Vanessa (she/her)Just saw a person with "Baeddel" in their handle & I am hoping everyone knows the history of this. Baeddels were on Tumblr in the early 2010s & created a community that was full of abuse. If you have not heard of this, or have seen the term around & thought it was innocuous, or even just need a refresher PLEASE read this. Baeddels have been all over Twitter recently & they are the fucking worst. They destroy communities. Please do not take this lightly.
Amelia π³οΈββ§οΈ BaeddeliaFrom now on this is going to be my default reply to anyone who brings up the dreaded b-word.
https://cohost.org/autogynamelia/post/687344-baed-company
#transmisogny #socialmedia #tumblr #cohost #baeddelism #baeddelists #baeddelist #baeddels #baeddel
Baed Company
My "Amelia Baeddelia" display name is literally just a pun but random strangers on social media love to declare that I'm a Baeddelist as if it were an established fact without having any actual concrete examples they can point to of me promoting that ideology. They can't credibly claim that I'm a transbian separatist. I'm not even a lesbian. I'm married to a transmasc and I mostly have sex with cis men. They can't credibly claim that I consider transmasculine people to be somehow "less trans" than transfeminine people or that I think transmascs deserve less access to treatment or support than transfems, not without others being able to point to dozens of posts on multiple platforms where I wrote the opposite. They can't credibly claim that I think manhood or maleness or masculinity or whatever is inherently oppressive or violent when people can point to dozens of posts where I've written the phrases "Patriarchy is not stored in the balls" and "Patriarchy is learned and it can be unlearned" and to numerous rants of mine pushing back against heteropessimism. They can't credibly claim that I think any given person's gender or sexuality is a choice when I've repeatedly written about how I knew I was a trans girl when I was 5 and how I wasn't attracted to men until after I started taking estrogen. They can't credibly claim that I see all transfeminine people as inherently innocent without someone pointing to all the times I've complained about other transfems weaponizing transmisogyny against me. They can't credibly claim that I think that transmasculine people don't suffer any oppression for being trans when I've written at length about how my transmasc spouse's material concerns mostly overlap with my own. It's just a vibe, a feeling. They say that I and my words are "harmful" but they can't point to any actual harm I'm doing beyond them just not liking the cut of my jib. The truth is that I don't hate transmascs, but I also refuse to show them deference. I refuse to placate them. I refuse to center them in my philosophy or in my activism. I refuse to indulge them when they affect over-the-top fragility and invoke essentialist tropes about being ontologically innocent. And a lot of transmascs can't tell the difference. A lot of people in general can't tell the difference between "hatred" or even "violence" from a transfeminine person versus merely a lack of deference from one. And that's not even getting into the fact that Baeddelism was never "a movement". It was just a clique of trans girls, a handful or two. It never had broad popular appeal or support and none of the adherents ever had any institutional power to speak of. The idea that Baeddelism is some looming spectre that we must all be vigilant about rooting out any sign of is absurd and the way that idea gets used to justify people appointing themselves to police and punish transfeminine people on social media as a whole is insulting and infuriating.