www.elizamondegreen.substack.com

Eliza Mondegreen #transphobia elizamondegreen.substack.com

Extremism-fluid: The neo-Nazi-to-trans pipeline
"Hate groups prey on people who feel like outsiders or that they don't belong."

[...]
The other day, I was talking to a friend about people—men in particular—going from neo-Nazis to transgender activists and he quipped: "What is the pipeline? The neo-Nazi becomes tired of being unpopular but still wants to be in a hate group?"

It’s a thing I’ve observed online and in real life. So what might be going on here?

[...]
When these Redditors talk about the allure of neo-Nazism, white supremacism, and the alt-right, they talk about being recruited online based on personality and life-situation factors like being young, frustrated, misfit, desperate to belong, confused, insecure, and too online. There’s a lot of insight here. They just don’t extend this insight from their dark pasts to their dark presents. In fact, now they see themselves as reformed. They believe they’ve left all that in the past.

But how did these young people come to the ‘saving’ realization that they were really trans? They were recruited. Online. Based on the very same personality and life-situation factors. Often in the same online spaces. By the same radicalizing algorithms. To participate in the same kinds of antisocial behavior and aggression.

Only the cause is different. The participants, recruitment methods, vulnerability factors, appeal, and behaviors are the same.

In other words, it sure looks like Hoffer was right when he observed what we could call the “fluidity” that so often goes along with fanaticism. It's easy for an extremist of one stripe to become an extremist of another type. The belief system on behalf of which they take an extremist stance is always secondary to the pull of extremism itself. More important that the belief system is the opportunity an extremist movement presents to vent hatred and channel self-contempt, as Hoffer observed:
[...]
The real question is what young people need to break up with fanaticism and extremism altogether, not how to get them to shift from one form of extremism to another, more fashionable one.

Eliza Mondegreen #transphobia elizamondegreen.substack.com

Don't let sissy-porn addicts redefine what it means to be a woman

Redefining women from a sex class to a mixed-sex class based on male sexual projections reifies sex-role stereotypes and requires actual women and girls to dissociate body and mind. After all, we’re not allowed to say we’re women because we’re female anymore. We’re supposed to look inside ourselves and find something else that makes us women—something that has nothing to do with female embodiment—that a man can experience, too, like getting turned on by the idea of your own sexual defilement. If some men want to wear ‘women’ as masks, then women must be masks, nothing more.

This dissociation of mind and body is a disaster for women’s political organizing and it does a number on the mental health of individual women and girls, too. But sowing dissociation is a great recruitment tool for the new global empire of disembodiment.

Since the men boldly redefining 'woman' are a bunch of self-confessed sissy-porn addicts, no woman or girl will relate to the definitions they put forward.

Are you an "expectant asshole" with "blank, blank eyes"?

Didn't think so. Not much of a woman, are you?

How about: “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”?

Still no?

"There is something about being treated like shit by men that feels like affirmation itself, like a cry of delight from the deepest cavern of my breast... To be the victim of honest, undisguised sexism possesses an exhilarating vitality."

Do you feel an exhilarating vitality at being treated like shit by men or not so much?

Meanwhile, you’re constantly prompted to accept or reject your debasement. You’re expected to package yourself as “cisgender,” which means agreeing—publicly, repeatedly—that you’re comfortable with what every girl and woman in fact chafes against as she grows up and tries to find a place for herself in the world. [...]