Horrifies me to see transgender activists gloating over a feminist’s terminal illness. To be deemed TERF is to be stripped of your humanity. Over & over I have watched this. Sadistic vitriol that is never applied to predators in the community doled out gleefully to wrongthinkers.
When my gf & I published an essay openly owning & explaining our gender critical beliefs, friends we had for years told us we deserved to starve in the streets. Strangers posted about how incredible my suicide would be. I was surprised as I no longer am able to be.
I have witnessed mass celebration of the assault of an older feminist in a square named to honor the right of free speech. Watched people proudly proclaim with their faces attached that a young lesbian should have been killed instead of merely jumped & beaten for misgendering.
The worst for me was a single comment on a thread in r/transgender about Dana Rivers’ murder of Patricia Wright & Charlotte Reed (and their son Benny Diambu), that read simply, “They were probably TERFs.” Based on nothing except being lesbians murdered by a trans woman.
I hope in palliative care Magdalen is surrounded by the love & light of her closest friends and family. May the anger we feel at the casual, reflexive, compulsive denigration of her as a person, a woman, a lesbian & an outspoken thinker keep the flames she lit alive.
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1/ The outpouring of support has been staggering. It's incredible to see the cotton ceiling being covered in mainstream media. I am floored.
2/ I want to be clear that my personal story was not in the BBC article - instead, I spoke extensively with Caroline Lowbridge about my experiences in the community & with supporting women who had also faced sexual mistreatment & violence from TW.
3/ Caroline said my story was cut for length as the story had to be "cut down quite a bit." She thanked me for helping her understand the dynamics. She was warm, thoughtful, kind, & attentive as I explained.
The most efficient/effective way I know to measure if a friend/social group, organization, or subculture you are in functions as a cult is the BITE Model. Here it is:
Cult-like structures are everywhere. You can be in a cult of 2 with an abusive partner. A friend group of 5 can function as a cult. Online spaces can be cult-like & this can leak over to your in-person behavior very easily.
Once your thoughts are in a cult-like structure, it is very hard to restructure them. Even if you leave a cult, you are vulnerable to the next. I experienced this my whole life up until a few years ago. I basically went from an evangelical cult-adjacent childhood -
1/ Quite honestly, I reject the pathologization/diagnosing of what I experienced as a lesbian little girl as “sex dysphoria”. The feelings I had were a totally understandable response to my upbringing & environment. I was brought up in a conservative southern Baptist home.
2/ Gender roles were very, very strict. There was physical, sexual & emotional abuse in the home. I understood from a very young age what I felt for other girls was a sin that would send me to hell. I fantasized endlessly about being a boy, bc that’s how a girl could love me.
3/ For as long as I could remember up to just a few years ago, I had persistent feelings of having a “phantom penis”, that is, a trauma based genital hallucination tied to sexual arousal. When identifying as trans, it got worse & worse.
I live in a town with a population 21,000 people. I am currently in the process of fighting to get a transwoman convicted of stalking & sexual crimes against a minor removed from the leadership of the only LGBTQ organization in town, a tiny thing with less than 30 members.
The prevalence of trans male violence is not a coincidence. It is not just unhappy accidents. Trans ideology harbors & supports male predators like it was almost designed for it. Just got off the phone w/one of the victims’ mom. She doesn’t understand how this could happen.
Seeing this piece of shit advertised as a queer mentor on a flyer every time I go the library makes me want to scream. The girl who was stalked walks around with PTSD & a major anxiety disorder. The stalker is featured in small town thinkpieces about being trans in a rural town.
1/ On this New Year’s Day I just wanna pay tribute to one of the OG detrans women who has been at this for more than 15 years: Redressalert. I’ve seen a lot of tweets about how 2019 was the year that detrans community got rolling, but that’s not true!
2/ Quick herstory lesson: three of the very first detrans bloggers were Redressalert, Crashchaoscats, & Twentythreetimes. Redress & Crash were who my gf and I reached when in gender crisis in 2015. Redress organized a detrans workshop at the last Michfest.
3/ 23 ran a private, secure forum for detrans women. It was the first support group of its kind. Redress edited & put out the very first publication of detrans voices - Blood & Visions. These women’s work gave us the foundations & roots of many of the terms we have today.
1/ In 2015, my gf & I openly spoke about our new gender critical beliefs on tumblr despite having a tumblr based business that was making the majority of our income. Why? Because we talked about it & it was the right thing to do. We took an immense hit to our finances, it sucked.
2/ People we’d been friends with for years said we deserved to “starve in the streets”. I was mocked for being open about my fear of having to return to the sex industry. The interpersonal fallout was intense, we struggled with money, it was painful. I would never take it back.
3/ For every 100 people telling me to get raped or kill myself, there was 1 who heard what we had to say. Feminism has always, always been in a cycle of forward movement & intense backlash. I suggest reading Backlash by Faludi (US focus) & Women of Ideas by Spender for more info