Questioning Transphobia

Jane LaPlain has agreed to guest blog here. If you want to see an example of her writing, I linked to a magnificent post she’s written about “cisgender” in the Trans 101 links.

I added a text resizer – you can see it as three As of increasing size in the top right margin. The left A decreases text size, the middle A resets it to default, and the right A increases it.

This is a temporary measure until I can get WP-chgFontSize to work. Unfortunately, I can’t get the widget to display, and I’ll be asking the person who helped me set this site up if there’s something we can do, but this is a (late) temporary measure

And I apologize for procrastinating on adding this. I got started on working on it weeks ago, but you know, see previous post.

Edit: Thanks to Emily S. it’s working and now I have two font resizers. There is no possible way this could go wrong.

I didn’t have the heart to just delete the blog because it would take away the domain name, and for some reason that annoyed me.

So it’s private and effectively gone forever. I hope people will finally stop linking to it instead of here.

Since people seem to fail at this constantly and I have to not approve their comments, I thought I’d offer some basic advice:

1. Don’t make any comments based on insulting anyone’s emotional state based on presumed type and level of hormones. This makes no sense and implies that substances that exist in everyone’s bodies somehow make trans people irrational. Doing this is not only a good way to not see your comment approved, but potentially a route to never seeing your comments approved.
2. Don’t do anything on this page. Period. I don’t care how valid or important you think these arguments are; you’re still wrong. Find some other way to make your point. For that matter, don’t do any variation of these, either. While Nezua focuses these on race, similar tactics are used against every marginalized group.
3. Don’t try to present your comment as the rational, objective perspective in opposition to my/our alleged emotional/oversensitive perspective. Don’t do this especially when you’re nursing a bruised ego because someone on the internet dared to criticize your favorite celebrity, movie, tv show, song, or comic book. You’re obviously coming from an emotional, biased perspective, so don’t even pretend otherwise.

Also, check out the comment rules in the sidebar.

I swear to god people, this is not rocket science. If you want to have a conversation, don’t come storming in here under the mistaken impression that anyone here is your social or intellectual inferior. If you can’t cope with that, write your own blog and whine about how unfair we are over there. I’ll continue to not care about your hurt feelings, but at least you can get some catharsis.

I know it will be late. I’m already so far off the rails at this point that I’m just going to enjoy the ride and get back here tomorrow.

They Call Me Vroom, also known as Bitchzarro at Below The Belt will be guest-posting this month. I don’t know how many posts she has in mind, but they should be interesting.

As I understand it, Butterflywings has objected to the characterization of her as a troll, and has suggested that it’s impossible for a woman to say the things that  Helen and I have said that she said on our blogs. She has also blamed us and accused us of bullying her because someone is allegedly commenting under her name and framing her. She has also demanded that I post the text of the comments because posting them would prove her innocence? That I’m lying? That what she put in my comments queue wasn’t really hate speech?

I just want everyone to know that I have a clear trail of trolling and sockpuppeting comments that go back 16 months on QT alone, that I can tie back to someone posting under the name Butterflywings to the Transphobic Tropes posts last September. Helen has similar logs pointing back to a history of trolling on Bird of Paradox, and the two of us have communicated extensively about the trolling on both QT and BoP over a period of months. Helen has also discussed Butterflywings’ history of trolling The F Word. I have also spoken with Genderbitch and Jill from Feministe (link, link) and have been able to link the trolling comments on QT and BoP to Butterflywings’ comment history elsewhere, including her recent protestations of innocence. Comments protesting her innocence have also been posted to Feministe, but not published, and again these are easily cross-referenced with the trolling comments. Also, while her comment was deleted from this Feministing discussion in May of 2009, you can determine the context from the responses (short version: She told a trans woman that it was misogynist to like her own breasts, and said that trans women don’t experience sexual harassment). She may believe I have no evidence, but the truth is that multiple people have evidence stretching back over the past 16 months.

If someone’s trying to frame Butterflywings as a transphobic troll, they’ve put a lot of time and energy into it, especially since Butterflywings didn’t notice until now?

She also insists that the trolling has nothing to do with feminism. But I didn’t make this about feminism, but rather the feminists who chose to troll. A notable amount of Butterflywings’ trolling itself draws upon radical feminist writings and theory. Butterflywings herself uses the language (actually, hate speech) adopted by the feminist blog “A Room of our Own” used to describe trans women. Feminism is very much at the center of this, specifically Butterflywings’ attempts to use feminist concepts to bully, harass, threaten, and abuse trans women.

Her blog is named “Feminist Response to Trans Activist Terrorism.” She’s trying to blame Helen and I for calling out the trolling. I have death threats on my blog, Helen has ominous threats to take down her post about the trolls or something bad will happen, and neither of us have gone looking for Butterflywings or anyone else, let alone posting comments anywhere she reads that say anything like what was left in our queues. At worst, I’ve mocked her attempts to troll QT.

Apparently, having abusive, threatening trolls attack you and being able to identify them by name is just like being a terrorist.

Also, I would appreciate it if no one trolled her back. I’m not posting this information to mobilize retribution, but to ensure that people know what she’s been up to. To know, more generally, what anti-trans radical feminist dogma is all about. And to know what to expect if she comes around to your blog.

If anyone has any questions, my e-mail address remains qt dot lisah at gmail dot com

to Sharav for setting the new site up and helping me with (or just doing them herself) various details to make sure QT runs smoothly.

And also for having the individual pieces of information I need every single time when trying to deal with the technical details gives me a headache.

New Blogger:

little light has joined us at QT. I know her posting volume probably won’t be all that high, but I have absolutely no room to complain. What she does write is powerful and true, and I’m flattered that she agreed to join QT.

Guest posting:

I know this fell off after a few months. I would like to get it started again.

I really loved having the conversations other people brought, and it was nice to have a few more posts going up (given my own approach to regular posting). So, this is just a note that hopefully we can get that going again. I want to thank everyone who participated in the past, and for those who didn’t get a chance to write posts they wanted to write, I’m totally down with repeat occurrences. I would like to be a bit more strict about the month-long timeline than previously.

Pre-Monday open post:

I’ve pretty much worked through everything I can without actually getting help regarding my earlier post. Yes, I’m still being vague about what it is. I want to be clear that it does directly impact my ability to produce blog posts regularly, and this is not something I am able to change at this time. Thank you for the supportive comments on my previous post.

The Monday Open Post will bring a surprise of amazingness and brilliance.

I’ve recently received some hate speech and actual threats in my moderation queue.

I may post in greater depth later, but I want everyone to be aware that occasional commenters have posted anti-trans hate speech several times on this blog over a period of several months, and topped it off with a threat to reveal my personal information (address, specifically) without my consent. Another commenter from the London area, from a different IP address, conveyed further hate speech and anti-trans slurs, and used language that had I heard it in person, I would have immediately called 911. To be more specific: It’s a death threat.

These comments were posted very close together, indicating to me that they were at least in communication about doing this.The language both trolls used is very similar to the transphobic language frequently used at the radical feminist blog “A Room of our Own.” I suspect that both are either readers or contributors, but I don’t have anything firm at this time.

I don’t particularly care about hiding this. I want people to be aware of who is doing this – who is actually at this point trying to intimidate me and my co-bloggers, who is trying to attack and harass us. Who is specifically using threats intended to silence us.

If any trans bloggers would like their IP addresses so you can look out for them (or find comments they’ve written in the past), e-mail qt.lisah@gmail.com and I’ll send all information you need.

Edit: Removed names because I don’t know for sure.

Edit a second time: I used up all remaining spoons on responding to this thing, and I didn’t realize that Butterflywings was harassing Helen at BoP as well. Also Lucky and Athena, for that matter. I love the bullying campaign aimed at Helen, complete with threats – and Butterflywings then demanding that Helen stop bullying her. I swear to god. are these people for real?

I haven’t abandoned QT, but I have been taking a long break. It’s not something I planned as a break, and it’s not something I really see as a break, but it has to do with all the other times I’ve taken long or short breaks from blogging.

Anyway, I’m still processing what I’ve just been learning about myself, and I don’t know if/when I’ll be prepared to talk about it. I am sorry that I’ve not been able to even keep up with something as simple as Monday open posts. I’ll try to get one up this Monday, and hopefully get some actual posts written again soon.

Other things are in the works to improve QT. I know there’s been trouble with ads (for example) recently, and that will be taken care of. I apologize that it hasn’t happened yet, but see above.

Thanks all for reading here.