via
https://ift.tt/2RK2YITbaeddel:
ladyisak:
corkysdebt:
ladyisak:
i will physically fight people who try to act like “baeddel discourse” is anything other than a way to yell at trans women you don’t like.
gotta disagree with you, maybe i don’t necessarily agree with them at times but i don’t think that’s what baeddel discourse is about at all
“baeddels” were a semi-coherent grouping of largely early-20s if not late teens trans women in shitty situations who were responding to stress and marginalisation the only way they could at the time. as a group, they’re gone. the username trend is over. not a single one of the people involved espouses some of the more radical views they co-signed five years ago that keep getting trotted out as proof that some trans woman somewhere had a rude thought about a man.
the fact is, most of their spicy takes about The AFABs were not nearly as bad or galaxy-brain as the modern cis-driven “trans men are nothing like cis men and are actually more like cis women in every way possible” bollocks. “AFAB privilege” as a concept was trying to address a real existing problem within queer communities; it was an inadequate theory and a framing that reified assignment, but at the time, assignment looked like a new, ungendered way of talking about bodies and experiences that was free from the cissexist baggage of “female/male-bodied”, the term that preceded C/ASAB.
now, AFAB privilege as a concept was lacking bc it failed to address the very real hostility, homophobia and transphobia towards certain AFAB trans people who were also seen to be too proximate to faggotry for comfort, namely GNC gay trans men and it failed to address the degendering and transphobia of online queer communities’ interactions with transmasculine bodies by constantly framing them as anything other than male.
and i’m not surprised those weren’t the focus, bc the “baeddels” were largely not in those communities, bc the same queer communities that try to stop transmascs from transitioning also kick out anyone they see who’s transfeminine, a GNC man of whatever transition status or some variation of proximity to either of those. i don’t see how anyone making AFAB privilege discourse would’ve been able to see what went on behind closed doors of seeming transmasc acceptance. moreover, cis people have always been very interested in reifying a “divide” between transmasculine and transfeminine, conceptualising the two as inherently philosophically opposed and attempting to erase the very real points of solidarity we have.
ultimately, the power differential baeddles called “AFAB privilege” does exist, but it falls along not assignment categories but a more ineffable, harder-to-explain line: proximity to faggotry. proximity to being the Unman, the should-be-a-man who has denied manhood, whether through being transfeminine or through being gender nonconforming and/or attracted to men. anyone on whom the stipulation to be a man falls can turn out a faggot, including trans men.
so like. what the fuck does all of the above amount to? a fucking hill of beans. it’s old-ass discourse that we’ve built on (frankly i don’t think the faggot-as-a-gender/class could’ve happened without some of the women that identified w/ the baeddel grouping five years ago!) and it’s over and done with and the only way it only ever comes up is to chastise trans women for having a thought you disagreed with. there are no baeddels in the sense of “young trans woman espousing transfeminine separatism and adjacent views” any more. so why are we still talking about it? let it fucking be. it’s Over.
this is a rlly good post although I wanted to add a couple things as one of the girls who was there & my perspective:
1. We’re not gone!!!! lol. Were still out here! I’m the only girl from the original gang* who still uses tumblr but the rest are still around. They almost all live in a collective together irl and just don’t use the internet much; some others we aren’t in touch with anymore but I know where to find most of them… To the extent that “no… young trans women [are] espousing transfeminine separatism” - its true only insofar as it was never transfeminine separatism but lesbian separatism (people get this twisted - it wasn’t necessarily exclusive of cis women & there were cis women who contributed to the theory back in the day) and if we aren’t espousing it its because we’ve implemented it with sufficient success. I, at least, still uphold lesbian separatism, but what separatism means is usually not what people think it means, a bugbear thats followed it since the 70s; there is a continuity between the misrepresentation of lezseps in the second wave and the misrepresentation of baeddels today.
*by original gang I mean girls who were around pre-split, which created ‘the baeddels’ as such; there are lots of other girls who sided with us over the years after this who are still on here, are good friends of mine/ours and have a variety of positions…
There was another group of girls who called themselves baeddels, which was a sort of personality cult around a woman called Amy Boyer - this later became called ‘boyerism’ - over facebook groups, and they espoused an ideology of trans separatism, but this was to my knowledge inclusive of cafab trans people and exclusive of cis women; the only thing they really took from us was the name and our dangerous reputation, nothing of our ideas.
2. It is I think uncontestably true that, in regards to our analysis of trans men’s role in patriarchy, the pendulum was swung too far. The line was basically that trans men werent oppressed or marginalized at all and this is obviously not true.
There were a couple of reasons for this: the first is that the state of tumblr discourse was that everything had to fit into a Privilege framework, which was a really impossible framework to work with. b8 & unobject, who were the first ‘on set’, actually already believed the privilege framework was BS but accepted its premise as a kind of gambit in order to defeat the position that trans women had male privilege prior to transition, which was at the time the dominant posiiton, and allowed TERFs & other transmisogynists to operate in tumblr feminist circles with immense ease. They were, to my knowledge, the first on tumblr to advance the position that trans women experience misogyny prior to transition. It was this line that created our gang as a theoretical engine distinct from other trans women on tumblr.
Three things result from this line: I. Trans men militantly opposed the line because of its corollary - that trans men did not experience misogyny prior to transition. (This is typically not remembered by detractors or even allies; we did not simply go out and attack trans men unprovoked, trans men made themselves our opponents and attacked our line themselves.) The struggle over trans men’s pre-transition experience basically still continues in the same way, & saying that trans men did not experience misogyny is still a very controversial statement; most trans men I’ve seen adopt a kind of hybrid line, that trans women and trans men both experience misogyny pre-transition.
II. Becase we were dragged into a conflicting line with trans men, we became a kind of shining beacon for women - both cis and trans - who experienced misogynistic violence & trauma at the hands of trans men and found themselves unable to talk about it in their old communities due to the nature of the discourse around trans men. This amplified the degree to which the discussion centered around trans men and also led to a lot of ad-hoc cathartic argumentation and lashing out.
III. The gambit, in the end, became a trap. The only way to realize an analysis of the different transgender experiences of patriarchy was to hammer it onto a privilege framework where this person was more oppressed than that person for this or that reason, totally disconnected from real life. Therefore, the discourses were focused on articulating why trans men weren’t as oppressed as trans women or cis women and ultimately that they weren’t oppressed; according to the model that was being used, it was the only defensible output, although it was of course incoherent because the model was flawed. We did eventually critique & abandon the privilege model, developing our ideas on different theoretical terrain, but by then no one was paying attention to us because the splits had already happened a long time ago.
3. A lot of what we said about trans men was true. There was a dynamic that permitted trans men to enact misogynist violence on women with relatively little scrutiny. I used to make a joke that in relation to imperialism, Ireland was the Aiden of the world, i.e. Ireland is a country that faces both ongoing colonial devastation while at the same time benefitting from global capital’s accumulation in the third world thru its proximity to the imperialst core. I think this is the correct analysis.
The hurdle was that the privilege framework is ‘binary’ (haw haw), you either oppress someone or you’re oppressed by them. We had to make the decision on wether or not trans men oppress cis women or cis women oppress trans men. We ruled, based on the evidence, that trans men oppress cis women. This failed to capture the very particular dynamic between cis women and trans women - which we’ve seen play out explosively over the past few days, lol - which is something I still find difficult to put words to. I would most likely call it a kind of unstable bargain, a very negotiable situation where different power dynamics can be leveraged depending on the precise factors at play in a given social situation. This kind of analysis was not available to baeddels in 2013 but is available today (but no one asks us now).
4. The extent to which trans men or cafabs were a focus for us is tremendously overstated. Even with all of the above, it was only ever really a tertiary concern, and my memories of our discussions do not feature these subjects especially frequently. For some reason, the conflicts with trans men were the easiest to caricature us with, and this is what public opinion focused on. I really don’t know why, other than perhaps that it was strategically convenient for our enemies to court trans men/cafab friend groups as potentially allies, since we had a soured relationship with them. Perhaps its just as they always say: its the little things you remember the most.
Anyway, thanks for indulging my trip down memory lane :P
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