[fairyfawm]

about post ^-^

my name is prilla (pronouns: fawn/fawns or they/them) and i'm in my early twenties. white and TME. disabled (mid support needs). i live in aotearoa.

interests include marxism-leninism, deltarune (which i post about on my sideblog @snowangelnoelle), animals (especially my pets), revolutionary girl utena (sideblog @revolutionarygirllenin), lolita + similar styes fashion.

[campodefiori9]

Tufted Titmouse in a fairy pose ,from the previous winter. Tupelo meadow ,Central park.

[hell-on-sticks]

Today in australia they started senate hearings on the bill the government hopes will make enough disabled people die or disappear to make us all less irritatingly expensive for them. We had two weeks to submit feedback on over 400 pages of complicated legal terms. They don't care what we have to say and they don’t care that this will kill people and disenfranchise disabled people across the country.

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

Sorry we're too expensive to have rights, I guess.

[hell-on-sticks]

Some additions, from the notes and also context:

- Nobody needs to apologise for venting in the notes or reblogs. We're scared and upset and deserve to be heard.

What to do:

- australians: don't give up! There's still people fighting this, it's not law yet. And even if it passes we can fight them on it. Most disabled peoples' organisations are fighting this, so organisations like People With Disability Australia and area specific groups. Membership to most of them is free if you're disabled. PWDA sends out a list of the news about us each week to keep us informed.

🔗Disabled People Against Cuts are leading a charge. There's always a way to make politicians pay attention even if we have to park our arses on their front step. Share support and resources where you can and keep an eye on the others in your community if you're able to. Talk to local support clinics about Coles and Woolworths vouchers for those facing a lot of uncertainty. And get your flu shot if you're able. Nobody needs the next protest to give everyone the flu.

- non-australians: keep watching. You might also benefit from seeing what DPAC are doing and if they ever call for international support. Supporting the disabled australians you know and refusing to be kept in the dark about what’s being done to marginalised people internationally is good preparation for lots of ways to help, it means you're ready to go if something you can help with appears and don't lose time educating yourself. Many of the situations with the NDIS have deliberately had short time frames to act, to try and stop us from having a voice.

context from the notes:

- When I said health insurance doesn't cover disability supports, I don't mean "it's very expensive so people can't access it". I mean the services often won't take on anyone who doesn't have an NDIS plan. Even then, it's common for services to prefer people who are "plan managed" or "agency managed", meaning someone else handles our invoices, because they feel "self managed" people might not pay them fast enough.

- People have been getting "check in" phone calls from the agency. It’s secretly plan reviews for them to reduce people's funding. If they call you and you don’t have your support people with you, they are lying when they say you don't need them. Tell them to organise a time to call later so you can have your support people. This kind of warning is the only reason I knew to contact my support coordinator when I got this phone call. Others I have seen didn't know and got their plan cut. And it takes years to try and change a plan or appeal it through the tribunal.

- Someone in the notes has identified herself as a support coordinator and offered to help with questions for people concerned about their plan via DMs (thank you @andromedusia). This is very kind of her and I also hope mentioning this here doesn't cause you any trouble, very sorry if it does.

- Also, not thrilled to find out they might be phasing out support coordinators. Lots of us are dependent on them - a support coordinator is someone who helps us understand out plan and connect with supports, and often helps with advocacy too. They’ll save money on us purely because we won't know where to go or what the plans mean. They use a lot of confusing terms in the plans. I'd be screwed without my support coordinator.

- Oh they also want to use a standardised assessment tool to tell how disabled we are, after a decade of having to pay out of pocket for specialists who know us to provide reports. This is actually worse because the tool doesn’t have to be done by a qualified professional and doesn’t work on people with a lot of different disabilities. The government is very good at somehow turning "bad" into "worse".

- Yeah. 760,000 australians is actually not that many. There's 27 million people living here. 85% of disabled australians aren't on the NDIS. Now, a lot of disabled people don't necessarily need the kind of support the NDIS provides, but you know who I don't trust to make that decision? The government who doesn't want to pay for it.

- None of this fixes the existing problems with access for First Nations people or people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. I'm pretty sure a standardised assessment tool will actually only make that way worse. No room for professionals to work with cultural sensitivity and humility to understand the impact of someone's disability, or the varying ways First Nations communities may construct and talk about disability that don't necessarily align with the settler government's convenient definition. Just checkboxes.

- This isn't even our "conservative" government party in power. This is the centre/centre-left party, Labor. The 'Liberal party' (note: not liberal) would likely do worse. But I don't think there's much to be grateful for when this will kill people. And probably won't stop later conservative cuts anyway. Because we cost too much.

It means a lot to see people care about what's happening here. Thank you for paying attention and getting angry with us. Because we're angry and scared and have a right to be heard that the government is doing its best to not have to hear.

[fairyfawm]

if you live in aotearoa and haven't submitted on the current list of government bills at select committee consider doing so; here's a masterlist of guides for submissions.

[hyenaswine]

i think people are starting to confuse class analysis with bioessentialism. like... no not all men do this, but Men as a constructed social class do do this. that's still okay to say. that is regular material analysis of the world around us.

[passionpeachy]

honk shoo

[passionpeachy]

kissy the pony

[accessible-art]

[ID from Alt: a digital drawing of a tan and blonde miniature pony with a blue bow on its tail and a lipstick kiss mark on its forehead. It sticks its tongue out. End ID]

[sobcat]

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[catasters]

[fairyfawm]

[video description: a person sits playing a piano with a cat laying, tummy up, with its head on the piano keys and its body supported by a pillow on the persons knee. the cat is clearly very comfortable and happy, fully relaxed and undisturbed by the piano playing. it lets its mouth hang open a little, its eyes are mostly closed but a couple of times it turns its head to look contentedly at its person. end description.]

[deepseasmetro]

personally i have something called the "they've heard it before" principle. basically, you might come across someone with some odd or unique characteristic (facial scarring, an unusual height, a particular accent, et cetera). the thing you have to remember is this is only odd to you. That person has been living their whole life with a tic or a limb difference or a dietary need and they don't need anyone going on about it because it's literally completely normal to them. this comes mostly from disability but honestly it's widely applicable.

no literally this! my girlfriend is 6'7" (twirls my hair and giggles and kicks my feet) and the number of people who. Literally like. complete strangers. who come up to them in public just to excllaim WOW YOURE SO TALL is like......... oh wow in her 30 years of existence. i bet they didnt know. how tall they are.

[deepseasmetro]

I do think once uve properly met somebody its less of a big deal. if a friend or coworker who ive spoken to a few times at least tells me my name is cool or unique its a lot less annoying. but when you are literally just Trying To Meet Somebody (or in my gfs case just EXISTING IN PUBLIC) its so. Like. Hi i do not know you literally at all. What do you want me to say back to you.

dude came up to my gf once unprompted, asked her how tall she was, and then said "you could take the undertaker" LIKE DUDE THATS INSANE

[thekimonogallery]

Puppy sleeping. 1955, Japan

[fairyfawm]

[image description: a black and white photo of a puppy sleeping with its head on a pillow, and body tucked under a blanket. the pillow is small, sized well to the puppy. end description.]

[16-may-circulate-again]

I think a consistent challenge in transfeminist analysis is the question of where trans women fit into the classical man-woman scheme of patriarchy. You have some transfeminists asserting that trans women are exactly identical to cis women, and others asserting that trans women actually represent a sort of "third sex." Conversations go back and forth about this and my current thoughts are that there are compelling arguments on either side, but that they're both deeply flawed and limited because of their typically one-sided, metaphysical analysis.

Looking at the material evidence, it is plainly apparent that trans women are women proper - we are forced into the same spheres of labor as other women within our classes. Most of us are trapped in low-wage (often highly feminized) work, or are forced out of the formal legal economy and into sex work, long-term unemployment and begging just to afford food, and so on. As with cis women, a small number of us (mostly limited to the imperial core) are professionals who can access higher education, well-paying jobs, and so on. We can see plainly that, when all other factors are equal, trans women make markedly less money through employment than do cis women, cis men, and also trans men, which is consistent with and easily explained by our real existence as a type of specially-exploited woman, the same way a Black woman will typically make less than a white woman, a periphery woman less than an imperial core woman, and so on. We are just another kind of woman with an added layer of special exploitation, and one which is not incompatible with any other such layer.

On the other hand, we can look at the way we are spoken of and commonly regarded in normal social life. It seems plainly apparent that many people, maybe even most people, do indeed regard us as a third sex even if they would not use that term. Cis women, for the most part, do not get they/themmed incessantly the same way we do when someone is aware of our trans status. We're totally unwelcome in sexed spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms, etc), on a bio-physical level we are regarded as alien or as if we function completely differently from a cis woman or a cis man (despite HRT making us bio-physically extremely similar to cis women, and extremely different from cis men. The vast majority of trans women are either on HRT or desire to be on it). Even bourgeois trans women, take for instance the US politician Sarah McBride, are regarded with so much distaste and hatred by other bourgeois women. A phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in my own life is that when in public, strangers will consistently and exclusively address me as female, as a woman, with she/her, up until I have to share my ID (as part of getting a job, to access medical care, to buy alcohol, etc) - I have been unable to get the sex marker on my ID changed, and as soon as a stranger notices that, it's immediately apparent that I instantly become something "other" to them, something unknown and foreign and scary, and they don't really know what to do about it and usually refer to me very minimally or with they/them for the remaining duration of the interaction. There are countless other such phenomena we can raise to provide evidence for the fact that we seem to be regarded as a third sex, but I'll end there.

What's happening here? On a material level, trans women are simply women proper, but on an ideological level, trans women seem to be widely understood as a third sex. Much to the distaste of those attempting to carry out a metaphysical analysis, this is a contradictory state of affairs - the reality as it exists within the financial statistics and within the medical journals and in a visit with a client is distinct from the reality that exists within people's heads, in the realm of the ideal. We can attempt to pick one side or the other and say that it is the truth of transfeminine existence, but I see this as a mistake. Rather, I think it is much more coherent to regard the true nature of transfeminine existence as this contradiction, as the class of people who are truly women on every material level but who are also widely regarded as something separate from and foreign to womanhood even at the same time as those same people regarding us as such produce the conditions that create our special-exploitation as just another underclass of women.

For the most part, this is not done with conscious intent, but rather, it's the natural cross product of the general conditions of capitalism and class society, the current ideological and material formation of patriarchy, and the specific neuroses non-transmisogynized people hold about trans women in the context of these greater systems.

The same way the proletariat is defined by its contradiction with the bourgeoisie rather than as something with independent existence, our nature as trans women is defined by contradiction to both men and cis women on a material level but also on an ideological level the very concept of a "cis" woman - the idea that women are not a socially constructed category but are instead something natural, immutable, in possession of existence separate from class society and patriarchy in particular. Or, to put it another way, trans women are defined as the class of women violating the perfect Platonic forms of patriarchy as people imagine them.

This is mostly just a collection of thoughts, or you could think of it as a set of notes I've made public for the sake of seeing how well they resonate with other Marxist trans women. Someday I might write something longer and more formal about this, but this has been on my mind for the last few years and this is the general conclusion I've reached.

[fairyfawm]

everybody be normal about big chunky loud wheelchairs !!! do not comment on someone's wheelchair being big or loud. do not compare it to a monster truck, or a race car. do not complain about the noise or the space it takes up.

i promise you that wheelchair user has heard it before. probably every time they leave the house.

yes, some wheelchairs are smaller and quieter (manual chairs being the quietest, but i'm including the smaller and quieter end of electric wheelchairs in this) but those wheelchairs do not serve the same purpose as big loud powerchairs. wheelchairs used by severely disabled people, who need full support of their body including their head, who need tilt-in-space so they don't get pressure sores, who need different controls because they can't operate a normal joystick (or manual wheelchair), are often much larger and heavier and louder. my electric wheelchair is loud and has bigger front tires because it is made to be able to get over bumps that, for example, my boyfriends smaller quieter electric wheelchair isn't able to. some people seem to see my wheelchair and assume that must mean like.. for hiking or something. some people use these chairs for that, but for me? it's so i can get down the street even when there's a bump, or a small branch across the footpath, so i can get up curbs cuts, over door lips, up a bit of a hill without my mum pushing me, and so i can go on the beach. these are all things that my boyfriends powerchair cannot do, and that means he has to stand and walk for a bit sometimes when we go out which i can't manage. the world is so inaccessible and my wheelchair makes it less so. i wish everyone who wanted/would benefit from a wheelchair like mine could get one.

my wheelchair is big and loud but without it i can't access the world and i hate being made to feel like it makes me too big, too loud, too in the way. i hate feeling like i'm drawing attention to myself when the sound of the motor fills the hallway at the hospital or doctors office. i hate old men (it's always old men.*) complaining about the sound or acting like i'm doing something wrong by existing.

* on that note, this treatment seems to be very gendered as well. maybe it would seem more 'natural' to some people to see a man in a wheelchair like mine. a man is expected to be louder and take up more space. maybe a woman or someone being seen as such (i am not a woman, but the way i present means that's what i am assumed to be by most people**) in a wheelchair that looks 'rugged' and is big and loud seems abnormal and out of place. and it's disproportionately men that are weird about my wheelchair! i do get women commenting on it but usually they're A. people i was already talking to, like nurses or doctors rather than a random passerby, and B. make comments about it seeming like it would be good for going places, calling it cool, or complimenting my ability to drive it. whilst these comments are often still frustrating they clearly come from a place of just trying to chat and seeing somethings abnormal so commenting on it in a way they see as positive, where as (mostly older, white) men are more likely to make comments that seem to be showing annoyance, to call things at me when i wasn't speaking to them, ect. i think like.. one woman has been particularly weird about my wheelchair (calling it a race car and making "vroom vroom" noised at me in a very infantilising way) compared to many men (less infantilising from men and more vaguely aggressive comments and complaining).

** in case it needs to be stated, that does not mean this is at all related to AGAB or that trans women + transfems + other TMA people would experience this any less; i expect they would experience it much more as the compounding of oppression places them in a more vulnerable position.

[ladylucck]

mosque cats x

[fairyfawm]

[image description: two photos, both of two small kittens just inside a mosque. there are ornate columns, the door is large and bears a carved geometric pattern, and big, worn rugs lay on the floor. all this makes the little cats, lounging on the rugs, look especially small. end description.]

[amnhnyc]

Have you ever seen a tufted pygmy squirrel (Exilisciurus whiteheadi)? Found only in Borneo’s mountain forests—at elevations of more than 3,280.8 ft (1,000 m)—this tiny critter is one of the world’s smallest squirrels. It grows up to 3.4 in (8.6 cm) long. And at about 0.8 oz (22.7 g), adults typically weigh less than half a stick of butter! Easily recognizable thanks to its ear tufts, this species feeds primarily on moss and lichens.

Photo: Daniel Schlaepfer, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

[base-and-superstructure]

Just saw a petition in a group chat about "don't bring ICE to Europe!" and I felt insane for a minute. We already have militarised borders and concentration camps for migrants and we let people die in the sea and we banish people to unfamiliar countries and we brutalise them and we terrorise them and we detain and deport them!! The UK and the EU are not the liberal paradises we pretend they are!! Our borders kill people!! We don't need a petition to keep US violence away, we need to organise against the European violence we already have!!

[deadbirds-and-daydreams]

The amount of pictures of people dying in boats trying to get to europe. and the amount of few survivors who then get denied put into prisons (remembering the harlem panopticon where we put immigrants for a while. and i do mean like an actual literal panopticon.) or camps and then send back. and why? because some europeans are so fucking racist and xenophobics theyd rather see their fellow men die than to have absolutely nothing change in their lifes to help these people survive. Words will never be enough to explain my rage for how EU has treated people like absolute fucking cattle. all my life the news here. the politicians. the US is a shithole. the EU is a shithole but tries a lot harder to hide it. theres so much blood on these hands. its sickening.

[dykepuffs]

I keep remembering that fucking post about "Uwu look at Europe's beautiful open borders!!!!" With pictures of a little boundary stone in a field in Belgium or a line painted on a road in Luxembourg, that was circulating around the same time as yet another overloaded boat had been turned back by Greek or Italian coastguards in the middle of the Mediterranean and the International Community(TM) had collectively shrugged when bits of it started washing up in the Greek islands.

The way that Europe has sold itself as such a fluffy woo Good Vibes Only Continent should be studied.

[bmoreisapunkrocktown]

I just want to add this, because I think it's immensely important in these conversations and because it took me 45 minutes to track it down.

How Europe Outsourced Border Enforcement to Africa

The European Union is militarizing Africa's internal borders to curb migration, with little regard for human rights.