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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.
@rv97
You’re not wrong that TERFs are toxic, but that whole thing you just said there was super toxic, too. You seem to have a lot of hatred for women, even if you only think your hatred is towards men. Not really unlike TERFs in that respect.
I mean I thought that was covered after the whole lesbians are better then straight women, but also lesbians need to be quite about their spousal abuse because that makes other lesbians look bad, thing that they had going on a while back.
@kupo
I relate a little bit to where @tv97 is coming from, because I am a trans woman…
Before I accepted my transhood, I went through a long phase of feeling jealous of women for “getting” to have certain modes of self expression.
I would feel like women got all the fun clothing patterns and prints, feel jealous that women are “allowed” to wear makeup without coding themselves as queer, and even feel that as a “straight male” I had to engage in constant self-monitoring and censorship of my voice and body language.
It felt like manhood was this constant act I had to keep up whereas women were “allowed to be themselves.”
When I broke through my denial and started to accept that I was trans, all of these feelings were thrown into clear relief: what I really wanted was just to drop the act and fully express my own femininity.
@rv97
Not sure how to put this politely, but:
A) it sounds like you are probably trans, genderfluid, and/or non-binary
B) it also sounds like you have a LOT of deeply internalized sexism to work through
These things are not mutually exclusive, in fact IME it’s common for newbie trans folks to have really fucked up ideas about sex and gender. But, like, you have to actually work on that, and learn to listen to people outside your own experience.
@rv97
This seems like a kind of self-hatred. I’m sorry if it is harder to express yourself, and I think most of us would agree that in an ideal world people of all genders could express themselves however they pleased.
However, I also think there’s a bit of misogyny here. Envy or resentment of women is a key part of manosphere misogyny, and you seem to have an idea that women are more privileged than men, which is false.
This again seems like a sort of self-hatred. You also seem to make a lot of generalizations about groups, both men and women.
TERFs evolved from lesbian separatists of the 1970s, and some do seem to advocate separation, but it seems now they care more about befriending conservatives to get their hateful goals through.
If you are agreeing with TERFs, that’s a bit of a problem. As well, you seem to have some internalized misogyny issues, as other commenters pointed out. I’m not 100% sure of how to work through that, so maybe someone else can explain.
As well, as Cyborgette mentioned, you could be trans*. Some trans* people who have internalized transphobia (which is not uncommon seeing the world we live in), and some even manifest this by digging into TERF ideology. As described in this Medium piece by Hailey Heartless (a trans* woman who once was a TERF):
Does this sound like your situation?
@kupo
How do you think it’s manifesting, just to be clear? I am aware though that I think of men and women differently, and I might have a vague idea of what you’re getting at, but I want to be sure.
@Cyborgette
I’m worried I’ll come across someone like an alt-right lesbian. I have come across someone like one, but they didn’t seem to defend men, hated gender non-conformity beyond entertainment and Islam too.
Also, it was through the same medium of Reddit (on r/inceltears) that someone hinted to me that I could be not cis – it then made more sense to me.
Thankfully my therapist has offered to help me with issues surrounding my envy towards women via a counsellor, in addition to why I’m even seeing them – regarding disturbing thoughts. Unfortunately, IRL bullshit means I’ll have to take a hiatus from such sessions briefly.
@Lainy
I still feel like lesbians are better than straight women, but beyond that, I’m less certain. Sadly, I still think many homophobes are straight and are trying to justify their disgust into something much worse, since they’ll simply not understand. Their first port of call would often be religious fundamentalists or evo psych.
@Naglfar
Very slightly, to answer the last question. Probably because I also do still consider cis and trans women different.
I don’t think women are privileged, but yes, I could have been dangerously close to manosphere territory (I still fear I could have some of their ideas especially not related to gender, as a result of a few certain bored years online). What stopped me was their gender policing of men (didn’t think I could be trans then) and their attitudes to religion.
I do hate myself too and I feel like I deserve shit. Some of this is for reasons unrelated to gender, like recently some disturbing thoughts and urges, which I’m seeing a therapist for. As for self-hate, it may be unaddressed for now. I’ve been offered by my therapist to discuss gender issues with a counsellor.
@rv97
Alternatively (and not to deny the experience of other commenters who’ve responded) you could just have been raised in a very rigid, toxic environment and are kicking out hard at the limits it has placed on you.
That is rather common.
There’s certainly a large amount of envy there (the misogyny has been covered far more adequately than I could ever attempt).
Its understandable in those circumstances.
It’s also both wrong and completely un-needed. You’re grown. An adult. You get to decide who and what you are and if anyone – including the conformist critic hiding in your own head – complains or criticises, you show them the hand. Takes practice and is scary as hell for a bit, but it is worth it.
There are a lot of ways to “be a man.” If you choose to do so, and it is solely your choice – find your way. Not someone else’s. That is always a bad fit.
Hope that helps some.
@Shadowplay
That is right, and thank you. I still need to determine my gender but I generally feel like I may not likely be cis. I could be wrong, I’m not sure.
I am worried that if I assert myself (including non-gender issues bothering me right now with family), I won’t be able to convince them. They’ve dismissed me as selfish when I said I didn’t want to be part of the multi-level marketing schemes they’re in, as someone who was then 21.
I plan to try and leave my parents without an argument, but a letter.
I see that the recent JK Rowling ass-showing brought Ricky Gervais out of the woodwork so he can scold us again about how we have no right no be offended by the dumb shit he says.
@rv97
That seems like another sign of internalized misogyny and/or transphobia (transmisogyny). It seems that you are struggling with these internalized ideas, and that can be difficult. I’m not 100% sure how to deal with this, so maybe someone else has better solutions. Something that I know helps some people is learning more about the history of feminism and trans* people.
Okay, CN: this post gets pretty involved and personal, and deals with internalized patriarchy, mental health, abuse, stuff like that.
Cis folks, if you keep reading, you may learn some scary things. I trust you not to weaponize those things against trans people.
And trans comrades, I know some of the stuff below is not normally what you’d see in public, but I think it’s sometimes helpful to bring it up for access reasons – the silence has its reasons but new folks don’t always know where to look, and that also gets dangerous IMO.
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@rv97
So, there is a lot to cover here.
First. Some level of envy towards cis women is
a) normal if you’re trans fem
b) also normal if you’re a cis woman, because patriarchal beauty standards get to all of us
c) even normal if you’re a dude, despite what patriarchy tells you about women being different and inferior and therefore not appropriate to envy
d) not shameful as long as you recognize it for what it is, and don’t assign blame to others or do harm based on it
(That last obviously being the most important!)
Unlearning patriarchal crap is part of the remedy, and a lot of times so is getting more comfortable with your own gender and presentation. But yeah, this is one of the things that trans fems tend not to talk about much outside of trans settings, because it can very easily come across as creepy and parasitic and stuff, and then cue the usual shock and horror about “OMG you’re really a bunch of predators and serial killers!” Which no we’re not, but good luck convincing cis people after decades of The Silence of the Lambs and Sleepaway Camp and Janice Raymond calling our existence a form of rape.
But. That envy is still deeply entwined with patriarchy. e.g. Those women in porn and media you’re envious of? Are usually wearing makeup and shaping clothing, and have skilled camera crew making sure to get their best angles. Entertainment media is a bucket of lies, mass market porn even more so.
Anyway, more generally…
You’re reminding me right now a lot of myself ~6 years ago, bitter and dysphoric and desperately wanting an in-group. That’s a dangerous combination, both for one’s self and for others. For me it resulted in a years-long friendship with a sociopath, which traumatized me heavily and made me complicit in their abusive behavior.
What eventually got me started on a better path was reading Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things, because it gave me an intro to forms of feminism that actually had a place for me, and ways of acting against injustice that weren’t openly cruel. YMMV with the reading (I’m still a newbie!), that might not be what you need. But, my take is
a) Learn more from feminists.
b) Learn from intersectionally minded AFAB feminists first. Transfeminism is broken without feminism-entire as a substrate.
c) Start learning skills for trauma management.
d) Internalize that things can happen or be the case without any person being to blame, yourself included.
Re unwanted thoughts/urges? Check this out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primarily_obsessional_obsessive_compulsive_disorder
Likewise CPTSD:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_post-traumatic_stress_disorder
I have both from growing up in a highly abusive environment, and they’re mostly under control these days but it took some doing. Finding a therapist who is trauma competent is vital, so is finding friends who understand this stuff. Cutting off or reducing connections to abusers helps. If you’re a sexual assault or child sex abuse survivor (including of grooming without physical rape), lots of resources exist – I had a counselor at BARCC in Boston for a while who was super helpful, there are probably similar organizations in your area.
Oh, and specific trauma management skills: learning this stuff is a long hard trip, but here is something that might be helpful to start with.
https://www.healingfromcomplextraumaandptsd.com/flashback-management-c1jmh
(Apologies for the low-contrast color scheme.)
Hope this helps, and sorry if I’ve been presumptuous anywhere about your life experiences etc. Good luck.
@rv97
Can’t (and have absolutely zero right to) comment on the gender stuff, but for the other stuff you may never convince them. You’re more likely to convince them so far and no further – people being stubborn like that. Won’t lie to you – its a hard slog either way. Worth it, mind.
However, and take this as an encouraging sign – they did back off when you said no in the MLM thing, right? Complained, growled, made a fuss – but they backed off.
So you do go in knowing they are capable of not only being made to back down, but backed down by you.
Luck to you (and there’s some spare stubbornness around here somewhere – we’ve got it by the tanker load)!
@Cyborgette
Thank you. I do admit that maybe as a result of porn, I envy women for how they can and do choose to dress to the point I feel like it’s giving me inappropriate urges (which I’m trying to address with a therapist).
However, even in entirely non-sexual situations, I envy the greater ways in which women can express themselves, even if everyone has to cover up neck down (it can generally come down to the hair they can wear), and I just felt pathetic I could be seen easily as one of the guys (owing to my biology being outwardly male) – one of the best examples for this was my computing classes in school, but some more examples I know of stretch far beyond school, like one occasion at a party for the ethnic community I’m part of, a few occasions at one or two IRC channels and at 2017 when I was at a beach near Irvine, California when meeting a distant relative’s colleagues. In the offline occasions, the women I envied didn’t wear anything that was very revealing, even at the beach when I saw them wear I think long sleeved tops and knee-high shorts.
This is the only way I see women as privileged too, at least in the West; I am aware there’s repressive societal norms held worldwide around women, how they shouldn’t do certain things. I am aware that women are shamed for sleeping around but men are celebrated for doing the same (although I think it’s the case in cultures where sexuality is more openly discussed and/or practiced).
I’m slightly unclear about the patriarchy now at the moment, although I might have to look at it to be clear; this was probably because I’ve seen it being derided as a buzzword while I was bored online for a few years and went to spaces with people whose views ranged from me not really being convinced by them (but still curious out of sheer boredom) to outright hating them – basically, more right wing spaces than Tumblr and when I ventured into Reddit, when I had some time off from Tumblr in the early to mid-2010s, which I deleted for personal reasons. I do think though that the patriarchy manifests itself at the very least in religious fundamentalist teachings, but there’s also this evo psych stuff too. I’ll still try and look this stuff up.
I probably have some more problematic views too which I don’t think I should bring up – I’ve decided to cut myself off from a lot of people for this reason too, at least until I get out of the habit of ranting and if I can sort out my problematic views; I’m just worried if my online therapist can’t fix them because they’d have to be rather neutral about it or something. More on the therapist in a bit.
As a result I feel like I’m a badly imperfect, defective or even a fake leftist in what seems to me over here is like a forum of perfect leftists (or two, if you count Tumblr). I feel like I don’t deserve to be in these spaces, but I’ve already been in one rather predominantly right-wing space and I just spent a lot of time arguing with people about gender in a Discord server that tried to capture people from all over the political spectrum to fight for a certain cause (challenging the EU’s copyright directive), and I don’t think I’d be welcome there too if I were in a similar or more exclusionary online space – I’ve simply avoided the Discord server and the platform itself entirely, since I just tend to rant there regardless of the server.
This therapist is understanding of my inappropriate thoughts, gender issues and relationship issues with family (they’ve signposted me to a counsellor to help with envying women), but I’m worried they might not go beyond that owing to how much they can deal with at a time – I found them already rather generous though in that they were able to offer help on one other topic aside from inappropriate thoughts and urges I might or do have. I still aim to get help if I don’t feel better or become worse after those sessions, hopefully something far more serious – it may make me feel a little better at least if it means I don’t have to be stuck with my parents (i.e. possibly sectioned here in the UK), although it does leave me slightly worried based on some preconceptions I have around being sectioned, which I don’t think I still know about.
@Shadowplay
They’re backing off but this is because I’m studying. I think what will make them back off totally is if I gain financial independence (since I think they talked about trying to get me into it as soon as I finish studyes), because then I can move away from them and not be bound as much by what they insist. Easier said than done, where I am unqualified for a lot of jobs and I live somewhere expensive (which I moved to with my parents when I was 6 years old – my parents were assigned to work in this expensive city as part of a work program the NHS here in the UK were doing).
I quit reading HP at book 6 as well… but in my case it was more because Rowling had said before book 6 came out ‘someone will die’, and after having read the end of book 5, I knew exactly who it would be (correctly). Very standard storytelling patterns. She blatantly gave herself an excuse at the end of book 5 to kill off this person in book 6.
That was the point at which I realized ‘there’s an interesting world here, but it really requires an author who isn’t in love with her own cleverness to write it’.
And, as others have pointed out, her world is far from unproblematic.
So, I’ll throw a bit more fuel on the language pile:
“Wizardess” is an actual word, albeit one now obscure. So people did used to have a separation of “magic traditions” which weren’t completely gender-specific, if still highly gender-segregated.
Male witches existed conceptually (if less common) and were either “witches” or “warlocks”. Of course, “warlock” originally meant “renegade/heretical druid”.
My experience with mythology and older fantasy literature seems to indicate that “sorcerer/sorceress” has connotations of usually uncaring and petty, sometimes spiteful or vengeful, but generally not outright evil unless it’s a “magic corrupts” setting. Basically neutral and non-heroic. YMMV, as I’ve hardly read everything out there.
“Thaumaturge” basically means “miracle worker” and usually has positive connotations, if any. It’s occasionally used as a generic word for spell-user. I’m not sure if it’s gendered in the original greek. A quick check of online images seems to indicate around 2/3 male and 1/3 female.
Fantasy gaming communities seem to be pushing for terms like Wizard, Witch, Warlock, Sorceror, ect. to be considered neuter terms. This doesn’t seem to have filtered much into the general public yet, and definitely doesn’t show up in products and images aimed at mainstream culture.
@MoonHuntress
My experience has been similar (though reversed)…. femininity has been something I’ve been “required” to wear and a role I was forced to play. I hated dresses, hated heels, hated always feeling restricted into the “lady” role that I was told I had to fill. I only wore lipstick and dresses and such when obligated and never thought I looked right but just sort of copied whatever other people told me looked good. Nothing about it felt liberating*. Giving birth to my daughter had been my last hope of finally feeling “at home” in a feminine role and the fact it didn’t help was the last straw that told me I just don’t belong in that box. But even then, I didn’t know what trans was, I just sort of floated along wishing I could just gather the courage to kill myself and be done with it because after close to 40 years I was fucking done.
And then I discovered drag kings, and then I realized THAT reflection, when I was dressed and made up for that role, fit me much better. *Sometimes complete with guyliner and flashy jewelry or a sequined suit, because I’m a flamboyant guy, and then it DOES feel liberating in that context.
Bottom line is, I guess, that if the gender role is wrong for you, it will ALWAYS feel too restrictive. So be yourself. <3
@rv97
For me, when I was a child I always wanted to grow my hair long, but my mother never allowed it. It’s possible that that contributed to dysphoria. When I was 17, I convinced her to let me grow it out (she thought this was a phase despite the fact that I’d been asking to do this since I was 4), and I haven’t cut it since. Even though I didn’t realize that I was trans* at the time, in some ways growing my hair out was the first part of my transition.
The patriarchy is definitely real, and learning about it is definitely a good idea because it’s important to know the enemy. I’m not an expert on online feminist resources, so does anyone have any starter-level ones?
None of us are perfect, but the best way to become better at political thought is to study and learn. Does anyone have good resources?
Patriarchy is a concept explaining a load of things. It’s “real” insofar as the theory of evolution is real. AKA it’s not that there is an actual secret society of men who enforce misogyny, but more that it’s a cloud of various biases, cliches and shortcut that have a lot of bad effect, including, but not limited to, institutional misogyny.
Or, said otherwise : the patriarchy is the umbrella term for the result of the sum of a lot of small, self-reinforcing behaviors, and working against the patriarchy is working against thoses individual behaviors.
This is not a privilege that women have. We are expected to have very specific hair styles that take a lot of time and/or expensive product to maintain. We can’t get a male-coded haircut or even a gender-neutral cut without hurting our employment prospects. We’re given what appears to be a wide range of clothing choices, but given vague language to describe what we are and aren’t allowed to wear, and if we’re larger will get told we’re “unprofessional” for wearing the exact same clothes as someone thinner. When inquiring about dress codes, we’re often told something vague like “business casual” (which is a range where a company on one end could have absolutely no overlap with a company on the other end for what is acceptable), and if we ask for more details we’ll be told something like “polo shirts and khakis, or the female equivalent.” No, I still haven’t figured out the female equivalent of polos and khakis. And before you say we can dress to the higher end, that can hurt us, too, if we dress too fancy for the position we’re interviewing for. Our shoe choices are generally restricted to styles that cause pain and/or damage to our feet, and if we’re physically incapable of wearing those kinds of shoes, we’re considered unprofessional for it.
And that’s without even getting into the ways in which women are supposedly flirting and/or “asking for it” by what we wear or how we wear our hair and/or makeup. Women are not privileged. Gtfoh with that bullshit.
Patriarchy isn’t a conspiracy that every man is in on. However, it’s not sum accident of biases either. There are plenty of men who very, very deliberately act in ways that reinforce their privilege. No system of injustice is maintained on accident. It’s always their by the choices of the people with the power.
@WWTH
There are also many people who reinforce it unconsciously through their actions by what they have been socialized to do. Even if they don’t realize it, they are playing right into the hands of the patriarchy. Mostly men, but even some women inadvertently support it.
Indeed, that’s a big part of how patriarchy (and other systems of oppression) perpetuates itself: acting in a socially normative fashion means acting in ways that reinforce it.
I’m not stupid. I’m well aware that people reinforce bias unconsciously. But I’m not going to pretend like men don’t consciously do things to keep it in place. For example, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. There were plenty of right wing judges that could’ve replaced him. But Trump doubled down on him when it was made public that he was a sexual predator. And millions of men gleefully followed his lead. It was all about proclaiming dominance over women. All about showing us we have to stay in our place, that we don’t matter. This was not unconscious bias. This was vicious, deliberate misogyny.
And yes, women uphold patriarchy. Going along with patriarchy is a time honored survival strategy women. It pisses me off that they do it and I call out misogyny from women when I see and hear it. But I’m not going to both sides patriarchy. It men who mainly are responsible for it.