Are You For Fucking Real

Often posts would go:

*describes a bad thing that many people may go through* (Okay. Nice. Good discourse.)

*adds an addendum about how it disproportionately affects trans women* (Excellent. Important to say. Good addition.)

*adds an addendum to that addendum that specifies I'm a stinky TME and calls trans men a slur* (Why. Why did you have to say that. I get that you hate yourself. I get that you're in a competition to be the feministest. But it's so unnecessary. It also detracts attention from the group whose voices you were trying to boost.)

If you actually take the threat of forced detransition seriously, then you should recognize "Conservative transphobes don't want to kill transmascs, they just want to detransition them" for the callous and out-of-touch statement that it is.

"Ugh, you're actually lucky they don't want to kill you, they just want to permanently cut you off from gender-affirming care, rape you, trap you in marriage and pregnancy, and force you to live the rest of your life as their property."

Wow, I feel so blessed.

"We don't want no Zionists here" is not a righteous political slogan. 

Every single country that has ever outlawed Zionism went on to persecute, abuse, and even expel its Jewish population…whether said Jews identified as Zionists or not. 

This is one of the many reasons Jewish historical literacy is so important.

IRAQ

When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Zionism became a capital crime in Iraq. However, Iraq’s persecution of “Zionists” dated back to the 1930s; for example, in 1935, all Palestinian Jewish* Hebrew teachers were deported and the head of the Iraqi Zionist organization was put on trial.

For a Jew to be convicted of the crime of “Zionism,” they only had to be denounced by two Muslims, and there was no system of appeal. Under the guise of anti-Zionism, Jews in Iraq were systematically charged with treason, dismissed from their jobs, arrested on trumped up charges, tortured, and even executed. Oftentimes, their assets were seized, totaling around $80 million. 

The “proof” that a Jew was a “Zionist” was often tenuous at best. For example, in one case, a Jewish man was sentenced to five years of forced labor because he owned a Biblical Hebrew inscription, which his accusers falsely claimed was a “coded Zionist message.”

While the Iraqi government claimed to go after “Zionists,”anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews were not spared.The most prominent case was that of Shafiq Ades, who had long been openly anti-Zionist. Ades was arrested on charges that he had sold arms to Israel. He was not allowed the right to a defense and was tried and convicted in a show trial. He was publicly executed on September 23, 1948, to a crowd of 12,000 onlookers.

By the early 1950s, 120,000-130,000 out of 150,000 Iraqi Jews had fled Iraq. By 1967, only 3,000 Jews remained in Iraq. Nevertheless, following the Arab countries’ defeat in the 1967 Six Day War, the Iraqi government amped up its crackdown on “Zionism.”

As part of this crackdown, Jews were dismissed from their jobs, their bank accounts were frozen, and they were confined to house arrest. 

In 1968, the new socialist Ba’athist regime announced that they were “hunting down an American-Israeli spy ring” that was supposedly trying to destabilize Iraq. Twelve people -- nine of them Jews -- were arrested. The Jews were hung publicly in January 1969 without trial to a dancing crowd of 500,000 people. Another 40 Jews were “disappeared” by the secret police; in total, some 100 Jews out of the community of 3,000 were imprisoned and tortured in 1969 alone. 

These Jews were accused and convicted of Zionism, treason, and spying not based on legitimate evidence, but rather, entirely arbitrarily. For example, Daoud Ghali Yadgar was one of the nine Jews who were hanged in 1969. In 2019, his cousin, Nitzan Hadad, explained: “Soldiers had entered their home looking for the eldest son, who was in London studying. When they asked who was at home, my aunt replied that her other son, Daoud, was home. So they took Daoud instead and accused him of spying for Israel.”

*At the time, any citizen of the British Mandate of Palestine was known as a “Palestinian,” regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

EGYPT

Egypt, too, claimed to crack down on “Zionists,” but in reality made virtually no effort to distinguish between Zionists and Jews. In 1947, the Egyptian prime minister told the British ambassador, “All Jews are potential Zionists [and] ...anyhow all Zionists are Communists.”

After Israel's independence, scores of Jews were arrested and imprisoned in Abu Qir detention camp. Professor Chacham Choureka, who was later arrested in the 1950s, described the situation, noting, “The authorities didn't differentiate between teaching Judaism and Zionist activity. In reality though, part of teaching Torah is about Israel.”

As in Iraq, the anti-Zionist incitement in Egypt led to a number of repressive policies, arrests, and more. The 1956 Suez Crisis between Israel, Egypt, France, and Great Britain further exacerbated the already precarious situation. Once again, the Egyptian government made its position clear, declaring that “all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state.” Thousands of Jews were then imprisoned on “Zionism” charges or removed from their jobs. Ironically, prominent anti-Zionist Jews also suffered the same consequences.

THE SOVIET UNION

The Soviets considered all forms of non-Russian nationalism — including Zionism — a threat to their budding communist empire. In 1918, the midst of the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Communist Party established a “Jewish branch,” with the consent of Vladimir Lenin. It was named “Yevsetskiya,” meaning “Jewish Sections of the Communist Party.”

The mission of the Yevsetskiya was, quite literally, the “destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.” In other words, this Jewish branch of the Soviet government was dedicated solely to the destruction of fellow Soviet Jewry. Until their dissolution in 1929, they imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of Jews. According to historian of Soviet history Richard Pipes, “In time, every Jewish cultural and social organization came under assault.”

As early as 1934, the Soviets presented the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a region in the Russian Far East, as an “alternative” to Zionism. Despite rosy Soviet government propaganda, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, located along the Russia-China border, was nearly impossible to cultivate for non-natives to the region and practically inhospitable. Though the government never outrightly admitted it, the Jewish population transfers to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast were a form of forced deportation, similar to other population transfers of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union.

Post-World War II, Jews in the far-flung republics Azeri and Uzbek republics of the Soviet Union were forced to attend anti-Zionist demonstrations, where they were made to publicly disavow Israel and Zionism under threat of arrest, deportation to gulags, or worse.

The Soviets’ “anti-Zionist” campaign culminated in the Doctors’ Plot, when “Zionist” Jewish doctors were arrested, tortured, and executed on entirely fake charges that they had plotted to assassinate Stalin. Some historians believe that this was only part of a wider plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Soviet Jewish population…all under the guise of anti-Zionism. However, due to Stalin’s sudden death, the plan was ultimately never carried out.

The Soviets were interestingly never covert about the fact that their “anti-Zionist” campaigns were actually just antisemitic. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda made blatantly antisemitic claims, including: “The character of the Jewish religion serves the political aims of the Zionists,” “Zionism is inextricable from Judaism, rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish People,” comparisons of Judaism to the Italian mafia, and claims that Israel was merely a means to an end of Jewish imperialism and world domination.

The repression of Soviet Jewry under the guise of “Zionism” only intensified after the 1967 Six Day War. Jewish cultural and religious life was highly restricted. Virtually every institution in Soviet society heavily discriminated against the Jewish population; for example, Jews were subject to highly restrictive university quotas. This placed Jews in a catch-22: on the one hand, they were not free to live as Jews; on the other, they were also barred from integrating as Soviet citizens. 

For this reason, hundreds of thousands of Jews were desperate to flee the Soviet Union. Requesting exit visas was considered an act of treason. In order to apply for exit visas, Jews first had to quit their jobs; however, this put them at risk of being accused of “social parasitism,” which was considered a crime. After having their visas refused, Jews were also then prevented from obtaining new work. Then, this joblessness was criminalized. Soviet Jews were stuck in an impossible living situation.

POLAND

n 1968, a series of student-led protests broke out against the Communist government of Poland. The Polish government responded to the instability by scapegoating their now tiny post-Holocaust Jewish community, enacting a a massive “anti-Zionist” propaganda campaign, spreading conspiracies that Zionist were plotting to take over Poland. 

The Polish public was then forced to renounce Zionism, and Jews, whether they identified as Zionists or not, were purged from their positions in the government and other sectors, accused of holding dual loyalties to Israel. Many were arrested, beaten, and tortured. In its efforts, the Polish government created lists of Jews, eerily echoing the policies in Poland under Nazi occupation just several decades prior.

As a result of these campaigns, 15,000 out of 25,000-30,000 Jews in Poland were stripped of their Polish citizenship. The 1968 Polish political crisis is sometimes called a “symbolic pogrom” because Jews experienced such severe disenfranchisement that many took their lives in a string of suicides.

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

According to Iranian-American policy analyst Karim Sadjapour, the three ideological pillars of the Iranian regime are “compulsory hijab, death to America, and death to Israel.” 

Immediately after the Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic to power, the Israeli embassy in Tehran was attacked and turned into the Palestinian embassy. To this day, the Islamic Republic has erected an “Israel annihilation clock” in Tehran, counting down the days to Israel’s supposed destruction. Incitement against “Zionists” and the “Zionist entity” is commonplace in Islamic Republic political discourse; for example, in 2006, then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated, “The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated.” 

About a month after the Islamic Republic came into power, the Ayatollah Khomeini made an example of a prominent Jewish community leader, Habib Elghanian, by accusing him of “Zionist espionage.”He was arrested, tried in a sham trial that lasted less than 20 minutes, and executed by firing squad.

Incidents such as this one prompted 80% of Iran’s ancient Jewish population to flee the country. Today, the 8,500 Jews still living in Iran are subject to second-class citizenship and are constantly under the suspicion of the regime, for which they must tread carefully, never openly criticizing the regime’s implementation of Sharia Law or revealing any ties -- however tenuous -- to Zionism or the State of Israel.

ETHIOPIA

In the late 1970s, a new Marxist government rose to power in Ethiopia. An antisemitic, anti-government right-wing group began a killing spree in 1978, cutting children’s feet off, bludgeoning babies, castrating men, raping women, torturing elders, and selling women and children into slavery.

Instead of condemning the attacks, the Ethiopian government decided to crack down on its Jewish community. They claimed to do so in the name of combatting “Zionist propaganda.”

Because of the worsening conditions, Ethiopian Jews tried to flee to Israel. As a punishment for “Zionism,” Jews were collectively arrested, tortured, and hung.

LIBYA

After the establishment of the State of Israel, Libya criminalized individuals who communicated with anyone in Israel, creating a difficult situation for Libyan Jews, most of whom have family in the Jewish state. By 1961, all but six members of the ancient Libyan Jewish community were denied Libyan citizenship.

OTHER

A number of other countries, such as Pakistan and Algeria, have passed laws criminalizing Zionism after the entire Jewish community was already expelled or fled from the country. In Pakistan, the criminalization of “Zionism” means that carrying a Jewish symbol like the Star of David can land you in prison.

SOME TAKEAWAYS

(1) Zionism is a political movement…a political movement, which, whether you like it or not, is objectively rooted in 3000 years of Jewish history, culture, and tradition. Anti-Zionists overwhelmingly reject not only Zionism as a political movement, but the 3000 years of Jewish history, culture, and tradition that precede it, because such history, culture, and tradition may provide an “explanation” or “justification” for Zionism. Therefore, it’s no surprise that, for example, a Jewish man in Iraq was charged with the crime of Zionism for owning a Biblical Hebrew inscription or that the Egyptian authorities did not differentiate between Zionist activism and teaching about Judaism. History shows us that crackdowns on “Zionism” always, without fail, turn into crackdowns of any and all expression of Jewish identity (which is precisely why anti-Israel protestors were shouting “we don’t want no Zionists here” in front of a Jewish hospital, which has no specific ties to Israel or Zionism). 

(2) Polls consistently show that between 80-97% of Jews identify as Zionists and/or believe in the State of Israel’s right to exist. There isn’t much difference between marginalizing 80-97% of Jews and marginalizing allJews. 

Perhaps it’s time to consider that the overwhelming majority of Jews identify as Zionists not because we are collectively evil, but rather, based on our own experiences and understanding of our history, identity, and tradition. Perhaps it’s time to consider that you don’t understand how Zionists define their Zionism.

(3) When you don’t want “Zionists” in Israel and you don’t want “Zionists” wherever else it is you live, perhaps the problem is not where we live, but that we live.

Anti-Zionists claim anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and yet, every single "anti-Zionist" campaign in history has resulted in antisemitism.

After everything our own parents and grandparents went through, why should we trust that your anti-Zionist campaign is any different?

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

Jewish historical literacy is knowing that once they start going after “Zionists,” anti-Zionist Jews won’t be spared, either.  So have some self-respect and stop groveling to people who hate everything about your Jewish identity.

I wasn't going to comment on Thicced-Witch going full Transandro Space Lasers but now she is just outright uhhh

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

oh jeezy weezy

this is a lot

a lot of you take terf arguments but then just replace the identity with transmasc/lesboy/theyfab/etc. and you're not fucking slick about it.

all this "um these non-western people are ACTUALLY just trans women, they just don't understand gender as goodly as I do :))" shit really gives "there's NO way the ignorant brown people could've built the pyramids, it MUST'VE been aliens!!". but again I had a racist father who was into the flat earth, ancient aliens, etc. bullshit so I could just be projecting a little lol........

if someone from another country doesn't identify as a trans woman MAYBE that's because they're not a trans woman, NOT because they're too uneducated and ignorant to know about the concept of trans women?? I feel like that shouldn't be that hard a concept to grasp.

the western gender binary of Masculine Man and Feminine Woman is not some innate biological default that all other cultures strive to emulate. Y'all are just exorsexist, xenophobic, and very very stupid.

The thing is, they just think the Western gender binary is objectively superior, so it's supposed to be flattering when they insist that White people simply imposed third sex nonsense onto, for example, Native Americans. It's more "brown people couldn't possibly have strayed from the light of the true path on their own, they're smarter than that."

can we please stop using certain names to mock trans men, nonbinary people and trans women yet. Like putting aside the fact that the names emily, aiden, kai and sock don't make good insults at all, you're shitting on a pretty big portion of the trans community by making these names seem like a bad thing, sorry that not everybody chose a ""special and unique"" name buddy.

An incredibly pernicious anti-transmasc argument that keeps making the rounds is that everything we do was plagiarized from trans women.

Coining a term to describe our unique and gendered experiences of oppression? We're just copying trans women.

Complain that we're often rejected from queer circles for our perceived violent maleness? We're just parroting what's happened to trans women.

Forcemasc fetish blogs? We're just copying One Specific Trans Woman-Run Blog that got popular.

These claims are annoying on their own, but together they paint a clear picture of what transandrophobes want you to believe: that trans men and transmascs are incapable of creating anything ourselves, or if we did, it would have nothing in common with what trans women and fems are doing. The function of these claims is to convince you that trans people of seemingly opposite identities are equally opposite in experiences, and any evidence to the contrary is actually cultural appropriation fueled by jealousy.

This is gender essentialism. It's fueled by the radical feminist belief that "woman" and "man" are not so much terms that get abused to justify people's oppression as they are positions in a class conflict, one where All Men seek and/or directly benefit from the oppression of All Women, and that indeed, manhood and womanhood themselves are defined by this relationship to one another. To be a man is to be an entitled parasite; to be a woman is to be an overworked victim.

That notion is racist and transphobic on the face of it, and that is equally obvious in these arguments about trans men - all of which are predicated on the idea that the average trans man is white, well-off, and able to go stealth whenever necessary, and therefore benefits from the maximum amount of male privilege a trans man can be afforded. Following from that logic, any trans man or that you encounter online can be reasonably assumed to share that experience, and any mention he might make of trans men who fail to meet those qualifications is nothing more than a rhetorical cudgel that we use to deny our own privilege.

I'm sure you can see the problem there.

It's not surprising that I typically see these claims made by white women, frequently about Black and Indigenous men. Speaking from the perspective of a white person, it can be very easy to fall into a trap of thinking that our specific experiences with oppression makes us general experts, and grow defensive when someone provides knowledge that shows we were wrong. It can like we're being victimized on the basis of the oppression we do have, and it can be incredibly hard to stop, listen, and admit that we fucked up. This is doubly difficult when the person criticizing us is a member of a demographic that seemingly contributes to the oppression we face.

But just because we think it's happening doesn't always make it so. Yes, there are times when people are acting in bad faith, or overlooking their own areas of ignorance - to err, as they say, is human. But often, we're the ones in the wrong, and need to recognize that fact before acting. So where do we draw the line?

The thing that I've always found crucial is to stop, breathe, and think. We have to honestly ask ourselves whether the other party is saying "your experiences are not real", or just "your understanding of these issues isn't as all-encompassing as you assumed". Simply asking yourself "am I really being harmed, or do I just feel like I'm being harmed?" can often save you from a massive foot-in-mouth situation.

It's necessary to remember that people whose identities are different from our own have their own experience and knowledge. Unless they are coming out and telling us what problems we do or don't have, we need to trust that they're coming from a place of good faith and genuine knowledge, and be willing to listen and change our minds if necessary.

We have to make ourselves comfortable with the fact that we are not always the most, or only, important voice in the room.

That's something that a lot of anti-transmasc women love to remind us, and I wouldn't say they're always wrong. Simply being a man can and often does incentivize people to engage in misogyny, to talk over women and disregard their experiences, when we find them uncomfortable or irrelevant. Again - everybody fucks up sometimes. But it crosses a line when you start demanding that courtesy from others while refusing to extend it back to them; when you treat any information they offer as automatically inferior or entirely invalid, based solely on their perceived relationship to privilege.

In fact, doing so is literally an ad hominem argument.

Aside from that, I must point out that these arguments are being employed specifically to silence trans men's and mascs' voices. This is not an honest misunderstanding; it's an act of profound self-centeredness at best and outright malice at worst. How do I know this? Well, stop me if you've ever heard one of these before:

"Women don't have real interests; they just like silly frivolous things. Men's hobbies are real and meaningful."

"Women are inherently wired to be emotional. Men are logical and level-headed. I'm not sexist, it's just science."

"If you hear a woman say anything smart, you can bet she learned it from a man."

These, too, are silencing tactics, historically (and currently!) used to devalue and silence the voices of women. In fact, they're things that I have personally heard and been affected by, as a trans man who has spent the vast majority of my life being seen and treated as a woman.

I didn't fall for it then, and I sure ain't falling for it now.

men are so whiny and sensitive about this oh my god. do you not hear how misogynistic entitled and lesbophobic this is and also just what a huge loser you sound like. "lesbians hate us because we're MEN and not sexy butch lesbians" Well yeah.. obviously.. even cis men can usually put it together that lesbians probably love lesbians more than men, so why are you so confused? you expecting some sort of special pussy treatment? No one wishes you would become a butch lesbian, you are thinking quite highly of yourself though aren't you

I guess Plaidos is doing that thing where she unblocks me to reblog me again lol.

Accusing me of pretending to be a trans woman is in fact misgendering me. I am a trans woman. I provably have a voice that can only belong to a person AMAB or someone who's tried very hard over a long period of time to masculinize their voice, so if I'm not a 'TMA' person, you must be necessarily be accusing me of being a man, although it would not be any better if you were saying I was any other kinna non-trans woman either, because it's still misgendering to say a trans woman is faking being a trans woman regardless.

You're misgendering a trans woman when you say I'm not a trans woman. You literally said me claiming to be a trans woman is the same as a conservative man making an attack helicopter joke. You can apologize for that at your leisure.

Extremely conceited. You come up on my blog fairly infrequently, but you have over fifteen times the followers I do and what you say has reverberations in trans discourse, so sometimes I get anons letting me know what new hornet's nest you've kicked off. I don't look at your blog because it makes my skin physically crawl. The fact that you're an Actually Popular Trans Woman on Tumblr, unlike me, means that you're going to get talked about occasionally because every time you say some dumb shit your gaggle of idiots is ready to enthusiastically vomit it at the other minority groups you call slurs.

Sincerely, get the fuck over it, you're either a prominant transfeminist literary analysist or you aren't.

It's literally a content warning, because you're a hateful and offensive person, but it's wild I should even have to defend that since 'transfeminists' will tag posts hating on me on a regular basis for no particular reason.

If you actually do go through that tag, you'll see that I tend to only ever talk about you in response to people bringing you up first, or in the case of you misgendering me, you talking about me first. The only real exception is that I made two posts about the Dropout discourse you blatantly started for attention, which was (a) still brought to me by anons since I'd not have known you were responsible for that otherwise and (b) a special interest of mine I was really fucking pissed off that you were fucking up with the bullshit that special interest was an escape from.

I'm not sending anyone to do anything, moron.

Your vanity is not charming. I've talked about you lately in direct response to you talking about and misgendering me. You are discussing me too dummy.

I don't think you should be transmisogynistically harassed, but I'm absolutely fucking not responsible for someone with fifteen times the followers I have getting backlash to things like defending a 4chan slur for non-binary people. Like, no, actually, someone taking issue with that is not on me, and considering what you think counts as transmisogyny, I'm not really sure I even buy your characterization of said backlash, especially if they're "directly referencing" anything I say.

Completely unsupported by your behavior! Do you remember when you were randomly like "if you're wondering what velvetvexations is up to, she's saying you can call trans women hysterical because they don't have uteruses" when that was not what I fucking said?

I've tried making the same "I'll never mention you if you don't mention me" offer to people who obsessively stalk my blog before, including people who I would never talk about anyway because they don't have nearly the same presence on this website. I've asked them to stop screenshotting my blog and lying about me and getting anons sent to my inbox as a result. I've reported them to Tumblr, who doesn't consider it harassment. Each time the people stalking me - which is what they were actually doing to me, unlike me occasionally commenting when someone tells me you've caused some new discourse - was laughed at and told I simply deserve it or bring it upon myself.

Once again, you position yourself as a serious transfeminist activist and you have the following to back it up. You have influence in the conversation around transfeminism and as a trans woman I have a right to talk about it. Tell people to stop parroting your every word, or better yet, entirely stop kicking at trans men and non-binary people literally every day. Like literally every day you do this, it's why I can't look at your blog because it fucking repulses me.

You don't do anything to help trans women. You don't care about trans women. You care about being cruel to other trans people and using that to prop up your own crumbling ego. I would love it if your opinions weren't unfortunately popular and constantly being widely disseminated among others, but like, they are, and it's fucking disastrous for everyone involved. I don't hate you more than any other dumbass radfem.

I've helped TERFs deradicalize and retransition. You will never in your life do a quarter of what I do for transfeminism. The most you will ever accomplish is being an aggressive contrarian who's too unoriginal to come up with headcanons that weren't popular with transmascs first and claiming it a win when you say they're too stupid and shallow to interpret art correctly.