If You Really Care About People Who Have Misidentified Themselves, You Won’t Attack The Labels They

Tons more at the source!

is he “trauma dumping” on you or have you just not unpacked what the patriarchy has taught you outside of “woman bad” and you think men expressing any kind of emotion or vulnerability is bad actually.

I feel like it would be useful if people conceived of causing emotional harm to others more through the lens of being the emotional equivalent to stepping on someone’s foot. Like obviously you can step on someone’s foot deliberately and maliciously, but most of the time if someone tells you you stepped on their foot you’re going to go “oh sorry I didn’t realise!” and stop doing it and try not to do it again. Getting caught up in how it makes you feel to be Someone Capable of Stepping on Others’ Feet would be a transparently self indulgent distraction from the other person’s pain, but also like… that’s just a status you hold by virtue of being human. Never ever ever stepping on someone’s foot is not really achievable, and therefore is not necessary to being a Good Person: what matters is that you do not step on others’ feet deliberately, and – most importantly – that you react kindly and calmly to any inadvertent foot-stepping you have been doing being brought to your attention, so that you can make best use of it as something that will help you reduce the amount of foot-stepping you will do in the future.

TERFs, Biphobes and Acephobes

Although they differ in levels of intensity (TERFS being more organized with more or a long history of violence) when you look at their theories and behavior TERFs, biphobes and acephobes have a lot in common. 

“I face all the oppression ever”. They all have a very simplistic image of how oppression based on gender or sexuality works and deny the possibility that it is possible for sexuality to be multifaceted in which one aspect of your sexuality is cause for one form oppression while another aspect of your sexuality means that you do not have to deal with another form or oppression. The ‘I can not have cis privilege because I’m a woman and I’m already oppressed for my gender’ and ‘I can not have monosexual or allosexual privilege because I am gay and I’m already oppressed for my sexuality’ is pretty much the same shit. 

“You have all the privilege” As a counter attack they all state that the identity of the people they have (bi folk, ace folk, trans folk) is not real and that thus the real identity of those people is a very privileged one. They ignore the experiences of actual bi, ace and trans people and make up a fictional narrative in which trans women have male privilege and bi and ace people have heterosexual privilege regardless of the constant stories by the people themselves about the shit they face for being bi, trans and/or ace. 

“I am more oppressed therefore I am right” They believe in an oppression olympics in which having the most oppression points makes you right. As a result they believe that if they can just convince people that they are more oppressed than the people they’re fighting, that status of most-oppressed with magically make all their writing true and all their bullying justified. 

“Individual trauma justifies my violence against whole groups” They all use individual  real or fake stories of violence (preferably sexual violence) to prove that all bisexuals/aces/transwomen are horrible people. They believe these individual stories justify their violence against whole groups and they use the emotional weight of the story to avoid being held accountable for their shitty opinions. So they’ll go “A … raped me once so all … are horrible” and they will throw a huge tantrum if you dispute the second part of that statement, claiming that you disputed the entire statement. 

“We were safe before you came in here” They believe in a magical perfect concept of the ‘safe space’, be it a womens space or an lgbt space, in which violence does not exist until the dangerous enemy enters. This of course overlooks the fact that most of us already real with racism, ableism, islamophobia, fatphobia, etc in these so-called ‘safe spaces’ and they were only ever truly safe for abled, thin white people. 

“Solidarity is a commodity of which supplies are limited”  They see a group asking for safety within an existing movement (a movement they were already always part of but were exiled from in the past) and they get defensive, instead of seeing an opportunity to extend solidarity. They pretend that when we include new people into our struggles, something is lost, as if our movement is a finite territory. They speak about ‘stolen terminology’ and ‘invaded spaces’ when in reality nothing was lost and all that happened was that one more group now has a place where they feel safe and words that help to describe the oppression they face. 

This is a first look into how these three groups often use pretty much the same tactics to justify being shitty bigots. There might be more similarities and there are obviously differences too, but I think these similarities are worth talking about. 

There are other aspects, like purposely misreading posts, that I think are not so much a feature of these 3 groups put more a feature of anyone trying to defend a hateful bigoted view at all cost. 

Why must the duty fall on me, the writer, to write the story that’s in my head, not on the reader, to simply develop the power of telepathy and *read* my mind for a change, huh?

[id: a light pink userbox with a pastel pink border, and pastel pink text that reads “this user believes their stuffed animals have feelings.” on the left is an image of a small pink teddy bear. /end id]

Shout-out to picrew creators. Carrying millions of paracosms on their backs.

THE GODS AS CUTE STUFF THEY DO

Aphrodite: Always has some candy in her pockets so if she meets little kids or someone sad she can cheer them up. She bewitched the candy so it’s always the favorite flavor of the person who eats it.

Hermes: Lets his friend catch a ride on his back if they’re in a hurry and there’s mad traffic. Never asks anything in return because he secretly loves normal people’s reactions to flying.

Dionysus: Reads every single post on Hestia’s blog and comments encouragements on her poems under fake names.

Hephaestus: Has an almost unhealthy addiction of adopting small stray animals for a few nights. Tried to rescue a venomous snake that was in danger of freezing once and got bitten. Had no regrets because the snake survived.

Hestia: Cooks for the family and packs their lunch in little name-coordinated boxes. Everyone pretends like they are way too mature for stuff like this but they love it.

Ares: Wears each and every friendship bracelet he’s received from kids over the literal thousands of years on his belt.

Artemis: Organizes themed Christmas greeting cards, succeeds in getting everyone in the pic (“even uncle Hades and his idiotic dog”).

Apollo: Plays the guitar and sings around campfires. Somehow manages to not be really fricking annoying while doing so. And in his own words: Doesn’t kill Hermes every time he asks for Wonderwall.

Demeter: Names plants after people she likes and grows a section of “cheer up herbs”, that smell like a combination of cotton candy and wild flowers when touched. She gives a batch to everyone from time to time to prevent family disasters. Dinnertime catastrophes decreased since she started.

Athene: Reads books in her spare time to kids and elderly. Sometimes she tells stories from her past instead of what’s actually in the book. Kids love her.

Persephone: Takes care of Cerberus when Hades is away. Acts like they don’t really get along but absolutely spoils the dog when it’s just the two of them. They even sleep in the same bed.

Hera: Somehow senses when someone in the family is in trouble. Hermes and Dionysus have escaped death thanks to this mom power several times.

Hades: Hosts the best game nights ever. Unlimited snacks, games, everything you can think of. Apollo once made fun of him and now game night’s only once every 6 months but it’s still awesome.

Poseidon: Gathers and repairs stuff that’s fallen into the sea and gives it to those in need under anonymous donations.

Zeus: Dresses up as Santa every Christmas to fly around the city real low and waves at kids who spot him from their window. Insists on keeping his beard all year long so he can “Stay in character. Method acting, ever heard of it?”