Bizarre Trick With Egg You'll Be Doing Over And Over Again

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the replies on that post split pretty neatly between

nonbinary lesbians: it’s transphobic to say you’re attracted to nonbinary people because nonbinary isn’t a “third” gender and you can’t tell if someone is nonbinary.

nonbinary non-women: I am a “third” gender actually and you can tell if for example I tell you.

like… people are speaking from completely different experiences and im not saying unaligned nonbinary people have perfect or even good opinions or treat nonbinary lesbians particularly well or respectfully but half the time it seems like nonbinary lesbians aren’t even aware that unaligned nonbinary people exist and certainly aren’t interested in like… creating discourse that acknowledges that we can be real, out, and in love.

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serious opinion, not a condemnation of anyone but just an observation based on some of my own experiences: a number of people who ID as lesbian on tumblr dot com do so for the very valid reasons of

1) they ID and/or align with womanhood and are attracted to women and woman-aligned people,

2) they’re deeply invested in lesbian history and communities

3) they find comfort in labels and communities of and for nonbinary and gender nonconforming lesbians.

they are also attracted to men.

I think it’s completely valid to say “I’m bisexual in terms of attraction but that’s a footnote to the fact that I’m only into dating women/woman-type people as same. I’m deeply invested in lesbian communities and history and I don’t think my attraction to men really matters in terms of that.” and I think that banning anyone who admits any sincere attraction to men from the butch/femme lesbian history clubhouse mostly functions to make people who desperately want to relate to lesbian communities scared of admitting that when they talk about how much they want to fuck video game men they kind of… kind of mean it.

I think bisexually-attracted women and woman-aligned people are at kind of a disadvantage in Community spaces in terms of… not having a lot of history that’s explicitly bi WLW history (that isn’t subsumed into [exclusively] lesbian history) and likewise with terminology and theory and stuff.

I think this could be solved if people would either just 1) be a lot more vocal about bisexuality for a while until that’s firmly established as an equal community on its own terms and serves all the same desires equally well or 2) be ok with political lesbianism from bi women, but of course nobody in human history ever has or ever will “just” and “people” certainly won’t.

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the collapsing of “antis” into a supposedly coherent class is one of the nastiest rhetorical devices in discourse. it more or less literally means “people who are against us, whoever ‘us’ is and whoever they are”.

like its nasty in fandom discourse w/ the equivocation of being against underage shipping/abusive shipping/a host of particular pairings for a variety of reasons/rapefic/'darkfic’, whatever the hell that is*, as though these are somehow all the same issue or even similar? and it leads to people talking like “antis” are a community of people who want all fic to be g-rated vanilla curtainfic forever, as opposed to diverse individuals opposed to specific themes for varying reasons.

*ive seen it used for serial killer AUs, villain aus, fic with relationship violence, fic where bad things happen to a good protag, fic with serious examinations of canonically cartoonish violence, and more

and in Community discourse it’s absolutely fucking wild like… anti what? anti queer, anti ace, anti aro, anti mogai, and what do these all mean? opposed to the actual people, opposed to the terminology, opposed to the ideology? nah just Antis. and as though it’s a nonoverlapping group with, you know, queer, ace, and aro people.

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golbatgender:

Just an expansion of something I said earlier, on my main:

Cis people cannot have a complicated relationship with gender.

They can have complicated relationships with secondary aspects of cisnormativity, such as heteronormativity, racism, ableism, sexism, etc. But if you take those intersections out, a disabled cis person or a non-white cis person or a cis woman does not have a complicated relationship with gender per se. They’ll have issues with the hyper- or de-gendering of their race, or of their specific disability, things like attribution of violence or sexual availability or, heck, penis size or the “autism is an extreme male brain” thing, but not binary gender itself. Admittedly, a non-Straight cis person still might, but that’s because heterosexism is so tied up in seeing anything non-Straight as doing gender wrong; on a certain level, anyone non-Straight is also at least a bit non-cis (and transphobic non-Straight people are just assimilationists), but that’s a tangent for another post.

But denying someone’s transness by calling them “a cis person with a complicated relationship to gender” is actually calling them trans. I mean, give it a couple of years and it’ll be the trans version of the bi character who always “doesn’t like labels,” only actually a bit more of a synonym than a real euphemism. It’s a shitty and avoidant way of saying it, but it’s for sure saying it. Yeah, you think that the person you’re yelling about using a label you don’t like or disagreeing with your exclusionist politics is some sort of creepy invader who doesn’t know what transness is (because you’re a recycled TERF with your head so far up your ass you can’t even see it, pardon my language), but you’re still literally calling them not cis. And unlike gender, cis/trans really is a binary; whether you want to use the word “trans” or not, a person who isn’t cis…isn’t cis.

I disagree with this, or at least this-as-an-absolute-statement, because I think it reifies a binary between cisness and transness that doesn’t reflect a lot of people’s lived experiences. I think there are lots of people who identify as cis and/or don’t identify as trans, who have, indeed, complicated relationships with their gender identity itself, not even just its implications but their identification as a man or woman. I don’t think that it’s inevitable that these people will identify as trans in the future, and I don’t think it’s necessarily desirable.

I’m sort of baffled by what I’m reading as the assertion that racism, ableism, etc. are “secondary aspects of cisnormativity”, to the point that I can’t imagine I’m reading it correctly. i think “if you take those intersections out [their experiences would be different]” is, frankly, a ridiculous thing to say. if you took all of the cells out of my body I would be a skeleton hung with connective tissue, but here in the real world, I’m a breathing human being! people’s experiences, even if they inconveniently contradict your point, are real parts of their lives that can’t just be pulled out like bones from a slice of fish.

on my, at this point maybe fifth or sixth reading of the post, I feel like you’re using “trans” to mean “gender nonconforming in any way” which I just feel is inappropriate.

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my fave criticism of young people who are against or not enthusiastic about voting for Hillary is variations of “well if you think [X] is bad where were you 4-8 years ago/before Hillary was running/etc.” and it’s like. first of all, acting like someone’s political consciousness changing and evolving over time means their newer opinions are fake or illegitimate is kind of Ungreat, and second, I feel like it shows a lack of consciousness of one’s audience to pull this rhetoric on like, 18 year olds. like, unavoidably, it sounds like “if you REALLY cared you would’ve held these opinions since you were twelve!” which is Unconvincing at best.

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shehzadis:

if posts open on saying something vague like “as a(n) ___ person” you dont always need to think its reflective of the entire community op is speaking from. use critical thinking

there are plenty of instances where i’ll read a post regarding some issue relating to me as well (ie op and i are both part of the same community) and then op will overgeneralize about the feelings in said community (often in direct conflict w my own feelings) and i know its just someone trying to politicize their preferences or views and attempt to make thinking otherwise some kind of oppressive. 

and then pretty well meaning people will spread the message and try to adjust around it bc they feel they arent authority figures and op represents said authority

i’d rather someone consider very carefully if ops messages are politically/ideologically sound and think for themselves even if they are not from the same group

not occupying a certain social space doesnt mean you cant have opinions on issues not directly pertaining to you or meaningfully question monolithic statements when you notice something seems off about it. 

like, there are desis who have objectively wrong opinions regarding racism directed towards desis, there are white people who have objectively right opinions regarding racism directed towards desis. objectively wrong meaning they may be excusatory or misunderstanding of the fundamental reasons for racism towards desis. there are some pretty simple guiding principles underlying the institution of racism that i’d rather everyone know such that even nondesis can look at such opinions and be like, no, this just isnt a valid conclusion

definitely heavy weight should be granted to people trying to discuss an issue they have intimate experience with and i know this problem has arisen because its been emphasized to not argue an opinion when its regarding a group you dont belong to 

but again, its been taken advantage of by people who are attempting to make their random opinions politicized and supporting it only with their occupation of a social space 

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auntbutch:

yehudisha:

auntbutch:

okay but wait “Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience.” i’ve thought for a while that the constant splitting of heterosexuality into distinct (not-hetero) categories only reifies the purity of heterosexuality as a category. it says “heterosexuality consists of what is good, pure, and acceptable”. but heterosexuality gains its power in part through its self-definition through disavowal! it started as a distancing from homosexuality - heterosexuality is good and pure and indicates a sound mind and healthy body, because it is not tainted by homosexuality. it exists only in order to say that something is not homosexual. so to continue with this tradition, to continue to say that heterosexuality is not [xyz] is a reaffirmation of its power, and only further recognition of its self-ascribed purity and naturalness

the thing that is natural (the origin from which all other things deviate) does not need to be named. but then also, the thing that is powerful resists naming, power resists appellation, it relies on the notion of being inherent or natural and always unseen. power breeds in the dark

so what does it mean to say that something that deviates from expectations or a heterosexual ideal is in fact heterosexual? i think it has the potential to break down the power of heterosexuality, at least linguistically, in that it forces heterosexuality to be 1) named and recognized and 2) understood as a thing that is not pure

to continually splinter off from the concept of heterosexuality (ie. kink, fetishes, specific kinds of heterosexuality are not in fact heterosexual) says “i recognize the purity of this concept, i believe it should remain pure, and that all deviations from the official heterosexual experience should be policed through constant identification”

it takes me a while to get through long dense text but I eventually parsed it and found it to be really good analysis, so I hope the post author doesn’t mind if I offer a condensed/less term packed explanation below so that more people may be able to access it (this isn’t a criticism @ the way the post was written, as the denser/theory term packed parts are valuable, I just wanted to offer people who’d otherwise scroll by an easier look at what I think is important content overall) 

the gist I got from this: people who say things like, for example, “kink/fetish is inherently LGBT/not straight because it’s not the Norm, it’s seen as impure” , give heterosexuality the definition of “normal and pure” by doing so, which then reinforces the concept of heterosexuality as purity and upholds it as good and non-deviant, leading to the continuation of the heterosexist ideal that straightness = more acceptable, more pure. when you define heterosexuality not only by gendered relationship dynamics, but also by “normal and pure and Not any of these deviant things, so things that deviate from any of our norms are automatically not straight”, you linguistically reinforce the social association of heterosexuality with purity and non-deviance. 

conversely, when we refuse to define straightness by “normal”, when we define it strictly by the fact that it’s a constructed concept of exclusive man/woman relationships, when we accept that things considered “deviant” and “non-normal” by society can still be part of heterosexuality (such as kink, fetish, etc), that can help to destabilize the concept of “heterosexuality as purity” through linguistics. if we say “no, these “deviant” and considered non-mainstream things like kink exist within heterosexuality often, heterosexuality is not a source of only pure sexual experiences, it’s merely a gendered construct”, we destabilize the heterosexist perception of it as a pure and good identity.

@auntbutch lmk if anything I wrote was off base / not what you were going for. 

no, this is a great summary (and honestly probably clearer than what i wrote since i just typed it out as i was thinking). thanks for adding it, it’s great to see how other people receive concepts i’m trying to communicate

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such classics as “reclaiming d*ke when you’re lesbian passing” “you can’t reclaim d*ke just because you’re lesbian passing” “actually you can’t reclaim d*ke unless lesbian passing”