traaaaaaannnnnnnnnnsI hate having to comment on other trans people
And yet our blogger friend Oliver does. And honestly, i'm not sure if i am comfortable dissecting this here, in a space where the cissies are listening, but i also wanted to write about hexbear's obsession with ContraPoints for a while because i see over and over again how reliably contra threads blow up in ways that threads about men with comparable or worse takes (say, V*ush or Kurzgesagt) don't. I am assuming this one will be no exception, so i may as well get one of my trademark nuanced takes out while it's still fresh.
First of all, Oliver either doesn't get what the problem with Buck Angel is or he's in the same boat as him and Contra. His other writings do not give me that impression, but at the very least he seems ignorant and i we want to discuss this issue, we need to fix that. So, to be clear, Buck Angel doesn't have "a few bad takes", he has constantly, over years, suckered up to Terfs whil attacking other trans people especially trans women and transfem nonbinary people, he advocates for medical gatekeeping of trans healthcare, for making gender affirming care for trans youth flat-out illegal and he denies the existence of nonbinary people. ContraPoints knows all of this, she had an entire collage of twitter screenshots with a small selection of his takes in her awful Cancelling video, a video that makes chauvinist centrists parade her around like a figurehead for how cancel culture has gone too far to this day. And i am assuming that Oliver knows this, too, Buck Angel isn't exactly an obscure figure and the way he writes his transphobia off is pretty much a carbon copy of Natalie's dismissiveness of the criticisms. Except that this guy also complains about the "whiniest, screechiest parts of our community" like some treasonous sellout making anti-trans cringe content for an audience of cissy fascists. He's generally much better than Contra or Buck at keeping up appaerances, but sometimes the mask does slip. Speaking of which, he also completely ignores that Contra has exhibited some serious hatred for translesbian relationships in the past (namely in her Shame video), but that is hardly surprising given that trans men with a seething hatred of t4t relationships are an entire genre on tumblr. I will note without further comment that he is a man, married to a woman, who calls himself a dyke.
Likewise, he ignores that Contra is just incapable of talking about nonbinary identities without sounding dismissive, ignorant, belittling and, in typical transmedicalist fashion, as if being nonbinary is just a phase that trans people will eventually grow out of. Her defense against being enbiephobic was literally "i used to identify as nonbinary myself back in my questioning phase" and while that sounds harmless and convincing to a wider audience, the "nonbinary phase" is textbook gatekeeper language. I know nonbinary people who got denied medical treatments or name changes due to that exact kind of reasoning.
Also absent is any critique of the extreme transnegativity that permeates the entire body of ContraPoint's work, the typical dysphoria-centric litany of trans martyrdom that lies at the pathologizing core of transmedicalist ideology. Now, this is the part that i like to discuss the least in front of a not exclusively trans audience because cis people will never be able to reliably distinguish between legitimate distress that will resolve through a combination of gender affirming care and self acceptance on one hand and the othering self-disgust that is the reason for why i've never met a transmedicalist trans person who was not utterly miserable. If you are cis and have made it this far, you should take away the following: It's fine to call it out when trans people advocate for gatekeeping, when they deny nonbinary experiences, when they claim that teenagers should not transition or when they argue that trans women should be banned from certain women-only facilities. You can - and should - push back against all of that. But when it comes to the issue of internalized trans negativity and the emphasis of trans suffering, that's a discussion you should leave to us because it's already hard enough to strike a balance here when you've experienced such feelings firsthand.
It was an opportunity for the dumbest, screechiest segments of our community to have a shit fit over a simple mistake.
😐
I hate Contra but geez this writer
Natalie, you’ve somehow radicalized yourself into being an enlightened centrist
I'm sorry but that's a great one
You've got me there, that is a good line.
But personally I think Contra was always a bit of a centrist, she was always very vocal about the opitics of the left and how they should try harder to be 'normal'. So I disagree with the writers implication that Natalie is like this because of some psychological failing, no I think Natalie is like this because she's a wealthy woman who passes easily and could afford to belittle the left for not being as appealing to the masses as her. She has always had that liberal streak of "Hey guys let's be normal adults here so we can get mainstream approval!". You know, the same thing Dems do when they finger waggle at the left for being to woke and scaring away their precious centre-right base.
and I think that this author actually agrees with that, from what is written in the post. A lot of time is spent trying to paint a strawman "leftist anime pfp" caricature. Of course people are annoying, but it reminds me of basically of how contra felt about non binary people (silly, not to be taken seriously, and screeching on the internet)
Ah I see. Thanks! This was yet another case of me misunderstanding author intent again.
This was yet another case of me misunderstanding author intent again.
no worries, you're doing a great job
But you used Buck Angel’s voice. A 10 second clip that overshadowed the entirety of your film. And its bullshit. Because directors cast people who have done far worse constantly in far greater roles, and no one says shit. And I’ll grant that it was bullshit. It was an opportunity for the dumbest, screechiest segments of our community to have a shit fit over a simple mistake. Months of hard work on what was essentially your magnum opus, destroyed by 10 seconds of footage from an old porn star with some bad takes.
From what I recall the response didn't get harsh until people pointed out Buck sucks and asked her to clarify her position and she doubled down and said she agreed with him. It wasn't Buck's shitty opinion that derailed the response to the video, it was her shitty opinion, that she aggressively defended.
I have not done the internet archeology to pinpoint were it really blew up, but yes, she doubled down hard on this. She didn't say she agreed with him, but she minimized the extend of Buck Angel's transmedicalism in a way that can only be explained with her knowing what she did.
On top of that, her defense against being called a truscum was literally "truscums believe there's male and female brains and that this explains transness, i do not believe that, i can't be truscum", which is like saying "nazis believe in haplogroups, i have never looked into human genetics, i can't be a nazi" - the fixation on and dumbed-down misunderstanding of gendered aspects of neurology is an obscure side note of trasmedicalist ideology. Some of them really get off on this, but literally nobody arguing in good faith would whip this out as an example of how to define a truscum. The common definition is "pathologizing, assimilationist view of transness that excludes nonbinary people and demands medical gatekeeping of gender affirming care".
Yup, that's what happened, no apologies, just doubling down and acting like the victim
I ain't reading allat, c/slop is that way
shes a fascist, stop caring
She got a whiff of success and immediately disappeared up her own ass
Interestingly, her widespread success came after she disappeared up her own ass. It's the Cancelling video that made her popular among liberal mainstream audiences, she's trippled her subscriber count since she got "cancelled". The bad takes came before most of her success.
myriads of pontificating psychological pieces instead of: got the bag->this is the best we've got evolution, same as it ever was.
The cycle of pontificating for ad revenue. First you pontificate about awful people who got money, then you get the money, then you get other people (who hope to also get the money) pontificating about how you turned into an awful person.
Neither the subject or the analyst are interested in examining the influence of getting the money. It's not necessarily actively dishonest, but we're all very good at deceiving ourselves when it's to our benefit.
"What the Heil is Going on with KKKᛟnᛏᚱa₽ᛟinᛏᛋᛋ?"
Dont do liberalism kids. Or "content creation"
She always had these takes as a “pessimistic socialist”.
