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If taken in the context of the two options being hetero and homo, then bisexuality would presumably mean "different and the same" In reality of course hetero doesn't usually mean hetero either as a lot of self identified herteros are probably picky about enbys.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:56
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some plague rats posted:Genuine question: are we actually treating sapiosexuality as an actual orientation now...? I personally find the argument for the various conditional attractions etc to be similar to the one for aces, which is that they may still find themselves on the lovely end of social norms that have historically been dominated by the same people who make life lovely for lgbtq people. Sexuality is complex and it can get silly if you try to make words for all of the possible ways anyone can experience it but if their experience helps them understand the importance of getting rid of the stifling social rules that make life worse for everyone then I don't see why I shouldn't find common cause with them. The club is going to become less exclusive over time as those norms are dismantled and people hopefully start just liking whoever they like and are more open to liking more people because they live in a society that celebrates that as much as our current one does heterosexual attraction, and the ideal world i want to see is one where none of the sexualities make sense in the same way that people who like eating cheese don't have a name for themselves, it's just normal, it's not something you would comment on or build an identity around, you can just do it, there is no stigma or need to fight for it that would mark your experience out as unusual. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Apr 14, 2022 |
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Apr 14, 2022 17:19
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Again, if it means someone is willing to subscribe to good political goals I really don't see what is served by belitting their feelings about themselves and others. If they make you act right they're good feelings, IMO. I have significantly more in common with a decent cishet person than I do with a bisexual person who acts in opposition to wider LGBTQIA liberation.
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Apr 14, 2022 22:49
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some plague rats posted:Hm. Not sure about this at all. No one is ever going to experience societal oppression for being sapiosexual. No US state is passing laws against mixed-IQ marriage. No one is getting yelled at and beaten on the street for being a smart-fucker. No one is refusing to date anyone who likes the big bang theory. This just doesn't line up But the entire reason LGBTQIA is a thing is because we want a world where that doesn't happen. Our identities cannot be defined forever by suffering, it may be suffering that brought most of us together but as advances are made then necessarily this is going to also be less true for more and more LGBTQIA people, and that's a good thing. It is going to be necessary at some point for our political freedoms to be maintained by people who have never suffered their absence, so to me it is far more important that somebody believes in liberation than whether they personally suffer for the lack of it. The latter is only a route to the former, and it isn't a route for everybody who experiences it either. Nobody has ever, technically, done anything to me because of my bisexuality because very few people know about it, so if suffering is necessary to join the club then I shouldn't be allowed in either. And going by what you said asexuals should definitely not be allowed in.
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Apr 14, 2022 23:00
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I fail to see the hard cutoff between asexuals/aromantics and demisexuals. The wider problem is people feeling it necessary to offer input on who you gently caress or don't gently caress, if LGBTQIA advocacy has opened the door for people to more readily explore their feelings about how they relate to other people and to sexuality in general then I am glad of it, and if they want to fight for better rights and for our rights then I am glad of them, too. The notion that it "dilutes" the fight I think is absurd, allies don't need the rights they fight for, but I still think they should fight for them, again I don't need any more rights, but I still advocate for them? Lesbian and gay people don't need the rights that trans people do, but many of them still fight for those rights because they believe they are human rights. If demisexuals need no legal changes then that's fine, but I see absolutely nothing to be gained by turning away their aid or fellowship, or trying to do respectability politics against an enemy that has at every single turn shown nothing but contempt for anything other than the absolute domination of their ability to dictate how everyone else lives. They are never going to respect you or me, our only hope is to crush them and for that we need as many people on board with our view of the world as possible.
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Apr 14, 2022 23:18
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But you aren't going to foster a sense of community by telling people they can't identify as [x] they have to identify as [umbrella term y] instead. If people want to spend time talking about the intricate details of their feelings and use words to do that you can't... stop them? If they feel it necessary to do that you just have to let them get on with it, and I would suggest the more important thing is to be supportive so that regardless of the words they use they still think of you as someone worth sticking with/up for. If they spend time exploring those ideas and come to the conclusion that they are happy to be lumped in with a larger group, great, that was a productive use of their time because allowing space that encourages that self understanding is the entire point of being inclusive. If they do it and come to the conclusion that they have irreconcilable differences that necessitate different actions, also good, because then they can bring those needs to wider attention and they can become a part of unified political fronts in exchange for the support of the groups that need them. The idea that that introspective process could, or should be stopped only makes sense if you start from the assumption that people are going to just make up differences that don't exist for fun, which seems a weird assumption, to me. Either the differences don't exist (or are minor) and the result of the process will be an affirmation of that, or they do exist and we should know about them because a liberation that is conditional on suppressing some people's experience and needs for political convenience is no liberation at all, both morally and practically because those papered over cracks in the foundation will always reassert themselves. I do not, fundamentally, believe that people's thoughts need to be managed by some authority to prevent them from introspecting their way into false ideas, nor do I see how this could possibly be achieved even if it were the case, certainly not among a decentralized political alliance such as this. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Apr 18, 2022 |
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Apr 18, 2022 20:01
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aniviron posted:I hate to say it but there does come a point where being exclusionary is okay. If you include everyone who is in any way marginalized under the same big umbrella, your movement ceases to become a movement. Is that because it is a broad coalition or is that because it is is functionally an oligarchy to which LGBTQIA activists have arrived late and do not hold any material power compared to the people already established in the organization who provide the money and the connections? Because I don't think that it really has much to do with the breadth of the organization and rather that it has far more to do with the fact that all political parties are majority controlled by people who really do not give a poo poo about us at all and have no interest in us or anything to do with us other than to the extent we can be used to empower them. It is not that we are in a broad coalition but rather that we are in a position of subservience, there is no "coalition" at all. They make the decisions and we do not. And the solution there, I think, necessitates a stronger base of power for us, a base of power we can exercise independently and with which we can remove those who obstruct us, without having to beg from politicians. And I think that is better achieved by getting as many people as possible to identify themselves with our way of thinking and our ideological view of the world, so that they view any failure to accomodate us as an attack on themselves. Thus, I favour the adoption and incorporation of as many people as possible who identify themselves as at odds with cishet normative society. The more time they spend around us, the more they identify with us, the more likely they are to identify themselves through the frameworks we use, through models where same sex attraction, or lack of attraction, or whatever else confer no shame on those who experience them, models where gender is performance and if you don't like something you are being expected to do you should be free to not do it, or if you find a form of expression that brings you happiness you should be free to do that. These are models of the self and of the world that I think are simply better than the ones that are proliferated by other political positions, they liberate the mind from the fear of non-conformity, and I think they have a tremendous capacity to improve anybody's state of mind, and in turn I think they promote better political positions in people who internalize them because they are far more likely to see the beneficial effect they have and want everyone else to have that freedom too. Thus I think everyone could and should adopt them and a great way to be exposed to them is to spend time with LGBTQIA people. If people come to identify very strongly with those models of the world I think that puts them closer to us than it does to our political opponents, who have made it very clear that they will not accept the proliferation of those models at all and they will target anybody who espouses them, even if they're cishet. So again I strongly advocate for making a space for people to explore identities on the margins of the "core" identities that make up our platform, because they have more in common with us than they do with the normative world. What you are seeing when people do that is the power of our worldview transforming the world for the better, I don't see any appropriate response other than celebration. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 19, 2022 |
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Apr 19, 2022 00:50
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Well that's why I put the emphasis on the frameworks, I think they are freeing for anybody who adopts them, and I suppose I feel that if someone who is cishet understands themselves through the framework of gender-as-performance and sexuality as being valid however it is expressed, then they are more like us than they are like people who are all into  and similar rubbish, regardless of their orientation.It's a similar view I come to when faced with prominent right wing gay people, if they don't share the framework that most of the good people I know do, then it doesn't make a bit of difference to me if they're gay, they're still a million miles away from me. The frameworks of self understanding I got from queer philosophy are, personally, more significant to me than merely the fact that I want to gently caress men sometimes, lots of people want to do that, but the theory can change your whole view of your life, and I really think it can do that for anybody. I would put it on par with marxism for "holy poo poo this is such a good way to look at the world" ideas that once you get them into your head it sort of permanently fucks your brain up and makes you much cooler. I think the ideas themselves carry their own radicalism with them, bascially, and spreading them as wide as possible will make everyone else more radical, not dilute them.
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Apr 19, 2022 10:17
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I would agree that it is a good example but personally it reinforces my stance in the opposite direction. There are plenty of, for example, horrible religious cranks who spent their lives preaching bile from the pulpit while loving men on the side. Or politicians who will happily sign away the rights of people I care about while utilizing their power and privilege to do whatever they want in private, I don't think they are "one of us" just because they do that. I feel far more connection and kinship with someone on the same page as me politically than someone who happens to share some of my sexual preferences. Them sharing the latter gives them a good opportunity to be a better person, but they are perfectly capable of squandering that. And if they do, they are most certainly the enemy as far as I am concerned. If your circumstances cause you to engage in productive introspection then that is good, but what matters is the outcome. You can be queer and still a piece of poo poo, just as you can be working class and still a piece of poo poo. Who you actually are is more important than who you had the opportunity to be. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Apr 22, 2022 |
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Apr 22, 2022 12:36
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And that is contingent upon the continued self reflection and arrival at a better outlook, not on merely being bisexual.
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Apr 22, 2022 14:50
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As I said before, if you are exposed to queer philosophy and it makes you into a better person, as I think it should, then I am happy to think of you as a comrade, whether you are queer or not. If it does not, or if for some other reason you are hostile towards me and other people I care about, then you are an enemy, again whether you are queer or not. If you have been a poo poo before then I don't think it is very surprising that it would put some people off wanting to associate with you, nor really do I think it is incumbent on the recipients of your antipathy, whatever its origin might have been (I don't really think it makes much difference) to try and make you feel welcome. If some do, then you're very fortunate, but people have themselves to look after first.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:33
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What the absolute gently caress is this moderation? Do you seriously think this is helping the thread, the forum, or your image by doing this? Do you have nothing better to do with your time given what you have been told in the feedback thread and given your contemptible performance moderating the last LGBTQIA issues thread, than to find the most spurious reasons to probate everybody contributing to this one? If you want something you can do to better handle moderation of this thread you can stay the gently caress out of it if this is all you intend to do, because how the gently caress can we have any conversation with you pursuing this idiotic vendetta. The only person making this thread unwelcoming is the moderators at this point.
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Apr 25, 2022 05:21
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Archonex posted:Where is this feedback thread, since I can't find it? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4000307&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 It is, however, now closed.
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Apr 25, 2022 11:06
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Koos Group posted:Well, I included most of what I would in a longer apology in the previous post, but to make it clear: I apologize for the rash probes, as it seems this had an effect of stifling discussion and making people not feel welcome here, which are both the opposite of what I want, and I mean to remedy this with the thread having its own IK. Do you understand why that happened because I would have thought anybody with a rudimentary level of emotional intelligence would not have made that "mistake" to begin with, and also because that is relevant to the wider issue of you, personally, being thoroughly deficient in your handling of transphobia on the forum. A mechanistic "oh no people are unhappy with this action therefore I will perform a different action" "oh I have been told to apologise therefore I will say that I apologise" does not suggest that you have actually taken any of the criticism people have leveled at you on board, that there is any understanding happening inside your brain, and certainly does not do anything to inspire confidence in your future decision making. Do you understand why consistently probating criticism of your behaviour on this issue rather than engaging with it makes people think you have a problem?
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Apr 25, 2022 19:14
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Kalit posted:Okay, so stupid question and forgive my ignorance, but can’t sexual orientation be based upon sex? Or are you saying this might hold true since it can be based upon sex or gender? The way I would look at it is that sex (as in, physical sexual features) as far as attraction goes, count as an element of gender performance. Which is consistent with why people often want to change their physical features to match their gender, along with dressing differently, speaking differently, adopting different behaviours etc. If those are all part of the performance for self actualization reasons, then it would make sense that they are also part of the performance that other people would be attracted to. And as with all other parts of gender there should be no reason why you can't mix and match as you like, a gay man is not less of a man if he presents more feminine, lesbians aren't men if they dress butch, so similarly I don't think what sex bits you have dictates it either, though people can obviously have preferences both for themselves and in what features they are attracted to. At the moment we still live in a society where the main choices are either man or woman, those are two somewhat distinct (though often very difficult to draw the borders of) groups of signifiers, including a lot of behaviours and physical features, that a lot of people clearly want to belong to and perform, and also that a lot of people are specifically attracted to. But I would like to think that over time, if we take apart the overt social pressures to fit into one of those groups, this might change. It seems hard to me to imagine that everyone on earth automatically and only fits into one of those two groups. So in the future it might be possible that gay and straight lose meaning, or at least their prominence. But at the moment I don't think it's the case. Also I would suggest that if those sexualities did lose their meaning then so what? Does it need a "scientific backing"? Surely you, as a human being, can just like who you like, you don't need some guy in a labcoat looking over your shoulder going "hmm yes my genderometer classifies this person as a man therefore you are still gay" who cares? If you look at someone and you think they are beautiful then that's IMO just a good thing, your day is presumably improved by that experience, does it need to mean any more than that? Does it need to fit into a previously established pattern or you're not allowed to find someone attractive? The "scientific" thing, IMO, is that lots of people find other people attractive, sometimes this follows particular patterns and sometimes the patterns correspond to pre-established gender binaries, but it is not that they correspond to those binaries that makes the attraction somehow "legitimate" it's that people experience it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Apr 26, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 05:04
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As An Bisexual I would strongly recommend, if possible, letting go of the desire to treat sexuality like xbox achievements, you don't get anything for doing the whole run on one attraction category and nobody's gonna take your sex% speedrun down if you find yourself attracted to someone that doesn't fit into your previous pattern. Genuinely just like whoever you feel attracted to, and don't stress about what it means for your categorization or how others will categorize you, they should help you understand yourself and if they start just making you anxious then they're bad categories, living without that stress is so much easier. And definitely don't go around worrying if it's unscientific for you to fancy someone. You don't need to go to the post office to have your scientific boner license updated. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Apr 26, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 16:16
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Dr. Stab posted:The argument by transphobes is that since the study shows that transitioned trans people have higher suicide rates than the general population, people shouldn't "become trans." I'm sure people who undergo heart surgery have higher rates of mortality than people who have no heart complaints too.
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Apr 27, 2022 21:19
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Also didn't you say you got poo poo as a teenager specifically for that? It is extremely bizzare to me to undergo that and not have your first thought upon hearing it's a worldwide problem for queer kids being "oh poo poo that happened to me and it loving sucked"
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Apr 29, 2022 09:11
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I have an extremely strong suspicion that the "concerns" are actually just post hoc justifications for people finding trans people icky. Which is also why so many of them are just recycled gay panic crap. A significant portion of society is very invested in enforcing their idea of normal on the rest of society, either because they are very invested in the norms themselves or they are very invested in the act of enforcement, lots of people, myself included honestly, really do enjoy just having a socially acceptable punching bag, and others find that they enjoy a position of authority out of the confluence of those two tendencies. So concerns can and will be invented and performatively espoused as long as the act of doing so can serve those purposes. So I think the most likely solution is not technological (though that might help render the idea of "being able to tell" even more farcical than it already is) but rather that I think a big part of the profusion of queerness among younger people since the real blows were dealt to its repression in the past couple of decades, is rooted in the fact that it is simply better to not bother with enforcing norms. You get the odd queer person who goes in on the gatekeeping and wanting to be accepted by the normative society so they spend their time making GBS threads on nonconforming people, but I think for the most part the foot in the door for queer acceptance has only made the more weird and wonderful side of the community flourish, and I think that is an inherently appealing message, you can and should just be yourself, and gently caress anyone who tells you you can't be. I am hopeful that idea will spread further, because it also has great applications, IMO, for wider politics. And I think the more people who embrace it the less power and appeal the enforcement obsessed section of society will have.
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Apr 29, 2022 20:09
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Lyesh posted:It's been distressingly difficult to get terfs to change their minds by pointing out that Shapiro and co want to ban abortion and generally subjugate women as well. I think a lot of them are fine with that as long as they're the arbiters of it, is the thing.
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Apr 29, 2022 20:15
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I feel like that a lot too. Mostly in that I don't know if I have a gender identity, it took a long time for me to understand the concept because the only experience of it I've had is that gendering is something other people do to you, not something you do to yourself. But apparently a lot of people don't feel that way. So if you offered me the ability to just snap my fingers and switch? Yes I probably would, it would be interesting to see if I would feel different about myself, and presumably I could also just switch back if I didn't like it. But the prospect of going through all the grief people go through now for it? I know myself well enough to know the effort would outweigh any possible benefit.
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Apr 29, 2022 21:22
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That's what makes me think I'm not, there is no better self I wish I could be, I am always myself, there is nothing else for me to be, it's just that I've also never felt like that included a gender. I have one because everyone else assigns me one but I put no effort into it and I don't feel like I want or need to be identified as it. One of the nice things is the older I've gotten the less people have been weird about it. Growing up I got told I needed to be more masculine a lot, but it's gotten so rare as an adult that it's startling and laughable on the odd occasion it does happen. I dunno, I don't think this is enby either because enbies usually seem to enjoy expressing a gender that isn't binary, rather than just being kinda nonplussed by the whole thing.
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Apr 29, 2022 22:05
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Well also I feel slightly odd when I look like a large burly man and I am definitely not going to put any effort in to stop doing that because I am very lazy and I have no idea what I would replace it with, so it seems presumptuous of me to sort of glom on to the same group as people who have a much harder time of things than me. And yes obviously I know that if I said that about someone else I would think I was being an oik but I'm allowed to have double standards about myself. Guavanaut posted:That reminds me a bit of Vi Hart's On Gender, which is bit like an affirmative trans positive version of the 'Gender Critical' badness but from before mainstream GC kicked off again, like it's easy to see how that attitude could turn into GC if they were surrounded by people echoing that and lacked the intellectual curiosity that they have, but goes in a different and better direction just by listening. Thank you for this also, first time I've heard someone else describe it and thought "yes this is correct" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 29, 2022 |
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Apr 29, 2022 22:19
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BougieBitch posted:So this is a bit of a digression from the current topic, but something I've been thinking about on and off for years but never really engaged with due to just not having a space where the conversation makes sense. [...] I don't have good answers for you but, just generally, cases like this (and, I guess, like me) are why I think the push for trans rights is doing everybody a favour. I think there's probably a lot of people who would be happier making some changes to their presentation and the expectations society puts on them but they're outweighed at the moment by how bloody difficult it is.
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Apr 30, 2022 17:34
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I feel like the more assimilationist side of the argument is inherently losing, though. Or rather, it's never going to be enough, but it can serve as the narrow end of the wedge. Granted I wasn't aware at the time but when the big fight was for gay marriage there was a lot less emphasis placed on the more nonconforming side of the community and yeah the emphasis was very much "hello I am gay man who want to have husband like good christian person" which while good for some people certainly isn't going to help everyone on the face of it, but on the other hand it feels like the gay marriage fight really did break the back of quite a lot of the opposition. And while they currently control the legislative efforts, that they are having to go out of their way to try and create a legislative barrier to trans people being able to live their lives and teaching people about better ways of understanding themselves in relation to gender, does kind of indicate how on the defensive they are? They really lost that argument and now wider LGBT rights are a full on culture war issue, with enough relevance to get big corporations even trying to market via their support for them. That to me suggests that the material reality is that a lot of people are on our side. For all the poo poo the right are pulling it still seems like these far more radical ideas are gaining a lot more traction than they were a decade ago, and especially among younger people, and I think that's because there's a pretty desprate need for it, it is the full range of human experience asserting itself into the world, and once people get a taste of it, it's very hard to put it back in the box. While I agree that it would be great to have the most radical possible ideas out there at the front, to me, history seems to suggest that less radical victories do seem to make more radical ones easier to fight, as each barrier broken opens more ground for people's real experience and need to assert themselves.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:20
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I literally only know him as the dude who spends a weird amount of time complaining about other trans people so I have filed him under "should be running a cringe reaction youtube channel but somehow is an adult man instead"
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May 2, 2022 19:48
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Miss Broccoli posted:I sure hope that "I'm trans but I don't want to act on it because the technology isn't there yet" and "I would transition if medical technology was better" don't get you excluded from anything. I can see people being sensitive if they felt like you were attacking their choices here though, people are (rightfully and understandably) pretty sensitive so you may have to be particular with your language. This is sort of why I feel odd. If someone were to ask me what pronouns I wanted, the honest answer would be "whatever you want" but I think if I said that it would come off as flippant.
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May 3, 2022 15:43
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It could also be a general skepticism about one's own self image. Like I can't imagine ever being particularly enthusiastic about my body and certainly not if it takes a lot of effort to change and/or upkeep. I've never liked it and I don't think I'm ever going to. It makes a lot of sense to me that someone would be reluctant to sign up for making big changes to their body even if it were free and even if, in an ideal world, they might prefer it to be different, same reason I've never considered plastic surgery, because I am pretty sure the complaint isn't with the actual physical nature of my body and just that I'm not capable of feeling positively about it. And if that's the case then the one I've got is OK, it can lift heavy objects, it isn't falling entirely to bits, it is relatively low maintenence as they go. Plus the parts of masculinity I really want to distance myself from are behavioural anyway. Exposure to gender theory if anything has helped a lot with that. Who I am isn't defined by my body shape and I find that pretty easy to internalize. It's more like I'm just stuck driving a mediocre car, it's not ideal but it's not going to get me to put in the effort to get a sports model because driving in general is crap. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:08 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 16:03
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Timeless Appeal posted:I think part of the problem is people like Chapelle, Rowling, or Shapiro will sometimes retreat to this place of "Look I'm just telling you where I'm coming from" and ignore both their position of power as well as the fact that they're not some dumpy uncle stumbling into a conversation with their trans niece, they're public figures who literally won't stop loving talking about trans people. An example of a wider problem where there is very little conception of the idea that you stop belonging entirely to yourself when you have a platform, intrinsically everything you say then becomes dangerous, like if you were wearing a magic ring that gave you super strength and had to think hard to avoid punching through walls trying to perform normal tasks. So everything you do no longer can be done just for or as yourself, it is necessarily done as a signficiant component of society. People generally don't become famous to have that ability, and a lot of people just refuse to acknowledge that it exists because they don't like the responsibility it puts on them, and normal people often refuse to acknowledge it too because they are often invested parasocially with famous people and want to imagine that they are, fundamentally, just like them, that their views are just like a random person talking to a friend or something. And yes, as you note, it becomes very readily weaponised by all sorts of people, right wing pundits, idiot rich and famous people who can't stop gobbing off about whatever stupid idea is in their head today, even up to corporations doing the trite "oh we're sorry we offended people we will learn from this and try to grow" shite when they do something (likely calculated) to piss people off.
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May 13, 2022 16:05
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The common one that really weird me out is "how can you be in a monogamous relationship, you'll always want to cheat with the gender you aren't with" like I dunno dude how do you manage to not cheat with other people of the same gender you're attracted to? I manage it the same way.
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May 14, 2022 15:14
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Oh sure I know jealousy and infidelity are issues everyone can have, it's just specifically the idea that if you're bisexual you can never really be happy without access to all possible sets of genitalia that is a strange thing to leap to. As if the mechanism of the sex you have is the defining feature of your being. I agree there is probably a link there with the bizzare obsession that conservatives have with the mechanism of gay sex though. And possibly the mechanism of transitioning too. Generally far too obsessed with other people's bodily functions IMO, very little interest in their thoughts or feelings.
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May 14, 2022 15:48
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I was I suppose more thinking about the pearl clutching about younger people transitioning, or showing any indication of wanting to transition. I was helpfully linked a youtube documentary done by Caelan Conrad a little while ago where they infiltrate online terf spaces and demonstrate all the hosed up poo poo they talk about and how they seem to think about trans people. It's very good I think, albeit difficult to watch because the subject matter is, of course, horrible. But it is full of these bizzare posts about people acting like they own their children, sometimes even their adult children, it's extremely loving weird and it's been simmering in my brain for a while. Also may be being a little loose with language characterising them as "conservatives" but they seem pretty compatible with them honestly, for all that they like to imagine themselves as being on the right side of history, that is not remotely unusual with the right, and given they're basically in love with all the anti gay poo poo from 30 years ago as well, really seems like the pretense of being progressive is just PR combined with the general effect that the advance of LGBT rights has had on the culture. Much like with feminism and civil rights, it is now (generally) unacceptable to just say the target group of your ire is just flat out subhuman and needs to be kept in line, you instead generally try to phrase it by appealing to progressive language, like you're doing them a favour and actually your weird trad vision of the world is actually the true form of equality and the best thing for the group you detest. So as you note this leads to people who are, fundamentally, just right wing conservatives trying to appear very concerned about the youth of today and women's rights while promoting social structures and ideologies that are utterly hostile to their liberation. And they do this not just for PR reasons but because I think that the cultural shift has fundamentally changed the signifiers of virtue in society. They need to dress it up in that language because doing that is an act of reification, making their own feeling that they are in the right, real. Same as with what I mentioned above with how people with platforms express themselves, they need to do it that way because doing it makes them feel like it's real. So to me, terfs are just conservatives who are partly trapped in a self-identity of progressivism. They need to feel like they are progressive despite the actual reality of what that means disgusting them. I think this is also why it appeals so much to a certain kind of "I was cool in the 90's" liberal, especially here in the UK. There are a lot of people who probably thought of themselves as progressive then and are quite attached to that identity but who do not, and possibly never did, really critically engage with what the various liberatory movements of the past few decades mean, why they exist, who they comprise, and why they have now reached the point they are at. And so now they are faced with things "going too far" as they understand it, and are trapped between wanting to seem hip and with it, but at their core being pretty deeply conservative when anyone threatens the societal norms they are attached to. It is, I think, in a sense a demonstration of our success, that we have fundamentally colonised their brains a little bit, to the point that they need our language to make themselves feel like they're in the right. It may not be very deeply ingrained and it may not stop the need they have to be assholes from finding ways to express itself, but it does make me smile a little bit to see them doing that bit of mental contortion. It would be nice to think it hurts a little bit every time they do it. But anyway, that sort of poo poo is why I jump to an obession with people's bodies, just utterly bizzare how some of these people talk about others, especially their own children some of the time. As opposed to the idea that your body is your business, you have to live in it and I can only interact with it on a surface level and only then if we are pretty drat familiar with one another. There's obviously the overt and unsurprising forms of it with cishets being weird about "oh no trans people existing means I might accidentally do a gay thing aaaaah" and that being an extension of a bunch of lovely ideas about feeling entitled to other people's bodies. But it also seems to manifest a lot between adults and children too, which IMO is very weird and creepy. And I feel like it also pervades more widely too, feels like there's little fungal filbers growing through that stuff and into things like as I said, the obsession with how gay people gently caress, as Timeless Appeal noted the separation of gay sex and hetero sex into fundamentally different categories. And eventually they're going to connect into a horrible mycellium of understanding and my brain is going to go crack ping at some point and sprout some dreadful mushroom of understanding. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:53 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 16:47
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That's probably right as well yeah, and I wonder if that also ties into the attitude I see a lot among the alpha bro and incel types where they view relationships as a hierarchy of posession, always wanting to own the most "desirable" people. And there is also a very strong current of normativity, the desire to project their concepts of value onto the entire world, to make them dominant among their peer group and to imagine that they are objective across all people by mentally excluding anybody who doesn't share them. Obviously seems very desparate to me to be trying to build such a convoluted, harmful, and unimaginative validation mechanism by such crude methods because you simply can't accept being vulnerable with other people. Probably some comparison to consumerism there too. The idea that you can never just be happy with what you have and must always want something more is certainly an idea that pervades far outside of relationships.
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May 14, 2022 17:23
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That also seems to be true of a lot of terfs, though. Or GCs or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. It is not a position that people seem to arrive at through an abundance of sociohistorical awareness or empathy for other people.
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May 23, 2022 11:16
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Timeless Appeal posted:If it's any consolation, I do think there really are big shifts happening in the upcoming queer generations. The more statistically obvious is that trans folks are much more prevalent along with bi or pan people being the vast majority of LGTBIA youth. Yes I was going to mention this, I am a big fan of the radical inclusivity that seems to be gaining a bit of traction in younger folks, and doubly so because it doesn't seem to be generated from any organiztion? It seems to be just a thing that lots of small groups and people have decided is important of their own volition and worked out ways to promote when they come together. Genuinely is very heartening to see this... impetus to understand I guess I would call it, being adopted.
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May 23, 2022 19:36
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I tend to view the commercialization of pride month fairly favourably to be honest. Like, obviously it's gross, but at the same time I view it as a sort of insurance. It wasn't so long ago that being LGBT+ was a joke, or something to be hidden away, so it being important enough for capital to try and co-opt it I think is an important part of entrenching it in the culture. It is a sign that we are doing well, basically. And I'm not sure it does a lot of harm to the movement as a whole either? I'm sure there are actual ultra-assimilationists who are totally onboard with pride flavoured missiles being made at raytheon by a diverse team of engineers to be sold to regimes who murder LGBT people if they get their hands on them, but I do feel like there is a fairly common sentiment that companies really don't "get it" and seeing it for what it is, rainbow washing as you say. I don't know how long it can last or how accurate the perception is but every company on the planet competing in the "how do you do, fellow gays" olympics for a month, to a significant amount of blank stares and mockery from actual LGBT+ people, is 1. very funny to me and 2. kind of exactly how I would want it to be, honestly? It is good that they feel it necessary to do that, but it is also good for people to be cynical about it. I think it is evidence of us leading the culture, to a degree. Which is how it should be.
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May 23, 2022 22:47
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Agreed on both counts, but I think it is better for them to be making the overtures while doing that, as that weakens their rhetorical position if and when it becomes possible to extract material changes from them, than the prevailing alternative in prior decades, which was that they give lots of money to republicans and treat their LGBT+ employees like poo poo and also say that's cool and good. I would like to think it is an indication of those attitudes becoming unstable, they feel it necessary to do the propaganda stunts to cover for those practices, rather than just doing them in the open because it's just accepted and good pretty universally. But that does also mean that I still think contempt is the best response.
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May 24, 2022 02:53
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And the fact that it is the same forces of capital that drive corporations to do LGBT+ branding are also the cause of many of our problems (not specifically related to queerness but often intersectional with) I think is why a lot of people think it's dumb and fake when they try it. Because yes it does not resonate with the actual lives of normal people in many of the same ways that advertising in general do not. And I am sure there are people who you could describe as left wing (though who I might not) who want to draw a distinction between queer issues and other social problems but I think it is quite easy to create a comprehensive worldview that incorporates both, and sees how they both intertwine. Which would rightly see the corporate crap as just propaganda (but interesting for the fact they feel it necessary to make) and also which would form the basis for a continued advancement of queer rights. For a revolutionary political movement to be co-opted I think the material issues which cause i to spring into being in the first place, need to be addressed sufficiently. And I have not really seen much slowdown from queer activism in that respect? Gay marriage got made more legal but I don't think very many people stopped after that. I think also, that our fight has an advantage in that the opposition depend on hegemonic control of social spaces to keep it down. And to an extent I believe that a big part of the changes you are seeing especially with younger people, are a result of the changes to how we socialize brought on by technological changes in recent decades. It is much easier nowadays for someone to find a community of people who will accept them and talk to them and with whom they can generate ideas about how the world is, and how it should be, even if it's only on the internet. I believe, ultimately, that the push for radical inclusivity we're seeing now is an outgrowth of people having had the chance to live part of their lives in inclusive spaces, and deciding that they much prefer living like that. And so they feel it necessary to make the whole world like that. And I think that the reason a surprising number of people are signing up to that (again I think especailly among younger people) is because that is a better way to live. I also think that this is a great way for anticapitalism to spread too, for a lot of liberatory ideas, actually. And I think it's reasonable to expect a lot of people to start joining the dots between all of those different-but-linked fights and to view them all as aspects of the same fight. They are all, ultimately, trying to break the shackles on your life, the things that stop you from being the healthy, happy, self actualized person you want to be. They are all fighting things that do not need to exist, that serve no good purpose by existing, but which exist out of historical inertia. The idea of the intentional community, building a little model society outside of wider society so you can live the way you want to live, is something that a lot of different poltiical movements have tried over the centuries, and usually they are crushed by force or collapse under internal problems brought on by isolation. But I think our position is somewhat unique in that the society we want can be built in miniature, I'm posting on an example of that at the moment. And it doesn't isolate people either, the internet allows the formation of self-curating groups of people from all over the world and you can be a part of those without physically being anywhere different, it integrates into your life far better than was possible at any previous time in history. Critically also, I think, from a trans rights perspective, the internet is one of the few things that kids might have access to without their parents knowledge. And that is obviously very important for kids who are experiencing doubts about their gender and also, I think, important in that they can have access to a countercultural view of the world at a formative age. Their parents might be assholes and they might live in a very oppressive environment IRL but they probably can have access to people who are trying to create a better one, before all the normative indoctrination gets fully into their brains. I really think that's powerful, that that gives people the opportunity to see how the world could be different, to live, on some level, how they want to, and having done that I think it's very hard for them to not want to see that reflected everywhere else. And because of the nature of the internet I think it's very hard for big powers like states and corporations to fully co-opt these communities because they exist in no small part because of the laissez faire approach to moderation of the internet as a whole. The internet runs on user generated content, and I think in the western world at least, trying to change that is going to run up against the entire spirit of the prevailing political ideology. I don't think content hosts are especially interested in moderating out LGBT+ content entirely, and that, I think, is why corporate pride month is insurance. It is emblematic of the attitude that I think is most helpful to us in terms of our continued advancement. They';re happy to have us around as long as they can make money off us, and I think a lot of queer spaces which form the big impetus for people to develop radically inclusive ideologies, exist within corporate controlled spaces. i.e the internet. As long as they continue to be fairly hands off, I think that works to our advantage, and while I don't expect them to stick up for us, I do expect them to be generally resistant at being drafted to fight a holy war of moderation on the behalf of old insane religious fundamentalists. I do not think it is consistent with the general trend of things in the corporate world, where they seem very keen to trade on LGBT+ goodwill, and as long as that includes harboring inclusive spaces, I think that's good for us. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:19 on May 24, 2022 |
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May 24, 2022 04:14
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I want to hope that it's concentrated among older, established politico types who seem pathologically obsessed with conservatism via the medium of fence sitting. Younger kids are probably more likely to actually know someone this matters to, or to be directly affected by queerphobia themselves.
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Jun 21, 2022 15:03
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It is increasingly hard to see how the US can continue to function when half the country wants the other half dead, basically. It's partly the case in the UK but the US seems to have it far more pronounced. Just a whole swathe of society whose total political contribution is making the entire world worse in every way.
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Jun 24, 2022 16:24
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