This started off as a response to a specific cis lesbian who has recently gone from trans positivity to entertaining TERF rhetoric, but because of some Tumblr weirdness, I couldn’t append it as a reblog.
I’m not male. When you call a trans woman a “biological male”, you’re saying she’s not really a woman, which is inherently transmisogynistic & transphobic. There’s … no question or ambiguity there.
Moreover, it’s a label with zero scientific basis. Here’s Julia Serano, PhD biologist and trans woman, talking about it. Here’s CV Vitolo-Haddad, a nonbinary person, talking about it. …
The most common stereotype of a trans woman’s sexuality is that we’re into men; in a sense, we’re sort of next-level gay men, so into men that we seek to turn ourselves into women in order to appeal to them. This is closely linked to two other stereotypes: that we’re deceptive and that we’re sex workers, both as ways of more easily riding that coveted cis dick.
These are all grounded, of course, in oppression and hate: misogyny, because it centers the emotional lives of women on men; homophobia, because it necessarily posits gay men as manipulative; and the unique…
Lemme be absolutely clear about some things about trans people, and trans women in particular, since we’re the preferred targets:
1. There is no definition of “woman” that includes all cis women but excludes all trans women based on biology, anatomy, or experience.
Genetics? Not all AFAB people are XX karyotype. Anatomy? I can promise you, I have boobs, which came from estrogen, and as for vaginoplasty there are cis women who have needed it because of, for example, Müllerian agenesis. Lived experience? Are you seriously going to argue that we don’t face oppression and violence because of our gender…
The following is a letter I wrote to Cory Doctorow re: a homophobic & transphobic image that has been making the rounds recently.
Mr. Doctorow,
I’m a trans activist who tweets pseudonymously at @sapphixy, and last week I was profoundly disturbed to find Xeni Jardin proudly posting this story at BoingBoing, and continuing to signal-boost it, throughout the day, including reposting the image itself:
http://boingboing.net/2017/04/05/this-putin-as-a-gay-clown.html
I understand the push against censorship, but this image is harmful.
- Putting a cis man in heavy, garish makeup as a form of mockery is rooted in transmisogyny; it trades on the idea that…
Earlier today, Gollancz, a UK speculative fiction publisher, tweeted a link to this list of Christmas reads from their authors. Maureen K. Speller pointed out a problem with this list:
@Gollancz Gosh, you really don’t publish much sf by women, do you?
— maureen k speller (@maureenkspeller) December 23, 2015
Out of curiosity, I took a look at the list of authors on their site, and noticed a problem. Here’s a partial screenshot of the sidebar, so you know what I’m referring to:
So I went through the complete list and picked out which ones weren’t white men:
Previous posts:
Part I: A Brief Introduction
Interstitial I
Interstitial II
Asks: Someone going by “justamblingon”: first, second, third
Recommended Reading:
The Trouble With Heroes
Cracked: 5 Things Vigilantes Do to Screw Themselves (alternately: 5 Reason the Internet Always Prefers Revenge Over Justice)
Mikki Kendall (Karnythia): Some advice on anger & outrage from a former outrage junkie
Unwinnable: The Tyranny of the Fan by Stu Horvath
The ‘Loser Edit’ That Awaits Us All
On The Ethics of Targeting Others
Hot Allostatic Load by Porpentine Charity Heartscape — it’s about the author’s experience as a trans fem person who was painted as a predator and abuser in order…
For those of you wondering what’s going on with this series, the second full post in this series is well underway. It’s been delayed by a mixture of work deadlines, a couple of false starts (having a lot to do with things I’ve found as I’ve dug into the background further), and then having that disrupted just as I was building steam by another event…
In the meantime, I’m going to just address a couple of things that have come up time and again.
You’re defending abuse! This, and other statements and assertions that reframe our objections to this shitstorm…
While I put together the next post in this series, I’m going to post a couple of things that tie into the whole mess, thematically, but aren’t part of the narrative proper.
This exchange happened today on Twitter, and I think it says things that can’t be said enough:
Why are people who can look at critiques of race/gender/class problems in thier work without flipping out so perishingly rare?
— Contrapunctus I (@sinboy) March 14, 2015
@sinboy I think it comes from a place of fear? Fear of getting it wrong, being “that guy.” Which doesn’t excuse it at all…
Anna asked me to write something about this, because a lot of people who may be concerned with online harassment, with intersectional feminism, and/or with abuse and harassment directed with the goal of silencing and isolating (at a minimum) a marginalized, vulnerable person may not be familiar with the story at all, or may only have heard about it from unreliable, distinctly biased sources. This is the TL;DR version — watch this space for longer, future installments, which will go into great detail.
In August of 2014, short story writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s novella Scale-Bright — her first fiction sale outside…
Serenity Dee
She/hers. Trans. Lesbian. Economist. Heathen.
