feotakahari

Just saw TME discourse in the wild, and discovered it’s just tucute discourse for people who would have been berated as tucute. This is not fucking Among Us!

Building off of my last Palestine post. When I read posts from Palestinians trying to get folks outside the region to see them as human, it reminds of queer folks trying to get other folks to see us as human. I had to catch myself earlier from saying “we”—“wait, I’m not Palestinian.”

So those posts that go “We have to have racial segregation. What if Palestinians try to kill us?” You can say I’m being unreasonable, and I guess you’d be right, but on an emotional level, I still read those as “what if queers molest our children?”

Today I argued with someone who tried to prove their point by linking to a Kiwifarms thread about “transgenderism.” So that’s how my day is going.

TERFs are so damn exhausting. They do “there’s no difference between men’s brains and women’s brains, so trans women and cis men aren’t different,” and I’m like, sure, whatever, we’re all one. Then they do “these men are pretending to be women,” but if we all have the same brains anyway, why do you even care? There’s so much emphasis on man as invader, man as threat to women, but of course this doesn’t make men and women different. Just pick a damn position and stick with it!

(“We’re all one” is also my attitude towards people who identify as dragons, which gets me even more backlash. I wouldn’t treat a dragon different from a human anyway, so who gives a shit?)

When you look up why a trans woman is hated, and you get KiwiFarms, Know Your Meme, and the Bad Webcomics Wiki.

Talking about “trans ideology” isn’t even repackaged anti-gay, it’s repackaged antisemitism.

Person A: we need lesbian separatist communes that aren’t TERFy.

Person B, a TERF with “womb” in her username: “Good luck with that.”

I think B is right about this one. The concept of separatism doesn’t really work unless you have a binary worldview where everyone can be classified as “okay to interact with” and “not okay to interact with.” If there’s someone who, say, identifies as a man sometimes and a woman other times, I don’t think you can maintain a separatist mindset unless you either go “I will never interact with this person” or “this person is a confused woman who only thinks she’s a man.”

I’ve seen what happens when people warn and call out for transphobic content. They primarily call out authors who are trans themselves. If the same principle holds, calling out racism will call out authors who are themselves racial minorities. Trans people are worse off because of fandom’s anti-transphobia push, and I don’t want to see that replicated.

Not that I don’t see where OP is coming from, though. I read this essay about some Harry Potter fic, talking about how a character was treated in a racist manner. The author showed up in the comments to talk about how the character faced realistic consequences for her actions. The essay writer and other commenters said that those “consequences” are often applied IRL in a way that disproportionately targets minorities, and the author kept failing to understand their point.

Sure, “queer people aren’t trying to ‘recruit’ your kids” is a full sentence. But I think there’s a bit more nuance that can be put on it.

There’s a right-wing idea that queerness is contagious, like turning into a werewolf. But on the left, what we think is that some folks figure out they’re queer, and other folks figure out they’re not queer, and what they are doesn’t change, just how much they know about what they are. We’ve seen folks who had a miserable time trying to date women before realizing they’d rather date men, or who pushed themselves to date when they weren’t interested in romance at all, and our goal is to make it easier to avoid that. If you turn out to be straight and cis, all the more power to you! You know what you are because you had the chance to see what you’re not. If you’re bisexual, but you only date the opposite gender, that’s fine! We’re not trying to “fix” you. All we want is for people to understand themselves a little better.