its miserable having online friends i would help you clean and paint your room and fold your laundry and move furniture and cook mostly edible food for you and generally do tasks for you and drink with you and smoke with you and go on walks with you and see you smile when i make you laugh. but the distance

The sum total of every online trans person "pressuring" you by talking about how they've benefited from medical transition equates to less systemic power than even one shitty gatekeeper doctor, actually.

I know I just restating the point of that post but respecting religious freedom will sometimes require you to respect someone's belief that religious beliefs are categorically untrue, and there are a lot of people who are unable to handle this, and even more people who think they agree with this but haven't really grappled with what it means.

Something that a lot of religious folks don't seem to realize the extent to which non-religious people, more than any other religious minority, are expected to walk on eggshells around other people's beliefs at the expense of their own for the sake of social decorum, in a way which no one else is expected to do with theirs.

To name a bit of an example I have personal experience with. When I was mourning my cousin a couple years ago, I was constantly faced with the situation of people trying to comfort me from a religious perspective.

And whenever this topic comes up, the conversation is always about how "you have to be mindful of their intentions, they're trying to reach out to you and comfort you in the way they know, they're being nice, you have to appreciate the effort they're making, you have to meet them where they're at and appreciate their attempt to help you". Which is what I did, of course. In this situation, replying to their attempt to comfort you with any reminder that you don't believe in this stuff is considered a big social faux-pas that will make you look like an asshole. And to an extent I agree, it can be rude and needlessly combative.

But somethin I feel it's conspicuously absent from any conversation surrounding this type of situation like. Any interrogation of *why* is going "sorry, I don't believe in any of this, this means nothing to me" considered a bigger social faux-pas than trying to comfort a grieving person with religious beliefs you know they don't hold.

Why, even when you're literally grieving, the onus is on you as a non-religious person to be mindful of other's worldviews and tread lightly and meet them where they're at and not contradict what they believe in and never the other way around.

It's been said to me that atheism is inherently reactionary and the persecution of religious minorities still exists the world over.

Well, atheists are also a religious minority, and there are plenty of regimes where apostasy carries the death penalty. There are more with blasphemy laws.

It's a very America-centric statement that tends to make a lot of assumptions about certain things. And often operates on a 'noble savage' view of religions outside of Christianity, as if extremists and adherents of other religions aren't capable of the same misdeeds. One need only ask the persecuted Muslim under Modi's Hindu nationalism, or the women who live under Saudi Arabia's extreme interpretations of Islam to know that isn't true.

Or for that matter the Palestinians going through a genocide which is fuelled, in part, by a Jewish theocratic ethnonationalism.

Yes, there are plenty of members of those religions who view these things as abhorrent, just as there are Christians who look aghast at the misdeeds of Christian nationalists in the United States. But to deny the role of religious tribalism as a central justifying and uniting force in that extremism would be disingenuous at best.

I know I just restating the point of that post but respecting religious freedom will sometimes require you to respect someone's belief that religious beliefs are categorically untrue, and there are a lot of people who are unable to handle this, and even more people who think they agree with this but haven't really grappled with what it means.

Something that a lot of religious folks don't seem to realize the extent to which non-religious people, more than any other religious minority, are expected to walk on eggshells around other people's beliefs at the expense of their own for the sake of social decorum, in a way which no one else is expected to do with theirs.

To name a bit of an example I have personal experience with. When I was mourning my cousin a couple years ago, I was constantly faced with the situation of people trying to comfort me from a religious perspective.

And whenever this topic comes up, the conversation is always about how "you have to be mindful of their intentions, they're trying to reach out to you and comfort you in the way they know, they're being nice, you have to appreciate the effort they're making, you have to meet them where they're at and appreciate their attempt to help you". Which is what I did, of course. In this situation, replying to their attempt to comfort you with any reminder that you don't believe in this stuff is considered a big social faux-pas that will make you look like an asshole. And to an extent I agree, it can be rude and needlessly combative.

But somethin I feel it's conspicuously absent from any conversation surrounding this type of situation like. Any interrogation of *why* is going "sorry, I don't believe in any of this, this means nothing to me" considered a bigger social faux-pas than trying to comfort a grieving person with religious beliefs you know they don't hold.

Why, even when you're literally grieving, the onus is on you as a non-religious person to be mindful of other's worldviews and tread lightly and meet them where they're at and not contradict what they believe in and never the other way around.

It's been said to me that atheism is inherently reactionary and the persecution of religious minorities still exists the world over.

Well, atheists are also a religious minority, and there are plenty of regimes where apostasy carries the death penalty. There are more with blasphemy laws.

Turning off anon asks, sorry.

every year the ao3 stats come out and every year people insist that the lack of women isn’t misogyny but because ‘most fic writers are female and therefore enjoy writing about men more’ and every year they don’t seem to understand that they themselves have just described a version of misogyny

"Racism is inherent to transmisogyny"

So, are white trans women affected by racism?

This is not a gotcha. I've seen a lot of people on here attempt to discuss racism and (trans)misogyny as co-constitutive, but people never show their work. If racism is in fact inseparable from transmisogyny, is everyone who suffers transmisogyny a victim of racism?

If cis women of color are subject to transmisogyny, is there no distinction between cis and trans women of color, either within or outside the West?

How does the inseparability of racism and transmisogyny operate in global south cultures where imperialism has shaped their history and economy, yes, but the extant regime is not one where white people are a present or meaningful demographic?

I know people mean well, but if you're going to make broad, sweeping statements about these topics, you need to be able to think through your arguments, realize what conclusions you are implicitly promulgating, and reason out whether what you're saying makes sense and matches up with history and empirical reality.

Because I've had experience both with Western and non-Western patriarchies, and I'm fairly sure in that regard, I am a minority on this site.

And all of this white supremacy and gender essentialism and bio essentialist bigotry affects everyone.

Everyone is affected by white supremacy and it's attempts to uphold itself and it's ideals, certainly any country that's been targeted by western imperialism.

And arguably one of the most prominent being sexism via patriarchy.

Which results in things like this:

And we've established now that the ideal of beauty and femininity that most women seek to attain has been defined by white supremacists.

Trans women are no exception.

I wouldn't say white trans women experience racism, but I think it'd be ignorant to say that they aren't affected by it.

In the same vein of logic, I wouldn't say men experience misogyny, but think it'd be ignorant to say they aren't affected by sexism when toxic masculinity exists.

People across several countries that aren't in the west are constantly criticized for how accessible and normalized skin bleaching is, are they not?

These definitions of white supremacy absolutely include people in other countries and across the global south. It's not just the west that upholds these ideals, afterall the west's main export is in fact white supremacy and I can't think of a single place where that doesn't ring true and/or hasn't influenced cultures elsewhere.

Excuse me, I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think this is addressing the OP adequately. Yes, transmisogyny and white supremacy have influenced each other over the past few hundred years starting with the emergence of white identity at the advent of European colonialism, and obviously that history is significant, but I don’t thing that provides compelling evidence that racism (in the form of modern white supremacy least of all) is inherent to transmisogyny. There is plenty of evidence for transmisogyny predating modern white identity (just look at Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, and so on and what they thought about “effeminate men” and other trannyized categories of people so to speak), and while colonialism did introduce a lot of oppressive categories of people to nations who had no previous oppressiveness along such lines, often it exacerbated a lot of existing problems within those societies. I think that there are a lot of historical ties between white supremacy and transmisogyny, but to say they are necessarily constitutive of each other is just historically on shaky grounds, and whether or not they reinforce each other is a historically relative thing that depends on how they have developed as systems throughout the history of a particular region.

Yeah, that was a lot of words to entirely ignore how transfeminization predates modern regimes of racialization by ... several centuries, at least?

the thing is I just really enjoy convoluted sentences. I think they're inherently funny. "You have fallen for my brilliant scheme and been made a fool of" type of shit is like catnip to me. Nobody fucking talks like that and it's hilarious to me

Counterpoint: You literally know people who talk Like That :P

Quick pre-emptive clarification: Not every scholar who did a hack job of describing non-Western cultures was white, and several were in fact diaspora with ties to the culture in question. Academic Orientalism is an institutional, not individual issue.