being terrified of your friends finding out you have riveting opinions like “trans men experience oppression specifically for their gender” is honestly exhausting
it’s literally just ace discourse but people who never bought into that exclusionism think it’s cool this time
hearing “I’m gonna become a baeddel” from people you heard mocking exclusionism in ace discourse and bi lesbian discourse and transmed discourse when it’s literally the same shit just. hurts. why is it me you forfeit your morals over? why now?
and a reminder: this is how exclusionism functions
it’s the same mindset, the same reasoning, the same arguments, the same tactics over and over and over again. this isn’t a flaw, it’s a part of the design
because it’s Looking for people who are susceptible to the Mindset, but haven’t been shown an “"acceptable”“ victim yet.
people who know that you’re not supposed to hate trans women or gay people or ace people or- eventually there will come a kind of person that you Don’t understand. that’s different from you, or that you have complicated feelings towards, or that you’ve never heard of.
and people who Only know that exclusionism is bad because of the Specific Victims being targeted are vulnerable to this. can be lied to, can be manipulated.
and what makes this scary is that once someone has bought into the Mindset the Victim Can Be Changed.
ace exclusionism was a terf recruiting tactic. this is a known fact. terfs were Openly courting ace exclusionists, they Openly spread ace exclusionist rhetoric, there were terfs who came out and said that they were drawn into it Through ace exclusionism.
it was to the point that a terf post would gain some steam, and within a day the Literal Exact Same Post would show up in the ace exclusionism tag with "ace people” swapped out with “trans women.”
your friends that were willing to stand up for ace people once upon a time might not be willing to do the same in a few years if they’re walking down the exclusionism path now. it’s Easier than some people would like to admit to go from hating one kind of trans person to hating All trans people.
and that’s exactly Why it’s important to understand how exclusionism works, how radfem rhetoric works. it’s not enough to just hate a specific kind of exclusionism or to recognize that it’s wrong to hurt a specific kind of victim. because the Methods, the Mindsets, the talking points, they’re Fundamentally harmful. and you Can be tricked by them if you don’t know what to look for.
Additionally, there are people that full out hate the target, and others who will say “but they’re not as oppressed as they say they are.”
Both of these are exclusionists. Just to different degrees. And thinking the second one will almost certainly lead you to a pipeline of believing the first one.