I've said before that the transfeminism I express here is not yet a real political movement, on the basis that it does not posses any actual movement. And while some of this of course is just the relative recency of viable versions of transfeminism and the public popularity of anti-feminist, anti-trans, and anti-transfeminist sentiments, some of it is also a tumblr problem.
Tumblr does not understand what a political discussion should look like. Inevitably, it devolves into a discourse™, and once it does, any semblance of a connection to the materiality of the subject matter is lost completely.
The spectre of the ship wars haunts this website's culture, it hardly means anything to be "pro-ship" or "anti-ship" because the discourse devolved so far past the domain of practical, material action, that it left the realm of politics entirely.
Transfeminism on tumblr has become mired in these discourses. Actual transfeminists who have actually read or write feminist and trans liberation theory understand the utility of terms like transmisogyny, tma/tme(or it's more useful alternatives like transmisogynized or transfeminized), they understand that any notion of "misandry", including "transmisandry" is a rudderless, antifeminist, utterly unsupported idea, and they understand the ways in which society does not view transfems as men or as meaningfully possessing male privilege.
They hold these positions, which are highly controversial on tumblr, and yet they make up barely a footnote of their actual theory and organizing, which are pointed squarely at the material demands of the people, especially transfeminine people, but also transmasculine people and cis women, who, unlike everyone on tumblr, they are actually fighting to liberate.
The fact that people reblogging posts about transmisandry are anti-feminists does not mean that you are a feminist because you reblog posts about transmisogyny. You are engaging in discourse, not politics.
This is not me saying both sides are wrong, far from it, one side is obviously correct and the other a glorified hate and harassment campaign, but that the way tumblr conducts political discussions as discourse is fundamentally unproductive, and leads to cases where trans woman making correct theoretical points get read in the worst possible fashion and then paraded around the site as the discourse machine takes away the political nature of the discussion in lieu of little more than harassment.
This what happened to isff. Especially after her brief ban by tumblr, she became the center of a still-ongoing hate and harassment campaign which cloaks itself as political discussion by making her into the subject of the discourse rather than a person with thoughts, beliefs, or agency. This discourse took her arguing for youth and sexual liberation and the abolishing of the family as supposedly advocating for child sexual abuse, and her arguing for transfeminism as showing her to be a TERF or even a "TIM".
This was also what happened to Tara Knight. "Puppygate" happened when a transfeminist not knowledgeable of or interested in the tumblr discourse machine wrote a series of articles that was actually about how found families reproduce the dynamic, also found in traditional family structures, of coercive exploitation towards woman and the most feminized. It was received that way on platforms other than tumblr, and while people regardless of platform pointed out the original essay's flaws, on tumblr the article was transmuted by the discourse machine into supposedly being about murdering disabled trans women, Tara's exes, and AI.
I say this all to point out that engaging in tumblr discourse should never be mistaken for real political action that actually contributes to the liberation of women and trans people. I will continue to use this blog to try and win over those who have been deluded by it into anti-feminist, anti-trans positions, and to introduce people who happen to fall onto the correct side of that discourse to real feminist theory and encourage them to go and engage in real feminist action, but that requires an acknowledgement that the vast majority of this blog, and of tumblr (and to a lesser extent, the internet), is none of those things.
