Mx Aria Stewart @aredridel@anarchism.space

welp. Just left a solarpunk community because they decided that using the word 'queer' will require a trigger warning. Bye.

I'ma just say that if it doesn't fit on this meme template it's probably not allyship, it's just performance.

Caution: Epistemological silliness ahead

Twitter: We made a social network. It is made of wasps and will fuck you up.
Facebook: We don't have wasps, because we have spiders that will fuck you and the wasps up.
Mastodon: Here's fifteen paper straws, half of them soggy. Make a social network out of it.

It's really telling that some of the people most undermining gender as a system of oppression are so shat on by TERFs as well as feminists. The strategy to separate us works.

Feminism _must_ keep a path open for men to exit both toxicity ... and being men. And it must allow people to become men without forcing them to adopt toxicity to fit in.

Some of this is divide and conquer by patriarchy. The language of feminism has been coopted. We can keep inventing it anew, of course, but we can also resist this reframing.

So, too, non-binary so often means 'not like other girls' or 'not like other men' or 'my womanhood is so often questioned it hurts less to let it go'.

And in more serious ways we've done poorly in modern feminism is the thing we dropped from the second wave feminists: there is oppression based in reproduction. Whether or not that is called 'woman', that oppression exists. We cannot will it away by changing labels. And, yes, my non-binary sisters, women participate in that oppression.

White trans feminists have done only a mediocre job of understanding gender at best. There is a strong compulsion not to question gender at the same time we question our own. So many of our takes are capitulations to patriarchy, not deeper truths. They are survival tactics and some incoherent theories.

Keeping out movements from being coopted by the adaptability of patriarchy and capitalism is an unending task. It requires us to be clever, to be aware, and I keep finding, the ability to reject the frame provided. It fundamentally requires changing every conversation we enter, to set new terms of engagement.

We have, as a culture, abandoned morality and the discussion of it as the domain of religion, rather than realizing it is the core of any just society.

Perhaps this is because to talk about it is to admit the evil around us in the world: the greed, the disdain, the avarice, the callousness and usury.

At the same time, we need a queer inclusive feminist theory based in moral philosophy and not just in phenomenology.

What we are left with without this is ways of being left as an assortment in the neoliberal fashion: marketing segments and "free choice" with no acknowledgement of social relations, their power structures hidden and embedded and shielded from critique, or bald appeals to 'innate nature'. We are reduced to labels, our movements cast aside. None of these will free us.