They need to eat less because they're so small and weak. Why are they so small and weak? Because they eat less. Let's base our entire society on this distinction.
im just so happy i live in a time period where actual meaningful biological transition is possible. even if we lose rights or the ability to exist in public, nothing can turn back the clock on that, and just by having any sort of access to that our lives are made immensely better. millions of our sisters throughout history would never have dreamed of a day where they could have what HRT does for us.
please don't lose the plot of this. if you're a trans person on HRT you're a living miracle, the dream of hundreds of millions of your ancestors. your lives are all deeply meaningful no matter what anyone says.
Cursed be the one who announced to my father:
“It’s a boy!"...
...How could he twist the course of the stars so much?
How could he have erred so in his astrology?
A lying tongue, a fool’s mouth it had given him
For he foolishly transformed justice to poison
He altered the law and transposed the lines
Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman...
...I would say "how lucky am I"
Father in heaven
who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water...
...Who would then transform me from a man to woman?
Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...
What shall I say?
why cry or be bitter?
If my father in heaven has decreed upon me
and has maimed me with an immutable deformity
then I do not wish to remove it.
the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure
and for which no comfort can be found.
So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground.
Since I have learned from our tradition
that we bless both, the good and the bitter
I will bless in a voice hushed and weak:
blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.
When transmascs attend an event or group "for trans people" and its mostly transmascs there, or even all just transmascs, I wish it was more common for them to notice this and asky why.
But its not. I've literally never seen one do it myself.
Me and my girlfriend attended a "Transgender Dance Party" in Fort Collins last month, and we were the only trans women there. Every single other person was transmasc or cis, and they all very obviously avoided us. Like, when we went out on the patio where a bunch of them were talking in order to try and socialize, everyone out there immediately went inside away from us. So we, the only trans women there, just left.
I just saw a post by someone pointing out that their college has a bunch of transmasc professors and not a single transfem professor. I have to assume that they have some kind of event at least once in a while where all the trans faculty get together. I have to wonder if even a single one of them ever notices that there arent any transfems there. I doubt it though.
it’s actually not misogynistic to say astrology is bogus, and it is indeed way way more misogynistic to believe that things that can’t be proven rationally through science are More Female.
Toxic yuri between a girl who thinks she's bothering people any time she initiates conversation and a girl who thinks nobody cares about her if they don't contact her first
In the us, interest in progressive change is growing much faster than consciousness of how to actually achieve such change. This produces a contradiction between the goals and tactics of popular movements, leaving them dangerously vulnerable to co-optation. A contradiction which is able to persist within the underdeveloped state of class struggle, where people aren't forced to contend with the irreconcilability of these aspects.
As communists, of course we must always be critical of liberal politics, however if we take a purely oppositional stands to every movement that employees them, we risk alienating ourselves from the genuinely progressive tide. What we need to do, rather, is to unite with people on the basis of this desire for progressive change, meet these movements where they are at, and then help lead them forward to the point where goals and tactics enter sharp antagonism.
Simply explaining revolutionary theory isn't enough, and the idea that this is our main function in liberal groups is something I want to move beyond!
We should join liberal movements with progressive demands, and work with them to develop actionable and effective plans (balancing mainstream political engagement with mass mobalizations, allying with sympathetic unions, etc.). We shouldn't hide the fact that we're communists, but we also shouldn't make a big show out of it. We want to bring revolutionary theory to people in a practical rather than abstract form.
Because none of what Trump is doing is entirely new (just an increase in scope and affect), an actually effective movement against Trump's agenda would necessarily be a movement against the mechanisms of Amerikkkan bourgeois dictatorship. So let's find movements inspired by opposition to Trump and work with them to build this!
This is true in any country with a similar such progressive upswing, or indeed to some extent any popular progressive movement. They will inevitably fail to bring any real liberation in themselves, we as Communists know this, but huge numbers of well-meaning left-liberals will be left burnt out and disillusioned by that failure unless we can not only show them why such a failure is inevitable but present a revolutionary alternative, and crucial to presenting that alternative is demonstrating our commitment and allyship from the outset.
A vanguard doesn't develop just by showing up with the most thoughtful programme and convincing people to get on board, it develops by proving itself the most committed and effective cohort of the organised proletariat at every scale - if and when a revolutionary moment arises, the trust of the masses to take advantage of it won't just be given to the group with the most insightful analysis of the situation, it'll be given to the group that helped stand up to their shitty landlord and helped stand up to their shitty boss and helped protect their neighbours from anti-migrant raids, and explained why these conflicts keep happening and why no amount of liberal reformism will ever stop them. To be recognised as the most advanced segment of the proletariat is a responsibility, and it is earned.
It is also crucial, indeed, to remember what Lenin said, that the vanguard party must always be one step ahead of the masses, but only one step. If the most politically conscious parts of society as a whole are still left-liberals then we must engage with the left-liberals, prove that we are committed to our shared goals and take them as far as they will go, and when they inevitably fall short of achieving meaningful change then all those who would otherwise be lost and aimless in the aftermath will already know us as reliable allies they can look to for a better path.
actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.
worst part of being an adult is how often youre forced to nag. you Have to be annoying or youre never getting anything done. which is unfortunate considering how common it is to teach kids to never nag and be annoying ever
a professional i am paying money doesnt show up w zero communication and IM the one who has to feel guilty for having to call him and ask whats going on. because when i was a little kid i would get yelled at for nagging. joke world
the commercialisation of Drawing Pictures For Fun that rots your brain out . asking permission to use something for reference . "you're copying x's art style" and the whole idea of being Good At Art . people with "do not use as insp" on their watermark it's all so fucking stupid
Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.
First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components.
I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.
So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.
So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:
(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)
The brain 🧠 - this is where identity is ‘stored’ in the human body. Identity is a thing inside you that arises from your thoughts, the ‘contents’ of your brain. If I were being really uncharitable towards these diagrams, they argue that gender identity is the delusion of how you see yourself that doesn’t interact with/reflect the rest of your body or person. I can “identify as a man” while every other gendered component of myself “is a woman.” Which like, I don't “identify” as a man, I am a man lol. More charitably, I think it’s trying to communicate the fact that trans people discover that their gender identity is in conflict with the rest of themselves, and seek to address this conflict through various forms of transition.
Even taking the charitable view, I think this is still deeply problematic. Just using my own experience, I did not ‘discover’ my gender identity in my head, I discovered it socially - dissociating during sex, friction in romantic relationships, problems with family members, difficulty socialising, being ostracised by peers, forcible assignment of femininity by my parents and especially my mother, and so on. Placing gender identity in the brain visually argues that gender identity can be discovered/thought of in isolation to the social world, because it is a symptom that comes out of a discrete organ, the brain (this is the transmedicalist view of transgenderism - gender identity is a mental illness that needs to be medically treated). This is where the visual tradition of anatomical diagrams works against these gender diagrams, reinforcing the biological view of gender despite the attempts to challenge it.
The heart ❤️ - Now this one is a bit more abstracted and ‘apolitical,’ because the diagrams all use the heart symbol ❤️ as opposed to the anatomical heart 🫀, but I think my criticism still stands, because it is part of the anatomical metaphor of the diagram. I don’t think you can extricate the fairly inoffensive visual association of heart = attraction from the rest of the diagram. The heart is the organ that stores sexuality and attraction, just like the brain is the organ that stores identity, and this sexuality/attraction can be isolated and identified from the rest of yourself. It is just as internal and divorced from the social world as identity is. It’s also bizarrely disaggregated in the unicorn and bear diagrams as physical and emotional attraction lol? What does emotional attraction even mean. I became emotionally ‘attracted’ to all my friends after getting close to them even though I’m not physically attracted to most of them, so I guess I’m demi-pan-emotional? This feels like a more minor nitpick, but it’s part of this containerisation of gendered traits, the idea that you can neatly divide emotional and physical attraction. They are ‘separate symptoms’ of the heart.
The chromosomes 🧬 - probably the easiest one to critique, and imo is the most egregious. Even mainstream pro-trans critiques of sex, which heavily rely on medical authority as the basis of their critique, argue that chromosomes are not “what sex is.” As I laid out above, sex is an assemblage of things that are ideologically bundled together for the purposes of enforcing a set of social systems, such as patriarchy and cissexualism. Using chromosomes to represent sex is an argument that sex is an immutable facet of the body that cannot be changed - even if you take HRT, have surgery, change all of your sex markers on your documents, and live your life as your gender, your sex hasn’t changed because you didn’t “change” your chromosomes. You will always be a biological male or female. Sex, these diagrams argue, is a biological essence, and ‘biological’ is a stand-in for immutable, mutually exclusive, and unalterable.
The other insidious part of this is that the chromosomes replace genitals in the diagram - you can’t show a penis or vagina to your audience, that’s icky and gross, so you use chromosomes instead. It’s the only place on the anatomical diagram where the organ is replaced by a non-organ, and the absence of genital organs only draws attention to the ‘genitality’ (to use Butler’s term) of chromosomes as a stand-in for sex. It is straightforwardly a transphobic and intersexist depiction of sex. The associated graph with it is even worse, placing “intersex” in between “male” and “female,” as if intersex is an undifferentiated amalgam of male/female sexual traits. It upholds the idea that intersex people are just sexually fucked up and have the “wrong” parts of M/F sex combined together, which again, can’t be altered. Which is ridiculous and contrary to reality! One of the core bases of intersexism is that doctors are very much invested in changing the sex of intersex infants, children, and adults through forced surgery and hormones to ‘correct’ a pathological incongruence of sex to either an acceptable ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex. This is what I meant earlier when I said this diagram might attempt to challenge was gender is, but not sex. It partitions sex off from gender as the stable immutable part of the body, which gender is then overlaid “on top of” (Butler also critiques this view in Bodies That Matter), which is, again, a transphobic and transmedicalist view of sex and gender. These diagrams beat you over the head with this point - the gender expression component is a dotted line traced over the body of the unicorn/bear/ginderbread. It is segmented and ephemeral in contrast to the solid lines of the body. Crucially, gender expression never touches their bodies. Gender expression is a thing that can be removed or changed, revealing the true biological essence of the body, which remains intact beneath its facade.
My more minor grievances are that these diagrams are visually ugly and infantilising. It is the queer equivalent of telling children to call a vagina a hoo-ha and a penis a ding-dong. I hate how infantilised and cutesy mainstream queer art and branding is. I’m an adult, I’m not a fucking unicorn or bear or “gingerbread person,” use plain visual language in your educational guides for the love of god. Trans minors also deserve proper representation and education that isn’t this quirky horseshit. The amount of abstraction going on in these diagrams, coupled with the ugly-ass cutesy aesthetic, obfuscates what is trying to be communicated and ends up (imo) being a poor educational tool, even setting aside the many, many ideological problems with them.
So I think these diagrams are deeply transphobic. They represent “components” of gender by assigning them to various organs, which re-inscribes gender as biological. They are also really ugly
christianity being a real facet of peoples lives instead of something you grow out of is killing me what do you mean youre 19 and still believe that mission trips are a positive force in the world
are women encouraged to be sad? to grieve? to be angry? to be bitter? to be petty? are they encouraged to be emotional, or are they expected to be emotional and then called irrational hormonal bitches for it?
stormborns
dailybridgerton
izzy806
areudirty
janainaart
theartofmadeline
