Notices by Rachel, Femme Doux Naturel (ykantrachelread@kolektiva.social), page 4

if the roles were reversed - if AnarchoNina were the one who falsely accused a cis girl of something and then admitted it - she'd have a mob of people calling for Accountability (tm) and a "liar" albatross hanging around her neck indefinitely.

instead, the cis girl is being lauded for her "bravery" in telling the truth - even though she didn't even really apologize to Nina - and Nina will have to live with the accusations indefinitely even though they've been thoroughly disproven.

this is transmisogyny in a nutshell.

in my replies, someone asked the question (paraphrasing): "why is it always certain specific people and their followers who end up on these personal social-media crusades against transfem person after transfem person?"

after I started noticing that phenomenon, I asked myself a variant of that question plenty of times. after all, abled cishet white guys are the most prevalent perpetrators by far of the type of shit that transfem people get accused of all the time. so why, then, do transfem people find ourselves the subject of these witch hunts while abled cishet white guys get off scot-free?

frankly, I'm tempted to just leave a one-word reply of "transmisogyny" here and call it a day, but I think the problem is a bit more complex than that (though transmisogyny is, of course, still at the root of it).

the truth is that abled cishet white guys generally have two things that transfem people don't: solid support networks, and the benefit of the doubt.

go after an abled cishet white guy for something, and at best nobody will give a fuck, because if you're a marginalized person accusing an abled cishet white guy of something, then ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the abled cishet white guy will come out on top. and at worst, you'll find yourself dogpiled by a bunch of *other* abled cishet white guys trying to logicbro you, and the abled cishet white guy's band of sycophants is probably greater in number and more persistent than yours.

so what do you do if you're a clout chaser with one or more marginalized identities who wants to build a brand around righteous anger and shaming?

well, you find a group of people who don't have those pesky little hangups to direct your righteous anger, and your followers, toward. and all too often, that group tends to be transfem people. onlookers - even many other transfem people - are already primed to disbelieve transfem people thanks to the persistent, longstanding transmisogynist idea that we're inherently dishonest, so the clout-chaser doesn't need to worry about not coming out on top. and very few transfem people - yep, not even those of us with large followings - have the sort of support network that your average abled cishet white guy has at his beck and call.

oh, and - again, thanks to unexamined, rampant transmisogyny - those same onlookers are *also* primed to see us *as "men,"* and therefore privileged. so instead of seeing, say, a TME queer serial clout-chaser punching down at a transfem person, they instead see the power dynamic in reverse; i.e., they see a big, bad, manipulative, deceptive "man in a dress" bullying a poor little, often AFAB, accuser who just wants to engage in earnest anti-ableism/anti-transphobia/antiracism/anti-antisemitism/etc.

so, yeah. in the end, it all comes down to transmisogyny. and it'll keep happening until we all, collectively, recognize it for what it is.

@nyx @AnarchoNinaWrites well yeah, and transfem people are still the easiest targets for this shit, because transmisogyny is the rule even in queer spaces unless it's specifically examined and rooted out.

and besides, then folks wouldn't get the sweet, delectable clout from going after transfems who speak a bit too loudly for their delicate widdle ears.

@kittenlikeasmallcat @nyx @AnarchoNinaWrites it's always welshpixie because she's a clout-chaser who discovered that using weaponized social justice language to mobilize unwary folks against a defenseless, vulnerable, marginalized demographic is a winning tactic.

there's people like her all over the internet. she just happens to be our local representative of that phenomenon.

fucking christ.

I take a long weekend's worth of break from mastodon and come back to @AnarchoNinaWrites of all people - a brilliant writer with some of the best politics on this damn site - going through a hot allostatic load moment.

and one of the perpetrators is, of course, good ol' WelshPixie, who seems to have a perpetual hard-on for chasing after transfem people waving spurious accusations and crying to the heavens about how every tran who isn't on her Nice List is Literally Hitler.

unexamined transmisogyny wins the day, again. sigh.

it's funny, albeit completely unsurprising, to me that the people most loudly calling for federation with threads seem to all be cishet white guys

like, this shit plays out the same every single time that marginalized people ask cishet white guys to not be complete shit

cis women and AFAB non-women: "I don't want my information turned over to the cops if I get an abortion"

trans people: "I don't want a fuckton of TERFs to swoop in and harass/misgender me"

BIPOC: "I don't want a fuckton of fascists to swoop in and call me slurs"

cishet white guys: "defederation is toxic actually! why are you being toxic? and what about the opportunity we have to bring a bunch of instagram folks who definitely have an interest in non-corporate social media over to mastodon! we can't be exclusionist now!"

@lanodan @AzulCrescent I was gonna say "madoka but trans," but that sounds way more depressing tbh

tired: not voting for cornel west because something something strategic voting

wired: not voting for cornel west because he's a religious weirdo who keeps company with fash

@AnarchoNinaWrites

anakin: "we need to build alliances and coalitions in order to succeed at our goals"

padme: "with other leftists and progressives, right?"

anakin: [waving a red-brown alliance flag]

padme, looking more pensive: "with other leftists and progressives, right...?"

this society will have you angrier at a poor, disabled queer person who uses the word 'based' than at a cishet guy in a suit who politely insinuates that all queer people are sexual predators

Panic! At Pretty Much Everywhere (you have an anxiety disorder)

it's been my observation that there's a toxic, "with us or against us" strain of thought running through many leftist circles. this tendency causes many leftists to treat anyone - even those who are currently more liberal/moderate in their outlook, but who might be convinced otherwise - as The Enemy, basically on the same level as fash.

in most cases, this is a trauma response. when we don't manage our trauma, we start to see the faces of the people who hurt us, and who *are currently* hurting us, in anyone who doesn't demonstrate one hundred per cent alignment with our beliefs.

and in a minority of cases, it's clout-chasing behavior - basically someone trying to platform themselves as Leftier Than Thou in order to build a following of the traumatized folks in the first category.

in both cases, that attitude is counterproductive to any actual movement-building and agitating for radical change. the moment that we start treating non-fash like fash is the moment that we've lost the battle, because nobody will ever earnestly change if we're placing them on the defensive. we must always be listening, and we must always be talking and trying to convince others of the goodness of radical change.

because you know who *is* listening to those people and talking to them like human beings? the fash. and they're never stopping, *and* they own all the lines of communication.

point of clarification: the above does not apply if said transfem is a proven fash, abuser or sex pest.

clarification on that clarification: no, "is immature/has an edgelord problem" does not equal "fash."

it's not transmisogynist to expect transfem people to own up to bigoted statements and try to do better in the future.

it *is* transmisogynist to make specific transfem people out to be such irredeemable boogeymen that anyone who associates with them is irrevocably tainted by proximity.

@AnarchoNinaWrites I hate how libs have turned "dirtbag leftist" from "red-brown 'anti-idpol' fucko who thinks it's okay to 'ironically' use racial slurs" into "any leftist who speaks rudely to me"

it seems to me that the divide between the "COVID is endemic now, all our events are mask-optional" abled anarchobros, and the anarchists who actually care about disabled and immunocompromised people, is that the former view anarchist organizing as primarily a social activity rather than as a means of change or resistance.

marginalized people aren't involved in anarchist organizing because we primarily see it as a way to make friends. we do so because we're being threatened by fucking genocide.

trans people, especially transfem people, have to be twice as good as cis people to be half as worthy of being accepted into communities.

and maybe - just *maybe* - by basing your blocklist on Six Degrees of One Transfem Person Who Said Some Racist Things, you're perpetuating that problem.

the only thing that I'll say about the masto.art defederation bullshit is that, if your defederation practices just *coincidentally* happen to block a whole bunch of instances that trans people tend to congregate on, during a time of rising institutional transphobia, then *maybe* you should take a step back and do a little bit of "are we the baddies?" self-reflection

"but all of the Big Trans Accounts are going to bluesky!"

okay. good riddance.

personally, one of the things I love about this place is that there's very little of the cults of personality and Main Character drama that were a major part of why twitter was so terrible for my mental health.

my mastodon feed feels more like a friendly hangout/activist space than a bunch of parasocial relationships and traumatized drama addicts. and I'll take the former over the latter any day.

you'll excuse me if I don't care about something called 'eurovision' because europe already saw their vision of the world come true and it fucking blows