By David Futrelle
There are a lot of people who try to leave comments here that break most of the rules of the site. Some of the comments are just plain annoying or offensive; others have a certain spark of weirdness to them that inspires me, if not to let them through moderation, then to present them to you all.
Today’s is one of the weirdest I’ve gotten so far, from a fellow who evidently thinks he has figured out a way to make both incels and trans women happy at the same time. How, you wonder, probably imagining the worst. I’m just going to let him try to explain.
Why can’t you just put transwomen or effeminate boys to become women through a state mandated girlfriend or wife program so that lonely men can have somebody and not be by themselves?
You know that no actual women born that way would be involved and you could still do as you want?
Most effeminate boys will not be accepted by any job anyway and are poor as heck. They are better off having their sex changed and assigned to men to balance out the lack of partners or women for men. Especially if you know that ‘transwomen’ could be able to have children of their own soon.
Why not give them a husband who can provide for them as well as give them a place to live?
So, yeah, big “yikes” for this one.
I’m not sure if this guy is trolling or not, but either way this is quite an extraordinary example of whatever the hell it is.
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@PoM
So it’s a revival of political lesbianism and female separatism crossed with MGTOW? It sounds a bit reminiscent of Valerie Solanas. I haven’t encountered this before, and it seems I’m fortunate in that regard. I do recall some TERFs shilling for a female separatist subreddit a while back, I’m not sure if that would be in the same category because it was invitation only so I couldn’t see it. It’s good that this got banned seeing as pretty much any sex essentialist ideology is also laced with misogyny in addition to the obvious transphobia, but it would be better if r/TRP were banned, as that is a far more popular subreddit with way more real-world consequences.
@Naglfar
Pink pill is much, much more toxic than your standard political lesbianism, and the political lesbianism is a very small part of their daily conversation. Like MGTOWs in reverse, most of their time is spent discussing the evils of men and obsessing about men, and very little time is spent discussing the GTOW part.
@PoM
I wonder if Julie Bindel is connected to the pink pill. She does much of the same, professing the evil of men, trans* people, and heterosexual and bisexual cis women yet never actually doing much to improve the lot of women. JK Rowling is a fan of her.
I also checked and there is a Reddit community called r/WGTOW. It is what it sounds like and has yet to be banned. There is also a r/PinkPill, but it doesn’t have any posts other than one from a mod 4 years ago introducing themself.
@Naglfar
The big (for some definition of the term big) subreddit for the pink pill was r/PinkPillFeminism. It doesn’t come up on the list when I search for it anymore, but now that I think about it, I can’t tell if it was outright banned or just closed by the mods. Either way, its reach has been severely curtailed.
In addition to all thoses transphobes getting banned, r/TheDonald have been closed, and the twitch account of Trump have been suspended.
Today silver lining us exhalirating, even if we are a long way from success.
What was wrong with the Chapo Trap House subreddit?
Personally I think RedPill and MGTOW are dead subreddits walking, as the saying goes. I’ve always thought of them as similar to GC, insofar as they adhere to a hateful ideology but aren’t “performatively” hateful like eg incels or some of the old racist/alt-right subs, and they tend to toe Reddit’s TOS regarding brigading, harassment, etc. Now that GC’s gone, those two are sure to follow.
I suspect MensRights will survive this round of bans, however. They just aren’t as egregious, either in their behavior or ideology.
@PoM
Checking now, it looks like r/PinkPillFeminism still exists but is invitation only. The message shown to non-invited users reads:
So it’s there, but they’ve made it private. Not sure if they were private before, but a number of other TERF subs like r/TrollGC have gone private in the hopes of evading bans.
The message sounds eerily similar to the alt right and incels with the references to lookism and the part at the end about it being satire for plausible deniability.
@Aaron
I would guess antisemitism and other bigotries, the Chapo hosts have a love of “edgy” jokes about Jews and various other minorities that sound quite similar to the alt right. And they use a lot of the same defenses as the alt right by claiming it’s all a joke. This is a general issue with the dirtbag left.
@Naglfar
Ahh, so it’s just closed. They’ve been complaining recently about getting repeatedly reported, so this is an obvious ploy to avoid a ban. It doesn’t show up when I search for it, though.
The sub description also mentions that it is a kink subreddit. It’s not, but they have the idea that kink subreddits are immune to bans. Same idea with the satire reference.
Oh, I forgot to mention another of their cute terminology: they call women who aren’t separatists “pickmes.”
@PoM
Where did they get that idea? That’s just weird. It sounds like they’re pretty desperate at this point.
It’s also odd because a lot of radical feminists are anti-BDSM and anti-kink, I guess because those things are depicted in porn and they don’t realize/don’t like that many people do them in their own lives for pleasure.
I assume this is used the same as how other TERFs use “handmaidens”? The thing that I find funny about TERFs calling women “handmaidens” is twofold: a) the book calls them “handmaids” without the “en” at the end yet TERFs seem to overwhelmingly use the former (as in the description above), and b) the handmaids rebel against Gilead, so it doesn’t really make sense as an insult.
I’m just going to be straight here and say that the mantra “your kink is not my kink but your kink is OK” is awful, because some kinks are awful and should not be tolerated. Just because something is a kink doesn’t make it automatically OK or even something that we all should be open-minded about. Making someone hard or wet is not the measure of morality here.
But there are a fuckton of people for whom that is a heretical and downright toxic stance. Reddit admin seem to be among them, and some really, really dangerous shit has been tolerated on reddit under the excuse that it’s “kink.” So their idea that something otherwise bad might get a pass if it’s under the aegis of “kink” is not entirely unfounded. It’s just not the magic word they think it is.
Are you sure they’re getting the word “handmaiden” from The Handmaid’s Tale? The word has a meaning outside that.
I don’t know how TERFs use “handmaiden” but a pickme is a woman who wants men to like her. She wants men to “pick me” and is willing to act against what pinkpillers believe to be a woman’s nature in order to attract male attention. Pickme’s are basically gender traitors lol.
…Once again, I am left thinking “Jesus Christ, how horrifying” at the thought processes of these turds. Best-case scenario is that he’s a troll using Poe’s Law, but given all of the absurd/horrible ideas I’ve seen from these chuds it’s still depressingly plausible he’s being genuine. I’d say the silver lining here is that he’s not transphobic, but given that he basically wants trans women to become sex slaves (not to mention to also force-transition effeminate men so they also become sex slaves, FFS), I’d be wrong.
Also Ye Olde Classick chesnut whereas all trans women are heterosexual. Ugh. This whole thing is just fractal in its wrongness.
“And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”
Eric Idle, The Galaxy Song, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
@PoM
To be clear, I am not advocating that mantra, and I apologize if any of my comments seemed to suggest it. I did not mean to state that.
But yes, point taken re: Reddit moderation, Reddit mods are really very willing to support problem behavior and look for every excuse to do so.
They might not be getting it from there, but I assumed they were because I have heard others suggest that they were. Apologies if I was inadvertently misleading.
TERFs generally use “handmaiden” to refer to a cis woman who supports trans* people in any way or just doesn’t oppose trans* existence. So similar in the sense of being implied to be a gender traitor, but for different reasons.
@Paireon
Or the assumption that any trans* woman, attracted to men or not, would want to be with an incel. I am bisexual and am attracted to men, but I am repulsed by the idea of having sex with incels. I would assume most women, cis or trans*, regardless of sexuality, feel the same.
They didn’t. I just didn’t want to get into a discussion about kink on a misunderstanding, though. Many people feel very strongly about kink, and so do I, although not in the typical way. No need to apologize, and I apologize if I came across as aggressive with that.
Oh, so that’s me then. OK! 😀
@PoM
Nor did I, I just thought that one thing in the subreddit description was weird. Thank you for clarifying, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t accidentally implying something I didn’t mean.
@Naglfar
How do transplanted uteruses work vis-a-vis the DNA of the baby? Is the egg still coming from the person who received the uterus transplant, or is the baby technically the offspring of the donor? Actually, can someone give birth with a transplanted uterus at all or is it done to avoid other issues?
“Pickme” is a common term that I’ve seen used by non shitty people. It’s just that it’s normally synonymous with “cool girl” or “chill girl” and meant to be used for women who are full of internalized misogyny. It’s for the “I’m not like other girls” woman.
Apparently the pink pill is trying to appropriate it to mean any woman who isn’t in their group.
@Talonknife
The only transplants to date have been with cis women who were born without uteruses or lost theirs to disease. They all had ovaries and AFAIK the offspring born in the cases where possible were all from the mother’s own eggs rather than the donors. There have been a couple cases of successful births delivered by C section, so it is possible. It has been suggested that if a trans* woman were to receive a uterus transplant, the pregnancy would use preserved sperm if she had preserved some, or donor sperm if not, and a donor egg.
An ex-friend of mine (who is a cis woman) wrote a novel last year, which she generously describes as a supernatural gay romance, but which I am given to understand is just bad vampire yaoi with lots of deeply problematic sexual content. Anyway, the main character is a tiny, delicate, feminine boy whose mother forces him to dress like a woman because reasons, and he is aggressively lusted after by all the other men in the whole book.
I bring this up purely because, weirdly, I think this dude may be on the same wavelength as said ex-friend.
All this TERFstuff about the acceptance of transgender women as women, whether or not they have/had penises, being somehow some kind of attack on the womanhood of cisgender women reminds me so, so, so much of all the pre-Obergefell homophobic wailing that allowing same-sex marriage would somehow devalue heterosexual marriage.
It’s a socially designated category on which society is allowed to change the qualifying criteria. That’s all. It doesn’t change your own personal biology or relationships.
It doesn’t somehow take away your “woman card” if a trans woman is also considered to have a “woman card”, any more than it somehow invalidates your marriage license if same-sex couples are also allowed to get a marriage license.
Yeah, I’m going to pass on being an incel’s sex slave
@Kimstu
Not only that, but TERFs tend to use a lot of the same rhetoric that was used against gay people in the past. They’re also a lot of the same people who realized they could still be openly transphobic and face less backlash than being openly homophobic.
@Sillabub
Would you care to tell us this the title of this work of… I hesitate to say “literature?” I’m morbidly curious how bad it could possibly be.
@Cyborgette, first thing I thought of too was The Female Man! That section of the book is the most fucked-up part, IMO.
@Cat Mara
Yeah it’s pretty bizarre, and misunderstands trans people rather badly. (Though at least it’s sympathetic?) But looking at stuff like this… Well. Russ knew what she was talking about as far as patriarchy.
Confession: The Female Man is one of my problematic faves, and I should really reread it soon.
@Naglfar: In my limited understanding of such things (currently the fine folks here are my primary source as you often talk about things I wasn’t aware of previously, and often do a bit of research afterwards to further inform myself but I still have some pretty big gaps IMO), I thought that many (though by no means all) TERFs, especially in the early years of the movement, were lesbian separatists, female supremacists and other types of mostly-genuine-but-extremist feminists; was I wrong?
(I recognize that the current iteration of the movement seems to have been mostly taken over by more “mainstream” -as in there’s more of them and they’re accepted by larger segments of the general public- mostly right-of-center transphobic women whose actual feminism is rather performative though)