for any of you wondering what's been up with my fixation on bad feminism/the downplaying or celebration of misandry here's what's been up to the best of my understanding. at first it was just me doing my normal thing when i find inconsistencies and push back on them and in particular my experience with misandry is literally what caused me to identify as a woman in the first place so it was always a topic i was going to keep coming back to. but more recently i was having a conversation with an actual anarchist who was afab and they said on the topic of there still being segregated facilities "people really just arent ready for that conversation yet" and i think something fucking broke in me. over the next few weeks fuming about this shit on twitter i started connecting a lot of shit in my life that made me more and more upset at the way people ignore or reinforce this fucked up apartheid society. i remembered growing up and having an afab friend when i was really young, they would come over and play on the swingset and look at bugs and play with dinosaurs with me and seemingly neither of the adults in our lives happened to mention any stupid shit about our presumed genders so it was just a normal friendship. they move and we both end up being in different schools and i never follow up with trying to hang out again because i'm just kind of like that, but once i get to school the boys and girls are just split, you're taught to be hostile to anyone that doesnt respect this split either. i dont really figure out what's going on because the party line is that boys and girls are the same and i've seen no reason to think otherwise. no one will say it directly, they'll always say something else, but they all act like they think there are differences. at some point later on all the way in middle school i have a memory of seeing that friend again. they'd had red hair they now dyed to black and were wearing goth clothing which where i grew up basically just meant you were being bullied. i'm guessing they didnt respect some of the gender rules and got punished for it by some slimy fascist's spawn. this shit makes me want to scream
i didnt read the aella article because i find it painful to read her writing (even tho i think i often like the way she thinks) but either alie or phoenix told me something that was in there was a bit about how she could never shake the feeling that maybe she was inherently inferior and now every time someone speaks with gender essentialism in their mouths it makes me want to tear their throats out. i dont care if it's "vent posting" i dont get on a screed about degenerate methheads or something when i get all my shit stolen by methheads i lived with, i turned up deep fried frez and talked shit about them specifically because i'm not a nazi. every "feminist" bitching about "men" as a category is in the same breath uttering assumptions about how well behaved they think women are or ought be. it's disgusting misogynistic bullshit on top of the misandry
another thing that's really lit my fire on this one is pun intended my partner phoenix, i dont entirely know where there thoughts are on gender rn but they're on low dose t and i'm definitely using he/him pronouns with him in front of family to bother them more. one of the things you start to figure out when you watch ftm transition is actually there are rules about where peoples attentions are directed in conversations that fall along gendered-ish lines where men are taken "more seriously" than women and basically no one takes trans men seriously and it's extremely frustrating. it's funny most of my conversational habits work so much better if people actually saw me as a woman in that sense, but because they read me as speaking with the gravity of a man all of a sudden i come off as threatening deranged belligerent and everyone gets to signal danger to each other. i shouldnt be the one with the reigns of the conversation, it's just that everyone stops to listen to me because my voice to them signals that something very important is being said. on phoenix's end of things i suspect an opposite dynamic is occurring where they put a lot more thought and care into the things they say so their words usually carry more weight to them but no one's listening. you cant ever point this out to an individual, where someone's attention goes is deliberately evasive to them especially in a world that tries to hold you accountable for your attention so there can never really be an anti bigotry push that abolishes this state of affairs in this society