AcidSmiley

For nearly two decades we have worked under the same basic hot dog exclusivity provisions

It was a bank robbery with a hostage situation where the pigs didn't want to compromise on anything with the robbers and were directly endangering the lives of the hostages.

I would have been hatecrimed all the time for being trans if i already would have come out in the 2000s, i honestly don't think i would have survived being trans in public 20 years ago. Not to mention that i would probably have been gatekept permanently from transitioning for being lesbian, or that it was impossible in my country back then to get a name change without either bottom surgery or forced sterilization (using cryoconservated sperm to sire a child also meant that your name change was retroactively voided and you were declared a man again back in those days. Oh, and we had forced divorces for married trans people, too). In the US, trans panic defenses were still a thing in these days. You could get away with murdering us when you stated that finding out about our transness after sex freaked you out. But yeah i guess time is being selective for targets and my opression just started happening 5 years ago and nobody bothered us before then. jfc.

35 years of far-right organizing and widespread hate crimes that conservatives did fuck all against, along with capitalist shock therapy followed by mass depopulation of rural areas and in some places outright nazi settlement policy with fascists from western states moving in and buying up cheap properties.

I'm in the same boat largely. Are terfs in practice working towards the most awful, antifeminist goals? Absolutely. It lies in the nature of the terf rabbit hole that fighting against our rights turns people into single-issue obsessives that are willing to compromise any and all other issues besides transphobia and enter alliances with openly anti-feminist orgs, because that's where all the campaign funds are. But that doesn't change that historically, terfs represent what used to be a major wing of feminism. To write that off for the sake of a simple gotcha like so many people do eschews the possibility for needed feminist self crit and creates blindspots in the understanding of feminist history and intra-feminist struggles. Terfism is one of the worse acts of mental contortionism out there, but it does come out of the gender essentialist wing of 2nd wave feminism that also was the root for political lesbianism and swerfism and that origin story is inseperable from their specific brand of transphobia. That they have backed themselves up into a discursive corner doesn't change how they got there in the first place.

That said, i'm also cautious to give terfs too much credit. I'm absolutely not saying that you're doing that, this is not my impression, but i run into a lot of people both offline and in discourse about trans rights that overestimate how many terfs are actually out there, how important they really are in anti-trans activism and how much influence they still have on feminism and lesbian* spaces today. So i think this is worth noting when we're having a discussion like this one: While cis feminism urgently needs a more thorough critique of its cisnormative biases and expectations, while there are areas where the movement needs to incorporate more of a trans perspective, i generally find that feminists, particularly lesbian, bi and pan feminists, are among the best allies i have out there. A lot of the offline spaces i feel safest in are operated by them and when i sit down at a table with cis people where i feel welcomed, it's usually a table in a deliberately feminist venue. And on the opposite end, when i look at how anti-trans movements are structured, terfs are tokenized figureheads for a movement that is overwhelmingly made up of and almost exclusively funded by rightwing white cishet dudes that deliberately hide behind the protective veneer that the weaponization of issues like "women-only" spaces offers them.

But it's worth noting that the feminist allies i'm talking about are the ones that are leftists instead of liberals, that are accutely aware of and critical of white feminist bias and take effort in welcoming PoC in their spaces, that have early on grown into a part of the movement that has consistently been open to impulses outside of white, affluent, cishet voices. Safe communities are always built on taking each others' experiences seriously.

Yeah, look at how much trans people are gaslit into being cis, how much effort and ideological domination that takes, and it still doesn't work reliably to keep our eggs from cracking. Imagine trying to do that thing not as an entire society backed up with decades of transphobic propaganda and medical gatekeeping, but as a single catgirl trying against all odds to convince a guy who does not even feel constant alienation from masculinity and his body and who doesn't get gender euphoria from girl stuff, who lacks all the driving forces that help us push through, to go through the entire mess that is early transition.

As a woman-shaped badger, i have nothing but love for my fellow woodland spirits (idk if Australian goblins live in woods tbh).

10/10 would ask you if you know where to get some acid

I'm genuinely sorry but i'm NOT gonna sift through a fuckton of accumulated trauma that me and literally 99% of the women, fems and pre-transition AFAB trans people i know have suffered due to men being horny as fuck and lay it out to you in clear terms. I'm not saying this to put you down or berate you, i'm just explaining why i can't do that thing you're asking for. It's just too much both emotionally and effort wise. The constant objectification that anyone who's read as female goes through doesn't fit in one neatly condensed post and spelling out exactly what is and isn't acceptable in this regard in any and all situations is plainly impossible. Let's just say that going out there as a girl is scary as hell way too often. To put this in perspective, i get at least one "that guy scared the shit out of me" story every day (i just read another one before coming to hexbear). And men tend to be completely oblivious to this because women* are used to them not taking our experiences seriously anyways, so we share this stuff mostly among ourselves. But it's omnipresent.

Eh. As somebody who's able to compare hornyness pre and post HRT, yes, testosterone has some pretty strong effects down there, but i really struggle with the biologist interpretation that the absolute awfulness of guys suffering from awooga syndrome is a hormonal problem. When you discard any and all belonging to a masculine gender role at a different time than going on HRT, when you date a pre-HRT, but socially and psychologically completely transitioned trans woman for a while, this becomes very obvious. Biodeterminism is a deeply flawed idea that is missing the central point and conflates a hormonal "it's so much easier to get a boner on this stuff" with a learned "i need to objectify and partition women to find them sexually desirable". The violence found in our society's standard male sexual behavior isn't organic in nature, it is performative, it is behavioral, it is trained and enforced and policed. This is good news, actually, because it means it is not inherent to being a man, or to being on T, it is inherent to a certain way of doing masculinity and of seeing women that we can denormalize and phase out if we [REDACTED]which would be good training to later perform DIY orchi[IN MINECRAFT]ew Tate in a pit full of hungry baboons.