Tag Archives: tumblr

Seriously People, “Spooky” Is Not A Slur.

3 Oct

spooky0

Before I go any further, lemme preface this with a thing. If someone tells you they are uncomfortable with the use of certain terminology around them (no matter how seemingly innocuous) and you go ahead and do so anyway, you’re a turd. Even more so if you go out of your way to do so.  You’re not some brave snowflake championing FREEZE PEACH or whatever, just a jerk that gets off on upsetting people for no reason.

spooky1pictured: not you

That said, the claims that the word “spooky” (or other variants like “spoopy” etc) have roots in anti-black racism are putting the cart before the horse etymologically. We should definitely work on avoiding diminutives and pejoratives rooted in racially charged language, but the racial slur “s***k” is based on the word “spooky” rather than the other way around.

The word “spooky” first appeared in 1854, expanding from “frightening” to including “easily scared” in 1926. The word itself is rooted in the Dutch word for ghost. In the 1940s, the racial slur began to appear as possibly a reference to dark skin being hard to see at night (which led to racist US soldiers referring to the Tuskegee Airmen as the “S***kwaffe”) as well as a reference to a common Minstrel show character of an easily-frightened black man.

tuskegeeairmanpictured: not that

So I definitely get why folks want to distance themselves from that sort of history, and I believe the racial slur still holds weight when used in that context or even as a pejorative whatsoever. But as far as reverse-engineering it the way people seem to do on Tumblr every year around this time just really doesn’t really hold water for me. Prove me wrong in the comments if you’d like.

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About That “250 Incidents Of Transgender Criminal Activity” Link Going Around Tumblr.

8 Apr

transplanet

PROTIP: This is not a trans woman.

transcrimez2Apparently this concept is difficult to grasp.

With that in mind, some of you may have already had this link of  “Over 250 Reported Incidents Of Transgender Criminal Activity” shoved in your face as supposed “proof” that trans women are as inclined (or even more so) to violent criminal activity than gender-conforming men. Pretty fucking daunting, right? TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY CASES BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

It’s sobering and certainly makes you reconsider your ideology and…

I honestly wonder how many people even bothered to actually read it tho.

Sweet lord Satan I did, and if I had a genie I’d wish for those couple of hours of my life back. But here we are.

Before we get the article, how about a little background of it? Because I am nothing if not thorough. Near the bottom of the original Tumblr post, it sources out to a post on the WordPress blog called “Out Of My Panties Now!”.  The owner of the blog calls herself Panty Popo, a reference to her being the “Panty Police” (because white people using outdated AAVE is totally “radical” and not something your out-of-touch, casually racist dad does). She’s known for bringing this sort of progressive dialog to the table-

 

transisrape

Seriously, when even Roseanne Barr of all people steps aside and asks you to dial it back, you’re pretty far out there in the realm of anti-trans rhetoric.

transcrimez3

The ultimate premise of the blog “Out Of My Panties Now” is to encourage pathologizing and criminalizing all forms of feminine gender expression in males (hm, where have I seen this before).  You know, because “gender-critical” theory is the path to liberate gender-non-conforming individuals from patriarchal oppression by making everyone masculine. The whole point of the movement is to become Western civilization’s overbearing dad, demanding we all cut out hair and stop being such goddamn sissy faggots. Because that totally makes sense and isn’t just homophobic as fuck and, literately, masculinism.

transcrimez4

So now that we’ve got some background on the motivation for the post, let’s get to the post itself. Whew doggie. In a move that surprises literally noone, nearly every link is sourced from rabidly homophobic religious-right “news” source like FOX News, The Daily Mail, and Free Republic.

I mean Christ. Forget caring that most of them are “crossdressers” (in many ways the absolute loosest sense of the word) because amongst the people they are claiming are “trans women” was like 40 naked dudes wearing nothing but high heels, a dozen men in MALE THONG underwear, a dozen dudes in spandex, a guy in a toga, and A GUY WEARING A PURSE ON HIS HEAD.

transcrimez5

I like how, to the “gender critical” mindset, literally no one is a trans woman until they want to compile crime statistics and then suddenly LITERALLY EVERYONE IS A TRANS WOMAN.

I mean, if you honestly think there’s an army of butt-naked men in high heels politely waiting for the passing of trans-friendly legislation, and that fighting it is the most effective way to prevent their infiltration and defiling of sacred women’s bathroom space, well shit I don’t even know what to tell you.

In many of the links, the crossdressers were simply questioned by the police and released with no charges, and an awful lot of the links are about shoplifting, which is apparently a crime on the level of rape and assault because we’re all suddenly living under the Code Of Hammurabi or something.

Not to mention that many of those links are dead (probably from maleviolence I guess) and in a good dozen or so the transvestites and/or trans women were actually the *VICTIMS* of violent crimes and sexual assaults. But hey whatever’s clever right? Might as well villainize us for GETTING RAPED AND BEATEN.

For fuck’s sake, one of the crossdressers is in the list for DROWNING. I guess being born with a penis means you even drown in a maleviolently criminal manner, apparently.

I mean, I’m not an unreasonable person. Out of those 250 links there’s a pretty solid 30 or 40 (so 20% of the total, tops) of men with pretty blatant psychosexual disorders that surfaced as compulsive and fetishistic crossdressing, and maybe a dozen (and I’m being generous here) people that legitimately fall under the trans umbrella that committed some pretty heinous stuff. Certainly that could be enough to inspire a robust discussion of the issue of toxic, violent masculinity and the value of women’s space, right? But no, it has to be literally buried in garbage to become this unintentionally hilarious monolith to willfully-blind groupthink and knee-jerk mindless hatred.

You act like FOX NEWS, and I’ll take you as seriously as I do FOX NEWS.

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