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daily stormer empathy deficit misogyny TERFs transmisogyny transphobia

Quiz: Who said it — A “Gender Critical” Redditor, or The Daily Stormer?

Not such strange bedfellows

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.

A) “The wise people in the UK government think that someone who is so mentally ill that he mutilated his body into looking like a parody of the opposite sex is fit to practice medicine.”

B) “A straight man is well within his right to beat up a trans woman who deceives him completely about their sex before having sex. That’s super fucked up.”

C) “I’ve said it before, but any man capable of fucking a wound cavity [neo-vagina] just isn’t right in the head.”

D) “Who could have predicted that cutting up a part of someone’s body to make a fake parody organ for them would very often cause the fake parody organ to not work properly?”

E) “I think trans may well be a mass social control experiment or, at least, this is one of the serious functions it serves.”

F) So out of curiosity, to get into the mind of a ‘trans girl’, I thought I’d browse some sub reddits and regretted it immediately. Most of them are toxic places full of egotistical, perverted men enforcing porn like stereo types 

G) [P]umping children with hormones is worse than any form of child molestation. There are a lot of people who get over being molested as children and move on with their lives, but no one is ever going to get over having their endocrine system completely destroyed with injections before they hit puberty.

H) Bruce Jenner’s surgeries have made him a misogynist caricature of a woman … The vanity fair image where he is dressed up in stereotypical feminine attire, with plastic surgery that has made him look like a mannequin. Good job liberal feminists, this is what you’ve spawned; a mutant man who pretends he’s a woman … .

I) “If a man cuts his dick off, he’s still just a man.”

J) “if you’re a woman athlete and you just got second place to a “fellow woman” with a bulge between “her” legs, do the bare minimum and show us that it actually bothers you.”

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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Naglfar
Naglfar
4 years ago

@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?

Cyborgette
Cyborgette
4 years ago

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.

Grace Annam
Grace Annam
4 years ago

Anything that has a liklihood of effecting the decision making of the person involved, whether ot not I would care about the same thing, whether or not I remotely agree with caring about that thing, or whether or not I deem such person an ass for caring.

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

tigtog
4 years ago

@Naglfar

@Surplus

Considering that TERFs originally called themselves “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” and the acronym, I’d say that counts as an own-goal.

They all like to conveniently forget that they cane up with the term…

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.

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