[cipheramnesia]

I keep thinking - that since the data on which people took the transphobe Harry Potter Max money is pretty complete, static, and public. And that the data on many other motion picture media is also public - both through IMDB. And JoaRo is very public about working against trans rights, to the point that it comes up in cast interviews, she talks about it everywhere. And we've even cases where people will drop out of something for ethical reasons, and the actors and many others involved with JKR before the went nuclear transphobe have publicly disowned her and her creations. So we know it's reasonable and possible to take an ethical stance after the fact. But also - it's after the fact now, for anyone still on board.

I would love some kind of app or browser extension that would let me put the complete cast and crew imdb page in, and it would run like a bulk "find on page" search to tell me whether anyone in Max Harry is in that particular project, and I could avoid anything that had anyone involved in it just forever. From producer all the way to catering. No part too big, no part too small, a permanent personal blacklist for the rest of the lives of anyone on that series. Not that I'm out here making it happen, just spitballing.

John Lithgow articulated it very clearly when he said he took a job in the HPO show, effectively, to have a secure income for awhile and that was more important than the ethics of Joan's politics, to him. Personally, I think it's just a shame he's so old that having people skip everything he makes for the rest of his life won't measurably alter his priorities, but it might bother other cast members. It might really be a big bother knowing anyone who popped in for a bit part, for wardrobe, for lighting or sound on a Harry P Product, becomes a financial liability for every other project in television or movies or even youtube since those things have IMDB now. It's probably kind of dumb and petty, but I sincerely would like to avoid everyone involved just. Forever. I'm older, I can tough out a multiple decade boycott I think.

[rainbow-demoness]

Kind of like Shinigami Eyes except, like, not That?

[cipheramnesia]

The major difference I think is that Shinigami Eyes was meant kind of like a discovery tool - a way to out transphobes flying under the radar one way or another. When it was maintained, it required a combination of crowdsourcing the data (individuals had to determine what behavior was transphobic) and moderator review (basically a second set of eyes in case it was being abused). It's been abandoned for awhile, and now for all purposes runs mostly on automatic which generally can be and has been abused.

On the other hand, a tool of this type is for boycotting. The data for a television series is relatively stable. While some crew changes, a large amount of the crew is stable for the length of a season. Basing it on a resource like imdb is much more hard data than soft, because imdb's main role is not strictly to be an encyclopedia but also to be a kind of resume. People working in motion picture media add and maintain their own history because it serves as a means to be discovered for new projects - in addtion to its other means of data gathering. Especially for a UK and USA series, the data set of "worked on a JKR project" is as reliable as possible. While having regular updates could be useful, the fact that the entire crew of these projects has to be accurate and public means the initial data is good qualitative data. There is not much wiggle room (it's never zero but not much) for "did you take JKRs trans-blood money to provide services for her trans genocide project."

As a single issue boycott tool with hard data, it cuts through most of the uncertainty around individual politics. It openly does not concern itself with other stances of the people involved, it does imply it is a comprehensive list of transphobes, or even extend beyond that item. It's just this project for this person paid these people. And, again, to reiterate, it would have been very difficult to remain unaware of the anti-trans politics around Joan and her products in the lead-up to and debut of the series. Not impossible, but it's a different world from the first HP book launch, first movie launch and so forth. Trans rights can't be called an echo chamber or niche interests in a sincere way.

Lastly, and significantly, a boycott app of this nature would also produce hard data. That is to say, its total downloads and potential total number of references (unsure if that's possible) can be public, which means anyone in motion pictures can look at the figures and put that number into potential revenue loss if they hire a JoRo alum. And if there’s one thing business guys hate, it's revenue loss. Having a tangible number like that makes a tool of this type potentially highly effective.

So, while similar in outcome, I think there are some essential details of this sort of program which are an improvement and also materially actionable beyond a boycott alone.

[tearlessrain]

most “protect the children” campaigns come with the implication that what’s best for children is 1950s white christian nuclear families and rigid adherence to the status quo, and having been a children I can definitively say that is very very incorrect

[gaybeatles]

revealing to someone that marvel was funded by the us military and that it’s literal propaganda and watching them genuinely be shocked

[stillnaomi]

unless you want to teach small kids about a laundry list of sex acts, they're not going to even recognise many acts of CSA as sexual in nature. instead, we need to have children who are raised with an expectation of bodily autonomy and who feel comfortable complaining when they're made or asked to do things they don't feel comfortable with. we need children to have the expectation that those complaints will be taken seriously and that they'll receive backup to make sure situations like that don't continue. if their desires for bodily autonomy are consistently ignored, how can we expect them to speak out when something confusing and uncomfortable happens with their parent, cousin, or babysitter? we've already taught them that what they feel comfortable with doesn't matter

[insomnianightss]

Amazing things happening on Instagram today

[probuccalfat]

i think she nailed it with hot girl summer and we don’t need to improve upon what’s already doing it big and well

[probuccalfat]

hot girl summer covers everything like you can be any kind of hot you can be any kind of girl matter of fact it doesn’t matter you don’t even have to be a girl

[theehorsepusssy]

[janmisali]

here's another idea for a poll! I think this will have some interesting results. this sentence is here to pad out this paragraph so people who don't read posts will be more likely to accidentally miss these instructions. if you're reading this, please select option eleven. here's another sentence to make this block of text look longer. anyway here's my fun poll idea!

try to create a normal (bell curve) distribution

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Remaining time: 6 days 5 hours

[goldensunset]

hate when people think the only archetype possible for a male sidekick to a female protagonist is a soft boi and/or himbo. like the implication there is that the only reason a man would ever defer to a woman’s authority is if he was a bumbling idiot. love male supporting characters who are smart and strong and confident and can step up when necessary but still kind and humble enough to let someone else take the lead most of the time

[goldensunset]

ok another good point here

[biracy]

Basically I think a lot of White ppl think the antithesis to racism is "Black people are inherently Cool, White people are inherently Lame" and it's just very hard to convince them that this is also extremely racist lmfao

[biracy]

It's the combination of "seeing a racialized group as Fundamentally Inherently Good is still dehumanizing and you aren't seeing them as people" and "your self-flagellating White guilt is extremely annoying for the people of color around you to deal with"

[freakoutgirl]

how to do things that everyone else seems to do no problem

[huariqueje]

Book Club , Unknown - Chloe Chlumecky , 2023

Canadian , b. 1999 -

Oil on canvas , 20 x 20 in.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

"The middle class is not our enemy" yeah and the people you need to be convincing of that is the fucking middle class.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Sorry I fucking hate these condescending ass posts. How dare the poor get uppity at people. Meanwhile half of the middle class is voting to eradicate homeless people off the streets.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

They're okaying means testing because of racism and are fine with anti-homeless architecture because homeless people are dirty and scary and want candidates who are "tough on crime" I really do mean it. The people you need to convince of that are the middle class.

[stjohnstarling]

You used to log onto the internet and find out it was peanut butter jelly time. Not any more.

[revizyonist]

med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid 😒" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times

[revizyonist]

"Before surgery, your body’s reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If there’s food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. That’s called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you

[ancelineonline]

I have four kids. I’ve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

I’m not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.

[bowditch]

i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!

[arctic-turtle-cassiopeia]

Reblogging to save a life and teach medical professionals basic communication skills

[autogynophelia]

Before coming out I used to work at a mental health crisis line. There were so many problems with this place, that I will probably talk about some other time, but generally stemming from issues relating to social class and demographics more broadly.

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

And now many years later I often see queer groups near me directing people to this crisis hotline in case of emergency, and I always have to make a fuss to get them to remove it as a categorically non-safe institution. But it's so well-known and respected where I live (by people who have never used it, but they are typically the ones in positions of power ofc) that it can be really hard to get people to believe it is actually that bad.

[thefairytaler]

So as an artist who has been known to play a few instruments, I've been thinking about this recent thing radfems are doing, where they’ve decided, seemingly out of nowhere, to just wildly shit on ukulele music. And not just the music, but to brand it as “cringe transmasc music.”

And look, even if that wasn’t deeply racist, it would still be stupid. And wrong. But the fact is…

it is deeply racist.

The ukulele is a Hawai'ian instrument, descended from the machete de braga, a small Portuguese guitar brought to Hawai‘i in the late 1800s by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira. Hawaiian luthiers adapted and reimagined it into what became the ukulele. It’s a cultural symbol with a history of colonization, cultural appropriation, and resilience, born from the blending of immigrant traditions with Native Hawaiian artistry.

When you reduce it to some internet stereotype, you’re not just making a dumb music take, although you are also doing that, more importantly you’re participating in the long tradition of white mainland culture flattening and mocking Indigenous Hawai'ian traditions for sport.

It’s also worth noting that the ukulele’s popularity didn’t explode because it’s “quirky” or “internet twee”, it’s because it’s approachable. The instrument is physically small, light, and low-tension compared to guitars or violins. You don’t need huge hand strength to fret it, the (usually) nylon strings are soft, and it can be tuned in a way that’s forgiving for beginners. That makes it accessible to disabled musicians, kids, elders, and anyone without the privilege of formal music education. You can teach yourself entirely off the internet or even practice alone if you're dedicated.

I say this as someone who used to play violin and piano but now plays ukulele and ocarina because those are instruments my bad back and hand tremor will actually allow me to enjoy.

My own ukulele was an investment, imported from Hawai‘i, made of mango wood, rosewood, and bull bone. It’s a gorgeous instrument, it’s one of the most expensive things I own (a very spicy $500), and I cherish it deeply.

But here’s the thing: you don’t need a $500 ukulele to make beautiful music. You can get a perfectly playable one for cheap, especially secondhand.

That means this is an instrument that’s accessible to poor and working-class people, including those from marginalized communities who often don’t get the same access to “prestigious” music education or expensive instruments or expensive equipment and programs to make music digitally.

So when I hear someone mocking “cringe transmasc ukulele music,” here’s what I know immediately:

They’re definitely not an artist making art with any real value

They’re transphobic toward trans men and likely nonbinary people too

They’re ableist

They’re racist

They’re classist

And if someone is happy being a mediocre artist who’s also multiple kinds of bigoted, that’s their prerogative, but I’m not going to respect their opinion on art, or trans people, or disabled people, or Indigenous people, or poor people.

I genuinely don’t have much more to say. That’s it.

You make fun of ukuleles like it’s an aesthetic crime instead of a living piece of Hawai'ian culture and a vitally accessible instrument for marginalized folks, you’ve told me exactly who you are.

And I believe you.

[baroquepopcorn]

It isn’t racist to make fun of trans men plying ukeleles

It’s transphobic

Making fun of an instrument, no matter what culture it is from, is not inherently racist

It is racist when it is disparaging to people from that culture specifically

If the TERFs are making fun of Hawaiian people specifically, then they’re racist

But if they’re just making fun of trans men, then that doesn’t need to have anything to do with Hawaiian people even if it is about ukeleles

The context of the ukulele has been divorced from, and has almost nothing to do with Hawaiian people when we are talking about trans men playing them on the internet

The terfs are not thinking about Hawaiian people, they are thinking about trans men

An issue can be about One issue. If you need to connect it to issues which it has a weaker connection to, you are implying that your case is weak. It isn’t

It’s wrong to make fun of trans men playing ukeleles like the TERFs do because it dips into transphobic and infantilizing tropes, and more generally, online cruelty degrades our empathy and makes the online and offline world a crueler more judgemental place

It doesn’t need to be about other issues and it is wrong to make up connections to other issues that aren’t there. It is distracting and weakening your case

That is just bad discourse

[hyperlexichypatia]

The context of the ukulele has been divorced from, and has almost nothing to do with Hawaiian people when we are talking about trans men playing them on the internet The terfs are not thinking about Hawaiian people, they are thinking about trans men

Yes.... that is.... that is the problem.... that is the problem being pointed out by OP...

"Transmasc people are bad musicians who play silly instruments" is transphobic (specifically transandrophobic, and, side note to the wing of Tumblr who adamantly insist that transandrophobia doesn't exist: Then why are there negative stereotypes specifically about transmasc people? The existence of negative stereotypes about a demographic proves the existence of prejudice against that demographic!).

"Ukuleles are silly instruments for bad musicians" is racist against Hawai'ian people.

"Transmasc people are bad musicians who play ukulele, a silly instrument for bad musicians" is, therefore, transphobic/transandrophobic and also racist.