This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Accommodated/Assimilated Minorities, part one: My Story of Trans-on-Trans Violence; or, the Abuse of a Trans Women Sex Worker by AFAB Sex Workers (Cis or Trans)
“What is a [woman]? A miserable, little pile of secrets!”
—Matt Walsh/Dracula, What is a Woman? (2021) / Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Picking up where “Selling War as Sacred: Sublimated War Pastiche and Gender-critical War Bosses” left off…
(exhibit 100c7: Model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, in 2017. I was skinnier back then and Zeuhl was less of a prude: “You’re really good at this!” they told me, snapping appreciatively as I posed nude for them in the Manchester sunlight. At the time, I had never done a shoot before, but discovered right away that I liked it; posing cutely and acting femme felt correct to me.)
Note: This chapter section was originally written as a response to the abuse that I—a trans woman sex worker, writer and artist—was receiving online from AFAB sex workers about this book. I originally wrote it down when it occurred just to keep a record of it (2023), but decided very quickly to include it in the book and expand on it. I did so because it included an element of marginalized trans in-fighting I hadn’t covered yet: trans-on-trans violence, specifically of binary trans people fighting amongst themselves to the detriment of worker solidarity and class, culture and race consciousness. —Perse, back in 2024
P.S. (5/5/2025), Various events have happened since May 2023. I’ve decided to include them in the same Google Docs file. Some are mentioned elsewhere in the book series (e.g., Jade, in “Policing the Whore“).
Fascism doesn’t just weaponize cis trauma and privilege against queer persons. It tokenizes it as something to internalize. Transphobia, for instance, can happen with transmen being transphobic towards transwomen (or vice versa); of cis-het or cis-queer people towards trans people. Male privilege is a thing but so is male stigma, which tends to come out more from AFAB sex workers’ xenophobia towards cis-male sex workers or trans women sex workers. The latter are branded by the former as threats for having penises and taking money and paid jobs away from AFAB sex workers (to which paid labor belongs to overt sex worker positions instead of sexually dimorphized, unpaid forms of “women’s work,” like childbirth, “wifely duties,” housework, etc) while also being seen as the universal clientele that must pay cash transactions during business exchanges.
This bias extends to AMAB content creators like artists or writers creating content with or about AFAB persons, who will often cite them as having a “Male Gaze” on account of them having a penis; i.e., being a “false” woman, wearing a “disguise” to enter women’s spaces by trying to get “free nudes” even when the exchange taking place is expressed as “labor for labor.” These biases towards trans women by trans men are generally informed by preexisting stereotypes of cis-het men vs cis women: boys are gross and made from slugs, snails and puppy dog tails (which extends to male humor and male behaviors as fundamentally violent); girls, of sugar, spice and everything nice (excluding immodest female behavior as hysterical, tied to the ancient stereotype of the wandering womb) whose trauma is “superior” to AMAB struggles, aka “rape ranking.”
The double standard, here, is used to abject trans women by transphobic trans men, who are falling back on their side of this heteronormative standard while still identifying as trans men; i.e., “the good transes.” They adopt a new label and co-opt the implied modesty argument while bashing trans women as secretly gross. During witch hunts, this purported misbehavior becomes something to uncover, and indeed I was labeled as “disgusting” or “sick” by trans men who were, by all accounts, acting like transphobic cis women. That’s how worker division works.
In fiscal terms, the common argument I inferred was, “you approached them, first, ergo its unprofessional to ask for nudes unless they asked first.” In fact, I encountered many arguments that tried to publicly dictate my private dealings with other sex workers and artists, often made by people who had made zero attempt to tell me privately during our own exchanges that my behavior bothered them; afterward, I was given statements like “sex workers only want money,” which makes two false claims: One, “All sex workers want money, not art; i.e., art is free, nudes are not”; two, “you are not a sex worker.” The bias, here, is being committed primarily by AFAB sex workers (cis or trans) against me as an artist and trans woman (many of whom are “fin doms,” which is an incredibly lazy and dubious form of sex work—akin to “aggressive begging” cz reword; focus on aggressive instead of begging, dehumanizing label of “pay pigs” and focusing on negotiation). It’s marginalized in-fighting on a social platform that has become increasingly conservative in the passing months, with those less marginalized punching down against those more marginalized to appease the white, cis-het, male consumer base on Twitter. It’s these AFAB workers, including trans men, towing the line as “legion whores,” following the camp from the rear while the male soldiers march in lockstep.
(exhibit 100d: Artist: Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s work is generally revered for the name attached to it; i.e., of Picasso as the self-proclaimed “greatest” artist of the 20th century. In truth, he was a sexist pig/pedophile whose cubism, Hannah Gadsby remarks in Nanette, didn’t include the perspectives of women. Re: Marta of Forever Barcelona writes extensively on Picasso’s behavior,
Picasso wouldn’t be Picasso without all of his women. A huge part of his work revolves around women, specially [sic] the ones he had love relationships with. But the way he treated them was often abusive. He’d be attracted by their youth, their beauty and talent, suck it off, then brutally substitute them by a new acquisition when they couldn’t offer him anything else.
Maybe he learnt such misogynistic behavior from his father, who introduced him to the Barcelona brothels when he was just 13 years old to make him “a man.” And he continued visiting them: his famous painting “The Demoiselles d’Avignon” actually represents the women that worked in a brothel in Avinyó street in Barcelona.
The truth is that he had a very low concept of females and said sentences such as:
“There are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.”
“Women are machines for suffering.”
“Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents.”
He indeed destroyed many of them. Only a few were strong enough to survive their relationship successfully. To see themselves first idolized in Picasso’s paintings, then savagely decomposed when another mistress entered his life [source].
What a cunt.)
To that, I found myself constantly surrounded by people who were calling me names, branding me for things I did not do and provoking me inside a ring of reactive abuse. They didn’t need to explicitly say “art is free, nudes aren’t” or “you’re not a sex worker, you’re an artist” or “you’re not a real woman; you’re taking away our money,” etc; their actions indicated as such while making me a punching bag—i.e., someone they could attack because, I suspect, they as trans men and cis women, feel powerless in the midst of the paradigm shift on Twitter/the world and decided they wanted to punch down at a trans woman instead of those who are actually oppressing them. The lengths they went to do so included black mail, veiled threats, impeaching my character, posting private conversations out of context, black-booking me, hypocritically lying about their own conduct with me, and so on.
I suspect these attempts were to provoke me into snapping—either calling them names or leaking their reference material out of spite or doxxing them, etc. I did nothing of the kind, trying to defend myself as well as I could while giving the people I’ve worked with the benefit of the doubt. I dealt with my accuser directly and accused them of being bad faith and abusive; I went to my friends and people I’d worked with to try and confirm if my behavior had been inappropriate, despite no one having indicated this. In short, if anyone was harboring ill will, they had acted like things were fine as we negotiated, and kept their true feelings secret. That’s the very definition of bad faith: hiding one’s true intentions! Perhaps they felt no malice, at first, but it’s terrible communication and entirely on them; expecting me to be a mind-reader or implying that I “somehow knew” is coercive and abusive.
In conclusion, the sex workers treating me this way were primarily cis-/trans AFAB persons. They were TERFs whose abuse included trans-on-trans violence, but also discrimination towards artists while acting as the gatekeepers of sex, labor and artistic expression (which has an oddly SWERF-TERF flavor to it: forcing artists/trans women to “stay in their lane” while treating art and sex as completely separate practices that are wholly cash-transactional as dictated [at least on the ground floor] by female workers).
I don’t know if I’ll do a write-up about this; I already address TERFs and SWERFs a great deal in my book and some aspects of marginalized in-fighting, assimilation fantasy and class betrayal. However, the sections in my book concern trans people being enbyphobic and the LGB Alliance, but there isn’t a specific section on trans-on-trans violence. Given how it’s so marginalized, I might use my own recent experiences to create a new section in the book at the end of my chapter about TERFs: a section about trans men being transphobic towards trans women “in the wild” according to my experiences, first-hand. I had never heard about this before, having only come out last August, and only having reached a larger group of sex workers in the past couple of months for it to even become an issue if it was one (it was).
In any event, this summarizes the events of the past couple of days from my point of view. I’ve written them down now after I’ve had time to process them, block abusers, and communicate with friends. I’ve also had a full-night’s rest for the first time in days and in general feel ready to speak about these matters outside the influence of my abusers. As I consider my work to be about the prevention of worker exploitation and abuse, I consider it my duty to report on these issues, wherever they occur, and to study and learn from them. That includes my experiences as a trans-woman sex worker, artist and writer who has devoted her entire life to the betterment of all workers.
(exhibit 100c8: model and photographer, left: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl in 2018; middle and right: Persephone van der Waard, in 2021 and 2020. The middle photo was taken in a dressing room in Florida, when my ex, Jadis, was love-bombing me by buying me nice clothes; the right photo was taken shortly after I left Florida and started doing sex work at a new location where I wouldn’t be abused by the person I was living with.)
It’s important to remember, here, that Capitalism sexually-dimorphizes all workers under Capitalism; its structured, reactive abuse is biased, happening less towards less-marginalized workers and more towards more-marginalized workers. The further outside the heteronormative order and colonial binary you go, the more this leads to an increasingly entropic degree of worker division; i.e., punching down, class betrayal and ignorance—especially from those who have already been abused. Those in the middle—mainly cis women, who have cis-privilege—will punch down against trans women more than men, because they conflate AMAB trans/nonbinary people with the cis-het men who normally abuse them.
However, this double standard extends to AFAB people being the expected party to perform sex work while catering to cis-het men as the universal clientele. These vigilante “chasers” of trans women will treat trans women as “weak boys” they can dominate and fetishize; they will see trans men as “confused women,” whose abuse will lead trans men to punch down against trans women, who they see as “weak,” easy targets that cis-TERFs will also attack and label as “false women.” However, the classic “divide and conquer” strategy is also in full effect here, incentivizing AFAB people and trans women to—from the Patriarchal, heteronormative perspective—fight amongst themselves (even when trans women are just trying to stave off abuse). In these instances, it’s important to remember that the recipients of abuse are commonly trans women (and cis-male sex workers) being abused by trans men as a smaller offshoot of the transphobic AFAB sex worker community.
The abuse works in favor of the status quo as a form of assimilation: “If we abuse these people, we won’t be attacked ourselves.” It’s false hope, trusting things not to get worse. When they do, trans men will have to go in the closet, and AFAB workers will be forced to do unpaid sex work, leading paid sex work to become a criminalized, unprotected enterprise. It will be privatized by the elite through porn companies while individual sex workers (of any gender or sex) live on the streets, being brutalized by their pimps. Queer people will be closeted. And cis men under this heteronormative order will be abused as well, forced into roles they may not enjoy that either have them becoming victims or abusers themselves.
(exhibit 100c9: Artist, left: Josef Engelhart; right: Toulouse Lautrec—source: “The Belle Époque, Heyday of Paris Brothels [2023]:
Between 1880 and 1914, Paris was the world capital of pleasures. All the pleasures … A time – the Belle Epoque! – that will know that its peak during the International Exhibition of 1900, where the French capital became a symbol of art of living and luxury. Among all these pleasures were those now illegal. At the Belle Epoque, there were no fewer than 224 brothels in Paris, and a hundred in 1946, the official date of ban of these houses closed day and night: Les Maisons Closes (means “Closed House”). But unlike other European cities, where prostitution was also tolerated, the sex in Paris was more class. Healthier first, with girls weekly checked by doctors, and better, appreciated for its “cocottes” meticulously chosen for its aristocratic and bourgeois clientele.
The one of working-class neighborhoods where people was queueing behind authorized brothels, sometimes ticket in the hand, waiting to enjoy the pleasures of a prostitute who could endure up to 60 tricks a day. These popular areas, which were hotspots of Paris prostitution for several centuries, have also known in their history streets with suggestive names. Rue du Petit Musc for example, in the Marais, was called up to the 18th century the rue de la Pute-y-Muse (meaning “Stroll-Whore Street”). Or in the area of Les Halles once existed Rue Gratte-Cul (“Scrub-Ass Street” – now Rue Dussoubs) or Rue Tire-Boudin (“Fat-Lump-Laid Street” – now Rue Mary Stuart). In fact, we have to say it: At the Belle Époque, sex was simply everywhere in Paris.”
Paris or not, a whore is a whore, thus subject to the same rules of domination; some are just more exotic in their monstrous-feminine status.)
I will not be dissuaded by these attacks against me from TERFs and SWERFs. If anything, it has only strengthened my resolve and encouraged me to work harder to fight for the rights of all workers. This requires educating allies of their own bigotry but also that of their heroes. While cis women or trans men may not be aware of these issues (either not being trans, AMAB, or both) I will critique capital by proxy—i.e., using my own experiences/pedagogy of the oppressed to enlighten AFAB sex workers of their own bias and bigotry in defense of capital.
With that, let’s move onto part two and critiquing Natalie Wynn!
(source)
Accommodated/Assimilated Minorities, part two: Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses (feat. Natalie Wynn)
History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon. Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes (source).
—Napoleon Bonaparte, while on Alba
Note: I would specifically revisit this piece in “Inside the Hall of Mirrors” (2024), where I discuss Wynn vis-à-vis her reading of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). —Perse, 4/21/2025
Whereas fascist feminists are Dark Medusa or Hippolyta weaponized against labor by the state, queer bosses are moderately conservative in relation to their own trauma, gender-critical condescension and reactionary violence; they are privileged queer persons who, once token, use gender-critical rhetoric against people marginalized differently than themselves (which turns into prison hierarchy of the abuser acting more marginalized during vengeful, but also sanctimonious DARVO tactics).
We’ll explore so now featuring Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints. Not always trans, but always centrist, people like Wynn usually attack non-binary people while acting better than out-and-out TERFs (their trauma, thus casus belli, is legitimate when deputized by the state into its monopoly on legitimate violence). Since non-binary people often identify as trans (Zeuhl did, for example), this makes binary trans enbyphobes specialized TERFs …NERFs?. Whatever you call it, that’s what Wynn is: a token cop-in-disguise (therefor traitor) whitewashing fellow fascists with moderate veneers; e.g., whitewashing Hillary-fucking-Clinton through trans cryptonymy glitz bandied about by a token SocDem:
(source tweet: Puppygirl Mao: July 3rd, 2024)
Towards enbys who don’t see themselves as transgender, queer bosses are simply enbyphobic, internalizing a superiority to their victims on par with other bigot types. Many trans enbyphobes, like Hunter Schafer, are transmedicalists (Jessie Gender’s ” Explaining Hunter Schafer’s Transmedicalism,” 2022) or align with their position (Schafer, in the Roman tradition of agreement, gives a trans enbyphobe like Piggy Taiwan the thumbs-up (Kat Blaque, “Jules Blames NB Folks For Transphobic Legislation?” 2022)—an unambiguous display of solidary against in-group opponents asking for their basic human rights): the notion that “individuals who identify as transgender, do not experience gender dysphoria, and have no desire to undergo a medical transition are not genuinely trans.” However, one of the biggest NERFs (at least in terms of material status, if not overall transmed conviction) is not an out-and-out transmedicalist, just an ally of one; re: Wynn and Buck Angel, respectively.
(exhibit 100c10: Artist, left: Cyan Capsule; top-middle: Natalie Wynn; top-right: Chuck Art; bottom-middle-and-right: Iren Horrors. Despite what second wave feminists [or 1993 Barbara Creed] might insist, the Medusa/monstrous-feminine isn’t biologically female. It is a threatening symbol of retribution and past wrongs that intersect with AFAB persons on their own axes of oppression. Like the Amazon, the Medusa’s fatal allure can be pissed off/snarky [Carrie Fisher’s 2023 postmortem, Wonderwell], varying degrees and combinations of sexy/repulsive [xenophilic/xenophobic] as well as statuesque in masculine and/or feminine ways [the Athena and the Medusa playing into this narrower dichotomy as tempered vs wild women]. Her petrifying stare can have bourgeois or proletarian invocations, but also neoliberal/fascist variants posturing as “reasoned/revolutionary.” These deceptions do not serve queer rebellion in the fight towards equal rights, merely pushing the equality of convenience for token individuals who have since assimilated. Wynn loves to evoke the image of the Dark Mother as a kind of “Batwoman” action heroine, for instance; her doing so is performative activism, sacrificing the Medusa’s much-needed critical power and subversive energy for the false power/empty threats of queernormative/neurodivergent concessions with the elite. Worse, her false resistance is yet another mask by which to hide abuse towards others behind. In the absence of radical empathy, her “rebellious” Amazonomachia is hollow, upholding the status quo.)
Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss; this bourgeois trifecta serves as the obstacle course for many-a-climbing activist. However, these weren’t simply Wynn’s obstacles on the road to fame; they became her modus operandi post-success. Her current function is that of a binary trans girl boss, specifically a queer boss—more committed to the preservation of negative social order (and the disorder it reliably engenders through fascism and marginalized abuse) than positive social justice for all queer people. She achieves this order by performatively criticizing her assigned, obvious political enemies (cis TERFs) while functioning identically to them within her own subgroup: provoking in-fighting within the trans community through the creation of us-versus-them teams. Binary trans people versus non-binary people instead of binary trans and non-binary people versus the elite.
The rest of this chapter section specifically criticizes Wynn’s defense of Buck Angel and Wynn’s moderate political views more generally. Buck Angel is an abusive enbyphobe who, by her own admission, is a transmed: “I guess I am a transmed truscum because I live in reality! Haha this shit makes my day” (source tweet: 2020); she divorced Karin Winslow in 2003, outed her, and harassed her for over a decade (as late as 2014). Knowing this, Wynn still worked with Buck in 2019, defended their collaboration a year later in her famous “Canceling” video, and played defense for Buck during a Guardian interview in June, 2021. Worse, this interview was done after Essence of Thought’s follow-up response in March 2021, which details Wynn’s enbyphobia in far greater detail (“Let’s Discuss Contra Points’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel”).
In other words, Wynn has never apologized for her collaboration with Buck, nor decried Buck’s transmed position as harmful. Quite the contrary, she openly worships Buck as a fashion icon (which explains Wynn’s bias as someone myopically fixated on style; the tweet has since been deleted by Wynn). Wynn’s blind eye towards enbyphobia, while not overtly practicing it herself, still encourages enbyphobia by downplaying its severity. Through her disproportionate influence, she uses continuous inaction, condescension and professional-level gaslighting to cultivate an unsafe atmosphere, one where authority figures like Wynn publicly defend an infamous abuser living within the trans community.
To be clear, not everyone with an axe to grind with Wynn is a genuine party with actual concern, and real victims might even lack the ability to articulate their problems fairly or well. This includes binary trans transmedicalists like Piggy Taiwan angrily stressing in a now-removed Instagram post that enbys should listen to black trans people as a hyper-marginalized group while also blaming enbys for trans oppression. Piggy does this instead of seeing the genuine, bigger threat: conservative moral panic and neoliberal moderacy.
Infighting and misplaced anger aside, the onus is still on Hunter Schafer and Natalie Wynn, as public intellectuals, not to be enbyphobic. They are enbyphobic, helping foster bias against enbys through performative leftism that creatively and socially shows signs of political moderacy. For Wynn, her open condemnation of Rowling becomes performative in relation to her curious inability to condemn Schafer, Buck or herself; and both she and Schafer target the same minority within their own base by covering for each other. For any binary trans moderate, the negative freedom of institutional order takes on a binary trans face, enforcing the former through elevated material conditions the bourgeoisie weaponize against an assigned political foe: enbys. The elite don’t need to hand out direct orders; they merely need to incentivize them through capital, specifically Wynn.
Even so, binary trans moderacy remains a difficult issue to discuss, in part because it involves gender issues that are tricky to quantify. To expose Wynn’s neoliberal habits in relation to these, we’ll have to get down to brass tacks…
For starters, enbyphobia effectively requires a distinction that many cis TERFs will not make, and is generally practiced by binary trans people or cis “allies” against enbys. Indeed, Wynn herself shows that NERFs will punch up against cis TERFs while also punching down against enbys, making enbys something of a universal target. Another challenge lies in documenting abuses committed against various trans subgroups, one where crime statistics—a concrete practice—attempt to quantify people who identify according to semi-fluid definitions (UCLA’s “1.2 Million LGBTQ Adults in the US Identify as Nonbinary,” 2021): what a non-binary person is versus a binary transgender person (versus the victim’s testimonies versus their various attackers’ motivations and [mis]understandings about their respective targets’ identities, etc).
(artist: Alison Czinkota)
Binary trans people are just that—binary. As a statement within broader gender politics, non-binary people represent a complex gender spectrum that allows for a variety of stances; re (from the companion glossary):
An adjective describing a person who does not identify exclusively as a man or a woman. Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between, or as falling completely outside these categories. While many also identify as transgender, not all non-binary people do. Non-binary can also be used as an umbrella term encompassing identities such as agender, bigender, genderqueer or gender-fluid (source: Human Rights Campaign’s “Companion glossary of Terms,” 2023).
Some of these stances are more radical (relative to the colonial gender binary) than others, but that’s not really the point. Sex positivity is already radical, and should aim to expose sexist abuses committed by persons who hold positions of power, regardless of which camp(s) they belong to.
Note: Refer to “Audience, Art, and Reading Order” for my specific approach to definitions to various gender studies terms; i.e., through Gothic Communism as intersectional when decolonizing gender studies/reclaiming it from TERFs and other token bad actors. —Perse, 5/8/2025
This includes positions within the larger trans community like Wynn and her own veiled enbyphobia. Compared to cis TERFs, she’s a binary trans moderate, one whose centrist positions compete—but also semi-align—with cis moderates. Both are financially incentivized to commit Capitalist exploitation against a common victim: enbys, but also poor people (enbys, along with gender non-conforming people in general, tend to be poorer on average thanks to additional financial challenges that cis-het people do not face. According to Clay Halton’s “An Overview of the Unique Financial Challenges LGBTQ+ People Continue to Face” (2023), these challenges range from marriage and family planning to collage debt, health insurance and retirement.
All of this means that Wynn—despite being far more radical and leftist than Rowling—still sponsors a left-leaning position that centralizes herself, thus sells out her fellow workers. For starters, she doesn’t take a hard stance on the abuses of the Global South by the Global North (most Americans don’t). Relative to this discussion, though, she’s a binary trans woman sitting to the right of enbys by virtue of her attacking them from a materially privileged position in the same location. She punches down, TERF-style, against people who can’t materially challenge her—specifically as a NERF whose phobias disproportionately affect non-binary trans people, but also binary trans people who absorb her bias and claim it for their own.
The whole point of a microcategory like NERF is to highlight moderacy regardless of where it occurs, including how moderates fortify their material position within ironic groups (the trans community). We’ll explore how Wynn does that in just a moment. For now, let’s examine the base premise: Socio-economic elevation occurs through positions of conflict, wherein moderate rhetoric sows class oppression on descending rungs. “Chaos is a ladder,” right? The difference—between functioning as a pedagogue for the oppressed (which can still be a lucrative position under Capitalism) versus appropriating struggle for profit—is how one behaves with their improved material conditions.
Wynn is not only loquacious regarding her elevated material position (focusing on herself rather than platforming others, especially enbys who might have a bone to pick with her); her dialog is functionally moderate. Yes, she’s done much to raise general trans awareness. This sex-positive trait co-exists alongside her enbyphobia as something Wynn exploits for material gain. Just like Rowling enacts feminism in bad faith by “bravely” attacking other feminists (re: trans people or allies of trans people), Wynn is a powerful binary trans woman who harms the LGBTQ+ community by failing to go after its greatest foe: the elite. She does so by arguing for their very existence, ensuring her own material security as someone aligned with capital the way any moderate is. Laterally.
As a white, binary trans moderate, Wynn is useful to those in power because she engenders marginalized in-fighting as orderly. As MLK addressed in 1963 with his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” not only are moderates inside or relative to the United States historically white, thus privileged in various ways that allow them to socially elevate; they also punch down or encourage punching down as part of the process. This “Great Chain” includes white cis TERFs like J. K. Rowling punching down against all trans people, but also white, binary trans enbyphobes like Natalie Wynn and Buck Angel against non-binary people (re: ” Contra Points’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel”); they just do it differently than Rowling does, albeit with the same emotional restraint, self-superiority and material advantage (the formula for moderacy-in-politics more broadly). You don’t see either of them actually owning up to anything after Piggy invokes trans people of color as the state of exception; they simply side with the idea that someone other than them is to blame, socializing scapegoats and doomed folk, then privatizing the rewards of already being famous themselves.
While moderates target marginalized groups, marginalized moderates like Wynn, Buck and Schafer use their own base to defang class warfare by pitting marginalized groups against one another. Even if this isn’t intentional beyond a reasonable doubt, the function remains disharmonious towards the oppressed seeking positive freedom for themselves. Moderates specifically use material advantage to claim de facto ownership over a particular base, whose victimization they champion in dishonestly performative ways. This isn’t always framed as, “My group is more marginalized than yours.” However, when presented as something to debate with other marginalized groups, we arrive at the troublesome presence of teams enforced by the promotion of wealthy de facto representatives with bourgeois class interests that supersede the needs of workers. Wynn doesn’t have to self-appoint herself as leader of the pack. From a financial-visibility standpoint, she simply is.
(source: Gender GP’s “Non-Binary People In History: Why Aren’t They Recognised?” 2021)
The problem with team-based rhetoric is that it leads to class abuse through the preservation of order—a divide-and-conquer strategy that weaponizes capital by turning potential class allies into class enemies. This means the real victims aren’t people like Wynn; it’s marginalized peoples at large—reduced by political conversations into good teams and bad teams and catalyzed by their performative leaders to in-fight unproductively. Feelings of alienation towards these leaders shouldn’t surprise anyone. Not only does this representation often fail; the representatives themselves frequently exploit the represented. Maybe don’t take all these donations if you’re going to use the money primarily on yourself and your own brand, Wynn?
The truth is, cis women are marginalized, but less so than binary trans people, who, in turn, are more marginalized than cis women, but marginalized differently than non-binary people (all while racial and religious discrimination intersect with gender discrimination). Are trans women “more numerous or visible” than non-binary people, thus more likely to be confronted for upending their assigned binary gender roles? Are non-binary people “more radical” than binary trans people for refusing to binarize to begin with? It’s honestly difficult to measure, but also totally beside the point. Victimhood isn’t a contest with a clear-cut “biggest victim.” Legitimate abuse needs to be accurately described, acknowledged, and condemned whenever and wherever it occurs, while actively seeking to expose the elite as the true vampires worldwide.
To this, Wynn’s enbyphobia has become actively harmful, using her wealthy position to deflect valid criticism coming from within the queer community at large. All the while, she continues to enjoy the obvious material perks afforded by a besieged “fortress” position (a castle isn’t just under siege; it’s a cushy place): She’ll attack Rowling but defend Buck Angel in the same breath, raking in $50k/month on Patreon purely through how she’s perceived: as someone defending herself, her castle, her hill to die on. Unfortunately it’s not just her hill; power under Capitalism aggregates through financial incentive, including class division generated by defensible positions[1] that align with capital.
About that. As Bad Empanada rightly points out (“Short Critique of Contra Point’s ‘Envy’ Video,” 2022), Wynn’s more of a symbol of wealth and power than an active iconoclast at this point, an anomalous success story in the trans community that refuses to accept genuine criticism when she’s actually wrong. And despite her being a far cry from Margaret Thatcher, Wynn’s lengthy and self-indulgent polemic on class envy (2022) antagonizes the poor in a very neoliberal way: worship of the owner class through moderacy as a besieged political position. Thus, her perceived proletarian radicalness wavers in defense of wealth as something to unironically perform (as Marie Antoinette, her throat slashed and spilling martyred gore) while victim-blaming the poor, saying they literally “envy” the rich[2]. She’s taking money from her own base to demonize critics within the same group, offering herself up as some kind of consolation prize (the neoliberal propaganda of “false hope”).
I’m all for weaponizing material conditions against the elite; Wynn turns them into a form of self-worship, alienating her base while lionizing the elite as something to perform: “Don’t call me bougie; I’m way beyond bougie” (Contra Points’ ” Voting,” 2021; timestamp: 6:15). Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek psychomachia, but we don’t “gotta hand it to Wynn.” Though funny, chic and stylish, her work functions as bourgeois apologia dressed up in high production values that valorize historical owners—all practiced by someone who happily takes her fans’ money as tribute.
Yes, tribute. I seriously doubt Wynn spends $150k per video (averaging four videos per year). Worse, what little she does “give back” through content can feel rather classist (see: “Envy”) and vain: “Look at how nice my costumes are, my sets, my bathtub. Envy me.” Even if fans do envy her (Lite Writes’ “Envy of Your Icon: Contrapoints and Audience Alienation,” 2021), consider how their alienation is a consequence of Capitalism—the giant, trans-oppressive system Wynn has ridden to the top and is abusing enbys with. Other influential binary trans women certainly exist, but few if any approach Wynn’s level of visibility and material success. Worse, she actively defends her privilege, acknowledging it as proof of her correctness versus calling it what is: a definite blind spot that requires radical empathy with those more oppressed than she.
Rather than acknowledge her white privilege as problematic like Jessie Gender does (re: “Explaining Hunter Schafer’s Transmedicalism,” timestamp: 39:28), Wynn weaponizes her success to canonize herself, becoming the binary trans girl of the online “Left” (many of whom are “leftists” functioning as liberal centrists). While not strictly “tokenized” through a direct employer, Wynn uses her self-fashioned glamor to certify herself as her giant fanbase’s perpetual darling. This jives with the neoliberal tactic of party shielding with appropriated minorities: “Attack me and you attack the only legitimate (materially elevated) representation your community has!” Not only is the token character’s position “precious”—i.e., precarious and materially endangered—it also grants the elite a marginalized persona to destabilize potential dissenters with. Queer bosses become the Quixotic stars of “their own” productions, propping themselves up as the saviors of the oppressed while becoming unable to imagine what actual activism, thus Communism is and could be beyond Capitalism as it exists presently.
Ignoring Wynn’s neoliberal leanings (the worship of the rich by socializing blame), her arguments about cis TERFs remain true (“J.K. Rowling,” 2021). However, not only are these arguments low-hanging fruit; they can easily be dismissed and discarded by TERFs (cis or trans) and enbyphobes looking for ammunition against non-binary people as an oppressed group. If you’re as rich and well-connected as Buck Angel is, you can easily ignore everything Wynn says except her enbyphobic comments; and if you’re as rich and well-connected as Wynn is, you can easily afford to ignore whatever consequences result from Buck Angel (or anyone else looking to dogpile) using their disproportionate influence over online discourse to blow up your enbyphobic rhetoric.
A pimp is a pimp; Wynn is a token pimp (cop) whose ostentatious wealth, post-assimilation—and made-it alien whore’s continued desire for flippant, moderate glibness (versus structuring her points around academically-sound arguments that actually hold water)—show more than usual why left-leaning artists working as de facto sex educators need to be incredibly conscious about what they say publicly. Alas, Wynn does what she does because she wants to, not because she’s ethical. To this, she isn’t negligent just for the sake of performance; she’s tailored for ready public consumption, purposefully branding herself as “radical” while still being a lush, sardonic aesthete openly defensive of the rich, but also enbyphobic personalities. She’s rich, supportive of bourgeois politics (ibid., timestamp: 5:56) and enbyphobic, making her no-brainer polemics against Rowling, however correct on paper, somewhat dubious and apathetic in practice—a performative sleight-of-hand that, whether through bad faith or not, kind of poisons the entire well (the extent of this poison is open to debate; its presence is not).
Wynn’s vengeful enbyphobia affects an incredibly small group, but so do many nominal leftists online who shrug their shoulders at whatever falls under the current state of exception. But even if this were all Wynn did, bigotry is bigotry and she still needs to be challenged, not worshipped, for refusing to change her moderate enbyphobic position when criticized. The problem is, Wynn’s position on class attitudes, specifically the envious poor, extend well beyond enby people. Worse, she cultivates this narrative through a particular visual brand as canon, but also exceptionally good—i.e., the heroic aesthetic performing “real activism.” Not only does she hand-wave the poor using this brand; she uses it to repeatedly gaslight another highly marginalized group within the queer community. If this doesn’t merit criticism, what does?
(exhibit 100a3: Cryptonymy is layered and dualistic, “Inside [a] Hall of Mirrors“; i.e., disguise pastiche through concentric veneers/gobstopper masks stems from an internalized desire [for cops] to employ compound subterfuge to defend the state. Some persons might be centrists who are duped by fascists (making them accidental or fascists complicit with their ideas); many more are fascists in bad-faith, requiring gender parody/trouble to make cryptofascists posturing as progressive, centrist or simply “not Nazis” to gag or shit their pants, self-reporting in the most ignominious manner possible. Once the mask drops or breaks, centrists can be outted as conservative instead of their more polite-sounding disguises like “gender-critical,” which is difficult to recover from; for conservatives, they can always posture as strong [another mask] unless they are humiliated in ways members of their own den won’t tolerate or explain away.
Their insecurity is our greatest weapon. While humanizing our enemies—i.e., by teaching them to love us and each other by dismantling the source of darkness and division [the state]—sometimes, we don’t have that option. We become required to make fascists gag or defecate mid-cryptonymy by simply being ourselves; i.e., in ways we know will upset them, thus drop the mask: flashing, breeding, rape pastiche/play and nudism as a means of attacking our own insecurities as cultivated by the state by reclaiming the instruments thereof. More of this in Chapter Five.)
This prolific and varied centrism isn’t singular to just Wynn, but instead involves a “better masks” mise-en-abyme that encompasses content creators across the broader political spectrum. If out-and-out Nazis are mask-off, then American/American-aligned alt-righters, traditional conservatives, liberals (moderate Republicans) and the performative “Left” (re: TERFs, economic white supremacists) represent a spectrum of political masks, often stacked on top of each other. The deceptions and crises become circuitous, embroiled within manufactured conflicts that obscure class war as a wholly serious affair. We are their common foe, relying on solidarity to avoid getting assimilated or picked off, one by one by state power aggregating with them (as Tolkien’s Battle of the Five Armies shows, four-against one is never a good idea, but it’s not like we chose to be seen as goblins).
While these “gobstopper” (concentric) disguises face progressively leftward—deliberately tailored to match the financial incentives afforded by a political market expanded by dissent—all of them remain centralized positions with a conservative core; they preserve the status quo at a systemic level. This includes Sam Seder’s Neocon past (Bad Empanada 2, 2022) and continued material defense of American Imperialism; streaming giants Destiny and Kochinski, whose variable centrism Bad Empanada lovingly refers to as “the Clout Human Centipede” (Bad Empanada 2, 2022), but also serve as the AMAB side of our aforementioned TERFs; and anyone else who dresses up right-leaning material positions through activism relegated to the moral abstract (a frequent neoliberal tactic) through so-called “ex-fascism” (Bad Empanada 2’s “I Used To Be a Fascist, Here’s My Patreon!” 2022), fascism-by-proxy or marginalized moderacy dressed up as hilarious theatre.
Before we move on to potential solutions in Chapter Five (re: revolutionary cryptonymy), let’s quickly summarize TERF moderacy with enbyphobia included.
At the beginning of the book, I quoted the trans maxim: “If you scratch a transphobe, a fascist bleeds.” The same is true of scratching neoliberals, including TERFs and NERFs. They might think they’re not fascist when appealing to fascists. It won’t change the fact that TERFs engender the worst sort of sexism imaginable by normalizing persons who will happily wipe them off the map. This makes TERFS and NERFs functionally fascist, a kind of “false friend” to the automatic targets of fascism: trans people, non-binary people and intersex individuals. To determine which is worse—out-and-out fascists or closeted ones—I’ll simply quote MLK, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
TERFs, NERFs, et al present as seemingly benign icons—like swordswomen, lesbians, and suffragettes—not genuine, sex-positive symbols of equality, but sexism-in-disguise. The same idea applies to gender and enbyphobia performed by so-called allies like Kochinski. At best, these disguises amount to neoliberal illusions that hide bias to varying degrees (re: Thatcher, Rowling and Wynn); at worst, it invariably turns fascist, aggressively targeting the state’s enemies. This includes inaccurate metaphors lifted from dystopian stories.
Note: Essence of Thought would return to Jill Bearup in 2025: “Jill Bearup’s Transphobia is Even Worse in 2025 (Just Stab Me Now).” —Perse, 5/8/2025
(exhibit 100a4: Aping Victoria de Loredani to attack the vulnerable for the elite, Jill Bearup loves swords and appearing strong to “pull a Brutus” in defense of “Caesar” [to be Rowling’s attack dog]. It’s all a mask [re: “Jill Bearup’s Anti-Trans Bigotry?“] that our cryptonymy must drop. Mask-dropping is important, because—like in a Gothic masque—some of the mask-wearers are concealing weapons; some, weapons they want to use on activists; some, once fascism is normalized, are holding them in plain sight—i.e., saber-rattling. “Flashing” these persons to make them gag [or otherwise exhibiting sex positivity and xenophilia] requires a fair degree of caution and “Trojan” inventiveness, because they will happily stab leftists [or take part by looking the other way] then credit themselves as brave.
We shall explore how to dodge their attacks, disarm their destructive anger and break their illusions in Chapter Five; but also avoid the reality that “activists” demasked by Capitalism-in-crisis will go back into the closet, their feminist icons abandoned; re: straw dogs, specifically a form of “bad play” vigilantism that is allowed, until fascism takes control and these boy-like girls are either tempered into good little girls or—like the asses from Pinocchio—turned into monsters and tethered/subjugated; i.e., “feral” feminism and queerness, made into an example for others who “act out” by speaking out against the state.
For “gender-critical” people [often women] like Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, Margorie Taylor Greene or Jill Bearup, they stonewall during the cryptonymy process; deny, obfuscate or discredit; or otherwise suck the air out of the room and act like their “victories” or strange company are a coincidence that in no way foreshadows their own demise [re: “Why Women Join the Alt-Right“]. It’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a slow, violent regression—i.e., slowly becoming the demon, dragon, god or dark mother as society’s deputy then scapegoat. The class character of their betrayal likely means that some of them can be kept as pets, while others sit like Gothic heroines in the count’s castle, or a dark queen in their own built on the bones of those they’re crushed. The end is assimilation and exploitation, but also Judas’ curse for the pirate who “made it”: hoarded blood money. The reality is, for the few dragons that make it, the vast majority are like scorpions in a bucket, conned into stinging each other to death; or turned into rabbits, bred for meat, violence or sex—exhibit 100a5.)
For example, TERFs demonize cis women who support trans people (and sex workers) by calling them “handmaidens”—a mark of shame within the game of espionage that, for gender-critical types, invokes a deliberate misreading of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). This conflation makes about as much sense as calling a trans person’s home a “joy division” (the sexual slavery wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in the 1955 exploitation novel, House of Dolls) but that’s the point: active misdirection. The point isn’t authenticity at all, but a pejorative label that helps establish a reliable pattern of reactive abuse—i.e., abuse that provokes a genuine self-defense reaction from the victim, whereupon the expectant abuser “self-defends” in extreme prejudice. Queer people and those who aid them are painted sexual criminals who can be attacked, penned in and goaded until they snap; i.e., allowing token cops to police them during the cryptonymy process to have the pimp’s revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine: out of revenge in bad faith.
The threat, here, is cyclical and two-fold: First, Neoliberalism valorizes Capitalism by hiding its true function: to enslave the majority (workers) and profit off their labor, while killing as many people in faraway places as it takes to ensure profit. The subsequent societal collapse (a built-in feature of Capitalism) allows strongmen/women to ascend to formal seats of power by pointing the finger at scapegoats—Jewish people and communists, but also trans, intersex and non-binary folk. This alleviates some of the pressure put upon neoliberals, who regain control by calling fascists “the real enemy.” Rinse and repeat, culling the herd within, and outside of, the in-group. Whether neoliberal or fascist, TERF/enbyphobic rhetoric, including the cryptonyms of “witches,” is inherently bad faith. This requires the audience (us) to scrutinize their untrustworthy arguments (and the canonical apologia inside). Just as we’d double-check Pepe if the source image came from 4Chan (David Neiwert’s “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ Behind Their ‘Meme Magic,'” 2017), giant corporations merit just as much scrutiny if not more. This includes their pimping of nature behind the usual cryptonymies:
(exhibit 100a5: Artist, top-left: Sim Kaye; bottom-right [AI-generated]: Spich AF; bottom-middle: Miles DF. We’ve examined the “killer rabbit” trope throughout the book [re: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“]. In the case of regressive Amazons, their perceived power has a kind of class delusion, where they think themselves something other than what they are: a product, a foot soldier and piece of ass all in one; i.e., not a killer rabbit in the Gothic-Communist sense, but a rabbit to be killed that thinks it’s a killer not working for the state.
The point of the viral subversion reversing abjection mid-cryptonymy is its guiding by actual artists—i.e., with the ability to make art regardless if the art wants them to or not; they’ve seized the means of production and are using it for proletarian means in an informed, organic way that doesn’t just steal and imitate what came before like AI programs do. In other words, it’s connected to real people, artistic movements and geopolitics and isn’t just birthed from a computer vault of pilfered images [making the user’s product, and they themselves, ignorant of all of the above].
There are a million starting points to subvert and a million more ways to subvert them. We won’t have time to even really begin, but I invite you to consider the idea when we discuss subversion through subversive Amazonomachia [exhibit 111b] and couples-based consensual voyeurism/exhibitionism [exhibit 101c2].)
We’ll examine the latter next, specifically the relationship between neoliberals and fascists as something to defend ourselves, each of them using “boss-like” heroes to sell war to American audiences: girl bosses, queer bosses, and traditional male bosses as rabbit-like as a harmful ruse. These cryptonyms can be embodied as covert disguises that usher in transformative allegory—i.e., covert, revolutionary cryptonymy in a larger socio-material exchange. Inside this exchange, the pen that draws the sword (or the lobotomy pick) as things to be hammered into cryptonymic “ploughshares” is mightier than
- the actual sword killing innocent people (whose slaughter under Capitalism won’t stop the ignominious, Promethean demise of the larger system)
- or weaponized, canonically violent media that leads to the creation of “bad” witches, clowns, zombies, vampires, Amazons, etc; who then viciously kill activists by treating them as disposable fodder under the state of exception (zombies, are shot; vampires, staked; Amazons, married; witches, burned; etc)
We’ll explore that seminal tragedy as well; i.e., that monsters—as things to symbolically reclaim and decolonize in oft-liminal modes of expression, during the whore’s revenge—will be put down with colonial violence to varying degrees if exposed. “The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods” (re: “Rape Reprise“).
So show ’em your Aegis, mid-cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., no matter how much de facto token pimps-in-disguise like Wynn, Angel or Bearup sell out and attack us! Land back is sex and labor back, including all its devices of terror as monstrous-feminine; e.g., anal sex (re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“) and BBC (“Concerning Big Black Dicks“) but also the monstrous-feminine at large (re: all my Amazon and Medusa research): something to pinch capital off in our holes! Tread carefully, comrade zombies, but rise up and fight!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnote
[1] Wynn, Buck and Schafer blame enbys for systemic trans oppression while also serving as trans-canonical figures, aka queer bosses. Not only is holding their moderacy accountable taking a stand against capital as an oppressive system for trans people; if you’re a curious, concerned cis-het person looking in (source tweet: F.D. Signifier, 2022), you might get called an outsider who should mind their own business.
[2] Also known as the narcissist’s refrain: “You hate me because you want to be me.” This is a common TERF tactic.