As a man-loving trans man, I just wanted to say that I've seen this behavior from some of my fellow trans people and it's disgusting and disturbing. I don't hold these views myself:
-I am not entitled to sex/relationships with everyone/anyone. No one owes me anything.
-Genital preference is not the same as transphobia. I mean, saying "I only date 'real men'" is kind of a mean thing to say, but "I prefer cocks sorry" isn't really. That's just life, man! There are dudes who will date/fuck dudes with a pussy, and some won't, and *that's OK*. It's not that dissimilar to finding a partner who's compatible in terms of personality and values and whatnot. You just move on and try again, y'know? Jeez.
-Threatening violence/rape against people is never OK. I don't agree with JK Rowling's views (in that she presents trans women as inherently predatory) but my god, people have said some abhorrent things to her in response. Way to prove her arguments wrong, y'all. *facepalm*
I came out and began transitioning a decade ago before it got to be trendy, and a lot of these trancels (this is a word now ok) give old-school trans guys like me a bad name, because we learned to suck it the fuck up and deal. These people who are deciding they're trans or "non-binary" like five minutes ago and using it as an excuse to be shitty to LGB people with a genital preference are going to cause a huge backlash against legitimately trans people with dysphoria who just want to live our lives in peace and not push an agenda.
I am so so sorry the things these people said caused you such anxiety, it's horrible and I'm ashamed people are like that.
And thank you for writing about how wokeness is a grift, it really is, it's "divide and conquer" strategies that are keeping the Left back from real progress and societal change. Your blog, and a few others here on Substack, has helped me to make sense and put into words things that have been bothering me about so-called "social justice" for awhile now.
I am just so glad I have found your writings, you speak so well to what is troubling me amongst the 'left' these days. There are so many blind spots that people are unwilling to look at but we really need to do it to actually make real change.
"To admit that a trans person might be inclined to rape or kill a cis person out of ressentiment or sexual frustration is to admit that the incel who might do the same is just as human."
Rhyd; deep thanks to you for looking unflinchingly at the horror of this particular form of ressentiment, and for going out on the limb to point it out.
There's been a lot of various events in my life recently that seems to be having the effect of suppressing my old ideological immune responses; not even a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to stomach reading something like this without reacting much like your anarchist friend did. Particularly because I, like your friend, supposedly "belong" to the trans community that also includes people who assembled such a horrific archive... and have trained myself to perhaps shrug and change the subject at some of the toxic things I've heard friends say or hint at, to remember what it was like to be at a less healed place, or remember the truly hateful stuff people have said about "my community" and use that to forget about the equally poisonous darts coming from behind me.
But trauma, rejection and misunderstanding is universal; why is it that I've trained myself to grant forgiveness to one group of people, and nurture spite towards others? Am I actually a part of this community to the point where I need to tribally defend its borders, simply because we share a convenient label that covers our unique and deeply personal relationships to our bodies? Do I have a responsibility, for that matter, to police the behaviors of people who fall in that group, so that this label remains in the "good graces" of the public?
I guess these are rhetorical questions; but I'm starting to think the answer is probably "No, of course not". And yet these are allIt's shocking to look at ingrained responses like this, and realize how taken-for-granted they are; and how nervous of different, more meaningful questions I am, even when I am starved for new, more fertile paradigms.
I read both your and Jozua’s posts on this and I thank you for looking at the ugliness head on and shining the light at it. Doing so is personally taxing to say the very least, as you both have expressed.
To slightly change tracks, but it’s related: this is a willful blindness I also see in radical SJ spaces where abolish the police is/was a theme. Regardless of what one feels about the systems of policing and their efficacy, my husband was a police officer for five years, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it: some people, their circumstances and intersectionalities and oppressions cannot justify their horrifying behavior. Some people really are just truly shitty humans.
I hate to sound cynical, but I figured that society as a whole would ignore this kind of thing (horrible behavior and entitlement issues from trans activists and their allies) until it started to affect cis men - gay, straight, or both. But at least now people are listening.
"Also, the percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016. DOUBLED!!! This is why LGBT people of color don’t really trust the white gays. Yes, I said what I said. Period."
5:37 AM · Nov 4, 2020
The above tweet was from New York Times columnist Charles Blow. While it doesn't come close to rising to the level of hatred that you have posted as examples it does show a trend to allow open hostility to white gay men in mainstream progressive culture and media. It should be added that Blow was the first to loudly object when white gay men started pointing out that Blacks voted in high numbers for Prop. 8 in CA. When I brought this up and response he blocked me.
I'm not shocked about the level of this malice and viciousness in these posts. A certain segment of SJ culture encourages it. I was intrigued that you have an archive of posts that have disturbed you. I've been doing the same thing for several years and thought maybe it was just me that did that. It seemed important for me to have proof that my claims that my progressive friends have been dismissing are verifiably true and are not a few random incidences. I think I kept a collection to remind myself that I am not exaggerating or delusional in the patterns that I see that I'm trying to get progressive friends to acknowledge and take seriously. You know what I mean? Those of us traditionally on the left but calling out hatred are gaslit into believing that is a figment of our imagination and "the real problem" is Trump. As though there can't be more than one real problem.
The 100% truth is that when I've seen Neo-Nazi like anti-Jewish rhetoric and looked at the profile of people it's coming from the overwhelming majority of times it is filled with all the social justice memes [believe women, no one is illegal, stop profiling Muslims, BLM, trans rights are human rights, etc]. I do a little bit more digging to make sure it's not a fake profile and unfortunately the overwhelming majority of times it is clearly not a sock puppet account. It's a miniscule percent of the time it's actually coming from white nationalists. It's a relief when it's coming from them because at least they're consistent. And at least you can publicly express your anger at it without being silenced and shamed.
I made the mistake of looking at that archive. That is truly hideous, even by the standards of social media, which I avoid for that reason.
I am really coming to conclusion that something very evil is in the air. And I mean evil, in the sense in which both a Christian and, I would guess, a druid, would recognise. There is a very dark energy around all this and I fear where it is leading a lot of young people especially.
Back in the Minoan Era, when I was at the University of Knossos, majoring in Linear B, nobody talked about a binary. A binary comes from computer programming--0 or 1, on or off. How binary somehow came to describe human sexuality and gender is, may I respectfully suggest, a topic for another essay.
Even the most conservative people have never talked about sexuality and gender as 0 or 1, on or off. I'm thinking of Sappho and of Aristophanes at the Symposium with his idea of love / desire as separated halves. In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, priests and nuns had a kind of shamanic status--the beyond-sexual religious figure. The classical metaphor, the hermaphrodite, is a union / fusion of two of the most popular and alluring divinities--Hermes and Aphrodite. And then there's Magnus Hirshfeld or Alfred Kinsey.
If we want to talk about sexuality and gender, we should be talking about a (musical) gamut or a (musical) scale. Anything else is veering toward puritanism.
Too much of U.S. academic hypothesizing, which is passed of as "theory,' is bloviating and a warming up of leftovers from bad Platonism (most of Platonism is), Methodist Youth Camp, or Psychology 101. The mind-body problem was solved years ago. We are not made up of a separable body, mind, soul, genitalia, free-floating desires--unless one wants to go mad.
More people need to wake up to this. Once again I am reminded of The Rescue Game: "In the Rescue Game, all members of the group assigned the role of Victim are always, only, and equally Victims, all members of the group assigned the role of Persecutor are always, only, and equally Persecutors, and the maltreatment of the Victims by the Persecutors is the only thing that matters. If anyone tries to bring anyone else’s treatment of anyone else into the game, it’s either dismissed as an irrelevance or denounced as a deliberate, malicious attempt to distract attention from the maltreatment of the Victims by the Persecutors." - from 'American Narratives: The Rescue Game' at https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/
As a man-loving trans man, I just wanted to say that I've seen this behavior from some of my fellow trans people and it's disgusting and disturbing. I don't hold these views myself:
-I am not entitled to sex/relationships with everyone/anyone. No one owes me anything.
-Genital preference is not the same as transphobia. I mean, saying "I only date 'real men'" is kind of a mean thing to say, but "I prefer cocks sorry" isn't really. That's just life, man! There are dudes who will date/fuck dudes with a pussy, and some won't, and *that's OK*. It's not that dissimilar to finding a partner who's compatible in terms of personality and values and whatnot. You just move on and try again, y'know? Jeez.
-Threatening violence/rape against people is never OK. I don't agree with JK Rowling's views (in that she presents trans women as inherently predatory) but my god, people have said some abhorrent things to her in response. Way to prove her arguments wrong, y'all. *facepalm*
I came out and began transitioning a decade ago before it got to be trendy, and a lot of these trancels (this is a word now ok) give old-school trans guys like me a bad name, because we learned to suck it the fuck up and deal. These people who are deciding they're trans or "non-binary" like five minutes ago and using it as an excuse to be shitty to LGB people with a genital preference are going to cause a huge backlash against legitimately trans people with dysphoria who just want to live our lives in peace and not push an agenda.
I am so so sorry the things these people said caused you such anxiety, it's horrible and I'm ashamed people are like that.
And thank you for writing about how wokeness is a grift, it really is, it's "divide and conquer" strategies that are keeping the Left back from real progress and societal change. Your blog, and a few others here on Substack, has helped me to make sense and put into words things that have been bothering me about so-called "social justice" for awhile now.
I am just so glad I have found your writings, you speak so well to what is troubling me amongst the 'left' these days. There are so many blind spots that people are unwilling to look at but we really need to do it to actually make real change.
"To admit that a trans person might be inclined to rape or kill a cis person out of ressentiment or sexual frustration is to admit that the incel who might do the same is just as human."
amazing quote!
Rhyd; deep thanks to you for looking unflinchingly at the horror of this particular form of ressentiment, and for going out on the limb to point it out.
There's been a lot of various events in my life recently that seems to be having the effect of suppressing my old ideological immune responses; not even a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to stomach reading something like this without reacting much like your anarchist friend did. Particularly because I, like your friend, supposedly "belong" to the trans community that also includes people who assembled such a horrific archive... and have trained myself to perhaps shrug and change the subject at some of the toxic things I've heard friends say or hint at, to remember what it was like to be at a less healed place, or remember the truly hateful stuff people have said about "my community" and use that to forget about the equally poisonous darts coming from behind me.
But trauma, rejection and misunderstanding is universal; why is it that I've trained myself to grant forgiveness to one group of people, and nurture spite towards others? Am I actually a part of this community to the point where I need to tribally defend its borders, simply because we share a convenient label that covers our unique and deeply personal relationships to our bodies? Do I have a responsibility, for that matter, to police the behaviors of people who fall in that group, so that this label remains in the "good graces" of the public?
I guess these are rhetorical questions; but I'm starting to think the answer is probably "No, of course not". And yet these are allIt's shocking to look at ingrained responses like this, and realize how taken-for-granted they are; and how nervous of different, more meaningful questions I am, even when I am starved for new, more fertile paradigms.
Anyway... thanks again, and hope you stay well!
I read both your and Jozua’s posts on this and I thank you for looking at the ugliness head on and shining the light at it. Doing so is personally taxing to say the very least, as you both have expressed.
To slightly change tracks, but it’s related: this is a willful blindness I also see in radical SJ spaces where abolish the police is/was a theme. Regardless of what one feels about the systems of policing and their efficacy, my husband was a police officer for five years, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it: some people, their circumstances and intersectionalities and oppressions cannot justify their horrifying behavior. Some people really are just truly shitty humans.
I hate to sound cynical, but I figured that society as a whole would ignore this kind of thing (horrible behavior and entitlement issues from trans activists and their allies) until it started to affect cis men - gay, straight, or both. But at least now people are listening.
"Also, the percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016. DOUBLED!!! This is why LGBT people of color don’t really trust the white gays. Yes, I said what I said. Period."
5:37 AM · Nov 4, 2020
The above tweet was from New York Times columnist Charles Blow. While it doesn't come close to rising to the level of hatred that you have posted as examples it does show a trend to allow open hostility to white gay men in mainstream progressive culture and media. It should be added that Blow was the first to loudly object when white gay men started pointing out that Blacks voted in high numbers for Prop. 8 in CA. When I brought this up and response he blocked me.
I'm not shocked about the level of this malice and viciousness in these posts. A certain segment of SJ culture encourages it. I was intrigued that you have an archive of posts that have disturbed you. I've been doing the same thing for several years and thought maybe it was just me that did that. It seemed important for me to have proof that my claims that my progressive friends have been dismissing are verifiably true and are not a few random incidences. I think I kept a collection to remind myself that I am not exaggerating or delusional in the patterns that I see that I'm trying to get progressive friends to acknowledge and take seriously. You know what I mean? Those of us traditionally on the left but calling out hatred are gaslit into believing that is a figment of our imagination and "the real problem" is Trump. As though there can't be more than one real problem.
The 100% truth is that when I've seen Neo-Nazi like anti-Jewish rhetoric and looked at the profile of people it's coming from the overwhelming majority of times it is filled with all the social justice memes [believe women, no one is illegal, stop profiling Muslims, BLM, trans rights are human rights, etc]. I do a little bit more digging to make sure it's not a fake profile and unfortunately the overwhelming majority of times it is clearly not a sock puppet account. It's a miniscule percent of the time it's actually coming from white nationalists. It's a relief when it's coming from them because at least they're consistent. And at least you can publicly express your anger at it without being silenced and shamed.
I made the mistake of looking at that archive. That is truly hideous, even by the standards of social media, which I avoid for that reason.
I am really coming to conclusion that something very evil is in the air. And I mean evil, in the sense in which both a Christian and, I would guess, a druid, would recognise. There is a very dark energy around all this and I fear where it is leading a lot of young people especially.
Back in the Minoan Era, when I was at the University of Knossos, majoring in Linear B, nobody talked about a binary. A binary comes from computer programming--0 or 1, on or off. How binary somehow came to describe human sexuality and gender is, may I respectfully suggest, a topic for another essay.
Even the most conservative people have never talked about sexuality and gender as 0 or 1, on or off. I'm thinking of Sappho and of Aristophanes at the Symposium with his idea of love / desire as separated halves. In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, priests and nuns had a kind of shamanic status--the beyond-sexual religious figure. The classical metaphor, the hermaphrodite, is a union / fusion of two of the most popular and alluring divinities--Hermes and Aphrodite. And then there's Magnus Hirshfeld or Alfred Kinsey.
If we want to talk about sexuality and gender, we should be talking about a (musical) gamut or a (musical) scale. Anything else is veering toward puritanism.
Too much of U.S. academic hypothesizing, which is passed of as "theory,' is bloviating and a warming up of leftovers from bad Platonism (most of Platonism is), Methodist Youth Camp, or Psychology 101. The mind-body problem was solved years ago. We are not made up of a separable body, mind, soul, genitalia, free-floating desires--unless one wants to go mad.
More people need to wake up to this. Once again I am reminded of The Rescue Game: "In the Rescue Game, all members of the group assigned the role of Victim are always, only, and equally Victims, all members of the group assigned the role of Persecutor are always, only, and equally Persecutors, and the maltreatment of the Victims by the Persecutors is the only thing that matters. If anyone tries to bring anyone else’s treatment of anyone else into the game, it’s either dismissed as an irrelevance or denounced as a deliberate, malicious attempt to distract attention from the maltreatment of the Victims by the Persecutors." - from 'American Narratives: The Rescue Game' at https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/