But it has made me think about how other people think.
An idea that frustrates me to no end is the idea of respectability and acceptability as it relates to queerness; but this can be applied to any other marginalized group.
The idea that if you act “good enough”, hateful people will leave you alone. Of course this intersects with a lot of other phenomena.
As an example, a white cis gay man distancing himself from wider queer spaces because the people are “too much” aka too queer. Statements that “those bad queers (but not me) make queerness their whole personality, but I’m a good gay—pick me!”.
Something else around acceptability that’s bothered me is trans people, specifically trans women, obsessing over their and other people’s bodies and gender expression. If someone makes art of a trans woman before transitioning, for example, it’s a “transphobic caricature” and should be erased from the internet. Trans people police other trans people’s art and expression of themselves because “it’s not trans enough” or “it makes me uncomfortable, therefore it’s evil and an attack”.
I just struggle to understand why trans women are so desperate to fit into misogynistic standards on how women should look like. Safety is the main reason, but shouldn’t you pursue your own identity? Your own happiness?
If you personally find a look on you to be dysphoric, you’re free to change. If someone else looks a way you don’t want yourself to look, you’re free to look different. But for crying out loud, you have no right to complain that another person isn’t performing gender correctly. There is no true “correct” way. It’s all a performance; you choose how you perform and others go their way.
No matter how gender conforming or cis you look, you’ll never be cis. That’s not a bad thing. No matter how “acceptable” or attractive you are, bigots will be bigots.
Why distance yourself and fight with people in a community that’s about self acceptance and challenging ideas about what it means to be “acceptable”?
The second issue is with self proclaimed radical feminists. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of feminists in real life are kind and fairly intersectional in their feminism.
I hardly consider internet radical feminists to be feminists at all.
Because I’m inherently a little selfish (as is everyone) my main problem with them began with transandrophobia, or transphobia against trans men and transmasculine people such as myself. I know people argue that misandry isn’t real—I agree, in the sense that it doesn’t cause any real world change. But a prejudice certainly exists. Again, most women and feminists are completely normal about men and believe in equality for all people.
But a lot of these “feminists” seem to treat people like me as if we’re some kind of “gender traitors” for “choosing” to be men.
Men aren’t inherently evil, because no one is inherently evil. Or inherently any kind of personality. And women are not inherently good. And, as always, I’m mostly just shoved into the man category anyway. It doesn’t really upset me; it gives me no dysphoria to be identified as a man. But it is frustrating that even so called feminists think on such binary terms. Man or woman. Good or evil. Correct or incorrect.
Anyway, rant over. Sorry
. I thought this was a better alternative than Twitter.