intracommunity discourse: wlw edition | crosspost

[nerdflighter]

articulated in relation to this post by themadcapmathematician 

[please bear in mind that this post was written with tumblr lgbtq intracommunity discourse in mind.]

I’ve seen wlw spaces work to accommodate trans women but refuse to extend that safety towards nonbinary transfems.

it’s hard for me to articulate the anxiety that i feel about these spaces as an nb bisexual, when it seems like so many lesbians i see these days on this website are also nb. it feels like you’re allowed to be an nb lesbian in a wlw space, but you can’t be an nb bisexual in a wlw space - you’re considered other when you’re both nb and bisexual/asexual. the only difference between me and an nb lesbian is that i am multi-gender attracted (many lesbians do not consider themselves to by mspec even if they’re nb and/or dating nb lesbians) and they’re not. i can only surmise that the category of lesbian is more internally cohesive and tightly-knit than the categories of woman and nonbinary, which leaves people like me, who are neither woman nor lesbian, out in the cold.

it’s also difficult to talk about this because many lesbians on this website are closed off to dialogue, or to people asking about their identities. i don’t think lesbian identities should be called into question, but i would like to know more about them and how they’re structured. i think many lesbians interpret people asking about their identity as people calling their identity into question, and of course that is in part due to the incredibly toxic nature of dialogue on this site. when i try to learn about it without asking, i have to wade through an ocean of biphobia, aphobia, queerphobia, and sex negativity. since i can’t do that as much as i need to in order to actually learn something, i’m forced to theorise in the dark.

saying that wlw spaces are full of lesbians is a neutral statement of fact, and also, like i said above, the category of ‘lesbian’ supersedes the category of ‘woman’ and ‘nonbinary’ in order to include people from both groups. but because they’re defining themselves as lesbians first and women/nb second, there’s no space left for nonbinaries and women who aren’t lesbian. this renders wlw spaces increasingly toxic to us until we cave and leave, reinforcing the idea that these were lesbian spaces all along and we were either fakers or interlopers.

[that’s not even getting into the toxic biphobia in claiming that mspec and aspec women can’t have as complex a relationship to their gender as lesbians can - as though being a lesbian makes you more of a person, or being bi/ace makes you less of one. it’s saying that bi & ace women face less bullshit from society than lesbians do, which is.........blatantly untrue.]

I’m talking about wlw spaces because those are the ones I have experience with - I cannot speak with any authority about mlm spaces. I cannot speak to how they account for trans, nb and bisexual men.

but I can only imagine it’s more of the same. which is why i strongly believe that we need a unified and cohesive bisexual, asexual, and nonbinary community that caters to our needs without us having to center monosexual / cis people in the process. i don’t think the wlw and mlm communities are above salvation, but i do think that the job of ‘saving’ them is going to go to trans, nb, aspec, and mspec people, and we need to have community support of our own before we can tackle that problem

Comments

[codex8]

I noticed about 2 yrs ago a huge uptick of people referring to themselves as nb lesbians, and also noticed that those people appeared far more prone to espousing radical feminist ideas about sex, porn, kink, feminism, etc, but would call themselves anti radfem and anti terf because of their surface level acceptance of transgender people (despite a deeper level of only accepting certain types of trans people). It felt a lot to me like what happened in the late 90s/early 2000s (i think? My memory for timeline is shoddy today) when trans women were first getting the chance to bring transphobia and cis privilege to a broader intra-communal conversation, and radical feminists began arguing that it was impossible for any female to be cis because it was impossible for any female to feel comfortable within the confines of womanhood, and so radical feminists who fought against trans women weren't actually privileged over them and couldn't be told they were oppressive as a result.

I don't think that the sudden uptick of nb lesbians are actually cis, but I do think that somewhere along the way, what with other intra-community pressures and prejudices, they became indoctrinated by radical feminist ideology, likely in part because for a very very long time, radical feminists have been the only groups discussing certain topics which are relevant to nb identity development and framing. And that indoctrination would explain why they value lesbianism so much more highly over people who are bisexual, the fact that they're less likely to accept aspec people, and so much more likely to exclude various "unacceptable" or "not real" identities from their ranks.

I don't really know what to do about that except to suggest that blacklisting challenging or risky or alternate experiential conversations in the trans (and bisexual and kinky and etc) community is not the be sa t route for us. But maybe I'm not the only one being reminded of that or seeing this as a potential explanation for various discourse phenomena?

[staranise]

Yeah, one group that confuses me are he/him lesbians who are transphobic. Like... what? How... how do you do that? (Radfem kool-aid, I know, but...)

I really really just want to make a strong queer tumblr presence that's radically accepting and really vocal.

[codex8]

Yeah. There's just a lot of "my way or the highway" that goes on. It'd be nice if I had an answer for that.

[amberite]

I think that particular strain is sometimes trans guys who've been sold the idea that they can keep their community if they continue to identify as lesbian - and they're really dysphoric, and really want to transition but don't want to lose the support of their radfem friends. So they can't acknowledge the reality of trans people's lives, because of sunk cost fallacy and the knowledge that if they did accept trans people, they'd have to question their own reality. It's kind of depressing.

[nerdflighter]

sounds like an environment similar to /lgbt/ on 4chan

[nerdflighter]

when I see somebody refer to themselves as nb, I generally expect some form of, well, attachment to that nb identity. some form of solidarity with nb people of other sexualities - which seems sorely lacking in this group in particular. I do know nb lesbians who advocate actively for a coherent nb community, but I know far too many more who don't, who seem more interested in their sexual orientation label and less attached to their gender identity - they're actively unsafe for many nb people, to the point of calling mogai genders 'fake' 'made up' 'cistrenders' etc. their support for nb people only goes so far as their [frankly, limited] ability to comprehend those genders.

you said

radical feminists have been the only groups discussing certain topics which are relevant to nb identity development and framing.

and I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? so if you could expand on that, that'd be great.

I hesitate to say that nb lesbians are in some part composed of radfems, but I can't actually find a reason why that would not be the case. They talk like radfems, they have a very warped view of intersectionality, and they hate queers. I don't know what that is, but it's nothing good.

[codex8]

There's a particular variety of talk about things like dysphoria, partial attachment to and combined alienation from your assigned gender, and the ways in which you might experience oppression on a societal level that is based, not on your perceived gender, but on your actual physiology (or rather people's fundamental misunderstanding of it) which is associated with radical feminist and radfem lite conversations and therefore was disallowed to the point of verbal abuse amd active cruelty from other trans people for a very long time, despite there being aspects of those conversations which are A) common and B) often critical to the early stages of recognizing/developing your sense of self as a trans person who does not fit the binary or the publicly available narratives of trans-ness. Because these conversations were so often shut down in a public context and could only be had in a deeply intra-communal space, often the first people questioning nb's would see publicly having conversations that touched on those topics were people who held radical feminist ideology, regardless of whether or not they publicly identified as radical feminists or believed themselves to be. This made a lot of questioning nb's more susceptible to the "pro-trans" sect of radical feminism which isn't really pro-trans (as you point out in your observations about their ideas on MOGAI and queer) but was at least not the most extreme form of anti-trans.

I don't think that the collection of nb lesbians I observed consider themselves radical feminists, and I'm sure if someone were to call them that they would be wildly offended and perhaps even lash out in defense of themselves. But ideologies aren't just about the names. And if a person is routinely quoting radical feminist ideas and sources, I'm not inclined to pretend that it's actually something else just because they don't call it that.

I know a lot of truly wonderful and supportive nb lesbians and don't think the community overall is more likely to be radical feminist (altho there has been some research to suggest that the category of lesbian is genuinely more likely to hold radical feminist ideas than any other sexuality), but I do think that nb lesbians who espouse radical feminist ideas are a semi-unique reprisal of that previous version of "non-cis" women who came to their non-cisness by way of opposition to queers rather than by way of personal identity.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I would add that like... some people's positionalities place them right smack in the middle of radfems and transmeds, which can create the illusion that radical feminists are the only ones talking about non-binary identity, or rather non-conforming gender expression/identity.

If all you see from the "trans" community (ie transmed community) is that being trans is a binary process wherin you are either mtf or ftm and there's no room for vagueness between what is and isn't male or female... then in turn, radfems saying that gender is a construct (something radfems do in fact argue, but with a different semantic meaning than poststructuralists) and that gender is a series of incoherent/impossible/harmful expectations seems really nuanced. Radical feminism has lots of things to say about gender non-conformity and the ways in which people are coerced into performing toxic expressions of gender--it's just that the movement weaponizes these discussions and turns them into a system of policing behavior/identity/language and upholding equally toxic standards for how people should be.

I can imagine that lots of nb folks feel super alienated from trans identity and communities--even I do, as a non-radfem. Unfortunately, the idea that there can and/or should be cohesive communities for members of social identity categories means that the most present/typical/vocal section of that group is going to become the Standard, from which deviate... and the more different you are from a normative and well-represented trans experience, the less likely you are to be accepted as trans or to feel trans... which puts you at risk of finding solace with radfems who tell you that gender deviance is normal and acceptable... and even praise-worthy!

[codex8]

Yes, that's very much the sort of vague and superficial draw I was talking about. Most people who begin by finding comfort in i5, I think, eventually realize that radfem ideology is harmful and not what the want, but some don't and that's where I think the phenomenon I was talking about tends to occur.