I'm Still Thinking About That Handful Of Posts Earlier This Week That Were All Saying Versions Of "masculinity

joe biden, you stupid fuck. listen to me. Crimes are legal for sitting presidents as long as they’re official actions. Listen: Joe. You have one chance

Getting the "girls can do anything and still be a girl" talk is like being handed a sword. Being told “maybe you’re a boy” when you stray from the mold? That’s a cage.

One says: you’re real.

The other says: you’re wrong.

You were never wrong. You were always you. And anyone who tried to un-girl you for not being soft enough, quiet enough, pink enough? They were scared of a girl who didn’t need permission to exist.

You didn’t need to change. The world needs to catch up.

You know that feeling when you spread your wings like you've been grounded forever, feathers tangled in the wires of their expectations and suddenly, the wind catches you? The air’s not heavy anymore, it's freedom.They tell you you're too wild for a cage, that you should be smaller, quieter, tamer. But they don’t understand you’ve always been meant to fly. Maybe you haven't even figured out your full wingspan yet, but every time you stretch, you feel the sky, vast and endless, waiting.

You were never meant to stay in the nest they built for you. The moment you left, you started becoming the bird you were always supposed to be. They can keep their cages. You’ll keep your flight.

Or something like that, I like birds....

it's crazy when gay men are misogynistic because at every high school debate there's a teenage girl fighting for gay rights like she's their personal lawyer

No I will not "look at the bright side" or "think positively" because I was born in a country where women don't have it as horrible as in other places. I didn't fucking choose to be born here, and they didn't choose to be born anywhere else.

If I were born in one of the 30 african and middle eastern countries where fgm is most concentrated according to the UN, my best scenario would be having my clitoris cut off without any kind of pain killer, with a razor blade that was never sterilized. They could also just decide to cut the whole thing off and then sew me shut, leaving a minuscule hole for my future "husband" to break through when he deems me worthy of his wrinkly, twice as old dick.

If I were born in Pakistan I could be one of the over 150 estimated women who get acid thrown at them annually, because their husbands (who I can assure you these women didn't marry by any real choice) threw a fucking tantrum over what they were wearing.

If I were born in America, where every 98 seconds someone is sexually assaulted, 91% of the victims being female, I could be one of the 1/3 of women who have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime according to the New York City National Organization for Women.

So with that said, I DON'T CARE THAT I HAVE IT LESS BAD, IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER

I didn't choose to be born in a country where I'm kind of viewed as an equal human being by most people despite the anatomy I didn't choose to have. Those 150 estimated pakistani women didn't fucking choose to have acid thrown at their faces. The women of america didn't choose the reality they live in right now.

I was lucky to be born in Sweden. I shouldn't have to consider being treated as a living, breathing human being as something lucky just because I have a fucking vagina.

Fuck the bright side and fuck your "optimism"

i'm not going to lie. i would do this all the time

The only thing holding me back from the edge these days is knowing the butch experience of adopting a trans identity is actually almost universal and not as isolating and soul crushing as it feels right now. Every day I wonder if the world will ever accept me as a woman again when I look and sound the way I do. Every day I’m recovering from the confusion and self hatred that prioritizing how others perceive my gender caused. When I think about the shitty reality of how much damage my trans identity did to my body and self image, I have to remind myself that I’m not alone. All around the world, there are other butches like me suffering silently. Some are quietly detransitioning, others are stuck with that trans identity, holding the regret at bay and pretending like its all ok. Acknowledging them and feeling compassion for them is what allows me to have compassion for myself. I have hope for myself because I have hope for all of us.

We all went through adolescence envying boys because of our crushes on straight girls, we all rejected patriarchal beauty standards, we all struggled with the rise of social media, and we all mistook puberty, mental illness, sexual trauma, and internalized lesbophobia for gender dysphoria. We walked the same path right into that doctors office asking for testosterone. Right now its hard to see this first wave of detransitioners speaking out get bullied. But I have hope that in 5 more years, this generation of young butch women will be bonding over the hair loss, the surgery regret, the deep voice, the body dysmorphia, the sexual dysfunction, and the isolation of being a medically masculinized female in today’s world. We wont care that we can’t go back in time anymore, because we’ll know we aren’t alone. The worries of our youth will be left behind, and together we’ll be able to close that chapter and go on living with purpose again.

Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.

It’s suffocating, how gender ideology has made me feel like it’s not safe to be openly lesbian.

Lesbians in gender ideology are put under the microscope. It feels like as soon as they find out a woman is a lesbian, anything she says can be grounds for the feared “TERF” accusations. Because to gender ideologues, lesbianism is inherently “terfy” because it is inherently male-exclusionary. Lesbians are automatically looked at with suspicion that we might be “terfs”, and it’s on us to break our backs proving otherwise.

I feel like if I’m talking to somebody who I know believes in gender ideology, I can’t mention I’m gay even if it’s relevant. Because I know that’s enough to alert them to keep me under close watch.

It’s frustrating, because they claim to be allies to gay people—sometimes they even claim to be gay themselves. But when confronted with true homosexuality, they see it as a threat, and they make sure we know that.

And I’m sure this is why so many lesbians seem to end up leaving gender ideology behind. Because it gets exhausting feeling like you either need to stay closeted, or constantly prove yourself to not be like those “cis” lesbians. And no proof will ever be enough, because your sexuality itself is enough for them to hate you.

TW: Trans activists

For more than a decade now, trans activists have been harassing those who belong to a feminist philosphy we call radical feminism or the women’s liberation movement.

Radical feminists, like most feminists, believe that men use sex to oppress women. Meaning they oppress women through sexual exploitation and by perpetuating sexist discrimination towards those who belong to the female sex. They were the first to research and expose violence against women as endemic and traumatizing, and to create shelters for rape and domestic violence victims. Those shelters are now being vandalized and defunded by trans activists.

Because radical feminists don’t believe in gender identities, gendered souls, gender roles or any form of innate personality based on sexist stereotypes, they have been receiving rape and death threats on a daily basis. The acronym “terf” was soon invented and is now used to describe any person who doesn’t support the trans movement, even if they’re not feminists, just as long as they're women, though lesbians and feminists tend to be the primary targets.

As a whole, the trans movement claims that its biggest enemy and threat, its most pressing matter, its most dangerous opponent is the women’s liberation movement or what they call “radfems” or “terfs”. This is where their energy and anger is directed, typically in the form of sexist and sexual harassment, intimidation techniques, violence, censorship and social isolation. So let’s talk about that.

From the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace:

Cyber harassment involves threats of violence, privacy invasions, reputation-harming lies, calls for strangers to physically harm victims, and technological attacks.

Victims’ in-boxes are inundated with threatening e-mails. Their employers receive anonymous e-mails accusing them of misdeeds. Even if some abuse is taken down from a site, it quickly reappears on others. Victims’ sites are forced offline with distributed-denial-of-service attacks.

While some attackers confine abuse to networked technologies, others use all available tools to harass victims, including real-space contact. Offline harassment or stalking often includes abusive phone calls, vandalism, threatening mail, and physical assault.

The Internet extends the life of destructive posts. Harassing letters are eventually thrown away, and memories fade in time. The web, however, can make it impossible to forget about malicious posts. And posts that go viral attract hundreds of thousands of readers.

Online harassment can quickly become a team sport, with posters trying to outdo each other. Posters compete to be the most offensive, the most abusive. An accurate name for such online groups is cyber mobs. The term captures both the destructive potential of online groups and the shaming dynamic at the heart of the abuse.

Cyber harassment disproportionately impacts women. The U.S. National Violence Against Women Survey reports that 60 percent of cyber stalking victims are women, and the National Center for Victims of Crimes estimates that the rate is 70 percent. Of the 3,393 individuals reporting cyber harass-ment to WHOA from 2000 to 2011, 72.5 percent were female. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 74 percent of individuals who were stalked on or offline were female, and 26 percent were male.

Researchers found that users with female names received on average one hundred “malicious private messages,” which the study defined as “sexually explicit or threatening language,” for every four received by male users.

According to the study, “Male human users specifically targeted female users.” By contrast, men are more often attacked for their ideas and actions. John Scalzi, a science fiction author and popular blogger, has found online invective typically situational. When he writes something that annoys people, they tell him so. People do not make a “hobby” out of attacking his appearance and existence as they do female bloggers.

The nature of the attacks similarly attests to bigotry’s presence. Hate expresses something uniquely damaging. It labels members of a group as inhuman “others” who do not possess equal worth. It says that group members are inferior and damaged. Bigotry conveys the message that group members are objects that can be destroyed because they have no shared humanity to consider.

Cyber harassment exploits these features by exposing victims’ sexuality in humiliating ways. Victims are equated with their sexual organs, often described as diseased.

Once cyber harassment victims are sexually exposed, posters penetrate them virtually with messages that say “I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore, your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole to stick my cock in.” 

Rape threats profoundly impact women: over 86 percent of rape victims are female. Virtual elimination may follow the imagined penetration: “First I’ll rape you, then I’ll kill you.”

One woman who faced online abuse noted, “Someone who writes ‘You’re just a cunt’ is not trying to convince me of anything but my own worthlessness.” Despite the gravity of their predicaments, cyber harassment victims are often told that nothing can or should be done about online abuse. Journalists, bloggers, lay observers, and law enforcement officials urge them to ignore it. Victims are called “whiny baby girl[s]” who are overreacting to “a few text messages.” Often victims are blamed for the abuse. They are scolded for sharing their nude images with loved ones or for blogging about controversial topics. They are told that they could have avoided the abuse had they been more careful.

A related message sent to victims is that the benefits of online opportunities are available only to those who are willing to face the Internet’s risks. They are advised not to expect anything different if they want to make a name for themselves online. The choice is theirs: they can toughen up or go offline.

The Internet is governed by society’s rules. Life online bleeds into life offline and vice versa. The notion that more aggression should be tolerated in cyberspace than in real space presumes that virtual spaces are cordoned off from physical ones.

Most victims do not report cyber harassment to the police because they assume that nothing will be done about it. Sadly, they are right. Law enforcement frequently fails to act on victims’ complaints even though criminal law would punish some of the behavior. Victims are told to turn off their computers because “boys will be boys.” Online harassment victims are told that nothing can be done; they are advised to ignore rape and death threats. During the summer of 2013, high-profile women were subjected to a torrent of online threats. The feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez received hundreds of graphic rape threats via Twitter after her successful campaign to feature more female images on British banknotes.

Members of Parliament and female writers who publicly supported Criado-Perez faced the same, including bomb threats. One tweet featured a picture of a masked man holding a knife with the message, “I’m gonna be the first thing u see when u wake up.”

Because the Internet serves as people’s workspaces, professional networks, résumés, social clubs, and zones of public conversation, it deserves the same protection as offline speech. No more, no less.

Without doubt, the free speech interests at stake are weighty. Free expression is crucial to our ability to govern ourselves, to express our thoughts, and to discover truths. For that reason, government cannot censor ideas because society finds them offensive. Truthful speech must not be banned just because it makes people uncomfortable.

But credible threats, certain defamatory falsehoods, social security numbers, and nude images posted without consent contribute little to discourse essential for citizens to govern themselves and discover truths. Their net effect is the silencing of victims. Victims could blog, post videos, and engage on social networks without fear of destructive cyber harassment. They could raise money using networked tools unencumbered by rape threats, reputation-harming lies, and distributed- denial- of- service attacks. They could take advantage of all of the expressive opportunities available online. Protecting against online harassment would secure the necessary preconditions for victims’ free expression.

With the help of law and the voluntary efforts of Internet intermediaries, parents, and teachers, we might someday achieve a free and equal Internet. We need to take action before cyber harassment becomes a normal feature of online interactions. A hostile online environment is neither inevitable nor desirable. We should not squander this chance to combat discriminatory online abuse; it is early enough in our use of networked tools to introduce equality of opportunity as a baseline norm of interaction.