Community Profile

A group of people were singled out for abuse, so they struggled to create a place where it was safe to be angry. But once they found it, they seemed to turn toward those of us on the margins and tell us there were rules, all of a sudden, about what and whose anger was permissible. But real anger doesn't obey rules, just like real abuses of authority don't travel in nice, neat one-way lines. So this is the space for those of you who are sick of being stifled by both patriarchal and feminist dogma. Scream so loud that both armies can hear you.

This is a community for people who feel they have been betrayed, marginalized, insulted, or silenced by other people's assumptions about gender. This is also a place to complain about the social institutions that have risen up around gender stereotypes. If you generalize what people are or are not, based on their gender, race, class, or any other criterion, then you are not welcome here. Yes, this community will be founded upon civility, mutual respect, and empathy. But we will not make this a 'safe space' for you, or anyone else, if that would mean reinforcing more arbitrary social boundaries between human beings or creating more false categories of enemy. We will endeavor not to filter your reality. We will not protect your psychological boundaries.

The ideal post to this community is a rant. The most on-topic posts are rants about people, places, and institutions who have tried to pigeonhole your gender into a category where it just didn't fit. We welcome rants on both a personal level and a social level.

If you want to post about something else, be considerate and try not to flood the community with material that dilutes its original purpose: being a supportive place to vent about gender essentialism. The best way to deal with a hurt feeling is to shrug it off, rather than provoking more hurt feelings by getting angry or defensive. Gender war is scary, edgy business and is not for the faint of heart. But if somebody complains that you hurt their feelings, the decent thing to do is apologize. Otherwise, the moderators will build up huge codes of speech to replace common empathy and civility, and nobody benefits from that.

Here are some other things we don't like:
* people who dismiss other people's experiences or emotions
* people who universalize their own experiences or emotions
* people who tell others that their life choices aren't valid, just because those choices don't fit in with a certain ideology
* people who say "if you believe (belief X), then you're not a real (group Y)!"
* the "but it's not NATURAL!" argument

Don't come here if you only want to meet people who will reinforce your own views. How can we ever learn to stand up to a deeply prejudiced world, if we let ourselves become so fragile that we can't even stand to hear contrary opinions? That will only lead to us becoming the next generation of oppressors.

There are to be no "privilege checks" here. The moderators feel that your social background has no bearing on the strength of your ideas or the content of your character. Calling such things to attention only reinforces categories that are nothing more than human mass hysteria. The best defense is to dissolve those categories.

This is not to say that we accept a "one size fits all" approach to people's problems. Oppression and marginalization are very real social forces. This community is explicitly dedicated to people who defy generalizations and have suffered for it. If you have a low tolerance for ambiguity, you will not feel safe in this community. By all means, enter anyhow.