thoughts on lgbt
jan 2025 foreword
(this isn’t a replacement for the original essay, but it became quite long so i moved the actual essay to a different page, linked at the bottom)
intro
i met my first ever irl trans person last week. to be specific, someone on hrt and pre-op i think, tho i don’t wanna focus/speculate on such private personal details too closely. i also made a correction to a sentence in this essay that was invalidating, in response to a comment i got on twitter. anyway, these things made me want to revisit it, and i decided a new foreword would be good
i feel like this topic has become my arch-nemesis lol, with my continual pivoting and revising of stances. i thought for a sec i’d have to publish a 3rd revision, but i don’t think that’s necessary. but either way, i don’t think this is an embarrassing or negative thing. accepting an ideology as-is thru peer-pressure when i knew it was wrong was obviously never going to happen with me. i know from observing the sms players that they’re able to suspend disbelief indefinitely when it comes to issues of abuse and fatal bullying they condone, so it follows that even if people en-masse feel the same as i do about gender ideology (which i know some do cos they feel safe enuff to tell me), we would be none-the-wiser cos they’d shapeshift into supporting the ideology to fit in
the other side of it tho is there’s nothing wrong with personal growth and continual working on one’s understanding of stuff. it’s only considered bad cos there is a compulsory ideology hanging over everyone in the first place. that comment from the vice article about cuntry living i linked rings true here (my emphasis):
Butler’s post received 1000 likes—almost 10 percent of Cuntry Living agreed with her. Despite their support of Butler, few people left the group. When I asked dissenting members for comment, they ignored me, possibly out of fear of retaliation. I had an easier time tracking down people to speak out against the al-Assad regime for a story about a Syrian soap opera star fighting Assad than I did getting people to speak on the record about Cuntry Living. Butler told me she was done speaking about Cuntry Living, but referred me to a blog post about her experiences.
good times. i still remember where i was standing, in the cambridge maths faculty café in michaelmas 2015 waiting for a galois theory lecture, when i read the news that cuntry living admin and prominent activist annie teriba was a serial sexual assaulter
framing
anyway, let’s get into the essay itself. i think my main reflection from the past 10 months is that, well, i kind of already knew that lumardy was a turning point for me where i would no longer be able to keep a grip on my own kindness, because i became buried in a terminal trauma. this seeps into the emotional outlook with which i write sociological essays, and the things i focus on, how they intersect with my own bisexuality and so on
transgenderism as a whole is a very muddy topic that’s hard to draw concrete conclusions on, mostly because everyone’s experience of it is so different. it’s hard to put into words the distinction between the experience of a dysphoric transsexual and an enby poser – everyone knows there is one, but it’s hard to say anything without pigeonholing people or being dismissive of somebody’s struggle. not every transsexual conceives of eir experience as an illness, and not every enby is laundering a cultural identity as a type of essential oppression
as such, minor nuances in framing end up becoming the meat of what distinguishes positions. for example, you can say you’re for gender ideology because you acknowledge the existence of self-conception – to you, gender identity is how you feel about yourself. you can equally say you’re against it because you don’t believe this gender identity is meaningful – that if say one male identifies as non-binary for cultural reasons, then that person has more in common with any other man than with a fellow enby who is mid-hrt, on a stepping stone to the other side. whichever of these views resonates with you more can determine which side of The Line you fall down on, even tho they both sit on a kernel of truth everyone knows, whether they admit it or not
obviously, for me, summarising my stance as being “against gender ideology” is a gut-feeling-driven decision. if i were privileged then i probably would be saying, like, well obviously trans women are not entirely women, there is a difference, but the perspective that they are is a helpful-enuff guide to the reshaping of social interactions we want to achieve that it’s worth standing on
i mean, i wish i were privileged. class oppression is so fundamental to the difference in mental health and sheer survivability of a person living in the west that, not only do i believe that other kinds of oppression truly do not matter in comparison (you’ll have to judge the extent to which you think trauma or egocentricity is corrupting my opinion), but i find it a cardinal sin when someone who doesn’t suffer from dysphoria uses non-binary identity to co-opt being oppressed. i find it offensive when all these people ever discuss is lgbt issues, when contrasting the harm caused by a period product with “she” branded on it with enduring 60h of noise torture in your flat every week. i find it offensive that the friend judging me the most for my stances on lgbt and gaslighting me about being xenophobic is some guy from a super-rich family
it doesn’t mean i’m right to feel that way but it’s where i’m coming from. and to be fair to myself, i identified this as being a problem long before i started being tortured. i just cared less
queerway 61 revisited
the word “queer” is even more prone to framing than the idea of gender ideology. i actually had someone cite my essay’s heading “i am not queer” as evidence of transphobia lmao. with time passing, naturally, what that word means to me or anyone else changes, as with any word. when i wrote “i am not queer”, i was talking about aspects of queer culture, like kink sex, as well as the idea of queer theory, both of postmodernism and its application in aggressively breaking cultural norms to get a reaction out of the Cistem™. fine, that was then. these days, i sometimes see the word as just being a term of endearment used to mean lgbt. or as a cultural movement that aims to break down boundaries in the expression of love. that’s maybe a naive view
the trans person i met, his friend described queer nights-out as being “free of creepy men”. it’s interesting because creepy men are a well-established problem in het dating and wider society in general. the solution proposed seems to be, you can be part of the queer night if you identify as queer. then, the easy option is to be enby because there’s no difference in being enby vs not. you could also be an ally, which i described in my essay as an intentional sidelining of the uniqueness of one’s gender and sexuality experience. either way, what’s being asked here is some sort of conformance to queer ideology and/or cultural identity
you could say, again, this is just a strong framing. can we not just say everyone is welcome to the queer night and you just need to be accepting of queer people? some would say yes, and in doing so not really have a materially different pov than mine. however, to me, the queer night and being queer are both speech acts. they signal a culture we’re trying to achieve. and that culture draws a distinction between queer people and creepy men. it’s no different to radical feminism (a philosophy that naturally leads to transphobia) in my eyes, because it promotes us-and-them. hell, pretty much all lgbt culture is born of despising cishets. a victim mentality that pervades the activists’ words and speech acts (and as i always like to tell rich westerners – the fuck are you a victim of?)
to rephrase this concretely: i’m someone who grows attracted to friends. in a culture where queer is a thing, if i like a girl, i am left with shitty stereotype-encumbered patriarchal dating, because i’m not likely to find a straight connection among queers. if i like a boy, i have to commit to queer culture, because the whole concept of homosexuality is siloed off as being a weird subculture, and so i cannot tell my male friends i like them if they’re not overtly gay without creeping them out
it feels like it’s solved absolutely nothing. it’s realised cultural identity into new stereotypes that have replaced old ones. none of this has anything to do with what sex one is or wants to be, and what sex one likes to be with
real
there are some reassuring things i can say at least. meeting the trans boy was a positive experience, and it went exactly as i thought it would. i’ve grown past seeing people for their “gender” or taking that stuff at-all seriously. i do see them for their sex expressions, but there are no relevant differences between men and women in casual social surroundings, beyond just, it’s cool that your voice is higher or lower, it adds to the diversity of sounds i hear in my life. that kinda thing
the things i did see are, well, his quietness, him being the best listener there, the cute you-know expression he gave me when i said smth about shitting on service workers being a big deal, jokes about his dyslexic misreads, etc.. it’s all that matters, really. i strive towards a society that is gender and race-blind, where we treat people free from prejudices and interpret them as an uncorrupted child would. as something new
i’ve always known that my outlook is exactly the kind of thing a trans person would be most comfortable with, and yet, i’ve been vilified for posting abstract opinions on what is and isn’t ideology or cultural identity. this isn’t to say i don’t say transphobic things from time to time because i’m fallible, but still, i think there’s a darker truth behind all this. if my freedom to interpret people as male or female in my head however i want to, if this is threatening to others (and it is a direct threat to gender ideology), then what we’re really saying is some people are trying to establish coercive control over other people’s internal monologues… isn’t that what ideology is? people are so judgemental that they cannot respect free thought, they cannot let trans people decide for themselves whom they’re comfortable being around, because they, fundamentally, cannot respect personal boundaries, personal autonomy, cannot accept respect and tolerance vs conformance. because the average westerner is entitled and abusive. that’s why this ideology caught on in the first place
i didn’t discuss politics with the trans boy and his friends, which let me take it easy and just enjoy their company. and i never do discuss it since it’s a small mercy for a trans person to not be caught in the ideological crossfire just this once. i appreciated the fact that, as irl queer people, that group didn’t behave much differently from other irl people i knew, weren’t encumbered by hardline ideological stances or excessive stereotypes, and just kinda were at ease with their personalities and interests (the trans boy is working on a dissertation about third genders in historical cultures). this in turn helped me be more at ease with my own lgbt identity, and feel further removed from the shit i used to see on the internet, such as the predatory behaviour normalised as being “queer” that lumardy dragged me into (at least, that was our best theory for why he thought it was ok)
daring to write about lgbt is a difficult thing for a victim of social abuse, since you can’t emotionally handle the risk outlay of people doubling-down in hating you. as such, lately i’ve found it easier to just send over aella’s what a woman is essay, which i agree with 97% and can tell is written more compassionately than i’m capable of. i particularly like the “cruel narratives” section because it directly helps trans people to come to terms with the psychological destabilisation that gender ideology causes them. simultaneously (spoiler!) it owns anyone who says “we know who the women are”
maybe a quick summary i can give on my essential outlook is i have a strong slant towards realism, which is like, the opposite of postmodernism. the idea is to respect the differences in the reality of men and women, like say reproductive rights, physical advantage, the not-a-coincidence that 95% of speedrunners were male children (actually 100% of the SMS top 150 as of last year lol), the differences in the experience of both cis and trans women with sexual harassment vs that of men, and so on. but also, to categorically reject artifical differences based on feelings, stereotypes, lgbt culture, or almost religious-sounding bullshit about how women are more earthly than men, or queer people more enlightened (and not just as shitty as any other westerner). in short, to respect sex and to try to be blind to gender where possible. and it does take a lot of thinking to figure out what’s natural and what’s societal – we just need to not be in denial
but yeah, i mostly just wanna get somebody else to do the talking. be a normie for a change. i don’t have the energy to track news like the cass review, whose interim version i stood on but whose final one i’m a lot more sceptical of. so i would rather just let my words stand as historical things, and write down this kind of reflection from time to time
read the aella essay! and thanks for bearing with me :)
the essay itself
(originally written aug 2023, updated feb 2024)