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hissing_serpents [she/her, it/its]
yeah we’re in a pretty reactionary area but i don’t think it’s that, like all this stuff is pretty mainstream liberal scholarship as far as i can tell, it just feels so alienating. like maybe i’m being spiteful or close minded but so much of “trans studies” just feels like trying to shoehorn us into some philosophical gender abolition thing for the sake of cis people instead of the actual material struggles of living as a trans person. the prof also seemingly can’t go a day without doing some really dismissive dig at marxism and then spending like half the class time trying to make my partner who’s in there with me look dumb for caring abt materialism.
pretty minor problem in the scheme of things but i’m taking a trans studies class in my university taught by who i’m 95% sure is just A Cis Guy and it is bothering me to no end.
going to class every week to learn why postmodern academics think Transsexualism™ is problematic and Reinforcing The Binary while i’m finally coming to terms with myself for actually wanting bottom surgery and realizing that it’s gotten a lot less accessible for me during the few years i spent waffling
ya maybe I should’ve brought up that I’m also a CPUSA member but that felt a little cheap at the time. I think we broadly agree on voting on electoralism and going off your one “confession post” so it was a little disappointing do see you calling a perspective that’s pretty important right now stupid and going after people who’re saying they don’t want to vote for a guy actively enabling genocide at this very moment.
Like joining the CPUSA and talking abt it with comrades there helped me move past being a “there’s no difference and engaging with electoralism is a waste of time because it’s not immediate armed insurrection” mindset. IMO the voting question is really a pretty simple problem with a simple answer, and getting so heated over it to the point of defending views most of us don’t even really hold isn’t helping the problem of the entire american left having a meltdown over elections every few years.
Why relitigate if voting is good or bad right now, when a sizable contingent of people are getting fed up with the Dems, and not even the most progressive elements of the Dems are stepping up to back them? If we’re trying to build a mass movement, isn’t this a golden opportunity to weaken the hold of a liberal capitalist party on that mass movement?
From my understanding of the CPUSA’s program the reason to be willing to collaborate with Democrats and endorse voooooting is because the Dems and more importantly their base represent one of the only nationally viable venues for the kind of progressive coalitional politics we’re trying to do with working class and otherwise oppressed people against american fascism and towards socialism.
Reading the link I’m really not getting ultraleftist denunciation of voting and electoral politics entirely, it reads more like a member of one part of the Dem’s progressive base who’s been burned by the centrist right collaborationist wing of the Dems supporting genocide and hate towards their people to hilt. I can understand allying with Dems and participating in electoralism because communism is about power to the people and right now the people are still trying to exercise their power within the Democratic party, but if we’re here for the people shouldn’t we be there for them when the Dems fuck them over? Why call this dumb?
Believe me I’m annoyed too when leftists go on about refusing to vote for Democrats as if it’s a revolutionary act, but how is this that? Like there’s a pretty clear call for change on the Dem’s part, and I don’t see why a constituency being abandoned like this shouldn’t speak out and make it clear what the Dems are doing.
at least for me the dehumanization is kind of the point, we use ‘it’ for animals too, but only for the disposable ones. cis ppl will apologize for misgendering a dog and then turn around and use the same language for a trans person that they would for a pest.
i don’t like that it’s as simple as “dehumanizing” to take away your consideration for someone, like maybe if being other than human weren’t a license to be treated with cruelty and disregard it wouldn’t be as easy to deny empathy just for being different.
i’ll use it/its out of solidarity with everyone and everything that doesn’t get to be a person, and bc i still have that privilege (usually) but i’d rather it not be a privilege at all.
also anecdotally as a trans woman saying she/it is a great way to not get passively aggressively they/them-ed and “that person”-ed
yeah i think a lot of this is based on a settler brained distortion of decolonization/landback as like reverse colonialism with the ultimate goal of instating some kind of bizarro ethnostate for the colonized. literally just isn’t what it’s about. especially in the US where we don’t have the same kind of hyper violent concentration camp thing happening (anymore) revenge really doesn’t seem to be a priority of any Indigenous people.