Honestly, it all started because of this: I love internet drama, and anything you tell me I’m not supposed to read or know about. Since childhood, I’d always had an insatiable taste for any knowledge that was forbidden to me, but especially forbidden writing and words (call it a consequence of growing up indoctrinated into a religion centered around a holy book).
My siblings and I were homeschooled1 through elementary, middle school, and high school due to my parents' religious beliefs, which meant that the majority of the information and ideas in the larger world were forbidden to us. My parents exerted extreme control over everything we were allowed to consume, specifically so that we would not absorb “secular” ideas like evolution or homosexuality. The culture of shame and secrecy fostered by their brand of Christianity was a factor, too, in my obsession with sniffing out secrets: I played out Eve with the apple over and over again, never doubting my choice, or seeing any irony in it. To a certain extent, I can’t blame my past self for these behaviors: I was so heavily indoctrinated at the time, I basically lived in an alternate factual universe. And I had never known any other way of living.
I was 15 when I was first allowed unsupervised internet access, and one of the first things I did was create an account on Tumblr. I don’t remember what prompted me to start a blog, but one and then two of my real-life friends joined me on the site, and from there hilarity and general good times proceeded; I fell enthusiastically into what I now recognize as extremely embarrassing pursuits. It wouldn’t be totally accurate to say that I have no regrets, but it was TONS of fun, and at no one’s expense. For one of the first times in my under-socialized life, I experienced myself as part of a group, part of the world at large, and I got caught up and carried away in the desire to belong.
Social media was also my first real exposure to liberal political ideology as a fully fleshed-out worldview. Naturally, my parents were staunch conservatives, and the version of liberalism they believed in was the caricatured representation preferred by conservative pundits. The most memorable people in this political landscape were the lurid, apocalyptic figures of Hillary Clinton (who activated both my parents’ homophobic rage, despite not actually being homosexual), and Barak Obama (a frequent target of my dad’s anti-Black racism). The rhetoric around the Bush-Obama 2008 election reached such a heated pitch on the conservative side, I remember being befuddled at my mom’s lack of dismay on election night, when it was revealed that Barack Obama had won. “What are we gonna do?” I asked her, worried. “Nothing,” she replied, looking a little confused.
The thing is, I can’t even remember any specific facts about why Obama’s election was said to be so bad for “our side.” This is probably because there really wasn’t much that was concrete: it was mostly rhetorical. What I absorbed was the message, which I thought was meant to be taken literally: the election of Barack Obama would mean an end to the financial stability of working-class families, to the very structure of the family itself—perhaps to our very nation. I was slightly miffed when I found out afterwards that no one actually believed we were doomed because Democrats had won the electoral college; they were just engaging in a bit of harmless hyperbole. Nobody said it in so many words, but I implicitly came to understand that, politically and ideologically, we often openly do not traffic in truth, but in hyperbole, metaphor, and performative gestures.
Eating the apple
I don’t remember being able to cogently challenge any part of my parents’ politics until I was about thirteen, when I started to get the first glimmerings of a kind of forbidden knowledge about myself: that I was attracted to other women. For perhaps the first time in my life, I did not invite this knowledge in any way, did not seek it out—the very opposite. I tried to run from it; I found myself making all kind of private, desperate justifications about what it was becoming clear I was: Okay, just because I think I want to ____, that doesn’t make me ____ … Well maybe I do want to ____, but if I never act on it, then technically nobody can say I’m____… My mother and I had a fight around that same time, in which she told me that bisexual people were sluts, that bisexual men in particular were degenerate perverts who slept with other men and then passed the sexual diseases thus acquired to bisexual women (which was okay, since they deserved it, being sluts) and straight women (which was not okay, as they could pass those diseases to straight men). I don’t know where I got the courage, and I didn’t have any real arguments that could have convinced her otherwise, but I told her that wasn’t true, and that it was a horrible thing to say.
An argument ignited that consisted mostly of us repeating ourselves nearly ad infinitum. Every time I insisted that my mother was wrong, she threw back at me: Why do you care? Are you bisexual? And I denied it, over and over again, more times than Peter denied Jesus. I couldn’t, however, continue to deny it to myself.
Eventually the cognitive dissonance became too much. I remember being at dance class and trying to dance the anger and frustration out of my body, furiously spinning and jumping and pounding the ground with my feet. I didn’t want to be this; I hadn’t asked for it, and I felt like I was being punished for my rebelliousness, or lack of faith, or laziness, or any number of a variety of traits my mother had told me were my worst. In that moment of throwing all my physical tension and frustration and anger into rehearsal, I exorcized something from myself. That night, I finally admitted to myself what I was: bisexual. And after that, I somehow wasn’t angry anymore—I found myself better able to cope.
It wasn’t so much one big moment of disillusionment with Christianity or conservatism as it was many small ones accruing, but accepting my bisexuality as a natural part of myself was the final straw that made my parents’ politics and religion untenable to me. I recognized I could not change the way that I was, no more than any other same sex-attracted person could, and for the first time in my life, I was interacting with people online who said the way I was was just fine, even something to be celebrated.
All this is to say is that assimilating the liberal beliefs fed to me by my new in-group on Tumblr was the easiest thing in the world. It felt good, too, for reasons I couldn’t truly see for years, reasons that should have alarmed me. Importantly, my new chosen ideology affirmed a formerly-established narrative about myself that I was invested in: I’d cast off the party of discrimination and intolerance, which had roped me—a marginalized person—in with lies and half-truths, and aligned with the champions of progress and justice, where I was meant to be all along.
Leaving the new Eden
After being let loose on the internet at the fifteen, in addition to adopting liberal politics, I became something of a virtual “disaster tourist,” traversing the most cringe corners of Tumblr to satisfy my appetite for all things dramatic and salacious. Among the anonymous bloggers unknowingly entertaining me: a MOGAI positivity blog where the two mods were, ironically, at war; a blogger who infamously “kinned” Hitler; a person who identified as “flamekin”; someone who claimed to have “fictives” of the entire Addams family in her DID system2. I really couldn't have picked a better site to become a connosseiur of this kind of content.
When the post that would lead to my undoing came across my Tumblr dash, I was at least aware of the existence of “TERFs” as a vague concept, largely only because of the weird “TERF bangs” meme3. I knew that we were supposed to hate them, but I had no idea what they actually believed.
I might have remained in my ignorance indefinitely, happily parroting the politics of radical inclusion and never having to leave the new Garden of Eden. I am where I am today only because of somebody on my own side, somebody I followed on Tumblr who couldn’t resist the urge to dunk on a so-called TERF.
Americans talk a lot about the conservative impulse to performatively “own the libs,” but far less about the equally-annoying liberal version of this. In the case of the post that led to my encountering gender critical ideas, someone I followed was responding to an accused TERF, who had said something like, “The reason you are so stringent about deplatforming us and blocking/reporting/staying safe, is that you know that if people are exposed to our arguments, they’ll realize they agree with them.” The person who’d reblogged this statement clearly did not believe it was literally true: they interpreted it as a challenge, and they couldn’t resist the urge to performatively “own the terves”: they responded with a typical, Tumblr-esque insult (something along the lines of “I’m gonna steal your kneecaps”).
In responding, even with such a childish insult, this person was clearly demonstrating their loyalty to the cause of online liberalism, which is what had been challenged: “our ideas are stronger, and can withstand more scrutiny than yours,” the TERF was saying. I instantly responded to the challenge. I can’t say this any more elegantly: my brain just went, “Something I’m not supposed to read? Bet,” and within seconds I’d clicked on and was reading her blog. Within hours, my entire new political self-conception was crumbling, and I was starting to recognize the enormity of the realizations and contradictions coming out of the Pandora’s box I’d unwittingly opened, wishing desperately that I could go back.
I plan to talk in my next post about the specific arguments and ideas that made me change my mind about trans ideology, because I want to spend more time with them than I have space for here. Here, I want to address the dynamics that led to my exposure to gender critical ideas in the first place. I think this whole incident is a miniature demonstration of a principle Freddie de Boer calls the “iron law of institutions”:
“‘the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.’”
Obviously, the person who couldn't resist dunking on so-called TERFs doesn’t “control” the institution of online leftism, but they obviously identify as part of it and said what they said to increase their standing in the institution, demonstrating their loyalty to the cause and lack of fear of the opposition’s ideas. Yet in doing so, they actually undermined it by platforming these ideas, which turned out to be dangerous in exactly the way that was implied: they were convincing. They convinced me. The performative demonstrating of this person’s loyalty to the cause resulted in the creation of an outright apostate (hello).
I remember being shocked, and ashamed, immediately afterwards: I’d never expected to end up in the position of a heretic for the second time in my life. Part of me felt betrayed by myself, as if having escaped religious indoctrination once should have prepared me to recognize when the same thing was happening again. I had to ask myself the obvious question: What had been so attractive to me about this ideology? That it affirmed a version of myself I desperately wanted to believe in—the fighter for social justice, the warrior on the right side of history.
But I still wasn’t out of the ideological woods yet. I remember thinking, quite childishly, as I scrolled the blogs of radical feminists and their orbiters, immediately post-peaking: Do I really have to believe this now? And this other thing, too? What if I don’t want to? And if I choose not to, where the hell do I go from here? It was like I’d moved into a new (ideological) neighborhood, and was evaluating the beliefs of my new in-group as if they were immovable fixtures, rather than opinions I had the ability to accept, and make a part of my politics, or reject.
It was a second shock—almost as profound as the first one—to realize that I was reenacting exactly what had got me into this mess in the first place: taking on a new set of beliefs as if they were a comfy pair of slippers I could slide right into, a ready-made compass pointing north. I thought I’d long since escaped the clutches of religious indoctrination, but it had actually primed me to do this exact thing, to decide what I believed based on those who were in the group I had chosen, and to let those beliefs be articulated to me by people I didn’t even know, rather than independently considering and evaluating each point against my common sense, critical thinking, and values.
This second realization was what allowed me to step back and see both of these larger worldviews as ideologies, two ways of seeing the world. On this particular issue, I was starting to realize that I largely disagreed with the rationalizations of one, and so far had agreed with what I’d read of the other. But crucially, I finally learned to resist what would have been the easiest thing to do: to fill the hole left by falling out of one ideology by falling right back in to another one.
Belonging: the price you may pay for deviating from party lines
I think a lot of us fall into the trap of thinking that the desire to be a good person by itself is enough to sanction whatever we do in its name. We simplify the process for ourselves—at least, I did—by falling in line behind the group of people who are talking about doing the right thing the loudest. My human desire for storymaking and tendency to get caught up in narrative is also at fault, as it has been many times in my life: I got caught up in the group that had the most compelling narrative about how they were doing the right thing; the extended invitation to join then on the eternal march of political progress was too attractive to pass up.
I have to admit it full-on: I was so invested in this vision of myself as on the “right side of history.” Never mind the fact that none of us currently living will actually live long enough to determine that the “moral arc of the universe” does swing towards what we call justice—I was desperate to be seen as on the right side of the macro narrative in the micro story, right now. I wanted the credit, but I hadn’t done any of the actual work interrogating my values and beliefs and checking my politics against them. I’d trusted other people to do it for me. I remain ashamed of that.
True believers have no reason to listen to an apostate; I get that. And chances are none of them will. But anyone can ask themselves these questions: Can you honestly say that you know what those you consider to be your enemies believe? Have you learned about them from them, and not from others in your in-group who already believe what you do? Have you ever given an opposing viewpoint a chance? How did you come into your current beliefs, anyway? Did you inherit them, either from your family, friends, or other social group?
You would be far from alone, if so. In my polisci class in college, my professor told us that around half of all Americans get their political views from their parents, and do not stray from them throughout their lives. Political polarization continues to drive us further from one another, to the extremes of each pole. Arguments that are so convincing they shake or alter your whole ideological worldview are few and far between. But if they exist, I want to be confronted with them.
It may not make you popular to take a trip outside your ideological neighborhood, or to challenge the fixtures within it: it is actually far more likely to turn you into a pariah among your now-in-group. It doesn’t matter. Thinking for yourself is not something you can afford to outsource.
Because each family does it a little differently, there are varying levels of isolation in being homeschooled. Some families purchase textbooks for their kids and do all the schooling alone at home; some get together with other, like-minded families to start co-ops, where qualified parents with different areas of expertise teach one another’s children in small classes. These co-ops are becoming more common, and are valuable for the socialization and in-class experience that you don’t get while being “traditionally” homeschooled. While my younger sister’s high school experience was about 80% co-op classes, I was what I like to call “severely homeschooled”: I only took a single co-op class in my final year of high school; the rest of my homeschooling was done entirely in the traditional manner.
If you are unfamiliar with some of the words in this sentence, it will not make your life better to know what they mean, although it may make it more interesting.
I’d love to know where and when the “TERF bangs” meme originated, because I still have no idea.
Excellent post, though it left me kind of worried for the fact that I understand what all the cringe corners of tumblr you mentioned are 😅