imo the term "walkable" in "walkable cities" should be understood to mean "wheelchair accessible" as well, not just literally "possible to walk in". the act of walking in a city doesn't automatically make it walkable
The older I get and the worse my heat tolerance gets, the more I realize nothing is truly accessibly walkable in severe heat/cold/weather. Regular, fast public transit with sheltered seating and maybe even someday climate control, has to be a thing.
If you're designing a city, or evaluating how successful you're being, your walkable city should be accessible to people who can't walk far, to people who need level access, to people who can't stand for long, to nursing parents, to people who need bathrooms etc etc.
However I think "walkable city" is used in a specific way to mean "accessible primarily by pedestrian traffic rather than car traffic", and I think it still makes to compare the layout of a city with bad accessibility that's pedestrian-focused to a city with bad accessibility that's vehicle-focused.
[at unicorn fuck club]
Larry Correia: see, the problem is that GRR Martin didn't finish Game of Thrones
Correia: now publishers refuse to take a chance on multi-book epic fantasy series
Correia: perhaps GRR should have thought about how that would affect me
Correia: the protagonist of reality
Correia: i mean, really
Correia: can you think of any other possible reason that publishers wouldn't be champing at the bit for my 12 part epic fantasy saga The Monster Shooter Chronicles: A Tale of Total Gun Accuracy
Correia: i mean, the guns in it are SO accurate
Correia: that's what makes good literature!
GRR Martin: what's all this now?
JRR Tolkien: larry correia says you ruined epic fantasy
Martin: ha ha yeah probably
Martin: who's larry correia
Tolkien: oh you know, the sad puppy guy
Correia: I'm not just the sad puppy guy!!! i'm a legitimate writer!
Correia: no one writes epic fantasy with 100% accurate to reality gun descriptions like me!
Correia: publishers should be beating down my door!
Correia: this is because of woke!
Martin: wait aren't you the guy that got owned by chuck tingle
Correia: [sputtering] i i i
Correia: NO
Correia: chuck tingle did not own me!
Martin: yeah i'm pretty sure he did
Martin: now that was some classy shit
Tolkien: well larry i guess we should thank you for chuck tingle's hugo win
Correia: what? no! shut up!
Martin: actually jrrt i think there's someone more responsible for chuck tingle's win
Martin: and that's chuck tingle
Tolkien: true, true
Correia: stahp it!! i hate you all!
Chuck Tingle: hello chums did someone call for chuck tingle, totally normal guy?
Tingle: i just stopped in to remind everyone that love is real and that, in this unfeeling world, nothing is as powerful as human connection
Martin: yeah its too bad you never got that hugo, pal
Martin: i would have loved the chance to mispronounce your name
Martin: ha ha ha!
Correia: why you---!
Correia: hold me back!
Martin: no don't hold him back
Martin: let him come at me
Correia:
Martin: [cracking neck] let's see what you got
Correia:
Martin: what's the matter, kid?
Martin: your true to life gun descriptions won't help you now
Larry Correia: George RR Martin must go!
GRR Martin: who must go?
Correia:
Martin: ha ha ha!
You spend decades thinking on how to destroy capitalism, how to fight Goliath as David. How even scratching the monster in the context of national liberation will be a nightmare. And then Goliath procedes to blind himself, cover himself in gasoline and set himself on fire
The adhd fairies are letting me do it now so let’s go!
tl;dr No one definitive answer, it depends on the denomination and it also depends on how people see transness. The three most common answers are
- “It depends on the birthing parent, not the parent’s gender”
- “Any child with at least one Jewish parent is Jewish”
- “Any child with at least one Jewish parent is Jewish if they were raised Jewish”
But there’s more to it; if you’re interested it’s under the cut.
Okay so first the background.
Firstly, matrilineal descent is a feature of Rabbinic Judaism, the much larger supersect of Judaism. The smaller sect, the Karaite Jews, don’t follow the Talmud and later works of Jewish law, having a more streamlined tradition of interpretation of Torah that aims to be as close to the Torah text as possible. Karaites use patrilineal descent. I’m not sure how they’d answer this question, so I’ll just focus of Rabbinic Judaism, but I felt it bore mentioning.
Also, this rest of this post will be about Judaism in the United States, because that’s what I know enough about to answer.
So, traditionally in Rabbinic Judaism, Jewishness passes through the mother, for a few reasons. The two I’ve heard are because you don’t definitively know who the father is and because women have often been the ones doing the bulk of childcare; so the idea is that young children are learning more about religion and culture from their moms than their dads. I think that’s a lot less true now and that’s likely a reason why this conversation opened up.
So let’s talk about the denominations and how they approach intermarriage a matrilineal vs. equilineal descent:
So, Orthodoxy, which sees itself as the continuation of the Jewish legal tradition, maintains matrilineal descent. Their perspective on intermarriage is that it does not constitute a legal marriage under Jewish law because Jewish law cannot bind gentiles (someone correct me if I’ve got this wrong), and also that sociologically it’s bad.
Conservative Judaism sees itself as similar to Orthodoxy except it opens avenues to overturn Jewish legal precedent, even ancient Jewish legal precedent, for times when there’s a communal need or to correct inequalities. It’s also less concerned with maintaining traditional “vibes” or experience when tasked with new questions (eg on whether electricity is allowed on Shabbat). On the topics of intermarriage and descent, Conservative has the same stance as Orthodoxy, but there’s been a lot of discussion within the movement about whether these stances should change. I will not be surprised if they shift in the next 10-20 years.
Reform Judaism views Jewish law as something we should study and learn from, but are bound by in the same way as Orthodoxy sees it. We should understand the laws, and interpret them as to what is meaningful in our lives. The official Reform position is that any child with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent is Jewish if they are raised Jewish. It’s left up to individual rabbis/temples how to define “raised Jewish” and how to handle edge cases. Unofficially, there are rabbis/temples who recognize folks as Jewish if they have one Jewish parent even if they weren’t raised Jewish. Reform explicitly allows intermarriage, and as of two years ago accepts students in interfaith relationships at their rabbinical school.
So how does this all apply to trans people?
Well, firstly, because most people are cis, most Jews are cis. Which means that right now, most rabbis are cis (although… my understanding is that currently, non-Orthodox rabbinical students skew disproportionately queer, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out).
And so this means that a lot of these questions have been answered by cis people in different ways than how trans people might answer them.
Also, these questions are comparatively new, even though trans people have always existed. Jewish law traditionally exists as a strictly binary-gendered system. It acknowledges that intersex people exist, but only so it can slot them into that binary system. Interestingly, this doesn’t apply to God; whose gender can be understood much more fluidly.
But, relevantly, all non-Orthodox denominations in the US are gender-egalitarian in most respects. Conservative Judaism did away with gendered differences in participation in services, ritual garments, and seating during services, ritual candle-lighting, and challah offerings. They state that gender in Jewish law now only applies to “anatomy-based” Jewish law. Which… already makes obvious that this framework won’t know what to do with trans people. But more on that in a bit. Relevant is the fact that the question of descent is still gendered in Conservative Judaism.
Back to OP’s question:
Because Reform takes a gender-egalitarian approach here, this isn’t a question for them, as the child is Jewish.
Among Orthodox people who do not recognize transness as real, the answer would be that it goes by “the woman,” ie, the person who they see as a woman based on that person’s assigned sex at birth. But we don’t need to waste energy on this.
Among Orthodox and Conservative people do who recognize trans people, many say that it goes according to the birthing parent or egg donor, not because they see the birthing parent as a mother; rather, because they believe that when Jewish law says mother, it means birthing parent or egg donor. (There is also discourse about whether it means birthing parent or egg donor, in cases where that isn’t the same person.) Essentially, this perspective assumes that Jewish law does not recognize transness, and that a trans-inclusive read means understanding gendered categories as actually sexed categories.
But trans Jewish scholar and rabbinical student Lexi Kohanski has said that such a framing is actually transphobic, because it reads the text through a lens that understands “woman” to mean “person with a womb/egg,” and that by doing so we as the reader are actually bringing a transphobic read to the text. I’m not sure what she has to say about this specific question, but it’s a relevant perspective.
A lot of trans questions are being asked nowadays of Jewish law, and the legacy denominations are frankly not equipped to answer them. For instance, a few years ago the Conservative movement published a Jewish legal response stating that trans women who convert to Judaism are required to be/get circumcised, because the requirement to circumcise is based on anatomy, not gender. But, trans folks have questioned this, as well as brought up the fact that it could be dysphoria-inducing.
Relatedly, many Jewish trans men have asked the question of if, after experiencing bottom growth on t, they’re now obligated in the commandment of circumcision. This is a question not just of gender but of anatomy; if they now have a foreskin, shouldn’t they do something about that? The solution many folks have come to is to pierce the foreskin such that a drop of blood comes out, based on the similar ritual for cisgender men who have been circumcised but not ritually so (eg, cis male converts).
These issues are discussed in a new trans-created scholarly work of answers to trans-related Jewish legal questions called the SVARA Trans Halacha Project, which I admit I haven’t read yet, so it likely has better answers than what I’ve written here! However, it doesn’t address OP’s question.
In the case of a Jewish trans woman having a biological child with a gentile, I wonder if some people would rule that the child is Jewish, based on the framework I mentioned above regarding reading the text trans-positively. I imagine some would.
But the question you ask is what about the case when there is no mother? How would that framework answer that? I think realistically that the practical answer is that very few people use that framework and so the answer would come from another framwork: either that the child is Jewish regardless, that the child is Jewish regardless of parental gender as long as they’re raised Jewish, or that it goes by who carried the child (or possibly who donated the egg).
In the trans-positive framework, though? I’m not sure! If anything, I think this presents a challenge to that framework! Since we can’t just say that the child is null, neither Jewish or non-Jewish. I guess we could say that the child isn’t Jewish because there’s no Jewish mother, but that seems a little silly to me, because it would mean that two Jewish non-women who produce a biological child together cannot produce a Jewish child, which wouldn’t be a desired or logical outcome in any framework.
Another place you could look for precedent here is a case of two cis men (either both Jewish, or one Jewish and one gentile) adopting a child or using surrogacy. It’s a slightly different type of case but it has some similarities I think.
Ultimately, I think the best option is to convert the child either way, just so that all of one’s bases are covered.
As an aside, it’s just generally rare that transness and gendered Jewish law even interact, because those things basically belong to different communal alignments. There just aren’t a lot of trans folks in spaces that gender Jewish law, and those I’ve known have had a mixed bag of experiences. And those are binary trans people. The one time I’ve seen non-binary identity ritually recognized in an Orthodox space is a very religiously-progressive Orthodox synagogue (with a woman rabbi) that created a prayer section specifically for nonbinary people (in addition to the existing men’s and women’s sections), but that isn’t common. The reason this particular question breaks these norms (ie, that transness is the realm only of gender-egalitarian congregations) is because the Conservative movement is mostly gender-egalitarian, but this is one of the areas in which it isn’t. So, in some sense, I guess this is really a question about Conservative Judaism.
Another caveat is I’m no longer really at the forefront of these conversions because of how my communal involvement has shifted so some of this information may be outdated.
Anyway, conversations about transness and Jewish law are emerging and evolving as we speak and I think it’s amazing to be alive while this is being codified!
I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.
The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.
And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.
And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”
And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.
A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.
“There’s no such thing as boy things and girl things.” I don’t need to be told that and I’m sure 99% of trans people also don’t need to be told that. Tell that to the society that hates us both instead of actively encouraging that hate.
Gonna point out the og tweet thread is now full of terfs saying that life was better for gay people in the fucking 80s, that it was super easy for them to be a tomboy in the 70s and 80s and therefore it must have been that way for everyone, and that it was totally acceptable to be a gnc gay person in the 80s! 🤪
They’re rewriting history as we speak to try to argue trans acceptance is making it harder to be gay and gnc for youth than it was to be gay in the 80s. This is a blatant lie.
I know adults and children who don't conform to stereotypical gender in lots of different ways.
Some are butch lesbians. Some are passing trans men or trans women with a fairly traditional presentation. Some are trans people who are *fabulous*. Some are fairly conventional women who like football or science.
I know some trans women, and some men who wear dresses.
Some people knew who they were most of their life, and some people who went through a few iterations.
Often I didn't know as much as I did later. But I don't think I've ever looked back and thought "wow, I wish people had suppressed that person's expression". Letting people identify in whatever way works best for them almost always works out best.
image description: tweet by olayemi olurin @/msolurin, reading: There's no high like making a successful hail mary argument. A prosecutor once asked for bail on my client because he had like 63 convictions and I was like judge... 63 convictions sounds like a man who showed up to court at least 63 times. And the judge was like yea you right /end description
Pinpanar9 is an unsung hero, leaving a simple and understated "good" on all manner of indie games. Every creator that I know who has an itch.io counts it as a mark of pride to have a "good" from pinpanar9.
I've got a couple, and every time I get one, I feel a little more like I've made it. That I'm a real designer.
And then I got this.
This is what I imagine an Ennie win feels like. It can't feel any better.
Also I hope everyone knows that Miette was fostered before she was adopted, and her foster mom loved that little kitten so much and always hoped she’d gone to a good home. this tweet got so popular that she recognized Miette and reached out to her current mom, and was able to share previously unseen baby pictures
a person from 150 years ago would be terrified by modern stuff . however , a duck from 150 years ago would just be all like ,still got lakes? yes ? okay cool
Reblogging again because I thought they changed the quote so I decided to look up the actual quote and it’s not fake that is very much the actual quote
