alias_sqbr

Well, I'm a woman too so am not the best person to ask :) (I actually feel a bit weird answering the question for this reason, so anyone with a better grasp of this stuff is free to correct me)

The perception has been growing for a while, to be honest I first noticed the "the only people who aren't women who like what I like are male chauvinist pigs" attitude when it was (indirectly) used against me (as a woman who likes plotty gen and science and other boyish things), and this meant that when people like alchemia complained about this sort of attitude marginalising them I had a certain base sympathy, and I started to think about what fandom would look like from a gay male/transgendered/genderqueer perspective. (For example, telling someone who was born a woman and has gone through hell and high water to gain any acceptance as a man that they're an "honorary woman" for liking fanfic and not being a misogynist is kind of rude..)

The only ones I have an actual link to are the rant I linked to above, and the comment that sparked this rant, where a (I think) FTM transexual was talking about feeling marginalised and was told that "being a dude in fandom is kind of like being a straight ally at a queer social event" (which I won't link to since I think the person who posted it feels a bit embarrassed about it now in retrospect :))

In general women are a lot less directly aggressive than men, so it's more subtle than the open misogyny you get in male spaces. But there have been several times I've seen gay men or trans people say that they're not comfortable with the way their group is portrayed by slash and they got an immediate reaction of "This is by women for women, if you don't like it then sod off" and "It's impossible for me to be prejudiced against gay men because I'm a lesbian" without any attempt to look at whether or not slash perpetuates homophobic/transphobic etc attitudes. I mean there is also a lot of very intelligent discussion about the gender/sexuality etc issues in fanfic, but that doesn't negate the bad stuff.