She might have completely changed her reasons for being awful! I mean, she doesn’t even mention Jesus, this is just gender essentialist rhetoric. And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”. Maybe her only master now is JK Rowling.
Marianne
And JK’s master is the mould from her castle, now that it’s colonised her brain.
thejeff
1) I wonder if she’s only changed her rhetoric because she knows Joyce is an atheist now and fear of hell isn’t a strong motivation.
2) It’s not hard at all to reconcile those ideas. Maybe it should be, but it’s done all the time. “We need good righteous men to protect poor helpless women from the evil predatory ones (and from the foolish ideas they get in their little lady brains).”
“And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”.”
It’s not all that hard, actually, speaking as someone who came from an extremely Catholic background. They teach you to trust men you know, but all other men you don’t know are potentially dangerous because they Only Want One Thing from girls. Girls are taught to guard their virtue rigorously from boys/men and to be wary of them as potential predators. But God and Jesus are/were not like that and can be trusted (also, ironically, your parish priest – which is why there are so many problems there). So Mary is still coming from the same place.
Bryy
Yeah, she could care less about Joe.
To her, everything comes back to trans folk. She probably even thinks Carla is the reason the kidnapping happened in the first place.
I see a big communication problem happening here. Mary seems to be just assuming that Joyce is following her, when (A) the shift in topic was so abrupt and without signal that it took me a minute to figure out that it had happened at all and (B) Joyce probably doesn’t even know that Carla is trans in the first place, which would make the whole exchange even more confusing.
As far as she’s concerned there’s a secret trans person and that’s all she knows, because she’s not worked anything out yet.
Mark
I take comfort in the thought that this communication problem my be happening all the time: it’s all just mysterious blablabla, what on earth is she going on about, oh well that’s just Mary, nothing to think about here.
PedanticJerkass
THIS is why Mary is an awful person.
Among a huge list of other reasons, yes. Granted, this one probably tops the list, though.
True Survivor
What is TERF? I have never heard that acronym before.
it’s basically a euphemism designed to make transphobia look legitimate by hiding it under a front of “feminism”
Falco
“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”. It used to refer to radfems who used feminist rhetoric to exclude trans women and be generally transphobic, though these days it usually just means “transphobe” in general and not ones that hold radfem beliefs.
Johnny Posadas
Wellll it is still more specific than transphobe, cuz you wouldn’t call like, Mike Pence a terf. It’s the “progressive except for Palestine” of transphobia
Yumi
Yeah, and like I wouldn’t really call Mary a TERF because she’s not a feminist, but she is using the rhetoric popular there because it benefits her stances.
Tan
Mary is just a plain ol transphobe, but she is attempting to recruit Joyce to be a TERF
I don’t think TERF Joyce is gonna happen, but I REALLY hope TERF Joyce doesn’t happen
to be fair terfs are also not feminists, and they’ve shown to not be veeery extensively, they use use the guise of feminism to justify transphobia (and it’s not a coincidence that it usually also ends up extending to biphobia and in some rare cases lesbophobia)
terfs are not feminists who are transphobes, terfs are yet another case of reactionaries co-opting progressive language (feminism in this case) to use it to justify their agenda
it’s just a standard case of fascists stealing language from the left and old liberal talking points and contorting it into a weapon to further their bigoted agenda
PedanticJerkass
I don’t think TERF Joyce is gonna happen, but I REALLY hope TERF Joyce doesn’t happen
It might happen… for all of about two minutes, right up until the point where she gets within talking distance again of Dorothy or Sarah or Becky or Joe or… well, basically anybody who isn’t a complete trash heap like Mary.
Highest possibility of Drama™ would be if Carla happened to be the first person transitory-TERF Joyce unknowingly got within talking distance of. Honestly, if it does have to happen, I hope this is the route it takes, which ends with Carla and Joyce scheming together to get suitable revenge on Mary, after any initial drama between them has subsided. Any initial drama would likely be very ugly, though.
PedanticJerkass
Or… you know… Joyce’s sister would probably be the most Dramatic™ possibility.
Oh… oh no…
thejeff
It’s not even really “progressive except for Palestine” these days. It’s transphobia with a veneer of “protect women” instead of Christian rhetoric. In recent years they’ve become far more openly tied to the far right though, both rhetorically and through funding and organizational links. Not to mention actual neo-Nazis at rallies.
Leorale
Yeah can we please not casually veer into Israel/Palestine? this terrible war directly impacts my family, and this website is like my one safe space before going to bed. Thank you.
Adam Black
its mostly Transphobia, but the underying Ideology and rhetoricmon gender denial is often present.
Dday
My understanding was that Radical Feminist theory posited that gender itself is a destructive construct of oppression, which put radfems at inevitable loggerheads with pro-trans people who would assert that gender (or lack-thereof) is innate to experience and inherent to self-identification.
At least… that’s the best I could extract from what Tatsuya Ishida seemed to be putting out there in Sinfest the last time I read that stuff. Boy that takes me back. Maybe someone here has actually read the source material and can explain it better.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny that now that term is now connected to sexual gender essentialists, who forcefully insist that gender is an expression of biology with a hard binary. It’s actually the polar opposite of the radical stuff, very conservative viewpoint.
I guess it’s the same principal, in that they’re both basically going out of their way to stomp on someone else’s experiences because they think someone should be feeling something different from what they say they are feeling.
Bogeywoman
I am petty about transphobes being associated with radical feminism. I almost got sent down terf highway as a young feminist because of it, which is probably part of the intent, but I got redirected to feminist intersection and back on track of just being rad.
Michael Steamweed
Wow, Sinfest…that’s been some years. I stopped reading that comic when it clearly went into hateful territory and just stayed there.
Zaxares
The irony is that Sinfest and Tatsuya himself have now also fallen down the TERF rabbit-hole. In recent years he also seemed to go full MAGA (before at some point it looks like he became disillusioned by Trump and people like Musk) and now he’s fallen to parroting anti-Semite screeds. >.> If it wasn’t so awful I’d honestly be saddened by how far he’s collapsed because I do actually like his art.
thejeff
The TERF to Nazi pipeline is a very real thing.
Schpoonman
The strip where Criminy literally visits Fuchsia in Hell crushes me and I hate that Tatsuya went off the deep-end so badly.
For the unfamiliar, she’s perfectly happy to see him but the fact that she’s a pretty literal demon and he’s just a guy who’s probably going to the canonical heaven (I think it was canonical at the time, it’s been a decade or more since I read) has been weighing on her, especially since she first appeared to him she was masquerading as another petty mortal.
So she asks him if he’s there to save her, assuming he wouldn’t want to be with a demon. His reply, that he doesn’t care and he loves her anyway, shreds me.
not someone else
The connection is actually that they’re the same people. “Gender is fake and oppressive” in radfem terms reduces to “and therefore you’re not allowed to have one, and if you want to have one, you’re either trying to hurt other people (if you’re AMAB) or a poor little girl who doesn’t know any better (if you’re AFAB)”.
Tbis is unfortunately a consequence of the fact that “radical” in this case doesn’t mean extreme. It means they believe that sex-based oppression is the root of all other oppressions. This is also why a lot of them are historically really goddamn racist.
Owlmirror
While TERF is as already explained, I’ve also seen the acronym FART:
Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Which is arguably a better term, especially for radical regressive right-wingers, who hold actual egalitarian feminism in deep contempt.
Michael Steamweed
I like that term better. The word itself is a giggler and denotes immaturity and smelliness, both of which apply to them. And “appropriating” seems more accurate.
PedanticJerkass
Oh wow, this absolutely needs to become more of a thing.
Taffy
It stands for “Totally Expendable, Ridiculous Freak”, because nothing about them is worth keeping around and nothing would be lost if they were removed from existence.
I mean that’s the point of a dog-whistle: it’s intended so that only fellow transphobic DOGS can hear it ?
deliverything
I’ve mixed feelings about the term “dog-whistle”… It’s a fitting analogy (other than that it’s a lot easier to learn to notice these metaphorical dog whistles than to become able to hear sounds outside your hearing range), but dogs have done nothing to deserve being associated with people like this.
“dog-whistle” started off being used to refer to racist stuff in particular because of United States history of slavery:
When slaves tried to run away from their plantations, their owners and fellow slaveholders brutally hunted them down for sport — referring to brothers as “bunnies”, “rabbits”, “black buck”, them vanilla white folk blew actual dog whistles to summon trained hunting dogs to tear up runaway slaves limb from limb.
“The end result of decades of dog whistling finally calling the dog,” said in reference to all the GQP dog whistling ending up with the arrival of Trump on the scene.
the mindset of a Christo-fascist like her is highly analogous to the mindset of a scam artist — absolutely ruthless, the moment they cannot keep a straight face is the moment they know it is all over
Mary is picking up on the fact that Joe (a cis man) breached her trust, without understanding precisely why, and is using that to paint ALL nonbinary and trans people as seditious dangers. It’s disgusting TERFy nonsense.
The “female space” part is key. That’s usually referring to public bathrooms and sporting competitions, which by trans exclusionary logic become private spaces that women need for themselves in order to be their special unique womanly selves (and not trans women obviously, since we’re fake women). Joe’s intrusion, if you want to call it that, was in a “liquor themed party” space. But Mary is just running a prepared script that only sort of occasionally touches on the actual subject.
Her life drawing teacher would understand I’m sure.
Technically, the party was held in the girls’ dorms, and Joyce is still walking through them while complaining about his behaviour, so Mary’s adding 2 and 2 and getting 17. But absolutely this is nonsensical in context. Joe was *invited* to a *mixed gender party*. And his breach was that of implied mutual activity, causing a loss of trust he didn’t anticipate because he was trying so hard to *not* be *more* untrustworthy out of inbuilt fear… he was doing nearly the complete opposite of what Mary is insinuating now. And the deliberate pivot to making this about trans people trying to just live, instead of Joe being invited as a binary cis man to a mixed group, is vile.
Kelibath
Missed the comment about her drawing but YES! She needs to be open to and capable of self-improvement, nay even change, before any of this can improve.
Kelibath
I actually think she’s jealous of Joyce deep down for being able to change, at least, that or she legitimately and truly looks down on her for “not sticking the course” in a way that she sees as pandering to society over faith. And that’s why she’s trying her absolute hardest to belittle and sabotage Joyce’s growth.
Mark
I think what she needs most is for someone to just fix her with a steady gaze and keep saying “that makes no sense,” “what does that have to do with the topic,” “the actual statistics disproved that,” “I have no idea what that means,” “what language are you speaking” and so on, fairly acknowledging valid points but not giving an inch on gibberish, until Mary either flees or collapses.
Still, calling it a “female space” because “women live here” is such a nebulous, insinuating turn of phrase. If it means anything concrete, it seems to mean past a certain amount of exclusively female presence, a space magically takes on female properties that mean women belong there and non-women don’t in the classic “Blud und Boden” paradigm.
Or else she could just say Joe invaded “the women’s wing.” That’d even still allow her to make her insinuations about Carla.
Are you people reading the same comic I am, or do you just make crap up? I mean, much of the commentary here is always just fan fic, but in this case it seems even less connected to the actual comic than usual.
It’s potentially confusing, because the topic is Joe, but Mary’s using anti-trans rhetoric in panel 3. As Amelie Wikström noted above, it doesn’t fit the situation (while most of the partygoers were girls, it wasn’t in any way a gendered space), and I think NGPZ’s speculating that Mary’s attempting to work toward recruiting Joyce to her anti-trans bigotry (using the situation with Joe as a way to segue into the topic; it’s likely that getting Joyce to hate Joe would be a bonus for Mary, but not the main purpose).
Trouble is, this thread has veered into a discussion of Mary’s transphobia quickly enough that anyone expecting it to be about Joe could easily be lost.
a/snow/mous/e
Yeah, I was confused initially at how “lying, predatory men” was definitely a dog whistle, before I realized the actual TERF language had occurred earlier.
a/snow/mous/e
It is very subtle because Joe has done actually problematic stuff in the past, but Mary doesn’t bring up the list at all, and it’s doubtful that Mary would be particularly bothered by an attractiveness rating.
However, by referencing Joyce’s experience, she seems to be conflating Joe with Ryan, and in particular labeling Joe as a predator. Even though the sex tape was Roz’s idea, her consent is not valid because Joe is a predator for having premarital sex in the first place (never mind the fact that Roz is equally promiscuous, she’s the victim for the purposes of this analogy).
The actual TERF stuff, I think, is the actual language Mary uses, the crime she accuses him of: “intruding in a female space”. He was invited to Roz’s room, and if Mary thinks Roz was “deceived”, this sort of fits… but it feels barely relevant to the actual sex tape. Roz could have come to Joe’s room, they could have had sex in the woods, whatever. However, an “inherently predatory man lying to enter female spaces” is very relevant to the conservative backlash to trans people using women’s bathrooms, or even to Carla being in the women’s dorm (never mind that she doesn’t have a roommate).
thejeff
I think the lying and female spaces refer to whatever Mary thinks happened that she overheard Joyce & Joe talking about – being drunk together and Joe lying and Joyce trusting him.
Not about the old sex tape.
a/snow/mous/e
Ah, yes, that makes sense. The “women’s spaces” thing seems to be the most incriminating bit, though.
Julez
The tape WAS filmed in Joe’s room. They attached the camera to Danny’s foot. So really the victim in this scenario is Danny. (But I agree with all your points, facts aside.)
a/snow/mous/e
ah yes, fair enough. so the “women’s spaces” thing just comes out of nowhere.
Proxiehunter
“Lying predatory men” isn’t not a TERF dog whistle. That’s a popular description they use for trans women. Or sometimes cis women they’ve randomly decided are trans because they don’t look or act feminine enough for them.
a/snow/mous/e
gotcha, I just thought it was an awfully short phrase to confidently declare it a dog whistle. but i’m not familiar with dog-whistle phrases in general so
466 thoughts on “So different”
NGPZ
Mary knows EXACTLY what she’s doing when out of all things she chooses the framing of “lying, predatory men”.
She’s trying to harness Joyce’s feminist resentment and redirect it towards a transgender scapegoat.
This is a very common TERF recruitment technique.
Sirksome
Is that what’s going on? Geez I’ve never been more baffled than by this interaction.
Yumi
Oh, yeah, this is TERF rhetoric, very directly.
Vanessa
So is Mary mad at Carla (for existing) not Joe oh my god. THIS is why Mary is an awful person.
Doctor_Who
Well, it’s reason #112 Mary is an awful person.
Vanessa
It’s a good example of the extreme right-wing hate she lets consume her.
Amelie Wikström
She might have completely changed her reasons for being awful! I mean, she doesn’t even mention Jesus, this is just gender essentialist rhetoric. And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”. Maybe her only master now is JK Rowling.
Marianne
And JK’s master is the mould from her castle, now that it’s colonised her brain.
thejeff
1) I wonder if she’s only changed her rhetoric because she knows Joyce is an atheist now and fear of hell isn’t a strong motivation.
2) It’s not hard at all to reconcile those ideas. Maybe it should be, but it’s done all the time. “We need good righteous men to protect poor helpless women from the evil predatory ones (and from the foolish ideas they get in their little lady brains).”
Amelie Wikström
Yeah that was a pretty unlikely theory.
Felis Dee
“And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”.”
It’s not all that hard, actually, speaking as someone who came from an extremely Catholic background. They teach you to trust men you know, but all other men you don’t know are potentially dangerous because they Only Want One Thing from girls. Girls are taught to guard their virtue rigorously from boys/men and to be wary of them as potential predators. But God and Jesus are/were not like that and can be trusted (also, ironically, your parish priest – which is why there are so many problems there). So Mary is still coming from the same place.
Bryy
Yeah, she could care less about Joe.
To her, everything comes back to trans folk. She probably even thinks Carla is the reason the kidnapping happened in the first place.
Carl Muckenhoupt
I see a big communication problem happening here. Mary seems to be just assuming that Joyce is following her, when (A) the shift in topic was so abrupt and without signal that it took me a minute to figure out that it had happened at all and (B) Joyce probably doesn’t even know that Carla is trans in the first place, which would make the whole exchange even more confusing.
General Tekno
Oh, Joyce ABSOLUTELY doesn’t know.
As far as she’s concerned there’s a secret trans person and that’s all she knows, because she’s not worked anything out yet.
Mark
I take comfort in the thought that this communication problem my be happening all the time: it’s all just mysterious blablabla, what on earth is she going on about, oh well that’s just Mary, nothing to think about here.
PedanticJerkass
Among a huge list of other reasons, yes. Granted, this one probably tops the list, though.
True Survivor
What is TERF? I have never heard that acronym before.
TrueVCU
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
True Survivor
Thank you. I appreciate you elucidating that.
NGPZ
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
it’s basically a euphemism designed to make transphobia look legitimate by hiding it under a front of “feminism”
Falco
“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”. It used to refer to radfems who used feminist rhetoric to exclude trans women and be generally transphobic, though these days it usually just means “transphobe” in general and not ones that hold radfem beliefs.
Johnny Posadas
Wellll it is still more specific than transphobe, cuz you wouldn’t call like, Mike Pence a terf. It’s the “progressive except for Palestine” of transphobia
Yumi
Yeah, and like I wouldn’t really call Mary a TERF because she’s not a feminist, but she is using the rhetoric popular there because it benefits her stances.
Tan
Mary is just a plain ol transphobe, but she is attempting to recruit Joyce to be a TERF
I don’t think TERF Joyce is gonna happen, but I REALLY hope TERF Joyce doesn’t happen
lur
to be fair terfs are also not feminists, and they’ve shown to not be veeery extensively, they use use the guise of feminism to justify transphobia (and it’s not a coincidence that it usually also ends up extending to biphobia and in some rare cases lesbophobia)
terfs are not feminists who are transphobes, terfs are yet another case of reactionaries co-opting progressive language (feminism in this case) to use it to justify their agenda
NGPZ
@lur YUUUUUUP
it’s just a standard case of fascists stealing language from the left and old liberal talking points and contorting it into a weapon to further their bigoted agenda
PedanticJerkass
It might happen… for all of about two minutes, right up until the point where she gets within talking distance again of Dorothy or Sarah or Becky or Joe or… well, basically anybody who isn’t a complete trash heap like Mary.
Highest possibility of Drama™ would be if Carla happened to be the first person transitory-TERF Joyce unknowingly got within talking distance of. Honestly, if it does have to happen, I hope this is the route it takes, which ends with Carla and Joyce scheming together to get suitable revenge on Mary, after any initial drama between them has subsided. Any initial drama would likely be very ugly, though.
PedanticJerkass
Or… you know… Joyce’s sister would probably be the most Dramatic™ possibility.
Oh… oh no…
thejeff
It’s not even really “progressive except for Palestine” these days. It’s transphobia with a veneer of “protect women” instead of Christian rhetoric. In recent years they’ve become far more openly tied to the far right though, both rhetorically and through funding and organizational links. Not to mention actual neo-Nazis at rallies.
Leorale
Yeah can we please not casually veer into Israel/Palestine? this terrible war directly impacts my family, and this website is like my one safe space before going to bed. Thank you.
Adam Black
its mostly Transphobia, but the underying Ideology and rhetoricmon gender denial is often present.
Dday
My understanding was that Radical Feminist theory posited that gender itself is a destructive construct of oppression, which put radfems at inevitable loggerheads with pro-trans people who would assert that gender (or lack-thereof) is innate to experience and inherent to self-identification.
At least… that’s the best I could extract from what Tatsuya Ishida seemed to be putting out there in Sinfest the last time I read that stuff. Boy that takes me back. Maybe someone here has actually read the source material and can explain it better.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny that now that term is now connected to sexual gender essentialists, who forcefully insist that gender is an expression of biology with a hard binary. It’s actually the polar opposite of the radical stuff, very conservative viewpoint.
I guess it’s the same principal, in that they’re both basically going out of their way to stomp on someone else’s experiences because they think someone should be feeling something different from what they say they are feeling.
Bogeywoman
I am petty about transphobes being associated with radical feminism. I almost got sent down terf highway as a young feminist because of it, which is probably part of the intent, but I got redirected to feminist intersection and back on track of just being rad.
Michael Steamweed
Wow, Sinfest…that’s been some years. I stopped reading that comic when it clearly went into hateful territory and just stayed there.
Zaxares
The irony is that Sinfest and Tatsuya himself have now also fallen down the TERF rabbit-hole. In recent years he also seemed to go full MAGA (before at some point it looks like he became disillusioned by Trump and people like Musk) and now he’s fallen to parroting anti-Semite screeds. >.> If it wasn’t so awful I’d honestly be saddened by how far he’s collapsed because I do actually like his art.
thejeff
The TERF to Nazi pipeline is a very real thing.
Schpoonman
The strip where Criminy literally visits Fuchsia in Hell crushes me and I hate that Tatsuya went off the deep-end so badly.
For the unfamiliar, she’s perfectly happy to see him but the fact that she’s a pretty literal demon and he’s just a guy who’s probably going to the canonical heaven (I think it was canonical at the time, it’s been a decade or more since I read) has been weighing on her, especially since she first appeared to him she was masquerading as another petty mortal.
So she asks him if he’s there to save her, assuming he wouldn’t want to be with a demon. His reply, that he doesn’t care and he loves her anyway, shreds me.
not someone else
The connection is actually that they’re the same people. “Gender is fake and oppressive” in radfem terms reduces to “and therefore you’re not allowed to have one, and if you want to have one, you’re either trying to hurt other people (if you’re AMAB) or a poor little girl who doesn’t know any better (if you’re AFAB)”.
Tbis is unfortunately a consequence of the fact that “radical” in this case doesn’t mean extreme. It means they believe that sex-based oppression is the root of all other oppressions. This is also why a lot of them are historically really goddamn racist.
Owlmirror
While TERF is as already explained, I’ve also seen the acronym FART:
Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Which is arguably a better term, especially for radical regressive right-wingers, who hold actual egalitarian feminism in deep contempt.
Michael Steamweed
I like that term better. The word itself is a giggler and denotes immaturity and smelliness, both of which apply to them. And “appropriating” seems more accurate.
PedanticJerkass
Oh wow, this absolutely needs to become more of a thing.
Taffy
It stands for “Totally Expendable, Ridiculous Freak”, because nothing about them is worth keeping around and nothing would be lost if they were removed from existence.
General Tekno
Geezus; did not realize she was being terfy.
UGH yeah just UGGGGGH
Mind, Joyce still has to cross that bridge of realization, between Carla and her sister.
Rose by Any other Name
@Yumi – YUP. My thoughts exactly.
NGPZ
I mean that’s the point of a dog-whistle: it’s intended so that only fellow transphobic DOGS can hear it ?
deliverything
I’ve mixed feelings about the term “dog-whistle”… It’s a fitting analogy (other than that it’s a lot easier to learn to notice these metaphorical dog whistles than to become able to hear sounds outside your hearing range), but dogs have done nothing to deserve being associated with people like this.
NGPZ
“dog-whistle” started off being used to refer to racist stuff in particular because of United States history of slavery:
When slaves tried to run away from their plantations, their owners and fellow slaveholders brutally hunted them down for sport — referring to brothers as “bunnies”, “rabbits”, “black buck”, them vanilla white folk blew actual dog whistles to summon trained hunting dogs to tear up runaway slaves limb from limb.
PedanticJerkass
I think my favorite use of “dog-whistle” as a political term that I’ve heard yet was in a Some More News <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pxg4Bycmw"video from a while back.
“The end result of decades of dog whistling finally calling the dog,” said in reference to all the GQP dog whistling ending up with the arrival of Trump on the scene.
PedanticJerkass
Ugh… html fail.
That should have been “in a Some More News video from a while back.”
Bryy
What’s worse is that she is using the kidnapping as well as Joyce’s almost-rape as tools.
NGPZ
the mindset of a Christo-fascist like her is highly analogous to the mindset of a scam artist — absolutely ruthless, the moment they cannot keep a straight face is the moment they know it is all over
Do not try to make conversation with the bigot.
The bigot will lie.
The bigot will cheat.
The bigot will make excuses.
IntangibleMatter
The bigot isn’t even guaranteed to agree with themselves on points they’ve previously made if it’s clear that there’s no way to win there.
HueSatLight
Panel 3 doesn’t describe what she overheard between Joyce and Joe. But it is very terfy.
Kelibath
100%. And it’s dreadful.
Mary is picking up on the fact that Joe (a cis man) breached her trust, without understanding precisely why, and is using that to paint ALL nonbinary and trans people as seditious dangers. It’s disgusting TERFy nonsense.
Jo_cubstar
Oy I really hope it doesn’t go there, but you’re probably right :'(
Amelie Wikström
The “female space” part is key. That’s usually referring to public bathrooms and sporting competitions, which by trans exclusionary logic become private spaces that women need for themselves in order to be their special unique womanly selves (and not trans women obviously, since we’re fake women). Joe’s intrusion, if you want to call it that, was in a “liquor themed party” space. But Mary is just running a prepared script that only sort of occasionally touches on the actual subject.
Her life drawing teacher would understand I’m sure.
Kelibath
Technically, the party was held in the girls’ dorms, and Joyce is still walking through them while complaining about his behaviour, so Mary’s adding 2 and 2 and getting 17. But absolutely this is nonsensical in context. Joe was *invited* to a *mixed gender party*. And his breach was that of implied mutual activity, causing a loss of trust he didn’t anticipate because he was trying so hard to *not* be *more* untrustworthy out of inbuilt fear… he was doing nearly the complete opposite of what Mary is insinuating now. And the deliberate pivot to making this about trans people trying to just live, instead of Joe being invited as a binary cis man to a mixed group, is vile.
Kelibath
Missed the comment about her drawing but YES! She needs to be open to and capable of self-improvement, nay even change, before any of this can improve.
Kelibath
I actually think she’s jealous of Joyce deep down for being able to change, at least, that or she legitimately and truly looks down on her for “not sticking the course” in a way that she sees as pandering to society over faith. And that’s why she’s trying her absolute hardest to belittle and sabotage Joyce’s growth.
Mark
I think what she needs most is for someone to just fix her with a steady gaze and keep saying “that makes no sense,” “what does that have to do with the topic,” “the actual statistics disproved that,” “I have no idea what that means,” “what language are you speaking” and so on, fairly acknowledging valid points but not giving an inch on gibberish, until Mary either flees or collapses.
Or maybe that’s just what the rest of us need.
PedanticJerkass
I prefer Dina’s method of dealing with Mary.
(I’m fairly okay with this method, too, though.)
NGPZ
Why not both?
The real question is, who gets to beat up which half? >:D
Amelie Wikström
Still, calling it a “female space” because “women live here” is such a nebulous, insinuating turn of phrase. If it means anything concrete, it seems to mean past a certain amount of exclusively female presence, a space magically takes on female properties that mean women belong there and non-women don’t in the classic “Blud und Boden” paradigm.
Or else she could just say Joe invaded “the women’s wing.” That’d even still allow her to make her insinuations about Carla.
Otl1973
Are you people reading the same comic I am, or do you just make crap up? I mean, much of the commentary here is always just fan fic, but in this case it seems even less connected to the actual comic than usual.
NGPZ
A better question would be, are YOU reading the same comic we are?
Michael Steamweed
I think that’s the only DoA strip I’ve seen with closed comments. I’m guessing too many hateful types were being too noisy over everyone else.
HueSatLight
There’s another one a few days later. It’s because they were too busy with newborns to do the comment moderation
thejeff
Well, a combination of newborns and transphobic jackasses. The comics on the strips before those got pretty bad.
deliverything
It’s potentially confusing, because the topic is Joe, but Mary’s using anti-trans rhetoric in panel 3. As Amelie Wikström noted above, it doesn’t fit the situation (while most of the partygoers were girls, it wasn’t in any way a gendered space), and I think NGPZ’s speculating that Mary’s attempting to work toward recruiting Joyce to her anti-trans bigotry (using the situation with Joe as a way to segue into the topic; it’s likely that getting Joyce to hate Joe would be a bonus for Mary, but not the main purpose).
Trouble is, this thread has veered into a discussion of Mary’s transphobia quickly enough that anyone expecting it to be about Joe could easily be lost.
a/snow/mous/e
Yeah, I was confused initially at how “lying, predatory men” was definitely a dog whistle, before I realized the actual TERF language had occurred earlier.
a/snow/mous/e
It is very subtle because Joe has done actually problematic stuff in the past, but Mary doesn’t bring up the list at all, and it’s doubtful that Mary would be particularly bothered by an attractiveness rating.
However, by referencing Joyce’s experience, she seems to be conflating Joe with Ryan, and in particular labeling Joe as a predator. Even though the sex tape was Roz’s idea, her consent is not valid because Joe is a predator for having premarital sex in the first place (never mind the fact that Roz is equally promiscuous, she’s the victim for the purposes of this analogy).
The actual TERF stuff, I think, is the actual language Mary uses, the crime she accuses him of: “intruding in a female space”. He was invited to Roz’s room, and if Mary thinks Roz was “deceived”, this sort of fits… but it feels barely relevant to the actual sex tape. Roz could have come to Joe’s room, they could have had sex in the woods, whatever. However, an “inherently predatory man lying to enter female spaces” is very relevant to the conservative backlash to trans people using women’s bathrooms, or even to Carla being in the women’s dorm (never mind that she doesn’t have a roommate).
thejeff
I think the lying and female spaces refer to whatever Mary thinks happened that she overheard Joyce & Joe talking about – being drunk together and Joe lying and Joyce trusting him.
Not about the old sex tape.
a/snow/mous/e
Ah, yes, that makes sense. The “women’s spaces” thing seems to be the most incriminating bit, though.
Julez
The tape WAS filmed in Joe’s room. They attached the camera to Danny’s foot. So really the victim in this scenario is Danny. (But I agree with all your points, facts aside.)
a/snow/mous/e
ah yes, fair enough. so the “women’s spaces” thing just comes out of nowhere.
Proxiehunter
“Lying predatory men” isn’t not a TERF dog whistle. That’s a popular description they use for trans women. Or sometimes cis women they’ve randomly decided are trans because they don’t look or act feminine enough for them.
a/snow/mous/e
gotcha, I just thought it was an awfully short phrase to confidently declare it a dog whistle. but i’m not familiar with dog-whistle phrases in general so