By David Futrelle
So I’ve done it: I’ve found the weirdest and most delusional take on the Coronavirus yet, and it comes not from the incels or the MGTOWs or the Trump administration but rather from the “Gender Critical” subreddit, the main hangout of Reddit’s TERFs.
You may need a stiff drink to get through the whole post.
“With so many people forced to work from home,” someone called itsnotaboutewe began.
we should spare a thought for all the TIMs who are now unable to receive outside validation for their delusions.
Just remember that “TIM,” in TERF-speak, means “Trans-Identified Male,” i.e. what the rest of us know as a trans woman.
What happens to the man who calls himself a woman and who usually wears makeup, heels, and a smart pencil skirt to work when he no longer has an audience for his performance?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say “nothing.” Nothing happens to trans women that doesn’t happen to anyone else forced to work at home.
Does he sit in front of his home computer in pyjama bottoms without his wig and cry into his coffee because he hasn’t been told by co-workers how lovely he looks this morning?
If there’s any crying into coffee going on it might have to do with the fact that we’re in the midst of a horrifying and surreal global pandemic that could easily kill as many as 1.7 million Americans and millions more across the world, not to mention leaving billions in precarious financial situations. That all makes me a bit sad.
How will they cope without the constant validation they need to function as mentally ill misogynistic men in a society that no longer prioritises them?
Yes, the people who have to fight for the right to use the correct public bathrooms are truly the “prioritized” ones in contemporary society.
Does the fact that way more males than females are dying from covid-19 plunge their self identification into turmoil?
I”m going to say no.
Due to the different death rates between the sexes, and the fact that this virus doesn’t give a shit about how you self-identify, I think coronavirus has feminist leanings and is more than a bit terfy.
Yes, that’s right, a TERF has just declared that the coronavirus is also a TERF, because it kills more men than women and makes trans women sad.
Again, I’m not saying this; a TERF is saying this.
Itsnotaboutewe’s post got some 800 upvotes on the so-called Gender Critical subreddit, and inspired more than a hundred comments, many of which are as unlovely and nonsensical as the original post:
According to Artemis_Jade,
The OP’s question is very valid. Trans comes down to “I want to be TREATED as if I were the opposite sex.” So then, is it possible to be trans if you are alone on a desert island?
c1ar3 joked
If a trans falls in a forest and no one is around to hear xer, does xe make a sound?
tervacious made the same joke:
This gave me the giggles. If a tree falls in the ladies toilets, does it make a trans sound?
jennywhistle agreed
This is what I hate about transgenderism. They can’t deny it wouldn’t exist in a vacuum. All that matters is how everyone else sees you.
soundsfromoutside sounded more than a little like an incel or a MGTOW hungering for the apocalypse because they think it will return society back to its “normal” gender roles:
This pandemic and economic crash is going to wake a lot of people up to reality. We had too much time on our hands, we were comfortable, we were spoiled-all of us. We worried about shit that didn’t matter, fought over things that led up to nothing.
Now, we are right back to our primitive roots: survival. Food, medicine, our families, our safety. We are going to see a rise in deaths, a rise a crime. We aren’t going to be worried about who is wearing what when our parents and grandparents are in the hospital. Pronouns, names, clothing, these are all nonproblems now (undoubtedly, some people will still try to make this about them).
This gleeful celebration of other people’s (imagined) misery is not really a good look, Gender Crits — especially when you’re trying to pretend to be a progressive civil rights movement, much as the Men’s Rights Activists do.
I found only one comment in the thread that took serious issue with the OP. Someone called 54321_Sun wrote:
This is rude and bullying, and beneath gender critical thought, I hope.
I come to this sub to feel validated, but when I see things like this, I start to get sick to my stomach, because I know that these type of posts can be used against us, rightfully so.
Naturally, the other Gender Crits voted this comment down below zero, because that’s what happens in a hate subreddit when anyone expresses similar concerns.
Bigoted assholes don’t like to be told not to be bigoted assholes, I guess.
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So, since I posted about it moments before the appropriate thread opened up, I’m going to reiterate here: When there’s a gender-correlated health difference, it’s usually (but not always) correlated more to hormone levels than anything else. So what if trans women who are on hormones don’t end up with the higher mortality levels associated with men?
Not that we’re likely to ever know. But they could be stupidly wrong on that point, regardless, invalidating the whole thing before any of the other stupid comes into play.
Actually, I think this is the most delusional take so far (using imgur for the sake of not wanting to look at the comments, the first post is already refined insanity):
https://imgur.com/a/qKhJCfV
How many boxes does this check off on the conspiracy theory bingo card?
@Snowberry
Yeah, in this case it may (IIRC?) be related to 2 copies of the X chromosome resulting in more ACE2 receptors in the lungs, which would mean most of us don’t get that protection.
I’d expect many trans people are at heightened risk regardless though. There’s a really wide intersection of transness and chronic illness IME, probably in part from all the developmental trauma. I’ve been keeping a close eye on my trans + disabled friends, and checking in with them regularly.
(On which note? The way these bigots throw around “mentally ill” as a value judgment makes me almost as sick as their transphobia. They always sound like they’re just a drink or two away from calling us “degenerate” or “subhuman” – the Nazi heritage of their beliefs shows through very clearly IMO.)
Blank. Image Picker (a Firefox extension) says “no images found”.
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So, one recently-out (to some of us, I’m honored she chose me) friend of mine posted a picture of herself to Facebook, and she looks fabulous and we told her so.
What’s this about not having validation from others because of quarantine? Have they not heard of the internet?
So… Trump created coronavirus to drive out the reptillians, enforce socialism, and set up Earth to be admitted into the galactic civilization. Sure. Okay. ?
Regardless of gender, I think most people don’t want to get sick. Even if I were a cis woman I still think I’d be taking the same precautions not to get the coronavirus.
A couple things here:
1. If your movement finds commonality with a virus, that might be a sign you really need to re-evaluate your life.
2. I thought they were trying to claim TERF is a slur. Now it’s an honorific for viruses? So it’s not a slur?
New idea: send all the TERFs to a desert island. Just an idea.
Uh, no? I don’t cease to be trans* if someone doesn’t see me.
Even if society collapses, I still think we’re going to use pronouns and names and clothing. It’s hard to keep track of who is being referred to without names, without pronouns sentences get quite redundant, and without clothing I’m cold and naked.
Then you are in the wrong place.
@Cyborgette
It’s also evident in their projection—Glinner and friends love to call us Nazis. And I’m not even sure it would take a drink: Posie Parker looked pretty sober when she appeared with Jean-François Gariépy.
Yes, there’s a global pandemic going on, and the thing these people decide is important is imagining that trans women are miserable because no one is at the office to tell them they’re pretty.
Good. God.
But, I thought that the zombie/hurricane/global warming/global pandemic end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it crisis were going to prove once and for all, the absolute natural fact that “Men were Men” and “Women were really Good at Housework”……….and at wearing make-up, aprons and push-up bras.”
Now, it seems, that a global crisis will dispense with all the artifices that society uses to define “femininity”.
MRA logic shifts more than a windsock in a tornado.
Anonymous, you’re right, I forgot about the reptilians.
Well, I didn’t forget about the reptilians. I NEVER forget about the reptilians! But I thought that the reptilians were going to be our galactic overlords? I was quite looking forward to overlords who can lick their own eyeballs with their tongues. What a disappointment that they’re instead going to be driven out.
@Naglfar
Meme I saw said “They told me a mask and gloves were enough for a trip tp the grocery store, but they lied. Everyone else was wearing clothes too.” Anyway, while there are a few regions on Earth where people can go about naked all year without dying of exposure, most people don’t live in them.
The interesting thing about anti-trans discourse — any discourse in favor of the status quo for that matter — is how deeply it fails to examine broader society and the experiences of the transphobia in question with the same critical lens. Like, sure, even though a trans identity is a personal thing that exists whether or not it’s validated in public, most people still put stock in how they’re perceived. Just like literally everyone who participates in society, cis or trans, gender-conforming or not. Trans people wouldn’t exist if society didn’t, but neither would cis people because gender as a concept wouldn’t exist. Every single person is affected by how their gender is validated by others, including the people on that sub. The only difference is that trans and gender non-conforming people tend to be invalidated more, which makes any positive reinforcement that much more valuable relatively.
Pretty much all forms of social conservatism seem to stem from not understanding that 1) we live in a society and 2) having empathy for people improves the society you have to live in.
@Perry
Of course. The main difference is that most of the transphobes above are probably used to having their gender recognized and validated regularly. This might be why they don’t understand what it feels like to not be validated, and I’ve seen many transphobes online and IRL get very angry when misgendered despite deliberately misgendering trans* people themselves.
If I, a cis woman am still a woman while I’m working from home in my pajamas looking a mess, I don’t really know why trans women can’t still be women while working from home looking a mess.
So close to getting it. Yet so far away.
I “love” that the disagreeing commentor’s concern is not so much “this is a bad thing to say” as it is “this could be used to make us look bad.”
Really shows how morally bankrupt TERFs are, doesn’t it? Even the “don’t say that” TERFs are just concerned with saying “that” where other people can see it.
@Anonymous I find it funny that whoever came up with that conspiracy theory thinks that superpowerful elites will somehow be stopped by travel bans between countries. The whole point about being part of the supposed superpowerful elite is that you can do whatever the hell you want.
AFAIK the difference between male and female cases is only reported from China, where there is a huge gap in smoking rates between the sexes. It would seem to be a behavioral difference; I haven’t seen any evidence that it is replicated where smoking levels are more equal.
@David Futrelle
Hi Dave! I will say the TERFS did their best, but they just can’t keep up with the really gross madness that comes from the deeply paranoid.
I almost forgot to clarify one thing since odds are nobody else here would have known it either (I sure didn’t): the “adrenochrome” that image is rambling about is basically just adrenaline that’s been oxidized. Back in the 50s-60s, a couple of Timothy Leary wannabes theorized that it had LSD-like properties (it doesn’t) and that schizophrenics had an excess of the stuff in their bodies (they don’t).Hunter S. Thompson ran with that in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, someone saw the part in the movie version where Dr. Gonzo said it could only be harvested from the adrenal glands of terrorized children, and somehow this bastard child of the blood libel myth and the Saw movies got attached to the whole QAnon clusterfuck.
You just gotta love crank magnetism some days, if only as an object of derisive laughter.
Granted, they’re not entirely wrong, though what marginal claims on rightness they have are for the wrong reasons. I’ve run into at least one trans woman who is sad (actually more mad) about the coronavirus. But that’s because the current health crisis is causing non-essential health care access to be de-prioritised, and not everybody considers HRT to be essential.
Dave has been highlighting a lot of people lately who have found a supposed silver lining to this pandemic that has killed thousands of people and will go on to kill many more. Maybe, just maybe, there is no silver lining to a global health crisis that leaves bodies in its wake. Maybe if someone is thinking, “Hey, the virus is bad, but –” they should stop thinking that immediately and maybe take a nap or something.
Is this funny even if you are a TERF? It’s awkward and doesn’t make any sense. If you are a TERF and you’re reading this, don’t tell me if this is funny because I don’t care to know what you think on that subject or any other.
And he hasn’t even gotten to the eco-fascists yet!
Here’s an article about how one particular trans woman and her husband are going through a hard time because of Covid-19. The writing is lovely and sad, and because I too live in San Francisco, I understand all too well the economics of their situation and their love for our beautiful city.
The Week the Dream Sank
Joan Summers
https://jezebel.com/the-week-the-dream-sank-1842381638
So. Much. Projection.
I’m a trans guy currently in isolation in a fairly remote cabin. (This is a result of being immunocompromised and having access to a cabin.)
I haven’t seen anyone for days. I am currently wearing “women’s” clothes (as much as pyjamas and a hoodie can be considered gendered). Right now I have zero external validation of my gender. I could be on a desert island.
Yeah, I’m still trans. I still live in a body, one that is now fairly congruent with my internal sense of self, and which only produces background dysphoria. My being transgender would exist in a vacuum. I know other trans* people for whom social dysphoria is much worse than it is for me, and perhaps away from society it’s easier to deal with. But we’re still trans.