Both: Did you identify as either QT or GC, and then switch sides?

submitted by worried19 from self.GCdebatesQT

Tell your story in the comments. What caused you to change your mind?

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[–]censorshipment 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I honestly still don't really know what queer theory is. I mean, I get the footnotes I've seen on Reddit... but I've never read any documents (can't think of the proper term atm lol) about queer theory. All I know is the word queer is a slur and makes me cringe.

I once believed that women could live/pass as men, and men could live/pass as women, but that was just a form of living a lie... using false identities. I socially identified as a guy, but I never believed I was a man trapped in a woman's body... I believed something was wrong with my brain/mind i.e. an identity crisis stemming from a mental disorder. I thought of myself as a pathological liar... not a transgender person.

There was a time when I sided with the LGBT community over heterosexual radfems because I just could not relate to straight women and their heteronormative bullshit. Their brand of feminism doesn't seem to center women the way that I center women.

After watching "Mrs. America" about second-wave feminists versus anti-feminist women... I'm more upset at the feminists and how they threw both lesbians and black women under the bus. Of course I already knew the history of that... but seeing it in a miniseries really makes me understand why so many lesbians and black women don't identify as radfems.

[–]divingrightintowork 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

gaah I started watching Mrs America but the server was all slow, but I'm half an episode in and so far so interesting! Though I think it's good! But I'm not even one whole episode in.

Of course it is a bit of a dramatization and I think it can be hard judging people in the past, hindsight is 20/20 and there have been plenty of movements that failed because they didn't "throw a group under the bus," and plenty of movements that succeeded because they did.

Are you familiar with how homosexuals in the US almost gained protection from orientation discrimination in the oughts, but likely failed because there was the addition of self proclaimed"gender identity" to the non-discrimination bill? Many gays think that trans people should have been "thrown under the bus," in that case - and of course, felt they were "thrown under the bus" by trans people.

[–]Rae 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I identified as a liberal feminist for five years.

I started when I was 16, had my first boyfriend, and went down an online rabbit hole because I thought I was asexual (really I was bisexual with a history of sexual trauma and also generally just not ready for sex).

I frequented Tumblr often and liberal feminist thought was the first opinionated content I found that appealed to my young brain. I also followed a lot of asexual content and "tucute" opinions were strongly central to both of these things.

Five years later a "terf" slipped through my block list radar and I somehow followed her. She posted a mundane shitpost about the inanity of gender identity and I felt my psychological world become literally flipped upside down.

For three days I remember walking around the house stumped and with a pit in my stomach realizing exactly how bad womankind has it and understanding women's oppression for the first time.

I swung too hard in the other direction and tried to life a life of ideological purity as a "rudefem" radfem. I was angry constantly.

Then I came across r/GenderCritical when it had 3k subscribers and an entirely different climate. They helped me even out and become more analytical about things.

Now here I am!

[–]divingrightintowork 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Welcome! So sounds like we should be cautiously optimistic when we write those private messages to libfem ppls who make posts on r/feminisms about how they hate being referred to as a "menstruator" ?

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Never identified with queer anything. Queer theory is simply gender stereotypes. Always hated gender stereotypes.

[–]CatbugMods allow rape victim blaming in this sub :) 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Very libfem leaning as a teen and in my early 20s. Absolutely fell for the party line if ‘they just need to pee’ and self expression blah blah blah.

Got rightfully called out for not my Nigel-ing in some forum and introduced to the idea of sex as a class group. Read more out of curiosity and saw every single argument I had been convinced by was utter bullshit. That gender was bullshit and feeling like a woman is a lie.

Spend the next year reading and watching radfems and being a better critical thinker.

[–]luckystar 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I never fully identified with either, but I used to swing hard on the QT side, then I swung hard to the GC side, and now I'm a bit more mellowed out but definitely still more GC. I used to be super QT (though I didn't know it had a name), TWAW, supporting the whole thing b/c I thought it was just another aspect of civil rights. The reason that changed my mind at first was seeing a lot of sexist/homophobic/hateful rhetoric from trans allies at "TERFs" and being called one myself (because I said something like, "isn't everyone non binary? the problem is gender stereotypes, why reinforce them?") googling around and actually listening to people and being shocked how much more sense the GC were making. Eventually I found issues with the extreme end of GC : the man hatred is a bit hard for me to swallow, I don't like sweeping generalizations against an entire group of people in any context. And secondly I have no qualms with transmed/truscum people (the ones that usually call themselves "transsexual" and aren't trying to make women uncomfortable or take over their spaces).

The biggest point is that words need to have meanings for people to be able to organize for rights. I think QT harms women, LGB people, and transsexual people because they think you just have to say a few magic words "I am a woman" and now your identity is VaLiD and we're never allowed to question that. The whole thing rests on the idea of the "honor system" and thinking that nobody would ever transition for a fetish, for attention, to be considered an "oppressed minority", etc even though we literally have people openly saying they are fetishists. I actually do believe trans people are oppressed but their oppression is not the same thing as the oppression women face, it's oppression based on a mental condition that they have extreme distress when presenting as their birth sex.

Ultimately to me it comes down to the fact that trans allies aren't advocating for trans rights but rather for trans women to be viewed as identical to women in all perpetuity, and also being trans being based solely on stated gender identity, hormones for all w/o psych visits, transing kids etc.

If QT says "trans women are women" and GC says "trans women are males" then I'd go for the middle ground of "trans women are trans women and that is fine but not completely the same thing as biological women". I like how the YTer Arielle Scarcella approaches these issues.

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I read some Butler in college and felt like queer theory was liberating in certain ways. I felt like gender was oppressive so maybe disassociating it from sexed bodies was a way to denaturalize it in peoples minds. It wasn’t so much about trans issues back then. Like ten or so years ago when the language around trans issues started to change (when transsexual became transgender and lost all meaning and when people starting saying “cis” to refer to non-trans people) I sort of turned against it. My feminism was about women and I didn’t like the way the trans rights movement was using queer theory to erase distinctions in a way that harmed everyone’s ability to discuss sexism and misogyny using words that made sense.

[–]worried19[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I didn't strongly identify with either side in the beginning. It was more like I was unaware of these issues, but I considered myself somewhat liberal. I didn't understand the difference between liberal and radical feminism. I considered myself pro-trans to a large extent. The first thing that made me question and then "switch sides" was the topic of child transition.

[–]divingrightintowork 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I've always been kind of moderate - I was much more "pro trans" historically because of course it made sense to support people who didn't want to perform to gender specs ten years ago (re trans ppl). Like sure some of the things they said or did were a little kooky but like, hey, whatevs. It was just an occasional rando doing what they thought they had to do - and while my beliefs haven't really changed - I noticed things started getting like... really weird in the past 3-5 years in a way that really didn't vibe with my gender abolitionist sentiments.