aussie l non binary l aro ace l white l he/they pronouns fandomstuff and pretty much anything else under the sun! Happy to chat! old enough to know not to put my age in my bio
i hate that nonbinary people can't be, like, nonbinary.
whatever we do, we can't win. we can't be seen as actually nonbinary. people binarize us and often mock us or get aggressive or dismiss and ignore our nonbinaryhood or something else.
if we don't medically transition, we are "just cis trenders."
if we do medically transition, we are "just [binary trans] eggs."
we are "technically transmasc or transfem anyways" if we don't use these terms.
we are lumped together with binary trans men and trans women if we do use these terms. our nonbinaryhood is ignored or seen as some kind of "gender-lite."
we are aggressively pressured to disclose if we're AFAB or AMAB, TMA or TME, transmasc or transfem, "boy nonbinary" or "girl nonbinary." and if we refuse to answer, people get double mad at us and pick something for us anyways.
if we show the slightest hint of something that could be interpreted as binary gendered, we are immediately binarised.
if we put a lot of effort into looking the most ambiguous or androgynous or neutral, people still try to find something. and they become aggressive. people often EXPLODE [PT: explode] when they can't gender someone by glance.
our ways of expression are constantly mocked and ignored (like neopronouns, nonbinary-centering labels for gender and orientation, basically all things that are associated with nonbinary people).
but if we choose more typical ways of expression (for example, use "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns), people use it to ignore and dismiss our nonbinaryhood.
I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.
America instills violence in men from a young age.
It’s irrefutable that men’s present anger is lacking in sufficient specificity and articulation. As a feminist movement, this should not be alien to us. There was a time, more than half a century ago, when women’s anger and frustration were equally inarticulate. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in search of illuminating what she deemed to be “the problem that has no name,” the problem that “lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women … a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning.” Her words from the ’60s still ring true today:
"It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough."
Might we now, 60 years later, say the same thing of men?
Without a movement to teach them or an analysis to guide them, their present anger lacks the sort of precision that could help us feel comfortable with it. It’s anger that stems from abstract knowledge, a gut feeling that injustice is being done: words on the tip of the tongue, but never quite spoken. Men don’t know exactly what the injustice is, but they perceive it nonetheless. Something is off. A stench without cause. An odor emanating from somewhere.
Here’s the thing: paucity of specificity and inadequate articulation do not render men’s current frustration illegitimate; if anything, they bolster the case for further investigation and lay bare the urgency of this historical moment. It’s time we entertain the idea that men might be picking up on something real. There has been hypocrisy, and it is worth being angry about.
Men look at the feminist movement and—subconsciously, I think—ask themselves: What is feminism doing to protect me? I need protection, too, you know.
In general, we dismiss this feeling. Protect you? After what you’ve spent centuries doing to us? Protect yourself, asshole.
Though I understand where it comes from, I’m afraid this sort of terse reaction stops us from asking the important questions. Namely: If we say we abhor the violence of men and want it to cease, what are we doing to stop boys from being recruited into it?
We have not embodied gender equality sufficiently. As a feminist movement, we have worked tirelessly to protect women and girls from the violence that is all too prevalent in their lives but have said next to nothing about the violence facing men and boys. We have fought tooth and nail against institutions that predominantly brutalize women but have done little to combat the institutions—institutions like military bases, prisons, and police training facilities—that so often brutalize men, too. I think that’s in part because men operate (and benefit from) these institutions, but that’s no reason to ignore them. Just because a man is in charge, that doesn’t mean the institution is safe for other men. Men and boys need protection from the violence of powerful men every bit as much as women and girls do. Powerful men—men who are used to enacting violence with impunity—are a threat to us all.
What’s worse, we seem to have decried men’s anger wholesale. We have labeled angry men as bad men and, in so doing, have lost vital nuance. Because they cannot articulate it to us in sufficient language—because they have yet to locate the precise source of the stench—we have denied any possibility that the anger men feel might be righteous.
Here’s the thing: men should be angry, and their anger is righteous, albeit misplaced. If the culture that raised you sees you as little more than a future agent of military, police, or corporate violence, it would be strange for you not to be angry. Men have been ignored. They have been brutalized. They have been told that it is their job to do the policing and soldiering and brutalizing on behalf of us all. They have endured grave gender-based violence, and rather than help them locate it, we’ve mostly told them they’re making the whole thing up. [...]
What if we encouraged men to trust their noses instead of instructing them to relinquish their frustration? What if, instead of spending energy denying that something is amiss, we dedicate our energy to affirming that something is off and join men as they search for the source of the stench? What if we say to men, “We agree. Something isn’t right. Your body and psyche are being exploited to nefarious ends. You were groomed unfairly,” and then rage and scream and investigate alongside them?
This is where I am flummoxed and exhausted by contemporary popular feminism, if only because it is so obvious. We will volunteer for hours outside an abortion clinic, helping to protect women who are entering from being harassed. We do so because it is both vital and necessary. We do so because we believe in a world where people have agency over their own bodies. But we do next to nothing about military recruitment centers or police academies, institutions whose primary job is to instill violence in men—to take their bodies and their minds and exploit them for the violent ends of the ruling class.
Can we stop scratching our heads and pretending we do not know how America became a nation of such violence? Can we stop acting surprised when, after raising our boys as child soldiers, their violence turns back against us? Can we own up to the truth: that we cannot ask boys to conceptualize ruthlessly killing faraway brown people, then reasonably expect them to turn it off when they come home? That we cannot raise boys to fantasize about guns and war throughout their childhood, then act surprised when they shoot up a school? That we cannot raise our boys to be fine with abusing Afghani prisoners, then expect them not to abuse us, too?
As a feminist movement, it’s high time we pick a lane. It’s time we take a stand with veterans and against the military. It’s time we declare that we’re no longer OK living in a violent world. We must decide that the dignity and bodily autonomy of men and boys matter to us enough to fight for them. We must rage against the myriad institutions that insist on making murderers out of our little boys. As a feminist movement, we must categorically decry war, in all its forms.
This article is by Jacob Tobia (they/them), a genderqueer person, and is an excerpt from their book Before They Were Men.
I feel very similarly to Jacob. While people will bring up "feminism helps men too!" as a comeback when relevant, on a large scare (especially with regards to pop feminism, which is a loose and largely useless combination of cultural radical feminism and liberal capitalist feminism), feminism has failed to actually, materially prove this. We have a massive messaging issue, and the failures of feminism for men, all trans people, and women are all interconnected, as are the failures of feminism to be critical of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. It's not that people haven't been talking about these issues - we have for decades - but that hasn't solved anything.
We need to make men's issues feminist issues in the minds of every person who knows about feminism. Feminists need to be the loudest and most passionate on framing war as gendered-based violence for those classed as men, on the lack of awareness for perceived-male victims of sexual violence, particularly forced-to-penetrate rape, on how the patriarchal weaponizes stereotypes of men as having an innate inclination towards physical and sexual violence to dehumanize men of color and all trans and gender non-conforming people.
One goal we should have for feminism, is that the average teenage boy has, on some level, an awareness that feminism is fighting for him. Many teenage girls already have that awareness - even if the are anti-feminist, they still have a sense feminism purports to be fighting on their behalf, for issues that concern them. Whereas many teenage boys - even if they are pro-feminist - do not necessarily view feminism as for them, they see it as for women, and they wish to support women. Meanwhile, this harms all trans and gender non-conforming people, whose place in feminism has always been tenuous and reliant on convincing cis women that we are "just like them" and ignoring the ways that feminism has always been built on profoundly cissexist beliefs and principles. All of this must change for collective liberation to be possible, on a gendered level and a total civilizational level.
as much as everyone loves "the power of love won't save us, we need the power of incredible violence" i'm sorry to rain on your parade but we've actually tried that about ten million times as a species, and you'll be shocked to hear the power of incredible violence, without the power of love behind it, is just brutality. the power of incredible violence has been ruling (various parts of, and then the entire) world for the past 5,000 years. ours is not that damn special.
like yes use that gun you found but WHY are you using it? on who are you using it? what would make you stop using it? is your goal to live in a world where every problem is solved by violence, or is your goal to do the violence necessary to live in a world where that necessity is unthinkable?
all the rights that come with marriage you should be able to have without marriage btw. you should be able to designate a person who can visit you in the hospital regardless of your relationship to that person.
the amount of leftists who uncritically support the DSM-5—wielding it online in battles against random individuals who might be “faking” a disorder—boggles my fucking mind. you guys realize that the DSM-5 isn’t the only diagnostic manual on the planet, right? you realize that we place it at the top of the global hierarchy because it’s american, right? has it occurred to you that the APA shouldn’t have so much authority over what counts as a “real” mental illness? has it occurred to you that perhaps there are other diagnostic manuals? in fact, there are dimensional models that don’t rely on sorting individuals into “disorder/no disorder” boxes in the first place. food for thought, lmao
I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things
my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say
Ahhhh, nothing quite like introducing an American to the Northern Territory’s “C U in the N T” tourism marketing campaign and watching their face engage in a slapdash performance of every emotion known to man in the span of about three seconds
to be clear you are fifteen thousand generations removed from the invention of stone tools. not from the end of stone tools. modern humans are still using stone tools.
snowghoul
origamiaround
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turnnoffyourmind
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