Thread by @Delafina777

Thinking a bunch about TERFs, evangelicals, white supremacy, femininity, and Dracula, but I'm also in the middle of 90 work things, so I can hopefully actually talk about those thoughts over lunch.

Okay, so, a couple things happened recently. I reread Dracula for the first time in years, I got reminded of a car accident I was in, and this whole Exvangelical thing with outing Chris Stroop happened.

And I went down quite a rabbithole last night trying to understand the context of the latter, and it was a trip. Long story short, a genderqueer person who's one of the faces of the Exvangelical movement wasn't out about their gender identity.

AFAICT, a bunch of cis women (and maybe a trans man?) wrote a manifesto about how AFAB people are the most harmed members of evangelicalism and thus their voices should be centered, and male and AMAB people needed to stop using their male privilege to dominate the movement.

And this was largely--and passive-aggressively--directed at Chris, who then self-outed to avoid being outed by others. It's quite a rabbithole and there's a whole maybe-related side thing with a women's group and I don't have the context to parse a lot of it. But 1 thing's clear.

And that's how TERF-y the language is. Which got me thinking about people who leave authoritarian environments, and TERFs.

So, as I mentioned, I recently reread Dracula. And it's been quite a while since I read it, and I was immediately struck by a lot of things, most of which aren't relevant to this thread. But the one that stuck out was the portrayal of women.

It's very Victorian, which lines up neatly with white (supremacist) ideals of womanhood. It's extraordinarily seductive. All the men are ready to die to protect Lucy, and they are constantly talking about how wonderful Mina is.

Like, every man who meets Mina is immediately like "YOU WONDERFUL WOMAN," and gets teary-eyed praising her and pledges undying loyalty and service to her.

It's very almost faux-medieval chivalric. And Mina mostly sits safely ensconced at home and provides support to the men and an ideal for them to fight for. (Until she gets bit by the eviiiiiil foreign man, but largely still even after.)

And there's definitely a feminist-lite way to read this text as empowering. The men listen to Mina and recognize her intelligence and don't write off anything she says, which is more than one gets in the tech industry, ffs.

But Mina also is very obliging in occupying the Angel in the House role. She defers, and supports, and never challenges. She is the Good Woman in a very patriarchal setting, so of course everyone gets along.

And there aren't REALLY any bad women. There are the female vampires of Dracula's entourage, of course, who are *fallen* women, but we have the example of Lucy becoming a vampire to show us that they're actually victims, and only evil against their will.

But Mina is the main female role, and her role is extraordinarily seductive. Who wouldn't want to be cherished and protected and respected and adored?

...

Being on a pedestal is actually a form of subordination and objectification, but since we get most of it through Mina's eyes, and she's cool with it, we never see the thorns on this particular rose.

And it made me think of a car accident I was in shortly after college. The freeway route I normally took home from work was super-busy, so I took surface streets instead. Like many upper-middle-class white girls in the area, I'd been told not to drive through the inner city.

But it wasn't dark yet, and I figured it would be fine. A guy on a side street ran a stop sign and t-boned me. I hit my head, and was a little out of it. So it's getting dark, and there I am, dazed and alone in the inner city.

People had heard the crash and come out of their houses. A man came over to my window. I couldn't hear him, so he motioned to roll it down. I rolled it down a crack. "You don't have to roll it down all the way," he said in a soothing tone of voice. "Are you okay?"

I wasn't sure if I was, and wasn't sure how to reply. "We called the police," he told me. "If you're okay, just sit tight."

A policewoman showed up soon. We were the only white people in the area, and as she ushered me into the front passenger seat of her cruiser, hovering protectively and eyeing the people around us, I was suddenly, acutely aware of that.

The guy who'd hit me's car was completely wrecked, but he'd taken off on foot. He was, I think, from that neighborhood, because he'd run into one of the houses.

And everyone was acting like I was this delicate creature that needed to be protected. The residents were making soothing noises and older ladies were calling me "baby girl." The cop was muttering darkly about how she was going to find the guy that did this.

She had me sit in the front seat of her cruiser until my parents showed up. Never asked to see my license. The residents found the guy and handed him over.

I had never felt so... valuable. I had a concussion and was still shocky, so it wasn't like I was doing any deep thinking on the racial dynamics at play there, but I very distinctly remember the intoxicating feeling of being treated like I was this precious, wronged angel.

So, like, I GET why women play nice with the patriarchy, and why white women cozy up to white supremacists who infantilize them. The sense of being this pure, idealized, angelic creature who must be protected from the Big Bad World is a hell of a drug. But it's a lie.

But I see a pretty clear parallel with TERF-dom. You realize that patriarchy's promise to women--accept a subordinate role, and enjoy a pampered life without all that nasty responsibility, and even rule through submission--is a bear trap and a lie. So you reject it.

But if you don't get to feel feminine--delicate and pure and threatened--in contrast to patriarchy's Bad Women--those who show sexual agency, refuse to play nice with men's requirements, etc. because actually those things are good--who are the Bad Women you need for contrast now?

Trans women, clearly. Scapegoating them gives you an easy way to continue to claim some sort of femininity-purity as both valuable and your birthright while still being angry at patriarchy.

You still get to have Bad Women who you can look down on, and best of all, you can claim they're not actually women, so you can escape criticism of not being in solidarity with other women.

Positing an enemy trying to infiltrate and corrupt feminine spaces allows you to feel special and valuable for being born a particular way, is a nice way to not have to grapple with thorny issues around race, class, disability, sexual orientation, etc...

Like, this is not news to anyone who's watched TERFS in action even briefly, but it's a pretty clear parallel to the idea of female empowerment being "traditionally feminine, but with a gun." Keep all the stuff you liked under patriarchy, just climb a step in the hierarchy.

It's the same lure as white supremacy's Victorian take on white women's proper roles.

So, back to exvangelicals. Like, look, I've never been evangelical, but that wasn't for lack of trying on my evangelical relatives' parts, or that of my evangelical friends in high school. I went to youth group stuff with them. I stayed in their homes. I saw it up close.

And I am, so to speak, acutely aware of the sales pitch. I also saw the damage it did, and saw the damaging in action. And yes, it *fucks up* girls. There's a hell of a stick, and a carrot that's forever just out of reach.

But I also saw what it did to boys--and genderqueer kids presenting as boys--who didn't fit the masculine mold.

And I think that trying to claim that one group was harmed the most there is both inaccurate and pointless. It's asking whether abusive restriction or complete negation is worse. Whether it's worse to be always failing, or to be failed preemptively.

So the idea that trans women, or genderqueer people who grew up presenting as masculine, are somehow automatically extra empowered, in evangelical spaces, and that boosting the voices of those who've left is abusing and silencing cis women, the Real Victims...

...welp, we're back to "keep everything you like about patriarchy"--the sense of being a fragile, precious creature who suffers nobly, Bad Women to look down on--and don't grapple with what rejecting patriarchy means for traditional femininity.

Bc the big question that all of these spaces are trying to dodge is:

If traditional femininity--in its submissive, Angel in the House incarnation--isn't coercive, if it's not *required* to be a Good Woman, if it isn't Better Than, does it still have value? Who's a Good Woman?

If we accept the idea that traditional masculinity-as-dominance is toxic and something we should reject, is there still value in traditional femininity?

One of the biggest challenges of feminism has been that it doesn't have a compelling alternative model for men.

Because its ultimate goal is that we all just be good adults, and good people, and that what that means doesn't come with a different blueprint based on having a different set of chromosomes.

And that there are 100 different ways to do it. But that's a way tougher, more nuanced sell than "Here is an exact set of behaviors and presentations for being a good man."

So, we have lots of conversations about how masculinity harms people (both the people who have to perform it, & everyone else), and whether it has any value in itself, but most of the parallel conversations about femininity focus on how it harms the people who have to perform it.

(The main exception I see to that is discussions around white women's weaponization of femininity against WoC, not limited to but especially Black women.)

And the specter I think is scaring white women fleeing back to traditional femininity in whiteness, and TERFs, and exvangelical women trying to push out trans women and (some) genderqueer people, is that elephant in the room.

Because, yeah, it's hard to ditch the map. And teasing out what is gender self-expression that is really *you* and what is self-expression that you enjoy because a broken system rewards you for it is difficult and scary and doesn't automatically make you happier.

And I want to make clear that I actually believe that there's a lot for EVERYONE to learn from virtues traditionally considered feminine. But I think that there's not just a problem with coercion there, but with clustering.

(I also recognize that I don't speak from an evangelical perspective. I dipped in & out of that world, & wanted acceptance and love from the people in it, but I also had an alternative model of brash, "unfeminine" women to come home to (with their own self-loathing probs, but).)