Grail

I use capitalised pronouns, please refer to Me with My preferred pronouns.

I frequently go to spaces that are made for and by trans people, where we avoid politics deliberately. Because we want to talk about other things, we want to talk about our lives, our own personal struggles. And not politics.

I recommend you check out My other article on this subject, There is no such thing as “apolitical”, and claiming otherwise is dangerous. The TLDR is that the statement you just made is an act of violence. It's a transphobic dogwhistle. There is no non-politics. The ideology of "Apoliticism" is deeply political, and deeply dangerous. The online spaces you describe where people "avoid politics", they don't. What they do is platform a specific set of non-controversial politics, and claim these politics are not politics. This dishonest course of action provides short term gratification, but in the long term it contributes to transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and ableism.

My purpose in creating the post here is to call for the destruction of such spaces. All queer spaces should be explicitly political at all times. And that is because the only alternative to explicit politics is implicit, unspoken, unconscious politics. Secret rules, self-contradictory aims, transphobic dogwhistles.

For example, suppose a nonbinary person like Myself joins an "apolitical" safe space for queer people, a Discord which is full of trans girls who like to play War Thunder together. I, a new War Thunder player looking for friends and a queer person, join the community. My capitalised pronouns are respected by about 50% of the Discord regulars, but one trans girl in particular objects to My neopronouns and says I'm oppressing her by asking her to respect preferred pronouns. The rules of the server prohibit politics.

If I or anyone else argues in favour of respecting trans people's preferred pronouns, I am in violation of the rules, and can fairly be banned. Now, so is the person kicking up an enbyphobic fuss, but you have to take human psychology into account. Moderators will think "Everything was fine before Grail arrived. We're only having this awful political conversation because of Them." If the moderators enforced the rules fairly, they'd ban everyone for every post they ever made, because everything is political. Since the mods believe in such a thing as apolitics, their impartiality is already compromised. They are already lying about the rules and enforcing them selectively according to personal bias. You cannot expect such people to make correct decisions about how to enforce the rules.

Most people only change enough to accept themselves. Nobody is a perfect leftist. If I were to believe in apolitics, I would probably end up acting racist, because I am not a person of colour and I have all kinds of blind spots from My lack of lived experience on the subject. I have a duty to constantly challenge Myself on racial issues so that I don't fall into the trap of only changing enough to accept Myself. Everyone does. Most people are racist when they believe in apolitics. Most people, including most trans people, are transphobic when they believe in apolitics. An "apolitical" space can only ever be a huge trap for these kinds of attitudes to fester and become normalised.

There are ways to have safe spaces that do not trigger or exhaust queer people, but they are not "apolitical" spaces, they are spaces which are fiercely political and fiercely allied with queer justice. The apolitical spaces are not safe for every queer person. They are only safe for white people with normal pronouns and mild or no disabilities.

Only people who are actually fighting deserve a rest. The people who are always resting and never fighting deserve to be kicked out of the resting places until they start pulling their weight.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-realist-hatred-of-fun-80565cf369f6

Unfortunately AWS doesn't allow HTTPS for static sites like this. I'd have to use Cloudflare if I wanted the site to be accessible to HTTPS

Thank you. Is your app changing the http to https?

I recommend Donald Hoffman's TED talk, which I'm pretty sure is linked on My website http://soulism.net. Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who literally wrote the book on why our perceptual reality cannot be objective truth. And he doesn't speak to any kind of religion or vague philosophy, his findings are 100% science.

I use capitalised pronouns. I came out as trans quite a while ago, and I went through the usual egg_irl to estrogen pipeline as a self-identifying trans woman. But eventually I discovered I was nonbinary. I'm not a woman, I'm a goddess. I had been openly trans at that point to everyone I knew, and I surrounded Myself with trans accepting people. But when I came out as goddessgender, as goddesskin, as a being who cannot exist within the confines of a physical, atheistic consensus reality, most of My trans accepting friends turned on Me. I went through a period of intense trauma that I'm still recovering from today. I couldn't work full time for years because of the flashbacks. My career was permanently impacted and it led to Me experiencing homelessness.

I had a relatively easy time of being a trans woman, relative to a lot of other stories I've heard. But being otherkin was too far for most trans allies, and My identity caused Me to suffer horrendous abuse.

Why would a trans ally, a trans person themself, be kinphobic? The answer is realism. These allies had accepted that trans people are part of reality. That gender is a social construct. But they hadn't accepted that reality is a social construct. They weren't willing to bend the rules all the way. In the soulist community, we bend the rules ALL the way. We accept everyone, and it's not lip service. For example, I believe in the gods of ALL religions. So that when I respect the beliefs of marginalised religions, it's not the liberal "they're allowed to be wrong in their unique cultural way". Instead I say "their beliefs are literally true. There is a world composed of their beliefs that literally exists, and it must be preserved."

I'm tired of people accepting trans but not otherkin. I'm tired of people accepting autism but not NPD. I'm tired of people accepting religions but dismissing their truth. I'm tired of liberalism. I'm tired of moderate leftists betraying people when our identities and lived experiences step outside the boundaries of permissible diversity. So no more boundaries! No more objective truth! No more "too far". Soulists will go all the way to the left. We will not compromise on diversity, equity, or freedom. Enforcing the conditions of capitalism upon our very reality is oppressive. Realism is fundamentally neoliberal. Excluding marginalised groups from the freedom to be as "real" as the privileged classes is genocide. Realism is fundamentally fascist. No more! We don't need reality, it's only ever been a justification for the extermination of the different.

I disagree. I think that failing to recognise humanity as a choice leads to greater dehumanisation of marginalised humans. The white supremacist's argument is always "They are less than human, intrinsically. It is their nature. It is reality." When we accept that humanity is a feature of nature and not of society, we cede ground to white supremacists. We should not be arguing whether people of colour meet some criteria that make them human. We should be arguing that white supremacists' dehumanisation is a choice, a choice to be evil, not an inevitable reality.

A core theme of soulist philosophy is responsibility. The white supremacist denies responsibility, saying that the essential nature of those they oppress is not their doing. They wield power irresponsibly. The power to control reality will always exist in the hands of the powerful. And a people who deny this power will not be able to see their oppression clearly. There have always been people of colour who knew their deserved rights and knew their oppression is wrong, but there have also historically been people of colour who bought into the propaganda, and accepted they were less than human. Such a belief can only be the result of realism, of ignoring society's responsibility in all this. The soulists say "this reality we find ourselves in, where people are separated by class and race, was built. It is not natural, and it is not inevitable. It is our choice. All of our choice. And we must choose to be better to each other. Or I'm going to bash some white supremacist heads in."

American style white supremacists don't want there to be nonwhite races, because a race is a people, and they don't want slaves to be considered people. Nobody cares about the ethnic identity of a cow. They only care about its pedigree for good meat or good milk. This isn't race in the human sense of the word. American style white supremacists want to be able to think of people of colour like that. They want white to mean human being, and black to mean animal.

There aren't many people who feel pride because they're smarter or stronger than an animal. There's lots of animal abusers who relish their power over animals, but I wouldn't call the thing they get out of their abuse pride. It's about having the power, not about reflecting on who one is as a person. It's not "I am awesome because I kick puppies." Likewise, the goal of American white supremacists is to have a society where people of colour are slaves, and white people get to think they're the only kind of human being in existence.