@blitter it reminds me of something, don't mind if i go on a bit of a ramble?

it reminds me of that time where i was still in my really bad internalised-transphobia-detrans phase and also an organised marxist at the time.

i repressed my identity so much at the time because i was ashamed after having been not that good of a person earlier in my life. unfortunately it led to this general nonsense in my head where I felt like being visibly alt or queer was associated with privileged college kids with shitty lib takes, while the actual good steadfast leftist revolutionaries were, like, the down-to-earth cishet union worker family men. rargh. you know the kind of nonsense narrative.

so i was always ashamed of introducing myself with names/pronouns, using my voice training, or being any kind of alt or visibly queer. i was so so afraid people would think i'm one of those ridiculous trans antifa trust fund kids. i wanted them to know i was actually working class first, and queer a distant, uncomfortable second.

i even unfortunately got somewhat deep into the whole "being trans is a scam" thing that detrans people sometimes get into, and into the whole "maybe changing gender isn't actually possible, gender is pre-determined, brains are sex-specific, and all of this is just wishful thinking" narrative.

and i thought everyone kinda had the same thoughts.

until after a meeting, one of my most respected comrades, this chiseled sculpture of a cishet tall well-kempt union man in his 30s, who carried everything in the organisation on his shoulders, basically sat me down to have a talk.

he told me that my takes on gender lately have been troubling; that as a representative of a cadre organisation they expect me to represent the programme. and that in the way i treated myself, i was carrying transphobic ideology to the outside. that my weirdly binary idea of gender was not in line with scientific marxism. that me striving to emulate this normative, masculine image of "the worker" and to hide all my queer traits was counterproductive and wrong because being queer/alt and being a worker is not mutually exclusive at all. that i should treat myself better and work through my internalised transphobia or face consequences inside the organisation. lol

and he gave me a fuckton of reading recommendations to do of, like, classic marxist writings on gender. and he talked at length about how even in the late 1800s and early 1900s, marxists wrote a lot about how binary gender was mostly a result of economic circumstances, how the idea of a male/female brain was disproven even back then, how most people are somewhere on a spectrum of gender identity, and how a socialist society would naturally dissolve the concept of gender over time and such.

i was baffled, but he was completely right. all of this sounded like a reprimand, but it was honestly more of a massive help than i realised. and i had no idea that all of these writings existed. i had no idea that these marxists.

the whole popular narrative of "cute queer anarchists who fuck and do drugs all day, versus stuck-up masculine marxist tankies with problematic takes on social issues" was so ingrained in my head but it crumbled in an instant.

its even more frustrating to know that marxists have been at the whole gender-as-a-social-construct stage almost a century before our current society go to that point. and that everyone forgot those pioneers, including me.