Question Everything

| Pronouns: it/its & Purr/Purrs/Purrself | |Shapeshifter Therian | | you will call me catboy | | adult |

[catboyandroid]

Pinned Post: original here

Hello I am Catboy Android a shapeshifter therian who prefers mustelids and this blog is for political posting mainly. I am an owner of many side blogs this is also technically not a main blog. You may shorten Catboy Android by any variation if you plan to address me. I use it/its and Purr/purrs/purrself and would prefer other pronouns to not be used. I understand not everyone checks though so don't worry grace will be given

Link to an about me: here

Personal posting tag: #cat posts searched on the blog

More about my beliefs and the why: In progress of expanding on my original pinned post

I am not a woman <- read this for my personal insight on transandrophobia/anti-transmasculinity

At my core I feel most strongly about gender abolition, death penalty abolition, prison abolition, anti racism, and bodily autonomy rights for all.

[i-suggest-transing-your-gender]

Shoutout to weird girls who became weird boys and weird boys who became weird girls and weird girls and boys who became both or neither. Let's all be weird and strange together

[ftmtftm]

"All the trans mascs I know have glowing careers and private health insurance and all the trans fems I know are struggling financially and paying for all their meager health care out of pocket. One is provided upward mobility based on patriarchy and the other is punished by it."

Okay so. I'm stuck in a dead end retail job that doesn't provide insurance at a business where one of my bosses can't gender me correctly to save her life despite the fact that I haven't had a foot in the closet for over a decade. I pay for all my health care and medications out of pocket and effectively work pay check to pay check. Now you know a trans masc who doesn't have a glowing career and private health insurance.

I know a couple trans fems with well paying jobs who are very accepted and accommodated in their places of work, who have health insurance and had their gender affirming surgeries approved by said insurance. They haven't lived pay check to pay check in years.

I know many other trans people across multiple identity lines who are in similar positions to me working dead end jobs and just scraping by. In fact that's most other trans people I know, regardless of if they're a man, a woman, masc, fem, genderless, genderful, it doesn't matter, we're all kind of in the pits together.

The like 3 gender conforming/stealth trans fems I know are an outlier and frankly shouldn't be counted, but could you imagine if I solely based my perception of how trans fems navigate the world based on their experiences alone? That would be fucked up! So why do the exact same thing with trans mascs?

If you're not seeing a broke and struggling working class demographic of trans people, maybe question why you aren't seeing us and where we might be instead of just assuming we don't exist because you personally know a handful of folks who are doing well for themselves.

[guardian-angle22]

Yasmin Benoit for Thistle and Spire

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm fairly confident that I've never met a person who doesn't have ptsd. I think the division is really "people with ptsd that they can mask/manifests in ways that others can ignore" and "people whose ptsd can't be ignored by others so they're forced to begrudgingly acknowledge its existence"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

"my cousin is the only one in our family with ptsd, he got attacked by a large dog and melts down at the sound of large dogs barking if he's already emotionally fragile" yeah and your mother shuts down at the sound of car engines that sound like her ex-husband's car, you just never noticed because you don't pay attention to her and she's been conditioned not to make her 'silly outbursts' anyone else's problem.

[learn-how-to-love]

Damn, if there’s anything my most recent post taught me it’s that we really haven’t moved on from transmedicalism and exorsexism as the norm in trans spaces huh. Yeah I’m sorry but binary trans folks if you feel that upset and targeted by a post saying you’re not actually advancing trans liberation by mocking the rest of us then maybe grow the fuck up? “I just want to be NORMAL” man, me too! I would love for my identity to be considered normal. Unfortunately members of my own community are eager to throw me under the bus for .5 cisheteropatriarchy points as soon as it’s convenient, which surprisingly is deeply unhelpful.

[schizopositivity]

I go to work, no one knows I'm schizophrenic.

I make prosthetic feet, none of the costumers know the person who made their prosthetic is schizophrenic.

I go to the grocery store, none of the fellow shoppers or cashiers know I'm schizophrenic.

I take the bus, no one knows I'm schizophrenic.

I go to concerts, no one knows I'm schizophrenic.

I sing karaoke at bars, no one knows I'm schizophrenic.

I pass my neighbors in the stairway, no one knows I'm schizophrenic.

I walk in the park, none of the owners of the dogs I pet know I'm schizophrenic.

Sure, these people may notice that I seem anxious, odd, maybe spaced out at times, but they don't know I'm schizophrenic.

So you don't know that if the strangers around you are schizophrenic either. We are ~0.3-1% of the population. We are everywhere. We are your coworkers, your classmates, your neighbors, the people at the grocery store or on the bus, the people singing at the bars and concerts, the people in your friend group or family. We are part of your community, part of society, part of your life. You wouldn't know unless we told you, and we often don't because of the unfair stigma against us.

Just please consider that we may be close by the next time you choose to make fun of us, or demonize us, or erase us.

And yes, we are also the people speaking to someone that isn't there on the side of the road, or living in a long term psychiatric facility, or locked up in prison, but we are all still part of your community, part of society and part of your life and deserve the same respect that any other human deserves.

Just because you don't care about us, doesn't mean we aren't there.

[infizero]

bringing back my too woke opinion that you should be allowed to change labels without the previous one being incorrect

[infizero]

i think you should be allowed to identify as trans without retroactively saying you were also trans in the past. i think the "born this way" rhetoric is limiting and you should be able say stuff like "i was fully a girl when i was a kid and now im a boy" without it invalidating your current identity but maybe that's just me

[alienlike]

the "transfeminist" discourse on this website is so like... white trans women need to be more aware of the fact that asians assigned male at birth are often perceived as more feminine than their white counterparts. if you're black, it's the opposite. they speak like everyone starts out the same, but that's just not true. you, as a white person, are far more free to explore femininity/masculinity than people of color are.

[alienlike]

they also don't seem to understand the ways in which cis women of color are forced to interact with western ideas of gender. the darker your skin is, the more masculine you're often thought of being. i said this the other day, but not all cis women get to enjoy the cliche soft femininity filled with flowers and rainbows. darker-skinned women are not handed femininity on a silver platter. maybe take that into consideration the next time you try to pull some theory out of your ass

[syzygyblvd]

this. another reason why the TMA/TME binary doesn't work. cis black women are far more likely to be transvestigated, but I'm supposed to believe they're exempt from experiencing transmisogyny? no, that's fucking bullshit. everyone can be affected by transmisogyny, or transandrophobia, or just transphobia period. even perisex cis people.

[discoasphodel]

this is something i see missed a lot in white transfeminist spaces and that i'm grateful for the chance to hear folks discuss. i think the tma/tme binary also fails to support our two-spirit and transgender native relatives whose genders and gender presentations are violently policed and managed by colonialist gender standards.

and it abandons ALL native people who experience this gender-coercive violence. a cisgender lakota man whose gender is wičháša is cisgender and yet also white colonial violence will be done against him on the basis of his gender expression. he will be policed on his hair and sacred braids, he experiences increased risk of violence and sexual assault, he lives with the effects of trauma and their relatives alcoholism and addiction and suicidality, and ultimately has a far higher likelihood to attempt suicide. or be murdered.

Remembering Cole Brings Plenty - ICT

Indigenous people continue to honor the Mniconju actor and call for justice

this is not a hypothetical lakota man. justice for Cole Brings Plenty now, and remember that your campaign to guarantee freedom from medicalized coercive assignment of sex and gender needs to also defend the gender expression of native peoples.

the crisis of MMIW and MMIP directly reflects how limiting and violent white colonial expectations of gender and sex are for First Nations, pueblos originarios, indigenous, native, and American Indian people.

[exeggcute]

I need a polite and effective way to say "hey your heart is truly in the right place and your anger is often righteous but I think sometimes you’re getting recreationally mad about things that are frankly not worth the amount of energy you’re spending on them, and every time you do this you're driving yourself slightly more insane with nothing to show for it," and then I need a way to broadcast that message through a loudspeaker to roughly 30,000 people at once, and THEN I need a time machine to send that message to my past self lol. and maybe a second time machine in case past me tries to be clever and sabotage the version of me who comes through the first time machine

[thekidsfromyestergay]

This was on a post about how it's ignorant and privileged to wear headphones in public and I fear its already become a part of my vocabulary. Must everything harbor a moral failure.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

the other thing about Internet dogpiling is that it is just not possible to think clearly during the acute stages. it’s so easy to criticize people for responding defensively or tactlessly to mass criticism but I cannot overstate the degree to which your brain becomes a rat in a trap. I think we do have to temporarily recalibrate our expectations in these circumstances and accept that they do not necessarily represent how that person responds to criticism. the skills for self-regulating and reacting to normal interpersonal criticism are not the same skills needed to respond to viral callouts.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

as other people have pointed out:

for most of human history, if a bunch of people are really mad at you specifically all at once, it means you’re about to die badly. obviously that’s not the case with internet controversy (…usually) but our nervous systems don’t know that. I just think that’s a variable we have to consider inherent to the circumstances rather than an aberration.

[anglaised]

the way ive had to drop ppl for this and theyd get angry at me and thought i was like defending capitalism or somethin instead of the fact that id always get targeted immediately after they were caught

[teddyssoapbox]

hear me out, this is a good way to exercise white privilege as a form of protest and we SHOULD be stealing more and commiting more petty crimes against corporations. More than any minority

[anglaised]

the fact that this is ur take away when the discussion is nonblacks putting black ppl in literal danger bc of not caring how certain behavior automatically gets blamed on us regardless of if we r participating bc of rampant racism….yall make everything bout ur selves u cant help it 😭

[beatricemeganblood]

its devastating when someone, in good faith, draw a trans woman who looks like me: tall, scruffy facial hair, wide shoulders, far apart boobs, big nose and then the trans community dog piles them in the comments saying its evil to depict such a negative stereotype like that.

like actually fuck off fuck off fuck off FUCK OFF FUCK OFF!!!!! and then theyll fight me when i reply with my pov! like christ lets all just chill the math out please for the christ of love

[beatricemeganblood]

im sick of this shit.

pull urself together and learn how to talk about women without getting distracted by how much u want to fuck them. grow up or get the fuck out, creep.

[maykitz]

the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad's hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he's in weird ambidexterity situation where he's not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf

[seeingteacupsindragons]

It is fascinating to me that people also think of handedness as an example of bigotry that just...went away. As you note, it...hasn't in some places. I know people who grew up in the mid-late 90s who still had this problem.

But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.

If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.

It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.

All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.

I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.

I could go on.

But the point is, bigotry isn't just a mindset shift. People can't just decide they're not bothered by that particular difference anymore and everything's fine, because society is still structured and designed to cause problems for marginalized people. And they're never even going to notice all the little ways their life is bent to convenience them that inconveniences others.

[imstilltrying-ok]

Being a trans man is so strange, like as soon as you come out your experiences stop belonging to you. The misogyny you face isn't about you, you can't claim it is or you're misgendering yourself. The transphobia you face isn't about you, no one actually cares if someone transitions to be a man. The homophobia you face isn't about you, you haven't suffered like a real gay man. If you struggle with toxic masculinity being pushed in you, you chose this, imagine what it's like for cis men who didn't get a choice.

[imstilltrying-ok]

Somehow, no matter what, there is someone who has a "better" understanding of the marginalization or social stigma you experience, and they should speak on it instead. There is not one thing in the world where your voice needed.

[bridget-lover]

I bring a “there’s no meaningful difference between men and women that doesn’t exclude someone” to the function that gender essentialists hate