A Taste More Bitter Than Blackest Coffee @alcrystallcrits - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Carrd

trumpetsbyjasonderulo

it’s been ten years and i can confirm that everything still happens so much. happy anniversary king

valenciiaa

genderkoolaid

i think genuinely one of the biggest political weak spots on the trans community in terms of actually pursuing liberation is people's aversion to meaningfully challenging the gender binary because it is personally gender affirming for them. so much reactionary bullshit in this community is intimately tied to exorsexism and transmedicalism/

and like. i also don't want to downplay why people would feel like that. you spend your entire life suffering because of being denied your gender. it impacts your identity and your relationships and your work and your everything. and then when there's finally a chance that you may actually be able to cross the great divide that separates the group you are forced to be to and the group you have always felt you belonged in, there is all of this talk about how we should dismantle the groups entirely, when you have barely - if at all - gotten a chance to even exist in a way that doesn't make you want to kill yourself, when the groups are still influencing everything about the world all the time.

but the thing is! we feel this way primarily because in our present culture, to be gendered as cis-binary is to be made human. it is to socially exist, to be seen, to be loved, to have existential, ontological meaning as a person. and nonbinary people do not get to pursue gender euphoria that also makes us human, you understand? nb/gq/gnc people do not have the option of pursuing being socially recognized as you truly feel you are and not wanting to kill yourself. some people can be happy on either side of the chasm and carve out space for themselves there, but too often only on the precarious edge. and the rest of us can only jump off or wait to be shoved off.

do you understand? we don't have the option. our insistence on fighting and deconstructing the binary is not an abstract political choice based on what we speculate would be the most #radical. it is as much a choice made out of trans survival as any binary trans man or woman's pursuit of a passing and stealth life. and plenty of us also do not want the concept of "man" or "woman" to be erased entirely; many of nb/gq/gnc people are men and women! sometimes both at the same time! others want to see new concepts to gain acceptance and social recognition!

but that is the problem with the community's exorsexism when it comes down to it. it is binary gender ideology which provides the foundation for patriarchal ideology and power as a whole, and so as feminists it is the binary we need to challenge (early radical feminists circled this realization, although they failed to develop it productively; intersectional feminism leads us to challenging the gender binary by challenging the related privileged oppressor/powerless oppressed binary). nb/gq/gnc people strain under a binary system and binary culture, and so tend to be more conscious of the binary and the need to challenge it, just like cis perisex women are more likely to be conscious of patriarchy than cis perisex men because they experience a lot more direct and obvious strain under it. all trans people are ultimately oppressed by gender binary ideology and exorsexism, and it goes against trans people's class interests to support it. but a lot of trans people who identify strongly with the binary have, for decades at this point, actively decided to sacrifice the pursuit of trans liberation and liberation from patriarchy as a whole, in favor of keeping the binary in place so they can experience being the ones who benefit from it and wield it against others. like lower-middle class people being fierce defenders of capitalism and taking great pride in self-sufficiency and financial sense and not relying on handouts.

fallen-saiyan

My favourite manga panel shot.

So many emotions displayed in one facial expression.....I had to draw it!

#dragon ball #goku

xphaiea

Martin Schongauer, Griffin, 1475-85

from "Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics" by the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions

For those who haven't heard of Shivy Bhat: he was 19 years old and already being abused by his family while living in California, when after asking his mother if he could cut his hair, she demanded he give her access to his phone and was outdated as trans. Under the pretense that they were taking a trip back to India to see his grandmother, Shivy's family kidnapped him, planning on forcing him to live in India in order to "fix" him by teaching him to be a "cultured Indian girl," and planning on forcing him into an arranged marriage. They had taken away all his identifying documents and his phone. He managed to escape with the help of a local queer feminist group, which then resulted in a legal battle as Shivy's family tried to accuse the group of kidnapping and sex trafficking to get access to him again.

This is not the first case of a trans man in Uttar Pradesh experiencing his family use the legal system to kidnap him after he escapes to a trans shelter. A trans man, 'Aditya', came to a shelter "starved and scared," telling shelter staff his family had confined him for days and he feared for his life. Three days later, in the middle of the night, police forcibly took Aditya from the shelter, without a warrant and without following the procedure of the shelter. In a different incident, a trans man, 'Deep', fled to the Asra shelter because his father, a police officer, was violently abusive, writing in a letter that "I know if I go [back home], I will not be able to come back. They will either kill me or marry me off" and that "I believe [my family] will lock me in the house and there is a threat to my life." Five policemen came to Asra and physically attacked shelter workers, arresting two trans men who worked there and taking them to the police station where they were assaulted further. Similarly, in this article trans man named Vivek Azad talks about his family beating him, having men sent to rape him, not allowing him to cut his hair, and having all his school certificates burned by his brother which prevents him from getting employed. A 17-year-old trans man named Manoj was beaten, tied by his hands and feet, and locked in a room in his family's house after coming out, and forcibly married to a man twice his age, although he was eventually able to escape with his girlfriend and get a divorce from the man he was forced to marry.

genderkoolaid

#these are heartbreaking#but also tie precisely back into what i keep saying about how violence against those reared into expected girl/womanhood is invisibilized#ie less political legislation is made specifically targeting these groups not because they are let off scot free#but because the unwritten social contract of a high-control patriarchical society says from the outset 'these are the people you are#EXPECTED to rein in. EXPECTED to discipline. shame upon the patriarch of the house if he cannot 'correct' a deviant member of the lesser#gender class.' and so because it is such a social shame this violence is carried out in the home and not publicly.#obviously this is not to say these groups don't also face public violence but that saying these groups aren't publically/legislatively#targeted is a) untrue b) conveniently obfuscates societally-sanctioned private violence as just a fact of this side of gendered rearing#the statistics on IPV alone corroborate this but are somehow dismissed as 'lesser violence'. default violence.#i keep meaning to write up a post about honor killings as gendered control mechanisms but i am so tired of this blog at this point#on a lighter note im mallu (not tamil but a closely related language) and learning the tamil word thirunambi from reading this did make me#go :) for a moment. yay queer terminology in L1s#anyway it is not an exaggeration to say in some cultures and parts of the world one is born into the property class of the familial unit.#and not even wanted property at that; the perceived girl child is a money pit and a burden to be foisted off on a man as soon as possible.

icecreamwithjackdaniels

Wilhelm Kuhnert (German, 1865–1926), "Rock Dove, Wood Pigeon, European Turtle Dove, and a Pouter Pigeon"

littleguymart

(source)

needsmoreexplosions

Y'know being a kid (early teen) in the early 2010s made it really easy to make fun of Rebecca Black, because kids are often damn mean to each other. But looking back on it, kids weren't the ones spreading that video and mocking it. I think back to that video now, and how she looked in it... She was singing a song about riding the school bus and enjoying the weekend. She looked like a kid. She was a kid.

As an adult, I'm kind of horrified in retrospect. Grown ass adults around the globe more or less went to a middle school talent show to throw tomatoes.

omorka

Specifically older teens and 20somethings, who were sufficiently close to those awkward middle school years for it to stir up insecurities about their own awkwardness. I was an actual grown ass adult at the time (like around 40) and the vast majority of people over 30 either (a) didn’t know about it at all because they neither followed pop music nor were terminally online, or (b) shrugged their shoulders and said “yeah, rich kid shit” and went about their day.

As someone in the second category, the reaction from the college-age crowd was baffling and frankly disappointing. There was no reason to be that weird and mean simultaneously about it; it was like Black became the scapegoat for everyone’s feelings of cringe - the cringegoat, if you will.