me). I’m sure there are transphobic lesbians out there, but it by no means appears to be a universal sentiment. It seems that the TERFs who think gay men are their allies think so as a result of extrapolating their already incorrectly extrapolated views on lesbians.
As well, most of the TERFs I know are straight women and straight men.
I’m not surprised at all. Those who hate the T in LGBT normally hate the B as well. They really just wanted it to be the LB but it looks like this person just wants it to be the L. Which is quite funny coming from a straight woman who would probably throw a fit if a butch lesbian hit on her at a bar.
@Lainy
Glad to see you back.
The TERF view of lesbians is further complicated by the fact that a significant number of lesbians are butch and yet TERFs don’t seem to see butch women as women and want to deny them bathroom access.
TERFs don’t like it when they have to count higher than two
I can think of nothing less feminist than reducing womenhood to the ability and inclination to give birth and the fetishization of motherhood.
And I never got around to reading the Harry Potter books (though I did see all the movies) and had planned on getting to eventually, but fuck if I’m going to do it now.
Now awaiting hearing about someone’s non-transphobic Potter fanfic in which people questioning their gender identities discover they are trans because the “wrong” staircase accepts them and gives them access to the other dorm from their gender-assigned-at-birth …
Something with a scene like this in it. Kid presenting mostly masculine, say, but carrying a pink bunny toy arrives and finds they can’t use the staircase to the boys’ dorm. Asks McGonagall, complaining that it doesn’t work. “Well did you try the other one?” Shakes head. Tries it and it lets him climb. Asks McGonagall why the Hogwarts architecture is getting this wrong and she gently chides them: “Hogwarts magic can see what’s in your head, see who you are on the inside, and it is never, ever wrong. You’re trans, sweetie. You’re a girl!”
It would also be interesting to see if such fanfic drew attempts at legal takedowns, despite Rowling’s stated policy of permitting the publication of not-for-profit amateur Potter fanfic. That would be nasty, to be sure, but it would also publicly expose her as both a transphobe and a hypocrite…
Hey, would you look at that, some actual honest to goodness misandry (and homophobia and transphobia of course, but bigotry has a lot of co-morbidity). It’s depressing that TERFS who are perhapse the most “appreciated feminists” in masculinist spheres are actually exactly what their caricature of feminism is supposed to be.
@WWTH:
Indeed, it is, rather, a common tendency among conservatives. Especially white nationalists concerned about declining white birth rates. One wonders if “GCMadamXX” will be posting as “WPGCMadamXX1488” in a few more years …
I’m also awaiting one of these someoneorotherXX screen names’ owners discovering when tested for some medical purpose or another (likely infertility) that they have androgen insensitivity syndrome and about 40 trillion Y chromosomes. Remember that racist a while back who was tested and found to be genetically nearly a quarter African-American and melted down on Twitter about it? That, but the TERF edition.
Meh, I like Harry Potter.
It’s a fantasy world and it helps me a lot.
I don’t care what Rowling MEANS it to be, I take it as /I/ see it.
I buy the books second hand so she gets no money from me.
“Gender is a set of arbitrary and unscientific standards that are used to oppress people!”
Great, I’m on board!
“So we’re going to eliminate that and create our own set of unscientific and arbitrary standards to oppress a different set of people!”
Whoa! Slow your roll there!
In other news, I’ve discovered that my…er, there’s no good gender neutral term, so I’ll say my sister’s child has come out as non-binary (they/them pronouns). I don’t ‘officially’ know yet, because they want to tell me themselves. They’re 11, and while I’ve done a fair amount to educate myself before I’d love some advice on how to best support them.
Your nibling?
@Surplus: Yeah, if there’s one thing that annoys me about the people who put XX in their Twitter handles¹ (apart from, you know, them being raging fuckwits and all) is their blithe assumption that people are routinely karyotyped when they’re born and we can all be certain of our chromosomal configuration because X chromosomes be pink and Y chromosomes be blue or some gibberish like that. THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. Hell, even when kids are born with ambiguous junk, they’re more likely to go, “does it look more like a penis or a vulva to you? Right, we’ll go with that” than run a genetic test (which is one of the reasons why “corrective” surgery on newborns has become an issue for intersex people)
I’ve said it before, that even if I agreed with the TERF position on trans people (which I don’t, not for a hot second) I’d still oppose them because of the deliberately cruel and hurtful way they go about their crusade, and their absolute callous indifference to the splash damage their vendetta causes cis women (the only “real” women in their view, remember) who have hormonal or other reproductive issues, or who simply fail to meet their standard of femininity. They are despicable through and through.
Having said that, I still don’t think I’d wish a diagnosis of AIS on anyone. Not because it’s a condition that has quality-of-life issues (most people who have it IIRC don’t even know they have it until they reach puberty and their menstrual cycle doesn’t start), but the psychological trauma that many of them go through on realising that any plans they might have had to start a family, etc., aren’t going to happen is not something I’d wish on anyone, even a TERF. Maybe it’s just that AIS was the plot twist on an episode of House (MD) I saw once (which was handled with every bit of sympathy you’d expect from that show; i.e., played for laughs ?)
¹ I’d be all in favour of Twitter hellbanning anyone who puts XX or XY in their handles so that the only other people on the site who could see their hatewanking would be other hatewankers
It took Rowling this long to be overtly TERF rather than just so happen to follow multiple TERFs on twitter. I sure can’t wait to read all the Rowling stans defending this shite.
@WWTH
Indeed. It sounds more like something MRAs would say. No wonder they get along so well with Nazis, seeing as both fetishize fertility.
@Schnookums Von Fancypants
I will admit, it’s frustrating that there’s no gender-neutral term. When they come out to you, maybe ask them if there’s a term they’d like to be called? I would say a big thing is use the pronouns and any new name(s) they tell you. Affirm them.
@Cat Mara
I think that might be a feature rather than a bug. To bigots, the more damage you can cause without extra effort, the better.
The problem with that is that you’d inadvertently ban a number of trans* people who’ve reclaimed it (e.g. Chelsea Manning is @xychelsea) and porn stars who have XXX in their handles.
I’m personally waiting for when a TERF realizes that half their genome came from someone with XY chromosomes. Or simply denies it and claims they were a virgin birth or something.
@Ooglyboggles
I tried to explain this to a friend, and she repeatedly denied that Rowling did anything wrong, then when the reality started to sink in she said she didn’t want to talk about gender anymore because it is too upsetting.
You can always tell a political lesbian because they don’t think that lesbianism is about female lust.
Political lesbians define lesbianism negatively as not having sex with men, as opposed to positively, as having sex with women.
For a long time, bisexual women were counted as lesbians (this is one reason there isn’t much bisexual history before the 1970s), and it was political lesbianism that pushed them out of fellowship. Political lesbians are the movement that TERFs emerged from.
@Naglfar:
You may well be right: I imagine there are plenty in the TERF movement who regard things like polycystic ovarian syndrome or other hormonal disruption, menorrhagia or amenorrhea, endometriosis, or cancers of the female reproductive system as a “judgement from God” or something similarly savagely atavistic. I remember a couple of years ago when the HPV vaccine first came available on the NHS in the UK, the edition of the Daily Mail (speaking of savagely atavistic) there started ranting about how it was “giving young women the freedom to sleep around” or such nonsense… meanwhile, on the other side of the Irish Sea, the Irish edition of the Mail was accusing the Irish Department of Health of “killing girls” because the vaccine wasn’t available for free because of lack of funds! Consistency? Who cares so long as we can get a good hate-on?