A Saltshaker is a Big Mood

i've been on this website for almost 10 years. all queer discourse looks like this:

hello fellow queers, don't you just hate those [queer subgroup] trying to harm us [different queer subgroup, "real queers" implied] by [discussing their experiences], which is [bigotry toward queer subgroup 2]. these [fascist dogwhistle] want to [fascist scapegoat rhetoric], because [identity phrenology]. clearly, we must destroy these [fascist dogwhistle, implied queer subgroup 1] because they are a threat to [queer subgroup 2] and queer people as a whole!

Honestly most discourse on here looks like this (though especially queer intracommunity discourse) and it withers my soul. People need to learn to recognise fascist dogwhistles more. Imho radfems basically invaded this site in the 2010's and people went completely unaware of it, until boom suddenly their rhetoric and subsequently fascist rhetoric started popping up everywhere.

“Queer people need to get weirder-” you can’t handle like. A lesbian.

The funniest part of this post is everyone in the tags immediately making it about things other than lesbians. You can’t even handle like. Thinking about a lesbian.

Trans women can make entire posts about how alienated we are from the wider queer or trans community, about how we need to contort ourselves continuously to present ourselves as “one of the good ones” and not be seen as oppressive males and the like. And how we still get punished for the slightest misstep even then. And we’ll all agree and nod because tbh, it’s fucking true and we all know it. Trans women’s lives are expendable.

But the moment a trans man notes similar sentiments and dynamics directed towards him we turn around to call him a transmisogynist and a terf huh.

Is it perhaps, just a little bit possible that there’s something rotten in how the community functions? Is it perhaps possible that there’s a wider problem in it that doesn’t just fuck over one group in particular but that means we all get shafted? And is it maybe possible that there’s also just a lot of regional variation in how queer communities function, which means there’s gonna be variety in our experiences?

But nah. The other side is wrong and you’ve gotta listen to marginalised people until the narrative’s inconvenient.

(edit: there was a long convo with a transmedicalist in the comments. Please do not send them hate but if that sort of thing hurts you, yaknow, stay out of the comments.)

*reads an online take about queer people*

Ah, so this person has never hung out with adult gay men irl. I see.

Idk who needs to hear this but queer men and bi women call themselves butch and femme all the time and most of the arguing about who “gets to use” these terms is conducted by terminally online white cisgender teenagers.

Also because I saw someone on tiktok claiming that she/her gay men don’t exist, let me tell you right now that yes they do. In abundance. Now go outside and find one and thank her for her service.

Plus, butch and femme are just as deep and nuanced gender performances when they’re done by mlm as they are when they’re done by wlw. Men do, in fact, get to have complicated relationships with gender!

As someone who grew up with two gay dads and a gay uncle can confirm.

I love when baby gays are clearly still unlearning a lot of biases and like every couple of months try to find a progressive reason to explain why men wearing dresses makes them uncomfortable. Like obviously transmisogynistic caricatures are Bad but if it's just a guy irl who wants to do drag or something that's literally fine. This has been a thing longer than you've been alive

Also like I need you all to understand that historically the line between gnc & trans people has always been way less distinctly defined than you want it to be. And for a lot of people that's kind of the point. Drag in particular is about radical self expression it's about taking gender performance and turning it into a literal show and it rules

To the people in my notes talking about "it's okay if gnc men make you uncomfortable as long as you don't police anyone <3" no it's not actually. You need to think about why that is and deconstruct it. Lol

the queer stereotype cycle often goes "queer group starts making inside jokes > these jokes are overheard by cishets > cishets now start using these inside jokes against queer people > these inside jokes fall out of favour > because queer people aren't a hivemind some queer people keep making these inside jokes > these queer people are then attacked by other queer people for perpetuating stereotypes > nobody criticises the cishets who made it into a bad thing in the first place" and youse just keep letting that go round and round.

i don’t know how anyones first response to seeing the rampant transphobia in the uk isn’t abject heartbreak for all the trans people that live here

so many people’s views around transphobia in the uk start and end at “haha terf island”, and never stop for 5 minutes and think how god awful it is for trans people to be stuck here

I haven't seen anything about this on tumblr yet, but since April 2021 the NHS also discontinued all trans male bottom surgery, including for patients BETWEEN surgeries, with no plans to resume

Holy shit, Dr. Tingle, go OFF!!!!

That’s not all!

Bless Dr. Tingle!!!

What is or isn't a slur can be highly contextual, y'all.

"Jonny Sims bummed a fag off my ma" doesn't contain a slur, but "What are you, some kind of fag?" does.

"Queer studies", "the queer community" and "I'm queer"? Not a slur. Some bigot calling you a "dirty queer"? Slur.

"Be gay, do crimes" and "He's gay" ≠ slur, but "Ew, that's so gay" = slur.

In conclusion, stop buying into this fucking "q slur" bullshit. Queer people talking about the queer community aren't using it as a slur any more than a gay man calling himself gay is using that term as a slur.

Everyone tagging this as "Don't call people 'queer' if they aren't comfortable with it", I don't disagree with you, but I do have one question for you:

Why are you singling out "queer"?

Hi, I'm queer and I don't like being called gay. Why is it always "don't call people 'queer' if they don't like it" but never "don't call people 'gay' if they don't like it"? Or just "don't call people words they are uncomfortable with"?

Why is it only ever "queer" that gets singled out?

And why do you even feel the need to tag that onto this post? All I said was "stop tagging people referring to themselves this way as if it were the same as bigots hurling it as a slur".

Bc 'queer' means 'strange' and I want to be normalized.

And I want people to stop treating any divergence from "normal" as a bad thing. I'm neurodivergent, I'm never gonna be "normal". I don't care about being seen as "normal", I want "normal" to stop mattering and for people to ask "Is this harming anyone?" instead.

You don't want to be strange. Okay, cool. Just don't act like other people being harmlessly different is a bad thing.

Again, this is a post about treating queer people talking about how queer we are like we're the same as bigots trying to hurt people who're different from them. If you don't do that, we're good!

Me, personally? I'm not gay as in happy, I'm queer as in fuck "normal".

Oh you look down others for being attracted to men wow that sounds shallow and exhausting I'm gonna go suck a dick

For me, men are like vanilla ice cream. That flavor is eons away from being my first choice, but I'd never shame or fault anyone for loving that flavor the most 😁

Bro you can just fuck dudes if you want to, it doesnt have to mean anything

I feel like yall aren’t getting me

A bi person: I like being attracted to guys and it sucks when people act like that's lesser somehow

Y'all, inexplicably: Lol yeah I totally get it sometimes I feel like indulging in trash too

You’re going to need to explain how there are a lot of transmascs TERFs and no transfem TERFs.

Some TERFs hating transmascs doesn’t erase the TERFs who ally themselves with transmascs and TERFs who are transmascs.

The target of TERFs are trans women first and foremost, and the goal of TERFs is the eradication of trans women.

The TERFs who hate transmascs and the TERFs who don’t hate transmascs and the TERFs who are transmascs are all willing to work together to eliminate trans women.

There are absolutely transfem TERFs. Here’s an interview with one.

If you’re asking why there tend to be more transmascs in the movement, though, the answer is fairly simple: TERFs actively want us there. What you’re misunderstanding here is why TERFs include and exclude certain groups, and how that inclusion and exclusion works.

For trans women, yes, the goal is to be recognized and validated as women; that means inclusion in feminism. So when TERFs say “no, we aren’t going to include you, you’re not women”, that is obviously counter to those goals & needs. It’s very easy to look over at the transmascs they do include and think, well, they’re getting what I want- that’s unfair.

But TERFs do include trans women, when it benefits them. If you read that article, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

And why do they include transmascs? Is it because they care about our struggles, validate us as men, and want to help us fight the transphobia that impacts us? Are TERFs donating to transmasc transition funds and discussing ways to better include us?

They include us because they want to manipulate, abuse, and sometimes even sexually assualt and rape us into detransition. They want to “turn” us. They want to “save” us. They want to eradicate the transmasc population just as much as they want to eradicate the transfem population; they just go about the two differently.

There are no “TERFs who don’t hate transmascs”. There are TERFs who manipulate and abuse us into detransitioning by pretending to have our best interests at heart, and there are TERFs who manipulate and abuse us into detransitioning by openly hating and harassing us.

When a TERF says “I love trans men, I just want what’s best for them” and you listen to them- even as transmascs are telling you how dangerous they are, how much they hurt us, how much damage their rhetoric is doing to our community- you are choosing to side with the oppressor and the abuser. Stop listening to TERFs, and start listening to the trans people they victimize.

“They want to eradicate the transmasc population just as much as they want to eradicate the transfem population; they just go about the two differently.”

I’ve seen at least three transfem TERFs during my time here. It stunned me every time.

Using the fact that transmascs are targeted for indoctrination into a cult with the ultimate goal of coercing them into detransitioning and living miserably with their gender dysphoria until they become another suicide statistic to demonstrate that there’s an ‘allyship’ between transmascs and TERFs is… really ugly to me.

Almost as ugly as calling tme people ‘collateral damage’.

That's been my deep concern with this growing divide between tme and tma trans folks. While we experience different flavours of bigotry, it's ultimately the same hatred. They hate ALL trans people. It's called Trans Exclusionist Radical Feminism, not Transfem Exclusionist Radical Feminism. The transmisogyny is the opening gambit, but they don't and won't ever stop there.

Pride history posts on here seem almost exclusively to revolve around Stonewall which can leave the impression that America is the only place where anything important ever happened and obviously is not true so I have compiled a few links where you can learn about LGBTQ history in other countries! Feel free to add

The Brunswick Four and the Toronto raids in Canada 🇨🇦

Queer icons like Virginia Wolf, Oscar Wilde, and Freddie Mercury in Britain 🇬🇧

Cultural revolution in Weimar Germany 🇩🇪

The drag scene in Nigeria 🇳🇬

Gay and lesbian Mardi Gras in Australia 🇦🇺

Frida Kahlo and Mexicos fraught history 🇲🇽

Gay samurai in Japan 🇯🇵

Queer narratives erased by colonialism in Pakistan 🇵🇰

The modern world’s first legal same-sex marriages in the Netherlands 🇳🇱

The honoured Mahu (transgender individuals) in traditional Hawaiian culture 🌺

Hidden queer communities in communist Poland 🇵🇱

Husbands in ancient Egypt 🇪🇬

The Athens pride festival in Greece 🇬🇷

The Homosexual Movement of Liberation in Chile 🇨🇱

Gay rights protests in India 🇮🇳

Pride, IMO, is “all ages” the way that most universities, pubs, and workplaces are “all ages” and the internet is “all ages” - it’s primarily about adults, and adult things, and kids are welcome provided they’re willing to behave themselves and they’re being supervised by caregivers.  “All ages” just means “we won’t kick your kid out for being under 18”.  It doesn’t necessarily mean “we provide free, fully accredited babysitting and child minding”.  

If parents are taking their kids along to Pride, then presumably those parents are willing to answer questions along the lines of ‘what is that person wearing and why?’ in an age-appropriate fashion for their child.  If they’re not willing to do so, then they shouldn’t be there.

PS: if we’re going to be asking for consent before people can wear certain items of clothing, does that mean I’m allowed to ask people to refrain from wearing t-shirts with sexist, racist, ableist, or just plain stupid slogans on them without my consent?  Nope?  Then the person in the harness at Pride gets to wear what they want too, and if thine eyes be offended, pluck them out.

I now realize I forgot to add; Both groups also fail to realize that men are not fucking evil, and that as human beings, they too possess the capacity for goodness, kindness, generosity, peace, and love. Men can hurt women, but they don’t have to.

People aren’t born inherently good or demonic. Neither biology or gender are destiny. We all get to choose how we respond to the positions we occupy, and whether we choose to collude with or resist the oppressive systems that want to co-opt us. There are good men in the world, and there can be more.

the trans experience of, after running as far away from your forcibly assigned gender as possible, turning around and cautiously approaching it from the other side