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Well damn. I was going to be spending less time online anyway, but it would have been nice for them not to ruin online. Feel free to send me an ask or DM for alternate contact details if you know me (mutuals and people I've talked to before included!).
Gill-Peterson - 2023 - Trans Auto-Antonym Theory (The Masc–Femme Dialectic)..pdf - Proton Drive someone gave this to me. It was paywalled but someone got around it. I'm only half way through but you totally have to read this. It's mask off
God I don't even know what her point is here. "Trans" as a term is problematic because it pretends that trans women aren't more oppressed than trans men, the solution is to accept that "trans" is meant to be about a dialectic between the "opposite forces" of masculinity and femininity (and uhhhh nonbinary and agender people too or whatever, which Jules constantly bemoans how much she doesn't understand what a nonbinary experience even is but I'm meant to buy that her theory has genuinely considered how nonbinary and agender people fit into this, sure!!!!!) and t4t is here too and we can fuck about it, problem solved.
I have to point out that she says
There is the non-binary denouncement of so-called binary trans women for apparently taking gender too seriously, or perhaps taking beauty too seriously, in medically transitioning.
And then she cites an article, Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid? by Meredith Talusan. And I do not get why. This article is about Meredith (a nonbinary person) talking about her friends Alok Vaid Menon (who is nonbinary) and Jacob Tobia (who is genderqueer), and their collective observation that Alok and Jacob struggle to get dates by virtue of being visibly gender-non conforming and androgynous, while Meredith (who can pass as a cis woman and went through HRT and SRS while still identifying as binary) is seen as much more desirable. They reflects on their friend's struggles with being nonbinary in the dating world while visibly androgynous in the "wrong" way.
There is nothing in this article about how “binary trans women” must be denounced for “taking gender too seriously.” That is entirely a projection on Peterson's part, one she does nothing to explain; just pops this article into this paper I'm guessing because it pissed her off when she read it. The article is about misandrogyny and how it impacts nb/gq/gnc’s people love lives. But of course, to Peterson, this cannot be interpreted as anything other than an attack on “so-called” binary trans women.
Because nonbinary people are never ever allowed to ever imply that being aligned with the binary in certain ways can result in being spared from kinds of transphobia that others, particularly many nb/gq/gnc people, cannot escape as long as we live authentically. Pointing out that a visibly androgynous, hairy and feminine, body is seen as undesirable is, of course, secretly REALLY about how nonbinary people loathe the True Transsexuals and their HRT and surgeries (nevermind that Meredith is a nonbinary person who physically transitioned, a group that Peterson loves to pretend doesn’t exist). Because everything nonbinary people do and say when it comes to describing our oppression is actually about being big meanies to binary trans people, The Main Characters Of Transness.
The "so-called binary" thing is a dogwhistle imo, because while all trans people can be affected by misandrogyny, binary trans people who CONSTANTLY define themselves in opposition to nonbinary people, love to act like being called binary is a slur (hmmm where have we heard that one before, class?). But I just know it grinded her gears to hear Alok joking about how going on E and getting electrolysis would make them be seen as more desirable, to see a person who decided being a binary trans woman wasn't right for them and who is openly talking about exorsexism/misandrogyny (if not by those names).
this isn't even getting into just how much this whole theory of hers is EXTREMELY fundamentally binary, but she thinks she can get around that by mentioning nonbinary people once or twice and suddenly its totally not everyone! like:
I suggest that trans is better regarded as an auto-antonym than an umbrella or an interchangeable prefix: a word that generates two opposite meanings (in this case, masculine and feminine). This auto-antonymic quality in fact produces many more than one pair of ‘opposite’ meanings, considering that trans holds nonbinary and agender significance too, rejecting any singular masculine/feminine master dialectic.
Nonbinary people are brought up three times in this whole paper, and one of those times was the above-mentioned bad faith reading of that article. & anyways, after reading her blame the fucking Skrmetti decision & the legal attacks on trans healthcare on "vainly championing the ostensible superiority of androgyny, or, today, a kind of immaterial, nonbinary idealism" and her doing that whole fuckass article waxing lyrical about how nonbinary people are just playing dress up and aren't meaningfully different than binary people, I'm sorry but fucking Press X To Doubt that she put the line about nonbinarity in there for any other reason than to say she didn't technically exclude nonbinary people if people yell at her on Twitter.
Anyways re: "the trans battle of the sexes can be fixed by t4t sex and everyone just agreeing that transfems have it worse, because that's the only real problem here :)" didn't S.L Void literally write an essay on this exact "solution":
‘transmasc vs transfem’ discourse & reactionary ‘boys vs girls’ politics in trans spaces
There are also cases where the reaction [from all types of people] to transmasculine people expressing pain they have suffered due to this kind of discourse and the sweeping generalizations being made about transmasculine people that sounds something like: “in real life we don’t talk about this, we all just kiss each other”, and this reaction is just as shitty as dismissing it entirely. It adds a dynamic of something that many trans people are intimately familiar with, that of the “please, I like you when you don’t speak and are simply something nice to look at”, the kind of reasoning that strikes the fear of being abandoned by loved ones into the hearts of many many trans people of all different gender embodiments. [...] It is not helping anyone to pretend like “in real life” these problems do not exist and in real life we all just kiss, cause it’s not true and it creates a situation where transmasculine people feel like to express pain is to be a party-pooper, and to be an ally is to be happily sexually available with no regard for who perpetuates antitransmasculinity or not. [...] So while yeah, its possible that in real life, some of us are just kissing each other, it’s also true that many of us are doing both — we’re acknowledging and working to combat one another's oppression, and loving each other while we do it. It is also very possible that in real life the opposite is happening, and there is antitransmasculinity and transmisogyny being perpetuated in spaces that should be mostly free of them. ‘Irl we just kiss’ is a dismissal of this, and it’s not helpful for anyone. It mistakes attraction for allyship, something we sincerely cannot afford as a unit.
^^^^ this is the problem with Peterson's whole approach to these gender wars and many other people's. While not always productive, some of this discourse is the dialectic, it is a slow addressing of some deeply unaddressed wounds in our community, and importantly, this cannot be done without addressing anti-transmasculinity and exorsexism alongside anti-transfemininity/transmisogyny.
Anyone who insists they want all peace and love and t4t sex between trans people, but also doesn't mention ATM or exorsexism at all, by any name (and in fact dismisses the concept of transmisandry outright) either doesn't actually understand what problems we are collectively dealing with, or they do not want to understand.
Nature Documentary: these deep sea creatures can withstand crushing pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch!
Me: they’re not withstanding a goddamn thing. The pressure is a part of them. Their interiors and exteriors are equalized. Just because your respiratory system is built around a pair of fragile poppable bubbles-
You don’t know me
there is this thing I see trans men talk about frequently where they describe being hyper-vigilant about making sure every woman in their presence feels comfortable at all times because they now “look like their abusers”, sometimes at the expense of their own safety and it makes me sad and a little mad to see otherwise compassionate trans men who are really struggling because they’ve internalized the idea that this mental load is a price they have to pay for transitioning
I think you can have grace and compassion for women and what it’s like to be a woman in a patriarchal society without getting defensive or taking it upon yourself to bear responsibility for every woman’s trauma with men and signaling to everyone you meet that it’s okay to treat you, a transgender person, as a potential threat to women and girls (big frustrated sigh) you may or may not be interacting with or just existing near
I’ve seen multiple “Best Death Personification” brackets on this website, and every time the Discworld fandom turns up en masse to vote for Discworld Death, and it’s always deserved, and it’s always funny. A horde of book nerds rising up in defence of their collective grandfather.
Discworld Heritage Post
We're not leaving this gem to languish in the comments:
it is kind of frustrating that discussion of fictional portrayals of police and how the goofy nice policeman and the brutal-but-noble cowboy cop are both propaganda used to excuse or gloss over the violence of real police has kinda been watered down into people taking stupid potshots at each other for liking a fictional cop
i don't think a guy who wants to fuck chief wiggum really needs to be yelled at about it and the more often you do things like that the more convinced i am that you care less about actual police brutality and more about how your taste in characters is "objectively" better and more moral than other people
A sick wizard castle with a nondescript van painted on the side. A gothy pin-up girl with the portrait of a random trucker tattooed on her thigh. A bathroom-themed beach vacation. A beautiful brightly coloured cupcake that tastes like soap.
Jesus with a portrait of my grandma on his wall. A scimitar-wielding fantasy protagonist reading about the adventures of sixth-grader Kelsey. A National Park with a framed print of somebody’s living room.
Tfw you find a new mutual with a fetishism you"ve never encountered before
When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I'm not crazy)
Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.
Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)
I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)
YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)
The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)
The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)
The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)
It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)
Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???
To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)
So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don't forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it's true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)
It's called planned obsolescence and it was invented when lightbulbs could still run for 1000 years. Enshittification is the web-specific (and more specifically social media) version of that.
Planned obsolescence is also a specific thing, but a lot of what's going on right now (in addition to planned obsolescence and enshittification) falls under what some people call "skimpflation." That's what the enlarged toilet paper rolls are. That's what it is when my hummus brand costs the same but now suddenly has guar gum instead of the actual amount of chickpeas needed to make hummus thick, or my yogurt and hot sauce brands reducing their fruit, herbs, and spices and replacing them with "natural flavor."
This stuff was at its peak in 2023 when my last business of ferrets got old and Tux was dying of kidney failure and Kit was dying of IBD. Nothing radicalizes you more than buying the exact same brand of paper towels (Bounty, which I've ragequit), using the exact same amount, and suddenly having diarrhea soak onto your fingers every time because the paper towels are now only 60% as thick as they were last week. And this stuff has just continued since then.
It's sometimes shocking to me how many people don't notice the degradation of quality. (I have a food allergy so I have to check food labels every time; I know a lot of people don't.)
What makes it so unacceptable is the dishonesty of it. It should be considered a deceptive business practice. Rising prices do sometimes go back down, but these companies never go back to increasing their quality.
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
Sometimes there's no metaphor.
The Wicker Man comes to mind. It's not a metaphor for anything. It's about the confrontation between Christianity and The Old Ways. There's metaphors in the story that are explained, but the film itself isn't a metaphor for anything. Christopher Lee's character says things elder Pagans taught me to say to Christians. The filmmakers did as much research as they could and cared about portraying the religious practises accurately according to information they had available to them at the time. The way the Christian character behaves, and what he says, is 100% things I have had said and seen done or had done to me and mine. There's no metaphor for anything, it's all right there in the open.
Sometimes there's no fucking metaphor.
Lately I've stopped writing because I feel so trapped by the audience assumption that everything I write will be seen to be, not just a metaphor, but specifically a bad metaphor, for some real-world thing when I am writing about literally what I'm writing about. A changeling is not inherently a Bad Metaphor for being autistic or disabled, writing about a religion is not inherently about Christianity. Vampires are not inherently a metaphor for sex or disability or what-the-hell-ever.
Not everything is a fucking metaphor, and tbh someone thinking everything must a metaphor for something else is a deeply Christian behaviour.
To assume that everything must be a metaphor is a very Christian way of viewing the world, I'm just gonna come out and say it plain. It's an established Christian belief that goes back at least as far as the medieval period, to think that everything in the world was created by their one-god as a metaphor or a parable for them to learn some kind of Christian idea, and that the whole world is meant to serve this purpose at all times.
Y'all need to stop fucking imposing that on everything. If you want that, stick to bible parables. Don't come out here reading stories by non-Christians expecting that's why or how we write stories, and certainly don't come out here combining it with bad faith readings and accusing people of things.
"well but I'm not christian anymore--" a person is what they PRACTISE, not what they say. People can SAY anything! So if you don't like being called christian, stop fucking behaving like one. Actions speak louder than words!
"but death of the author" that means YOU bring projection to the art, and YOU need to take responsibility for your response and interpretation. It isn't MY fault you are bringing a shitty, poisonous, lack of critical thinking to my story, and it isn't my job to soothe you either! death of the author means DEATH. It means grow up and take responsibility for your fucking projected meaning over the fucking text, not "my interpretation is what the author intended and even if it wasn't it's the author's responsibility to respond to me about it". No it isn't. You experience what YOU bring to the art.
Any piece of art will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you half-way, but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something--and so do you. YOU ARE A SPACE, TOO.
nasty amount of tumblr class discourse boils down to "how can my superior access, resources and quality of life be a privilege when I pay for them fair and square"
which in itself is symptom of how american this site is. class and wealth invariably have heavy overlap but the two being basically interchangeable is a feature of a very specific social structure which really does directly feed into the "disparity is only worth talking about if someone didn't earn it" mindset
this might shock you: a lot of ruling class Americans, people you've heard of even, are in staggering amounts of debt. it just doesn't matter. on account of their class.
i think americans should have to put a banner above their post that says U.S. CENTRIC ADVICE/INFORMATION. i think political posts should clarify that they are giving protest/societal/class information relevant only to the USA i think i would like to stop getting halfway through a post with really good information and then realising it is not widespread advice and is only applicable in the united states of america
for the love of GOD can we PLEASE stop treating us-centric advice as applicable to the whole entire world. Please. beyond anything else, i do not think you guys understand how difficult it makes it for young people to interact with and learn information relevant to them.
at a certain point, treating us-american advice as universally applicable borders on misinformation. i am not saying that it is done maliciously, but it is dangerous at worst. i do not want younger people going around assuming that certain laws do/do not apply to them and getting in trouble because of it. i worry about what 'fundamental/constitutional/labour rights' are only legally defensible in the USA. i worry about kids who do not know yet to wonder where the advice is for, and take it as fact because a post that reads "EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS" begins with "EVERYONE".
some examples i can think of (perspective of a kiwi):
the concept of jaywalking. just crossing the road, americas weird for trying to ban it.
literally anything about guns in america almost certainly doesn't apply to most other countries. in aotearoa and many other nations we do not have the right to own firearms, nor do people even really want to. we don't have a reason to have them and people usually treat them like a bomb that has to be locked up at all times. they are all registered here and some types are entirely illegal.
the idea of cops having guns is so ridiculous and unhinged its the subject of mockery to a lot of people. batons and tasers are more common but still not all cops just run around with them.
the word "republican" means something different in different countries. in america its a political party, overseas its typically referring to the idea of separating from or abolishing monarchy.
places outside america have different political systems. the 2 party system is not universal. even if labour and national usually win the prime minister role, kiwis still actively vote for parties like the greens and te pati māori, which get seats in parliament as a result while another party is in the main role.
race dynamics are different in different countries, even within the limitation of just western countries. people keep failing to understand this in concept and practice so ill just say this: according to the new zealand census infomation publicly available one of the largest racial minorities is māori. the census has usually listed a joined option for latinos, black africans (a lot of africans here are white), and people from the middle east (which is incredibly vague). if i remember correctly last census these 3 groups were collectively 1% of the population.
a city having a population of 7 million or something is absolutely nuts, theres countries smaller than that.
there are thousands of languages and asia has a lot of them.
because of american homogeneity everyone has to learn english anyway to read half the fucking internet.
because of american homogeneity other english dialects are losing our slang and our accents. these things are part of our culture, and in certain dialects like nz english local indigenous languages are closely intertwined in the vocabulary.
that one particularly saddens me personally. commonwealth english has a fascinating history with dialects so diverse there are variations between towns in some areas. southern hemisphere english has loanwords from local languages and collectively shared features that northern hemisphere english doesn't have (the monotone accent especially). there is a particular dialect group encompassing aotearoa, australia, many pacific islands, and more recently antarctica.
cultural things are lost when american english takes over. it doesn't have words for certain things we have (is there an american word for bogan? or in the uk? redneck is not quite the same). going bush is a whole thing people regularly do and ive never heard a word for it in any northern hemisphere dialect.
i just.... idk what to say. the team americaness of it all ignores the concept of our collective societies and now we cant even keep our accents
oh he would have loved having a blog
And here I thought "the Like" was invented in Silicon Valley with the blogging sites of the 90s. Typical westerner, unaware that "Likes" had been invented in China two hundred years earlier.
found out lindsay graham died tonight through this fucking meme how's everyone else's night going?
One of my ancient posts has gone through the AI Recyclers that turn them into New Posts for Facebook screenshots so I keep getting jumpscared by words that are very almost mine attributed to other people's faces. I feel like I have a doppleganger in a horror movie who keeps showing up in places I go in order to freak me out.
This post is not mine, but this is the kind of shit I'm talking about. "Elaborate on your gender identity to him thoroughly". They just make it a little bit... off. You stare into the mirror and realise that your reflection's eye colour is not your eye colour. This isn't how it was. Something is wrong here, and Rowanchen895 is NOT your friend.
