dreamwidth makes me feel like a baby. did you guys use to blog like this
Yes!!!! And we liked it that way! You could make a post and it wasn’t vague! It was a full on rant about your roommate who you know follows you. But you had privacy filters on so only your fandom friends could read it and none of your IRL friends.
You never had to worry about a personal post blowing up. You posted your fandom stuff in communities and your random thoughts of the day we’re restricted to your own blog.
Comments! You could have a whole conversation that made sense. Do you know how long it took for us to get nested replies on here?
Community! Not just Communities as in the feature but a community! You would make a post and everyone would comment on it. Directly! It didn’t feel like a derail by having something to say and you didn’t have to hide things in the tags. And you could reply! And it went directly to them and not buried under 20 other reblogs of replying to other people. You could post fic and actually get comments and start a conversation. I legit think a lot of fandoms issues as a whole is because we don’t have a lot of platforms where having conversations like that exists anymore. It’s very much just us screaming into the void.
Tumblr was never supposed to become the fandom platform it did and it’s ill equipped to function as such. Which has resulted in a lot of fracturing and isolation.
I’m not saying it was perfect or with drama. Just that when the drama hit, it was always juicy and complex, instead of just two complete strangers screaming at each other because of a misunderstanding
I’m sorry I’m going fucking insane over trans people in sports issues the anti trans crowd has lost the fucking plot and then has the audacity to act like its the trannies who are ridiculous
I used to be of the “well the sports issue isn’t really important to me its w/e I just don’t want it to be a gateway into other transphobia” but oh my fucking god we are so far gone. The fencing shit is sending me over the edge. What the fuck.
I can’t even articulate my words so I’m just going to tell a story in screenshots
I am so fucking tired of being gaslit about this
I’m also still so fucking pissed that we have to include “ooo the trans fencer only finished in X place” because its a reminder that trans women will never be allowed to excel at anything in the public eye without being cut down. Fuck OFF
i hope you don’t mind me adding to this post op but i’ve got a sorta personal connection to this story. for ppl who do not know this about me, ive been fencing for like five years and am trans. i also used to fence in the same circles as this woman
this woman—stephanie turner is her name, because i think people should know it so this shit can ruin her life—regularly fences cis men and wins because fencing is fucking co-ed
i know that is in the screenshots already, but what i can add which isn’t in the screenshot is that i personally know and have fenced some of the people listed in that “competition history” screenshot, including some of the cis men which she beat. i know from fencing them myself that these guys are good, smart, capable fencers
that said, even if i didn’t know them, i could tell you a lot of these guys are solid. do you see that column labeled “rating”? being rated means they’ve placed very well or won medals at prestigious or decently sized tournaments—E is the lowest rating (but still difficult to get) and ratings go up to A (and U means unrated). if you look, you can see she beat a few rated fencers in that screenshot, some of them male!
another thing i know about stephanie turner is that she fences at a club my friend’s brother works at. she regularly beats said brother, who is 6’4 and 200lbs. i’ve never met this brother, but if he’s anything like my friend, he’s a damn good fencer with years of experience. stephanie turner is GOOD. per my friend, she probably would have won the bout she took a knee on. she really did not need to pull shit transphobic shit and i guarantee she knows it.
all this shit about fencing cis men really does not matter, to be clear. being a woman beating men doesn’t make stephanie a good fencer—it doesn’t even make her a notable fencer. every afab fencer who is good enough to beat other fencers beats amab fencers. the first fencer i beat as an afab person was a cis man who started the sport at the same time as me just bc we were at the same general level. because again, fencing is co-ed. i just am explaining all this to show how damn stupid dying on this hill is (and the fact she for sure knows how damn pointless and hateful it is)
because fencing is NOT a strength sport! being stronger or taller than your opponent, like how a cis man would stereotypically be vs a cis woman, isn’t necessarily an advantage—strength can absolutely fuck you up if you don’t know how to manage it, and if you know how to use it, being shorter than your opponents can actually be an advantage
if anything, fencing a stamina sport, which something you can very much train no matter your gender if you put in the work. more than anything to do with strength or speed, though, fencing is a strategy sport. there is really no reason to gender segregate it. a lot of tournaments do, but plenty tournaments DON’T, and most clubs you go to for practice and drills and learning fencing will be co-ed and have you constantly fencing against “opposite sex” fencers
(half related—one of the best foils on my fencing team is a trans woman who sometimes fences in the men’s brackets in tournaments and regularly beats cis men)
if stephanie turner is a good fencer—which she definitely is—she knows all of this. that fencing is more about stamina, that strength and height mean nothing, that the only thing that really matters is your strategy.
stephanie turner was literally just doing this to be an asshole. the fact she’s getting money for it is fucking disgusting. i hope she faces some damn consequences for this shit, because it’s such stupid, hateful bullshit, especially for a sport where that “biological advantage” shit really and truly does not matter
i do want to end this addition on a nice note tho, so i want to add: a few days after this story broke—this weekend, actually—i attended a two day tournament as a spectator. while it wasn’t everywhere, i definitely saw a lot of refs and staff wearing trans pride/support pins, as well as a few people in attendance wearing trans supportive shirts and accessories. all of the people ive spoken to in the fencing world about this—which is quite a lot—have thought it both appalling and monumentally stupid, and im hoping that will lead to consequences for stephanie turner and anyone else who tries to follow in her bullshit idiot footsteps
