Vgal

So, next we have Julia Serano!
This one helped me go “hey, wait a minute”, because I have read her online articles and blog posts. She always struck me as a very reasonable and likely decent person. Having demeaning views about women seems rather unlike her.
That said, I do assume the quote is accurate, though a case of “fantasy ≠ reality” AKA “don’t do this at home”.

Here’s her quote from the Twitter thread:

"While I never really believed the cliche about women being good for only one thing, I found that that sentiment kept creeping into my fantasies. I would imagine myself being sold into sex slavery and having strange men take advantage of me. It's called forced feminization, and it's not really about sex. It is about turning the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best f*ck ever."
— Julia Serano, trans-identifed author, "Whipping Girl"

I can’t find more context for this. I guess the only way would be to buy the book.
I’ll assume the quote is accurate, though I’d still like more context.

So… what to conclude from this?
Welp, I guess Serano has quite the sexual imagination and is into kinky stuff?
That’s… not particularly telling of anything, though. Many people are or were at some point turned on by weird stuff. That doesn’t mean they want to apply it in real life, let alone subject other people to it.

In any case, as I said, thus far I’ve found Julia Serano to be a thoughtful, well-informed and quite sane person. This by itself doesn’t change that image. It however does show that TERFs are horrified by certain sexual kinks, and might read too much into them… as we’ve had the opportunity to see many times so far, in their own words.
Let me know if you disagree though, folks.

Next up: the two quotes by Andrea Long Chu. This one is an odd case, because she’s a trans woman who is, apparently, quite fascinated by Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and wrote her own book titled Females in which she quotes Solanas in the opening of each chapter. Eeep. So yeah, I expect her to be kinda weird and screwed up.

Anyway, first quote:

"Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness.
Getting f*cked makes you female because f*cked is what a female is."
— Andrea Long Chu
Trans-identifying academic

I managed to find an excerpt from her book, Females. Gotta say, it’s quite the weirdness, indeed. But in regards to the quote, the first and second sentence are unrelated. Here’s the first one in context:

The manosphere is deeply divided over the issue of pornography. For many in the alt-right, pornography—and the addiction to masturbation with which it corresponds—is genuinely dangerous for men. The far-right fraternal group Proud Boys, who made headlines in 2018 for beating up antifa protestors on the Upper East Side, requires that all second-tier members subscribe to what they call NoWanks, giving up masturbation and pornography for thirty days at a time. (At the end of a cycle, Proud Boys are given the option of a single cheat wank.) In a 2015 video for the right-wing website The Rebel, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes explains that, by providing young men with a fleeting but addictive hypermasculine delirium, pornography has made it impossible for them to date, marry or reproduce effectively: “You’ve fooled your brain into thinking you’re inseminating 10s, and then when you’re with a real woman, your brain goes, “What are you doing with one broad? She’s not even a 10, she’s like a 7. Why are you wasting my time with this?’” While he admits that being antiporn sounds like “an Andrea Dworkin thing,” McInnes assures viewers that it’s worth their time. “I’ll be whistling on my bike, I sing in the shower,” he tells the camera through his hipster beard. “I really feel more alive.”
Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness. Of course, anxieties over porn addiction are hardly exclusive to the manosphere, especially now that digital technologies, especially smartphones, seem to have placed an infinitude of free, easily accessible pornographic material beneath the nation’s vulnerable thumbs. Hence what is known as Rule 34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it. This has left the social field well lubricated for periodic moral panics about the sexual degeneracy presumed to prowl the public playgrounds of the digital. The decades-long cancer of go-go bars and porn theaters in Times Square may have finally been cut out by the family-friendly scalpel of the Walt Disney Company, but Lion King–themed erotic cartoons can now be accessed by any twelve-year-old with Internet access and a clue.
Feminists, meanwhile, have been debating pornography for decades, since it became a centerpiece of the so-called sex wars of the eighties. For activists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, pornography, with its graphic depictions of female degradation, was the patriarchal institution par excellence, the key to understanding all sex between men and women. Others, sometimes grouped under the label “pro-sex,” wondered how their feminist commitments might be reconciled with genuinely pleasurable experiences of dominance and submission—not to mention, eroticism generally. Tensions between the two camps boiled over at the famous “Pleasure and Danger” conference held at Barnard College in 1982. […]

So yeah, make of that what you will. Personally, I’m not even sure what the bolded two sentences mean given the rest of the context. I think that what Long Chu means by this is that using the worldview of the Manosphere types she is discussing in that part of the text, or perhaps within the context of classic asspumptions of what sort of relations constitute femaleness, being addicted to porn (“owned” by the ‘object’ on the screen) would be seen as “being the female” (as in being the passive, owned, dependent party).

But the text is odd enough that I can’t make a confident interpretation here. Anyone else wanna try?

Oh, I still have to address the second part of the quote, which was unrelated to the first sentence and is on a different page of the book (page 5, rather than 4). Here it is in context, as seen here:

Sissy porn’s central conceit is that the women it depicts (some cis, some trans, mostly but not always white) are in fact former men who have been feminized (“sissified”) by being forced to wear makeup, wear lingerie, and perform acts of sexual submission. This is executed through the unique form of second-person address in which captions are typically written: sissy porn directly addresses its viewers and presumes to inform them of their own desires: “You love to be fucked in the ass,” for instance, or “You want to suck cock.” (Sissy porn often uses cock as an uncountable mass noun, like water or sugar, presumably because there can always be more.) Captions further instruct viewers to understand that the very act of looking at sissy porn itself constitutes an act of sexual degradation, with the implication that, whether they like it or not, viewers will inevitably be transformed into females themselves. This makes sissy porn a kind of metapornography, that is, porn about what happens to you when you watch porn. In other words, sissy porn takes the implicitly feminizing effect of all pornography (even the most vanilla) and promotes it to the level of explicit content—often with spectacular results.
At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the gay male critic Leo Bersani famously wrote that public horror of anal sex betrayed a hateful envy of the “intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” Sissy porn takes this literally. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is. At the same time, sissy porn remains wholly uninterested in who’s doing the fucking. Men appear, when they appear, only in fragments: a hand, an ass, a stray leg. Tops are props; their function is purely structural. “To call a man an animal is to flatter him,” Valerie writes in SCUM. “He’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.”
Sissy porn makes frequent use of fetish objects—makeup, lingerie, breasts, high heels, and the color pink—but unlike the classical Freudian fetish, these objects promise castration, instead of warding against it. For Freud, the fetish was a clear substitute for the “absent female phallus.” The little boy, traumatized by the discovery that his mother has no penis and fearing lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reassurance to an object that can replace that penis—a high-heeled shoe, for instance, or the touch of velvet. The fetish is thus “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.” Yet even Freud knew that the fetish, in disavowing castration, thereby implicitly acknowledged it; sissy porn exploits this weakness, transforming the fetish from an assurance that the penis will be kept safe into a guarantee that the penis will be lost forever. This means that, in cases where the sissy is a trans woman, even her own fetishized penis becomes a symbol of castration. If her penis is limp, it is mocked for its tiny size and called a “clitty”; if it is hard, this is simply proof that she is enjoying her degradation.

Conclusion: Oh TERFs, you idiots. Long Chu isn’t saying actual women are like that. She’s giving a description of sissy porn and its elements, as part of an analysis. But of course, one of you took it literally, mined it completely out of context, then the rest of you presumably just keep mindlessly regurgitating the hacked-out copy (though I assume that, given their usual assumptions, the rest of the TERFs would similarly misunderstand what they’re reading even if given the full context).

God, this woman seems to have a certain fondness for Valerie Solanas of all people (which suggests a serious degree of radfemmery), and TERFs still managed to make her out to be one of their arch-enemies somehow. Bloody impressive work there, gals.

I might look into Andrea Long Chu’s second quote as given in the TERF copypasta later.
I have to admit, when I first looked at that Twitter thread, I had a slight “Oh my god, for all their awfulness, the TERFs might have a point this time”.
Then I looked at the actual sources, and I’m getting very skeptical of my earlier tentative assessment. Now I’m wondering if there’s anything there that’s actually nearly as problematic as the TERFs made it out to be, or if there’s anything that wasn’t hopelessly mangled out of context.

Thanks a lot, TERFs. Even your “Gotcha!” moment here is reinforcing my views about how unreliable you are (and perhaps maliciously dishonest).