An ecofascist antisemitic anti-trans conspiracy theorist is now calling for violence against clinics that help trans youth and is praising the fascist trucker convey in Canada for being "willing to die". This kind of talk doesn't end well.
This comes soon after she attacked a more "moderate" group of transphobic parents and conversion therapists who are trying to infiltrate and change trans healthcare to restrict and eventually abolish pediatric transition. Their crime? Being willing to work with GC trans people.
Hardline GCs refuse to work w/ any trans people, even those who embrace GC ideology. For them, working for more gatekeeping or promoting conversion therapy doesn't go far enough. They want to destroy the "gender industry" because they see it as part of a larger conspiracy.
I've seen quite a bit of support for the fascist occupation in Ottawa from GCs. As crossover between the GCs and the far-right increases, GCs will likely become more willing to adopt not only conspiracy theories but more extreme tactics from the far-right.
We need more attention to the growing confluence between organized transphobia and the far-right, beyond the work many hate researchers are already doing. Fascist use of force could embolden anti-trans activists to take their tactics to the next level and we need to be prepared.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
One of the main purposes of "ROGD" isn't just to label young trans people as "mentally disordered" but to claim that their "disorder" is of a different degree and kind compared to other (adult) trans people's "disorders". That they're not as "broken" as other trans people.
It's so transphobic parents can say that their kids aren't like those "sick mutilated freaks", those adult trans people over there. No, those adults with other more severe "mental illnesses" have corrupted and confused their poor child. "ROGD" isn't as bad as other kinds of GD.
In this framework, the kind of gender dysphoria that adult trans people have is not only worse and much harder, if not impossible, to cure but it can also cause those who have it to become "groomers" who prey on youth and infect them with "ROGD".
This is something I intend to write more about, how detrans rad fem narratives were very selectively quoted by other transphobes to promote their own anti-trans narratives while hiding the parts that were too fringe or didn't fit with their agenda.
The leaders of the rad fem detrans community were largely focused on promoting lesbian separatist culture and spaces. Most transphobes aren't lesbian separatists and don't give a fuck about keeping lesbian separatist culture alive. They're weirded out by that shit too.
Most "ROGD" parents don't want their kids to grow up to be lesbian separatists anymore than they want them to be trans. Pretty much the only people who want more lesbian separatists are lesbian separatists. There's a reason they're worried about dying out.
In my experience, detrans people and trans people generally get along. The first detrans/retrans online space I ever participated in was trans-friendly and many members considered themselves trans. The line between trans and detrans has always been blurry.
Most de/retrans people either consider themselves trans or feel like they have a lot in common with trans people. Most continue to participate in the trans community to some extent. Many trans people likewise sympathize with de/retrans people and consider them siblings or allies.
I and another founding member of the detrans radical feminist community had previously been part of trans-friendly de/retrans groups before we converted to transphobic feminism. We deliberately tried to create something completely different from past de/retrans groups and spaces.
Some of the most traumatic conversion practices I experienced were religious rituals performed by transphobic Dianic witches. They really messed my head up and had a lasting negative impact. I've wanted to write about them for a while now but I'm still too raw to go into details.
There was actually a very strong religious aspect to the early radical feminist detrans community, drawing mostly on lesbian feminist paganism and goddess worship, focused especially on myths about Amazons and more aggressive or monstrous goddesses, not the soft motherly ones.
We actually weren't particularly attached to Artemis but we made connections with Dianic witches all the same because of their transphobia and female separatism. And some of us participated in some their rituals, including one meant to "heal" us from our transness/transition...
If you claim that being trans is a "mental illness", a "disordered coping mechanism", etc, and that GNC lesbian and gay people are more susceptible to it, aren't you basically pathologizing GNC gay and lesbian people by saying they're more likely to develop this "disorder"?
That kind of thinking feeds right back into the theories behind classic "reparative therapy", that both gay and trans people have a "gender identity disorder", that our gender development was knocked off track in childhood somehow, but trans people's "disorder" is more severe.
This is why conservative Christians have no problem with the idea that trans people are "confused, self-hating gay people". It fits right in with their particular conversion therapy ideology and they see winning acceptance for anti-trans conversion therapy as a stepping stone...
The damage of anti-trans conversion practices can be long-lasting. Years later, I'm still dealing with psychological wounds from engaging in conversion practices to suppress my sense of self and dysphoria. It doesn't just stop once you decide it doesn't work and stop doing it.
It's like I spent years cutting a part of myself away. I had to numb myself to what I was doing. Now I can feel the wounds in my psyche and work through my past denial. A lot of healing starts with facing what happened & learning to trust my own perceptions that my pain is real.
Part of engaging in conversion practices is normalizing and rationalizing suffering because seeing a part of yourself as "false", "wrong" or "unhealthy" is suffering. Trying to suppress or destroy part of yourself is suffering. It hurts but you learn to justify it to yourself.