The problems with sex positivity and strangers oversharing about their sex life are both things that sexual moralism can never address but only contribute to a culture of silence, shame and ignorance about sex and sexuality just like it did for our grandparents generation. The solution has always been the promotion of boundaries, consent and open communication.
Obviously we live in a society in which the opposite is true. But you can’t reject sex. That won’t help the billions of people who have it especially the significant portion who do experience it through or as trauma. That’s not some innate feature of human sex or sexuality. That’s patriarchy, a social and political force which indoctrinates us at a young age to accept its world view and values including violence, poor sexual communication and boundaries, disregard for consent often by inflicting it against us.
A continued silence about sex and what healthy sexuality could and does look like only allows for further silence on existing and future abuse. That’s all “sex negative” thinking will promote. Sex positivity was used to pressure women but at the heart of it that’s just another way patriarchy has promoted poor boundaries, suppressed communication about our own desires and disregarded consent. It’s the same problem. And you can never hope to address that by a returning to a period which was horrible for women. People like R. Kelly or Harvey Weinstein could never have been caught. No one would be speaking of their violence nor demanding anything be done. Silence is isolation, never ending trauma and death.
The choice isn’t sex positivity, soft boys pressuring women into sex, daddy doms performing kink in public or complete rejection of sex as some innately evil drive only predatory men want or engage in. Regardless of how feminist you think either is they’re hopeless neoliberal band aids that can’t possibly lead to any kind of liberation. Only collective struggle can do that.
In other words: people hate trans women so much that community involvement wears us down. Communities that regenerate and heal trans women are outliers. Trans women that get enough social esteem in other communities to make those communities good for them are against the grain.
This is true even though social interaction and acceptance is, for many people, a basic need.
Communities (any community) fail trans women so utterly that it is less depressing to go without community involvement than to try to involve yourself in one.
A staple of Traumatized Millenial Culture is spending ages 10-15 sexting perverts on Omegle
Speaking from experience, I feel like presenting this issue in what reads as a somewhat flippant manner does a disservice to those who don’t realize this is a (what seems to be a pretty ignored or downplayed) form of CSA and it probably negatively affected their psyche in ways they don’t yet understand.
what’s the right process of becoming a woman in materialist terms? women are made into women, but how does that start? is it coercive assignment to the female category upon birth? but isn’t that based on biosex since that assignment is based on what people have perceived as female sex organs? further how does that process account for trans women? wouldn’t the process then need to rely on some form of personal identity so that one accepts their assignment as a woman/ rejects assignment as man?
First of all, let’s be clear about what womanhood is. “Women” refers to a structural position in a system of male dominance. This system of male dominance (patriarchy) is centered on the social control of bodies, in particular the sexual domination of some bodies and their transformation into sexual objects for men’s use. “Women” refers to a place in this system where:
1. One is coerced into becoming a baby-factory (the purpose of one’s body becomes childbirth and child-rearing)
2. The purpose of one’s body becomes male sexual satisfaction at any cost (sexual violence, ritualized sexual dominance)
and/or
3. One’s body is coerced into being an object of male arousal more generally (pornography; also, in order to do anything, one must be “sexy” doing it).
This is not all there is to womanhood but this is what is foundational to women’s existence. Not every woman experiences all of the above in the same degree, but all women experience at least some of those forces. What is most important is that in patriarchy, women’s sexuality exists to be used, principally by men.
Becoming women means first of all being subjected to this process. For most women, this does start at birth. Seeing patriarchy as principally about sexual dominance allows us to see why the body matters—for men, their desire is embodied physically in women and girls. But it must be stressed that womanhood is about what society tries to do to our bodies, not necessarily what our bodies are like, in themselves.
The terms of sexuality itself also enable sexual objectification and embodiment to extend beyond specific anatomies. Sexuality as we know it requires intimacy, and intimacy entails that our sexual organs are hidden most of the time. Of course, for patriarchy to function, men still need some way of identifying who they believe to be sexually available on their terms, so what constitutes “femaleness” necessarily becomes more complicated than “what parts you got.” Literally everything women do comes to convey sex (in the dual sense) in patriarchal society. Certain behaviors, actions, ways of being communicate information about the body somewhat independently of what parts one “really” has.
This all means that while anatomy does matter, there are ways in which womanhood can be bestowed (or burdened, depending on how you want to look at it) on people who weren’t born with a certain kind of anatomy. It’s relatively rare of course. But when sex (again in both senses) is ultimately about sexual objectification, and especially when sex (due to the requirements of physical intimacy) extends beyond pure anatomy, then there’s room for the status of “female” to be occupied by multiple “kinds” of anatomies.
What I mean is, by being subject to processes that coerce us into behaving in modes which adhere to male sexual desire, and indeed by having our bodies regulated in accordance with what men want, trans women share the same structural position within patriarchy as cis women. A “female body” is one which is coerced into being the object of male sexuality, both through presentation, norms, behaviors, and through regulation of our anatomies.
So how exactly does one who might have been sexed as male at one point come to be sexed as female? Identity usually has something to do with it, since a shift in ones identity can lead to a shift in other practices which changes the structural place one occupies. But this also begs the question: what causes trans women to reject male identity? There are probably structural reasons for this too. Some of us were never fully accepted into the male status, either due to our appearance, our personalities, or any other number of factors. Some of us experienced trauma that led us to feel far more in common with women than we did with men. Whatever the case, for trans women, changes in our way of being lead us to become subject to most of the same processes that other women are. We don’t need to know exactly how this happens because it will vary so much from person to person. It also doesn’t matter very much. A trans woman should not have to theoretically justify her existence. And ultimately, if the first thing in common between women is a shared experience of sexual oppression, then the next thing in common should be seeking community with each other and working to take political action against our common oppression. Policing who became women the “right” way is only counterproductive.
This post actually makes me want to scream, rip my hair out, and die because:
- It projects the poster’s transmisogyny onto the entire cis female population, and although the vast majority of cis women are transmisogynistic this isn’t what’s being pointed out here - the writer is instead using the vast majority of cis women’s transmisogyny as a way to validate their own and assumes the hyperfocus on trans women is because of some justified fear instead of unnecessary animosity ingrained in cis people and trans people who were CAFAB that leads to horrific transmisogynistic violence.
- It likens the attitudes people have about cis men with trans women, despite those two groups not being treated or percieved the same whatsoever on a society-wide scale and even in the specific scope of transmisogynistic supposed-feminism. I don’t recall prevailing attitudes surrounding cis men, in specific relation to their maleness, being related to something like finding their bodies and livelihoods irreparably revulsive (so much so that they are not-infrequently the victims of murder and assault to “punish” or “get rid” of them), they see them as sexual objects that only exist for exploitation, they see them as especially predatory (an idea not super divorcible from homophobic attitudes about gay people, especially gender non-conforming gay people, yet it is being not-so-subtly promoted in this post) or perhaps even a combination of both. Say it’s “identity politics” or whatever but with how cis women tend to talk about trans women, how trans women tend to be portrayed in the media, I think it’s safe to say the majority of cis women’s “fears” about trans women lie in being taught by our society that trans women are purely sexual beings that exist either to sneakily exploit others or be exploited.
- It posits cis women’s fears about a marginalized group (said marginalized group being trans women in this instance) as beyond criticism, again, as if cis women’s fears can only be morally just / pure and not at all tainted by patriarchal attitudes surrounding a group of people they’ve been encouraged to hate.
- Worst of all, it ends on the note that (cis) women’s fears should be prioritized, but throughout acts as if trans women don’t have these very same fears about (cis) men. If the writer knows that men frequently subject trans women to sexual violence, that trans women are risking their wellbeings by using men’s restrooms (or even public restrooms in general) far more than a cis woman sharing a restroom with a trans women is at risk, they do not care. If the writer knows that there are far more reported cases of transgender people being harassed in public restrooms by cisgender people than vice-versa, they do not care. If they are unaware of this, they have not even thought enought to consider some reasons why trans women and other trans people who were CAMAB would vastly prefer women’s public restrooms over men’s (beyond thinking that trans women want to pray on the fragile, innnocent cis women I guess.)
This to me is just further confirmation that this side of the “bathroom debate” is primarily based on hypothetical situations borne out of transmisogynistic stigma rather than anything intellectually solid such as formal research (something transmisogynistic feminists only use when it works in their favor, which it seldom ever does if it at all), because the facts aren’t on their side on this one. The complete lack of compassion for a marginalized group of people that many transmisogynists even admit are particularly subject to violence at the hands of (cis men) is astounding.
There’s a middle-ground between acknowledging and embracing the sometimes blurry boundaries between the (outwardly gender non-conforming) cisgender gay experience and the transgender experience but most of the people I see pushing this the most are cis people who have shown themselves to be either overtly or covertly transphobic / transmisogynistic and to me that shows they have intentions other than uhh actually helping to improve the material situation of trans people or liberate us from cissexism.
Call me paranoid but it does seem like what some of these people are actually doing is implying in other areas of online that being a gender non-conforming cis gay person is the most ethical way to navigate gender, while being so gender non-conforming that you decide you’re transgender is going too far, and then in the specific area of “solidarity” between cis lesbians and trans men / cis gay men and trans women feels like they’re subtly trying to obfuscate the differences there actually are between gender non-conforming cis gay people and trans people that can only make me think of transphobes / transmisogynists asserting that our dead, who died in ways that are inextricably tied to transphobic or transmisogynistic violence were actually just gender non-conforming cis gay people (as we’ve seen with Marsha P. Johnson, and more recently Leelah Alcorn.) It feels almost like all of this tied together is the most acceptable way they can find of rendering us ideologically nonexistent or irrelevant.
Seeing reactionary men use “bottom” as basically a stand in for “faggot” on this website and no one comment on it is a trip but like indicative of a larger situation lol
The amount of attention and salivating the gays give people like Shawn Mendes, Tom Hardy, Troye Sivan, Ezra Miller, Ryan Reynolds, Armie Hammer, Harry Styles, Evan Peters, Zac Efron, Noah Centineo, Henry Cavilll, Timothee Chalamet, Cole Sprouse, Ryan Gosling, etc etc etc is honestly kind of pathetic. I get that some of you prefer the safety of mediocrity when it comes to men, but I do question why it seems to be only these type of men. White is that? Is it cause you can’t won’t or don’t question the ways you have been taught attraction? Is it cause you prefer those who have achieved fame in an industry built to reward only specific types of celebrity? Or is it just cause you want to fuck them or them to fuck you?
And before anyone says it isn’t that deep, consider what it means that out of all the men out there you choose to consistently center your focus on these. Really think about that. Cause guess what? They aren’t going to fuck you.
t*rfs also like to twist the fact that there’s little long-term medical research into transitioning (for both trans women and trans men) in order to abuse and frighten trans men into detransitioning (which, btw, often leads to the suicidal depression that dysphoria causes and transitioning alleviates!)
like that popular post about how binding even with a good binder will fuck you up for life and make it impossible to have top surgery later on? written by a crypto-t*rf who thinks trans men are lesbians
the number of replies/tags that say something like “i’ve been terrified to bind and/or thought i’d completely fucked up my chance of getting top surgery because of that post” is horrific tbh and if you cis people actually gave a single shit about trans people you’d stop circulating shit like that
