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Queer Autophagia
Or, self destruction being presented as beneficial by the very actors who most want us all dead.
An essay on homofascism, homonationalism, and (unfortunately) mediocre tiktok videos.
Autophagia is the act of eating yourself. Autocannibalism is an equivalent term with slightly different connotations. Cannibalism acknowledges the personhood and shared humanity of the actor and victim.
If overly enthusiastic queer people trampling all over each other in the race to be the most morally pure actually acknowledged the personhood of their victims, then perhaps autocannibalism would be more relevant. But since dehumanization is the name of the game, autophagia it is.
Queer people are eating ourselves and each other, and we don't even have the decency to be cannibals.
Just tearing chunks out of our own flesh, swallowing them down without even chewing, and then wondering why the fuck our arms are bleeding.
In today's extremely specific example of the overarching pattern of destructive self loathing that has dominated queer spaces for the last decade, let's talk about this TikTok, and the attendant "controversy" on tumblr and twitter's "queer" spaces. Web archive link.
I put scare quotes around queer there, because it's important to remember that Tumblr actively banned the vast majority of its queer user base in 2018, when all forms of sexuality were banned, and mysteriously, queer sexuality was hit hardest. What remains on tumblr is a collection of people who were so violently anti-sex that they were spared the ban, or a small number of people who have returned since then. The rest of "queer tumblr" has been stripped from a vibrant and politically active public space, to a loose cohort of "apolitical" people who "happen to be queer" intermingled with TERFs, SWERFs, Christian Fundamentalists and Fascists who use the language of queer liberation to push their cult like conservative agendas.
Tumblr is, at this point, nothing but a feeding ground for violent cults. A term I use not "colloquially" or in a lay sense, but specifically in its sociological and technical sense. These are groups of people with a history of violence and even murder, who use extreme and very narrow political language to justify their violence, and engage in psychological indoctrination tactics with religious overtones. These are cults. Not "fads" not "aesthetics" and not moral crusades. These are cults, and they have killed people, raped children, in service to their ideologies. They need to be stopped. Pulling punches by pretending they are anything less than cults is irresponsible and counterproductive. These are cults.
Twitter is little better. Officially, sex and sexuality are allowed on the site. This allows a small number of politically active queers to go about their business. But, with so many places where conservative anti-queer agendas can fester, such as tumblr, these enclaves are rapidly shrinking. The constant onslaughts of anti-sex and anti-queer legislation, the risk of disease, and the trojan horse of TERF rhetoric, does all the work of policing queer people out of these public spaces. Even if you are not subjected to direct personal harassment, the psychological weight of being told homophobic lies by self-destructive queer children is just, to be frank, bad for your health. Many queer people rightfully identify these spaces as the cause of PTSD, and leave them. We've reached a point of self-policing.
As a result, queer community building in these spaces is all but destroyed.
Nevertheless, plague and fascism render physical queer spaces equally difficult or impossible to access. For many of us, especially in conservative regions, social media is the only option.
We must accept that for the reality it is.
Nevertheless, the "queer communities" on twitter and tumblr are not to be confused with the vibrant communities of the early 2010s. Fascism has more than adequately invaded and squashed those notions out, using uniquely fascist methodologies.
Including, and yes, I understand how bizarre this will sound at the face. Including using fascist methodologies to reinforce fascist goals in small, cultural ways as well as large, political ones. Small ways like encouraging the mob bullying of some people over a cutesy video. Little things that ensure anyone who lives under the fascist spectre can have no peace, no comfort, and no rest. Not even the smallest reprieves.
That's how microaggressions work, after all.
For the sake of ease, I will be using Eco's 14 features of fascism. For a more familiar set of examples featuring these same traits, here's an article about how these traits apply to Donald Trump, a US politician.
1) The Cult of Tradition.
There is a widespread demand that people stop with all of this new-fangled queerness with its neopronouns and its demands for revolution. A desperate demand to return to the good old days, when gays were gays (not ~kweers~), cishets were cishets, and trannies knew their place was dead in a basement. These calls for a return to a better time tend to ignore the fact that queer culture in the 90s, 80s, 60s, or whatever the target era is, DID NOT ACTUALLY LOOK OR ACT LIKE THAT. Historical revisionism runs rampant, with everything from the redefinition of "lesbian" to mean "cisgender woman who exclusively has sex with other cisgender women" to the reframing of "queer" as a "dirty word" that no queer person should ever get to use, only cishetero bigots.
2) Rejection of modernism.
None of this gender-weird bullshit. Just hard working high femmes coddling their stay at home butches, and cis-for-cis men who have anal missionary with the lights off. People whose gender expression doesn't match the speaker's conservative ideals are to be rejected as fake, outsiders, or even a threat.
3) Action for action's sake.
This random girl on tiktok is trying to be supportive of her boyfriend's attempts to question his gender and sexuality using the religious framework he finds most comfortable? Nah, gotta tear them both to shreds. Why? Well, their completely harmless mutual support might lead them to a greater sense of self-understanding! That's horrible! It must be stopped! Why is it horrible? Why must it be stopped? NO TIME FOR QUESTIONS, TEAR THEM APART!!!
4) Disagreement is treason.
Or, to clarify that, "disagreeing with the accepted tenets of the political movement is a high crime that justifies the highest punishments, up to and including death."
Now let's all take a moment here, and remember how many people have been killed by the TERF's satellite cult of "antishippers," a group of sexually traumatized teenagers and young adults who have been taught to force teens to 'have sex' with adults because they consider teens sexually experimenting with other, like-age teen peers to be rape. Unlike the 'sex' that they encourage underage teens and grown adults to have, which is somehow 'not rape.' I say "somehow" here because the actual mechanism is a complex set of cult indoctrination techniques that I don't feel like going into too much detail about here, but here is a thread of previously compiled examples of the cult mechanics of this group.
The amount of suicides alone for which this group is responsible is obscene. But they have in fact successfully murdered people. And what was the crime which justified execution?
Disagreeing with the claim that any fictional account of a crime is equivalent to committing that crime in real life (eg, that actors playing dead in a movie is the same as ending real human lives).
Let me repeat that. These people executed someone--MURDERED him--because they didn't like the way fictional characters were hurt in a fictional story.
But lets say you think that's too extreme. I don't blame you. It's rough info. Let's bring down the scale a little bit here.
Just in the context of this tiktok, disagreement is treason.
People who question the group decision to eliminate these two randoms for making a Cute Lesbians In Love video are framed as the enemy. At best, they are treated as ignorant try hards, and at worst, open white supremacist lesbophobes calling for the extermination of anyone outside the aryan ideal.
Really sit with that for a moment. Really consider how far removed from reality we have gotten. To conclude that someone is a white supremacist homophobe, because they made a video where they acknowledged that lesbians were often religiously persecuted in the past, especially the nonwhite ones, but they do so slightly clumsily.
Since when was "I love lesbians, I'm just kind of new at it" the act of a rampant bigot?
5) Fear of difference.
Denigration and hatred of even completely harmless actions which are unfamiliar to the audience.
Such as, for example, seeing a random girl say "Oh yeah lol I think I was probably burned as a witch in a past life haha" and deciding that makes her the single most racist, lesbophobic person on earth.
Such as, for example, seeing what appears to be a young man saying the words, "Yeah, I think I was/am a lesbian" and instead of concluding, "oh, some trans issues happening there, maybe I should support this questioning person until he finds out a deeper truth about himself," deciding he hates women and is trying to steal women's lives and wear them like costume.
That's the most BASIC kind of transphobia. How anyone ever saw this video controversy as anything other than an attempt to destroy one of the most common methods by which trans people discover themselves (feeling like their relationships are gendered incorrectly) is so fucking wild.
6) Appeal to frustration.
Queer people are, right now, very reasonably and rightfully PISSED AS HELL. The causes of our suffering, however, are not two random whities on tiktok. Blaming random questioning-or-queer people just makes our entire situations WORSE, because, again, it just makes it that much harder for other queer people to come to terms with themselves and begin fighting for their rights (our rights) alongside us.
The causes of queer suffering in the modern world are, primarily, legislative and financial, not personal.
If you want to be pissed at anything, try being pissed at the bullshit "think of the children" laws like SESTA/FOSTA that actually made child sexual exploitation EASIER and MORE COMMON on the internet, while utterly destroying any online spces sexual minorities used to fight for our rights.
Going after a random couple on tiktok for doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG is, at best, a waste of all our time. But it's a waste that appeals to the pain we already feel. It's an easy waste. For a moment it even feels good. That's what makes it so dangerous. That's what makes it part and parcel of fascism.
7) Obsession with a plot.
Hey, fun fact: some white folks on tiktok making a video where they clumsily express their interest in queer history and culture is not, in fact, proof of a grand white conspiracy to destroy all lesbians. The fact that I even have to say that is so fucking weird.
Anyone claiming there's a big conspiracy among OTHER QUEERS to try and eliminate all lesbians is a TERF.
It's a basic attempt at isolating victims based on an existing vulnerability.
It's a common story. Most of us can relate to it. Take a young, scared teenage girl. Tell her she's a horrible monster. Fill her with guilt and hatred and disgust until she either dies or runs. And if she runs, she'll eventually realize that there are other monsters out there too. People just like her. She can seek them out, realize she's no more of a monster than the rest of us. She can reclaim her humanity from the bigots who tried to destroy her. She can stand up for her own rights, and for the rights of others treated like her.
Unless, of course, the "other monsters" are also unsafe.
Unless what should be a safe and welcoming queer culture is instead just as cruel and exlusionary towards her as the "cishets" she is escaping.
Unless they spend all their time mocking people like her for saying innocuous shit online, because they think (just like neocons, just like fash) they think that she's STILL A MONSTER.
Is it any wonder, then, that in such extremities of isolation, these young girls turn to TERFs? That they give their loyalty to the first people to look at them and say, "yes, you have worth, you are good, its the rest of the world that doesn't understand your beauty"?
Is it any wonder than they fucking join this cult obsessed with an imagined plot about their own extinction, when there are so many REAL plots out there that look and act exactly the same?
I mean, my god. Let's just for one second, assume the "dude" in that video actually is just a woman who will need another 3 or 4 years to figure that out. What the FUCK is she going to do when she realizes her true identity? Because she's sure as shit not going to turn to any of the "trans friendly" people that mocked and harassed her for being--honestly, not even clumsy or ignorant!
Frankly there was NOTHING offensive in that video in the first place. You all just made that up wholecloth! Fucking holy shit. You people really do all of TERFs work in isolating victims FOR them. The greatest TERF allies of all: their little farms who harass and abuse questioning queers and turn them into ready made TERFlings.
8) The enemy is as strong as it is weak.
The entire controversy here is predicated on mocking people who fundamentally lack ANY capacity to fight back.
And the way this harassment is justified? Well, "they're white/straight so they have all the power here."
Motherfucker, I would like to see the strongest, straightest, whitest person on EARTH try to take down HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people at once. What is WRONG with you people. They have EXACTLY, PRECISELY as much power as you, the singular individual reading this. You know what they don't have? HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER PEOPLE ALSO EXERTING THAT SAME AMOUNT OF POWER.
I don't know how to tell you that 2 is a smaller number than 100, let alone 150,000. Like, if you don't know that, please consider getting some small objects (rice, pebbles, jelly beans, whatever) and then setting two of them on one side of a line, and several HUNDRED on the other side. Which side is STRONGER?
9) Pacifism supports the enemy.
I'm literally, right now, arguing only that the people in this video were harmless, and that our mockery of them is in fact far more harmful.
That's it. That's my whole thesis statement.
So, looking at that simple fact, a fact which this entire essay more than supports, how many people already gave up reading it and started calling me the real TERF or the real racist or whatever else?
As if I have not been spending this entire time excruciatingly making the point that we are DESTROYING OURSELVES and that in fact it would be better for all lesbians, all trans people, all queers if we simply STOPPED trying to KILL each other and instead focused on the external threats to our livelihoods, eg, legislative and financial attempts to exterminate all queer people.
I'm not even arguing pacifism!! I'm arguing we take the fight to the people trying to kill us, and even THAT is seen as cahooting with the enemy. My god, my god. What a mess.
10) Contempt for the weak.
Here we have a couple of confused, questioning people.
People at the absolute nadir of the queer experience. Lost, without words, struggling to make sense of something that far exceeds what their culture allowed them to know. Fighting for a shred of light in that ignorance.
And we HATE them for it. We LOATHE them for that newborn frailty. We would rather no one ever learn or grow again, if it would keep us comfortable. We would throw away every future queer who hasn't yet learned who they are, just to stay shielded from the memory of our own youth, our own ignorance and struggles.
This hatred for anyone new or learning about queerness is unacceptable. It is omnipresent. And yes, it further aids cult recruitment by further isolating queer people from each other.
It is self destructive.
Self eating.
11) Everyone is educated in heroism.
We are all educated in the acute, splashy, dramatic acts of the hero.
In the fight, and the burn. In immolating ourselves to take out our enemies. In immolating ourselves, to take out others of our own team, because we have been taught to see them as enemies, rather.
But none of us are taught kindness; few of us are even taught education. The gentle process of reaching out to the scared looking for safety. The burden of building that safety for them. These are not skills we learn.
We learn to scream, and rage, and hate, and we call that heroic because at least it's not dying quiet and alone in the shadows.
It's just condemning others to die alone in the shadows instead.
Every villain thinks they are the hero, too.
12) Machismo and weaponry.
Ah, now here is where I will lose the handful of you still clutching on, probably. As we all know, fascism hates homosexuality!
Except, isn't it strange, how much modern queer spaces also hate homosexuality? Or any sexuality, really?
Everywhere you look, the entire idea of sex--raunchy, graphic, erotic SEX--between people whose bodies don't match your expectations is seen as criminal. How often has your own disgust or contempt for something been encouraged as a way to "shame" the target into "cleaning up their act"?
Even if that sex was consensual, harmless, and did not involve you in any way?
Isn't it strange how often "queer sex" is quietly, completely snuffed out, even while peri/cis/heteronromative sexuality and eroticism is constant? In media, in casual conversation, in the very language we use to speak to each other itself, normative sex is constant. But queer sex is uniquely treated as vile and repellant.
But, let's set aside sex. Let's talk about this tiktok specifically.
Isn't it odd, how the couple themselves actually explicitly describe themselves as (former) lesbians, but because they do not match the expected modern aesthetic of lesbianism, they are to be punished?
For as much as broader conservative western society loathes queerness, most "online queer spaces" also loathe it.
It's just that where the "heteronormative" range of acceptability in relationships is "peri-cis-gender conforming man + peri-cis-gender conforming woman," the narrowly acceptable range of relationships in the smoking crater left behind after the collapse of queer online spaces tends to be "the maximum number of vaginas possible, and barring that, the closest you can get to a rigidly defined male/female gender role while still nominally being a same-sex couple."
Watching butch and femme go from revolutionary and reclamatory labels designed to uplift those who identify with them, to oppressive boxes that you must stuff yourself into even if it means cutting parts of yourself off, has been a tragedy in slow motion. The gender norms may be different, but the punishment and hatred for anyone who does not conform is all too familiar.
13) Selective populism.
Anyone who disagrees with you is "too online" and needs to "go touch grass."
But anyone who upholds the same violent worldview as you, wherein any difference must be cut off and burnt immediately, those people are fine. Those people are the "real people" and you are simply doing what "real people" want.
Anyone who disagrees isn't real, of course. Not as real as you are, anyway, and that's why they don't deserve to be allowed to learn and grow in peace, and instead must be immediately, violently mocked.
To punish them for defying your expectations, but more importantly, so that anyone else thinking about defiance knows exactly how cruel, violent, and relentless your power and authority truly are. Because it's "not just your authority," is it? No, no, it's the authority of all the real people.
How convenient that anyone who disagrees isn't real. Is either stupid, or ignorant, or worse, is one of the subhuman others that make up the enemy.
14) Newspeak, and the collapse and redefinition of complex language.
Let me just go ahead and describe the video that sparked this controversy, in two dialects. First, I will describe it as it was described to me by others who hated the tiktok.
"This straight girl thinks that just because her homophobic, lesbian fetishizing boyfriend believes in reincarnation, that makes her a lesbian! Disgusting! Total appropriation of the lesbian experience!"
Now, I will describe it as I perceived it.
"A white-ish looking girl (whose tiktok account is positively plastered in Indigenous Pride stamps, hence the -ish) and her much whiter looking partner had a little fun imagining what their past lives might have been like 'if' they were 'both' women. At no point did either of them say they have the right to speak to lesbian politics. They just made a cutesy video about a common fantasy scenario that is, notably, especially EXTRA common among trans people who have not yet realized or come to terms with their gender identity."
Now, where the fuck did "appropriation" come into it? In fact, where was there any kind of political anything whatsoever?
"Appropriation" has been so completely redefined in online queer spaces as to be meaningless. It no longer summarizes complex situations wherein marginalized people are punished for expressions of their culture, while centered people are allowed or even praised for adopting those same expressions. It no longer carries the implication that we should be familiarizing ourselves with marginalized cultures so that we can adequately respect them while also granting marginalized people the space and agency to express those cultures.
Now it just means, "I think this person shouldn't be allowed to talk about themselves, because I, a third party with no knowledge, believe they shouldn't be allowed to speak, and no, I do not see how being denied a voice is a marginalizing act."
This has happened with DOZENS of pieces of important, critical language that are used to develop and advance inter-cultural and intra-cultural understanding. As a result, conversations about these kinds of complex subject just fundamentally cannot be had.
It further atomizes, alienates, and isolates queer people from each other.
So, there's your points.
I apologize for being the one to tell you that you accidentally did a fascism, but if it helps, it was only a very very SMALL fascism and you can just stop doing it.
God I didn't come into this planning to explain how homonationalism has begun its decent into homofascism and I certainly didn't intend to use a pointless fucking tiktok video where a couple talks about the 1500s for about 45 seconds to do it.
But honestly, just. If you see this controversy again, ask yourself this really, really simple question.
"Would I be this angry, if they were both cis, gender conforming girls?"
If you wouldn't be that angry, then there was almost certainly not actually anything wrong. Bigory is still bigotry, even when coming from the mouths of the marginalized, after all.
You've just been taught to perceive these people as The Enemy.
Take a good, long look at the people who are suspiciously not included in that "enemy" bracket.
Some of them (most of them!!) are your friends.
But at least a few taught you to see hatred in something as harmless as a mini-video about imaginary medieval lesbians.
An essay on homofascism, homonationalism, and (unfortunately) mediocre tiktok videos.
Autophagia is the act of eating yourself. Autocannibalism is an equivalent term with slightly different connotations. Cannibalism acknowledges the personhood and shared humanity of the actor and victim.
If overly enthusiastic queer people trampling all over each other in the race to be the most morally pure actually acknowledged the personhood of their victims, then perhaps autocannibalism would be more relevant. But since dehumanization is the name of the game, autophagia it is.
Queer people are eating ourselves and each other, and we don't even have the decency to be cannibals.
Just tearing chunks out of our own flesh, swallowing them down without even chewing, and then wondering why the fuck our arms are bleeding.
In today's extremely specific example of the overarching pattern of destructive self loathing that has dominated queer spaces for the last decade, let's talk about this TikTok, and the attendant "controversy" on tumblr and twitter's "queer" spaces. Web archive link.
I put scare quotes around queer there, because it's important to remember that Tumblr actively banned the vast majority of its queer user base in 2018, when all forms of sexuality were banned, and mysteriously, queer sexuality was hit hardest. What remains on tumblr is a collection of people who were so violently anti-sex that they were spared the ban, or a small number of people who have returned since then. The rest of "queer tumblr" has been stripped from a vibrant and politically active public space, to a loose cohort of "apolitical" people who "happen to be queer" intermingled with TERFs, SWERFs, Christian Fundamentalists and Fascists who use the language of queer liberation to push their cult like conservative agendas.
Tumblr is, at this point, nothing but a feeding ground for violent cults. A term I use not "colloquially" or in a lay sense, but specifically in its sociological and technical sense. These are groups of people with a history of violence and even murder, who use extreme and very narrow political language to justify their violence, and engage in psychological indoctrination tactics with religious overtones. These are cults. Not "fads" not "aesthetics" and not moral crusades. These are cults, and they have killed people, raped children, in service to their ideologies. They need to be stopped. Pulling punches by pretending they are anything less than cults is irresponsible and counterproductive. These are cults.
Twitter is little better. Officially, sex and sexuality are allowed on the site. This allows a small number of politically active queers to go about their business. But, with so many places where conservative anti-queer agendas can fester, such as tumblr, these enclaves are rapidly shrinking. The constant onslaughts of anti-sex and anti-queer legislation, the risk of disease, and the trojan horse of TERF rhetoric, does all the work of policing queer people out of these public spaces. Even if you are not subjected to direct personal harassment, the psychological weight of being told homophobic lies by self-destructive queer children is just, to be frank, bad for your health. Many queer people rightfully identify these spaces as the cause of PTSD, and leave them. We've reached a point of self-policing.
As a result, queer community building in these spaces is all but destroyed.
Nevertheless, plague and fascism render physical queer spaces equally difficult or impossible to access. For many of us, especially in conservative regions, social media is the only option.
We must accept that for the reality it is.
Nevertheless, the "queer communities" on twitter and tumblr are not to be confused with the vibrant communities of the early 2010s. Fascism has more than adequately invaded and squashed those notions out, using uniquely fascist methodologies.
Including, and yes, I understand how bizarre this will sound at the face. Including using fascist methodologies to reinforce fascist goals in small, cultural ways as well as large, political ones. Small ways like encouraging the mob bullying of some people over a cutesy video. Little things that ensure anyone who lives under the fascist spectre can have no peace, no comfort, and no rest. Not even the smallest reprieves.
That's how microaggressions work, after all.
For the sake of ease, I will be using Eco's 14 features of fascism. For a more familiar set of examples featuring these same traits, here's an article about how these traits apply to Donald Trump, a US politician.
1) The Cult of Tradition.
There is a widespread demand that people stop with all of this new-fangled queerness with its neopronouns and its demands for revolution. A desperate demand to return to the good old days, when gays were gays (not ~kweers~), cishets were cishets, and trannies knew their place was dead in a basement. These calls for a return to a better time tend to ignore the fact that queer culture in the 90s, 80s, 60s, or whatever the target era is, DID NOT ACTUALLY LOOK OR ACT LIKE THAT. Historical revisionism runs rampant, with everything from the redefinition of "lesbian" to mean "cisgender woman who exclusively has sex with other cisgender women" to the reframing of "queer" as a "dirty word" that no queer person should ever get to use, only cishetero bigots.
2) Rejection of modernism.
None of this gender-weird bullshit. Just hard working high femmes coddling their stay at home butches, and cis-for-cis men who have anal missionary with the lights off. People whose gender expression doesn't match the speaker's conservative ideals are to be rejected as fake, outsiders, or even a threat.
3) Action for action's sake.
This random girl on tiktok is trying to be supportive of her boyfriend's attempts to question his gender and sexuality using the religious framework he finds most comfortable? Nah, gotta tear them both to shreds. Why? Well, their completely harmless mutual support might lead them to a greater sense of self-understanding! That's horrible! It must be stopped! Why is it horrible? Why must it be stopped? NO TIME FOR QUESTIONS, TEAR THEM APART!!!
4) Disagreement is treason.
Or, to clarify that, "disagreeing with the accepted tenets of the political movement is a high crime that justifies the highest punishments, up to and including death."
Now let's all take a moment here, and remember how many people have been killed by the TERF's satellite cult of "antishippers," a group of sexually traumatized teenagers and young adults who have been taught to force teens to 'have sex' with adults because they consider teens sexually experimenting with other, like-age teen peers to be rape. Unlike the 'sex' that they encourage underage teens and grown adults to have, which is somehow 'not rape.' I say "somehow" here because the actual mechanism is a complex set of cult indoctrination techniques that I don't feel like going into too much detail about here, but here is a thread of previously compiled examples of the cult mechanics of this group.
The amount of suicides alone for which this group is responsible is obscene. But they have in fact successfully murdered people. And what was the crime which justified execution?
Disagreeing with the claim that any fictional account of a crime is equivalent to committing that crime in real life (eg, that actors playing dead in a movie is the same as ending real human lives).
Let me repeat that. These people executed someone--MURDERED him--because they didn't like the way fictional characters were hurt in a fictional story.
But lets say you think that's too extreme. I don't blame you. It's rough info. Let's bring down the scale a little bit here.
Just in the context of this tiktok, disagreement is treason.
People who question the group decision to eliminate these two randoms for making a Cute Lesbians In Love video are framed as the enemy. At best, they are treated as ignorant try hards, and at worst, open white supremacist lesbophobes calling for the extermination of anyone outside the aryan ideal.
Really sit with that for a moment. Really consider how far removed from reality we have gotten. To conclude that someone is a white supremacist homophobe, because they made a video where they acknowledged that lesbians were often religiously persecuted in the past, especially the nonwhite ones, but they do so slightly clumsily.
Since when was "I love lesbians, I'm just kind of new at it" the act of a rampant bigot?
5) Fear of difference.
Denigration and hatred of even completely harmless actions which are unfamiliar to the audience.
Such as, for example, seeing a random girl say "Oh yeah lol I think I was probably burned as a witch in a past life haha" and deciding that makes her the single most racist, lesbophobic person on earth.
Such as, for example, seeing what appears to be a young man saying the words, "Yeah, I think I was/am a lesbian" and instead of concluding, "oh, some trans issues happening there, maybe I should support this questioning person until he finds out a deeper truth about himself," deciding he hates women and is trying to steal women's lives and wear them like costume.
That's the most BASIC kind of transphobia. How anyone ever saw this video controversy as anything other than an attempt to destroy one of the most common methods by which trans people discover themselves (feeling like their relationships are gendered incorrectly) is so fucking wild.
6) Appeal to frustration.
Queer people are, right now, very reasonably and rightfully PISSED AS HELL. The causes of our suffering, however, are not two random whities on tiktok. Blaming random questioning-or-queer people just makes our entire situations WORSE, because, again, it just makes it that much harder for other queer people to come to terms with themselves and begin fighting for their rights (our rights) alongside us.
The causes of queer suffering in the modern world are, primarily, legislative and financial, not personal.
If you want to be pissed at anything, try being pissed at the bullshit "think of the children" laws like SESTA/FOSTA that actually made child sexual exploitation EASIER and MORE COMMON on the internet, while utterly destroying any online spces sexual minorities used to fight for our rights.
Going after a random couple on tiktok for doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG is, at best, a waste of all our time. But it's a waste that appeals to the pain we already feel. It's an easy waste. For a moment it even feels good. That's what makes it so dangerous. That's what makes it part and parcel of fascism.
7) Obsession with a plot.
Hey, fun fact: some white folks on tiktok making a video where they clumsily express their interest in queer history and culture is not, in fact, proof of a grand white conspiracy to destroy all lesbians. The fact that I even have to say that is so fucking weird.
Anyone claiming there's a big conspiracy among OTHER QUEERS to try and eliminate all lesbians is a TERF.
It's a basic attempt at isolating victims based on an existing vulnerability.
It's a common story. Most of us can relate to it. Take a young, scared teenage girl. Tell her she's a horrible monster. Fill her with guilt and hatred and disgust until she either dies or runs. And if she runs, she'll eventually realize that there are other monsters out there too. People just like her. She can seek them out, realize she's no more of a monster than the rest of us. She can reclaim her humanity from the bigots who tried to destroy her. She can stand up for her own rights, and for the rights of others treated like her.
Unless, of course, the "other monsters" are also unsafe.
Unless what should be a safe and welcoming queer culture is instead just as cruel and exlusionary towards her as the "cishets" she is escaping.
Unless they spend all their time mocking people like her for saying innocuous shit online, because they think (just like neocons, just like fash) they think that she's STILL A MONSTER.
Is it any wonder, then, that in such extremities of isolation, these young girls turn to TERFs? That they give their loyalty to the first people to look at them and say, "yes, you have worth, you are good, its the rest of the world that doesn't understand your beauty"?
Is it any wonder than they fucking join this cult obsessed with an imagined plot about their own extinction, when there are so many REAL plots out there that look and act exactly the same?
I mean, my god. Let's just for one second, assume the "dude" in that video actually is just a woman who will need another 3 or 4 years to figure that out. What the FUCK is she going to do when she realizes her true identity? Because she's sure as shit not going to turn to any of the "trans friendly" people that mocked and harassed her for being--honestly, not even clumsy or ignorant!
Frankly there was NOTHING offensive in that video in the first place. You all just made that up wholecloth! Fucking holy shit. You people really do all of TERFs work in isolating victims FOR them. The greatest TERF allies of all: their little farms who harass and abuse questioning queers and turn them into ready made TERFlings.
8) The enemy is as strong as it is weak.
The entire controversy here is predicated on mocking people who fundamentally lack ANY capacity to fight back.
And the way this harassment is justified? Well, "they're white/straight so they have all the power here."
Motherfucker, I would like to see the strongest, straightest, whitest person on EARTH try to take down HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people at once. What is WRONG with you people. They have EXACTLY, PRECISELY as much power as you, the singular individual reading this. You know what they don't have? HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER PEOPLE ALSO EXERTING THAT SAME AMOUNT OF POWER.
I don't know how to tell you that 2 is a smaller number than 100, let alone 150,000. Like, if you don't know that, please consider getting some small objects (rice, pebbles, jelly beans, whatever) and then setting two of them on one side of a line, and several HUNDRED on the other side. Which side is STRONGER?
9) Pacifism supports the enemy.
I'm literally, right now, arguing only that the people in this video were harmless, and that our mockery of them is in fact far more harmful.
That's it. That's my whole thesis statement.
So, looking at that simple fact, a fact which this entire essay more than supports, how many people already gave up reading it and started calling me the real TERF or the real racist or whatever else?
As if I have not been spending this entire time excruciatingly making the point that we are DESTROYING OURSELVES and that in fact it would be better for all lesbians, all trans people, all queers if we simply STOPPED trying to KILL each other and instead focused on the external threats to our livelihoods, eg, legislative and financial attempts to exterminate all queer people.
I'm not even arguing pacifism!! I'm arguing we take the fight to the people trying to kill us, and even THAT is seen as cahooting with the enemy. My god, my god. What a mess.
10) Contempt for the weak.
Here we have a couple of confused, questioning people.
People at the absolute nadir of the queer experience. Lost, without words, struggling to make sense of something that far exceeds what their culture allowed them to know. Fighting for a shred of light in that ignorance.
And we HATE them for it. We LOATHE them for that newborn frailty. We would rather no one ever learn or grow again, if it would keep us comfortable. We would throw away every future queer who hasn't yet learned who they are, just to stay shielded from the memory of our own youth, our own ignorance and struggles.
This hatred for anyone new or learning about queerness is unacceptable. It is omnipresent. And yes, it further aids cult recruitment by further isolating queer people from each other.
It is self destructive.
Self eating.
11) Everyone is educated in heroism.
We are all educated in the acute, splashy, dramatic acts of the hero.
In the fight, and the burn. In immolating ourselves to take out our enemies. In immolating ourselves, to take out others of our own team, because we have been taught to see them as enemies, rather.
But none of us are taught kindness; few of us are even taught education. The gentle process of reaching out to the scared looking for safety. The burden of building that safety for them. These are not skills we learn.
We learn to scream, and rage, and hate, and we call that heroic because at least it's not dying quiet and alone in the shadows.
It's just condemning others to die alone in the shadows instead.
Every villain thinks they are the hero, too.
12) Machismo and weaponry.
Ah, now here is where I will lose the handful of you still clutching on, probably. As we all know, fascism hates homosexuality!
Except, isn't it strange, how much modern queer spaces also hate homosexuality? Or any sexuality, really?
Everywhere you look, the entire idea of sex--raunchy, graphic, erotic SEX--between people whose bodies don't match your expectations is seen as criminal. How often has your own disgust or contempt for something been encouraged as a way to "shame" the target into "cleaning up their act"?
Even if that sex was consensual, harmless, and did not involve you in any way?
Isn't it strange how often "queer sex" is quietly, completely snuffed out, even while peri/cis/heteronromative sexuality and eroticism is constant? In media, in casual conversation, in the very language we use to speak to each other itself, normative sex is constant. But queer sex is uniquely treated as vile and repellant.
But, let's set aside sex. Let's talk about this tiktok specifically.
Isn't it odd, how the couple themselves actually explicitly describe themselves as (former) lesbians, but because they do not match the expected modern aesthetic of lesbianism, they are to be punished?
For as much as broader conservative western society loathes queerness, most "online queer spaces" also loathe it.
It's just that where the "heteronormative" range of acceptability in relationships is "peri-cis-gender conforming man + peri-cis-gender conforming woman," the narrowly acceptable range of relationships in the smoking crater left behind after the collapse of queer online spaces tends to be "the maximum number of vaginas possible, and barring that, the closest you can get to a rigidly defined male/female gender role while still nominally being a same-sex couple."
Watching butch and femme go from revolutionary and reclamatory labels designed to uplift those who identify with them, to oppressive boxes that you must stuff yourself into even if it means cutting parts of yourself off, has been a tragedy in slow motion. The gender norms may be different, but the punishment and hatred for anyone who does not conform is all too familiar.
13) Selective populism.
Anyone who disagrees with you is "too online" and needs to "go touch grass."
But anyone who upholds the same violent worldview as you, wherein any difference must be cut off and burnt immediately, those people are fine. Those people are the "real people" and you are simply doing what "real people" want.
Anyone who disagrees isn't real, of course. Not as real as you are, anyway, and that's why they don't deserve to be allowed to learn and grow in peace, and instead must be immediately, violently mocked.
To punish them for defying your expectations, but more importantly, so that anyone else thinking about defiance knows exactly how cruel, violent, and relentless your power and authority truly are. Because it's "not just your authority," is it? No, no, it's the authority of all the real people.
How convenient that anyone who disagrees isn't real. Is either stupid, or ignorant, or worse, is one of the subhuman others that make up the enemy.
14) Newspeak, and the collapse and redefinition of complex language.
Let me just go ahead and describe the video that sparked this controversy, in two dialects. First, I will describe it as it was described to me by others who hated the tiktok.
"This straight girl thinks that just because her homophobic, lesbian fetishizing boyfriend believes in reincarnation, that makes her a lesbian! Disgusting! Total appropriation of the lesbian experience!"
Now, I will describe it as I perceived it.
"A white-ish looking girl (whose tiktok account is positively plastered in Indigenous Pride stamps, hence the -ish) and her much whiter looking partner had a little fun imagining what their past lives might have been like 'if' they were 'both' women. At no point did either of them say they have the right to speak to lesbian politics. They just made a cutesy video about a common fantasy scenario that is, notably, especially EXTRA common among trans people who have not yet realized or come to terms with their gender identity."
Now, where the fuck did "appropriation" come into it? In fact, where was there any kind of political anything whatsoever?
"Appropriation" has been so completely redefined in online queer spaces as to be meaningless. It no longer summarizes complex situations wherein marginalized people are punished for expressions of their culture, while centered people are allowed or even praised for adopting those same expressions. It no longer carries the implication that we should be familiarizing ourselves with marginalized cultures so that we can adequately respect them while also granting marginalized people the space and agency to express those cultures.
Now it just means, "I think this person shouldn't be allowed to talk about themselves, because I, a third party with no knowledge, believe they shouldn't be allowed to speak, and no, I do not see how being denied a voice is a marginalizing act."
This has happened with DOZENS of pieces of important, critical language that are used to develop and advance inter-cultural and intra-cultural understanding. As a result, conversations about these kinds of complex subject just fundamentally cannot be had.
It further atomizes, alienates, and isolates queer people from each other.
So, there's your points.
I apologize for being the one to tell you that you accidentally did a fascism, but if it helps, it was only a very very SMALL fascism and you can just stop doing it.
God I didn't come into this planning to explain how homonationalism has begun its decent into homofascism and I certainly didn't intend to use a pointless fucking tiktok video where a couple talks about the 1500s for about 45 seconds to do it.
But honestly, just. If you see this controversy again, ask yourself this really, really simple question.
"Would I be this angry, if they were both cis, gender conforming girls?"
If you wouldn't be that angry, then there was almost certainly not actually anything wrong. Bigory is still bigotry, even when coming from the mouths of the marginalized, after all.
You've just been taught to perceive these people as The Enemy.
Take a good, long look at the people who are suspiciously not included in that "enemy" bracket.
Some of them (most of them!!) are your friends.
But at least a few taught you to see hatred in something as harmless as a mini-video about imaginary medieval lesbians.