Ferristriangle

Age: 30s Non-practicing intellectual

[mathytickles]

mouth on tummy rb if you agree

[cryinglawstudent]

God forbid you ask a pharmacy to fill a prescription

[punishedsaints]

[tamamita]

This is even more ironic knowing that Theodore Herzl was inspired by the Scramble for Africa and even proposed to Secretary of State for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, to colonize Cyprus or the Sinai Peninsula. Furthermore, in the Sixth World Zionist congress in 1903, Herzl proposed the Uganda Plan as a potential for Jewish colonization. However, the plan was ultimately rejected when they saw that the white settler colonizers in East Africa weren't so keen on sharing land with the Jewish colonizers, hence why they changed their focus to Palestine. I do not think the pioneer of an anti-colonial movement would be in bed with the likes of Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes.

Either way, Zionism being an anti-colonial movement is such a tired zionist talking point.

[cutecipher]

like. people dont get it. this is from over a decade ago from the fbi itself.

Contacts:.The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Innocence Project, and the National

[cutecipher]

forensic science being fucked is not a conspiracy theory. forensic science isnt just basically regular science.

[daughter-of-sapph0]

in real life research, you create a hypothesis, then experiment to prove or disprove your hypothesis, then draw a conclusion from the results. accurate science is that which is repelicable, aka repeatable under the same conditions. and as a given rule, science must be unbiased by default. researchers must disclose where they got funding. if anyone is found lying about results, they're stripped of their status and barred from research for life. "scientists" trying to prove an agenda by skewing the results are not considered scientists. it's not a perfect system, but it's decent at catching most of the bad actors.

forensic science on the other hand is completely fake. there is no adherence to the regular scientific process. they're so deadset on the belief that their evidence is irrefutable proof of crime, but the reason for gathering evidence in the first place is incredibly biased by its conception. forensics science falls more under a conspiracy theory than actual science. rather than doing research and experiments and drawing a conclusion afterwards, forensics already has a conclusion in mind and will look for any data that aligns with that conclusion and ignore any data that doesn't. if you submitted that to a journal, you'd piss off every scientist in that field to the point where they'd wish to beat you to death with hammers for making a mockery of their profession. but because forensic science is backed by the police and prisons and is used for wrongful mass incarceration, its totally fine apparently. gotta make sure that the united states has the biggest prison population and the highest amount of prisoners per capita out of any country on earth. gotta make sure we maintain our popular of slaves because of that loophole in the 13th amendment. best country on earth, guys. trust. 🙃

[elektraking]

[cryptid-deity]

[Images description: a Twitter thread by Alisa Lynn Valdés, M.S., @ AlisaValdesRod1. It goes as follows:

“This quote, from the @ nytimes review of the Oppenheimer film: (quote) “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico” (end quote)... It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed. 1.

Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all of their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government. 2.

All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not. 3.

The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those people. 4.

For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family's land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too. 5.

She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won. 6.

The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state's human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly. 7.

But, no. We want more films about the "complex and troubled" "heroic" white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a "virtually unpopulated" place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as "nuanced." 8.

Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of Oppenheimer to be told. End.”

End description.]

[lostpuppyquasi]

Dressing someone up is the most intimate thing you can possibly do.

No, I'm not just saying this because I've been wearing the exact same style of outfit for the last decade

...okay that's definitely part of it.

But still.

Like, being put in a cute outfit; something you'd never wear in a million years; solely because your partner thought you'd look cute

Having makeup put on because they wanna see how beautiful you'd look

Having someone who loves you take care of this, sometimes stressful, part of your life

Never having to worry about your appearance, because they make you look perfect. Like their own personal dress up doll.

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

surgery recovery will have you thinking otherwise incoherent thoughts like "it's hard and scary to wiggle my toes. but it's worth it. i gotta be brave!"

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

you could set up really good surgery recovery just by recruiting enough girls with the right fetishes. intox play girls, go count out my next meds. omo girls, help me with peeing in this container. feet girlies, the surgeon says playing with my toes will help with blood flow & speed recovery but you must be gentle. and can someone ask the sense deprivation girl for a cold cloth if i promise to wear it over my eyes as well as forehead? the light hurts. ok who's next in line for under the blanket

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

and someone please tell the nursing kink girls that there's been a misunderstanding but they're welcome to stay if they want

[esthermika]

the plushie girls can also help! recovery can be lonely sometimes, so having a little plushie friend can help keep the rainclouds away!

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

THATS RIGHT 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

oh, and food kink girlies: i feel like i have never been this hungry in my fucking LIFE. please help

[innerchildabortionclinic]

actually no they were kinda right about the post being weird about trans men. it suggests that trans men benefit from the patriarchy (i realise the mouse bit is a joke but they’re using it as a metaphor).

I mean if they are perceived as men than in some ways they would? i'm a cis woman so I don't usually engage in these discussions but I did go to many different schools and have been friends with trans students so seen the ways trans men vs trans women are treated by peers. I am not saying trans men have no problems at all, but we do live in a patriarchal society and femininity is devalued. my younger brother is gay and that alone was enough for most of his friends to alienate him once he came out

[ferristriangle]

Also anon, no one has to imply anything. The wage gap between trans men and trans women is the exact same percentage as the gap between all men and all women.

You need to understand that in these conversations, "privilege" effectively means "not being the primary target of the systems of oppression that privilege one group over another and being able to navigate your life without those additional burdens."

It obviously doesn't feel like a privilege to suffer under transphobia, but trans men still have social and economic standing above the women in their social class (i.e. trans women). And this can be measured objectively in statistics like the wage gap.

[marxistlesbianist]

since you love these questions so much: will i be able to keep the purchasing power of my united states dollars under communism (i already know that banks aren’t going away lol why would anyone get rid of banks)

I'm presuming that you mean within the transitional state of Socialism? Under fully developed Communism we will be able to do away with banks and money—the problem as it stands is that banks and money solve pernicious problems which we haven't yet found another way of managing. But figuring out how to better manage these kinds of problems is the purpose of the transitional state.

Now, as regards your question: what purchasing power is it that you're concerned with keeping?

Is there a specific year you had in mind, or are you more concerned with making sure that the pace of gradual decline stays the same?

In all likelihood, we should expect the purchasing power of the $ to keep declining—slowly and then rapidly—as the as imperialist system it's historically been backed by continues to collapse!

Under these conditions, we can speculate that, far from keeping the $ purchasing power where it is, a primary task of the future revolutionary government will be to work on repairing the economy and elevating the currency—first to get us out of whatever mire the bourgeoisie winds up casting us into in their death spiral, then to cultivate national prosperity

[jingerpi]

forgive me for being confused but i’m just beginning to learn about communism and in principles of communism engels is talking about how capitalism was born from the industrial revolution so was the industrial revolution disastrous for the human race or wasn’t it

well capitalism has brought a lot of good with it. its better than feudalism in countless ways. it industrialized much of the world and has allowed technological advancements that didnt exist previously. capitalism has been a step forward in human history, but we cant stop walking either. a lot of people seem to argue about whether capitalism has good in it from an abstract perspective, is it inherently morally good or bad. and some people will say capitalism drives innovation, capitalism feeds the hungry etc etc. and people see this and are rightfully upset, they see all the bad in capitalism, all the suffering it causes, all the people it doesnt feed and all the backwards and damaging "innovation" being made, and says its bad actually. and in some ways its true, capitalism is not a very good system, but we have to view things historically. its not just "bad" in some abstract sense, it causes specific problems and harms that we can understand and analyze the causes of, and it doesn't undo the real good thats come from it either. these harms aren't something we should look at to have a moral position, the reason we should care about these issues so that we can fix them.

if we compare capitalism to socialist projects and communist theories, it sucks, it pales in comparison. and thats a big reason we need to push against capitalism to end it, because there are better options available. but if we compare it to feudalism, to slave society and preindustrial society, theres been a lot of wins too. the only reason we can even "do communism" is because of changes in production brought by industrial capital, going from relatively isolated production with handicrafts and relatively individual farming tools, to collectivized production in factories. its also allowed for better transit and globalization, the internet, etc... of course it also brought increases in imperialism and global exploitation, but we dont have to judge from this perspective that liberalism pushes us too. its not either morally good or morally wrong. its both morally good and morally bad in different contexts. it has good things and bad things within it, like everything, everything has good and bad within it, our goals in life should generally be to locate the good within everything and figure out how best to make it flourish. sometimes that means changing something fundamentally into another thing, like capitalism into socialism. sometimes it just means taking something and shifting it in amount, in quantity, from being mostly good to being even-more-mostly good.

im really rambling now but i genuinely think its so important to look at these things deeper than purely "good" and "bad", but rather everything containing elements of each within. If we look at the industrial revolution though, we wouldn't be here without it. its caused a lot of problems, but it also allows many potential solutions. its allowed us to produce enough food to feed everyone, only, we now have the new problem of distribution. its allowed us to make medicine and treatments for sick and disabled people, only its used to push people into exploitation. its not that these things are bad, they're wonderful and have so much potential for liberation in them, its just that we're not there yet. its like birth, it hurts like hell and is messy and some people might say it looks horrifying, but just because theres pains while its happening doesnt mean its a bad thing. its just not complete yet. thats like the industrial revolution. its one step in a painful process, but its one that brings us further forward

[breadnaan]

I want to add that what has helped me with understanding the historical place of capitalism is to think in terms of the primary contradiction that a society is presented with/challenged to overcome. Because what I often find to be the case is that the thing many people struggle with when it comes to understanding anti-capitalist critique is that the advertised benefits of what I like to call the "Brochure" or "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism does have some real academic merit and analysis to support its claims. So the sticking point becomes "Even if I accept the premise that capitalism has the flaws and deficiencies and disastrous consequences that you have convincingly proven to be the case, is there not an argument to be made that the benefits might outweigh the cost and that humanity is still truly better off because of the good that capitalism has achieved despite the horror? And is it worth the bloody conflict it would take to change that system if we lose out on the benefits of capitalism which is arguably responsible for propelling humanity into the modern era?" And I think getting caught in the weeds of that kind of morbid cost-benefit analysis is a trap. The key to demystifying this line of thinking is to point out that the analysis made in the "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism regarding its benefits is based on premises that are not universally true throughout history and throughout different periods of time/societal development. And that the challenges that the principles of capitalism are most well-suited at addressing is also not necessarily the most significant challenge that a society is facing at all points throughout history.

To put specifics to these claims, I would argue that capitalism is most well suited towards over-coming the challenge of scarcity, and in pre-industrial society overcoming scarcity was the most pressing challenge that society faced as a whole. So it could be argued that organizing economic matters around principles of competition was the most rational approach to meet this challenge with. If your primary concern is how to best allocate scarce resources where they will be used to the greatest effect, then you don't want to have all of your lumber being used by a craftsman who wastes an entire tree worth of wood to make a single chair and then discards the rest as scrap. You want a competitive setting where the producers who are wasteful and inefficient will go out of business, and where the producers who have the best processes succeed. Clearly our modern society is one which has long overcome the problem of scarcity, and most of what we feel as scarcity is artificially imposed by the economic system we live in. But even so, the conservative argument would be "How short-sighted and naive, the moment society has abundance you want to tear down the thing that created that abundance! The moment you dismantle capitalism because you feel jealous of the wealthy who were successful under capitalism is the moment that you will all become equally poor and start fighting against scarcity again because you slaughtered the golden goose which created that wealth!"

Which brings me to my other point, which is that the conditions which produced those benefits are also not constant over time. The "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism relies on the assumption that capitalist markets will have an abundance of competition, and it is this competition which acts as a self-regulating force (The Invisible Hand of the Market). And when I made the argument that "capitalism" was well suited to addressing the challenge of scarcity, it was this self-regulating mechanism that I was referring to. The idea that inefficient producers will fail on the market because producers who are more efficient will out-compete them. But the "Sales Pitch" assumes that abundant competition is the natural state of the market, when this could not be further from the truth! The entire point of a competition is to decide on winners and losers, and the entire point of this particular competition is that the losers will go out of business and get pushed out of the market while the winners are rewarded by being able to capture a larger market share. The natural endpoint of this process is that competition continues to shrink and shrink as wealth/market share continues to consolidate into fewer and fewer hands.

An argument could be made that despite this being the case, that in pre-industrial society the barrier to entry in most markets was so low that any producers that got pushed out of the market could easily be replaced by new producers. For most markets, the barrier to entry as a producer was the cost of a few hand tools and maybe a few years of apprenticeship to learn the trade, so you could reasonably conclude that it's possible that the rate at which producers went out of business and the rate at which new producers entered a market would cancel out at some natural and stable equilibrium point which could maintain a state of abundant competition indefinitely. But the barrier to entry as a producer is not a fixed quantity. As society and a market develops, the state of the art in a given market is constantly being pushed towards incorporating new technologies, and new labor-saving tools and machinery that increases the efficiency of those industries. And therefore, as a producer your barrier to entry to compete in any given market keeps getting higher and higher as time goes on and as being able to compete on the market requires a steeper and steeper investment in the specialized tools, machinery, facilities, and expertise that is required to produce at a level that is competitive with the rest of the market. So even if an equilibrium of indefinite and abundant market competition may have been possible in a pre-industrial society, the steady march forward of technology over time has made it clear that the assumption abundant competition is the natural state of the market is a relic of the distant past.

And without that abundant competition, the "Sales Pitch" version of capitalism has no leg to stand on to argue that it still beneficial overall to the whole of society to continuing organizing our economic lives in this way. The brochure simply asserts that competition is beneficial, without bothering to answer the question of whether the conditions to create/maintain an abundance of competition still exists today. The brochure wants you to ignore that the competition its analysis is based on is a thing of the distant past and instead asks you to judge capitalism on its past achievements regardless of whether those achievements could be replicated in the modern day. But the truth is that any benefits attributed to capitalism have always had a limited shelf-life simply because competition is self-annihilating, and the benefits of capitalism have long since expired.

This obsession with competition as an "Ideal" that we must live up to rather than it being an emergent property of a specific time, place, and level of social/technological development is what leads to solutions which are ultimately doomed to failure such as "trust-busting," and "small-business incentive programs." The logic goes that if capitalism requires an abundance of competition to function like it says in the brochure, then the solution must be to recreate a long past version of capitalist development and simply rewind the clock again every time wealth and market domination becomes too concentrated according to some arbitrary standard. But the thing is that large-scale enterprise is more successful than small business precisely because large scale enterprise is far more efficient and benefits from economies of scale. If your solution is to constantly undo the results of the competition that was designed to reward efficiency and punish waste, then the only thing this strategy could hope to accomplish is to constantly reset society back to a stage that was less productive and therefore increase everyone's toil only to end up back at the same logical endpoint again and again.

This is an ultimately reactionary strategy aimed at preserving the current state of things rather than an honest strategy that's based on a genuine belief in the merits of capitalism. And so tactics like trust-busting and supporting small/local business is treated as the most extreme remedy that is willing to be considered in mainstream political discourse, because any acknowledgement that capitalism is not the system which is best suited to resolving the challenges of modern society would serve to undermine the power and authority of the capitalist class who greatly benefits from maintaining the current system indefinitely.

Ultimately, it is Socialists and Communists who have the strongest claim to inherit the credit and strongest arguments for the benefits that are currently attributed to capitalism. It is often argued that Socialists and Communists want to undo all of the progress made by capitalism because they want to centralize industries and therefore lose all of the benefits that competition has provided. But it is not Communists who call for centralization as an axiom which must be adhered to, rather it is capitalism which naturally centralizes industry into large scale enterprises which enjoy immense competitive advantages due to economies of scale which are so effective that they render the vast majority of potential competitors obsolete and redundant! We have run the experiment of capitalism for a few hundred years and the result that this experiment has produced has shown us that the most efficient way to organize the labor of society is not through a bunch of small owners competing amongst each other indefinitely, but instead that it is far more efficient to have people organized into large scale enterprises where huge numbers of people are cooperating with each other to advance the interests of the enterprise as a whole. It is the liberal who wants to keep putting band-aids on this system and is content with breaking up a monopoly every now and then or approving a small business loan program here and there who is ignoring the lessons and insight that capitalism has produced. Because even though capitalism is based on principles of competition, capitalism has proven that the most successful modern industries are ones which have organized large numbers of people to work together cooperatively towards a common goal.

The liberal wants to keep un-making this logical end state of capitalism and continue to fruitlessly recreate the conditions for a competitive market over and over again and keep re-running the experiment endlessly until the end of time hoping they will get a different result each time. On the other hand, the communist understands, acknowledges, and accepts the lessons and results that capitalism has produced and recognizes the truth that the success of modern industry is rightfully attributed to the work of large organizations of workers unified around a shared goal/task, and not through an abundance of small producers competing among each other like the sales pitch for capitalism asserts. The communist and the liberal will both correctly identify that the primary challenge/contradiction that society is struggling with in the modern day is the tyranny of the public being under the thumb of a relatively small handful of capitalists who privately own the economy, and because of the steady accumulation of wealth, power, and authority into fewer and fewer hands the tyranny and exploitation of these petty tyrants of industry continues to intensify. And where the liberal solution is to keep trying half-hardheartedly recreate the competition that the brochure version of capitalism claims is supposed to be the force that regulates the negative consequences of capitalism, it is the communist who instead recognizes that it is the huge number of people working together in large scale enterprise that is responsible for any success that is attributed to modern day capitalism. And instead of constantly undoing that success to create artificial competition so that capitalism can keep limping along, communists instead argue that we should keep building on that success. That we should not keep tearing down large scale enterprise endlessly in a pointless attempt to replicate an era of capitalism from the distant past. Rather we must identify that because we know that our modern problems are a result of the tyranny of a system where our labor is organized by and for the class of capitalists who privately own the economy, that to solve those problems we must attack the very institution of private ownership which holds authority over our economic lives! The position that these petty tyrants of history have in society is effectively a political office which gives them the authority to set the goals and priorities of the working class according to their own interests. And the only thing that qualifies the capitalist to hold this office and exercise that authority over the huge swathes of the population which they are permitted to command is that they privately own the means through which society is able to be productive. And the amount of authority a capitalist wields over the working people in a given society is directly proportional to the amount of capital that they own. It is not the large scale organization of workers which is the problem, but the undemocratic way in which our labor is organized by and for unelected tyrants whose only qualification for office is the quantity of their wealth. And this results in a viscous cycle where the more wealth a capitalist can steal from the workers they employ, the greater the number of workers they will be able to have authority over.

There is no necessary function or role that a capitalist fills in the organization of the labor of society that could not be fulfilled just as competently by governing bodies that are elected democratically by the workers themselves and organized around advancing the collective interests of the workers rather than organizing our entire lives around satisfying the interests of an unelected tyrant whose only qualification for holding authority is that they privately own your place of employment. The communist is not arguing to destroy the benefits that capitalism has produced, rather the communist is who best understands how those benefits were created, and argues that those benefits should belong to the people whose labor actually created that wealth. That the organization, priorities, and goals that the labor of society is set in motion towards pursuing should be decided by the workers themselves.

All that is to say is that the question posed by anon is not one that should be answered by doing some kind of cost-benefit analysis of capitalism in order to arrive at some black-and-white determination of if capitalism is good on the whole or bad on the whole, and you are correct to warn against that kind of abstract moralizing. But also, it is important to recognize that even if you could drill down into the weeds and have the most morally nuanced understanding of time-periods such as the industrial revolution as is possible to have, ultimately arriving at a determination on whether the industrial revolution was more good than bad or more bad than good isn't a very fruitful line of inquiry regardless. I believe it is far more important to put those developments in the proper historical context, and understand that arriving at an answer on whether the industrial revolution was good overall or bad overall will not necessarily provide insight on what the best path forward is today. If the goal is to be persuasive, I don't think getting into the weeds of the good and bad of the industrial revolution is all that helpful. I think it's much more important to be able to go "Let's assume that the good outweighed the bad and that the upheaval of the industrial revolution can ultimately be 'justified.' Let's take a step back and look at what the primary challenges that society was tackling at that stage of societal development, how do they compare to the challenges we are faced with today, and are the strategy and principles used to address the challenges of the past still well suited to the challenges of today or is a new approach needed?"

And it is by walking through that process of historical materialism that we can arrive at and support the conclusion that organizing towards communism is a historically progressive act which is best tailored to the challenges and conditions of modern society, even if we concede/accept the premise that capitalism was a historically progressive force at a previous point in history.

That's my overly long ramble anyway lol.

[stillnaomi]

Ur Fascism isn't a useless essay but it can't be your basis for identifying fascism if you want to talk about it in any coherent way. Even by its own admission:

These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.

the "despotism" in question including communism, with the essay several times refering to the Stalin era USSR as "totalitarian"

Ur Fascism provides a list of cultural and ideological trends that may or may not be present in a fascist movement. what it leaves out completely is why fascism manages to rise to power at certain times, and that's found in common political and economic trends. fascist movements are heavily financed by big capital when it wants to break communist movements and organized labour, in order to maintain capitalist rule and restore profit rates

when you leave out the basis in capitalist crisis, you end up with people calling countries like the DPRK fascist, because you can match them against a few cultural or ideological traits

[jingerpi]

one of the points is literally

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. ...

[maidslime]

You know the phrase "you couldnt torture that out of me?" That's how I feel every time I see someone proudly mention they're a US military veteran. Like, that's embarrassing. That's pathetic. You're a proud murderer? You're a proud imperialist? A proud racist? Proud for helping perpetuate violence, terror and genocide around the world? You can't even say you deserve grace for being reformed or some shit cuz you aren't embarrassed by it enough to not give that information away for free. You're a loser.

[mousidy]

Sick of the TME view of gender as a radical performance of nonconformity rather than the existence of nonconformity and gender being radical through external force declaring it such. Wanting to be taboo vs the natural state of existence being seen as taboo.

yes!!!! too many of them act like it's this game of fucking with the status quo and playing with taboo that trans women have some kind of advantage in, because to be hated more is to Win, and they are Losing because their expressions of gender are seen as more acceptable

[mousidy]

if the thing you want out of gender is to be perceived as transgressive, then it's in your interests to continue to construct shock and awe around transgressive expressions of gender

rocky horror and much of mainstream drag serve this function. they cultivate and reproduce a sense of shock around gender nonconformity, gamifying the transgression of the boundaries of gender performance. but in order for that game to be played at all, those boundaries need to remain so they can be continually transgressed. trans women who are harmed by these boundaries and who want to truly do away with them, then, represent a threat to the game

[mousidy]

I don't want to revel in the perpetual Challenging of the boundaries of gender performance

if I challenge the boundaries on purpose it's because I want them to go away... but more often than not I am challenging them incidentally, just by being myself. and in real life, which isn't a game or a stage performance, this has incredibly horrible consequences for myself and my sisters

if the boundaries are challenged enough that they go away, and thus no more games or performances can be constructed around Challenging them, then... fucking good!!!!!!!!

[mousidy]

can you imagine a future where none of this is transgressive? where it's easy and comfortable to transition because it transgresses no boundaries? a future where people treat all forms of expression and transition as normal? where there's no more fun to be had by shocking people who hold backward views, because those backward views are things of the past? do you want this future like I do?

[villainessbian]

Can you help me understand the whole thing around why transandrophobia is such a debated topic and why every time i find a post that's focused on trans men it's written by someone who thinks transmisogyny doesn't exist

like i want so badly to find posts about trans men and then the blog is like "trans women aren't welcome in this space" and it makes me nauseous.

The very short TL;DR is: a small subset of trans men are trying to resurrect misandry theory.

The longer explanation is, trans men face transphobia, which is absolutely vile, and are left out of many talks that focus on trans women (because the global hate wave focuses on trans women) - as well as challenges for accessing resources such as HRT, because testosterone can be more restricted than estradiol and progesterone as a drug.

That's all trans men. But far from all trans men believe in transmisandry/transandrophobia, so what gives?

Enter transmisogyny. It's the intersection (interplay of two different sociological oppressions) of misogyny and transphobia: what trans women face when a focus is made on "defending women" by banning trans women, or treating any woman who doesn't pass as "natural-born" as a child molester - the list is long and not exactly the point.

A small subset of trans men who, regardless of when their gender revealed itself to them, were raised in the cultural reinforcement of "I am considered Unproblematic because of my sex" now have to deal with

a type of gender-based oppression they are not the target of

a type of misogyny they are in the oppressor class of

a group of people who will say that out loud

and they cannot handle it at all. It's entitlement: how dare someone tell them to not oppress others? That they are privileged, when they are the oppressed (and they are: by transphobia - it just doesn't make them incapable of propagating oppression on others).

So two parallel things happen:

A, undermine the analysis of transmisogyny. "Well, when people are transphobic they see me as a woman, so I am the one experiencing misogyny, so transmisogyny is about me first!"

B, make it an oppositional sexism thing (the gender-essentialist belief that any gender-specific issue or experience finds its mirror opposite): transmisandry (later renamed "transandrophobia" for the optics, by someone who later came out as proud detransitioner, twerf, and... nazi. that's A Lot to digest)

Then come a few different justifications for it, that the defenders of the concept will switch back and forth between so that no debunking can be met with good faith:

it's the intersection of androphobia/misandry and transphobia!

oh, androphobia/misandry doesn't exist and can't intersect - well I never claimed that it did, it's just transphobia directed at trans men!

oh, that's "just transphobia" - well how dare you try to prevent trans men from talking about their own unique form of oppression?

(there are a couple other lines, but really, these are the least insulting, and the switcheroo is just from "it's intersectionalism" to "it's just specificity" to "it's a unique form oppression" and when you ask what makes it a unique form, go back to line 1)

If it were just these dialogue trees, it would be obnoxious but toothless. The bigger problem is that this is rooted in misogynist and especially transmisogynist radicalisation.

Think of your reaction if someone barged in saying "#NotAllMen, get rid of feminazis, shut up about misogyny you cunts misandry is a major problem" -- now add "trans" in front of it and you get men who assume they're the "not" of #NotAllMen, call transfeminists "trans radfems" to try and make it sound like "TERFs," and oppose anyone who discusses transmisogyny with an appeal to "transandrophobia."

And getting worse. And getting worse. And. Getting. Worse.

Then you check on the groups and you see there are known TWERFS in the middle. There are open detransitioners. They start finding it weird how they really have to side with TWERFs to fight evil trannies, and... the move is pretty much done at this point. Radicalisation complete if it gets there.

It's transmisogyny all the way down, and it's not subtle.

I want it to be very clear: trans men have it tough. A small subgroup of them is pretending to speak for them all and reviving Gamergate-era MRA bullshit. Spend a few minutes on the big "FTM" tumblr community and you'll see nothing but fine folks who are not repeating that bullshit. Last time I went there I saw one guy try to start shit and the other trans men on there told him to stuff it.

But the issue persists because the same issue as with cis men exists: for every man who disseminates that manosphere drivel, there is one to fight it, two to listen, and ten who passively accept it without reacting.

[villainessbian]

#this is well put although i’d be hesitant to include the bit about how they’re raised lest you invoke the idea of (fe)male socialization

Thank you; and while I get the hesitation it's different to "socialisation" which is very touchy when it comes to trans people and honestly gender in general.

It is mostly the first steps in political self-definition that will make it. The bioessentialist beliefs take root around that point, where pop feminism teaches one to interiorise the lesson that they are the Victim Sex and that all the Gender Problems come from the Other Sex. It breeds entitlement and self-exceptionalist thought.

Note that this doesn't have to be the same MRA bullshit to happen:

I've had someone (non-binary, she/they/he but if I used anything else than "she" I got a Look, transmasc), tell me that there is something specific to girls and that nothing comes close to in being sexualised from a young age. Then she said how she could "always tell" and tried to explain how neocunts differ from "real- uh, natal vaginas." Poorly, because the differences were very wrong.

That person called herself a man. When I said we weren't having sex because I'm only into women, she said I just said something cruel because she's also a woman. I said I'm not into men. She said I made her dysphoric and it's not what she is.

And that's when I understood that literally nothing she said about gender would be rooted in anything else than a zealous belief of birth-right to truth. What is convenient has to be true from gendered experiences, what doesn't go her way is Problematic for gender reasons, what she assumes is Just How Sex And Gender Work.

Now I'm not saying this is representative, that's just one person. But it is illustrative. That belief exists. It comes from entitlement to a feminism that is about you, regardless of your actual gender or relationship to it socially.

[segamascott]

My conspiracy theory: ozempic is marketed by religious fanatics who want to stop normal people from jacking it 6 times a day to giant butts.

better conspiracy theory skinny and thick have fluctuated between which has more social capital for hundred and hundreds of years and it's because as soon as the beauty standard becomes attainable to the poor the rich flip it back because the unattainability is the point

[mynorthernattitude]

"listen to your body"

my body: go get a cinnamon roll the size of a tire

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Any Anglo LGBTQ publication that publishes clickbait traumaporn about homo/transphobia in non-Western countries, especially Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, without mentioning the role European/American colonizers and capitalists and evangelicals played and continue to play in installing those bigotries is doing de facto imperialism for free

[takashi0]

that sure is a word salad you just put on display there

[dashaibo]

Please explain to me how hardcore radical Islam or the Russian Orthodox Church are the fault of Western Europe.

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

"Hardcore Radical Islam" - the US overthrew secular, progressive, elected governments in Iran and Afghanistan in the 20th century in the name of resource theft and stopping socialism. The mujahideen, which later formed the basis of Taliban, was directly armed and funded by the US to fight against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989. The CIA and US State Dept. directly funded other fundamentalist wahabbi groups during the Cold War as a way to combat secular socialism and communism. The US is currently funding and arming extremist Islamist groups in Syria as well, such as the al-Nusra Front and Tahrir al-Sham. Saudi Arabia, one of the United States' biggest allies in the Middle East which currently enjoys the generous patronage of the US arms and petrochemical industries and hasn't had a single sanction placed on it in the name of "democracy" despite literally being an absolute monarchy, also spends exorbitant sums to propagate fundamentalist salafist interpretations of Islam, is one of the biggest financial supporters of al Qaeda, and was literally complicit in 9/11. Additionally, the destabilization of Iraq and Syria through U.S. interventions laid the groundwork for the rise of ISIS, which is essentially a U.S. asset by keeping swathes of the Middle East destabilized and staging terrorist attacks that create the justification for further U.S. military presence in the region.

Russian Orthodox Church - the fall of communism in Russia and other Eastern European states essentially devoured the social fabric of those countries and left millions of people to fester in abject misery, crime, corruption and poverty. The Orthodox Church and other religious organizations which had previously been kept in check by the secular socialist governments filled the void left by the collapse of virtually every social safety net that existed during communist rule. The current oligarch-nationalist-Orthodox alliance that rules Russia was directly set up by the U.S. through interference in the 1996 Russian elections to ensure Boris Yeltsin would be elected president over the Communist Party candidate; Yeltsin would later essentially handpick Putin as his successor. A similar pattern can be seen in other former Eastern bloc countries, such as Poland, where the U.S. supported the right-wing, strongly Catholic trade union Solidarity in the 80s, which would later form the basis for Poland's current far right, homophobic ruling party Law and Justice, and Hungary, where the U.S. supported the "liberal" student organization Fidesz, which is today Viktor Orban's fascist anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant ruling party.

[seasonoftowers]

Anti-LGBT movement in Romania is literally founded by neoprotestant USA religious folks tho. The Romanian Orthodox church may be homophobic AF, but it's a lazy, satiated wolf most of the time. The neoprotestants organize tho

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Entire swathes of neocolonized territory in Eastern Europe, Asia, LatAm and especially Africa have essentially become playgrounds for American "evangelicals" (read: theocratic fascists) to export their venomously anti-LGBT, anti-feminist "movements" after they fail in the States. They take their anger at being made irrelevant and impotent in the imperial core out on queer people, women and religious minorities in the periphery and Global South. Supremely evil shit.