Alita

hopelessly hopeful opinionator

[anjomecanico]

Introduction post.

Brazilian • Gifted lvl 1 autistic • ♀ • Radical feminist • Gender abolitionist • Anti-capitalist • Agnostic • 2005 • het partnered bisexual • Mechanical engineering student • Futuristic aesthetic enjoyer • pt-br/eng/rus

° I'm not putting a DNI bc this shit doesn't work anyway, I just block freely all the chronically imbecile, annoying and horrible people that I see;

° Even though I talk a lot about feminism this account is personal and I post about various topics, including my personal life, things that interest me, media I consume, random polls and jokes, autistic experience and various kinds of reblogs;

° I'll never allow anonymous asks. If you wanna send me something don't be a coward, I don't bite;

° I don't mind interacting with men but know your place;

° Name changing is moral and good if not for crime. You didn't choose that shit, you should have the right to change it;

° A thing being a choice or consented for doesn't make it good nor immune to criticism;

° I'm highly critical of organized religion, specially abrahamic religion. Misogyny is a core factor of these and will be better off destroyed;

° Female-only spaces should exist and obviously males shouldn't be allowed in those regardless of "gender identity";

° In humans, sex is dimorphic and immutable. No amount of ideology, aesthetic choices or procedures can change someone's sex, you were born with it and will die with it. Anomalies in sexual development don't make sex a spectrum and even intersex individuals never have two perfectly functioning male and female reproductive systems. I won't even say I think that because it's factual;

° I'm explicitly anti-bioessentialist. Even though I criticize men often as part of feminist critique, I think their wrongdoings are completely their choice as rational beings and not the fate of their biology. The tendencies of testosterone are a ridiculously small influential factor in their behavior and even that can manifest in various manners that don't result in the bullshit they do.

[anjomecanico]

I'll never be here exposing crypto radfems, I know how hard it is to swim against the current completely alone

[anjomecanico]

Rough sex defense is victim blaming

[anjomecanico]

This might be controversial but I prefer LoL caitvi over Arcane caitvi

[anjomecanico]

Men banding together to take away women's right to define what a woman is, the category they are a part of, is a level of bro code beyond human comprehension. Rule number eight of misogyny full steam ahead

[anjomecanico]

Eating pastries with sugar for flavor and cinnamon for blood sugar regulation because life is all about balance

[femsolid]

femoid cis bitch terf feminazi swerf karen uterus-owner afab cunt

The more accustomed you become to seeing women referred to as acronyms, the easier it becomes to forget that they are people, too. - Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women

The powerful normally determine what is said and sayable. When the powerful label something or dub it or baptize it, the thing becomes what they call it. And generally, when renegade women call something one thing and patriarchal loyalists call it another, the loyalists get their way. - Marylin Frye, The Politics of Reality

He gives the name, the name endures; she gives the name, the name is lost. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself. It is the naming by decree that is power over and against those who are forbidden to name their own experience; it is the decree backed up by violence that writes the name indelibly in blood in male-dominated culture. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. - Andrea Dworkin, Pornography

[anjomecanico]

I wish men danced like male birds to attract women instead of doing negging and their tons of other lazy manipulation tactics

[anjomecanico]

Women leaving organized religion gives me so much hope in humanity

[anjomecanico]

She fell asleep onto me

[anjomecanico]

The whole situation with wizard liz is so ridiculously tragic. Now that prick is trying to make her pay child support even though he purposely sabotaged her visa so she couldn't get into the US to fight for custody in the first place

[anjomecanico]

The concept of "gender identity" goes against all the critique to the assignment of roles, behavior, personality and lifestyle based solely on sex (that's now called "gender"), that are critiqued and aimed to be abolished for being oppressive, regressive and limiting, by claiming that people inherently have these assignments embedded in themselves.

The difference is that instead of the traditionalist pathway of "your body (sex) defines your gender", they go by "your gender defines your body (sex)".

It doesn't aim to abolish gender, it only rearranges the terms, which doesn't make gender any less harmful, regressive, oppressive and limiting of human experience. The only path to destroy gender and its negative consequences is gender abolitionism, not making up more categories to limit people.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

While I'd argue "gender identjty" and "gender roles" are different aspects of the sociological phenomenon of gender and eliminating one is not the same as removing the other, I do think you can certainly take a more gender abolitionist stance if you'd prefer.

The key point is that there would still be people who have the personal experience/qualia of a gender identity even in a "post-gender world", its just that how we frame and talk about that experience would be different. Same with trans folks: there's still gonna be trans people in a hypothetical un-gendered world, even if the ways they socially interact with whatever system we'd have is different.

[anjomecanico]

In a genderless world, identity wouldn't be tied to gender (aka the social assignments pushed around sex), since gender would not exist, so there wouldn't be gender identity nor gender roles. What would exist is cases of incongruence with the sex the person wished they were and the person's actual sex (therefore a psychological dissonance that affects a person's sense of identity), which would be something adjacent to body dysmorphic disorder and treated in a similar way that disorders involving mind and body incongruence are, but focused on its specific issues. For the rest of the population, the closest thing to the concept of "gender identity" would simply be their personalities and personal individuality that every single human being has, which are ironically what many people are calling "gender identity" in this day and age.

That's the closest it would get to a "gender identity" and "gender dysphoria" in a genderless world, which is still pretty different.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

So again, how we frame the experiences *would* certainly be different (labeling as "gender identity" now vs considering just personality traits in a genderless world), the point I'm making is that the experiences themselves, like the internal sense of self, would still exist. If we're just a "yeah, but that's only personality and wouldn't be tied to gender" then that's fine, sure, but that's moreso a linguistic shift in the way we're describing the phenomenon.

Like, whether or not we use the word "gender" in that description or whether we find differences in it noteworthy enough to discuss are more about the framing than the reality of the experiences.

That said, could you elaborate a bit on how you feel gender dysphoria ought to be treated? Cause we'd still have people experience dysphoria, or who pursue altering their sex characteristics, even in a post-gender world, so I'd love to hear how that fits into your framework.

[anjomecanico]

Yeah, many things would go through a shift in language, but the experience would still exist with some alterations.

In a genderless world, the treatment to sex dysphoria (because since there wouldn't be gender, the factor would be sex) would follow the same logic of treatments to disorders involving incongruence between body and mind: therapy aiming to reduce the malign symptoms of incongruence generated by the mind.

A successful and robust specialized psychotherapy would considerably reduce the desire for body modification of many people, but I do think there would be people still looking out for body modification even if specialized psychotherapy for sex dysphoria was more robust and available, people with adjacent conditions still look for body modification and with them it wouldn't be different in that regard, but body modification wouldn't be sold as treatment like it is today. They could get procedures and hormones like anyone could, but it wouldn't be a formal treatment for the condition in the same way surgeries and other procedures aren't considered a treatment for BDD but they still can get them if they want to

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

Sorry, just to be clear, you're imagining that the only recognized treatment for gender dysphoria would be the same or similar to treatments for BDD despite all of our current understanding that the conditions are different and respond differently to treatment? Like I don't see how being in a post-gender world means that the finds we already know to be true about the efficacy of GAC would suddenly disappear, you know?

[anjomecanico]

BDD and GD aren't the same thing, but the incongruence of the mind-body axis is present in both in different ways. Unfortunately, a crucial difference between how both are treated is that the only time it came close for the people with this condition to receive a humane treatment was when the treatment was body alteration, while the other is able to receive humane psychological treatment in this day and age. GD never came close to receiving a humane and robust standardized psychological treatment because there was never enough interest in doing research into building such. In a world without gender, more research about it would exist since there wouldn't be *gender* *affirmation* and people would aim for more solutions to the issue.

The efficiency of GAC is proven now because we live in a world highly influenced by gender, therefore for many people it's the most efficient way to deal with their psychological suffering and active social discrimination in this current world. But even when the world is like this, there are people who have GD and are able to live comfortable lives without GAC, so the sole existence of these people show GAC is not the only treatment option that's possible to exist, specially not in a world without gender where discrimination by not following it would be a thing. In a world without gender, the efficiency of GAC (that wouldn't be called gender affirming) would considerably differ since many people with GD would opt for a robust psychological treatment instead of body modifications because of the lack of external pressure for conformance to gender + the existence of another treatment to compare results. The findings with GAC wouldn't be ignored, but they would be analyzed and questioned more critically.

Another thing I think would affect this in a genderless world in some way is that many people with dysphoria want to be biological parents without IVF and stuff, and a robust psychological therapy without body modification wouldn't have any effect on fertility and will treat the malign symptoms of the condition, so without gender and discrimination related to it they wouldn't feel pressured into deciding between treating the symptoms or naturally having children because they could have both with minimal complications. I don't think this would be a major factor in general for not choosing body alterations, but it would be beneficial for some people.

Also, there should be more resources about the physical effects of GAC in the long term. Most data about side effects of GAC in the body only considers the short term, there's extremely little research about how and which side effects show when people are over their 60's for example. Data like this should be more available even nowadays so people can be more informed about their decisions

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

We do already know the efficacy of dissuasive psychological treatment for gender dysphoria, and it by and large is in effective for treatment on a broad scale. It's absolutely true that some do see positive outcomes with it, but medical transition is overwhelmingly more successful at increasing quality if life for the people experiencing it.

I think if your understanding of gender abolition necessarily includes the assumption that people simply wouldn't experience incongruence with the sexual characteristics of their bodies in a post-gender world, you're going to be fighting an uphill losing battle about it for as long as trans people exist. And depending on how exactly your framework would treat the sexes themselves (re: their own sociological groups) – which to be clear we haven't touched on – I think that problem could compound greatly.

Like, the idea that transition would simply no longer be effective as a treatment for these people in your hypothetical is at best groundless speculation and at worst anti-science (re: psychology/medicine).

[anjomecanico]

I never denied incongruence that biological sex would exist despite gender, it would, sexual characteristics exist regardless of gender and there would be incongruence with it. The questioning is what exactly would be the most efficient treatment for it when there's no gender in the equation: would it still be the same thing? Or if the ratio of efficiency of specialized psychotherapy and body modification will change along with the world? We still live in a world flooded with gender from every side, so the debate is still open.

We already know that in this current world GAC shows more efficiency in treatment of malign symptoms (and does some positive effects socially), but in a world where there's no gender to be affirmed and what's being treated is specifically the person's incongruity with their own sexual characteristics and not along with a socially assigned role, there's the possibility of the most recommended treatment switching because one appears to show more efficiency in the world's conditions than the other. And yeah, at this point it is speculative, we did not achieve a genderless world yet to know anything with total certainty. What most gender abolitionists theorize is that without the gigantic worldwide effects of gender in absolutely every single area, a switch in that regard would happen. That's all

[anjomecanico]

The concept of "gender identity" goes against all the critique to the assignment of roles, behavior, personality and lifestyle based solely on sex (that's now called "gender"), that are critiqued and aimed to be abolished for being oppressive, regressive and limiting, by claiming that people inherently have these assignments embedded in themselves.

The difference is that instead of the traditionalist pathway of "your body (sex) defines your gender", they go by "your gender defines your body (sex)".

It doesn't aim to abolish gender, it only rearranges the terms, which doesn't make gender any less harmful, regressive, oppressive and limiting of human experience. The only path to destroy gender and its negative consequences is gender abolitionism, not making up more categories to limit people.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

While I'd argue "gender identjty" and "gender roles" are different aspects of the sociological phenomenon of gender and eliminating one is not the same as removing the other, I do think you can certainly take a more gender abolitionist stance if you'd prefer.

The key point is that there would still be people who have the personal experience/qualia of a gender identity even in a "post-gender world", its just that how we frame and talk about that experience would be different. Same with trans folks: there's still gonna be trans people in a hypothetical un-gendered world, even if the ways they socially interact with whatever system we'd have is different.

[anjomecanico]

In a genderless world, identity wouldn't be tied to gender (aka the social assignments pushed around sex), since gender would not exist, so there wouldn't be gender identity nor gender roles. What would exist is cases of incongruence with the sex the person wished they were and the person's actual sex (therefore a psychological dissonance that affects a person's sense of identity), which would be something adjacent to body dysmorphic disorder and treated in a similar way that disorders involving mind and body incongruence are, but focused on its specific issues. For the rest of the population, the closest thing to the concept of "gender identity" would simply be their personalities and personal individuality that every single human being has, which are ironically what many people are calling "gender identity" in this day and age.

That's the closest it would get to a "gender identity" and "gender dysphoria" in a genderless world, which is still pretty different.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

So again, how we frame the experiences *would* certainly be different (labeling as "gender identity" now vs considering just personality traits in a genderless world), the point I'm making is that the experiences themselves, like the internal sense of self, would still exist. If we're just a "yeah, but that's only personality and wouldn't be tied to gender" then that's fine, sure, but that's moreso a linguistic shift in the way we're describing the phenomenon.

Like, whether or not we use the word "gender" in that description or whether we find differences in it noteworthy enough to discuss are more about the framing than the reality of the experiences.

That said, could you elaborate a bit on how you feel gender dysphoria ought to be treated? Cause we'd still have people experience dysphoria, or who pursue altering their sex characteristics, even in a post-gender world, so I'd love to hear how that fits into your framework.

[anjomecanico]

Yeah, many things would go through a shift in language, but the experience would still exist with some alterations.

In a genderless world, the treatment to sex dysphoria (because since there wouldn't be gender, the factor would be sex) would follow the same logic of treatments to disorders involving incongruence between body and mind: therapy aiming to reduce the malign symptoms of incongruence generated by the mind.

A successful and robust specialized psychotherapy would considerably reduce the desire for body modification of many people, but I do think there would be people still looking out for body modification even if specialized psychotherapy for sex dysphoria was more robust and available, people with adjacent conditions still look for body modification and with them it wouldn't be different in that regard, but body modification wouldn't be sold as treatment like it is today. They could get procedures and hormones like anyone could, but it wouldn't be a formal treatment for the condition in the same way surgeries and other procedures aren't considered a treatment for BDD but they still can get them if they want to

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

Sorry, just to be clear, you're imagining that the only recognized treatment for gender dysphoria would be the same or similar to treatments for BDD despite all of our current understanding that the conditions are different and respond differently to treatment? Like I don't see how being in a post-gender world means that the finds we already know to be true about the efficacy of GAC would suddenly disappear, you know?

[anjomecanico]

BDD and GD aren't the same thing, but the incongruence of the mind-body axis is present in both in different ways. Unfortunately, a crucial difference between how both are treated is that the only time it came close for the people with this condition to receive a humane treatment was when the treatment was body alteration, while the other is able to receive humane psychological treatment in this day and age. GD never came close to receiving a humane and robust standardized psychological treatment because there was never enough interest in doing research into building such. In a world without gender, more research about it would exist since there wouldn't be *gender* *affirmation* and people would aim for more solutions to the issue.

The efficiency of GAC is proven now because we live in a world highly influenced by gender, therefore for many people it's the most efficient way to deal with their psychological suffering and active social discrimination in this current world. But even when the world is like this, there are people who have GD and are able to live comfortable lives without GAC, so the sole existence of these people show GAC is not the only treatment option that's possible to exist, specially not in a world without gender where discrimination by not following it would be a thing. In a world without gender, the efficiency of GAC (that wouldn't be called gender affirming) would considerably differ since many people with GD would opt for a robust psychological treatment instead of body modifications because of the lack of external pressure for conformance to gender + the existence of another treatment to compare results. The findings with GAC wouldn't be ignored, but they would be analyzed and questioned more critically.

Another thing I think would affect this in a genderless world in some way is that many people with dysphoria want to be biological parents without IVF and stuff, and a robust psychological therapy without body modification wouldn't have any effect on fertility and will treat the malign symptoms of the condition, so without gender and discrimination related to it they wouldn't feel pressured into deciding between treating the symptoms or naturally having children because they could have both with minimal complications. I don't think this would be a major factor in general for not choosing body alterations, but it would be beneficial for some people.

Also, there should be more resources about the physical effects of GAC in the long term. Most data about side effects of GAC in the body only considers the short term, there's extremely little research about how and which side effects show when people are over their 60's for example. Data like this should be more available even nowadays so people can be more informed about their decisions

[anjomecanico]

A cat purring close to you is such a honor

[anjomecanico]

The concept of "gender identity" goes against all the critique to the assignment of roles, behavior, personality and lifestyle based solely on sex (that's now called "gender"), that are critiqued and aimed to be abolished for being oppressive, regressive and limiting, by claiming that people inherently have these assignments embedded in themselves.

The difference is that instead of the traditionalist pathway of "your body (sex) defines your gender", they go by "your gender defines your body (sex)".

It doesn't aim to abolish gender, it only rearranges the terms, which doesn't make gender any less harmful, regressive, oppressive and limiting of human experience. The only path to destroy gender and its negative consequences is gender abolitionism, not making up more categories to limit people.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

While I'd argue "gender identjty" and "gender roles" are different aspects of the sociological phenomenon of gender and eliminating one is not the same as removing the other, I do think you can certainly take a more gender abolitionist stance if you'd prefer.

The key point is that there would still be people who have the personal experience/qualia of a gender identity even in a "post-gender world", its just that how we frame and talk about that experience would be different. Same with trans folks: there's still gonna be trans people in a hypothetical un-gendered world, even if the ways they socially interact with whatever system we'd have is different.

[anjomecanico]

In a genderless world, identity wouldn't be tied to gender (aka the social assignments pushed around sex), since gender would not exist, so there wouldn't be gender identity nor gender roles. What would exist is cases of incongruence with the sex the person wished they were and the person's actual sex (therefore a psychological dissonance that affects a person's sense of identity), which would be something adjacent to body dysmorphic disorder and treated in a similar way that disorders involving mind and body incongruence are, but focused on its specific issues. For the rest of the population, the closest thing to the concept of "gender identity" would simply be their personalities and personal individuality that every single human being has, which are ironically what many people are calling "gender identity" in this day and age.

That's the closest it would get to a "gender identity" and "gender dysphoria" in a genderless world, which is still pretty different.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

So again, how we frame the experiences *would* certainly be different (labeling as "gender identity" now vs considering just personality traits in a genderless world), the point I'm making is that the experiences themselves, like the internal sense of self, would still exist. If we're just a "yeah, but that's only personality and wouldn't be tied to gender" then that's fine, sure, but that's moreso a linguistic shift in the way we're describing the phenomenon.

Like, whether or not we use the word "gender" in that description or whether we find differences in it noteworthy enough to discuss are more about the framing than the reality of the experiences.

That said, could you elaborate a bit on how you feel gender dysphoria ought to be treated? Cause we'd still have people experience dysphoria, or who pursue altering their sex characteristics, even in a post-gender world, so I'd love to hear how that fits into your framework.

[anjomecanico]

Yeah, many things would go through a shift in language, but the experience would still exist with some alterations.

In a genderless world, the treatment to sex dysphoria (because since there wouldn't be gender, the factor would be sex) would follow the same logic of treatments to disorders involving incongruence between body and mind: therapy aiming to reduce the malign symptoms of incongruence generated by the mind.

A successful and robust specialized psychotherapy would considerably reduce the desire for body modification of many people, but I do think there would be people still looking out for body modification even if specialized psychotherapy for sex dysphoria was more robust and available, people with adjacent conditions still look for body modification and with them it wouldn't be different in that regard, but body modification wouldn't be sold as treatment like it is today. They could get procedures and hormones like anyone could, but it wouldn't be a formal treatment for the condition in the same way surgeries and other procedures aren't considered a treatment for BDD but they still can get them if they want to

[anjomecanico]

The concept of "gender identity" goes against all the critique to the assignment of roles, behavior, personality and lifestyle based solely on sex (that's now called "gender"), that are critiqued and aimed to be abolished for being oppressive, regressive and limiting, by claiming that people inherently have these assignments embedded in themselves.

The difference is that instead of the traditionalist pathway of "your body (sex) defines your gender", they go by "your gender defines your body (sex)".

It doesn't aim to abolish gender, it only rearranges the terms, which doesn't make gender any less harmful, regressive, oppressive and limiting of human experience. The only path to destroy gender and its negative consequences is gender abolitionism, not making up more categories to limit people.

[avoidingthehaters-alt]

While I'd argue "gender identjty" and "gender roles" are different aspects of the sociological phenomenon of gender and eliminating one is not the same as removing the other, I do think you can certainly take a more gender abolitionist stance if you'd prefer.

The key point is that there would still be people who have the personal experience/qualia of a gender identity even in a "post-gender world", its just that how we frame and talk about that experience would be different. Same with trans folks: there's still gonna be trans people in a hypothetical un-gendered world, even if the ways they socially interact with whatever system we'd have is different.

[anjomecanico]

In a genderless world, identity wouldn't be tied to gender (aka the social assignments pushed around sex), since gender would not exist, so there wouldn't be gender identity nor gender roles. What would exist is cases of incongruence with the sex the person wished they were and the person's actual sex (therefore a psychological dissonance that affects a person's sense of identity), which would be something adjacent to body dysmorphic disorder and treated in a similar way that disorders involving mind and body incongruence are, but focused on its specific issues. For the rest of the population, the closest thing to the concept of "gender identity" would simply be their personalities and personal individuality that every single human being has, which are ironically what many people are calling "gender identity" in this day and age.

That's the closest it would get to a "gender identity" and "gender dysphoria" in a genderless world, which is still pretty different.

[anjomecanico]

My kitten is growing so fast 😭