pretty minor problem in the scheme of things but i'm taking a trans studies class in my university taught by who i'm 95% sure is just A Cis Guy and it is bothering me to no end.
going to class every week to learn why postmodern academics think Transsexualism™ is problematic and Reinforcing The Binary while i'm finally coming to terms with myself for actually wanting bottom surgery and realizing that it's gotten a lot less accessible for me during the few years i spent waffling
pro-Hamas domestic woke terrorists are secretly building an elaborate hose network to facilitate a full scale invasion of our beautiful suburban lawns
uncritical support to ewichuu for being so nice she actually reads my rambling
yeah that sounds pretty different from the sorts of situations i'm talking about, it makes a lot of sense to be cynical over it though. i think seasoned anarchists, even if they fully mean well, can turn orgs not explicitly laid out like that into something really unpleasant. there's a kind of normative behavior that comes out of consensus based organizing that's very focused on raising basically every single concern you might have and avoiding keeping quiet for the sake of getting along that is pretty essential for consensus to work as intended but can end up pretty obnoxious outside of that context. maybe the only way out is just not going along anymore if enough ppl are tired of it even if it'll likely be unpleasant.
that's def what happened to me, a huge turning point for me was participating in an small group with a very anarchist structure and seeing all the issues that creates, and eventually finding myself in the small group of de facto leaders doing evil unaccountable centralism bc of a combo of social cachet and being one of the few ppl to actually bother showing up to meetings. coming across The Tyranny of Structurelessness was an unpleasant literally me moment. ragging on ML organizing for not being democratic enough made a lot of sense until everyone's silently democratically decided you're responsible for everything or else the whole thing falls apart
Just to defend the vast majority of people who subscribe to anarchism a little, ime huge amount of self proclaimed anarchists don't have particularly strong opinions on methods for organizing or effecting change at scale, mostly because a lot haven't done much organizing. In my experiences with anarchist types they're pretty flexible on the methods part just because it's nice to do anything for a change and doing basic organizing in the maximally anarchist fashion can just get exhausting.
Granted i'm mostly talking abt like new to leftism anarchist by default types but the anarchists who're ideologically committed to the point of opposing all centralization in organizing bc authority are overrepresented online and irl MLs are incredibly unlikely to even have a chance to work with them.
yeah we're in a pretty reactionary area but i don't think it's that, like all this stuff is pretty mainstream liberal scholarship as far as i can tell, it just feels so alienating. like maybe i'm being spiteful or close minded but so much of "trans studies" just feels like trying to shoehorn us into some philosophical gender abolition thing for the sake of cis people instead of the actual material struggles of living as a trans person. the prof also seemingly can't go a day without doing some really dismissive dig at marxism and then spending like half the class time trying to make my partner who's in there with me look dumb for caring abt materialism.