I still don't get why there's so much fucking infighting in the LGBTQ+ community. There's been discourse to exclude intersex ppl, ace/aro folks, trans people in general, transmascs, nonbinary ppl, MOGAI ppl, queer folks, even bi ppl... Like, seriously, where does all this come from?
Y’know, when I first got involved in ace discourse, I asked that a lot. I ran through several theories as to why in my head, but most didn’t really seem right. I always found I could point to something that each explanation did not account for.
Now, tho, I think I’ve settled on one answer, which is “a lot of things, all of which are feeding into each other, but each contribute a different amount to the problem”.
A major key player in all of the discourses we see on tumblr, including/especially this one, is radical feminism. I have tried to drill it so hard into as many people’s minds as I could what radical feminism is and what about it I think is so harmful, but it never seems to stick. Radical feminism is not just “hating trans women with a feminist veneer.” It’s a subset of feminism that claims to target the root cause of women’s issues. However, it’s extremely bioessentialist, gender essentialist, sex negative, founded by white western women who either didn’t pay any attention to anyone else or projected their white western ideas onto woc and non-western folks, and completely lacking in nuance. But their ideas persist in part because they were a major wave of feminism and their group wrote a shit ton of feminist theory just a few decades ago. And, unsurprisingly, some of their decades old books shat all over trans people as a group because TERFism is literally just radical feminism taken to its logical conclusion. And embedded in all those books is the. Exact. Same. Fucking. Bullshit. That you see on tumblr in the discourse. Not word for word, of course, somehow I doubt Adrienne Rich knows what a neopronoun is, but the idea of bi women who date men being privileged isn’t new. Nor is the idea of a sinister invader of the community trying to sneak in so they can steal resources and abuse the people who truly belong there. And the idea of men always being evil by nature and women always being good by nature? Also not new at all. It’s recycled, repackaged, given a new paint job, but still the same bullshit. But it keeps cropping up because radfem influence is pervasive and unrelenting, and also because crypto-radfems are a thing. But what’s worse are the people who openly take their ideas and basically go “hmmm, what if we made the SCUM Manifesto trans inclusive? 🤔”. There is no salvaging this. You cannot take the gender essentialism and remove the bioessentialism and say “look, I did a trans-inclusive feminism!” You cannot let fear of The Other override your better judgement and drive wedges between you and any other queer person. Too many people on the exclusionary side of anything have found that exclusionism was their gateway to radical feminism because they found they were using the same arguments so suddenly the TERFs seemed reasonable. I believe that if they knew how to spot radical feminism before that point, none of that would’ve happened. That’s why I harp on learning about radical feminism and what they believe and why it’s wrong. I don’t want discourse to keep leading more people down that path.
…I didn’t expect to type that much. Anyway…
Another cause is a disconnect from queer elders and older queer culture, which was caused by the AIDS crisis and Reagan doing nothing. Yes, I’m partially blaming Ronald Reagan for tumblr discourse and doing so unironically. Our history is not particularly well known and most younger queer folks (myself included) don’t even know where to begin with seeking it out, or even which sources are reliable (radical feminism dipped quite a few toes into the lesbian community, hence the political lesbians, the lesbian separatist movement, and the more restrictive definition of lesbianism we’re familiar with today. Even if we aren’t looking at radfem influence on what we know, I recently bought a book on American trans history but it focused only on transfem history while claiming transmascs just didn’t get involved in the trans community because they could blend in more easily, which was not true and I have several complaints about that). So we end up with a bunch of young queer folks teaching each other queer history based on what random scraps they could find from the Internet. While some older queer folks are still alive, we don’t turn to them to learn our history as much as we should, and even if we did, there are so, So many more stories that we’ll never hear. Look, I know with the pandemic it’s not a good idea to get involved in in-person groups, but if you find a local queer group, spend some time there! If more people on tumblr did this, it would help a fuck ton! And guess who generally tends to get barred from these spaces for being assholes? Your hint is that I just spent an entire paragraph ranting about how toxic they are and people on this site need to learn how to recognize them. Yeah, it’s radfems. Radfems generally aren’t welcome in these spaces. That’s why they congregate here; they can’t reach us and influence us there.
So uh, TLDR: the discourse happens for several reasons, two of which are radical feminists and the disconnect from our history. The solution is to be more vigilant against radfem rhetoric and go to local queer groups.
To add on here for some UK flavoured context- in the UK Margaret Thatcher introduced the infamous Section 28- a law that forbade the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ - which basically means schools couldn’t mention LGBTQ+ topics and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were threatened with prosecution. Thatcher was *famously* very buddy buddy with Reagan and both in the UK and US at least, the pair did their best to ignore the AIDS crisis.
“ So we end up with a bunch of young queer folks teaching each other queer history based on what random scraps they could find from the Internet.” - also this is really succinct and exactly what we’re all depending on rn because there’s basically no alternative except rebuilding and becoming those elders for queer people in the future.
And may I recommend onearchives.org as a reputable source for queer history education? Their mission is preserving the stories of queer people so while it’s not the same as talking directly to queer elders, it is the stories.
Also the comment on the trans inclusive branch is explicitly why equating ALL radfems to TERFs is not accurate. Most visible ones are TERFs, but including trans people (aka TIRFs) does not stop it from being radical feminism either. Also just because you are accepting and actively supportive of trans people, or are even trans yourself, Does Not mean you are not a radical feminist and it Does Not mean your brand of (potentially unpacked/unnoticed) radfem rhetoric is suddenly the Good kind. All of radical feminism hurts the queer community enmasse. There is no one who gets by it unscathed. And the trans inclusive radical feminist point of view is still very harmful to trans people enmasse.
You don’t have to consider yourself a radfem, letalone a TERF, to still be mimicking and outright scripting from radfem talking points. Please learn what it is, and do your part in unlearning whatever pieces of it you have picked up unknowingly or purposefully. It is never too late.
Simple bits to start with questioning and asking others about are:
- The idea that All Men are Evil (this hurts literally everyone, even cis women who hear this and can end up too afraid to enjoy life for long periods of time, and this is actually a notion that has been used to pull people into cults. Letalone anyone who is not a perisex cis woman that gets targeted for this and the violence is then ‘rationalized’ with this notion)
- Testosterone is the evil/violent/overly sexual horomone (even when you personally claim that trans women on HRT are exempt from this view, it still hurts them, non-HRT women, cis men, trans men, trans folks on T that aren’t men, all intersex people w hormonal imbalances, and yes even cis women bc this is a misogynistic point used as to why Women On Period Are Insane Bc Higher Testosterone. Testosterone is neutral and so is estrogen)
- Women’s love for other women is Better or More Special than any other loving dynamic (even when this includes mspec and trans women. Not to be confused with celebrating the special specifics of WLW dynamics. It’s the emphasis on inherent Betterness or More Healthy than any other dynamics that is the one to look out for. WLW dynamics are beautiful and special, but there is no one dynamic inherently better than any other one)
- Certain queer orientations have privilege over others (it’s all lateral)
- Anyone with a beard is safer in the world (… Please think about anyone who isn’t a cis man who has a beard and why that may actually put them in more danger, especially dependant on any of their other features)
- Some trans genders have more privilege than others because of how cis genders work in society (being trans is a different playing field, it is again all lateral)
- Only women can ever really be healers and teachers
- Anything that equates all positive human traits to femininity only and equates all negative human traits to masculinity only
- Only addressing toxic masculinity and never naming nor addressing toxic femininity
- Anything trying harder to seperate men’s and women’s gay communities rather than help understand and respect each other
- Anything that pits mono orientations (hetero/homo) against mspec orientations (bi/pan/omni/etc)
- Anything that claims monogomy OR polyamory are inherently abusive in dynamic
And there is many other radfem bulletpoints but I am working off the top of my head and after a long day here. So use this to stoke your intrigue and please learn more about how to love your queer community rather than resent or hate it. Learn what radical feminism is, and how to get it out of your life.