Female-Presenting People: What Leftism Isn’t

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

0passed Out On The Stairs

I shall not be moved!

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

“…Or female-presenting people.”

Posted back in December of 2019, Arielle becomes unusually quiet here. She hangs her head and mutters, “There’s nothing complicated about the fact that I like – that, that I’m attracted to boobs and vaginas. I mean, it’s that fuckin simple sometimes.”

She tries very hard to keep it that simple.

I don’t mean to imply that Arielle is somehow not really a lesbian. I was touched by her confusion and pain –  It’s a pain straight women have been feeling for a long time: I’m attracted to men, I just don’t like them very much!

Arielle wants to see her sexuality as straightforward – Being attracted only to other women makes her a lesbian. We’re about the same age, I remember when this was assumed. Homosexuality was a fact of life, and female homosexuals were called lesbians. A straight man being a lesbian inside was nothing but a cheap punchline.

Although she’s been on the scene since 2009, Arielle is fairly new to politics. She built her personal brand on frank talk about lesbian sexuality, assuming a liberal social environment that’s beginning to dry up. After making waves when she “left the Left,” she still spends a lot of time critiquing them. The ‘Woke Left’ is the ex that Arielle just can’t get over.

Wistful Moor Girl

I wonder what Bernie’s doing right now!

Which is weird, because she doesn’t seem to know who she’s talking about.

Which Way Is Left?

According to Brittanica“Left, in politics, the portion of the political spectrum associated in general with egalitarianism and popular or state control of the major institutions of political and economic life. The term dates from the 1790s, when in the French revolutionary parliament the socialist representatives sat to the presiding officer’s left.”

Fun fact –  It’s not random, arbitrary directions or concepts!

But Arielle talks about ‘The Left,’ ‘The Woke Left,’ and ‘The LGBT Community’ interchangeably as she describes distancing herself from all of the above: “I don’t think like these people, and I no longer want to be associated with them.”

Fair enough, right? But then she says things like“The Left is so far left at this point that they are suggesting conversion therapy,” such as insisting anyone with a sexual orientation is a ‘genital fetishist,’ “and hiding it behind the idea of ‘queer progressiveness.'”

…The egalitarians are so egalitarian, they’re using social pressure to enforce conformity? You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means. And she is far from the only one I have heard use it this way.

Britannica continues, Leftists tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class. They tend to regard social welfare as the most important goal of government.”

Taking a Political Compass quiz, Arielle and of one of her new ‘right-wing’ friends casually agree that taxes are useful because they fund government programs. Arielle says she supports things like publicly-funded museums, because “Art is important.”

Sage wisdom, indeed. And upon discovering she qualifies as a ‘Left-leaning Centrist,’ Arielle still fails to find any definition for any of these words!

Red Book

The book matches my dress! Cute, right??

She also glosses over the binary axis of the quiz – Social is laid across Political to arrive at a grid point, allowing extremes to cancel each other out. Someone who wants to drown Government in the bathtub but doesn’t give a shit who you sleep with comes out as a moderate on tests like this, too.

No True Authoritarian

Arielle repeatedly ignores giant clues that she’s not dealing with Progressives at all – “Why is it that the only things required to include all people start out female-based? ‘Feminism’ equals ‘equality for all,’ and women are expected to just sit back and take what’s given to us.”

“Shaming women for their sexual choices is not activism,” Depends on what you’re agitating for. “And it’s certainly not progressive.”

Ding ding ding!

But Arielle resists making inferences about the movement she helped build, “I don’t think the trans community at large is doing this, it’s the loud extremists. But those are the ones being heard, unfortunately.” She doubles down on the ‘few bad apples’ hypothesis before admitting it’s taken her a decade to speak up about it.

As for why that might be, she answers this in a video from a year earlier, in 2018 – “What other lesbians, and even gay men at this point, aren’t telling you is that they are fucking terrified to even touch on any trans topics; How often other LGBTQ YouTubers agree with what I’m saying but avert their eyes and don’t say anything, because they’re terrified of being labeled a transphobe.

But in taking the long way around, Arielle seems to have missed this connection. She claims, “No one wants to talk about the fact that trans activists are making shirts with slogans like, ‘Kill All TERFs.'”

…There are evidently some corners of cyberspace Arielle has yet to discover – Plenty of us are talking about it!!! But that Cancel Culture censorship your friends are all terrified of keeps most of us from ever being heard at all.

Female-Presenting People

Navigating by instinct, Arielle seems to be caught in the false dichotomy of Right vs. Left, conservative vs. liberal. These simplistic labels blur social and political concepts, turning social liberals into political conservatives when Gender Studies overtakes Poli Sci.

Runner

I’ll be good, I swear… Just let me sit down!

Arielle’s relaxed social views are intact, but she only has her own perspective to defend them with. Underneath all her steadfast posturing, Womanhood for Arielle is determined by her own impression. This reasoning falls apart under the slightest pressure – It’s very White Feminism to insist you support transwomen, so long as they spend thousands on hormones and surgery!

Arielle’s impassioned defense of ‘gatekeeping’ and boundaries is undermined by her self-serving adherence to presentation. If you pass, you get a pass!

She even pulls Rose of Dawn in to tell us why the female gender role doesn’t need redefining – A hypothesis that any brand of Feminism would disagree with! Liberation of female people from our oppressive social role was the whole point of all this, remember??

But Arielle is happy to let Rose cling to the very traditions that oppress him, because Good Trans keep the questions at bay. She seemed to be on the edge of something in December 2019, right before she ‘left the Left.’

But she hasn’t changed her views much, remaining pro-choice even as she grows more pro-gun. She just stepped back from the community she helped build, filling the space with criticism. Arielle is reinforcing a refuge of reasonableness for herself as the stability of her position is assaulted from all sides.

Having founded her identity on her membership in the LBG(TQI+) community, she’s tethered to the sinking ship. Deeply enmeshed in the performance of her sexuality and unwilling to face her own contributions to the current situation, Arielle is still following the will-o-the-wisp that found her surrounded by “the mentally unstable.”

But if she admits that even the most attractive transwomen are men, Arielle has to ask herself some uncomfortable questions. Her advocacy will always be shallow because she contradicts herself on a fundamental level.

Some men have figured out a way to get at women like Arielle, to cloud their vision with the smoke and mirrors of ‘gender reassignment’ – Some men have learned to present as female. This disquieting spectre, and her own complicity in creating it, keep Arielle cuddled up to the pussy where she feels safe.

Pussy

She’s naturally protective!

Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off

 The Left ‘left the Left’ a long time ago, and anyone who stumbles into material analysis gets mobbed. Arielle could be a powerful advocate for women if she hadn’t been betrayed by her government and her community. Watching her struggle to make sense of it all reminds me of the importance of definitions.

Identity Politics has flipped the script, enforcing an oppression hierarchy and placing transwomen – Men – at the top. Those with clout have used it to create an illusion of oppression.

Arielle Scarcella is a perfect example of how entwining politics and identity leaves us vulnerable to manipulation. If she could loosen her grip on that one word – Lesbian – just enough to admit there’s no True Trans, she could become the spokeswoman lesbians deserve.

Feminists On Fox: Suicide By Optics

There’s been a lot of discussion in Radfem spaces about whether cooperating with conservatives is a good idea.

Leopard

What? He’s tame!

Plenty of writers and activists have stepped up to remind us why conservatives don’t make good allies. Just because Sky Daddy agrees the sky is blue and talks real sweet, doesn’t mean we need to go back to him. He’ll only hit us again sooner or later.

But with such a complete media blackout, with social platforms banning us for nonsense like ‘misgendering,’ it’s not hard to understand why some feminists choose to take advantage of the few opportunities on offer to get the word out.

It’s easy to see how I ran across a Christian News article on Ovarit this morning about a little girl standing up to her school system, that devolved into her mother talking about Jesus.

Most of us are well aware that Jesus is not our friend. Regardless of presentation, anyone who preaches absolute life roles is not a feminist. But it’s getting lonely in Leftland lately, and conservatives are the only ones even calling women by name anymore.

Defection is possible because each side has a point, in its own way. But each side is getting too much mileage out of demonizing the other to ever admit this, making real answers impossible. Any admission of nuance is cast as ideological creep, asking questions risks slipping into no-man’s land.

But this pressure to conform tends to have the opposite effect, of course. The forbidden fruit looks even sweeter, and eating it makes you a rebel. You’re halfway to being a Revolutionary / Rugged Individualist already, depending on your perspective.

Most feminists traditionally thought of ourselves as liberals. But our leaders have abandoned us, and our organizations have shunned us. A few people here and there of various liberal pedigrees are peeling off and ‘leaving the left.’

Lesbian YouTuber Arielle Scarcella is a great example of the ideological creep that can happen when, instead of questioning things, someone just goes looking for alternative answers. Defection doesn’t solve anything, because the same problems exist across the political spectrum.

Read To Sleep

All this heavy thinking really takes it out of me!

Conservatives believe women are private property, liberals believe women are public property, remember? Misogyny is always recognizable, regardless of the motivation behind it.

But feminists have been arguing with conservatives and winning for a long time. They feel familiar, even safe, in a weird way. The old values have been defanged by modernity. Jesus might not be our friend, but he’s mellowed a lot with age.

We know that church attendance has been dropping for decades, and conservatives have needed to invoke all kinds of tricks to stay relevant. We can talk to The Heritage Foundation or Tucker Carlson, confident in our ability to walk away whenever we want.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter if walking in was our fatal mistake.

Too often, the truth just doesn’t matter. You know how humankind has been writing the same story over and over and over, about how the Good People win the day just by Doing What’s Right? I wonder if that’s our favorite fantasy because that’s almost never how it really works out.

Barbarella2

Being the Good Guy means I’m bullet proof, right??

We’re naive if we think we can simply walk in, present our rational arguments, and win most people over that way. Optics are everything because they’re what we use to bring the picture into focus. Most people in the US are either looking through a red lens or a blue lens.

If you’re sitting across from Tucker Carlson, you will be seen through that red lens. Conservatives will mostly agree with you anyway, and liberals will ignore you out of habit.

Which is fine by the Trans Lobby, by the way. They are happy to have us all corralled in one corner where they can disgrace us all at the same time.

Accepting the conservative invitation is climbing aboard a sinking ship. Unless we’re talking about legislation that supports women and girls, it’s nothing but a photo-op for those looking to slander us.

And it’s working! I think the comparison of feminists to Nazis was metaphorical at first, Nazi was a byword for fascist for a minute there. Rush Limbaugh first used ‘Feminazi’ back in the last century, deftly condensing decades and centuries of resentment toward bossy, uppity women into a metaphor for the ages.

But it was a long time before the comparison became literal. Even Limbaugh wasn’t that absurd.

I laughed it off at first, but things have turned darker these past few years and Nazis aren’t metaphorical anymore. Anxiety is cranked up to 11 and loyalties are being questioned.

Add in generalized economic stress, and most people are too busy to look very deeply into much, and too tired to absorb it anyway. All most people are going to see is the Radfem sitting next to Tucker Carlson, in the clip their favorite YouTuber is smirking at.

No Way

Don’t make me come out there and see what’s making all that noise!

More people are finally waking up to just how upside-down most conservative, old-school ‘family’ values really are. Associating ourselves with them in a social setting implies agreement. Once upon a time, feminists would be on Fox News scowling over the latest challenge to abortion access. Now that they’re the only ones who will have us, we feel pressure to behave ourselves.

It’s not just that we’re talking to them, we’re being nice to them. On camera!

And when the new world sweeps away the last traces of the old, the New Religion will be only too happy to push Women’s Liberation into the past right along with it. A quirk of early Modern History. A quaint movement based upon outdated understandings of things, for a group of people we don’t recognize anymore.

It won’t matter how many of us are Marxists or lesbians. It won’t matter what the true history of women is or how hard we worked to escape it. Because history is written by the winners, and the old ways are on their way out, one way or the other.

Flirting with conservatism is helping to discredit feminism. Failing to address this sacrifices our integrity for short-term visibility. It’s participating in our own smear campaign. It’s handing live ammunition to our enemies.

I don’t think we should sacrifice feminism for views.

Regressivism: Let’s Call Them What They Are

Tribalism has really gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? Everything must be on one side or the other in the Culture War, no front line is too remote.

Flaming Cross

Oh, no – They found me!

But tossing everything in two huge piles throws together things that have no business anywhere near each other.

The simple dichotomy of Conservative = RepublicanProgressive = Democrat has shown itself inadequate for a while now. For one thing, a ‘conservative’ is someone who wants to conserve things as they are. But this makes the Biden administration’s Back-To-Normal schtick a little weird, doesn’t it?

Repulsive as they are, Republicans are the ones getting creative. They filibustered more bills during the Obama years than in all of US history up to that point put together. Not exactly traditionalists.

No, the Dems are the ones pretending it’s 1996 forever. Bernie Sanders’ offer to bring us into the modern world was crushed, then swept aside as if we didn’t all see it happen.

But words mean things. A ‘progressive’ is someone who works for progress toward an egalitarian ideal. To create a new world, you have to shoot for the moon – Even if you miss, things will improve here on earth.

The US doesn’t have a Progressive party, the Democrats have made sure of that. Those who are agitating for change don’t want progress.

The so-called ‘conservatives’ are dragging us backward. Who would have guessed we’d be going up against actual Nazis 80 years after they lost? The MAGA slogan calls back to an imaginary time, yes, but Progressives can only imagine a safe, democratic world.

MAGA’s mistake is looking backward – If only we could return to our ignorant past, things would be better! is an absurd statement on its face. That hollowness is the ring of fraud. We all know what returning to the 19th century would mean for most of us.

Things like progress and conservation are pretty self-evident when the sheen of Marketing is scoured off. ‘Progressive,’ ‘socialist’ and ‘liberal’ have become dirty words in some places, but these are just descriptors for schools of thought.

Modern life has forged eager students.

Candelabra

I hear these woods are haunted, but someone salted the field!

It’s time to call out those who want to strip us of our hard-won rights for what they are: Regressivists. They don’t just want to conserve the status quo – They’re talking about a pre-modern era, winding the clock back over 100 years!

For our own good, of course.

Naming a problem shines light into dark corners. A Regressivist is anyone who clings to the Neoliberal ideals that have burned up the beating heart of our society.

The Regressivist is the one torpedoing change with Culture War firebombs. That social safety net might help someone you don’t like!

Regressivists are the ones so wrapped up in their identity – Be it Trans, Christian, Libertarian, Marxist, whatever – that they lose touch with material reality. 

They’re the bad-faith debater with the preconceived notion that somehow always comes back to women’s subjugation.

Most importantly, calling a Knave a Knave walls them off in their own toxic little corner.

Not everything about modern western culture is garbage, and change for no reason isn’t progress. Some things are worth conserving. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

But with only two categories, this kind of talk gets you the side-eye even from your friends. You’re not secretly Conservative, are you?? Fear echoes in the chasms of relentless political earthquakes. These days, you never know who’s gonna say something crazy next.

Even questioning any of the cascading changes can get you accused of heresy, but not all change is good.

And no one trying to roll back abortion and voting rights is conserving anything!

Let’s call Regressivists what they are! Let’s claim some space to discuss what actually needs to change, along with what’s already working. It shouldn’t be controversial to say I don’t think society needs to abandon everything that existed before 1960.

This will also make it easier to tell who’s who – Drawing a line between vanilla-lovers and chocolate-haters makes the difference obvious. Preferring a traditional lifestyle doesn’t have to mean judging how anyone else lives.

But having only two categories makes shallow details feel deep. It pits people against each other based on personal choices that are actually irrelevant to collective debate.

Ladies In Masks

Oh come on, since when did collective action ever help anything… right??

Those of us who want to move forward can come together in mutual hatred of Regressivism. Let’s wall the reactionaries off, away from the rest of civilization where they belong.

The US is lost in a funhouse of corporate prisons, lobbyists and apathy. I’ve heard that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results but, as the American Dream slides into myth, eventually frustration will spill over into action.

Unless the egalitarian left pulls itself together, that action will take the form of more authoritarian power grabs. The quickest way I know to unite a group is against a common enemy.

We’re facing off against people who use language as camouflage.

Calling them what they really are lets us see who we’re really up against, as well as who we’re not.

Here’s Why Everyone Thinks Radfems Are Conservatives

Hey everyone, 

A harried BrazenShe checking in real quick, because I think I’ve solved a little mystery. 

There’s this idea floating around that radical feminists are conservative. More than that, I have seen us called white supremacists with all the authority a Tumblrite can muster. 

Umbrella'

Dafuq you say?

At first blush, this confused me immensely. I’m from Cleveland Heights. Racism does not compute for me. 

Ok, some of us have made appearances next to conservatives recently. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a frustrated liberal abandoned by her friends. 

The only other people in the room not falling in line with gender ideology are the people who want us back in the kitchen.

Then there’s the idea that Male and Female are projections of colonialism, as if indigenous peoples don’t understand how babies are made.

But radical feminist philosophy is not conservative in the slightest. Reading just a few sentences of any resource will inform the reader of this, so claiming otherwise is suspicious. The obvious reason anyone would ignore our clearly stated views in favor of painting us as enemies of progress is to discredit us. 

Lacking any way to discredit our arguments, they try to discredit us ourselves. But if this accusation has such flimsy evidence, why does it have such legs?

Because it calls back to the very roots of knowledge itself. 

There are two main schools of thought about knowledge: Rationalism and Empiricism. Plato and Aristotle argued about it, modern Enlightenment thinkers tinkered with it, and we are still having this argument. Even if we have forgotten what we are fighting about.

Rationalism is a founding principle of liberalism, of education. Rationalism teaches that the world works according to knowable rules. That an educated person can make wise choices and improve her own life. That ideas are the real Truth of existence.

Empiricism teaches us that the Truth is what we can see, hear, and touch. Ideas are only as good as their practical application.

These building blocks have obvious influence on the current culture wars. Rationalism and Empiricism need each other like mind needs body, and the distinction is probably just as artificial.

Classical Confused

How does anyone keep track of all this??

The Rationalist liberals insist their ideas – Their identities – are the most real thing.

The Empiricist conservatives use simplistic understandings of the world to justify selfish short-sightedness.

Radical feminists cross this line. We are progressives – A liberal creed wanting to rewrite the relationship between women and men – whose practical streak falls back on Empiricism in the Scientific Method tradition. 

Neither Rationalism nor Empiricism is inherently liberal or conservative. They are mental tools that can be applied in either direction, depending on the biases of the user.

But our current polarization of thought has attempted to wedge them into one or the other. Conservatives are against education in their gut because they understand the liberals have claimed ideas. Liberals feel betrayed when an educated person disagrees with the accepted orthodoxy, usually because of observations made in material reality.

Radical feminism appears to exist in a dimension that most of modern thought does not. It doesn’t know what to make of us, we’re not following the rules. I can only hope that, as we continue gathering, discussing, and getting the word out, eventually we will reach critical mass.

With persistence, maybe we can at least bring dimension to the debate.

Happy holidays,

    – Sarah