girl eunuch

they/them/anything neutral | tma | marxist-in-training | I'm an adult

[cas-50-28-2]

For the past few months I've been experimenting with using black cohosh to enable healthily having 0 estrogen and 0 testosterone (i.e. eunuch or castrate levels) and I wanna share the results! It was pretty promising so I think this could be cool as a new biological sex that people could transition to

[ghelgheli]

i love your thoughtful posts and your patience in answering questions, was wondering if you had read transgender marxism and if so what did you think of it? ty!

thank you 💖💖

i put off answering this ask specifically to read transgender marxism. i hadn't realized, going in, that it was an anthology of essays rather than a book with a single thesis and thread. having worked through them all i have to say... i was underwhelmed.

a few of the essays (e.g. queer workerism against work and seizing the means) read as restatements, using assorted theoretical widgets, of the rote fact that aspiration toward class consciousness and proletarian revolution demands that we organize with a consciousness of transness. true! moving on.

a few others (trans work employment trajectories, notes from brazil, dialogue on deleuze) felt like re-presentations of known knowns and (sorry!) kind of pedestrian to work thru.

several of the later essays (and especially the afterword, which as far as i could tell misrepresented at least JGP in histories of the transgender child and possibly even metabolic rift) bored me near to tears and were difficult to distinguish from the wordplay of theorizing purely in the realm of ideas. i'm pretty sure i think "‘Why Are We Like This?’: The Primacy of Transsexuality" by xandra metcalfe is just wrong and plays into racialist constructions of the plasticity of the subject while trying to construct an image of liberation.

that said, I had some favourites that i would recommend:

Encounters in Lancaster by JN Hoad. i posted an excerpt of this one recently. the analogies to atomism, the conception of the aleatrix, the image of heterosexuality as the swerving stream that sweeps us up in its currents—i thought it was beautiful and sharp.

The Bridge Between Gender and Organising by Farah Thompson. also posted an excerpt of this one. just a good autobiographical account with clear upshots of one subjectivity of organizing for a Black trans woman

A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction by Nat Raha. this is a critical recommendation (i think there is a classic overuse/misapplication of "femme" thru the text) but the concept of "gender labour" (not gendered labour!) and of the transfeminine subject as being relegated to the lowest, informal and unwaged rung of performing this labour in service of gender maintenance is something that will stay with me

i also enjoyed Transgender and Disabled Bodies: Between Pain and the Imaginary by Zoe Belinsky. don't have too much to say about this one. here's an excerpt tho: "The organism creates her own foundation: she continually creates the being of her own species – the condition for creating the ‘I can’. She continually creates her capacity to create that species-being and the ‘I can’. She does this through the collective labour of organisms labouring in common, in order to coordinate themselves as sensory parts in a higher organism. The labourers must move from particularity to generality in order to establish the general horizon of transformative possibilities: the inorganic body – institutions, tools of culture – that support the creative capacity of the human body."

[mahpiyatowin]

On December 26th, 1862. 38 Dakhota warriors were hung in Mankato, Minnesota. They were wrongfully convicted of war crimes while trying to protect their homelands during the US-Dakota war. Shortly after freeing the slaves, Abraham Lincoln signed off to execute these 38 Dakhota men. Over 4,000 Americans showed up to watch the public hanging. To this day, this is the largest mass hanging in United States history.

Remember the Genocide of this countries Indigenous Peoples everyday, remember that YOU ARE ON STOLEN LAND. And my people died trying to protect it.

Picture by Travis Blackbird

[choujinx]

DOROHEDORO (2000-2018) by q hayashida

[bimboficationblues]

I find the Marxist stance on the family strange and counterintuitive because it is pretty much the only area of society not penetrated by exchange. Marxists themselves will usually admit this but their criticisms almost sound like liberal criticisms that the "exchange of equivalents" doesn't apply therefore exploitation.

For example, here's Adorno in his essay "On the Problem of the Family": "The family is presented with the bill not only for the crude oppression so often inflicted by the head of the family on the weaker woman and especially on the children up to the threshold of the modern age, but also for economic injustice, the exploitation of domestic labor in a society that otherwise obeys the laws of the market..."

So is Adorno's problem ("bill") that... the family doesn't obey the laws of the market? That's the injustice? Very uncharacteristic of him, but that's how it sounds and that's how Marxists generally sound to me when they talk of "unpaid labor" and "wages for housework". Like look at how bluntly the SEP article on "Feminist Perspectives on class and Work" puts it: "Typically, liberal feminists critique housework because it is unpaid. This makes women dependent on men and devalued, since their work is outside the meaningful sphere of public economic production (Friedan 1963). Marxist feminist theorists see this as part of the problem..."

So it's acknowledging that liberal and Marxist critiques of the family are pretty much the same but with different solutions suggested. If you look at the SEP paragraph after, it talks about comparing the total amount of hours spent working between couples, and then exploitation is present if they're unequal, which sounds to me like an ideal of "equivalence". The paragraph even uses the term "bargain" to refer to the arrangement made between partners. It sounds to me like extending the ideal of exchange to the family (or abolishing all remaining relations of nonequivalence, i.e. the family). Am I understanding this right? Because sounds pretty cringe tbh. When I was younger I envisioned communism as extending familial relations to all of society, but it sounds like what Marxists want is the reverse.

it is pretty much the only area of society not penetrated by exchange.

I think this is a popular fiction, it seems clear to me that the family qua family is also caught up in webs of exchange relations, the idea that the household exists "outside" of the sphere of exchange doesn't really map onto reality but is more of an ideological narrative that holds some kind of "social objectivity"

Marxists themselves will usually admit this but their criticisms almost sound like liberal criticisms that the "exchange of equivalents" doesn't apply therefore exploitation...So is Adorno's problem ("bill") that… the family doesn't obey the laws of the market? That's the injustice? Very uncharacteristic of him, but that's how it sounds and that's how Marxists generally sound to me when they talk of "unpaid labor" and "wages for housework".

hm I certainly think this is true of some Marxists, but I think that is just like, how a lot of Marxists talk about exploitation in general (that it is wrong because it fails to conform to liberal ideals of contract and exchange of equivalents). this is sort of the view Marx was trying to rail against (more or less successfully depending on your view), arguing that the conditions of bourgeois freedom are predicated on various forms of unfreedom. this is in part what the "wages for housework" movement was meant to highlight - it was in a broader web of political tactics and not like, an end conclusion. (you can argue that it's not the right tactic and I think there can be a discussion on the merits of that, but I don't think it should be conflated with the theoretical critique).

So while I agree that making "universal exchange of equivalents" is not an aspiration of mine, I guess I'm saying you can't isolate "*the* Marxist view of the family" as something that exclusively points in this direction (of moralizing exploitation as a kind of betrayal of liberal principle that ought to be fulfilled), there are many competing perspectives on this topic as there are with work more broadly.

If you look at the SEP paragraph after, it talks about comparing the total amount of hours spent working between couples, and then exploitation is present if they're unequal, which sounds to me like an ideal of "equivalence". The paragraph even uses the term "bargain" to refer to the arrangement made between partners. It sounds to me like extending the ideal of exchange to the family (or abolishing all remaining relations of nonequivalence, i.e. the family). Am I understanding this right? ... When I was younger I envisioned communism as extending familial relations to all of society, but it sounds like what Marxists want is the reverse.

Yeah I mean, I think this is an issue of defining one's terms, the concept of "exploitation" in the Marxian sense gets a bit wonky when you take it out of the contexts of M&E working in and against the literature of radical republicanism and political economy and examining the wage-relation (the same paragraph also talks about trying to distinguish between "leisure/play" and "work" to determine exploitation, and that is a distinction worth exploring for some questions, but is somewhat alien to Marx's object: "The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats."). So perhaps they're using "exploitation" in a colloquial sense or in an unelaborated sense or are speaking in broad strokes - difficult to say because multiple authors (Federici, Vogel, Delphy, Barrett, who I would say all have overlapping but different kinds of commitments to a Marx-influenced feminism) are being cited to different ends.

Your "bargain" objection, though, seems like a misreading, because the use of that language there:

"Since non-market activity does not have a clear criterion to distinguish work from non-work, nor necessary from non-necessary social labor, an arbitrary element seems to creep in that makes standards of fairness difficult to apply to gendered household bargains between men and women dividing up waged and non-waged work."

is describing the currently existing arrangement of how men and women divide household labor under various conditions - which (under your assumptions) would point towards the idea that there are indeed exchange relations going on within the family, which is part of what Marxists dislike about it. Like I think if they are calling the currently existing familial relation that they're critiquing a kind of "bargain," it's hard to leverage the critique that Marxists want to make such bargaining a universal law. get me?

I don't really know what you mean by "extend familial relations to all of society" so it's difficult for me to weigh in on your question, but that sounds unpleasant.

More "procedural" stuff under the cut.

As far as the Adorno quote goes I agree that that's oddly phrased, but because he doesn't really elaborate on that specific point in the essay it's hard to muster much of a defense or attack. but I do think it is reasonable to observe the various arenas within civil society where we rely on laboring activity that is performed under various conditions of unfreedom.

though I think it speaks to another issue I find here: you are also honing in on one very particular line of Marxist-(feminist) criticism I think, which is the division of labor within the family. Definitely a very important critique to many Marxist-feminists, but that seems non-exhaustive of "the Marxist position on the family" to me, which is also concerned with e.g. the family as a site of social reproduction (in the various different senses that term is used in post-Marx literature), as a form of arbitrary power that subjects women and children, as a tool of psychological repression, as a pre-capitalist hangover, the treatment of sexual intimacy as a form of value or exchange, the reliance of society on these forms of unfree labor, and so on

this ties into the use of SEP - I think where you cut the sentence off produces a disingenuous effect, because in the remainder of the section they elaborate various alternative explanations of what Marxist-feminists think is "wrong" with the family (as they said, the libfem diagnosis is merely "part of the problem"). I also think SEP is like a merely adequate resource for these kinds of questions - it's often a good launching point for like broad pictures of debates and finding good sources (as is IEP, which I generally prefer in its detail), but those articles typically aim for breadth that results in oversimplification (often in a way that does damage to the argument for the sake of covering a lot of material accessibly).

I think Kirstin Munro's work on these kinds of questions is really edifying and might resonate with you in some form if these are your concerns.

[metamatar-deactivated20250401]

i have a question and sorry if it sounds incoherent. why is it so important to marxists to distinguish that marxism is not “moral” or “ideological”? i understand that marxism is grounded in historical materialism and that it aims to understand how existing structures and institutions function with the specific goal of abolishing them in favour of a marxist state, but when it comes to understanding how to move forward past capitalism, how can MLs claim that it’s entirely objective and scientific? isnt the fundamental purpose of marxism (abolishing the oppressor class and putting the proletariat in power) a subjective one, given that it to support that you need to believe that abolishing the oppressor class is desirable in the first place? how would ML “scientifically” help people decide where the line is drawn on subjects like the death penalty and incarceration if its committed by a communist party (given that the decision that the cost of killing/imprisoning people is worth the boon it would give in establishing a communist state is still based on subjective goals?)

i don't think modern marxists should claim they're not ideological. im sure some do, but imo the correct claim is marxism is not idealist. i think some of this confusion comes from a popperian view of science as "neutral" or "objective" outside of time. how the political economy affects the propagation of ideology and the process of science as practiced in reality is very standard marxist analysis now. some of the claim to objectivity is something that most people claim belongs to their favourite philosophical project see the rawlsian veil of ignorance in liberalism. marx is also writing in a world where theological and religious reasoning have a lot of primacy in philosophy and he is drawing a clean break from that by hewing to scientific characterisation of his methods.

idealism, in the kantian sense is a philosophy that argues that our ideals (about say, fairness, justice etc) inform how we organise society. marxism, as philosophical project develops in response to kant and hegel to argue that the political economic base, ie the productive relations of society actually inform superstructure of ideals. to quote marx in the preface to critique of political economy: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

for clarity's sake the idea changes the mode of production (mostly due to technology) transform the relations of production which is the main driving force of history is historical materialism. the analysis of why existing structures and institutions must be abolished therefore has to be grounded in analysis where such structures are considered variously – unstable, internally contradictory etc. if you view historical materialism as true, your theory of change cannot be that you'll change the world because it is unfair (an idea.) you can view the world as unfair as a marxist and talk about it to propagate the necessity of your project but that doesn't actually give you a blueprint on how to change it.

capitalists are oppressors, but marxism doesn't view the problem in their oppressive or evil natures. capitalist economies demand even the most moral capitalist to exploit the proletariat. but! it is desirable to abolish there class relations not merely because they are unfair and exploitative but because these class relationships cause workers to develop class consciousness, recognise their power and abolish capitalism.

on your specific example, i don't think marxism can or should claim their are no moral dilemmas. historical materialism doesn't assert that there are no conflicting understandings of history. walter benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history is imo good reading here.

so i dont think your concern about why it's important for marxists to believe this makes sense, because this is what marxism is. if you don't find this convincing, you're not a marxist. you could be an anarchist, or a social democrat or a radical liberal.

[totheleft5times]

[deepseametro]

help a disabled trans native buy a wheelchair!

Donate to Support Ciro's Journey to Recovery, organized by Oliver Wagner

Hi! I'm Ciro, a 24-year-old trans-person who's been living with chronic pain and disa… Oliver Wagner needs your support for Support Ciro's J

hello again! thanks to many very generous people, i reached my initial fundraising goal of $2000, intended to be used to hit my insurance deductible to ensure i could still access healthcare i needed.

since then, i've been diagnosed with hEDS, and my mobility has lessened. I can no longer walk long distances without significant pain, and this has severely limited my ability to go outside, spend time with loved ones, or care for myself.

i've now upped the total goal to $2500, with this new $500 intended to go towards me purchasing a lightweight travel wheelchair for me to use to visit places, spend time with friends, etc. whatever is left will be used to purchase me a new desk chair, as my current one is very cheap and leaves my body in pain after extended use.

any and all donations are appreciated and are helpful, even as small as 1 or 5 dollars! and if you can't donate, please consider sharing this post and spreading the word. i am slowly but surely rebalancing my life so im able to cope with this diagnosis but i unfortunately need money to do so.

$0/$500

[mikurinkuwu]

doodles

[deepseasmetro]

um hi its eight deepseametro :( they got me :(

i'd like my mutuals and followers back please :(

and if anyone has any of my old posts thatd be nice too

[deepseasmetro]

reblogs on this appreciated i cant remember all my mutuals urls sob

[maowives-deactivated20241215]

i don't mean this in a bitchy way, i genuinely like adore and appreciate the good faith questions and engagement with my article, but i think that, much like the old magic the gathering adage, "reading the card explains the card," unfortunately I do think a lot of these questions can only be responded to with "reading the article explains the article." Like I put kind of a lot of time and effort and thought into how I articulated myself and tried pretty hard to acknowledge and accommodate any edge cases that were both within the scope of the article and within my current capability to address, and I tried very hard to be concise and economical with my language, and unfortunately what that means is that there isn't a whole lot of fluff in the article and it's not really something that can be Skimmed. I think many if not all dear beloved commieblr mutuals understood this and like took the time to engage with it and chew on it critically, but I think (understandably) a lot of people probably started reading the article and tried to speed ahead towards the end. like I do think many "but OP what about x" questions are literally things I addressed concisely in the article. it's just that like, it's a rather dense article! I don't mean this as a self-praise, I genuinely do think that my failure to be able to articulate myself in a more accessible manner is a shortcoming of my abilities. however, if I was going to write the essay in a way that someone who is not at all acquainted with marxism-leninism, class analysis, materialist feminism, and/or dialectical materialism could understand easily, it would require at least another several thousand words at a minimum to get there, and I don't really think I'm a great enough mind to be able to pull that off effectively.

this isn't really anything beyond just musing and reflections, and i think it's been genuinely helpful for me that everyone has been asking these questions, but I do think that I probably will only really try answering questions that I feel like genuinely aren't already addressed in the body of The Text Itself and that I consider to be like, addressing real shortcomings of the text.

[maowives-deactivated20241215]

i do think something perhaps worth me articulating is that part of the essential character of the hypothesis im putting forth is that it cannot line up 1:1 with the currently mainstream understandings of gender and sexuality. I'm not attempting to reskin liberal feminism or even transfeminism. I'm not writing transfeminism. I'm trying to write trans (materialist) feminism. or rather, I'm trying to write (trans) materialist feminism.

i don't think Gender Feelings or Gender Euphoria or Choice or Dysphoria or Autonomy factor into the analysis. I'm arguing something entirely different. I'm not saying we should rename the genders that exist. I'm trying to draw the lines in completely different places, according to completely different analytical assumptions. and of course, necessarily, I'm going to make mistakes! and I celebrate critique and critical analysis. and I understand that saying "this isn't transfeminism, and that the core of this project is, at least on some level, a departure from transfeminism" will rub many people who i respect and admire the wrong way. but i think it's important.

i think what i said was incomplete. i think it was necessarily incomplete, because, at least from my perspective, it's a very young idea coming from a relatively young person. but i tried very hard not to say anything that is overtly and obviously untrue.

[maowives-deactivated20241215]

so when people ask me "where do lesbians fit into this? where do trans men? are trans men NP or P or F-SA?", I'm arguing "trans men don't exist in this paradigm. trans women don't exist in this paradigm. the genders aren't "trans woman = F-SA," it doesn't work like that and that's not the point. this paradigm disagrees with these categories, in that this paradigm seeks to use very specific analytical frames to construct a gender analysis for a very specific application, which is the analysis of gender-class."

idk if this makes sense but I talked about it this way with my wife:

A lot of the contemporary transfeminist discourse seems to center around a particular Engine in the same way games are built in an Engine. and you can do a lot of things with Unity, you can build so many different kinds of games in Unity, but at the end of the day, they're all games coded in Unity, and necessarily, by this fact, have some connecting artifacts and limitations of having been made in Unity. Likewise, things in one Unity game can, at least nominally, translate to another game in Unity.

what I'm doing is trying to build an entirely different game engine. and building a game engine is hard! and it takes a lot of time! and that means early iterations are going to struggle to do very basic things, things other game engines would be able to do easily and quickly. the utility here is that it can do those things in a fundamentally different way, with a different method, for a different purpose.

maybe that's lofty, maybe that's even pretentious or overly grandiose, but I think that my new engine might have some utility, possibly, in the future, for people who are able to do more with it than I can, and that enough makes me feel like it's important to at least try.

[frailgun]

this line from a scanlation of beastars is the funniest thing i will ever see

[tsunderemployee]

lastfm describing a babymetal song as “post-nerdcore”

[tsunderemployee]

i wish i was joking

[tits-a-me]

what the fuck is a scrobble

[tsunderemployee]

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

Also average tumblr user does not know what a chaser is (hint: it isn't when you are attracted to trans women)

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

Chasers are people who will actively go after vulnerable groups of people to sexually exploit.

In the case of chasers who go after transfems, they are looking for transfems who are emotionally vulnerable and crave validation so they can manipulate them. At best they will treat transfems in seemingly nice ways (to fuck us). At worst they will treat us like a disposable sex object who should shut the fuck up when not in use. They disregard boundaries, they project transmisogynistic tropes onto the transfems they prey on, they exoticise transfems and will generally treat us like shit with just enough validation to keep them in the relationship.

Ultimately, a chaser is never even someone who is genuinely just attracted to transfems. Chasers mainly just see trans women as easy prey or as whatever fantasy they have from shitty porn and not as people.

Chaser is not a "haha funny meme word". It's a term for a type of predators and bigots.

[beardedmrbean]

[radiofreederry]

[reasonsforhope]

More than 70 babies have been born from uterus transplants: 'It's a complete new world'

A new study found that 14 of 20 women had successful uterus transplants, and all 14 went on to have at least one baby.

"The first modern attempt at transferring a uterus from one human to another occurred at the turn of the millennium. But surgeons had to remove the organ, which had become necrotic, 99 days later. The first successful transplant was performed in 2011 — but even then, the recipient wasn’t immediately able to get pregnant and deliver a baby. It took three more years for the first person in the world with a transplanted uterus to give birth. 

More than 70 such babies have been born globally in the decade since. “It’s a complete new world,” said Giuliano Testa, chief of abdominal transplant at Baylor University Medical Center.

Almost a third of those babies — 22 and counting — have been born in Dallas at Baylor. On Thursday, Testa and his team published a major cohort study in JAMA analyzing the results from the program’s first 20 patients. All women were of reproductive age and had no uterus (most having been born without one), but had at least one functioning ovary. Most of the uteri came from living donors, but two came from deceased donors.

Fourteen women had successful transplants, all of whom were able to have at least one baby.  

“That success rate is extraordinary, and I want that to get out there,” said Liza Johannesson, the medical director of uterus transplants at Baylor, who works with Testa and co-authored the study. “We want this to be an option for all women out there that need it.”

Six patients had transplant failures, all within two weeks of the procedure. Part of the problem may have been a learning curve: The study initially included only 10 patients, and five of the six with failed transplants were in that first group. These were “technical” failures, Testa said, involving aspects of the surgery such as how surgeons connected the organ’s blood vessels, what material was used for sutures, and selecting a uterus that would work well in a transplant. 

The team saw only one transplant fail in the second group of 10 people, the researchers said. All 20 transplants took place between September 2016 and August 2019.

Only one other cohort study has previously been published on uterus transplants, in 2022. A Swedish team, which included Johannesson before she moved to Baylor, performed seven successful transplants out of nine attempts. Six women, including the first transplant recipient to ever deliver a baby back in 2014, gave birth.

“It’s hard to extract data from that, because they were the first ones that did it,” Johannesson said. “This is the first time we can actually see the safety and efficacy of this procedure properly.”

So far, the signs are good: High success rates for transplants and live births, safe and healthy children so far, and early signs that immunosuppressants — typically given to transplant recipients so their bodies don’t reject the new organ — may not cause long-term harm, the researchers said. (The uterine transplants are removed after recipients no longer need them to deliver children.) And the Baylor team has figured out how to identify the right uterus for transfer: It should be from a donor who has had a baby before, is premenopausal, and, of course, who matches the blood type of the recipient, Testa said...

“They’ve really embraced the idea of practicing improvement as you go along, to understand how to make this safer or more effective. And that’s reflected in the results,” said Jessica Walter, an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who co-authored an editorial on the research in JAMA...

Walter was a skeptic herself when she first learned about uterine transplants. The procedure seemed invasive and complicated. But she did her fellowship training at Penn Medicine, home to one of just four programs in the U.S. doing uterine transplants. 

“The firsts — the first time the patient received a transplant, the first time she got her period after the transplant, the positive pregnancy test,” Walter said. “Immersing myself in the science, the patients, the practitioners, and researchers — it really changed my opinion that this is science, and this is an innovation like anything else.” ...

Many transgender women are hopeful that uterine transplants might someday be available for them, but it’s likely a far-off possibility. Scientists need to rewind and do animal studies on how a uterus might fare in a different “hormonal milieu” before doing any clinical trials of the procedure with trans people, Wagner said.

Among cisgender women, more long-term research is still needed on the donors, recipients, and the children they have, experts said.

“We want other centers to start up,” Johannesson said. “Our main goal is to publish all of our data, as much as we can.”"

-via Stat, August 16, 2024

[leebrontide]

Holy shit????

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Love it when Rolling Stone puts out an article about the 25 most influential internet creators and I've only heard of 7 of them

[dandelioncasey]

Well I've only heard of two so you're doing better than I am!

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

I'm curious now since tumblr.com is home to such a specific audience and the list seems to be full of TikTokers and Instagramers. Is Instagramers the word?

Out of Rolling Stone's 25 Most Influential Creators of 2024,

how many names do you recognise?

0

1-5

6-10

11-15

16-20

20-24

All 25

Voting ended onSep 4, 2024

reblog for a bigger sample size and also please tell me who, if any, you recognise?