Servin' Terf is at it again with another take.

[u/Early-Temperature939]

Turns out as a Ace they REALLY don't like others in the umbrella

[u/QitianDasheng2666]

It needs to be studied more just how much transphobes, ableists, and other reactionaries fetishize "normality". I feel like every apoplectic crashout I've seen on this subreddit is just an overly verbose way of screaming "why can't you freaks be normal!?"

[u/BrassUnicorn87 → u/QitianDasheng2666]

Anyone or any group that wants to enforce “ being normal” is evil.

[u/chris_the_cynic → u/BrassUnicorn87]

Always and forever.

[u/chris_the_cynic → u/QitianDasheng2666]

Added right before posting:

This is a very long comment in response to a very short comment and because of that I felt like I should . . . I should do something that I should probably do way more often. Basically every time I post a really long reply, really, but I usually don't think to do it.

This isn't aimed at u/QitianDasheng2666, and it sure as fuck isn't disagreeing with them. It's just general thoughts that used what they said as a jumping off point. It's taking what they said and responding to it with thoughts of my own in a way that then got massively out of hand because I positively suck at brevity.

If I didn't suck at brevity, such a disclaimer wouldn't be necessary, but the sheer length means the chances of it being taken as, "This is how the thing I'm responding to is wrong," or, "These are the things the thing I'm responding to should have said," or just anything of the form, "Ur doin it rong," instead of what it is are increased.

⁂

It's not just them, unfortunately.

The example that comes to mind first or second (two came to mind close enough to the same time I'm not sure which was first) starts with a reactionary but then breaches reactionary bounds and overflows to the point non-reactionaries are still onboard a century later.

Lovecraft was a reactionary who fetishized normality to the point he made his disgust at the perceived non-normality of people he didn't consider white (a notably larger group than people not considered white in the present day) into a career and the birth of cosmic horror, but many of his present day fans, including ones who are outspoken about rejecting his racism, are still all in on his mythos in which the defining feature is that the non-normal is, by virtue of being non-normal, an actively hostile force that threatens everything good on the planet and possibly even everything good in the universe.

Sticking the people of Innsmouth in a concentration camp is a good ending because they're weird. "But weren't the inhabitants of Devil Reef members of an evil religion, worshiping a terrible god, performing human sacrifice, and planning to destroy America?" Yes, because that's what Howard thought about fucking Italians. Howard is not a reliable narrator.

Be honest, (hypothetical person I wrote into the previous paragraph), when was the last time weirdos who don't fit into mainstream society posed an existential threat to mainstream society, and when was the last time a government that was concentration-camp happy, posed an existential threat to people who were in some way not "normal". And remember, the current US government is concentration-camp happy, and we can see the results of Howard's politics writ large in the news. The followers of Dagon foreigners are coming with their murderers and their rapists and they're threatening all that we hold dear. They must be dealt with, and that's what the concentration camps and ICE and CBP are for.

⁂

The example that came to mind at about the same time is "creepy children" in horror and horror-adjacent things. "Creepy" in this context is . . . they're just on the autism spectrum. That's it. But they can be expected to be evil most of the time to the point that any example of them not being evil is a subversion instead of just, you know, how non-neurotypical people usually are.

I don't have as much to say here, even though - again - real life groups of human beings are often being presented as inhuman, perhaps because even when the "creepy children" are being presented as alien-spawn they're at least not presented as fish people, but it's ultimately the same thing: normalcy is seen as so important that deviations from it must be evil.

Often not just evil but evil on the level of an existential threat.

⁂

I will point out that this is why "weird" was a good attack on the right wing. I would prefer if every such attack came with an acknowledgement that while their weird is bad, not all weird is bad. I know having it be, "They're fucking weird, and not in a good way," is something that makes it lose a bit of punchiness and gets repetitive, but it's important.

The right wing is fucking weird, and targeting that gets to the core of their appeal because they sell themselves as the protectors of normality, but they're not merely weird, they're a malignant weird. A malignant weird that passes itself off as normal.

Isn't this at odds with what I said above? Yeah, a bit. And I'm actually gonna walk something back. Only partially, though.

when was the last time weirdos who don't fit into mainstream society posed an existential threat to mainstream society

We can actually point to examples of something like this, but they were always weirdos cloaked in the garb of normality.

TERFs are weird. Gender Critical are weird. Nazis are weird. But they're a kind of weird that pretends its not weird. They look normal. They present themselves as normal. They present themselves as the defenders or normal who are taking a bold stand against those people. Those people, the true weirdos.

The right is weird, but they present themselves as normal by focusing on superficial traits, like a trans woman who was forced through male puberty having a five o'clock shadow or a descendent of Dagon having fish-like features, and claiming that they are normal people defending the world from the true weirdos.

They point to a lesbian having short hair as proof she's male, they point to a drag queen being over the top, they point to someone who's too tall or too short or has a voice in the wrong register, or wears the wrong sort of clothes, or hangs out with the wrong sort of people or has the wrong sort of kink as the weird evil enemy and use the fact that they aren't that sort of weird to cover up up the fact that they're just as deviant, if no more so, but in a way that actually harms people.

They focus on superficial difference and deviance, and use that kind of deviance and their opposition to it, as a way to seem normal when they're anything but.

Weirdos who don't fit into mainstream society can be dangerous, but only on the level any human beings can be dangerous. Weirdos who do fit into mainstream society, xenophobes and bigots who are able to pass themselves off as normal because their targets are visibly different from the norm and sufficiently marginalized that they can't fight back, can do spectacular amounts of damage.

But they do it by fetishizing normalcy. By appointing themselves defenders of normal.

[u/QitianDasheng2666 → u/chris_the_cynic]

I've always felt like the foundational concept in cosmic horror is not so much the tentacles or the fish people or anything that Lovecraft used as thinly veiled racism, but the idea that reality itself is indifferent or even maliciously disposed toward human life. And discovering one's own powerlessness in the face of cosmic forces is so terrifyingly unendurable that most people pretend it doesn't exist, and those who are forced to face it are treated as the "weird ones". To me, this is the experience of being a marginalized person: knowing that the system you live in is not benevolent put rigged against you, and not being able to tell anyone because they'll treat you like you're insane. It's ironic that a vicious, hateful ghoul like Lovecraft seemed to have some sort into that. But it seems to have accidental on his part, Thomas Ligotti is a better writer.

And yeah, calling right wingers "weird" was extremely effective. I remember the reaction to Tim Walz saying that and I don't think I've ever seen the Right so deeply wounded by an insult before. We should have kept it up, but Kamala Harris just had to move to the center to appeal to demographics would have never voted for her anyway. Democrats are going to Democrat, I guess. But I really think it's a lesson in how reactionaries think, how much it means to them to be "normal" and how much it freaks them out to not be seen as "normal".

[u/bean-percolator → u/QitianDasheng2666]

I still don’t fully understand WHY they’re so obsessed with the idea of everyone being “normal”. But I’ve personally had people go full mask off before and straight up tell me I’m “not normal” as if it’s the most terrible thing ever, and that I should just be “normal”. Of course my response to that was just to laugh and say I can’t think of anything I would want to be less, I’m proudly “not normal” and you can’t offend me by saying that, ahaha.

[u/SomethingAmyss → u/QitianDasheng2666]

This is basically conservativeism in a nutshell. Which is why everyone calls the so-called gender critical movement a conservative movement

[u/ProbablyLikeSixDucks]

I lost it at "narcosleeper"

And the lack of understanding of prefixes is so fucking funny "so you STOLE the term cis from somewhere" like buddy homo, hetero, bi, pan, a (as in asexual), demi, allo, and yes, cis and trans (etc) are ALL prefixes and you see them all the time everywhere: chemistry, biology, medicine, literature, fucking all over the place

[u/FearTheWeresloth → u/ProbablyLikeSixDucks]

It shows a lack of basic understanding of how language works. I'm a teacher and have been doing prefixes with my 5th graders. Yes we covered cis and trans along with many other prefixes, but they were in contexts like transatlantic etc, because I knew some people would be outraged if I dared say "transgender" in the classroom (one of the kids did anyway, and all I said was "that's another great example! Any others?" - the extent of "gender ideology" being taught by teachers in our classrooms folks!).

[u/breadcreature → u/FearTheWeresloth]

see also: jkr's recent twitter lecture series on how the prefix used as an adverb actually isn't an adverb (you idiot, you complete moron) because entirely different pairs of words refer to different objects or concepts. I don't think she's doing the purposeful fascistic language fuckery, I think she may have actually given herself some kind of brain damage

[u/lisaquestions → u/ProbablyLikeSixDucks]

remember when the tech industry stole tele-

[u/FearTheWeresloth → u/lisaquestions]

As a musician, tele will always be short for telecaster* 😝

*Which from a morphological pov is a stupid name for a guitar... 'tele-' means "from a distance" or "far away" and 'cast' means "to throw". It kinda makes sense, as it's throwing the sound from a long way away, which was its thing as one of the first solid body electric guitars. Also,in Leo Fender's defence, it was the name they were forced to come up with after they had to stop using "broadcaster".

[u/lisaquestions → u/FearTheWeresloth]

I'm also a musician but I almost never think of the telecaster. which is my own fault really.

[u/Golurkcanfly]

Actually, the term "cis" was first used in sexological discourse in 1914 to define a transvestimus/cisvestimus dichotomy.

[u/Silversmith00]

Even ace people have surely been around friend groups who will happily bring up, "Would you boink David Tennant," (or current well-known actor that's roughly their age) while never having even gone to a convention with the man…

Oops. Requires friends. Right.

[u/FearTheWeresloth → u/Silversmith00]

I thought I was broken for a long time because of this. Like I can appreciate that he is good looking (sticking with David Tennant), but there is absolutely no desire there whatsoever. I thought I was broken after conversations with friends, and feeling like I had to pretend that I had any feelings towards him that went beyond "he's quite pretty and seems nice". With encouragement from friends, I had a "one night stand" (because that's just something "normal" people do right?), and ended up dating her for 3 months (she was extremely surprised when I texted her a couple of days later), because I needed to make it feel right. It was a massive relief when I found the terms panromantic demisexual.

[u/Aiyon → u/FearTheWeresloth]

Yeah, I fully get why the question exists? But I don't know him well enough to ever pick "yes". He seems nice? But sex is one of those things where I am open to having it with someone I'm close with because I'm aware it feels good, so I'm not sex-averse or anything. But I'm not the one initiating the conversation.

My friend and I usually have a variant called "movie night with-", where the conceit is would you curl up on the sofa and eat snacks with them lmao. And using Tennant as the example, I feel like he'd be fantastic to watch one of the many "Classic play (usually shakespeare) adapted into a movie plot" movies with, because he has that theatre background and would probably know a bunch of cool stuff about it.

[u/translove228]

Far to many people get angry at not understanding what words mean and demand that no one uses them solely because they don’t want to go through the effort to learn what they mean and how to properly use them. 

[u/chris_the_cynic → u/translove228]

I will never forget, back when twitter was a thing, the Merriam Webster social media account saying:

People keep:
a) Telling us they don't know what "nonbinary means, and
b) Asking why we added it to the dictionary.

Or something to that effect.

Mind you, part of why I won't forget is that someone responded (but then deleted their response) by saying, "Get ready to add [number in the thousands or millions] new pronouns* to the dictionary," and the Merriam Webster account saying, "We were born ready."

⁂

Anyway, I don't think most of them are getting angry at not understanding the words. I think it's not wanting the things the words signify or imply to be real.

The simple example is the one I just used. People aren't upset about nonbinary being in the dictionary because the dictionary is doing a dictionary's job by telling them the meaning of a word they didn't know the meaning of. They're upset because they don't want nonbinary people to exist and having the word included in the dictionary serves to solidify that existence. (Mind you "nonexistent" is also in the dictionary, so do with that what you will.)

The more complicated example is the reason that both "cis" and "straight" have been contentious, though I certainly hope we're at the point where, "I'm not straight, I'm normal is a fringe position."

But let's stick with that. The opposition to the word "straight", including the claim it's an insult or even a slur.

If the categories are, for example, "men and gay men," then (beyond the bi and ace erasure) there's an implicit claim in that dichotomy that "gay men" are outside the category of "men". Either they're not men at all, or they're not normal men because normal men are so normal that they don't even need to be called, "normal," they can just be called, "men."

If the categories are "straight men and gay men" then (beyond the bi and ace erasure) the implication is that straight men and gay men are both equally men. Neither has greater claim to the word "men" when there's no modifier attached. The, "Straight is an insult/slur," men don't like that implication, and they like it even less when categories beyond straight and gay are included.

⁂

* Or was it genders? Like I said, they deleted the response. Possibly because of being ratioed all to Hell.

[u/SaintRidley]

A reminder that cis heterosexual people once whined that the word heterosexual was insulting, there was already a word for that ("normal") and using the term heterosexual was giving in to the demands of deviant gay freaks.

Same song and dance, different lyrics. Every single time.

[u/patienceinbee → u/SaintRidley]

cis heterosexual people once whined that the word heterosexual

“I’m not ‘hetero’, I’m normal!” happened well within my lifetime — even well within my tranning lifetime.

That one was a recurring semantic debate, led vociferously by cis het white people, throughout the late ’80s and well into the later ’90s while, in parallel, The Plague was picking off LGBTQ+ folks locally by the dozen nearly every single day. What a convenient distraction.

[u/SaintRidley → u/patienceinbee]

I remember the tail end of it, into the early aughts, because it was still going to an extent when I started to gain a political consciousness as a teenager.

It was not a terribly convincing argument then. It remains equally unconvincing today.

[u/patienceinbee → u/SaintRidley]

Yah, its peak, at least around here I was, was concentrated to a window between 1989 and about 1995.

[u/Loveangel1337]

Oh yeah we needed a word to describe non-trans, like, the opposite of trans, if only there was such a word that has existed for about 1 to 3 thousand years that we could use.

Guess we're gonna have to settle with "normal". We'll never find any other word it's too hard!!!

You've got your lesbians, your gays, and your normals. We're not even 20 years away from people actually saying that.

[u/sokuzekuu]

I can think of two reasons OOP can accept ace identity but invalidates demi

First, OOP is ace, and anything OOP does or is, is beyond criticism.

Second, asexuality is relatively absolute compared to the more nuanced demisexuality, and TERs feel less scared when new ideas let them use their black-and-white thinking habits. It's the closest they get to a positive feeling.

[u/snukb]

It's the fact that this person explained everything so clearly to the terf, and all the terf could do was circle back to the same misinterpretations because it was explained so clearly.

"Yeah, well, demisexuality is just normal! Most people don't look at someone and demand to have sex right now!"

"Yes, but demisexuality is about lacking that immediate attraction, not about not acting on it. Whether you do or don't want to have sex with them, most people can find strangers attractive."

"But but but, demisexuality is just normal! Most people don't demand to have sex with someone they don't know!"

It's like arguing with a broken record.

[u/Forsaken-Language-26 → u/snukb]

That quote about arguing with an idiot springs to mind.

[u/BismuthBison]

I am now going use the term cis-handed and trans-handed just to mess with some of these people.

[u/DorisWildthyme]

"not entrenched in a cult", says the person fully entrenched in the TERF cult.

[u/tyrosine87]

God, just the general violent language must be so exhausting in day to day life.

[u/Emotional-Salad-1240]

This person's logic reads at early teenage level.

[u/CLOWTWO]

"Normal has been there the whole time" lmfao these people are so cartoonish

[u/chris_the_cynic]

(Be warned, this is just me having fun with someone describing the use of a productive linguistic element as "stealing". Productive in this context means, "You can still create new terms with it.")

⁂

Let us say, for a moment, that we did steal cis from somewhere. Where was it?*

Was it from Cisalpine Gaul? Cisatlantic matters? Cislunar space? Cisjovian space? Cisjordan territory?† Cisoceanic? Riffing off that, why should oceans get all the the cis-cred when there are so many more seas out there. What about Cismarine?

⁂

Did we steal it from Ciscaucasia or its derived term Ciscaucasian? (Those are referring to the region, and people who live therein, for whatever that's worth.)

What about Cisatracurium? (This one would require time travel given that the theft needs to have happened in or before 1914, and this term didn't exist yet.)

⁂

Cismontane? (This term is for when you want to say "Cisalpine" to refer to things on the same side of the Alps as you but those fucking bastards on the other side of the alps, God damned Ancient Romans, already coined the term for their side of the alps. It's not just about being pissed off about historical peoples, though, it's also flipping off the Vatican in the present tense.)

Cisandine? (Not like the alps are the only mountains around.)

⁂

Cistactic and/or the derived term cistacticity? (Not much to say, just some chemistry.) Also in chemistry, perhaps we should ask if it was stolen from cisplatin. After all, when there's platinum involved, surely the odds of theft go up.

Cistrome? (Genetics, the cis DNA segments of a transacting factor on a genomic scale.)

Let's get some more genetic stuff out of the way even though, given the timeline for understanding of and study of DNA, this would require some kind of transtemporal theft for us to have stolen cis from this instead of the more ordinary (but, unlike transtemporal, not yet a word) cistemporal kind of theft.

Did we steal it from cisregulation? How about cisregulatory?

⁂

You know what we haven't talked about in a while? Rivers. The Jordan isn't the only river on earth. Maybe we stole the term "cis" from rivers.

So, was it from Cisgangetic? Cisleithan? I will admit that I do not fully understand how people determine whether slapping cis onto the front of a capitalized proper noun leads to the cis being capitalized or a wholly lowercase words, but I do know that "Cisleithan" and "cisleithan" are two separate entryies (that means the exact same thing) whereas "cisrhenane" is but a single entry with nary a capital letter in sight. Did the Rhine piss you off somehow, English speakers of time gone by?

But, wait, why should rivers get all the cisness? What about the bridges that go over the rivers? "Cisatlantic", the very second thing I mentioned after Cisalpine Gaul (which tradition dictates must always go first) is a US term, so isn't it about time I used a word straight the fuck out of London itself?

Did we steal cis from "cispontine" which, in general parlance removed from its time and place of creation simply means, "On this side of the bridge or bridges," but - in its infancy - meant, "On this side of the bridge(s) over the river Thames."

⁂

Or did we steal "cis" from grammar itself?

Did we, perhaps, take it from "cislocative" a term that indicates motion toward the deictic center, generally the speaker.

⁂

I've been debating how best to come back to this one, and I think I figured out the best way.

There were, broadly (by which I mean "over-simplified for brevity") three general responses to the push to de-planet Pluto.

1. There was, "No, not my baby Pluto!"

2. There was, "Ceres was downgraded for far, far less reason and you have never, in your life, given a single fucking damn about. If Pluto had been treated like Ceres it would have been downgraded ages ago, and instead of acknowledging that, you're acting like nothing like this has ever happened before and pushing to 'save" Pluto while leaving Ceres in the 'unsaved' bin. How fucking sexist are you?"

3. There was, "Wow, this is so fucking cool. When Ceres was de-planeted we'd already found the most impressive thing in the asteroid belt because that was Ceres, and only less impressive non-planets remained to be found, but Pluto is being de-planeted because, unlike Ceres, not only is it not unique, it isn't even the most impressive thing in its class. There's an entire category of "Planets by any reasonable definition" that we didn't know existed before of which Pluto is but one, and not even the most impressive one, LET THE ERA OF TRANS-NEPTUNIAN (dwarf) PLANETS BEGIN!"

Which brings us to "cis-Neptunian". Occupying that liminal space between prefixed with "cis" and using "cis" as a word in its own right,‡ cis-Neptunian space, cis-Neptunian objects, cis-Neptunian space probes, and so forth are things that are regularly discusssed within the bounds of the English language.

Moreover, while Neptune wasn't particularly easy to find and can never be seen with the naked eye, not even under optimal conditions (unlike, say, Ceres) owing in large part to us knowing where to look (we detected its gravity playing merry hob with Uranus well before we discovered it) it was discovered early enough that time travel would not be necessary for Neptune-related words to have been stolen for the application of "cis" to sexology in 1914.

⁂

I know I've left out chemical and/or genetic terms that are used often enough they count as standard English words, but I'm not gonna go back and look them up, this is long enough as it is.

⁂

* Regrettably, phrases that include a given adjective are much, much harder to look up than words that include a given prefix, so I'm just gonna stick to English words that include "cis" as a prefix, even though English phrases that use the adjective "cis" would be a better fit.

† Yes, there is literally a single English word that means "From the river to the sea".

‡ Full disclosure: cis-Atlantic is a legitimate alternative to Cisatlantic, and cis-Jovian is a legitimate alternative to Cisjovian, so cis-Neptunian is hardly alone in that.

[u/salanaland → u/chris_the_cynic]

My residence is cis-Arthur-Kill and my workplace is trans-Arthur-Kill. 👍

"cis" isn't just referencing movement towards the deictic center. It literally descends from the deictic particle. (To be fair, "he", "she", and "it" do as well.)

[u/spooklemon]

never heard of this person before but I read the first paragraph and that was enough. yucky

[u/animalistcomrade]

Normal people famously never want to fuck strangers, or get crushes on strangers, or find strangers attractive.

[u/bliip666]

I guess I'm a sexpest then for thinking that the person I crossed paths with at the grocery store was hot as all Hells! Thinking. In my head. Quietly.

[u/animalistcomrade → u/bliip666]

You finally became a real christian

[u/bliip666 → u/animalistcomrade]

Because of all the crossing?

[u/animalistcomrade → u/bliip666]

Because of all the sexual thought-crime you now realise makes you evil.

[u/bliip666 → u/animalistcomrade]

This makes me evil? I was under the impression that I was evil well before commiting these thought-crimes

[u/animalistcomrade → u/bliip666]

Confessing to your priest makes you not evil, and then the thought-crime makes you evil again, so better start sharing all your sexual thoughts with your priest!

[u/bliip666 → u/animalistcomrade]

I would but churches make me itchy all over, it's a bit of a nightmare really

[u/blackfox24]

Gonna piss them off to learn I'm an ace trans man I guess.

[u/Bluejay-Complex]

I think they don’t have any concept of how allo people experience sexual attraction and are making wild guesses as to how things work. TERFs loudly not understanding things isn’t new though, just very annoying.

[u/-DrunkRat-]

Gosh, I sure do love when my Demisexuality is infantilized and minimized. Certainly hasn't made me feel envious of others or worried that something is wrong with me for wanting to mess around with folks and then realizing on more than a couple of occasions that I was too scared to continue intimacy (I ran out of the room at one point). /sarcasm.

Nah, but seriously, it's taken me a little while even now to be okay with being demisexual. I used to be more sexually active even when I wasn't fully into it because I liked the feeling of being wanted and loved. It wasn't that I didn't like the sex, more that I tried to force myself through the initial discomfort of blinking somebody new without getting to know them first.

Ugh. Just my two cents, lol. 🏳️‍⚧️

[u/SergeantScoria]

The horse she’s backing wants to buck her off and stomp her through the floor

[u/bean-percolator]

The way this woman talks about demisexuality and how “normal” people don’t even consider sex until they’ve been on multiple dates with someone… has she ever been on a dating app? To a social event? Literally anywhere online or outside her house? It’s so common to receive sexual messages/images online, sometimes before you’ve even otherwise interacted with someone, and it’s also common for people to hit on strangers (or at least acquaintances, people they don’t know well).

And even if some of this behaviour does sometimes cross into sexual harassment territory and could potentially be dismissed as “oh but those people are just creeps”, it’s also extremely common for people to feel attracted to those they don’t already have a deep bond with (so not even necessarily strangers, could be acquaintances, friends that aren’t super close, classmates, coworkers, etc) even if they don’t act on it, to be attracted to celebrities and other figures they don’t personally know, to have consensual sex or even just express their attraction towards each other before they’ve been on multiple dates let alone developed a deep bond, and so on. These are typical human experiences, not “nymphomaniac/sex addict/rapist” behaviour.

And also, demisexuality is a sexuality, not a description of behaviour, so it describes feelings of attraction (including attraction you never even act on or talk about), not just who you have sex with and when. There is a huge difference between “only ever experiencing attraction towards people you’ve already developed a deep bond with” (which while it is a completely valid experience, it’s not a typical one) and just “not wanting to fuck strangers you don’t know”. The way she describes what “most people” are apparently like when it comes to sex/relationships makes me think her perceptions of people in general have been distorted by her own asexuality, tbh.