By David Futrelle
One thing I’ve learned doing this blog lo these many years is that hate looks like hate, no matter what kind it is: Misogyny looks like racism; racism looks like antisemitism; antisemitism looks like homophobia. While these different forms of bigotry aren’t identical by any means, they do share many of the same tropes; a misogynist complaining we live in a “gynocracy” secretly controlled by women, for example, sounds a lot like an antisemite peddling some updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I’ve also learned that these various varieties of hate sound remarkably similar even when they’re being promulgated by people who are ostensibly on the opposite ends of the political spectrum: the transphobia promoted by women who consider themselves both radical and feminist sounds a lot like the transphobia promoted by those on the far, far right.
I’d like to illustrate this last point with a little experiment in the form of a quiz.
Take a look at the quotes below. Some are from the Gender Critical subreddit, Reddit’s main forum for trans-exclusionary “radical feminists.” (All of them garnered multiple upvotes from other “Gender Critical” Redditors, with several getting well over 100 upvotes.) The rest of the quotes are from articles in the neo-Nazi internet tabloid The Daily Stormer, one of the most gleefully bigoted sites on the internet. See if you can tell which quotes come from which of these two sources.
The answers are below, or you can just click on the quotes, which are linked to their sources.
I) “If a man cuts his dick off, he’s still just a man.”
Answers: A) Daily Stormer; B) Gender Critical subreddit; C) GC; D) DS; E) GC; F) GC; G) DS; H) GC; I) DS; J) DS
How’d you do?
If it’s any consolation, I had to doublecheck a few of these to make sure I was correctly remembering where they originated.
Hate sounds like hate, no matter where it’s coming from.
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@Oppga
I can’t read minds. Consequently, I can’t know what will cause someone to not want to have sex with me. For example, I have anxiety. Most people probably wouldn’t find that to be a turn-off, but someone could, so should I have to disclose it even if it’s pretty much irrelevant to the sex? By extension, should everyone have to present a complete report on every minor detail of their life and personality before sex?
And like not to in any way imply that rape by deception isn’t a thing. A spy having relations with an unknowing partner, under a false pretense and assumed identity? Is absolutely rape, and causes real trauma. Being a serial cheater and hiding it from your partner (hi Joss Whedon) might not be taken as rape, but regardless it’s absolutely traumatic and absolutely abusive.
But those are whole other levels of deception and manipulation from the things women have to hide to protect themselves under patriarchy.
So, I should take care to educate myself on the local bigotries generally, and the potential partner’s hangups specifically, and make sure that I validate them by giving the potential partner information the revelation of which, demonstrably, might lead to them assaulting me. Cool, cool. That sounds equitable and workable. (/sarcasm)
Grace
@Naglfar
As someone who gets hate-tweets from people identifying as gender-critical for supposedly coining the term “TERF” (and sometimes hate-tweets from folks who mistakenly believe that I’m a TERF myself), that’s not exactly how I remember the conversations that led to the acronym.
Radfems defending MichFest’s trans-exclusion WBW-only policy objected to being called transphobes, so various progressive radfems & intersectional feminists criticising MichFest’s trans-excluding policy modified our descriptor to trans-excluding/exclusionary for the sake of keeping the discussion on track, and they grudgingly acknowledged the term as an accurate description of the MichFest stance.
The acronym came about some short while later because “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” takes a long time to type out. It took a rather longer while before transphobes starting objecting to it as a slur, certainly.