Blunt, honest and full of very important info. Thank you for your time and effort. It shows. I mentioned on a different thread that I think modern feminism is toxic. I am also over 40 years old and did not grow up with the internet. I grew up poor as well so I think we also need to take into account social class as a key factor here when you talk about the experiences of tumblr and many of these young women - they seem to be very privileged and come from middle class to upper class families. When I went to college it was a first not only because it was during a time when men still outnumbered women in all education but also because I was from a family where we were poor and women were the lowest on the totem pole compared to male family members to get an education. My mother and father were very proud as 1st gen Americans to know I would be better off then them. Unfortunately I still suffered as a young woman from real rape, domestic violence and destitution. Trust me when a man takes away your right to speak without being hit or threatened with sexual violence or physical assault, you realize really fast that men and women ARE physically different. I think many of these women who tote on social media their male trauma may not actually know what they are talking about. Also male feminization is very unattractive to me personally. Even as a Italian woman and culturally strong and independent, I have always craved traditional masculinity in the healthy way. Too bad some men think masculinity is supposed to be violence and dominance driven. I also don’t trust male feminists. I agree with your position in what I’ve seen as well. Finally as with trans and AGP there is a mass contagion tied to porn as well. I’ve had my own experiences where men have been lured into sissification (I find it sexually repulsive to dominate men and to belittle and penetrate the male body sorry) but it can be very seductive in the porn rabbit hole. We do need women to stop hurting men and stop militant hatred of masculinity
Brilliant piece. As with all your writing the breadth of scope, searing honesty, and logical rigour is incredibly engaging. I’ve read all your work with great appreciation and never felt compelled to reply, as I’ve never needed clarification or taken issue with the depth of insight. I still don’t, but I’m commenting now to request a future exploration of a point mentioned as an aside in this piece towards its conclusion.
I am very interested in your critique of feminism - one of the few that has truly resonated with me, and one that is so rarely explored in good faith. I strongly agree with your identification of the ideology’s fatal flaw (the ostensible solidarity, based in inevitable sex-based oppression, of all females across classes). The Tumblr environment you so accurately describe in your piece, governed by disaffected adolescents of a mostly homogenous class, is living proof of how this strident bourgeois feminism has crippled the legitimacy of the movement (and the emotional development of teenagers who are stewing in the conflation of male/female with oppressor/oppressed).
I would love to read more in-depth writings on your critiques and be able to discuss it further! Thank you very much for your work and for sharing it with the public.
Wow - amazing. As I read I couldn’t help but think how can rogd parents tak or understand our kids trans ID without learning the nuances of the ideology that got them/us here. I know about Tumblr, but I didn’t “know” how it “distorts gender roles/expression certainly, but in a delusional and cruel manner”.
you absolutely killed it with this essay! it all brings back so many memories - I recall joining in around 2011/2012 for the Harry Potter and Coldplay fandoms, back when there were still funny/viral posts of teenage guys doing silly shit and a thousand girls being like "omg I love men of tumblr". of course by 2015 i was a self-dx'd bpd agender she/he/they!
>“Kill all men,” Tumblrites claim, is just a funny ha-ha joke, and for the most part it is, but it is rarely ever used jokingly.
perfectly accurate, applicable to "kill all hets" and etc. that maintains this nasty facade of plausible deniability while it wears away at you after a thousand viewings, in ways that can't be qualified & sound like an overexaggeration when describing a single isolated incident. very much sounds like toxic female bullying actually!
(interestingly, more normie friends of mine who were only light tumblr users were quick to point out how horrible and nasty that phrase is - really interesting to think how being online & enmeshed in the ideology enough makes you not consciously register the objective meaning of the words & explain them away as a necessary hyperbole)
the social pressure to not be straight (let alone a straight male) is so painfully obvious but, like misandry, nobody wants to admit that on these hellsites minority status = power. everyone still acts like lgbt people are marginalised on them even when people identifying as lgbt make up the majority & loudest demographic. it is very natural to me that to stay sane, straight males on tumblr would need a way out of that. even in detrans circles i noticed for a long time the narrative was always that people (females) just transitioned due to internalised homophobia; i'm glad it's moving away from being so intertwined w the radfem community (who say the same "kill all men" rhetoric and have no self-awareness) and that there are so many prominent straight detrans members.
i'm really glad for all your insights and work you've done & are still doing. you got this!
I've just spent the afternoon reading all the entries on your blog after seeing this piece on The Glinner Update. It was fascinating, thanks for not putting it behind a paywall.
The most interesting article for me was Cold Tukey Check-in where you talked about the effects of stopping taking estrogen. I'm an AGP male myself. I'm a generation older than you, and I've never had any desire to actually transition, but I've always been interested in the differences between the sexes, and in people who don't conform to gender norms. Everything about the recent trend for transgenderism and gender identity ideology has been fascinating to me. I know that if I'd been born in the late 1990s or early 2000s I'd be calling myself genderfuid, at the least.
I don't agree with all of your veiws, but I appreciate your candor and your righteous indignation at the people pushing this ideology upon children.
Fascinating read. Thanks for putting it out there.
I'm puzzled by this statement: "In neither case are these men adequately able to confront the shame and disgust that is biologically part and parcel with male sexuality ..." Could you elaborate? Do you consider shame and disgust intrinsic to male sexuality? Why?
Read this today on Graham Linehan's substack, and had to come here to comment. What an outstanding and insightful piece of work. Thank you for writing it!
"Narcissistic self-identification was and still is sacrosanct. To dispel what one believed oneself to be was akin to a hate crime."
This needs to be analysed and debunked with a good dose of reality.
Pull these kids away from screens at home and at school. Back to the classroom with a real live teacher and no smart-phones, lots of new (or old!) school subjects - without "gender" in the PHSE curriculum - and wide reading for pleasure, sports, charity work, dressmaking, whatever takes the adolescent's fancy. Just fill their lives with off-line reality.
Limpida depicts very accurately a miserable, introverted world of insecurity and infantile entitlement.
Wow, niece piece, superb writing. Only recently I was telling a friend that I detected a rhetorical and ideological connection between feminism and TI but I didn’t have the wherewithal to unpack it, so you can imagine how fascinated I was by this essay.
"While there is a truth to the idea that women lack the physical force necessary to defeat men in combat, they more than make up for it through their unique strengths in social coercion." Bonobos, chimpanzee wars, and sexual dimorphism, oh my!
I listened to you on Benjamin Boyce and have followed you on twitter. You have a wise and thoughtful perspective. My 14 yr old is mixed up in this so I am leaning in and trying to understand. I really appreciate all your thoughts. Also, I think you and Helena would make a good couple- though then you'd be normies lol.
Blunt, honest and full of very important info. Thank you for your time and effort. It shows. I mentioned on a different thread that I think modern feminism is toxic. I am also over 40 years old and did not grow up with the internet. I grew up poor as well so I think we also need to take into account social class as a key factor here when you talk about the experiences of tumblr and many of these young women - they seem to be very privileged and come from middle class to upper class families. When I went to college it was a first not only because it was during a time when men still outnumbered women in all education but also because I was from a family where we were poor and women were the lowest on the totem pole compared to male family members to get an education. My mother and father were very proud as 1st gen Americans to know I would be better off then them. Unfortunately I still suffered as a young woman from real rape, domestic violence and destitution. Trust me when a man takes away your right to speak without being hit or threatened with sexual violence or physical assault, you realize really fast that men and women ARE physically different. I think many of these women who tote on social media their male trauma may not actually know what they are talking about. Also male feminization is very unattractive to me personally. Even as a Italian woman and culturally strong and independent, I have always craved traditional masculinity in the healthy way. Too bad some men think masculinity is supposed to be violence and dominance driven. I also don’t trust male feminists. I agree with your position in what I’ve seen as well. Finally as with trans and AGP there is a mass contagion tied to porn as well. I’ve had my own experiences where men have been lured into sissification (I find it sexually repulsive to dominate men and to belittle and penetrate the male body sorry) but it can be very seductive in the porn rabbit hole. We do need women to stop hurting men and stop militant hatred of masculinity
Brilliant piece. As with all your writing the breadth of scope, searing honesty, and logical rigour is incredibly engaging. I’ve read all your work with great appreciation and never felt compelled to reply, as I’ve never needed clarification or taken issue with the depth of insight. I still don’t, but I’m commenting now to request a future exploration of a point mentioned as an aside in this piece towards its conclusion.
I am very interested in your critique of feminism - one of the few that has truly resonated with me, and one that is so rarely explored in good faith. I strongly agree with your identification of the ideology’s fatal flaw (the ostensible solidarity, based in inevitable sex-based oppression, of all females across classes). The Tumblr environment you so accurately describe in your piece, governed by disaffected adolescents of a mostly homogenous class, is living proof of how this strident bourgeois feminism has crippled the legitimacy of the movement (and the emotional development of teenagers who are stewing in the conflation of male/female with oppressor/oppressed).
I would love to read more in-depth writings on your critiques and be able to discuss it further! Thank you very much for your work and for sharing it with the public.
Wow - amazing. As I read I couldn’t help but think how can rogd parents tak or understand our kids trans ID without learning the nuances of the ideology that got them/us here. I know about Tumblr, but I didn’t “know” how it “distorts gender roles/expression certainly, but in a delusional and cruel manner”.
you absolutely killed it with this essay! it all brings back so many memories - I recall joining in around 2011/2012 for the Harry Potter and Coldplay fandoms, back when there were still funny/viral posts of teenage guys doing silly shit and a thousand girls being like "omg I love men of tumblr". of course by 2015 i was a self-dx'd bpd agender she/he/they!
>“Kill all men,” Tumblrites claim, is just a funny ha-ha joke, and for the most part it is, but it is rarely ever used jokingly.
perfectly accurate, applicable to "kill all hets" and etc. that maintains this nasty facade of plausible deniability while it wears away at you after a thousand viewings, in ways that can't be qualified & sound like an overexaggeration when describing a single isolated incident. very much sounds like toxic female bullying actually!
(interestingly, more normie friends of mine who were only light tumblr users were quick to point out how horrible and nasty that phrase is - really interesting to think how being online & enmeshed in the ideology enough makes you not consciously register the objective meaning of the words & explain them away as a necessary hyperbole)
the social pressure to not be straight (let alone a straight male) is so painfully obvious but, like misandry, nobody wants to admit that on these hellsites minority status = power. everyone still acts like lgbt people are marginalised on them even when people identifying as lgbt make up the majority & loudest demographic. it is very natural to me that to stay sane, straight males on tumblr would need a way out of that. even in detrans circles i noticed for a long time the narrative was always that people (females) just transitioned due to internalised homophobia; i'm glad it's moving away from being so intertwined w the radfem community (who say the same "kill all men" rhetoric and have no self-awareness) and that there are so many prominent straight detrans members.
i'm really glad for all your insights and work you've done & are still doing. you got this!
I've just spent the afternoon reading all the entries on your blog after seeing this piece on The Glinner Update. It was fascinating, thanks for not putting it behind a paywall.
The most interesting article for me was Cold Tukey Check-in where you talked about the effects of stopping taking estrogen. I'm an AGP male myself. I'm a generation older than you, and I've never had any desire to actually transition, but I've always been interested in the differences between the sexes, and in people who don't conform to gender norms. Everything about the recent trend for transgenderism and gender identity ideology has been fascinating to me. I know that if I'd been born in the late 1990s or early 2000s I'd be calling myself genderfuid, at the least.
I don't agree with all of your veiws, but I appreciate your candor and your righteous indignation at the people pushing this ideology upon children.
Excellent article. Some parts I don't quite agree with, however enjoyed it all. Thanks for the incredible time & effort you've put into this.
Fascinating read. Thanks for putting it out there.
I'm puzzled by this statement: "In neither case are these men adequately able to confront the shame and disgust that is biologically part and parcel with male sexuality ..." Could you elaborate? Do you consider shame and disgust intrinsic to male sexuality? Why?
Read this today on Graham Linehan's substack, and had to come here to comment. What an outstanding and insightful piece of work. Thank you for writing it!
"Narcissistic self-identification was and still is sacrosanct. To dispel what one believed oneself to be was akin to a hate crime."
This needs to be analysed and debunked with a good dose of reality.
Pull these kids away from screens at home and at school. Back to the classroom with a real live teacher and no smart-phones, lots of new (or old!) school subjects - without "gender" in the PHSE curriculum - and wide reading for pleasure, sports, charity work, dressmaking, whatever takes the adolescent's fancy. Just fill their lives with off-line reality.
Limpida depicts very accurately a miserable, introverted world of insecurity and infantile entitlement.
Wow, niece piece, superb writing. Only recently I was telling a friend that I detected a rhetorical and ideological connection between feminism and TI but I didn’t have the wherewithal to unpack it, so you can imagine how fascinated I was by this essay.
Now I know why there's been a proliferation of teenage girls purporting to be "queer".
I've yet to encounter a right-wing trans incel though 🤔
"While there is a truth to the idea that women lack the physical force necessary to defeat men in combat, they more than make up for it through their unique strengths in social coercion." Bonobos, chimpanzee wars, and sexual dimorphism, oh my!
Amazing piece by the way.
Hi there. I would love to publish the parts of this specifically about Tumblr. Would that be ok, with a link back here of course?
Very insightful piece Keep writing And keep the door open for new experiences I hope life brings you more joy than you think possible
I listened to you on Benjamin Boyce and have followed you on twitter. You have a wise and thoughtful perspective. My 14 yr old is mixed up in this so I am leaning in and trying to understand. I really appreciate all your thoughts. Also, I think you and Helena would make a good couple- though then you'd be normies lol.