fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2216 ]

[ SECRET POST #2216 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2216 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Short answer: Yes.

Long answer:
I have PTSD. I'm gender- and sexually- queer. I'm very poor. Most of my life I've been presenting as a chick. I've been bullied, harassed, assaulted, raped several times including a gang-rape. I grew up in a community of drug addicts and criminals. I've been shot at and stabbed because of where I lived and the people I hung with. And on and on. I used to really love activism, because so much of it supposedly should be about helping people like me. But I've grown really disillusioned with it.

After ten years I've realized none of it is about helping people like me. Because I'm poorer and more 'ethnic' than the white middle-class assholes who make up 99% of SJ circles. Because I haven't been to college so I'm not up on all the buzzwords. Because I've seen from experience just how in-applicable modern SJ theories are to the real fucking world, how activist circles talk down to us poor ghetto folk by treating us like modern noble savages who can do no wrong even when we're doing wrong.

And I've seen how people take good ideas like trigger warnings for people like me, and willfully misunderstand how and why they should be used and what the limits of their usefulness are. Trigger warnings are fucking USELESS a good portion of the time, because PTSD doesn't work like that. We've perpetuated this myth that triggers are these easily explainable things like 'every time I see someone mentioning rape I start shaking and get nauseous and upset' rather than the extremely complex layers of connection and reaction that PTSD sufferers have with trauma. (It's like these people have never seen fucking movies about soldiers, where the guys go home and have flashbacks at all sorts of unrelated things.) And its all so people can pat themselves on the back every time they type out "TW:" because they can feel like they're really helping people like me, and then they get all fucking indignant or confused when someone with PTSD asks for a warning they didn't think of or says the warnings aren't useful.

(This is why I wish more people would adopt "content" labels or "squick" warnings. Useful to everyone and its not corrupting or spreading misinformation on the meaning of 'trigger' for people who actually have them.)

And of course there's also the fact that people are so focused on fighting the man that its bad to even examine problems in our own communities. Like, the neverending racism and classism in feminist circles. Or the misogyny in so much of the trans* community. Or the sex-shaming in anti-racist circles. Or the prude-shaming (not sure what to call it) in certain parts of the gay community. Or even having discussions about drug use and crime. These are all things that need to be addressed but they're constantly swept under the rug under the umbrella of "victim-shaming", because we can't hold victims of one thing responsible for their actions elsewhere.

tl;dr yeah, I'm fucking done with it.

I'm actually genuinely curious about the misogyny in trans* communities - if you or anybody else can explain this. I've heard this said several times, but it's not something I've personally come across despite being trans* and in a trans* community. I don't know if it's conspicuously absent in that community, or if I'm just missing it, and I'd really like to be able to recognize these sorts of problems.

ayrt
I've mostly seen it from ftm guys (understandably because a guy is more likely to be a misogynist than a mtf woman). Basically lots of 'girls are catty' and 'girls only talk about boys/clothes/whatever' and 'girls are bitches'. Sort of a grade school mentality. But there's also lots of 'misandry is real because guys have to shave their faces just like girls have to shave their legs' false equivalencies that you'll see get thrown around. And dudebro entitlement, that straight women should be automatically sexually available for them just because they work out or whatever and any chick who isn't interested is just a bitch or discriminating because they're trans (even when those women don't know that the guy is trans).

There's also lots of really heavily misogynistic vagina-shaming in parts of the ftm community. Like, 'I need to get a dick because c*nts are gross and smelly' type comments. Again, dysphoria can explain it, but dysphoria isn't an excuse for sexism. There's also lots of fat-phobia (for a few reasons, such as it being easier for thin people to pass in either direction) that tends to tie in with the sexist attitudes.

(And, personal anecdata, I identify as genderqueer/fuck now, but I used to identify as ftm because I was entertaining the idea of transitioning, and the really horrifically gross sexism of so many ftm guys basically entirely turned me off transitioning and made me embrace the parts I had even if my gender doesn't match.)

Holy crap. I have never seen any of this o____o FWIW, I'm FTM and I understand that none of that is okay, and none of the FTM guys I've been around have acted like this. Not all of us guys (cis or trans!) fall into the horrible traps of "acceptable masculine behavior" Western culture shoves down our throats :(

I'm sorry you've had such a gross experience with them :c That's just appalling behavior, no matter who it's from.

A lot of it isn't immediately obvious, but more patterns of behavior that you start to notice. Like, one person says something really sexist and you can excuse it as 'that person is sexist'. But after the hundredth person, it becomes a pattern. And after the thousandth you notice it even in places you didn't before. It sort of crept up on me over a few years, until I was re-reading some old favorites by the "elder wisemen" of various ftm communities and saw all of the things I'd missed.

There's definitely awesome trans* people out there, lots of them! But the movement has some serious issues, too.

Not that I'm excusing their behavior, but some of it might be reactionary to the misogynistic culture - many FTM guys aren't taken seriously because they're female, and I know the "ubermasculine" thing used to be the only thing people would take as acceptable behavior for a trans guy, because if you were just going to be "effeminate" anyway, then why not just be a girl? That sort of thing. I get told a lot that I can do X, Y, Z, "and still be a girl!" and I can see where the reactionary (and childish) comments of "but girls are _____!" come from. Our culture tends to define gender in actions and expressions, and when you're coming into your own as a trans person, it can be hard not to fall into using "But I don't do that!" as a way to assert that you're not that gender. I used to be that way, and I know now that my comments weren't okay, but they were also coming from a place of anger and frustration, and I needed to grow up a bit to recognize how to better word myself to assert my identity without attacking anybody else.

Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a discussion. It's just rather near and dear to my heart, and I'm a little over-protective. It hurts knowing that there's all this in-fighting within and between minority groups :c

Oh yeah, a lot of it is definitely a reaction to our culture, and a lot is insecurity, too. Unfortunately, especially for newly-transitioning guys, its easy to confuse acting masculine with dudebro douchebag behavior, because 'masculinity' is actually a lot more subtle than 'drink beer, watch football, hate women'. But this sort of thing can make trans* spaces seem like very unsafe and unwelcoming places to people who aren't okay with that kind of posturing. (And there are lots of reasons beyond just 'I don't like sexism', like not wanting to have surgery, not wanting to transition, being a trans person without body dysphoria, etc.)

It's cool! Its a discussion that needs to be had, after all! :D

We've perpetuated this myth that triggers are these easily explainable things like 'every time I see someone mentioning rape I start shaking and get nauseous and upset' rather than the extremely complex layers of connection and reaction that PTSD sufferers have with trauma.

THANK YOU. This drives me fucking nuts.

If you write about this stuff anywhere, I would like to read it. I'm really tired of the window-dressing solutions and rampant, arrogant ignorance I've encountered in modern activism.

Nope, sorry. :( I thought about keeping a blog about it for a while, but I'm really not a terribly good writer and I think I would just exhaust myself trying to keep up with it.

(Plus, I'd worry that it would bring endless hate from the SJW crowd. blegh.)

It wouldn't have to be a space where you wrote a lot, or kept writing in perpetuity. You just sound like you have relevant stuff to say that is actively being stifled, because of conflicting interests and because a lot of activism these days is toothless and ineffective but how dare anyone admit that?

It wouldn't have to be a journal that allows comments. :) Or is linked to you.

I just - it kills me that organizations that are mobilizing money and resources supposedly to help poor and oppressed people can afford to not listen to them, and the internet is only sometimes any good at exposing that hypocrisy.

Aww, well. It's definitely something I'll consider doing in the future. I know it's super frustrating that there are so few people posting worthwhile sj stuff online.

Organizations and movements are great, but they tend to represent only the 'average member', and all the people who don't fit that average get left out in the cold.

Yes, and if you do, plz poke. If you know/respect other people online that are talking about some of these things, links would also be love. (I'm sort of going "what is sex-shaming in anti-racist circles?" but I don't mean to pepper you with questions.)

See. If activist communities were about people fighting their own oppression, that might be a reasonable bias. It's unacceptable when you have, to use an entirely too-common example, middle class people "fighting homelessness."

If I do I'll definitely poke you! :D Unfortunately I don't have any links on me since I'm not on my main computer and I can't remember the names of any of the bloggers I've followed. But there was a thread not to long ago that had links to a few really awesome writers. I'm sure if you asked the GC section tomorrow they'd be able to point you in the right direction.

Okay, yeah. I'll probably poke around and see if I can find it first, and ask for help if that doesn't work.

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[ SECRET POST #2216 ]

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