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Anonymous asked:
hi! i was wondering if you'd be willing to do an analysis of the aromantic manifesto thats been going around? most of the ppl ive seen so far have been from either non-aro queer ppl or non-loveless aros and i cant find any loveless aros talking about it, and ik thats something youve talked abt b4 (loveless aros i mean) id love to also see your thoughts on it.
So funny enough I saw this manifesto a while ago, but didn’t really have any thoughts on it because I had too much trouble reading it for brain reasons, because its just. A lot.
So @spacelazarwolf compared this to lesbian separatism/radical feminism and I think that is pretty apt. Radical feminism takes accurate criticisms of the patriarchy (such as gender as a tool of oppression and misogyny) and comes to the conclusion that gender is, in all forms, inherently oppressive, men are inherently oppressors, and that to personally identify with gender roles or men in any way contributes to oppression, so we must take on political lesbianism to reject this.
This manifesto seems to do the same with amatonormativity. There are real criticisms of amatonormativity in queer spaces here; aromantics have talked a bit about how focusing queer liberation on romantic love as a reason why we shouldn’t be oppressed is alienating, and how queer spaces often reinforce amatonormativity. But it then comes to the polarized conclusion that romance is itself oppressive, identification with romance contributes to oppression, and that we must take on (essentially) political aromanticism to reject this.
Which, like political lesbianism, is just… unnecessary? This is not the only conclusion we can come to as a result of these criticisms. And these conclusions prioritize abstract political theory over people’s real lives and autonomy. Which is a big reason (although not the only one) why radical feminism fell apart, because eventually women got tired of having to structure their entire lives and identities around acting out Good Political Theory instead of being able to. y'know. Be themselves? But also, these kinds of conclusions are so absolute and polarized. They assume that nothing about gender or romance can grow and be improved.
There are parts of this manifesto I like. The line “The first big ruse of romance is that it is ubiquitous because it is natural, and it is natural because it is ubiquitous” I think is actually pretty cool and can be adapted to all kinds of things; for example, capitalism does the same thing, taking over as much of the world as possible & erasing other ways of life, and then using its dominance as evidence thats its just how humans naturally are. It brings up criticisms of love that are big parts of lovelessness, like the idea that love is inherently a good thing when it can be harmful and still be “love.”
But then it takes the… strange path of saying that if people can’t help how who they love, then neither can racists and transphobes and fatphobes, which is why romance is inherently oppressive. But like. Even within relationship anarchy, where all hierarchies are rejected, this problem won’t disappear. Its a problem of attraction & how social systems shape how we think.
I also disagree with how it frames private vs public life:
Public life concerns the interests of people as citizens and is regarded as a legitimate sphere of social intervention.
Private life concerns the interests of people as consumers/individuals and is nobody’s business but those privately involved.
While the domestic sphere fashioned by heterosexual kinship relations has been historically designated as private life, queer intimacies have instead been regarded as a matter of public concern due to moral panics associating them with predation and perversion throughout history.
I disagree with this framing of private life as something which is seen as “nobody’s business.” Maybe that’s true on the small scale of social politeness and ideals. But on a systematic level, to me, this is absolutely untrue, and its something I’ve been doing some thinking about with regards to modeling the patriarchy.
The patriarchy is greatly concerned with the private lives of individuals. In order to keep its control over society in general via gender-sex-sexuality, its important to control how people interact with others. Even heterosexual, cisgender relationships haven’t been free from patriarchal scrutiny; the wife must submit to the husband, the children must submit to the parents, and the queers must be kept outside the home. Again, on the level of neighborly politeness, people are going to say “what happens in the home is none of my business.” But a relationship where the wife is the breadwinner and the husband stays at home is easily subject to scrutiny because it threatens the patriarchal norms, which causes unease.
Romance, as a construct, is a tool of oppression in multiple ways. But the physical reality the construct is built on top of is not inherently evil. The feeling of romantic love is not inherently corrupt, the same way the feeling of gender isn’t.
Their advice for abolishing romance also feels kinda… vague and unhelpful and messy. I’m still not really clear on what “abolishing romance” even entails because most of the things they list can be done while romantic relationships occur. It just reads like they took the ideas of relationship anarchy and made it political lesbianism 2
I, as an aromantic, find the idea of political aromanticism to be pretty gross. I know how it feels to be pushed towards a certain relationship with romance and I don’t want to seen it done in reverse, and tbh I don’t like the idea of making my identity into a political stance. Being aromantic absolutely influences my politics, but its also my experience as a person. Again, similarly to why it would be uncomfortable to have lesbian spaces be full of women who are not in any way attracted to women but are making a political statement.
It disappoints me that this manifesto’s conclusion is that romance itself must be rejected, the same way radical feminism does. Because there are good points here, but all-or-nothing conclusion, to me, is more divisive than connective and that’s a big problem. My feelings about gender abolition are that, if we achieve true liberation from the patriarchy, our construction of gender is naturally going to be very different. Perhaps those people will no longer use gender, or they’ll just use it differently- but trying to force a specific outcome is unhelpful and clashes with individual autonomy and culture for the sake of political theory. Same goes for this. Maybe in a post-amatonormativity world, “romance” will lose meaning, or at least be very very different. But trying to force that outcome isn’t helpful.
Anyways I hope these takes were interesting! Honestly given how much arophobia I’ve seen I’m worried people are going to see this manifesto and get hostile to a lot of aromantic ideas. So I wanna suggest that people check out I Am Not Voldemort by K.A Cook, which is where the concept of “loveless aros” came from, as well as The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy by Andie Nordgren, which created the concept of relationship anarchy. Both of these essays do a much better job at criticizing love & amatonormativity than this manifesto.
Anonymous asked:
Answering your question in this post: https://www.tumblr.com/genderkoolaid/725011418157563904/i-didnt-say-that-experiencing-violence-was-a?
No, a trans woman being perceived as a woman wouldn't be privilege because being a woman is not a privilege. Being perceived as a man is a privilege, regardless of what comes along with that. This is basic feminism, men are in control of the patriarchy and women are oppressed by it
I mean. for one, the original claim was:
“It is a good thing that they saw him as his true gender. Most trans women can’t experience that. That’s literally your friend experiencing male privilege, he is seen as the gender he says he is and that gender is male”
“I didn’t say that experiencing violence was a privilege, I said that being perceived as the gender he is was a privilege”
The main disgusting thing about this is that a Black man is experiencing police violence because of the intersection of his race and gender, and you (I assume you are the same anon) said that him being correctly gendered by the police who want to kill him for being a Black man is a good thing because his gender is being affirmed.
The rest of this is just bog-standard shitty cis-white feminism. Its not intersectional to act like a Black man’s race can be separated from his gender, especially when many Black trans men have talked about experiencing an increase of violence after transitioning. This is not a side-note on Black men’s gender, its an integral fucking part of it. “Men control the patriarchy” is an obviously cissexist way of looking at it when you consider that trans men do not and literally have never been the ones with social power. Fuck off
[Also: “being perceived as a man is a privilege, regardless of what comes along with that” so following this statement, closeted trans women are privileged and there’s absolutely no nuance to anything else oppressive that they experience as a result of their gender because the most important thing is that they are perceived as a cis man in any context?]
I really hate to say this, but it is genuinely to the point where ANY AFAB person who still identifies as female (to any degree) will get called a TERF for being female, and for talking about sex based oppression - the very real thing that they face.
And the thing is, this is largely the fault of the TERFs. They've got people genuinely confused as to what is and is not feminism.
TERFs have people so wound up that they see someone identifying as female or talking about sexism and sex-based oppression and immediately just call that person a TERF.
So I would like to say, resoundingly: Fuck TERFs. Fuck you for muddying the waters so much that you've basically made everyone more sexist than they were before.
And I fear it was the goal. To REINFORCE patriarchal norms and making sexism "hip and trendy".
I don't agree that this was the goal of radical feminists, and I don't think it was the goal of trans exclusionary radical feminists. Because they are feminists - they're just feminists who are deathly afraid of destroying the sex binary.
Anonymous asked:
It is a good thing that they saw him as his true gender. Most trans women can’t experience that. That’s literally your friend experiencing male privilege, he is seen as the gender he says he is and that gender is male
spacelazarwolf answered:
i……….. genuinely don’t even know what to say anymore.
for context, this is in reference to a response to an ask where i mentioned my friend, who is black trans man, being told that he should consider it “affirming” to experience more police surveillance and violence. i seriously cannot fucking wrap my brain around how utterly disconnected from the real world you have to be to assert that a black person experiencing more police violence is not only good but privilege?????? like. how do we come back from this? how in the world are we supposed to redirect discourse that has gone this far off track? i am genuinely at a loss here.
ALTOhhey that's me. If you're passing by this post I encourage you to peek at the original tag because it often feels like I was put on this earth to tell off naïve white people for their unexamined, implicitly colonial worldviews. Got plenty good essays I wanna put in there soon but I'm very tired and also trying to wrangle enough good, freely-accessible papers to cite inline.
Anonymous asked:
I didn’t say that experiencing violence was a privilege, I said that being perceived as the gender he is was a privilege
spacelazarwolf answered:
i feel like i’m going fucking insane!!!!!!!!! what planet r u all living on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what bizarro definition of “privilege” r u using!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hey anon quick q: if a trans woman is harassed by a misogynist whose made she turned him down for a date, is she experiencing the privilege of being percieved as the gender she is? you fucking donkey?
[for context, anon is saying that a black trans man experiencing police surveillance and harassment for being a black man is privileged for being correctly gendered while a lot of trans women aren’t. because of course trans women never pass and trans men always do]
“When she (lesbian) and (gay) I had our first (heterosexual) kiss In the doorway of her midtown apartment, we were cautioned by a cop (straight?) I wonder if she found it as funny as I did; is Manhattan so uptight that a (straight) kiss is frowned upon?” - Laurence W. Thomas
(published in “Anything That Moves”, 1991)
hey guys could you share and/or donate to my gofundme so i don't end up in debt for having cancer thanks lol
oh and here are all my money-app usernames if you'd rather do that
paypal: jordavidson
venmo: jorbrad
cashapp: jordavidson
Hi everyone, just sharing this around again. I've raised a few hundred bucks so far, which has been helpful, but I'm still trying to reach my goal.
I'm in the middle of my first round of chemo treatments right now, and so far I'm not experiencing any significant side-effects. Hoping that doesn't change, but we'll see!
Anonymous asked:
Am I alone in thinking that when people make up a strawman to mock "transandrophobia truthers" the image they paint is like. Indistinguishable from 2014 era "ugh delusional blue haired sjw transtrenders" in tone? Like as a transgender who came out in 2014 it is eerily similar to the way people used to talk about "crazy feminists who say they're not women" lmao
a-faggot-with-opinions answered:
Seeing as some of those people literally use the word “theyfab” to describe us, no, you’re not alone. It stinks of “you have no real problems, try being like ME who actually suffers!!!”
some facts
-the stigma against vaginas in our society is rooted in misogyny
-laws that try to restrict and control vaginal health are also rooted in misogyny
-not everyone that has a vagina is a woman
-not all women have vaginas
-there are trans women with vaginas
-there are trans men with penises
none of these statements have any reason to contradict each other
by far the most interesting part of the latest You’re Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call “official” suppression.
essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didn’t know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it down–or talk to any other naturalists about it.
and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didn’t write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in it–miller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.
“official” suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldn’t get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicion–i.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?
and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, “well, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?” would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.
Luckily, the end of this is nigh. Recent literature all points to bisexuality - ie, nondiscriminant sexual behavior - being ancestral and the standard across Animalia. We’re finally admitting how queer nature is, and its awesome.
