MechanizedPossum [she/her]

Queer liberation in bourgeois democracies has largely been thanks to grassroots movements that had a big societal impact owed to to queer communities being at the cutting edge of pop culture and queer activism being loud, radical and relentless. These movements until this day struggle against the opposition of well-funded, deeply entrenched, officially endorsed reactionary forces. Due to this materially powerful, hostile forces, advances were often restricted to select legal fields like gay marriage, while areas that have an economic impact like protection from workplace and housing discrimination or encompassing trans healthcare are in many nations lackluster and incomplete until today.

Queer liberation in AES was in many ways the opposite of that, being enacted top-down by decree. There was input by party members from queer communities, by clinical experts ect., but ultimately anything hinged on whether the party wanted to support this cause or not. At the same time, tho, reactionary forces (the churches, activist billionaires) were actively suppressed and did not have any political influence, removing a major factor for state-endorsed and institutional queerphobia.

This lead to drastically different outcomes in practice. In many western countries, queer acceptance among the populace has vastly outpaced our legal (and in many cases where it is relevant) medical acceptance. The people are ahead of the reactionary insitutions here. In many AES countries like Eastern Germany or Czechoslovakian SSR, the institutions were ahead of the people, legalizing homosexuality before western countries did while the public was less accepting of gay people than in the bourgeois states were gay sex was still treated as a crime and fought with police raids on gay bars. A tightly regulated public life led to less cultural impact of queer subculture in many places, with few exceptions like Slovenia (which still under Tito hosted Europe’s first queer film festival and until this day is the most gay-friendly country in Eastern Europe).

These are fundamentally different situations stemming from fundamentally different institutional frameworks for activism. East Germany outpaced West Germany when it came to the legalization of gay sex and the legal recognition of trans people. The “reunification”, or rather: the annexation of the DDR by hostile capitalist and reactionary forces, led to tangible legal setbacks for East German queers - the DDR legalized homosexuality a year earlier and unlike the West, did not retain different ages of consent for gay and straight sex, for example. So when the wall came down, there were suddenly teenage gay couples that were at least in theory threatened with persecution because the West German legal system still operated under the idea that homosexuality spread as a form of social contagion, through seduction of youths by older men. This reactionary and unscientific view lead to a higher age of consent for gay sex until 1994. Trans people were able to change their papers and access treatment on a case by case basis in the DDR, which often led to easier transitions than in the West, were either bottom surgery or sterilization was required until 2011 if you wanted to change your name and gender marker. But East Germany’s public was measurably less accepting of queer people than the public in the west, and outside Berlin is less welcoming to queer people until this day. Where every major West German city had a bustling and open gay nightlife in the early 1970s, East Berlin had its first official gay bar in the late 1980s. Yes, it was a state-run gay bar, i get how cool that sounds, but having a lively, vibrant queer scene requires a kind of organizing that is … difficult if all has to happen within your country’s socialist unity party.

It is overly simplistic to draw statements like “gay people were better off in country x than in country y” from this, such comparisons even today disregard the complexity of the opression we face. How do you rank the fact that Thailand is socially more accepting of trans people than most Western countries, but makes it flat out impossible to have our actual gender legally recognized, meaning that trans women in Thailand routinely and automatically end up in men’s prisons? You can’t put a number on that and say “Thailand ranks as place number so and so on trans rights and Canada ranks as place number so and so.” It doesn’t work. The details aren’t comensurable. And this also goes for comparing gay rights in AES and Western countries.

I know this is a thorny and complicated topic, we’re all used to libs using 1950s soviet laws as an example to hallucinate a supposed inherent homophobia of communism when the UK at the same time chemically castrated Alan Turing and drove him to suicide, or when the US routinely raided gay bars back then and did human experimentation on conversion therapy. It is infuriating how liberals completely memory hole the brutality of our opression in the West due to them having suddenyl forgotten about their own homophobia ten years ago. I hate to see that kind of person act all smug. Fuck that. But let’s not paint a nostalgic and idealized idea of the DDR’s gay bars, this will not enable us to take a Marxist, scientific approach and learn and do better than earlier socialists.

What we see in examples like Cuba can be seen as a learning from other AES states’ history. They did not just pass their new family code, they accompanied it with a widespread agitprop campaign, they ensured that they got the public on board with their plans. And then they backed it up with tangible, material benefits where needed, such as in trans healthcare, were they are training more surgeons than required for the Cuban trans population so they will help trans people from all over LatAm lead a dignified, happy life. And they make sure that queer culture is adequately represented in Havanna’s nightlife, that there’s pride parades etc. This is a good approach under socialism, and it requires a lot of acceptance and openness from the upper ranks of the party to work out.

i thought this would trigger the whataboutism bot, kinda disappointed ngl

She did a hecking whataboutismerino!

I have skulls on my helmet, how do you not get this?

That’s the most queerphobic thing i’ve read all month and that’s after having gotten into two online arguments with people who thought nonbinary transfems can’t be lesbians in the last week alone.

As others have pointed out, your experience is actually highly typical of the community at large. As in, you hit all the marks of actually common trans biographies. The thing is, if you feel that you’re speedrunning your transition and that you aren’t ready for bottom surgery yet, it’s ok and valid to postpone and make another appointment at a later date, or to call it off entirely. You can progress through this at your own pace, it’s your decision which steps to take and it doesn’t make you less trans or less of a woman when you’re unoperated, the only question should be what kind of body you want to live in and that just varies a lot from person to person. I know several people who went off testosterone HRT and still identify as nonbinary and are still gender as fuck and active parts of local queer communities. I just met another one yesterday at my local dyke bar, bowl cut, miniskirt and complete bear mode body hair, pronouns any / all, but statistically they count as a detransitioner when the reality is simply that they’ve gotten all they want out of T and are fine with that. The idea that we need to follow a pre-determined checklist of necessary transition steps and must not deviate from it, the threat that backing down, reversing, stopping or just pausing aren’t acceptable options, that’s such a pile of horseshit. This isn’t how our lives play out irl, people are messy and complicated and we’re allowed to have messy and complicated relationships to our gender and to our transition.

Yeah, that’s a big part of this that terfs have completely refused to acknowledge for several decades now: Gender is performative. As in, you have to actively uphold it through your behavior and you subconsciously do that because you want to be seen in a certain way. Toxic masculinity is maintained by the feedback loops you’re describing, men keep acting that way because they want to be seen as men by others and transfem eggs keep acting that way because they’ve been led to believe they want to be seen that way by others. For the eggs, this has one big advantage that makes it a lot easier than for men to stop engaging in toxic masculinity: At some point during our cracking, we realize that we do not want to be seen as men anymore, that in fact this is something we want to avoid at all costs. And that just pulls the rug from under these behaviors in a way that is not accessible to men. A dude that wants to stop engaging in toxic masculinity not only has to create a non-toxic understanding of a male gender role, he also has to find ways to make others perceive himself as a man when he acts that way. We don’t.

Look, i get what you’re trying to say and i’m sorry for being standoffish. Just to put this in perspective and understand why i’m coming off like that recently, most of the last weeks have been rough for me, i had to deal with a covid infection that ruined a lot of plans i had, i felt super isolated and depressed because i could not meet up with my gal pal and my support network due to being ill, i’ve had trouble with my employment situation and my landlord, so all in all i was just in a really foul mood and honestly i’ve been kind of mean online because of that. That’s not to say this makes it ok to engage in a discussion in the way i often do atm, but i hope this takes some of the weight out of my post and makes it seem less like me coming after you personally. Honestly, that goes for a lot of what i’ve been posting recently.

Anyway, my main point is this: You shouldn’t have to worry about saying inappropriate things just by engaging with Serrano’s text. If you think she’s making mistakes in regards to Skinner’s work, you’re free to point them out and give your own perspective on how he viewed human socialization, that may add something to the discussion. I don’t think she has a problem with Skinner per se, i don’t think she was trying to say that he was being transphobic in his work or whatever, i think she just used a household name like his as a jumping off point to say that we’ve largely moved away from earlier “blank slate” models of socialization. And if you think that it misrepresents Skinners work to frame it like that, it would give some perspective if you elaborate on that if you feel like it.

If not, i don’t mind if we just agree that we met each other on a wrong foot and disengage here, that’s really up to you.

I get that you can’t talk about a binary normative system without recognizing that there’s a reification of a binary happening that materially affects people, but idk, i just really fucking hate the term “opposite sex” or “opposite gender”. I’m sorry to get argumentative about that, i know that people here are more or less on the same page, but i really think it’s good if we just phase that term out of use and be mindful of not re-introducing binary reasonings when we discuss trans issues. Like you said, it’s probably worth typing some things out just for the people who are only reading along.

So let’s say that yes, ofc patriarchy doesn’t give a fuck if people are nonbinary. Because clearly, it doesn’t. Even then, trans and nonbinary gender presentation still subverts and breaks these distinctions down in practice because it means we so often do not neatly fit into these two boxes anymore, whether that’s intentional or not. What about people who are genderfluid or about pluralities who include personalities of different genders in the same body and reflect that in their presentation? What about people who do not want to be either femme or masc presenting at all because they are agender or greygender or xenogender? Even for nonbinary people like me who are clearly and consistently aligned towards one of the binary genders, i don’t think it really works in all cases. Some people clock me as trans, to some i pass as a butch cis woman, some are absolutely convinced to see me as a gay man, some just get a stack overflow error when they try to read my gender. Idk how i do that, but these are things that happen to me regularly, they’re just part of my life. Less often now as i progress in my transition, but it’s still not always a clear picture and probably never will be, because the better i pass, the more liberties i take with queering femininity, being more butch and enjoying androgynity. And this uncertainty that we give people affects how we experience gender-based discrimination - when people read me as feminine, they are more likely to violate my boundaries and touch me without asking, they are less likely to take me seriously, they are more likely to start making unsolicited sexual advances. When they read me as trans, they act extra weird in ways they don’t when they read me as cis. When they read me as a queer man, i’m subjected to an entirely different set of prejudices and get completely different kinds of stares (i’ve come to tell apart a very large number of unique stares from “i want to punch him” to “she can’t wear that” to “omg i can’t make up my mind if i would fuck them”). And that goes for a lot of trans people, because passing isn’t this reliable either-or thing for many people, but highly dependent on who’s looking. Like, the entire TME/TMA discourse, that doesn’t work for a large number of the AFAB trans people i know because they’re usually or at least frequently read as and misgendered as women and are regularly subjected to the full gamut of mysogyny, and when they say they are trans, that quickly shifts into transmysogyny because people have this “trans = trans woman” assumption. At the same time, they are also confronted with the host of transmisandrist stereotypes like “you just want male privilege”, “are you sure this isn’t a phase, i’ve also really struggled with being a girl when i was younger”, “don’t you want to have kids at some point, is it really necessary that you medically transition when you can just live as a masculine woman”, “you’re so pretty, do you really want to ruin that with hormones and surgery” and so on. There’s often no either / or of what kind of transphobia AFAB trans people receive. To me, it seems to generally be a pretty big part of the trans experience that we confuse and overwhelm people just by existing, that the way we live our lives make the gender binary ache under its internal contradictions and that is reflected in the weird and unpredictable ways in which we are treated.

And honestly, what is “opposite gender” even supposed to mean in my case? I’m a nonbinary trans woman, according to your line of thought the opposite of that is a nonbinary trans man. And that works in a lot of ways - when i talk about dysphoria with nonbinary trans men, their triggers tend to be the polar opposites of mine, for example. And a lot of their other experiences are like mirror images of mine, too. But then, we also share that we’re both trans, that we’re both nonbinary, that we are both trans and nonbinary and in spite of being nonbinary claim a term for a binary gender for ourselves, and that means that a lot of our experiences are not the opposite, but the exact same. We face the same transmedical ideas about not actually being our gender before bottom surgery, we both get impostor syndrome and ask ourselves if we’re even allowed to call ourselves nonbinary and so on. So under that perspective, when i try to find the opposite gender for ALL of my mentioned labels, that polar opposite of my gender would be binary cis man. And yeah, i can get behind that, that’s very unlike me in all the ways possible. But it also is supposed to be the opposite gender of binary cis woman, and then we have the inverse of all the things i just got into, that binary cis men and binary cis women take up opposite ends of the binary cisnormative spectrum, but have all these aspects of binary and cis privilege in common. And you could argue that binary trans woman is in some ways an opposite gender to mine, or that binary cis woman is, or that these two are opposite genders to each other and so on and so forth. Framing things in a way were genders have just one opposite just doesn’t strike me as particularly productive when i get into the day to day experiences in the communities i’m active in.

does this happen to trans people of the other gender

What “other gender”? You’re aware that us nonbinary people exist and that we make up roughly half of the populations you’re talking about here, right?

Why would you write out that entire wall of text about half a sentence that has zero relevance to the actual substance of the article and then not even tell us the tiniest bit with how she’s supposedly wrong about Skinner when you’re in the middle of reading one of his works?

btw Julia Serrano’s pronouns are she / her, would’ve taken you like 10 seconds of googling. That’s besides the point here, but consistently misgendering her over and over again on top of all this weird beating around the bush that you do, all this complaining about “most disenfranchised folks” and our “pseudoscientific dismissal” of ancient and methodically dubious pre-replication crisis psychology, that realy rubs me the wrong way when you can’t even be bothered to get your actual point across. If you’re such a fucking brain genius, you should be able to come up with a more substantive criticism than “her arguments are flat out awful”, at least she even has an argument to begin with, which i can’t say about anything of the vagueposting word salad you’ve written.

soap opera where they visit moral dilemma planet, but yeah

washable

I would say it makes sense to leave it there, it just has the most activity. anti_cishet also has a nice weekly queer megathread

Do i want to express “positive manhood”, or am I a demiman?

These aren’t mutually exclusive. Expressing positive manhood is a gender performance, being a demiman is a gender identity. These are distinct from each other. You can be a demiman and perform masculinity, you can also perform androgynity, you can alternate between both depending on social context or on how you feel today.

• How you express is an act of social display, it is the show you put on, it is how you present to the outside world.

• How you act in a relationship to a woman is a gender role. It is how your gender performance relates to others, how it works when it goes from a display to a way to structure interaction and relationships.

• Gender identity is who you are, it’s internal, it’s the psychological depth structure that arranges and determines how that outside performance, and your gender role, and your body as a gendered physical object relate to your true self.

So how does this work in practice? How does a gender performance or a gender role relate to your gender identity? It’s about if you do these things in spite of your gender identity, or if you do them because of it. I wear nail polish all the time because i’m a girl and because i love how girly it makes me feel. I love swords in spite of being a girl. I’m a big angry lesbian (as a gender role, not as a sexaul orientation, i’m bi / pan) because i like how that liberates me as a girl from me being coerced into patriarchal structures of sexual-emotional exploitation, and you could do lesbianism as the male counterpart to that, as a way to have straight relationships in a non-toxic, non-objectifying way. OR you can do lesbianism because it’s one of the ways in which you are not 100% a man. It’s about the WHY, not the HOW or WHAT.

It’s a bit more complicated than this for me because i’m a nonbinary trans woman and really really love to fuck with labels and with the enlightened liberal shit-notion that words have to mean a universal thing defined by some cishet cracker asshole of an acedemic invory tower dude, so my examples in relation to myself are simplified to the point where you can also undersatand them when you aren’t buried a mile deep in a weird transbian catgirl kinkster antifa goth sect. But i hope you get the gist of it: What matters in regards to your gender identity is not how you want to relate to others (that’s important, but it comes later), but what’s inside of you, and i know it can be hard as fuck to access that as an autistic person, it took me literal decades to figure myself out. But it’s possible.

I can’t speak from personal experience, but i see others warn each other about not falling asleep in the thing. Wearing it too long or while you’re exerting yourself can lead to back problems it seems? Wearing it for too long due to the threat of dysphoria setting in again is a problem for some people i know, but i’d count that as a pretty big testament for the good these things can do.

Honestly, it would make more sense to merge transenby and anti_cishet_aktion. traaaa is very distinct as a meme and shitposting comm that was actually fully intended to be a replacement for the traaa subreddit to onboard trans reddit users. It has a very clear focus and decent activity, whereas the two more serious LGBTQIA+ boards have a ton of thematic overlap and both see too little activity. Yes, this comm has a clear trans and nonbinary focus and is more theory heavy than anti_cishet, but given the site’s userbase and the content on anti_cishet, i don’t think we would be underrepresented among the cis gays in case of a merger.

Nah, that’s hospitalized by transgender

Also fuck yourself doubly for being a cis shit that tries to have an opinion about trans issues AND COMPLETELY IGNORES ANYTHING TRANS REALTED ABOUT THEM, i’ll file another report of your shitty post. We never should have federated with your shitty instance full of wehrmacht apologists, fuck you.