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This website documents the lived experiences of Boys' Love fans and how it's a safe space for them to embrace and accept their queerness and/or their own genders, while also facing scrutiny and online harassment for liking men loving men fiction.

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Cleaning and analyzing the data from the BL Fan Interview Project has shown predictable results in some ways and surprising results in others. This is the first chart I wanted to share.
Survey and Participants
The question asked for this part of the survey: "Do you use any of the terms fujoshi, fudanshi, or fujin to describe yourself? "

Three of the data points are self-explanatory- which participants use Fujin, Fudanshi, or Fujoshi. For the other two options, I felt I should elaborate on why they were organized in this way.

The "No" response recorded participants who made it clear they did not use any of the terms. Their recorded answers did not indicate if there had been a change or not in that decision to not use the fujin terms for themselves.

The "Not Anymore" response was a little different. I felt it would be significant to record these answers when someone else could have filed them into the "No" set of responses. The participants' replies who were categorized under this answer very specifically replied that they no longer used the terms, but at one point had chosen to use them. It indicated a very clear decision to no longer use these terms to describe themselves.

Why did I choose to categorize responses this way?

With the recent activity and trends in the online BL fan space, I have observed that many fans or readers may have used these terms at one time but were influenced or pressured to stop using them recently (in the last 5-10 years). What I have found to be a large influence over this decision is a negative response to these words online. Generally, this response is due to the misinformation of Japanese culture/language spread around online fan spaces and social media, insisting that these words mean something negative or perpetuate a harmful behavior within fan spaces. It's important to state that this is not factual at all and not validated by any current academic literature on BL consumers. This trend has lead fans who once used the fujin terms (to describe their fan experience/participation) to no longer use them out of fear of backlash on various social media platforms.

This won't be the case for every interview participant or fan, as some choose to distance from the terms for personal preferences. These are optional Japanese terms to describe the fan experience.

However, I considered the above trend significant enough to report on as we commonly see misinformation spread through fan spaces and social media to have negative effects on fans and fan participation. It's an illustration of the rippling effects on the fan experience.
Results
Originally there were 463 online responses when I started to analyze the numbers.

Previous percentages:

"Fujoshi" 32.6%

"Fudanshi" 11.9%

"Fujin" 16.2%

"No" 21.4%

"Not Anymore" 17.9%

Now we have a total of 553 responses by the end of 2020 as the first survey closed.

You can see where there was a notable increase in the "Fujoshi" response percentages, increasing by roughly 2%. The "Fujin" and "Not Anymore" replies also increased. However, I saw that I was receiving more explanations on the "Not Anymore" responses. I found them insightful and telling. So I shared a number of them here.
Fans' reasons they stopped using fujin/fujoshi/fudanshi terms:
"I stopped using them because of the huge harassment and now I don't use them that much."

"In the beginning, I used to call myself a fujoshi. Then people said to me fujoshi was a bad term only cishet girls who fetishized gay couples used. Recently, I found out it's something made up so I'm back as a fujoshi."

"Fudanshi for sure. I chose to reclaim the 'rotten' when I learned that there was a widespread embracing/reclamation of "fujoshi" by women who self-describe that way, especially since the stereotype in Japan is that fujoshi are likely to be bi. I thought it was interesting that it's wielded as a misogynist insult and used to misgender trans men with the assumption of straight womanhood as necessary for a fu-identity in current US English fandom. I'm queer and a fudanshi."

"To be honest, no. There's a lot of people nowadays that harass fujoshis/fudanshis/fujins on the internet."

"Yes, I use fujoshi, but only with my friends. Other people might attack me if I say I'm a fujoshi."

"I use fujoshi since it simply means 'a woman who likes BL', but many people use this word as something bad, so sometimes I hesitate before using it."

"I used to use Fujoshi, but because of the bad image it got, I'm afraid to use it and get bashed on the internet."

"No, only out of fear, though. If I could openly, I would describe myself as a fudanshi."

"I used to, but then I saw all the people spreading hate to those who said it and some people who called themselves that were not great and stopped at the age of 16. Thanks to researching for my dissertation I finally properly know the words origin and don't feel as about it as I was made but I'm still not comfortable saying that I am one out loud because of people."

"I would use fujin, but don't describe myself as such to avoid backlash."

"I only use fujoshi in Japanese so I don't get attacked by antis online."

"I do not, but that is largely because I don't want to suffer the backlash people online would give me because they refuse to learn."

"I have previously experienced backlash for using the word fujoshi to describe myself, so I tend not to anymore unless I know the person I am interacting with does not have a negative view of the term."

Tracking these responses over time will help map consumer and fan trends across a global fan space.

Some questions to consider:

Will we see an increase of fans using fujin terms or will more elect not to?

How much of that decision will be affected by behavioral trends in fan spaces on social media?

Will there be observable patterns regionally for preference of fujin terms?

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[The first sentence of text in a Twitter post back in Jul. 2021, made by user neigevil: ""Consume your media critically" go fuck yourself critically", with a reply following it up from the user galacticakagi: "Looking at something critically doesn't mean being a stupid c*nt about it/trying to force it into somehow being "problematic" lol. Wish they'd understand that." Neigevil follows up with the last response: "Exactly, nowadays it just means being an anti lol". Image description END].

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The Evolution of Anti-Critical Consumption/Thinking "Anti-Anti" Fandom - Stitch's Media Mix

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The Evolution of Anti-Critical Consumption/Thinking "Anti-Anti" Fandom - Stitch's Media Mix

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This post also includes the aspect of unchecked and open racism seen in fandoms, especially in Star Wars and in Voltron. Racists also misuse 'anti' against Black fans of fandom who are calling out the racism that exists (and still does) in online fandom discourse communities.

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The Evolution of Anti-Critical Consumption/Thinking “Anti-Anti” Fandom

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Pride Month Reads: Boys Run the Riot Manga Shows a Trans Teen Embracing Himself Through Street Fashion - Briana Lawrence

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Pride Month Reads: Boys Run the Riot Manga Shows a Trans Teen Embracing Himself Through Street Fashion - Briana Lawrence

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Alright, this manga is really good (yes, I've read it online), and it's basically about the similar, but often realistic struggles transgender boys, men and transmasculine people such as Ryo (he goes by he/him) have to deal with in a conformist environment (i.e., schools in socially conservative countries such as Japan). For example, being stuck in unsupportive families, being outcasted, humiliated, bullied, name-called, deadnamed, misgendered, and/or being treated with constant disrespect and opposition from non-intersex/perisex and cisheteronormative society.

This also relates to transmasculine self-expression and how brutally censored and policed it is, even online besides in real-life.

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‘Boys Run the Riot’ Manga Shows a Trans Teen Embracing Himself Through Street Fashion

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Boys Run the Riot, written by transgender mangaka Keito Gaku, focuses on a transgender teen named Ryo who explores gender through his love of street fashion.

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[Image ID: this photo is blurry, so the text isn't readable for those with screenreaders. Image ID End].

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TWs: discussions of transphobia/transandrophobia against transmasculine people and trans men, racism against queer and Asian BL fans by English-speaking fans of fandoms, discussions of radfems, TERFs and SWERFs, including gender criticals [transphobes, but think of the worst gender-conforming, binary, non-intersex and cishet, Christian, white, abled and neurotypical women you've ever remembered or known in your life].

While this source is good for fans in fandoms to do further research about the negative impacts and consequences of fandom anti behaviours (i.e., bullying and harassment, doxxing, suicide-baiting, racism, transphobia, colonialism, misogyny), the screenshots provided on the website (demonstrating the horrid behaviours of fandom antis) can be triggering towards others, so please open this website with genuine caution.

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Anti-Fujoshi & Transphobia | Fujoshi Info

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Understand what anti-fujoshi are and why their behaviors are harmful from perpetuating anti-Asian racism, misogyny and transphobia.

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A Tumblr post on the behaviours of anti-fujoshi [fandom antis who hate female BL fans, including gender-diverse, nonbinary, trans, intersex {fujin} and male BL fans {fudanshi} just for consuming BL] against queer, intersex and trans BL fans, including Asian BL fans from a fudanshi [a BL fan who goes by he/him and is an Asian BL fan who has seen the racism, femmephobia, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia from anti-fujoshi bigots]

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A Tumblr post on the behaviours of anti-fujoshi [fandom antis who hate female BL fans, including gender-diverse, nonbinary, trans, intersex {fujin} and male BL fans {fudanshi} just for consuming BL] against queer, intersex and trans BL fans, including Asian BL fans from a fudanshi [a BL fan who goes by he/him and is an Asian BL fan who has seen the racism, femmephobia, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia from anti-fujoshi bigots]

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This post begins with the person starting with him addressing anti-fujoshi bigots [people who hate fans of Boys' Love, predominantly female fans, but there is a modality of gender diversity, sexual and racial diversity within the BL fandom itself] the harm that their words and actions bring.

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You know, this isn't the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/"yaoi"/fujoshi discourse, but it's high up there so I'm going to say it.

It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I'm a feminine guy. Every time I was laughed at for being girly, nonviolent, called a sissy, bitch, or worse, it hurt like hell. And when I realized I was attracted to boys, that was when I started to question whether I was a real man. It felt like a stab to the gut.

I was there, little teenage me, reading BL, because I couldn't connect with anything else I knew of. Straight romance didn't do anything for me. I watched Brokeback Mountain and liked it, but I couldn't relate to almost any part of it. Gei Comi ("bara") wasn't my taste back then - I wanted to see boys who looked a bit like me, not big hunky adults with facial hair! So I fell back to BL.

And you people on here complain about "straight girls squeeing and saying 'my sinful gay babies!!!'" - guess what, I was around when you actually DID see fangirls say this type of thing. I was there consuming BL and slash by the truckful, ignoring the occasional homophobic comments from the author/uploader. I saw all the hate every other corner of fandom threw at BL fans, and you know what.

None of that hate was because they had homophobic attitudes.
It was purely because "yaoi is for stupid girls", and they were "ruining the source material with their dirty gay hands".
If girls touched anything that was "meant for boys", including male characters themselves, it was "dirtied", "ruined". (Sounds familiar?)

And the boys who liked BL? Who preferred a romantic manga about androgynous guys slowly falling in love, with cherry blossoms being swept by the wind in the background, rather than just watching gay porn featuring masculine men? We weren't "real men".

If you thought there isn't a fuckton of toxic masculinity in the gay male community, boy do I have news for you. Feminine, camp, flamboyant men, they all "made gays look bad". Because of us, cishet people wouldn't accept gay men as "real men", so there were attempts to exclude us to protect the reputation of the unoffensive, masculine macho gays.

Obviously, it didn't work, but damn if it didn't make me and guys like me feel horrible that even other gay guys hated us.

It took me a long time to accept myself. Little mid-to-late-teens me, with light hypogonadism that stunted my growth and made me look very feminine. Before I started taking hormones per my endocrinologist's advice, I barely had appetite to eat decently. I only lost my baby cheeks and started gaining muscle mass a year or so into hormone treatment.

Me, still flaming gay.

As I grew up, came out, and made queer friends, I became less and less dependent on BL for self-esteem and entertainment. But BL fans were slowly being more accepted in animanga fandom (or at least, people made peace with the fact that we weren't going anywhere). Same for slash shippers in western fandoms. I was so happy to see all the M/M content. I was so happy to see a space where girls could share their passion (including erotica) and support each other.

When they learned that a gay guy liked the same things as them, they were ecstatic. They never shamed me for sharing their "girly" interests. I had serious conversations with them when they said insensitive or ignorant things, but it was becoming less and less necessary to do so. Fans were becoming progressively more conscious of queer issues.

And now.
Now,

"Yaoi is for cishet girls."

"You must be lying about being a gay man. You're obviously a straight girl."

"Nasty fujoshits."

"If you have more m/m than m/f or f/f ships, you're fetishizing mlm."

Good fucking lord.
It's so transparent. You feel so self-righteous expressing hate for women (plenty of whom are queer, but yeah, straight women too!) having interests, and god forbid, sometimes sexual interests (gasp!).

You dress it up as "concern for MLM" in the hopes that people will sympathize with your campaign to shame and harass women, men and gender non-conforming folk for daring to like content "not meant for them", just like 2ch and 4chan dudebros in the mid-2000's.

It makes me sick to the stomach.

Don't pretend this is about homophobia. You don't go after the exact same content if it's made by "real men" featuring masculine macho "real men".

You've heard of seme/uke tropes? Get ready for aggressive tops and "bottom bitches"!
"Fetishizing Asian men"? Well, good thing that gay dudes have rice queens, and on the other end of the spectrum, " no fats, femmes or asians".
Transphobic themes? Some men consider "sh*male" or "tr*nny" to be porn categories! But neither anti-fujoshi nor transphobic gay men will talk about trans men - they're "not real men", after all, just " straight women invading gay spaces ".

And let's not get into the rape, abuse, incest, racism, sexism, violence, and plethora of other problematic things that cis gay men portray in gei comi, original fic and fanfic - it puts dark BL and fic written by anyone else to shame.
But it's okay, because it's "real men" creating and consuming it, right?

Look, I get it. You want to seem like you're doing good and fighting for queer men. I'll hazard you even were fujoshi/fudanshi before and are ashamed of how you acted back then.

But all that you're doing is misusing terms of a language you don't know, from a culture you're not part of and fandoms you don't participate in, speaking over gay men and Asian fans, othering Asian people, and fostering an environment in which harassment of innocent fans is encouraged and marginalized people are used as scapegoats.

I feel for the trans guys, who go to fandoms to escape the hate and transphobia from the world, only to be misgendered and send hateful messages in the spaces they wanted to have fun in. Who are already accused of "faking it", of not being "real men", by bigots in the real world, and now have to face the same horrible things in fandom.

I feel for the queer girls, some of whom may not even be attracted to men, but to whom BL and/or slash means a lot. Who often don't even have female characters to relate to, much less queer female characters, or simply can't relate to them very well for a variety of complex reasons. They seek refuge in fandom, only to be misoriented, called "cishet", having their identity erased to push an agenda.

And I feel for the straight, cis girls, who put genuine effort into educating themselves on queer issues, for whom fandom was a welcoming space where they could finally share their interests and be themselves, be allowed to have sexual interests... and now are being called perverts, deviants, and being told that they taint everything they touch.

And as much as it pisses me off to be called "basically a cishet girl", it doesn't get to me. At present, I'm secure in the knowledge that I am a real man, despite being gay, despite being feminine, despite liking BL. I am comfortable with myself and my identity.

But little teenage me would have been devastated.

Hey, anti-fujoshi? I don't need your faux-activism. Kindly take your misogyny, efemmiphobia, transphobia and identity politics and leave us alone. Or -OR! Listen to the people you're supposedly trying to protect.

Sincerely,

a gay, Asian, fem, queer as fuck fudanshi.

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You know, this isn't the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/"yaoi"/fujoshi discourse, but it's high up there so I'm going to say it. It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I'm a...

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Definition of Fujin from another Tumblr post that is from a gay fudanshi himself

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Definition of Fujin from another Tumblr post that is from a gay fudanshi himself

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This post explains the definition of 'fujin' and its meaning while briefly discussing the kind of wordplay with the 'fu' kanji character.

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Toxic Fandom: When Criticism and Entitlement Go Too Far

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Toxic Fandom: When Criticism and Entitlement Go Too Far

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This article discusses the origins of anti-shipping and how it came to be, including the horrid tactics fandom antis use to excuse themselves of their bullying, doxxing, harassment, suicide-baiting, death threats, etc. (which is part of the Wicked Problems on Censorship of Self-Expression, Misinformation, lack of Critical Thinking, and the list goes on)

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Toxic Fandom: When Criticism and Entitlement Go Too Far

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Many parents and their kids are becoming more and more immersed in the fandoms surrounding their favorite shows, movies, and books. Guest contributor Sean Z. provides an in-depth look at the recent history of fandom we should all be aware of and be discussing with our kids.

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Fandom, purity culture, and the rise of the anti-fan - Vox

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Fandom, purity culture, and the rise of the anti-fan - Vox

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Written by Aja Romano, this article goes in-depth to its interpretation of fandom anti-ship origins, including the real-world and online puritanism that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are headed towards and the hatred for anything sex-positive and queer-inclusive in sexual education programs and even in fandoms.

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How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry "gross" at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they're ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we're being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They're having less casual sex, they hate dating, they're more reserved about relationships in general. It's easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. "puriteens." Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who's horrified is a teen who just hasn't arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet's underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of "antis" - a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media - isn't that they are minors who are scared of sex. It's that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.

To understand how we got here, we have to look at the wellspring from which much of the internet's creative impulses flow: online fandom, where superusers gather to celebrate, write fanfiction, and create fan art about the media and characters they love. On Tumblr and Twitter, where so much fandom discourse happens, this conversation about sexual content in media has spawned an entire movement called "anti-fandom." In the wake of the 2018 passage of the internet child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in the US, fandom's proudly sex-positive culture has increasingly become sanitized, homogenized, and erased - which has allowed the puritanical voices of these "anti-fans" to take their place.

This trend would be bad news in any online community, but it's been especially heady and unwieldy in fandom, an entire culture built around feeling things strongly, not rationally. The result is one of the unlikeliest fronts of the culture war: an internet community, once the bastion of delightful deviance and subversion, being completely overtaken by a new form of purity culture often spearheaded by people who would otherwise describe themselves as politically liberal.

Though this may sound like a niche fandom issue, this modern puritanism has spread far into the wider culture, intersecting with both a broader media illiteracy and a moral panic that crosses the political spectrum.

It's making it more and more impossible to have a healthy discourse about sex at all.

The weaponization of social justice and the rise of the "anti-fandom"

Above all else, fans are passionate. Fandom is where the internet houses some of its most engaged communities - where fans flock to celebrate their favorite stories, create fan works, carry on intense discussions, and argue over which fictional or celebrity relationships they're shipping.

During the first half of the 2010s, that passion meant that fans were effectively cultural superspreaders, proselytizing their favorites, from Marvel to K-pop to Netflix, far and wide. Their cultural influence, especially through the Tumblr-to-BuzzFeed pipeline, was outsize. You may not have been on Tumblr then, but its fandom-infused language and culture likely heavily influenced your internet experience just the same.

This trend would be bad for any online community, but fandom is an entire culture built around feeling things strongly, not rationally

Part of what Tumblr effortlessly exported, along with its fannish sensibility, was its users' awareness of social justice concepts and language. The Tumblr culture of the early 2010s rapidly shifted an entire generation of social media users toward the left. That shift started not on Tumblr, but on LiveJournal, thanks to a widespread, year-long conversation about racism in geek culture in 2009 that became known as RaceFail. In 2010, LiveJournal became frequently nonfunctional due to intermittent hacker attacks, which sent thousands of displaced fans to Tumblr. With them, they brought all of their recent conversations about race and social justice. The result was an unexpected culture clash between the fandom teens of still-new Tumblr and the fandom adults of LiveJournal. Many Tumblr users, regardless of age and academic experience, got crash courses in progressive ideology and everything from socialism to structuralism - but that education wasn't always easy or welcome.

"I was on Tumblr as the migration was happening," journalist Allegra Rosenberg told me. "I distinctly remember the shift in tenor of doing fandom on Tumblr in late 2010, early 2011 as the LiveJournal adults came over, bringing with them the language of feminism, the language of social justice, intersectionality."

"I remember feeling almost scared or offended," Rosenberg said, "because I was like, you guys are trying to make this serious. We're just making memes. I was just a kid and I felt kind of threatened by what I perceived to be this atmosphere of seriousness, because I don't think I really understood what had been going on over there."

The language of social justice may have been revelatory to many fans, but it also became fodder for zealotry and demagoguery. It frequently became a double-edged sword, weaponized by and against the people using it. Members of the alt-right started using the phrase "social justice warrior" to mockingly describe zealous Tumblr users who performed what they saw as shallow, overly aggressive, or inauthentic versions of progressive politics.

Tumblr teens also learned to weaponize this language, often through performativity that became a core part of 2010s fandom culture. This coincided with the rise of "call-out culture." Blogs such as Your Fave Is Problematic typified what some dubbed Tumblr's " accountability culture " by simply listing things various beloved celebrities, usually popular within geek culture, had done that were bad or troubling.

Call-out culture predated and existed independently from cancel culture. Its goal was always to raise awareness, not prompt mass harassment or boycotts, but one easily begets the other. Fans of the era adopted an eagerness to label absolutely everything even slightly complicated as "problematic," and that easily translated into harassment of others who still enjoyed those now-tainted stories and creators.

Once fans had been given the tools of social media harassment and the moral motivation of social justice, they waged war on each other - often for things that only nominally had to do with social justice and were instead about things like fandom shipping and character biases. These fights often obscured or further marginalized actual fans of color and queer fans, all in the name of fighting on their behalf.In contemporary fandom, this fight continues, only now, ironically, it's often the cavalier use of the "anti" label that gets used to silence fans of color.

Soon, this tendency converged with "antis" in fandom: people who were identified primarily not through their love of a thing but for their hatred of it. Over the back half of the 2010s, the notion of what an "anti" was began to shift away from, say, K-pop stans hating on a specific K-pop star, toward broad opposition to various fandom ideologies and practices. This usually comes down to two things: sexualized content and shipping. Especially shipping.

How ship wars led to a war on shipping, which led to a war on all fictional sex

Few things in fandom are more polarizing than who a character falls in love with or ends up with or who you want them to end up with instead. More has been won and lost in the name of ship wars - fans fighting over which ship is the best - than time could detail. Specifically, in the Voltron fandom in 2016, hatred for a single ship on the animated TV show reportedly led to the creation of an entirely new concept in fandom: the idea of being "pro-ship." The stated goal of this fight was to call out and oppose alleged pedophiles in fandom. But the actual goal was to wage war against one specific pairing by demonizing as a pedophile anyone who shipped it. (The characters in question, Shiro and Keith, were approximately 25 and 18, respectively, in the show's first season.)

Fans devoted to this "problematic" ship gradually got shorthanded as being "pro-ship." The "pro" here has historically meant "in favor of," but some in the world now claim it's short for "problematic" - a frustrating point of dispute that shows how slippery these conversations can be. (It's of course hard to defend or debate being in favor of something inherently problematic.) In other words, if you shipped characters in fandom - which is arguably the dominant reason many people are in fandom - then you were suddenly on notice as being harmful.

"It's just cartoons at the end of the day"

To be blunt, this is bonkers. The act of wanting two characters to fall madly in love, and celebrating when they do, is a natural response to fiction. If you were, say, a person who read or watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Peeta and Katniss, this group might brand you as problematic for shipping two teenagers.

Yet shipping is also often explicitly sexual, which makes it prone to distortion by people who want a moral excuse to oppose shipping. Just as with the original Voltron fandom ship war that presaged much of this discourse, people who are "anti-ship" often start out by seeking to attack specific ships based on their personal bias. Rather than acknowledging that bias, however, they instead frame fictional depictions of sex as harmful. This allows them to paint not only the ship they hate, but all ships, and shipping itself, as harmful.

It may sound hard to comprehend that anyone could take this rhetoric seriously, but the deeply emotional and accusatory nature of calling someone a pedophile makes it wildly effective. (Multiple sources I talked to for this article told me of unexpectedly vicious personal encounters with purity culture; everything from online accusations to a real-life friend group considering ostracization over suspicions the source was "pro-ship.")

Sam Aburime, an artist and independent fan scholar who has dedicated years to tracking anti-fandom examples, argues that the movement is part of the changing generational nature of fandom. Older Gen Z and younger millennials who learned the language of social justice on Tumblr are now teaching younger generations how to wield those concepts for ill. "I think they grew up with faux activism as it was starting online," Aburime told me, "where it was like, 'if you like this, or if you don't do this, you're a bad person,' when it's just cartoons at the end of the day."

FOSTA-SESTA made this conversation so much worse

It's not a coincidence that anti-fandom discourse, which has single-handedly reframed decades of sex positivity in fandom, has also coincided with a broader crackdown on sex positivity across the internet.

Originally, Tumblr culture's nuanced language around politics and accountability coexisted alongside a rampant, thriving, sexually explicit counterculture. Fans and non-fans, many of whom were queer, sex educators, and/or sex workers, enjoyed a healthy relationship to sexual expression during this era. While Tumblr became notorious for hosting porn, the reality was that the permissiveness of Tumblr's adult content policies made it a safe space for many marginalized communities.

That all changed with the passage of the child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in 2018. FOSTA heralded a sweeping crackdown on online adult content; as part of the fallout, huge swaths of the sex-positive internet were wiped out in the name of protecting children. Among those decimated communities were sex workers and sex educators on Tumblr, as well as the legions of users, many of whom were queer and genderqueer, who sought self-expression and explored their identities through sexualized content. Overnight, via its infamous ban on porn, Tumblr went from being a notably horny platform to a site full of regressive, paranoid, wary fans who were obsessed with spotting pedophilia and illicit sexual materials everywhere and anywhere - even if the things they deemed immoral and illicit were nowhere close to illegal.

FOSTA seems to have weakened the natural resistance of fandom and internet culture at large to the US's broader puritanical, anti-sex culture. The purity movement formally began in the '90s within evangelical culture as a way of normalizing an abstinence-only approach to sex, especially among teens. In the modern era, the language of this movement has converged with that of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who enact a regressive approach to sex and gender expression.

"If you go into certain radfem forums, you'll see language mirrored one-to-one," Aburime told me, describing the way TERF rhetoric overlaps with and sometimes infiltrates fandom spaces. "It's almost like a game - slipping some ideology secretly" into a fannish experience. "It's misinformation under the guise of activism." Like the US's larger current moral panic over drag shows, LGBTQ people, and " groomers," fandom's culture has regressed toward sexual repression, attacks on sexual minorities, and censorship of art made by marginalized people. The shifts happening in fandom and across the internet help exacerbate this larger cultural shift.

"There's no meaningful difference to me between a right winger who calls me a pedo because I'm trans and an antishipper that calls me a pedo because I read Homestuck," said Farrah, a 33-year-old fan from North Carolina whose full name has been withheld at their request, referring to the famously weird webcomic. "They're both putting me and people like me in a dangerous position."

"It's misinformation under the guise of activism"

"It's hard to say where fandom starts and where everything else begins," Rosenberg told me. She identifies the root of the shift as a core of "emotion and disgust" in response to various types of sexualized content, but while this response to sexual deviance has always existed, the internet allows fans to express their disgust in new ways, and the rise of anti-fandom allows fans to pathologize all kinds of things - from garden-variety kink to age gaps and sexualized cartoons.

Another major factor in the intensification of all this is Twitter, specifically the mass migration of many fandom cultures to Twitter over the last decade. "When these cultures moved to Twitter and were exposed to literally everybody and everything," Rosenberg said, "the stakes were higher, in being on the so-called winning team." Twitter also allowed fans to codify and systematize harassment through the use of platform-specific tools like hashtags and mass-brigading by bots, as we saw with the Depp-Heard trial last year. As Musk-era Twitter's abuse team has dwindled, multiple sources told me they have been using the platform less, retreating into siloed spaces like private Discord servers and locked mailing lists or Facebook groups. Yet those siloed spaces do little to solve the problems; instead, they typically reinforce and entrench all the niche ideas that led to fandom extremism to begin with.

One positive development is that Tumblr recently brought back, in a limited capacity, the ability to create NSFW content on the site. While this won't restore the zany porn-for-all days of yesteryear, it might encourage the return of sex-positive communities to drown out the noisy, harassing fringe of haters.

Farrah, who left Twitter due to the harassment there, told me they're still on Tumblr, and hopeful things are changing.

"I think more people are starting to realize the extremity in the culture and politics around them," they said, "and that awareness makes them better equipped to recognize the same extremism in fandom. I've seen more robust calls for a return to, 'don't like don't read,' and, 'your kink is not my kink and that's okay,' in the last year or two than I had in a very long time."

The downside is that the wider crackdown on sexual expression, especially in the United States, is only getting worse. That bodes ill for the internet and all its citizens, especially since media literacy as a whole is also on the decline. As purity culture spreads, the idea of depicting fictional harm as equivalent to real-world harm grows and spreads along with it.

Then again, if anyone can creatively respond to a culture of increasingly absurd attacks on ingenuity and imagination, it's an army of passionate deviants who've historically been vanguards of the weird, the queer, and the subversive. They're sexual rebels and literary freedom fighters.

If fans can't kick that nonsense to the curb, who can?

Update, May 24, 11 am: This story was originally published on May 23 and has been updated to include shifting definitions around the term "pro-ship," as well as how "anti" is used against marginalized fans.

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Puritanism took over online fandom - and then came for the rest of the internet

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Puritanism took over online fandom - and then came for the rest of the internet.

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What 'Boys Don't Cry' taught us about trans representation | Dazed

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What 'Boys Don't Cry' taught us about trans representation | Dazed

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This article discusses the dark history of the film, based on the life of a trans man named Brandon Teena, who was murdered in 1993 [Hilary Swank, a heterosexual, gender-conforming and binary cis woman, got the role instead of the many trans people who auditioned for the role of Brandon Teena in the movie].

Dazed discusses the importance of trans representation and where is it going now.

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What Boys Don’t Cry taught us about trans representation

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In the 20 years since the Hilary Swank-starring film about Brandon Teena’s murder, there have been remarkably few depictions of trans men on screen

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NotHorses' post on the definition of Transandrophobia

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NotHorses' post on the definition of Transandrophobia

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It's a post describing the ways transandrophobia or transandromisia [utilising the -misia suffix as there are issues of ableism with using the -phobia suffix for describing forms of hatred/oppression] is embodied within self-proclaimed 'feminist' circles and even in other queer and trans circles as trans and queer people, including both binary and non-intersex cis men and women are guilty of being transandrophobic towards transmasculine people.

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We know "misandry" isn't real. We know transmisogyny is a huge, pressing issue, and transandrophobia is not meant to be a counter to it, or to undermine it, or to discount that it exists and is a problem.

There is this urge to binarize the trans community, and to create pyramids of oppression within it that directly mirror the pyramids of oppression that cis people experience. There's a desire to say that because trans women are women, they are The (only) Oppressed, and because trans men are men, we are The Oppressors.

The thing is, the trans community and trans experiences aren't that simple. We aren't a direct mirror to the way the patriarchy works for cis men & women, where one group oppresses another, and gains privilege for it. Trans men don't gain privilege within the trans community for being men, and we don't oppress everyone else because we are men. Being trans complicates things, and it makes gender interactions much more nuanced than that.

"Transandrophobia"- the specific marginalization that trans men/transmascs experience.

We say this instead of "transmisandry" because we do not want to miscommunicate our intentions. "Misandry" does not exist. It is not a way of countering or undermining the reality of transmisogyny. The word refers to the fact that trans men are marginalized because they are men when they should not be. When they should be women instead, because that's what society wants.

So why not just "transphobia"? Because transphobia is a broader term that covers some, but not all of the marginalization we face. Because it impacts everyone differently, and that's worth discussing- just like transmisogyny and nbphobia/enbyphobia/exorsexism is worth discussing.

Stereotyping transmascs as "soft", or as "men lite".

Refusing to call us "boy" rather than "boi", as if the actual word credits our manhood too much ("Boi" is also a term which, unless I'm mistaken, which refers specifically to black lesbians)

Encouraging trans men to be more feminine, to distance ourselves from manhood and masculinity.

Cis lesbians saying they'd date trans men, insisting we're just confused lesbians

Cis people who say they'd never date a cis man, but would date trans men- because we are "softer" and not "really" men.

"Men are gross... except trans men"

Transmascs are seen as "gender traitors"- betraying the sanctity of womanhood to chase ugly manhood instead.

Silencing transmascs by insisting we are, by nature, misogynists and benefactors of male privilege regardless of how well we pass/whether we are out/what the context and situation are.

Scare or nonexistent resources for abuse inflicted upon us, due both to transphobia, and to the exclusion of trans men specifically from most abuse resources.

Medical professionals refusing to believe we are who & what we say we are, often leading to unnecessary procedures and miscommunication

Pregnancy tests for transmascs without a uterus

Urine testing receptacles meant for penises rather than vaginas (or vice versa)

Misgendering over the phone, demanding to speak with the "actual" patient

"Women's clinic"

Mistreatment and abuse at women's clinics for looking like an "intruder", for appearing to be "stealing resources" or "taking up space".

Some examples!

The word refers to a slice of specific experiences and marginalization that the rest of the community does not generally experience, and that's it. It is not a way of perpetuating transmisogyny, and it should not be leveled against transfemmes. It does not imply that trans women oppress us, only that we have different experiences.

If you are uncomfortable with the word, that's fine. I think there's room to tweak and converse and make sure it suits the purpose that the community wants from it. This is just a compilation of what I understand, right now, and what I've heard from other transmascs.

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We know "misandry" isn't real. We know transmisogyny is a huge, pressing issue, and transandrophobia is not meant to be a counter to it, or to undermine it, or to discount that it exists and is a...

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Saint-Speaks' Tumblr Post on Transandrophobia

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Saint-Speaks' Tumblr Post on Transandrophobia

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Saint Dionysus' Tumblr page has excellent writings on transandrophobia and defines what it is in their own words and how it's an issue in queer spaces for nonbinary individuals and even for queer (and non-queer) cisgender women venting their traumas and pain of men and gender essentialism onto transgender men and transmasculine people as if they are 'punching bags' for them.

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[Image ID: this photo depicts a user by the name of kuromantic or ia with a profile picture of a male-presenting fictional character saying in a tweet: "invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings . But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. many people are now throwing an entire genre away." Image ID End]

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This tweet expresses horror and disgust at how transgender men and mascs who love Boys' Love or Yaoi are treated by people being ingested by and have internalised TERF ideology and using it towards transmascs while throwing a genre of Asian queer media under the bus with said anti-fujin people being secretly racist and xenophobic about it.

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invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings. 

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. 

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.

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invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings. 

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. 

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.

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but why not let it go?? why not take a deep breath??

you see, the primary anti-fujos on tumblr are IMMENSELY homophobic and transphobic. 

TW FOR ABLEIST SLURS, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND AWFUL PEOPLE

THIS IS THE SHIT I'M ANGRY ABOUT. https://t.co/anDj4Hwb51

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invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings.

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT.

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.
— ia (@kuromantic) April 10, 2020

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invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings. 

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. 

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
but why not let it go?? why not take a deep breath??

you see, the primary anti-fujos on tumblr are IMMENSELY homophobic and transphobic. 

TW FOR ABLEIST SLURS, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND AWFUL PEOPLE

THIS IS THE SHIT I'M ANGRY ABOUT. https://t.co/anDj4Hwb51

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings. 

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. 

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
invalidating trans men who like BL. claiming every BL fan is a cishet woman (who can read BL all they like who gives a fuck), being suspiciously TERFy and garbage human beings. 

But oh no. It does not end there. It does NOT. 

many people are now throwing an entire genre away.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
but why not let it go?? why not take a deep breath??

you see, the primary anti-fujos on tumblr are IMMENSELY homophobic and transphobic. 

TW FOR ABLEIST SLURS, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND AWFUL PEOPLE

THIS IS THE SHIT I'M ANGRY ABOUT. https://t.co/anDj4Hwb51

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This is a Reddit post on r/transandrophobia sharing their experiences with transandrophobia in fandoms and with radfem/gender-critical-adjacent androphobia/misia [a hatred of men and masculinity for the fact of men and masculine people of all genders being men and masculine people, and it additionally intersects with many interconnected bigotries such as racism and gender essentialism] tying into transandrophobia.

The comments section below the post also share their instances of transandrophobia in fandoms.

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This Subreddit section is predominantly female-centric, but it shares the Original Poster's (or OP's) very well about the ways that BL fans have to prove their enjoyment of BL isn't seen as harmful and is harmless to a degree.

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A Reddit post on r/boyslove with the caption "In this designated BL fan space, we shouldn't have to be constantly defending our enjoyment of BL: boyslove

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A Reddit post on r/boyslove with the caption "In this designated BL fan space, we shouldn't have to be constantly defending our enjoyment of BL: boyslove

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KrisPNatz's YouTube video on Consent being a controversial topic in Yaoi/BL fandoms

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KrisPNatz's YouTube video on Consent being a controversial topic in Yaoi/BL fandoms

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KrisPNatz is a bisexual and queer YouTuber providing his own commentary and/or thoughts on topics related to BL/Yaoi, sometimes doing playthroughs of Boys' Love related visual novel games.

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Another video by KrisPNatz [more focused on issues with Super Lovers, a Boys' Love series that has fictional age gaps and fictional incest, but with controversies made by puritanical fans who excuse the same controversial issues in cishetero-normative media such as Hentai and/or Ecchi and in Girls' Love/Yuri]

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Another video by KrisPNatz [more focused on issues with Super Lovers, a Boys' Love series that has fictional age gaps and fictional incest, but with controversies made by puritanical fans who excuse the same controversial issues in cishetero-normative media such as Hentai and/or Ecchi and in Girls' Love/Yuri]

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KrisPNatz in this video shares his thoughts on the anime Super Lovers, including the controversies made against the anime and the accusations some fans outside of and inside Boys' Love fandoms made.

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A third KrisPNatz YouTube video talking about the issues in Sasaki to Miyano [a BL series that isn't as intense, but claimed 'issues' fans point out or perceive as problems]

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A third KrisPNatz YouTube video talking about the issues in Sasaki to Miyano [a BL series that isn't as intense, but claimed 'issues' fans point out or perceive as problems]

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This involves in-depth discussion of the Sasaki to Miyano series, including the discussion of issues discussed by fans inside and outside of the Sasaki to Miyano [Sasaki and Miyano] fandom.

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A Tumblr post discussing if Alpha/Beta/Omega-verse (A/B/O) has anything to do with gender dynamics and debunking any arguments made against the usage of A/B/O for trans and GNC [gender-non-conforming] fans to use in not only exploring themselves gender and/or sexuality-wise, but to be vigilant about any arguments made against A/B/O from transphobic and TERFy standpoints

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A Tumblr post discussing if Alpha/Beta/Omega-verse (A/B/O) has anything to do with gender dynamics and debunking any arguments made against the usage of A/B/O for trans and GNC [gender-non-conforming] fans to use in not only exploring themselves gender and/or sexuality-wise, but to be vigilant about any arguments made against A/B/O from transphobic and TERFy standpoints

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Content Warning: open and/or frank discussions of pregnancy and/or chest (or breast)-feeding in fanfiction (which may be dysphoria inducing to some trans and GNC persons who have dysphoria with anything related to reproductive health issues)

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More than once, I've talked about the negative implications of Evangelical/purity culture logic being uncritically replicated in fandom spaces and left-wing discourse, and have also referenced specific examples of logical overlap this produces re, in particular, the policing of sexuality. What I don't think I've done before is explain how this happens: how even a well-intentioned person who's trying to unlearn the toxic systems they grew up with can end up replicating those systems. Even if you didn't grow up specifically in an Evangelical/purity context, if your home, school, work and/or other social environments have never encouraged or taught you to think critically, then it's easy to fall into similar traps - so here, hopefully, is a quick explainer on how that works, and (hopefully) how to avoid it in the future.

Put simply: within Evangelism, purity culture and other strict, hierarchical social contexts, an enormous value is placed on rules, and specifically hard rules. There might be a little wiggle-room in some instances, but overwhelmingly, the rules are fixed: once you get taught that something is bad, you're expected never to question it. Understanding the rules is secondary to obeying them, and oftentimes, asking for a more thorough explanation - no matter how innocently, even if all you're trying to do is learn - is framed as challenging those rules, and therefore cast as disobedience. And where obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a sin. If someone breaks the rules, it doesn't matter why they did it, only that they did. Their explanations or justifications don't matter, and nor does the context: a rule is a rule, and rulebreakers are Bad.

In this kind of environment, therefore, you absorb three main lessons: one, to obey a rule from the moment you learn it; two, that it's more important to follow the rules than to understand them; and three, that enforcing the rules means castigating anyone who breaks them. And these lessons go deep: they're hard to unlearn, especially when you grow up with them through your formative years, because the consequences of breaking them - or even being seen to break them - can be socially catastrophic.

But outside these sorts of strict environments - and, honestly, even within them - that much rigidity isn't healthy. Life is frequently far more complex and nuanced than hard rules really allow for, particularly when it comes to human psychology and behaviour - and this is where critical thinking comes in. Critical thinking allows us to evaluate the world around us on an ongoing basis: to weigh the merits of different positions; to challenge established rules if we feel they no longer serve us; to decide which new ones to institute in their place; to acknowledge that sometimes, there are no easy answers; to show the working behind our positions, and to assess the logic with which other arguments are presented to us. Critical thinking is how we graduate from a simplistic, black-and-white view of morality to a more nuanced perception of the world - but this is a very hard lesson to learn if, instead of critical thinking, we're taught instead to put our faith in rules alone.

So: what does it actually look like, when rule-based logic is applied in left-wing spaces? I'll give you an example:

Sally is new to both social justice and fandom. She grew up in a household that punished her for asking questions, and where she was expected to unquestioningly follow specific hard rules. Now, though, Sally has started to learn a bit more about the world outside her immediate bubble, and is realising not only that the rules she grew up with were toxic, but that she's absorbed a lot of biases she doesn't want to have. Sally is keen to improve herself. She wants to be a good person! So Sally joins some internet communities and starts to read up on things. Sally is well-intentioned, but she's also never learned how to evaluate information before, and she's certainly never had to consider that two contrasting opinions could be equally valid - how could she have, when she wasn't allowed to ask questions, and when she was always told there was a singular Right Answer to everything? Her whole framework for learning is to Look For The Rules And Follow Them, and now that she's learned the old rules were Bad, that means she has to figure out what the Good Rules are.

Sally isn't aware she's thinking of it in these terms, but subconsciously, this is how she's learned to think. So when Sally reads a post explaining how sex work and pornography are inherently misogynistic and demeaning to women, Sally doesn't consider this as one side of an ongoing argument, but uncritically absorbs this information as a new Rule. She reads about how it's always bad and appropriative for someone from one culture to wear clothes from another culture, and even though she's not quite sure of all the ways in which it applies, this becomes a Rule, too. Whatever argument she encounters first that seems reasonable becomes a Rule, and once she has the Rules, there's no need to challenge them or research them or flesh out her understanding, because that's never been how Rules work - and because she's grown up in a context where the foremost way to show that you're aware of and obeying the Rules is to shame people for breaking them, even though she's not well-versed in these subjects, Sally begins to weigh in on debates by harshly disagreeing with anyone who offers up counter-opinions. Sometimes her disagreements are couched in borrowed terms, parroting back the logic of the Rules she's learned, but other times, they're simply ad hominem attacks, because at home, breaking a Rule makes you a bad person, and as such, Sally has never learned to differentiate between attacking the idea and attacking the person.

And of course, because Sally doesn't understand the Rules in-depth, it's harder to explain them to or debate with rulebreakers who've come armed with arguments she hasn't heard before, which makes it easier and less frustrating to just insult them and point out that they ARE rulebreakers - especially if she doesn't want to admit her confusion or the limitations of her knowledge. Most crucially of all, Sally doesn't have a viable framework for admitting to fault or ignorance beyond a total groveling apology that doubles as a concession to having been Morally Bad, because that's what it's always meant to her to admit you broke a Rule. She has no template for saying, "huh, I hadn't considered that," or "I don't know enough to contribute here," or even "I was wrong; thanks for explaining!"

So instead, when challenged, Sally remains defensive: she feels guilty about the prospect of being Bad, because she absolutely doesn't want to be a Bad Person, but she also doesn't know how to conceptualise goodness outside of obedience. It makes her nervous and unsettled to think that strangers could think of her as a Bad Person when she's following the Rules, and so she becomes even more aggressive when challenged to compensate, clinging all the more tightly to anyone who agrees with her, yet inevitably ending up hurt when it turns out this person or that who she thought agreed on What The Rules Were suddenly develops a different opinion, or asks a question, or does something else unsettling.

Pushed to this sort of breaking point, some people in Sally's position go back to the fundamentalism they were raised with, not because they still agree with it, but because the lack of uniform agreement about What The Rules Are makes them feel constantly anxious and attacked, and at least before, they knew how to behave to ensure that everyone around them knew they were Good. Others turn to increasingly niche communities and social groups, constantly on paranoid alert for Deviance From The Rules. But other people eventually have the freeing realisation that the fixation on Rules and Goodness is what's hurting them, not strangers with different opinions, and they steadily start to do what they wanted to do all along: become happier, kinder and better-informed people who can admit to human failings - including their own - without melting down about it.

THIS is what we mean when we talk about puritan logic being present in fandom and left-wing spaces: the refusal to engage with critical thinking while sticking doggedly to a single, fixed interpretation of How To Be Good. It's not always about sexuality; it's just that sexuality, and especially queerness, are topics we're used to seeing conservatives talk about a certain way, and when those same rhetorical tricks show up in our fandom spaces, we know why they look familiar.

So: how do you break out of rule-based thinking? By being aware of it as a behavioural pattern. By making a conscious effort to accept that differing perspectives can sometimes have equal value, or that, even if a given argument isn't completely sound, it might still contain a nugget of truth. By trying to be less reactive and more reflective when encountering positions different to your own. By accepting that not every argument is automatically tied to or indicative of a higher moral position: sometimes, we're just talking about stuff! By remembering that you're allowed to change your position, or challenge someone else's, or ask for clarification. By understanding that having a moral code and personal principles isn't at odds with asking questions, and that it's possible - even desirable - to update your beliefs when you come to learn more than you did before.

This can be a scary and disquieting process to engage in, and it's important to be aware of that, because one of the main appeals of rule-based thinking - if not the key appeal - is the comfort of moral certainty it engenders. If the rules are simple and clear, and following them is what makes you a good person, then it's easy to know if you're doing the right thing according to that system. It's much, much harder and frequently more uncomfortable to be uncertain about things: to doubt, not only yourself, but the way you've been taught to think. And especially online, where we encounter so many more opinions and people than we might elsewhere, and where we can get dogpiled on by strangers or go viral without meaning to despite our best intentions? The prospect of being deemed Bad is genuinely terrifying. Of course we want to follow the Rules. But that's the point of critical thinking: to try and understand that rules exist in the first place, not to be immutable and unchanging, but as tools to help us be better - and if a tool becomes defunct or broken, it only makes sense to repair it.

Rigid thinking teaches us to view the world through the lens of rules: to obey first and understand later. Critical thinking teaches us to use ideas, questions, contexts and other bits of information as analytic tools: to put understanding ahead of obedience. So if you want to break out of puritan thinking, whenever you encounter a new piece of information, ask yourself: are you absorbing it as a rule, or as a tool?

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Anonymous said: Does abo even have anything to do with gender? Correct me if I'm wrong since that trope isn't exactly my cup of tea and I've only read like two fics about it but I though the 'roles'...

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A blog post by em54 on the Infantilisation of Transmasculinity in LGBTQ+ Feminism (especially in mainstream, cishet, white, Christian, able-bodied, neurotypical, mentally sane and/or non-intersex circles with their exclusive understanding/reading of feminism)

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A blog post by em54 on the Infantilisation of Transmasculinity in LGBTQ+ Feminism (especially in mainstream, cishet, white, Christian, able-bodied, neurotypical, mentally sane and/or non-intersex circles with their exclusive understanding/reading of feminism)

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Em54 himself speaks about the infantilisation he's experienced as a transmasculine man (transmasculine includes masc-leaning people, not just binary trans men, and trans man and transmasculine aren't the same at all, to clarify) who happens to be neurodivergent/disabled [ableism in combination with transphobia and/or transandrophobia]. He also discusses experiencing those forms of transphobia in KAM (or Kill All Men, a term utilised by feminists as a form of humour in coping with trauma from interconnected systems of patriarchy, and by radical feminists to not only disregard the underrepresented mental health and issues of men as the patriarchy affects them as well, but to use it as a way to be transphobic towards trans men and homophobic and queerphobic towards gay and queer men, to be racist towards racialised men, Black men, Indigenous men, Asian men, and Men of Colour) mainstream feminist circles that often misgender and infantilise trans men and mascs, and are racist, colonialist, etc. towards racialised trans men and mascs, including marginalised trans men and mascs whose identities strongly intersect with each other and inform the ways they navigate a transandrophobic society that hates them for being men and masculine people [because according to society, they're not 'supposed' to be].

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Something I generally try to ignore but am unable to, as someone who is transmasc but also neurodivergent/disabled, is the feeling that people are not seeing me as a grown, capable man. This can sometimes be especially true in cis queer spaces. While attempting to be very positively accepting of my identity, they can end up making me feel worse. Sure, I can act childish sometimes, but so do most other people my age. They are still called "men", "women", "adults." Yet even my mother seems to be seeing me as weaker and more emotionally sensitive since coming out as male. The term "boi" is often used by people I know online, and I have rarely, if ever, had someone who isn't a confused transphobe call me a "man" in the traditional sense.

Trying to figure this all out in my head, I found a potential explanation from where I find a lot of information on social phenomena: Tiktok and Twitter. There are three things that stick out to me when cis people discuss the transmasc spectrum: discourse around transmen's role in KAM (kill all men), references to transmascs as "boi" types, and the seemingly immediate policing of transmasc voices when they are discussing misogyny.

What do these all tie into? My initial thought is rejection of traditional social masculinity in queer spaces. For most of the LGBTQ community, deviance from heteronormative ideals of masculinity define their membership, while tramsmasc membership is based in some desire to fulfill some part of that ideal. Our deviance from a core foundation of modern hegemonic masculinity, namely a certain biological makeup, is often one of the largest internal signs of dysphoria or gender non-conformity, either directly or indirectly. We find our identities within the confines of cisgender traditional masculinity, having been raised outside of it, but are unable to fulfill it. For many transmen, these standards remain important pillars of reference, and rejection of those standards may not ever happen. If they do, it may not even be until after an amount of social/medical transition that relieves this dysphoria. This is fundamentally different from those who are still able to stand on those binary biological foundations of gender (sex) and reject traditional narratives from a (relatively) more privileged position.

Transmen experience a unique pressure from outside and inside the LGBTQ community to conform to standards the community supposedly works to reject. All binary trans people experience pressure to conform to the binary in this way, but transwomen are given more freedom and benefit of the doubt. It is the result of 2nd wave feminism: women are allowed to participate in more gender-deviant acitivties than men. Transwomen can wear pants without a problem (as they should), but transmen are unable to wear skirts without people completely invalidating their gender. This is easily visible to me from cis reactions to Harry Styles wearing a dress versus transmen wearing skirts on social media. Cis men, regardless of sexuality, are praised by the LGBTQ communtiy for breaking gender norms through their clothing, while transmen are met with comments such as "if you're going to say you're male, at least try to pass". Transwomen experience this kind of rhetoric as well, but I do not have the experience to talk about transwomen's experiences in more detail.

Earlier, I referenced rhetoric involving the inclusion of transmen in the phrase "KAM", an acronym standing for "Kill All Men", which is a phrase used half-jokingly by women as a response to systemic abuse by men due to patriarchal rape culture and excuses for femicide. Most transmen, having been socialized as women, are aware of this phrase and have their own ideas about how they fit in. The oft-repeated phrase "transmen are men" meant that many cisgender women were calling it transphobic to decide the KAM was exclusive to cisgender men. As this rhetoric evolved, many started swinging to the opposite side of the pendulum, saying things like "Kill all men, including transmen. :D" While intended to be inclusive, the extra note of transmen not only removes us from the phrase directly, but it also ignores how transmen's experience some of the same violence from the same men that are referenced in KAM. Transmen are still sexually assaulted and murdered simply because they are trans, and also if they are seen as women by other men. The frequent inclusion of positive emojis after the mention of transmen also serves as a form of infantilization and not taking transmen as seriously as cis men.

As we can see, this topic alone shows how the push by cis people to show unwavering acceptance of transmen's identities can actually do more harm than good, glossing over even the differing perspectives in the transmasc community. When transmen did start to bring up that their experiences still differ from cismen and that they felt uncomfortable being grouped with their oppressors, especially since many were treated as women by these cis men, they were told they were invalidating their own identities. Others were saying "yes, we are all included, no exceptions", which is an easier perspective to remember and go by as a cis person if you're worried about being seen as transphobic. Cis people are the ones taking control of the conversation since apparently transmen are unable to understand and internally discuss nuances in their identities without it being seen as self-hatred. While conversations about misogyny obviously belong to women, the rush by ciswomen to accept trans identities and not appear transphobic hurriedly erased the nuance that simply identifying as a man does not exclude us from experiencing misogyny or, in this case, even violent transphobia. Even after being on T for 7 months, I know people still see me as a woman, and I do still experience misogyny by those who do see me as a woman. Saying "I'm a guy" does not suddenly hand us male privilege, especially for those who are unable to transition.

When trans people are not allowed to have nuanced conversations within the cis LGBTQ community, progress is halted, especially when cis members of the community try to speak on our behalf. I have watched this kind of scenario happen over and over with real-life consequences, especially when it comes to stereotypes around reactions to pronouns and gender assumptions. I see this in other areas of activism, too, including disability advocacy, racial equality, and neurodivergent activism, where those from a relatively more privileged state will act as a vigilante of sorts and not leave room for any nuance or perspective in possible cases of discrimination. Even something as small as a transman experiencing discomfort at a song lyric ("but I just can't date a dude with a vag", used in a "grow a pair" context) can turn into a fight among cis people over whether transmen were trying to cancel Ke$ha as a transphobe. This brought more transphobia into the "allied" community as well as to other random transpeople's accounts. There was a suspiciously large consensus in the "allied" community that somehow we transmen were unable to take context of the song into account, and they were here to explain it to us. Essentially a weird GNC version of mansplaining, even though every response by a trans person was that nobody was actually offended by the lyric (surprise: we can, in fact, take context into account. Just call us snowflakes already if you don't believe that).

While this post is not as essay-like or research-oriented as my previous one, I hope me explaining my experiences with this serves as simply some food for thought.

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My Recent Experiences With Infantilization of Trans Masculinity in LGBTQ Feminism – Masculinities

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Something I generally try to ignore but am unable to, as someone who is transmasc but also neurodivergent/disabled, is the feeling that people are not seeing me as a grown, capable man. This can sometimes be especially true in cis queer spaces. While attempting to be very positively accepting of my identity, they can end up making me feel worse. Sure, I can act childish sometimes, but so do most other people my age. They are still called “men”, “women”, “adults.” Yet even my mother seems to be seeing me as weaker and more emotionally sensitive since coming out as male. The term “boi” is often used by people I know online, and I have rarely, if ever, had someone who isn’t a confused transphobe call me a “man” in the traditional sense.

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A Reddit post from r/ftm beginning an open and difficult discussion with the ways that people are more interested in policing the ways transmasculine people use words such as transmisandry and/or transandrophobia to describe their nuanced and complex lived experiences with the ways that race, gender, disability, and more influence their experiences with growing up being perceived as 'women/girls'

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A Reddit post from r/ftm beginning an open and difficult discussion with the ways that people are more interested in policing the ways transmasculine people use words such as transmisandry and/or transandrophobia to describe their nuanced and complex lived experiences with the ways that race, gender, disability, and more influence their experiences with growing up being perceived as 'women/girls'

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Another r/ftm post with additional open conversations about the terms of anti-transmasculine hatred/oppression in connection with racism, colonialism, misandry, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, etc. that trans men and mascs (myself included) experience from a transandrophobic and transphobic society who hates us and wants us dead for not being "women" as we're expected to be.

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Another r/ftm post with additional open conversations about the terms of anti-transmasculine hatred/oppression in connection with racism, colonialism, misandry, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, etc. that trans men and mascs (myself included) experience from a transandrophobic and transphobic society who hates us and wants us dead for not being "women" as we're expected to be.

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Beneath this post, there are many transmasc folks in this subreddit sharing their lived experiences with how transandrophobia/transmisandry intersects with misogyny, misandry, racism, colonialism, gender essentialism, ableism, among many interconnected forms of oppression. People need to understand that similar to white cis men, white cis women are just as guilty of benefitting from patriarchy and from non-intersex cisheteronormativity that relies on racism, white supremacy, colonialism and xenophobia [including additional forms of bigotry such as ableism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and queerphobia].

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Luxander's 'You're Too Pretty To Be a Trans Man' | "What IS 'Transandrophobia'?"

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Luxander's 'You're Too Pretty To Be a Trans Man' | "What IS 'Transandrophobia'?"

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This is a video by Luxander themself [they go by they/them or it/its] on the topic of transandrophobia and how it embodies itself in not only feminist spaces, but also in queer and trans spaces [even in transmasc spaces with other transmascs who have ingrained self-hatred/anti-transmasculinity within themselves].

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"You're Too Pretty To Be A Trans Man" | What IS "Transandrophobia"?

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This post has screenshots of Vivziepop [the creator of Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss] being transandrophobic/transphobic towards transmascs

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This post has screenshots of Vivziepop [the creator of Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss] being transandrophobic/transphobic towards transmascs

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This post contains screenshots of Vivziepop being more than merely transphobic towards transmasculine people and trans men and the way she misgenders and infantilises them in a myriad of ways [from referring to them as 'white girls' to disrespecting transmascs].

Content Warning: transandrophobic language, misgendering of trans men and transmascs done by a media creator, etc.

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Happy Friday, here's Vivziepop being transphobic.

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Tumblr Post by KrispyBlorbos talking about how anti-fujoshi are more homophobic than fujoshi themselves

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Tumblr Post by KrispyBlorbos talking about how anti-fujoshi are more homophobic than fujoshi themselves

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In this post, Krispy himself backs up his claim by stating that anti-fujoshi have a belief that cishet people [anti-fujoshi specifically refer to predominantly cishet women when talking about cishet people] cannot or shouldn't enjoy queer romance [also referring to men loving men or MLM fiction] in media at all while watering down serious terms such as fetishisation [anti-fujoshi bigots also water down serious terms such as romanticisation, normalisation, etc. to make themselves seem more rational and legitimate than they actually are].

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I feel like anti fujoshis are more homophobic than fujoshis because they literally think straight people (specifically women) can’t enjoy gay couples (specifically mlm) in fiction at all??? And then…

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A Tumblr Post from BioPanik discussing the morality of Fandom Activities 

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A Tumblr Post from BioPanik discussing the morality of Fandom Activities 

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A very good post discussing about this topic from BioPanik's perspective and also why fandom puritans are not doing anyone any favours.

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This might as well be an essay, so apologies for my long asf post. Just a few heads up: this is in no way talking about people who support incest irl and MAPS. Those are extreme cases that I'm not qualified myself to talk about, I only know that I don't want them on my page 😭

I stopped having a very active social media presence when I was finishing high school. For me, this was a huge deal, because as the token weird queer kid all my life, Tumblr and fandom culture provided a safe space for self-expression, developing my writing skills and exploring myself. Fandoms usually play a huge role for teens, since their interactions and their experiences shape their mindsets into the primary form their adult brain takes. Whenever I look at my old posts, I can see the points where I was maturing, I could see my opinions change very clearly without always connecting old posts to significant life events.

What is very important to take into account is that I was in ALL the "red flag" fandoms, even some niche ones. BNHA, Homestuck, RWBY, Okegom, Voltron, you name it. I was into it, I had Instagram edits of it saved on my phone. As a result, I am familiar with all kinds of fujoshi, yuri bros, proshippers, etc. I'm not here to inform you about my entire digital footprint though. I'm here to discuss fandom morality. Fair warning, I will be referring to a bunch of dark themes vaguely.

I want to start by saying I understand the appeal of a toxic ship. A ship that is straight-up problematic given the context of the story. Be it because the characters are abusive to each other, a very big age gap or them being blood relatives - I get it, even if I'm one of the people who's easily repelled by this shit. I get why Junjou Romantica, for example, became so popular. The big body proportions, the "forbidden romance" trope, the guilty pleasure, I get it. I understand how nerdy young women would fawn over yaoi because they craved a soft male touch. I understand the south park proshippers because they inserted their younger selves into the characters and imagined scenarios where their own fucked-up childhoods would make sense.

My experience with Funamusea helped me understand that things that are taboo can be appealing in a fictional form. There were a lot of issues because the horror used in Funa's games was centered around sexual battery and assault. To me, that made perfect sense. Funa games are packed to the brim with gore, war, mental abuse, and disturbing characters. Of course, there would be SA in such a fucked up setting. Rape is a horrifying thing that no one should face because it is a subcategory of violence. VIOLENCE IS SOMETHING NO ONE SHOULD EVER COME ACROSS. Therefore, why is it that people who write stories containing this trope receive so much hate, but 1940s war aus for example get praised? Why is FMA a pacifist masterpiece and not torture porn?

For "glorifying" real-life horrors? Triggering people? Let's broaden this.

Think of your favorite slasher film. Your favorite best-seller horror book. Do you think that the people behind these stories are freaks and murderers? Psychopaths are capable of fitting in anywhere they want, even fucking churches. So it is useless to assume creators are moral instigators for their VILLAINS. Now let's think about Colleen Hoover and Sara J Maas (or as I like to call her, Sara J Ass). Their "love" stories are super popular because of the immense marketing that they have received, despite profiting off romanticized harmful content. Backlash is still minimized in contrast to anime niche, because they are backed by million-dollar industries and the fact that they conform to the norms of a straight story. Although that, is a topic for another discussion - how problematic characteristics are "musts" in irl relationships.

Lastly, I want to talk about the so-called community saviors who want to protect these platforms. Those who want to build a safe environment so that no predators infiltrate our sacred grounds where we discuss Persona 5 ABO dynamics. A lot of them are oftentimes victims of this sort of abuse. I myself have come across groomers. But tbh 15yo kids who reblog Shiro X Keith are not really the enemy? Anyway, that's a little besides the point. I want to directly talk to these people right now, hear me out: you are hypocrites. You only pretend to care about Tumblr communities but do not hesitate to accuse someone of abuse (any kind) and tell them to end their life. How are you protecting anyone like this? How are you a positive role model for the children partaking in fandom activities when you show clearly that you wish death upon someone. VIOLENCE IS SOMETHING NO ONE SHOULD EVER COME ACROSS, I re-iterate and you possibly agree, but YOU ARE STILL VIOLENT, and justify it by being "virtuous". How are you any different from @\hivliving? Her actions will forever be engraved in her victims' heads, even if she was humiliated in the end. Then again, it would have been better for her to write a shitty low-quality fic about Hamilton having HIV or whatever the fuck, if looking up basic things about HIV was so difficult. After 7 years in & out of fandoms, there's one thing I'm fine with, and that's bad fics.

Ultimately there is so much more I want to say. I might cover this topic on my bestie and I's podcast sometime (soz it's in Greek). The bottom line here though is not about keeping a neutral stance on problematic media. It is to enjoy whatever the fuck you want just because it makes you happy. It is to differentiate what's a wolf in sheep's clothing from what's a sheep. It is to accept that kids will ALWAYS lie about their age to access all sorts of NSFW. God knows I did so. It is to recognize them and realize that their creators and fans are most likely not going to act out every bad thing that occurs in said story. Because if that were the case, with the rise of all the Yeagerists, we'd have so many bitchless college students trying to start little rumblings of their own, and the world would be a much funnier place.

Now go outside and spread your moral philosophies to people outside your Discord server

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This might as well be an essay, so apologies for my long asf post. Just a few heads up: this is in no way talking about people who support incest irl and MAPS. Those are extreme cases that I'm not qu...

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The Rise of Fandom Conservatism | Anti-Shippers Part 2 - Jess Galaxie

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The Rise of Fandom Conservatism | Anti-Shippers Part 2 - Jess Galaxie

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This video discusses the importance of tagging, the harassment and cyberbullying fandom antis do, instances of toxicity in fandoms such as She-Ra and Voltron, tagging Dark-fiction, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, including trigger warnings.

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The Rise of Fandom Conservatism | Anti-Shippers part 2

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CrissOxy's video on the Hypocrisy of Anti-Shippers

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CrissOxy's video on the Hypocrisy of Anti-Shippers

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Fandom Discourse's video on Fandom antis protecting fictional minors over real children

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Fandom Discourse's video on Fandom antis protecting fictional minors over real children

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Content Warnings: Discussion of Paedophilia/Child Molestation, Harassment, Doxxing, Suicide Baiting, Cyberbullying, etc.

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Fantis Protecting Fictional Minors (Fandom Discourse Deep Dive Series)

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E's video on Fujoshi and/or Fujin (a gender-neutral term encompassing BL fans who are non-binary, trans and/or queer)

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E's video on Fujoshi and/or Fujin (a gender-neutral term encompassing BL fans who are non-binary, trans and/or queer)

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Content Warnings: anti-Asian racism, misogyny and sexism, transphobia towards trans fans of BL, and transandrophobia towards transmasculine BL fans

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Women Who Enjoy Boys in Love - A Tale of Misogyny, Racism and Transphobia

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Fandom Discourse's video on Fandom antis harassing industry professionals

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Fandom Discourse's video on Fandom antis harassing industry professionals

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Content Warning: cyberbullying, paedhophilia mention, verbal abuse from fandom antis, etc.

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Fandom Discourse's video showing proof about fandom antis protecting fictional drawings of minors over protecting real life children

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Fandom Discourse's video showing proof about fandom antis protecting fictional drawings of minors over protecting real life children

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Content Warnings: screenshots of bullying, watering down terms used for serious accusations [i.e., paedophile on accusations of paedophilia], depictions of NSFW (Not Safe For Work) art

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Fantis Protecting Fictional Minors (Fandom Discourse Deep Dive Series)

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Ya Girl Zenon's video on talking points coming from fandom antis

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Ya Girl Zenon's video on talking points coming from fandom antis

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An incredibly good video of talking points fandom antis have towards fiction, including the rebuttals against these talking points.

Has wicked problems:

racism against racialised communities

queerphobia/misia against queer communities [especially against trans communities]

a kyriarchy of multiple oppressions against many people based on how their lived experiences inform oppression and privilege

harassment online

watering down serious terms from casual callout culture

bullying online

Additional wicked problems that aren't addressed in this video, but in different corners of fandom spaces on the internet and outside of them:

the mainstream feminism to the alt-right and/or anti-fiction pipeline [as seen with TERFs, white supremacists, transphobes {transandrophobes included}, racists, antisemites, Islamophobes, etc.]

a lack of critical thinking permeating the rise of anti-intellectualism [another variant of it]

minimal media literacy

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E's video on Fandom Policing, Purity Culture and the death of Media Literacy

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E's video on Fandom Policing, Purity Culture and the death of Media Literacy

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Content Warnings: cyberbullying, doxxing, harassment, mentions of paedophilia, incest, and/or abuse, etc.

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Fandom Policing, Purity Culture and the Death of Media Literacy

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ColeyDoesThings' video on Twitter/X users wrecking fandom spaces with purity culture (but in the fandom flavour of it)

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ColeyDoesThings' video on Twitter/X users wrecking fandom spaces with purity culture (but in the fandom flavour of it)

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Content Warning: doxxing, bullying, rape mentions, transphobia, homophobia, anti-Asian racism, misogyny, stalking, etc.

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Fandom Discourse's video on fandom antis and their homophobia towards queer ships (women loving women [WLW] and men loving men [MLM])

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Fandom Discourse's video on fandom antis and their homophobia towards queer ships (women loving women [WLW] and men loving men [MLM])

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This relates to transphobia towards transmasc BL fans, especially transmasc fans who happen to be queer themselves in fandoms that are harassed by fandom antis and their homophobic hypocrisy.