Isn’t that already contained in being angry about why no one cooked you dinner yet and being angry about why women don’t want to have sex with you all the time? /s

Should better get on another bird app like iNaturalist, very open minded people over there! ❤️

Oh nice! Funny enough I was planning on doing the pride ans trans flags by arranging pictures of flowers (to print on a shirt).

Do you also complain about people saying ‘eat the rich’? What is considered bigotry and what not? I didn’t say that bigotry is fine per se, just that some comic relief is. And I’m firmly convinced that discrimination is based on a structural oppression. That’s what I meant with the phrase about bigotry. But sure, even someone without much power can be an asshole and this wouldn’t be fine for me either. Although it is more complicated than to say this person is just a bigot, because you would need to include a structural level in this. Calling other people bigot for not confirming to your standards is a common way of discrimination as well. So talking about bigotry like a universal thing that is always this one way and that is bad is really overly simplistic and just playing into structural oppression. So maybe go fix this yourself?

While I see your point of humans being humans and those being in power often oppressing others, I don’t think this applies here. Because the struggle of emancipatory movements against the existing power hierarchies is not one of overthrowing one ruling class and replacing it with another. If you think that’s what is going on when people try to abolish racism or the patriarchy, then you have to be very far removed from those struggles in the first place. Instead of trying to topple one ruling class, we fight an intersectional struggle here, running through families affecting each person differently. This is a structural oppression very different from one class of rulers against an oppressed class. On top of that, I think the vast majority of oppressed people would agree that they want to live in a emancipated society where the form of oppression they face isn’t present anymore. No one wants to turn any form of oppression around.

I try to be giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but if you really think that feminism or anti-racism is about the goal of oppressing others, then you have to be either ignorant or malicious.

Regarding the comic relief, I think you downplay the role of personal emotions too much. What for of relief or venting would you suggest for all the suffering, the fear, the anger people have? I’m not Jesus and I don’t think his victim mentality will bring us any further here. I won’t turn the other cheek.

I also disagree with reversed bigotry in a safe place. First of all, Lemmy is no safe place. Most of the people here are cis(het) dudes and that makes it not safe per se. Second, I think there is a huge difference between structural oppression backing bigotry or people being assholes. The person you were responding to was obviously not saying that all the cishet people should vanish. You may have projected that on them, but that wasn’t the point. The point is comic relief and as such more of a sarcastic joke. When I say “cis men are garbage” (as I did some months ago here on Lemmy), I don’t literally mean that I think all cis men are really bad people that I want to get rid of. But what else to do about the fact that like 99% of cis men are bigots and are abusing their power? I would be the first person to welcome cis men into my life and be friends with them, if they would not be such irresponsible bigots. So saying “cis men are garbage” can help me vent all this frustration but without me being literal.

And sure, one could say that we should only apply the means that fit our end goals. But this form of comic relief is just that. It is not supposed to be a form of change or how we restructure society. If all we did would be to complain about oppression without trying to constructively change it, then I would be opposed to this as well. But this is not the case. There are already so many things people try to do to make this a better world for everyone. But we are all humans after all and so there needs to be some way of letting off steam. So don’t police other people innocently complain about oppression…

That’s your projection though. How do you know that oppressed people will in turn become the oppressors once they have the chance? Same goes for racial or other kinds of oppression. Women, queer people, people of color and any other minority have been working to get a more inclusive world benefitting everyone. It is just fear mongering to warn against this. As the other person said, it is comic relief to make fun of the oppressor, in this case cishet people, and it is obviously not a long-term strategy. But it is also not bigotry because for that you need power.

Hahaha so true! Although I get that autistic people could go either way, either be completely confused by gender and then abandon it as much as possible. Or on the other extreme autistic people might also try to learn all the rules of gender and get it just right?

Wow, I feel really seen by the essay and also by the comments by both of you ♥

Because of the author’s book “unmasking autism” I first discovered the labels autigender/neuroqueer. Those helped me a lot to see my gender doubts and internal conflicts as being the products of me as an autistic person trying to assimilate into a gendered society.

I think you didn’t understand what I was trying to say. No, what you commented on is not an outsider’s perspective. You see, everyone who deviates from societal norms has their own perspective but is also forced to be familiar with the normative perspective. Every single one of us gets bombarded from birth to their death with the cis perspective. Because it is the norm you have to adapt to. So the cis perspective is nothing new to anyone here. Just as queer people also have to accommodate the straight perspective and black folk have to live with the white perspective as default.

I know you mean well, but it feels rather patronizing to me.

Interesting! I guess this is only a possibility because of how we designed computers and machines to work? Like I often feel frustrated that I cannot pause or rewind someone who is speaking to me. Or digitally search for where my stuff IRL is. We really are all cyborgs and part of our brains is already fused with computers.

Hm, I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s obviously an ambiguous social situation where we could think of all parties involved feeling and behaving in all kinds of ways.

It kind of feels obvious to me that if people make a mistake and misgender me and feel genuinely sorry for it, that I won’t rub it in.

And I get your point that it might be harder for some folk to get new pronouns and not everyone has even heard of what that means. I wonder why you focus so much on the person not getting the pronouns right and not so much on the trans person themselves. Many trans people, especially people with non-binary pronouns, feel anxious about their pronouns being disrespected already. I don’t think your comment has much to add to the conversation. It’s not like trans people had a lot of power in society and could will people to respect their pronouns. So why caution against being too harsh on the other person?

What I feel uncomfortable about in your comment is that you tell trans people, who are oppressed, get discriminated against and made feel shit about themselves by society, to be more patient and compassionate. Now way! We are supposed to go through this transphobic world, try to survive it and also empathize with people who disrespect our pronouns? I strongly disagree with that. Yeah sure, if a person is generally nice to me I give them the benefit of the doubt. But they are not the ones who have to go through a dysphoric day afterwards.

I think this position of being “compassionate and patient” with people who are dominant in society is rather apologetic of oppression. Oppression doesn’t need to educate itself but lets oppressed people do the job for it. We shouldn’t fall for this fallacy of “neutrality”. There is a huge power imbalance in society that you miss if you want oppressed people to behave to society’s norms. Trans people already do so much to accommodate society’s backwards rules every day they live. It is already a great burden on most trans people to try to get along with society, telling them to also be “compassionate and patient” about their identity not being seen is not as understanding as you think it is.

I know you probably meant well with your comment, but I think it is important to caution against such apologetic behavior.

Oh, and btw in my experience autistic people are the ones who get pronouns much easier/faster because social norms feel more arbitrary to us anyways and because a much larger proportion of autistic people is also trans.

You know this meme?

This is essentially true because (we) trans people have to spend a ton of time into thinking about what gender and sex are. What may be helpful is thinking not about how trans or even queer people deviate from the norm but how sex, gender and sexuality work in general.

You may want to look into Judith Butler’s revelatory “Gender Trouble” (or at least summaries of it) that was kind of the birth of Queer Studies and where they discuss how gender/sex are “performative” (not in the sense of literally performing but rather how it is repeated and maintained). Butler explains how the category of sex is not descriptive but instead a constructed one. Even a newly born baby is put into a constructed (made-up) category that doesn’t necessarily reflect physical reality.

Sex as a physical reality actually crumbles the moment you have a closer look at it. Medicine has been trying to correct it by mutilating intersex people for ages now, trying to put them into neat categories. Like someone already said here in the comments, you probably don’t know your karyotype, right? You just assume it. There are various factors playing into sex, like chromosomal, hormonal, genital sex (plus some more!). All of them can show variations.

How sex is constructed can be made even more clearly when looking at animals. Biologists have always been very eager to put animals into sexual binaries because they tried to replicate their own view of the ‘natural’ man vs woman binary. But this is far from true. There are some animals with two genders, but also some with three or more and there are some with only one. Intersex, “trans” and queer animals are very common among animals as well. E.g. there are female deer with antlers etc. Science has just been too busy with projecting their own ‘truth’ to realize this. In recent years we have been catching up though. There is this great book called “Evolution’s Rainbow” where the author Joan Roughgarden goes into much more detail.

Another interesting point is that while it feels “natural” to us that there is a gender binary, this is actually a pretty modern view. Gender and sex as we know it have only been around for a few hundred years. Just like homosexuality and in response heterosexuality are very recent phenomena. Likewise, our concept of “love” is also a very recent invention and probably a product of the emergence of capitalism.

But you can see how the performative nature of sex and gender leads to scientists and generally people trying to impose/project sex and gender onto very arbitrary traits or phenomena. And by doing so, the perceive differences between sexes/genders is even stronger which leads to repetition of the imposition/projection. We probably cannot know how our species would express itself without these social constructs interfering.

So, that is why some people here in the comments gave you the wise hint not to try to rationalize gender/sex. Those are social constructs all the way and won’t really ever make sense. Where does the feeling to be any gender come from? No idea! But it definitely is there (or not haha).

Wait, what are we discussing here? GAG is (according to Wikipedia) a far-right, anti-LGBT organization and Arielle Scarcella fits right in there with her terf rhetoric. Obviously they are all full of shit and none of them is really interested in helping people or making the world a safer place for queer people.

Not sure if anyone mentioned it already, but The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is really cozy and nice. You play as a witch that got exiled and is mentally not in a good place but then you get to do all kinds of badass witch stuff. It is inclusive of trans women and I had to cry a lot when I found out midgame.

Well, I tried to explain it via identity before i.e. feeling feminine for being externally seen as a woman or seeing myself as a woman. That’s why it is tied a lot to gender euphoria for me. But as I tried to say in my last comment, the specific trait in which I may feel feminine is arbitrarily set by societal constructs. Feeling feminine means attaining a certain identity of womanhood or femininity and thus being confirmed in my own gender identity. To give some examples when I feel feminine: having smooth skin, having a curvy body, being caring, being empathetic, looking feminine. Does this help?

What a complicated question! I don’t think we can really say that femininity (or masculinity) are needed to belong to any gender. And it is really hard to entangle all the social constructs that make us believe of femininity as something essential, as something inherently gendered. So I guess most of the time when people are talking about their own femininity, they mean how they feel at home in certain social roles or identities. But of course cis women also don’t need any femininity to be women, nor do they need to behave a certain way. It is just that identity is based on how you view yourself in relation to how other people see you. That’s why we often need to make use of these social constructs to make us feel more fitting to a certain role. Even if most strangers misgender me, I can still feel feminine and thus save my womanhood from their invalidation.

Another interesting point surely is that most transfeminine people were raised at least partly as boys. And the society constantly trying to eradicate every bit of feminine behaviour or wishes leaves a lot of transfeminine people with an open wound. I mean, even cis guys obviously suffer from this a lot because they lack the ability to connect to their own emotions or be emotionally close to others. This is a weird place for a transfeminine person to be in because you feel your own femininity but it also has been rejected, forbidden and sanctioned all of your life. This certainly needs some time to heal and I can relate to needing to reconnect with my own femininity.

Oh, that sounds really hard. Sorry to hear!

I think it’s probably mostly a result of living in a rural area? If I had to live in an area with only cishet people, trying to blend in a little, I would feel disconnected to the queer community as well! And I’m a transbian xD

As a counterexample: One of my flatmates is cishet but all of her friends (and flatmates) are queer/nb/trans etc. We often talk about how she sometimes has the impulse to be ashamed of being straight because of how problematic cisheteronormativity is. But in my mind, she is also kind of queer because she tries in every way possible to dissolve cisheteronormativity. She is also surrounded by queer culture and is pretty far away from straight people in that regard.

And I think this is actually a really hard position to be in: to be a feminist and simultaneously being romantically and sexually attracted to straight men. Resulting in heterofatalism and all that.

It also depends on how you understand ‘queer’. Many would think not straight and/or not cis. To me, queer is very much political, not fitting in and trying to dismantle cisheteronormativity. However, queering cishet norms is not accessible to everyone and probably not advisable for anyone alone in a rural community? Also, I probably tend to be of that opinion because I’ve never fit in and get frequently misgendered the moment I step into straight spaces.

I am obsessed with crocheting atm by the way. I made a humongous millipede (over 1.5 m long) and many other little critters I can cuddle :) What are you knitting?

Another very queer game I’ve played is The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. Highly recommended if you identify in any way as a queer woman (cis, trans or non-binary). Such a great story, meaningful decisions and trans-inclusive (although they exclude non-binary people and everyone else who doesn’t identify as a woman which is annoying).

Yes! I can see myself in nearly all of these points unfortunately. I went through a relationship where my partner wasn’t sure about her sexuality so it was kind of a constant back and forth between being in a romantical or a queer platonic relationship. That sucked a lot, especially because of my own insecurities because of childhood trauma and being trans.

But what I wanted to add is that heterosexual relationships are in my view just another type of messy. Sure, they less frequently have all that what you pointed out in your list. They often try to blindly follow this “script” of how a straight relationship has to work and what roles both sexes have to take up. This leads to a situation where they are probably kind of stabilized by this kind of script, but on the other hand they cannot but fail in following it. To follow the heterosexual norm, you have cut off so much of yourself in order to fit in this small role you’re given. And then people, especially your partner, constantly police you what you should and shouldn’t do. I’ve talked with soooo many straight people about their relationship problems (they shove it in your face really) and every time I’m really happy that I’m not straight. Trying to live inside a norm in general seems really tiresome and detrimental to your own mental health. All those people have to compartmentalize huge parts of their own desire and personality to be able to live that way.

Where did they state the opposite? Of course polyarmory should be disclaimed and discussed.