crunkfeministcollective:

POP FEMINIST PERBLOG: (tw rape)

rgr-pop:

As if I’m surprised that these bros are disregarding every history of the “movement” they have deigned to lead, as if I am surprised they choose to so consistently deliberately push out the voices and wishes and bodies and concerns and histories and works of every survivor.

How can you miss all the criticisms of the “‘yes means yes’” epidemic? What kind of grasp can you have on consent if you don’t understand that sometimes yes doesn’t mean yes? What does it say about you that you can’t fathom a “yes” that is anything but enthusiastic? It says that you’ve never considered, you know, power relationships, it says that you have never listened to survivors, especially survivors of prolonged domestic abuse, it says you have not read literally any literature about the dynamics of rape, like, ever. (It also says you might be a rapist, let’s be honest.) Most importantly, a men’s group fighting to preserve the “‘yes means yes’” slogan which is alreadycontroversial among survivor advocacy groups just highlights how important it is for would-be rapists to have this tool in their belt. Men and/or rapists need us to keep saying “yes means yes” because that means that all they need to do to attain total amnesty is get you to say “yes” at any cost.

I just—naively—never thought I would see a semi-institutionalized anti-rape group telling me that “no means no” doesn’t apply anymore. “Enthusiastic consent” means “you no longer can use ‘no’ as a potential response.” What are we supposed to say? Does enthusiastic consent mean we have to be enthusiastic in nonconsent? That we have to say “I am not gonna have sex with you and I swear I have a good reason”? What about silence? If “no” isn’t enough, what good is silence?

It makes me think about how, to these people, the tools of consent, the tools of “stopping rape,” are really really really really not supposed to be accessed by people who have already experienced rape. Because when they read the slogan “no means no” they read it as “when someone says no I am supposed to listen to them,” they are reading it from the perspective of the potential rapist, or the already-rapist. The potential violator of consent, the person who needs to learn how not to rape. And certainly there is a strong history, and an urgent need for that reading of “no means no.” But “no means no” is mostly an old tool for survivors, to assert “rights,” coming (first) out of contexts where some people aren’t allowed to say no. It was, in one permutation, a liberal rights affirmation addressing marital exemption laws (especially in affirming their repeal over the past thirty years or so). In other cases it has been used to resist situations where people aren’t given the “right” to say “no”—a resistance to political structures that invalidate the “no.” 

So often, though, “no means no” is like, one of the only things survivors-who-said-no-but-still-got-raped-and-still-got-no-justice have to cling to. “I said no,” while a really limited device that has often hurt the survivors who didn’t say no, is a classic part of the reparative process. “I said no” is a validation for survivors who blame themselves. It’s not necessarily even that useful, and it doesn’t change anything, but it has operated like this for a long time. It should be something survivors can use to heal, if nothing else. I just can’t even believe some dudes are like “nope, that doesn’t count anymore. you don’t get to use this.”

4 days ago  /  141 notes  /   /  Source: rgr-pop

Call for Submissions: Trans Feminine (Anti)-narrative Zine

lumpenspaceprincess:

Being a trans lady is real hard, and part of that is especially in places like where I grew up and live there’s nobody to reflect back to you and say “no actually what you’re feeling is real and valid and ok.”

Reading Nevada by Imogen Binnie fucked with me for like a week straight because I don’t think I’ve ever read another story where a trans lady was a 3 dimensional character and a protagonist. And that’s fucked up.

Ok so I had this idea in a fit of rage of basically taking a bunch of my blog entries and mashing it up with a bunch of stuff a sweetie would contribute and making this weird kind of cut-up zine about what it’s like to be a trans lady and what I’m mad about but it’s hard to talk about.

So what I don’t want to have in this zine is

• any form of essentialism
• long theory pieces
• anything fucked up w/r/t race, gender, sexuality, ability, etc, etc
• social justice

What I do want is

• your (real or made up) diary pages, rambling and semi-coherent
• your complicated feelings about complicated things that never get talked about
• things that run against narratives
• sloppy embarrassing feelings
• what you wish another trans feminine person had told you to validate you 

Submit away! Your submissions will be anonymous and probably cut up and rearranged in some way by me (lumpenspaceprincess). I won’t necessarily include everything but I’ll include as much as I can.

Plz reblog

4 days ago  /  347 notes  /   /  Source: lumpenspaceprincess

ananiujitha:

radtransfem:

koboldfacedlie:

sendificator:

yuriadventure:

sendificator:

i just think “The Abolition Of Gender” seems so abstract and nebulous and basically impossible and we should really be focused on FUCKING with gender and allowing gender to mean more than just male or female and allowing people to create their own gender and do gender in ways that make them happy and promote the respect of every gender. i think thats the important work that needs to be done right now

I don’t think it’s any more abstract than “the abolition of class”, which faces a lot less backlash in progressive circles. Gender is just so engrained into people’s minds as being Essential that people don’t understand what getting rid of it would actually entail.

For the present tense, people should be allowed to “fuck” with gender, sure, because that’s the only way for people to deal with gender being omnipresent at the moment.

yeahhh but just like you implied there i think it’s easier for people to see that class is forced upon us and the concept of class mobility is a widely accepted thing and people dont generally “identify” with their class much. they’re just different issues

whereas peoples genders become very very important to them especially if they are trans* and/or genderqueer and their identity is considered by many to be something that doesnt “exist.” essentially people like that are fighting just for the right to be accepted and so suggesting the abolition of gender altogether (that their gender SHOULD NOT exist) might seem like a slap in the face.

i think it’s a lot easier for cis people to say “hey why not just do away with gender altogether” because for the most part we have not had to fight for our gender identification to be recognized. 

hi, trans person here.

there are a lot of reasons that people identify with things. one of the biggest though, is when people feel (rightly or wrongly) that who they are  is under threat from an external force. identity is, in many ways, a crystallization of a group’s attempt to define itself, often in opposition to narratives placed on it from outside.

the idea that people don’t identify with their class is a very modern, american idea. marxist and other left struggles are predicated on the working class’s consciousness of its own oppression. this necessarily entails the ability to identify oneself as a member of the working class. for those people, knowing who they are is critically important.

gender too, is an oppressive system. gender isn’t just about choices and expression, it’s about creating categories that hold one class of people (women) subordinate to another (men), for that other group’s benefit. the problem with queering gender is that it operates kind of similarly to the idea of class mobility. it creates the myth of an equality of opportunity. but while the idea that anyone can take on any gender role and that this will subvert and undermine oppression is a tempting one, in practice access isn’t equal. a lot of people just can’t do queer, or face more stringent punishments for doing queer. especially groups that are less privileged along other axes, people of colour and so forth. 

also, hierarchical systems like gender are good at adapting. there hasn’t just been “man” and “woman” for all of history, that’s actually pretty recent. in practice, most societies have operated according to “man” and “other”. queer people are just the most modern incarnation of that other.  queer people cannot directly threaten patriarchy by living as they will, because patriarchy accounts for them and doesn’t care.

the only way to achieve liberation, in pretty much any case you can name, is to tear down the system, piece by piece. it’s liberation vs equality. existing on your own terms in a fair system vs being tolerated by an oppressive system.

that’s why fighting to be accepted can only go so far for trans people. 

this is not the same as saying trans people’s identities shouldn’t be recognized. they’re no less real. saying that gender shouldn’t exist is not the same thing as saying that gender is a fantasy. trans people are entitled to their identities because those are the reality of their lives, and those lived experiences are no more false than cis people’s. 

really, the trans community is not monolithic and i wish people would stop pretending it is to win arguments. i am a gender abolitionist, a trans woman and a lesbian. these identities all intersect and inform one another. i am opposed to gender because as a woman i can see that it harms me, and as a trans person i can see it harms me. i don’t believe that gender abolition would mean the abolition of what i need with regard to medical treatment and so forth, because i don’t find it at all convincing that my body dysphoria is the result of gender. 

what gender abolition WOULD mean for me, would be an end to gatekeeping doctors insisting that i act a certain way before i can receive treatment. it would mean an end to a weight of expectations placed on me by society, eager to regender me into something more palatable. it would mean loving my girlfriend without being afraid that someone will take offense. it would mean being or appearing to be female bodied and not subjected to a whole world of shit for that. 

as far as i’m concerned, it’s win win.

but yeah, these are arguments that need to be undertaken within the trans community. we don’t need cis feminists assuming what we need based on issues they have no first hand understanding of. i don’t mean to be rude here, i know you mean well. 

Great post (the OP later responded well to this point). I often say that abolition of at least this gender system that’s hierarchical, based on sex-roles, coercive (without necessarily insisting on it being all gender systems everywhere, e.g. all indigenous systems that the same word, ‘gender’, is still used to describe) is not so much a tactic as a prediction.

The tactic is fighting coercion into gender, understood as so many things, including sexual violence. The prediction (“gender abolition”) is that: 1. as you stop forcing people into a subordinate position, they gradually stop being in one, 2. once “woman” is no longer a subordinate position, and “men” are no longer “dominants with characteristics that enable them to remain dominants”, whatever sex-role system remains (if any!) is no longer hierarchical and no longer recognisable as “gender”, and what “gender” was has hence been abolished.

For anyone getting hung up on words, for example how “gender” means so many things (a minor disadvantage of colonising huge areas of the world and trying to enforce your value systems and language on everyone as well as smashing up their land and a million other sins), just read it as “the abolition of a hierarchical/dualistic compulsory sex-role system”, understood as targeted at the causes, not the symptoms, of that system.

Like many ideas: like “anarchism”, even like, I dunno, “making tea”, it’s possible to do it wrong. Attacking symptoms is one way. I think there’s a perception that we plan to abolish coercion into gender by commissioning a fleet of buggies, fixing giant lasers to the top and riding through cities shooting the gender off people. I’m not saying nobody’s tried to do that. They have (well, with less lasers). But I’m not convinced that because some people have done a thing wrong, that thing can only be done wrong.

TL;DR: soft on gender, tough on the causes of gender

While I’m all for the abolition of gender hierarchies, gender enforcement, and strict gender roles, I’m concerned that the “abolition of gender” is all too often an excuse for the erasure of trans people’s experiences, because so many cis radfems assume our experiences are “genderism.”

Definitely. I think we’re right to be suspicious, just as we are when a male anarchist tells us that he’s gonna smash the state, yo, and what he really needs you to do in order to help out is to see if you can’t fix up some sandwiches for the way radikewl action him and his mates planned in the pub. That’s one reason many women I know don’t describe themselves as anarchists. But for me it doesn’t falsify anarchism.

1 week ago  /  176 notes  /   /  Source: sendificator

koboldfacedlie:

sendificator:

yuriadventure:

sendificator:

i just think “The Abolition Of Gender” seems so abstract and nebulous and basically impossible and we should really be focused on FUCKING with gender and allowing gender to mean more than just male or female and allowing people to create their own gender and do gender in ways that make them happy and promote the respect of every gender. i think thats the important work that needs to be done right now

I don’t think it’s any more abstract than “the abolition of class”, which faces a lot less backlash in progressive circles. Gender is just so engrained into people’s minds as being Essential that people don’t understand what getting rid of it would actually entail.

For the present tense, people should be allowed to “fuck” with gender, sure, because that’s the only way for people to deal with gender being omnipresent at the moment.

yeahhh but just like you implied there i think it’s easier for people to see that class is forced upon us and the concept of class mobility is a widely accepted thing and people dont generally “identify” with their class much. they’re just different issues

whereas peoples genders become very very important to them especially if they are trans* and/or genderqueer and their identity is considered by many to be something that doesnt “exist.” essentially people like that are fighting just for the right to be accepted and so suggesting the abolition of gender altogether (that their gender SHOULD NOT exist) might seem like a slap in the face.

i think it’s a lot easier for cis people to say “hey why not just do away with gender altogether” because for the most part we have not had to fight for our gender identification to be recognized. 

hi, trans person here.

there are a lot of reasons that people identify with things. one of the biggest though, is when people feel (rightly or wrongly) that who they are  is under threat from an external force. identity is, in many ways, a crystallization of a group’s attempt to define itself, often in opposition to narratives placed on it from outside.

the idea that people don’t identify with their class is a very modern, american idea. marxist and other left struggles are predicated on the working class’s consciousness of its own oppression. this necessarily entails the ability to identify oneself as a member of the working class. for those people, knowing who they are is critically important.

gender too, is an oppressive system. gender isn’t just about choices and expression, it’s about creating categories that hold one class of people (women) subordinate to another (men), for that other group’s benefit. the problem with queering gender is that it operates kind of similarly to the idea of class mobility. it creates the myth of an equality of opportunity. but while the idea that anyone can take on any gender role and that this will subvert and undermine oppression is a tempting one, in practice access isn’t equal. a lot of people just can’t do queer, or face more stringent punishments for doing queer. especially groups that are less privileged along other axes, people of colour and so forth. 

also, hierarchical systems like gender are good at adapting. there hasn’t just been “man” and “woman” for all of history, that’s actually pretty recent. in practice, most societies have operated according to “man” and “other”. queer people are just the most modern incarnation of that other.  queer people cannot directly threaten patriarchy by living as they will, because patriarchy accounts for them and doesn’t care.

the only way to achieve liberation, in pretty much any case you can name, is to tear down the system, piece by piece. it’s liberation vs equality. existing on your own terms in a fair system vs being tolerated by an oppressive system.

that’s why fighting to be accepted can only go so far for trans people. 

this is not the same as saying trans people’s identities shouldn’t be recognized. they’re no less real. saying that gender shouldn’t exist is not the same thing as saying that gender is a fantasy. trans people are entitled to their identities because those are the reality of their lives, and those lived experiences are no more false than cis people’s. 

really, the trans community is not monolithic and i wish people would stop pretending it is to win arguments. i am a gender abolitionist, a trans woman and a lesbian. these identities all intersect and inform one another. i am opposed to gender because as a woman i can see that it harms me, and as a trans person i can see it harms me. i don’t believe that gender abolition would mean the abolition of what i need with regard to medical treatment and so forth, because i don’t find it at all convincing that my body dysphoria is the result of gender. 

what gender abolition WOULD mean for me, would be an end to gatekeeping doctors insisting that i act a certain way before i can receive treatment. it would mean an end to a weight of expectations placed on me by society, eager to regender me into something more palatable. it would mean loving my girlfriend without being afraid that someone will take offense. it would mean being or appearing to be female bodied and not subjected to a whole world of shit for that. 

as far as i’m concerned, it’s win win.

but yeah, these are arguments that need to be undertaken within the trans community. we don’t need cis feminists assuming what we need based on issues they have no first hand understanding of. i don’t mean to be rude here, i know you mean well. 

Great post (the OP later responded well to this point). I often say that abolition of at least this gender system that’s hierarchical, based on sex-roles, coercive (without necessarily insisting on it being all gender systems everywhere, e.g. all indigenous systems that the same word, ‘gender’, is still used to describe) is not so much a tactic as a prediction.

The tactic is fighting coercion into gender, understood as so many things, including sexual violence. The prediction (“gender abolition”) is that: 1. as you stop forcing people into a subordinate position, they gradually stop being in one, 2. once “woman” is no longer a subordinate position, and “men” are no longer “dominants with characteristics that enable them to remain dominants”, whatever sex-role system remains (if any!) is no longer hierarchical and no longer recognisable as “gender”, and what “gender” was has hence been abolished.

For anyone getting hung up on words, for example how “gender” means so many things (a minor disadvantage of colonising huge areas of the world and trying to enforce your value systems and language on everyone as well as smashing up their land and a million other sins), just read it as “the abolition of a hierarchical/dualistic compulsory sex-role system”, understood as targeted at the causes, not the symptoms, of that system.

Like many ideas: like “anarchism”, even like, I dunno, “making tea”, it’s possible to do it wrong. Attacking symptoms is one way. I think there’s a perception that we plan to abolish coercion into gender by commissioning a fleet of buggies, fixing giant lasers to the top and riding through cities shooting the gender off people. I’m not saying nobody’s tried to do that. They have (well, with less lasers). But I’m not convinced that because some people have done a thing wrong, that thing can only be done wrong.

TL;DR: soft on gender, tough on the causes of gender

2 weeks ago  /  176 notes  /   /  Source: sendificator

timseriladashmimeni:

shoutout to all my trans* sisters who’re radical feminists and have to put up with the shitty trans*phobia that this movement breeds.

Bless you. I don’t think I’ve ever read those words, apropos nothing. Thank you for seeing me. :)

(Are there other trans* woman radical feminists on this thread? Call me! Well, ‘ask’ me…)

2 weeks ago  /  82 notes  /   /  Source: timseriladashmimeni