💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › flexibeast › thoughts.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:54:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Some short thoughts

You have privilege if you don't have to fight to have your gender recognised and accepted but can instead just ‘play’ with gender.

If for you ‘genderfuck’ is just a sociopolitical tactic you can opt-out of, you need to examine how this requires privilege.

If you respect a woman's ability to choose for herself re. abortion, regardless of economic / social / cultural pressures, why don't you respect a woman's ability to choose for herself re. sex work?

A movement theoretically welcoming of diversity, but lacking diversity amongst its thought leaders, needs to critique its approach.

Privileged people playing subversivism can often end up drowning out the voices of the less privileged.

You might want to reconsider your ‘activism’ if you're devoting time to bullying genuine allies.

“You would be wise to not offend me,” says Darth Ally.

A lot of nomimal collectivism i've witnessed seems to me to be the ultimate in individualism: “The masses will carry out My Vision.”

If you feel those with power could be counted on to reliably exert that power on your behalf, you might be in a position of power yourself.

i would rather a cishet political representative who significantly represents my values and interests, than a queer/tgd representative who doesn't.

Dualism is not the same as binarism. You might be actively opposed to binarism, yet still reinforcing, supporting or promoting dualism.

Resilience: The characteristic individuals are expected to develop by multiple systems of oppression in order to deal with the consequences of that oppression, for which those systems abdicate responsibility by declaring “that's just life”.

Communities typically contain one or more in-groups. If you think a community doesn't, you might be part of one.

Part of how i perform gender is noting that people can't make assumptions about my gender on the basis of how they perceive me to be performing it.

Unkink hoses, not people.

Various mathematicians: “Most areas of mathematics have applications outside of maths, or will eventually find applications; but regardless, mathematics is beautiful and interesting in its own right.” Also various mathematicians: “Category theory? What _use_ is it?”

i make no apologies for prioritising listening to people's lived experiences of their own lives over the theories of typically-privileged academics.

If it's patriarchal to expect/demand that a cis woman present in a ‘feminine’ way, why expect/demand that of a trans woman?

Non-cis or not, if you're a “gender abolitionist” wanting to “ban gender”, you're no ally of mine. Show some respect for others' struggles.

You're not “less kinky” or “failing at kink” by not being active or visible in your local kink scene. Being kinky isn't defined by your level of public performativity.

Y'know ... If medicine had taken those of us with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a _lot_ more seriously for the last few decades, we might be a _lot_ further along in our ability to now handle Long COVID. Just sayin'.

Telling an autistic and/or ADHD person “don't let autism/ADHD define you”? _You don't have the right to define how we define ourselves_.

Let's cut through the euphemistic bullshit. When the mainstream social media platforms use the phrase “(our) community guidelines”, it can often by replaced by the phrase “conservative Christian beliefs”. “Your post has been removed for violating community guidelines” → “Your post have been removed for violating conservative Christian beliefs”.

Privilege politics has to be accompanied by intersectional thinking and expressions of solidarity and mutual aid. Otherwise - based on experience - it becomes a recipe for division, self-centeredness and entitlement.

Health professionals to autistics: “You need to respect people's boundaries.” 👍 Also health professionals to autistics: “Your boundaries are invalid, and you overreact when they're crossed. You need to learn emotional regulation and distress tolerance.” 😳

At some point, the mental health professions are going to need to have a reckoning about how they've gaslit and traumatised so many of us autistics.

When promoting ‘resilience’ and ‘mindfulness’, reflect on how you might be enabling ‘sustainable exploitation’ of less-privileged people for the benefit of the more-privileged, and failing to validate the former's experiences of systemic inequalities.

If you claim you're against slut-shaming, but express that by supporting the idea that being a slut / promiscuous / proactively sexual is inherently A Bad Thing: _You're slut-shaming_.

So porn necessarily causes certain behaviours in men, such that the only way of stopping those behaviours is to limit porn? Really? Does women's clothing necessarily cause certain behaviours in men, such that women should limit how we dress? How about we instead focus on men being responsible for how they behave?

A core story we tell ourselves: “Everything has a primary underlying cause.” No. Existence is far more complex than that, and has no obligation to meet reductionist psychological needs.

Why do people quite rightly find biological essentialism problematic, yet actively support spiritual essentialism (‘the divine feminine’, ‘the divine masculine’)? Can we talk about how spiritual essentialism and biological essentialism can mutually reinforce each other?

Whatever else one might say about politics where one axis of oppression/privilege always trumps others, it certainly can't be described as _intersectional_.

Sadist me inflicting suffering on a fellow adult who has explicitly consented to it: Weird, worrying, mentally unhealthy. Employer inflicting suffering on thousands of adults who have little choice but to take it: Upstanding, valued, contributor to society.

There are many paths to meditative states, and to altered states more generally. Kink and sex are not only valid meditative paths; for some of us, they're _the_ paths that take us to meditative states, where ‘respectable’ or ‘acceptable’ paths simply don't.

i know increasing numbers of people whose mental health has been significantly helped through kink, drugs or sex, where they failed to be helped (or were only minimally helped) by religiously or politically ‘acceptable’ treatments. Who in some cases might also have been gaslit by suggestions that they were the ones failing, rather than the ‘acceptable’ treatments. Limiting opportunities for people to improve their health is harm. Blaming people for not being able to improve their health via ‘religiously correct’ or ‘politically correct’ methods accept is harm.

Being a dominant doesn't necessarily mean looking masc. Looking femme doesn't necessarily mean being a submissive. Kink dynamics don't have to involve gender essentialism or gender dualism.

Respectability politics involves a more privileged group throwing a more marginalised group under the bus for personal gain. In that sense, it's less ‘pragmatic’ and more ‘sociopathic’.

Sometimes the wisdom of having been doing consensual nonmonogamy for decades is not having the answers, but knowing from experience that there are situations which _don't have_ straightforward solutions.

So ignorant and disrespectful of so many people, including health and support professionals, to assume that any relationship other than one with a ‘wife’ / ‘husband’ / ‘spouse’ is inherently less involved, has fewer responsibilities, and/or is less committed overall. Just one example: there are many kink dynamics with more ongoing love, care, support and respect than many marriages.

‘NSFW’ stands for “Not Safe for Work”. It usually refers solely to sexually explicit material. This not only erases sex work, but also implies that sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, queerphobia, and so on, are safe for work. And indeed, that does often seem to be the case.

i'm regularly told i have ‘feminine energy’. i'm also a domme and a sadist. If those two things feel contradictory to you, you might need to examine the patriarchal dualism you've internalised.

i'm disturbed and angered by fellow trans women promoting radfem beliefs, e.g. whorephobia and kinkphobia. How about showing some solidarity with other women negatively impacted by paternalistic, agency-denying radfem analyses?

Community after community after community seeks mainstream ‘acceptance’ by disavowing sexual expression / sexuality, with community members ‘too tainted’ in this regard getting thrown under the bus. What does it say about a community and its culture when it's willing to treat some of its members as ‘expendable’ for ‘the greater good’?

Some people talk of collectivist ideologies as ideologies of the weak. Well, if we're going to play that game, we could talk of capitalism as the ideology of the so obnoxiously self-centred that people won't willingly share with them.

Radfem ideology is often bioessentialist purity-politics fundamentalism, which aligns well with .... certain other ideologies. Intersectional leftism needs to move beyond simply criticising ‘TERFs’ and ‘SWERFs’, and _explicitly_ and _continually_ reject radfem ideology more generally.

Rather ironic that autistic people are pathologised for ‘deficits’ involving implicit communication, yet at the same time there's a general recognition that there are systemic problems in neurotypical culture resulting from deficits of explicit communication.

If you're asking people to examine their privilege and change their behaviours, but can't give examples of how _you're_ doing so yourself in other contexts, your politics are actually ‘egocentrism’.

Respect and support for difference and diversity doesn't scale. Whether in government, business, or community, “economies of scale” require internal dynamics of homogenisation. Increasing size often leads to difference and diversity being opposed, downplayed, ignored or erased.

Glossary

Gemlog Home

Home