stop fucking calling all lesbians dykes (ex. “an older dyke”, “many of the awesome dykes”), especially if you’re not a lesbian. “lesbian” is a label that exists and it’s rude and disrespectful to use a slur to refer to a broad group of people who you don’t personally know. that should honestly be obvious.

ohemgeelizabeth:

queeranarchism:

lines-and-edges:

lierdumoa:

solluxismsnowaifu:

lines-and-edges:

leproblematique:

lines-and-edges:

queeranarchism:

solitarelee:

sarahsyna:

iron-sunrise:

queeranarchism:

mautlyn:

comcastkills:

queeranarchism:

When I say ‘dykes’, I mean ‘dykes’. As in: people who identify as dykes. 

In the post you’re refering to I made it quite clear that I was writing about dykes I  know and when I speak of these dykes I won’t erase or sanitize their identities by using a mainstream, tame, deradicalized word that denies the words they specifically chose for themselves to emphasize their identities and their struggles as queer marganilized working class proudly-perverted revolutionary DYKES. 

Keep your fucking respectability politics to yourself. 

Hmmm. Interesting post!

Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.

did he really just say “proudly-perverted” 

Yeah, that makes no sense at all.

(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)

When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn. 

I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history. 

But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?

The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.

Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.

It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives). 

Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this. 

And we gotta call it by its name:

It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).

We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.

These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.

I’ve been thinking about this lately too.

The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.

Let’s start calling it what it is.

I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc)  Discoursers as the social conservatives of the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.

Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited and conditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics. 

Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.

And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.

It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.

Good additions – and, kind of off topic, but I actually teared up a little when I saw your URL in my notes, and got a case of happycry sniffles writing this, I’m just so glad you’re back. You always post with such depth of perspective and moral clarity and insight; a heartening light in the fog.

@adigitalmagician @curlicuecal

Friendly reminder that the infamous “bechdel” test comes from a comic titled: Dykes to Watch Out For 

The bechdel test was invented by a self-identified dyke. 

Also re: 

• “youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago”

I’ve noticed it too but I didn’t realize this way of thinking was becoming so prevalent.

There was a trend a while back where any personal expression of appreciation of carnal sexual acts on this site was met with kidding-but-not-really-kidding “please go to church” comments from lemonfaced nineteen year olds. I don’t know if the trend actually stopped or if I just unfollowed the people perpetuating it.

A while back I saw people reblogging a post saying that fanfic authors need to stop putting rimming in their fic because it’s ‘ugh so gross’ and real gay people don’t really do rimming at all and they hardly ever do anal and it’s “pornifying” the gay community to imply that these behaviors are common.

Like??? 

Real people, of all orientations, do in fact do all those things, probably with a great deal more frequency than you want to imagine. I should know – I’m a bisexual with a vagina who’s had both a tongue and a dick up my asshole and liked it. I’ve also had a threesome. I didn’t have to find a special sex club to do these things. These acts happened with regular people I dated – people I met during conventional social interactions like sharing a college class or meeting on the dancefloor at a Latin club.

This kind of conservatism over “queer” sexual acts is the same kind of conservatism that, in the past, led to the reclamation of the word “pervert” in queer spaces. 

Ultraconservatives kept moving the goalposts of what constituted “perversion” to demonize perfectly normal sex acts real people do, insisting that any sexual act that wasn’t fully clothed tongueless kissing with the lights off was “perverted” and that anyone who participated in those acts was a “corrupting influence on the larger community.” 

Now the same conservative push is taking place here on tumblr.

More good additions.

Also, as a side note, I’ve been going through the notes on this post and it’s amazing to me that some of the aforementioned pseudo-leftist conservatives are reblogging this with comments about how wrong they think the entire reblog chain is but with literally no supporting arguments for their point of view?

Like they’ve created this weird fact-free bubble in which making a snide remark completely takes the place of coherent language and substantive content, and in their enclaves that’s a Power Move somehow.

I genuinely don’t know if they understand how pathetic and baffling this looks to people outside their anti-intellectual clique (though as a note, I’m sure the ringleaders of their circles do; creating and enforcing ingroup behaviors that are alienating and dysfunctional outside of their context is a standard cult tactic.)

I’ve noticed the same. You can write 10 pages of queer history with sources and some shit will just reblog it with ‘bad post op’ or ‘this post is a trainwreck’. I’m blocking them all but more keep popping up. Pathetic.

“Like they’ve created this weird fact-free bubble in which making a snide remark completely takes the place of coherent language and substantive content, and in their enclaves that’s a Power Move somehow.”

This. There is this set of young LGBT+ people who have more in common with 4chan trolls than with the rest of the queer community at large. They approach discourse with zero sources and even less good faith, refusing to consume the media they critique and also demanding it be not watched by anyone. I thought I was crazy when I originally thought ‘this reminds me a lot of the Christian PTA moms who pearl clutched their way into large scale book banning campaigns when I was in school’ and honestly? Maybe I was onto something there.

Performative allyship, purity culture, transphobia, TERF ideology, and “pulling reciepts from ten years ago” smear campaigns have mixed together to create this… monstrosity of young queer culture. There are plenty of young queer people who get it, we saw them with signs during the walkouts that say “if I’m killed in a school shooting, drop my body on the steps of the CDC.” But then there’s this other group who behaves exactly like the Alt-Right.

They demand conformity from everyone, even non-members of the group by invading spaces they were not invited to, and are not welcome in. They have a humongous entitlement problem, treating media as something that is required to conform to their specific critique. They have harassed, bullied, and even doxxed people for everything from ten year old tweets to straight up fake stories, and there were even some high profile instances of kids as young as 12 getting raided. They are no better than Reddit and 4chan in the way they engage with things they don’t like. They might not be Alt Right Nazis (though some are also insanely racist, because why not fill out the entire bigotry bingo card) but they use their same tactics and don’t see a drip of irony in that.

When members of your own community have to create secret tags to avoid being raided, maybe YOU’RE the assholes. Like, there logically should not be this humongous schism in the queer community but it’s there, and I’m worried about how much more aggressive and narrow minded they’re going to get over time. I know the arrogance of youth is one hell of a drug, but this is far beyond that. This is conservativism with a rainbow pin in its lapel.

Hmmm… let’s see if we can categorize different groups of lgbt conservatives to make this issue more clear:

1. White rich gays and lesbians for normalcy: just want to get married and walk hand in hand safely. Anything about gender is a distraction. Casually transphobic, biphobic, racist and islamophobic. Has the HRC on his side. Silently votes conservative.

2. Corporate LGBT: wants to ‘preserve’ the progress made on lgbt rights by collaborating heavily with oppressive systems and suppressing queer movements that want more change than what we have now. Strong overlap with white rich gays and lesbians for normalcy.

3. White rich gays for white supremacy: presents any gay rights he has as the accomplishments of white culture, under attack from homophobic brown people. Still into normalcy and against trans rights but with a passionate islamophobia in there and a heavy dose of alt-right. Basically a nazi in pink boots.

4. TERFs and SWERFs: into feminist theory from 40+ years ago and reducing women to their genitals. Somehow made their entire feminism about policing what women can be and do. Will side with classic republicans to use violence against trans people and sex workers. Anyone they disagree with is lesbophobic.

5. REGs: imagines that the LGBT community as a naturally defined group of people that has been the same for a century and is under constant attack from ‘cishets’ looking to infiltrate. Has a weird mix of transphobes and true-scum but is united in their aphobia. Strongly resemble TERFs in their rhetoric. Either doesn’t want allies or wants them to grovel in their unworthiness.

6. Think Of The Children: uses performative protectiveness to stiffle any sort of queer sexuality beyond a kiss on the cheek. Heavily polices age-differences in queer spaces. Sees the existence of queer sexuality as some how a threat to pure unspoiled gay children who just want love. Anyone they disagree with is a pedophile. Often a minor themselves, bullying other minors for having sexual feelings before they’re 21. Sends death threats to teenagers writing slash fiction. Grows up to become rich white gays and lesbians for normalcy.

7. 4-chan turned to Tumblr: bully on an online power trip, their first interaction with you will be an attack. Hangs out in TERF, REG or Think Of The Children spaces looking for someone to project all their rage on. Works with others to whip up large bullying campaigns against their targets. Their favorite target is young trans women with a low follower count but anyone vulnerable with photos online (gotta see your victim to enjoy the rush) will do. Often grow up to be white rich gays for white supremacy.

Generally all of these groups overlap a lot (some more than others 1,2&3 often hang out together, so do 5,6&7.) and they all hate words like queer and dyke.