• ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      BEING A MINORITY DOESN’T MAKE YOU A DECENT PERSON OR MAKE YOU MAGICALLY UNDERSTAND SOCIAL JUSTICE. LOG OFF AND READ A BOOK!

      More neurodivergent queer CIA ghouls does not a liberated society make.

      obama-drone

        • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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          I mean, Freud’s greatest intervention was recognizing that “normative” is constructed and contingent on social norms (his “primitive society” being so depraved especially helps us see it). Even though dude was entirely wrong about everything biological, etc, you’d think the field would recognize what he got right and build on it, instead of, ironically, repressing its greatest potential.

            • Sasuke [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              i think the problem with freud is that, outside of some lit studies, he isn’t really approached from a sociocultural perspective anymore. all of his most prominent theories, at least in pop culture, has been tossed into this grotesque wellness machine where they’re at best treated as tools to achieve personal happiness, and at worst used to erase the web of social relations and material conditions that forms an individual

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            As a trans person stuck in a highly transmed, gatekeepy and pathologizing healthcare system, i’ve been through my share of psychotherapists (not really, i will have to go through at least two more ffs) and Freudians are the fucking worst. I mean, that’s not entirely correct, Jungians appear to be the same but nazi and i’m glad i never had a run-in with one of those freaks, but jfc do Freudians make my skin crawl. And when i ask around in local trans groups, hey, what’s your experience with this and that guy, yeah, the psychoanalytically oriented ones aren’t the ones any of us trust.

            I get it, he’s got some nice ideas when he’s not doing his straight ass pulls and blatant mysogyny, he’s also an excellent prose writer and the charm of his Vienesse German even carries over into the English translations, i can give him credit for a lot of things. A lot of things outside of psychology. Yes, he was right about the constructedness of social norms, but you do not need Freud for that, any psychologist with the tiniest bit of background in leftist acedemia understands that part already, it’s been kind of at the center of all humanities for the last decades. Psychology doesn’t need more Freud, it needs more intersectional anticapitalism to understand that some people just have entirely different experiences than those within the normative framework that defines the illusion of normalcy in our system. And i know a psychologist who does that, and she’s got nothing to do with Freud, she just does the usual evidence-based cognitive behavorial therapy slop, but she’s read enough feminist theory and queer theory and anti-racist theory to understand where her biases lie and how to treat people correctly when their very existence is at odds with how society is “supposed” to work, and i’ve never seen anything like that from a Freudian, even though there’s ofc Freudian leftists. But even those appear to be permanently stuck with overvaluing and centering the experience and the intellectual idiosyncrasies of a single cishet dude that are just super fucking misleading about how the human mind works, that perpetuate a very lopsided and hierarchical doctor-patient relation and that mostly work on making the wildest assumptions about your patients and always one-upping and controlling them.

        • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

            I can’t agree with this at all, as an ethnic minority I have seen way too many reactionaries among those who have been oppressed their entire lives.

            Being a minority and having direct experience of discrimination do increase one’s revolutionary potential, but class also plays a substantial role (I’d argue an even larger one just from personal experience) as well as the ideological superstructures being imposed upon us.

            Ultimately there are a lot of collaborationists across every segment of minorities, both within the imperial core and in the global south.

            • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              racism and trans stuff are similar in some ways but different in others, i think its not really right to equate them, very different experiences. the basic rub of it is there is a nonstop media campaign targeting trans people with blatant lies, the history of our community is largely embedded in socialist movements in america, there are inherent medical costs to most transitions, there are inherent painful and traumatizing sensations that you can open yourself to if you seek surgery, a possibility of familial ostracization, there is often a whiplash where you go from not being discriminated to discriminated (or vice versa, or discriminated on a new and different basis), and of course its likely that people have been physically and emotionally aggressive with you no matter what community youre in.

              and then there are discriminatory acts in healthcare and so on, but these forms of discrimination can manifest in different and similar ways for poc, so a little complex there.

              its still my experience that the vast majority of trans people are socialist and people become more active with socialist orgs the longer theyve been transitioned. i also think the fact that our community spans multiple ethnicities also has a factor in this rate of socialism, we all experience similar pains and have many things that unify us. and of course there are some shitty trans people out there, not saying there arent, but i feel like people are greatly overstating how many people are shitty in this thread.

              • charly4994 [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                I remember when I was still relatively fresh in my transition being introduced to another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been “out” for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn’t even have my name change done because I didn’t have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright “oh I’m a communist.” Was a bit of a major moment for me. I had a lot of seeds planted over the years between Occupy and just the financial crash but was still very much a lib. As time went on and suddenly the word socialism became less toxic it was a relatively quick shift to make, suddenly all those seeds ended up sprouting and it all just clicked together finally. Having more lived experience as trans and having come across a few people online and IRL that helped demystify it all really did help and I think that’s also a relatively big portion of it. We’re pushed towards the contradictions with our lived experiences while a solid portion of the community is already there able to explain the contradictions and demystify leftism.

                I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had. Completely exiled myself from trans discussions and attempted to never even mention it in any contexts. Finding /r/traaa was an opportunity to actually see more of the trans community and be happy with being trans and ended up kinda just being fine with being visibly trans, though it still sucks that people are shit. I do think the communities we build and the attitudes we allow are just as important as the lived experiences lest you have libs come in and try to paint it over leaving you wanting to just disconnect entirely because their answers suck.

                • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been “out” for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn’t even have my name change done because I didn’t have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright “oh I’m a communist.”

                  lmao was it me?

                  I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had.

                  yeah i remember thinking similar, but you should also take some of the stuff on reddit with a grain of salt, liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly. really amplifies what is really a minority opinion among the larger trans community. you can tell by how many comments have a socialist bent but all the upvotes go to the one liberal opinion

                  • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly

                    oh fuck i can just see this in my mind

                    Well, time to go save these damn transgenders from themselves again. I’m such a good person.

                    fucking gross

            • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              gotta remember that generally people tune out of trans spaces the longer theyve been on hrt. so a lot of trans communities are new transitioners and the long-transitioned and few ‘moms, dads, and vague parental figures’ that guide them to resources and pool the knowledge.

            • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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              The sad tankie phase is completely avoidable. Most of the ones you encounter online lack praxis. Active socialist practice in your community is inherently rewarding.

              Class consciousness might not exist in our local communities in the way we would want to see it, but it is there.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.

            In my experience this depends on stealth vs not-stealth. The stealth people wanting to blend and capable of it tend to deradicalise because they can fit into existing society, those that can not tend to hyper-radicalise because they need society to change for them.

            • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              maybe. i pass and i gotta tell you im never forgetting how people treated me in vulnerable moments knifecat

              also there are plenty of times where im forced to out myself, particularly when dealing with insurance and medical, and i pretty much always get a sour and many times visceral reception because people feel ‘tricked’. i had a nurse very unprofessionally yell ‘WHAT’ at the top of her lungs when i was explaining i was trans and my basic medical history

                • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  cat-trans yeah people fucking with you over whether you pass or not sucks. i had a family member claim i dont even though i havent been misgendered by randoms in like 8 years. pretty sure they were just being a spiteful asshole, they couldnt point out why

                • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  When people keep telling you that you pass, you most likely do, and you’re most likely hella cute as well, because people conflate high passing and being conventionally attractive a lot. And some people, including a lot of trans women, just can’t handle that. Our society teaches women to constantly monitor each others beauty and put each other down both when we’re not pretty enough and too pretty, we’re forced to constantly square the circle, to navigate this ridiculously narrow corridor between supposedly being an unsightly mess and supposedly being a shallow skank. And like most of mysogyny, that gets amplified further when you’re trans. I keep hearing stories like yours and they’re always from really beautiful trans girls who are resented for looking conventionally hotter or more cis-like than the person putting them down. Like, i just met this super cute trans girl and took her to a local meetup because she was afraid to go alone after some other trans woman had trash talked her for not doing enough about her voice at another get-together years ago - not only is that a horrible demand in general, voice work is hard and not everybody has the talent or the ressources or the time or the lack of voice dysphoria to pull through with it, no, she actually has a lovely voice, low-pitched but very smooth and feminine, a voice i could listen to all evening. But that other woman saw her and probably felt threatened and had to lash out. I had to think of that when you wrote about your ex.

                  And no, you’re absolutely not a bad trans person for stealthing once in a while. It’s a scary time we live in, and while it’s important that we’re visible and outspoken and let people know we’re actual human beings they know and not just some abstract “gender ideology”, it’s hard to be visible 24/7. When you put yourself out there most of the time, and when you reflect the way you do when you do that, and give people the opportunity to learn, that’s more than enough. From each according to their abilities also goes for activism, and there’s no shame in not wanting to be in the trenches permanently. Our survival and continued existence in itself constitutes a revolutionary act. Reaction wants us dead and being alive as a trans person and living your best life in itself defies the necropolitics of today’s fossil capitalism. Being able to take a break from the struggle is a form of privilege, as is being able to transition at all, or having enough money to pay out of pocket for surgeries, or living in a place with easier access to public trans health care, or being educated and able to articulate your existence in a convincing way, or being binary trans, or having had a supportive home and being able to accept yourself in ways other people can’t because their parents didn’t give them the love they would’ve deserved, or being a white trans person, or living in an area that makes it easier to access queer networks, but none of these are things you shouldn’t use as tools for your survival if you’re lucky enough to have them at your disposal. Cisfascism wants all of us dead, and we have a right to fight bacvk against it with anything we have at our hands, we should just be aware of and mindful towards people who don’t share some of our privilege instead of throwing them under the bus like the actual assimilationists do.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      I don’t hate philosophy tube etc to be clear

      Then you should probably edit that you’ve misgendered her in that same sentence. Fucking gross, and it hurts doubly when it’s coming from another trans woman.

        • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          Where?! Are you being serious?

          I was, i either overlooked the “etc.” or somehow didn’t infer from it that you meant a plural “they”. I’m super fucking sorry for this. It was an honest mistake, and if you re-read that sentence in question and leave out the “etc.”, you can probably imagine how i came to these conclusions and how it felt to believe that a trans comrade did that kind of thing to another trans person.

          Once more, i’m really really sorry for misreading you, and for causing that amount of distress. It’s always a particularly awful kind of pain when people from within the community jump at you with such accusations when they’re in the wrong, i know what that’s like, and i should’ve taken a second and reread your sentence before posting to avoid putting you through that kind of shit. That was negligent and careless of me and i should’ve given you more of a benefit of the doubt and double-checked what you wrote. Do you want me to edit that comment or should i leave it up? I really want to make this right and if you want me to remove or edit the comment, it’s the least i can do.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        generally dont consider using they/them to be misgendering tbh, i default to it in trans spaces when i dont know someones gender. but its clearly being used in the plural here

        • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          generally dont consider using they/them to be misgendering tbh

          I’m making exceptions for when pronouns are unknown, or when you’re talking about people in general, and ofc for plural they like in this case that i’ve completely gotten wrong, but once we’re adressing known individuals who’ve stated their pronouns, i’m under the very firm assumption that if these people would be fine with they / them, they would state it as a secondary set of pronouns. When people do not do that, i will never use a singular they / them on them just as i wouldn’t he / him or she / her them if these aren’t their pronouns. I know there’s a bunch of folks both cis and trans who see this different than me and don’t mind it, but there absolutely are trans people who find it highly offensive and hurtful, including myself, and also including PhilosophyTube, who will block anybody they / theming her. British terfs are extremly fond of using they / them to deniably misgender binary trans people, too, it’s defintily not without its problems.

          but its clearly being used in the plural here

          It absolutely is, i hope @Tastysnack@hexbear.net sees my apology in time and that it helps her at least a bit. She sounded so upset, it’s horrible i’ve wronged her like this.

      • TC_209 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        Given the “etc”, I believe the use of “their” is meant as a plural pronoun, not a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Tastysnack’s last paragraph isn’t a case of misgendering but rather imperfect grammar, something we’ve all been guilty of.

          • TC_209 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            I thought you were using “their” as plural possessive, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in an English class, ha. What’s important is that I understand you’re respecting people’s pronouns, regardless of the holes in our knowledge of grammar. :)

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                You were correct. Etc makes it plural here, so you should use “their” rather than the singular “her”. If there was an issue, it was the following conjunct [items combined with an “and”] being in reference to “her,” seemingly dropping the etc. Shorter sentences do make things easier, but I can never tell someone to do that since every sentence I write is run-on.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        The “etc.” makes it plural, so the “their” is not misgendering because it refers to the trans breadtuber clique and not one of them in particular.

    • epicspongee [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I don’t hate philosophy tube etc to be clear, I just find their videos to be self indulgent slop

      I don’t disagree, but I think she and contra hold a special place in my heart cause they were really the start to my radicalization. Contra’s earlier videos really got me thinking outside of a capitalist mindset and got me to think “oh, there’s alternatives to capitalism, and gender, and blah blah blah”, then I read the manifesto, then I started listening to Teach Me Communism, and then I became a chronically online tankie lol. I feel like I’m not the onlyyyy one that did this (I have friends who I think consider themselves socialist and anticapitalist who still like some of Contra’s newer stuff), but I definitely feel like the vast majority of her fanbase is annoyingly liberal to a fault. In her recent ‘anti-JK Rowling’ lane she’s been pretty decent I think except for when she steps even slightly out of it.