Random musings from another nattering TERF cloud that recently bombarded my feed: “Just asking questions of gender identity” was one of the ways this particular TERF piece of shit cloaked her bigotry.
So, thing is, gender variance as a concept is already being investigated. By researchers, not anonymous bloggers on the internet. Even I don’t perform original research, I merely propagate its findings in the naive hope that facts will eventually enter this fucking conversation. But when TERFs say this, they don’t mean they’re investigating gender variance as a concept–more of them would be actual researchers if that were the case, and they’d have more than one citation that will inevitably be That Fucking Swedish Study–they mean they have taken it upon themselves to question my questioning as to how it applies to me.
Frankly I just want to stop and ask them how many times they think I’ve wrestled with this question. Did I come to terms with my gender by popping up one morning and saying “oh yeah, this’ll be a laugh”? Or was this a process delayed unnecessarily for 15 years between the first inkling that something was wrong and having the vocabulary to articulate myself because the very culture I live in treats my existence as some kind of baby-eating taboo?
It’s fucking offensive, and that’s not a word I use a lot, to tell me I haven’t thought this through. Every day. Every morning. At most finding distractions for half an hour to get my mind off it. I’ve spent more time questioning my life than living it, so the sheer arrogance of some self-appointed fucktwit spouting off a bunch of invasive and uninvited psychosexual nonsense just blinds me with anger. Don’t you dare fucking tell me I could’ve found better ways to cope when those “other ways” would involve me drowning myself in drugs and pain all because you misapprehended Judith Butler in first year women’s studies. Like if I say I don’t want any motherfucking blueberries, that doesn’t mean I want you to keep giving me blueberry pie or blueberry tarts or blueberry salads until we find a format I might like, it means don’t. give. me. blueberries.
Fuck me I’m so done with TERF bullshit. I think after I get these projects up I’mma do a couple weeks of something else.
-Shiv
That’s what happens when actually reading Butler is too hard for you so you rely on that one slide in the introduction…
Blueberries? Dingleberries ( http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dingleberry ) more like.
& I don’t mean the type of native cranberry plant from the SE USA.
I’ve found this to be a problem in general with people who are ignorant about complex personal topics. They haven’t put a lick of effort jnto understanding anything, but you are the one who hasn’t thought things through.
Then if the reality is threatening to the way they need to believe the world works, they keep doubling down.
I’ve been a feminist for a good number of decades and I’m also a trans woman. Twenty years ago, you couldn’t toss a pebble over your shoulder without hitting a TERF in the mainstream spaces of feminism. That began to shift during the past 10 to 15 years, and from the trends I’ve seen, TERFs are being rapidly marginalized in much of feminism—especially among younger feminists. Their only viable path now is to appeal to clueless political moderates and bigoted right wing audiences. In fact, several instances of TERFs actively colluding with the right wing have popped up over the past couple years. That will buy them support for the time being but this is only temporary. Hang in there. Their time will pass into the obscure corners of history.
@ 4 timberwraith
Yeah, TERFs are a minority in feminism these days, but their influence is mainstream. What I mean by that is, Siobhan pointed out recently that for mainstream articles about trans people that allow comments, the comments overwhelmingly support a TERF point of view. I don’t mean the commenters are radical feminists, I mean the comments recycle standard TERF tropes. Sex is science, gender identity is “just a feeling”/mental illness/autogynephilia/predator in the bathroom/infiltrating women’s spaces/reinforcing gender stereotypes/blah, blah, blah. And this is my experience also. Read the comments to a mainstream press article about trans people and you’ll find yourself drowning in a sea of transphobia.
So, sorry to be a downer. I agree TERFs are on the wrong side of history, as the kids say. But the problem is their bullshit isn’t marginal, it’s mainstream. :-(
Those “other ways” are perhaps the thing I hate the most about anti-trans dialogue, not only because it’s so foolish to think that trans people have not tried those other ways before (for years or decades), but because my own transition was needlessly and dangerously delayed so I could look for them (even after pointing out the overlooked methods by which I had, because there was surely something that would work).