council of lesbianism

If someone calls themselves a bi lesbian you can just roll your eyes and move on. You don't have to accuse them of destroying the "community" or being responsible for corrective rape

I get emails from Information (left-wing newspaper around here) about books they recommend, and just now one was described as "the incredible story of a man from [Danish town] who kept North Korea afloat by skirting sanctions" and I was like oh cool this guy sounds awesome but then it turned out that of course the book was from the perspective of journalists uncovering his Evil Crimes and bringing him to Justice

Just got in my dad's car and he was listening to some kind of edgy teen rage music like "IT'S NOT A FUCKING PHASE I JUST WANNA BE OKAY" on full blast

It's not a social role and nothing else, like I said it can be a personal identification thing if we're looking at it individually. But when looking at gender as a feminist I'm not interested in individual identifications. It's a matter of the lens we're currently using and what we want to use it for.

And I don't know when trans women become women. I don't know when I became a woman either. Or when I became a lesbian. But when I was in the closet, for instance, I think it would be fair to still call me a lesbian. When I heard my male friends joke about corrective rape, I knew they meant me, even if they did not. I've heard similar stories from trans women about locker room talk, for instance. Gender being a social role doesn't mean that it is simply what others call you explicitly, which I also wrote about here. There's more going on below the surface, just like with the categories of man and woman.

There's a huge web of social factors constantly affecting us all, or not just affecting us but rather continually creating us. It might be more correct to say that I am constantly in the process of becoming a woman, or performing womanhood, as Butler might put it (and failing, per Wittig.) I don't know that we can ever fully understand the intricacies of these processes, even if we can understand the larger patterns. Maybe we can, it would be cool to know, but unless my feminist program is "make everyone women" or something like that, it's not the priority for me to know exactly when or how a specific person becomes a woman. I don't think that knowledge would help us destroy patriarchy

Oh god I have to actually articulate something clear myself? And thus open myself up to legitimate and informed criticism? I'll do my best.

One of the main point of disagreement I have with other people who agree that gender is a social construct is whether it's "transhistorical," as in whether this construct (and that of patriarchy) is essentially the same across different periods of history. Some radical feminists and those deriving their ideas from them will often say that it is (although others are not social constructionists at all), but you find it in other tendencies as well. I don't think it's really the case. You can look at various past societies and see that they are made up of men and women (or at least that they use words for themselves that we translate to "men and women,") with the men having a position of power over the women. They're very comparable, but ultimately the actual details of how those systems of gender operate are very different from the modern one found in global capitalism, in a way that I think disqualifies them from being essentially the same. An obvious example would be all the memes you might have seen about how ancient Greek men would have sex with each other, as well as their conventions on the roles of penetrating vs being penetrated. These are things that don't fit into our modern conceptions of gender at all (and also one of the reasons some historians will say "today we would consider him gay" rather than "he was gay," for instance.) This also ties into the concept that the historical origin of patriarchy doesn't serve as its current foundation. A while ago I wrote something about that here.

Another point of disagreement is whether gender is something personal, an identity you can play around with and do whatever you want with, or a social role that isn't defined by you alone. The former is an attractive position both in that it's just more fun, but also because in defending trans people from attacks by conservatives, the argument that has become popular in liberal and some leftist discourse is that trans people are the gender they say they are. That argument is in my opinion putting the cart before the horse somewhat. A trans woman is not a woman simply because she says she is, but rather because she occupies the social position of womanhood. Identity is a product of that, not the cause, in my opinion. It follows that gender is not really something we can just play around with for fun, at least depending on how you define "gender." In an individual context we can identify however we want, using both conventional and unconventional terms. There's nothing wrong with this, and it would be absurd to say that this personal identification is illusory or meaningless, as some do. But in the context of analysing gender on a larger social scale, which we need to as communists and feminists, gender is just not a personal thing. We can't opt in or out or do whatever we feel like, it's a coercive system of categorisation.

However, it's important to note that this doesn't mean that the categories of "man" and "woman" are simply all that there is. It's here that Joe Biden's "at least three" answer to the question of how many genders there are is ironically kind of true. Because I think of you study how different people are treated by patriarchy, it eventually becomes clear that there's some kind of third category. What the best way of conceptualising this third thing is, I'm not really sure. Is it "outside" the two official genders? Is it "below" woman on some kind of hierarchy? Is there just one big spectrum? I don't think there's really a good way to visualise this, partially due to the nature of social constructs like this. It's not something one guy wrote down at one point, it's something all of us are continuously creating together, an amorphous blob of collective beliefs and practices, although obviously some have greater power than others. I have a soft spot for Monique Wittig's insight into this. She argues that lesbians are not women, because by rejecting men altogether they fail to perform the most important part of the role of "woman" that patriarchy has constructed. I think there's more to it than she gets into, but if lesbians are not women they are something else, and that something else is what I'm talking about. This "other" is also something that's a great motivator for performing your assigned role as best you can. Like I said it's difficult to visualise exactly how these roles relate to each other, but there's clearly some kind of hierarchy, and you're more or less constantly threatened with being "demoted" by failing to perform your role properly and thus falling into the "other." The desperation to stay afloat is what subconsciously motivates a lot of transphobia, both directed at the self and at others.

One last point I'll get into because this post is very long now is the notion of "authenticity" when it comes to gender. Here I think Judith Butler is very insightful. Like Wittig I don't think they get into it fully, and in Butler's case I think a lot of their other theory is not quite right or at least often misused, but nonetheless they are correct on this one point. That point being that gender is an imitation with no original. Everybody is pretending. In that sense it's correct to say that trans people are just pretending, but only because so are cis people. In the same way, there isn't really a difference between "authentic" trans people, and people who are supposedly just pretending for attention or even out of some "sexual perversion." One of the things that made me think of the original post was seeing someone I follow (if you see this, hi, nothing against you) talking about the concept of only transitioning "to fuck lesbians," and it struck me as funny that really, you could just as well say that my reason for becoming a lesbian, that is, adopting that identity explicitly, was because I wanted to fuck lesbians.

Anyway, reading recommendations, right.

For Monique Wittig's argument, The Straight Mind and Other Essays is where you wanna look. For Judith Butler, I believe they wrote about that in Imitation and Gender Insubordination. Other than that, maybe Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch?

These aren't things you should just absorb and move on, no work is like that, so I recommend reading with others and critically discussing it together.

There's a lot of metal music I kind of enjoy but would enjoy so much more if not for the vocalist's voice. I can enjoy screaming and yelling but something about how it's done in the metal I otherwise like is really off-putting to me. Most recently noticed this with bands like Vile Creature and Khanate where I would honestly much rather just listen to the instrumentals alone

Apparently these days you will get called sectarian for not wanting to interact with me. I had no idea I had such powerful psionic warriors under my banner but if such an army does exist I would urge them to calm down

I wouldn't say I'm surprised at it because it happens all the time with every conceivable topic, but it's kind of funny and strange to be periodically reminded that most of the big leftist accounts on social media have basically no connection to communism. They always just get big from dunking on liberals and conservatives but then eventually turn around and go "Haha can you guys believe there are wacky people out there who believe [basic communist critique of society]? I mean, what can you do except laugh and keep scrolling am I right folks?"

The monarchy is honestly one of the less ridiculous medieval things about Danish politics. I am not kidding when I tell you that probably the most important source of advice and critical evaluation of the government's financial policies is a council of people known as "de økonomiske vismænd" meaning The Wise Men of Economics

I love when people try to correct me in the tags on my fake future history post like "actually there are lots of examples of people using scarce resources for ceremonial purposes" yeah man. Lenin also wasn't interred in a large burial mound in Siberia either. Did you see that part of the post

Having the mortifying realisation that there's probably gonna be a wedding in my family soon, and wedding-appropriate outfits like suits or fancy dresses are not things I want to wear at all