ugh stop letting a few niche micro bloggers on tumblr make you think transfeminism has an issue with antitransmasculinityā¦wait no donāt look at any other social media site eitherā¦ no no donāt look at the most popular published transfeminists ā¦. fuck no shit wait donāt look at the coiner of transmisogyny ā¦
itās not a tumblr issue. itās not a bluesky issue. itās not a twitter issue. its not an instagram issue. itās not a tiktok issue. itās not a fucking reddit issue. it is on every goddamn site i have looked for community. it is on fucking youtube for christās sake. itās in the literature staples. itās in the academia. itās in the in-person community. story after story and story responded to with āthis isnāt a wide spread issue itās just happening in [insert whichever specific place that person was].ā
i repeat for what feels like the hundredth time though i think itās only the fifth: if you do not think an axis of oppression exists then you will without a doubt be perpetuating it.Ā
most transfeminists i have seen over the last three years of observation do not think they can be meaningfully bigoted towards trans men and mascs. they do not think they can meaningfully hurt us. they do not think they need to check their biases. so their biases are going unchecked, and my god is the harm and bigotry abundant.
the problem is fucking everywhere. stop belittling us every time we try to bring it up bc itās just a [blank] issue. i am going to scream now okay? okay.
Bonus: when I made a post about this last year I found this flier. Take comfort in the fact that trans people did see this and did make noise about it!
Kadji Amin joins Jules to talk the category nonbinary, the asymmetry of trans masculinity and trans femininity, and a shared love of f*gottr
I just found this and it's really bad
Wtf is this seriously.
Not only is this just an absolute circle jerk, but they view enben (in 2021 mind you) As a political statement, as something like oooh we're just shaking things up, we're so silly goofy.
Hey how about ask us?
This is the lady who goes to further her reactionary hatred of non binary people with her "transgender liberalism" article.
At least in 2021 they both treated us like some strange tropical bird they were studying. Now it's pure blame and hatred.
This is the kind of "scholars" that make me want to be more loudly mogai. Because the self is the point, you don't need anyone's external evaluation in order to be. I don't live my gender in relation to other people, it's not an act, it's just a static piece of info about me.
Also, "if everyone treated me like I was okay, I'd not transition" is a very strange argument to bring out. I don't think we should treat trans people harshly in hopes it'll push them to transition. That's fucked up.
Okay yeah I read this article and it sucks ass. Also this reblog got longer than anticipated to under a cut it goes.
They keep talking about nonbinary people in the abstract, and going like "ohh if only we could understand what nonbinary femmes think their identity means! Are they trying to figure out the boundary between being a gay man and being a trans woman??? What are their intentions???? If only we could know!" like. Jules. You know you are allowed to talk to nonbinary people right? And listen to their words? You don't have to speculate on them from your ivory transsexual tower, helpless to understand their strange and foreign minds.
Not to mention how they continually treat "nonbinary" as, seemingly, equivalent to non-transitioning, and draw a sharp distinction between "transsexuals" and "nonbinary people." They talk in this frustrating, masturbatory way about their many Intellectual Transsexual Questions for nonbinary people and just projecting all their exorsexist bullshit onto nonbinary people, and acting like its impossible for them to just ask a nonbinary person?
this whole paragraph:
Whenever I would think of genderqueer (the term in vogue in my twenties) and nonbinary as positions, I would imagine them as truly heroic. As naming people who are able to exist in a space where others donāt see who you know yourself to be, but you just donāt care. Your sense of yourself is so strong you donāt need to change your body to get other people to see you in a certain way; you just know that other people are wrong and that youāre right and thatās okay. And I thought I could never be strong enough to do that. In my life I had associated it with the most unbearable dysphoria, the most unbearable gap between how I was seeing myself and how other people were seeing me, especially once I had taken on the pronouns he/him but was trying to transition without testosterone.
So, I thought of nonbinary as this heroic position for a long time and then, more recently, Iāve begun to have doubts and think, well, maybe thatās not how it feels.Ā
LISTEN, KADJI. I DO NOT WANT TO BE YOUR NONBINARY HERO. I DO NOT WANT TO BE SEEN AS TRULY HEROIC.
They seem just. Obsessed, with this image of nonbinary people as "brave" for being visibly androgynous?
[J]: [...] But this is the problem because we donāt have an operative, positive account of whatās at stake in nonbinary trans femininity, so it gets filtered through these really superficial lenses. Like, āwell, they get treated like shit all the time, but theyāre really resolute, plus itās empowering to have facial hair and wear lipstick,ā and Iām like, yes, okay, but tell me more! I want to know.
Kadji:Ā Maybe my major question is why there isnāt more of a discourse about all of this? Even an intra-community discourse where questioning people could go online and hear āthis is what it means to identify with this as opposed to that, this is what you do.ā I donāt know if I should read that as a refusal orā
Jules:Ā Or just the impossibility of speaking outside a discourse of gender? Which in some ways, nonbinary is trying to do in a really sophisticated way, but which remains very hard. How can you simultaneously dissent from a system but still maintain its central presumption, which is that gender is a fundamentally important facet of the self? That seems like a really complex tangle that, technically, is not unique to being nonbinary. Even cis women have this problem to some extent, but thereās something really interesting in the nonbinary case that is not being unleashed.
How can we understand the phenomenologies attached to different trans identities of this moment and what their claims are on the relationship between the self and the social? It seems like the contemporary taxonomy of gender identity and expression suggests that every identity position is valid so long as it is articulated and can therefore be respected, and in that sense it becomes devoid of content. How do you give an account of yourself in this situation?
This just feels like "I don't get nonbinary people" soaked in fifty-three layers of academic language, all to avoid confronting the fact that nonbinary people are nonbinary in the same way a trans woman is a trans woman. They just cannot help but insist that nonbinary people are "heroic" and "trying to [speak outside the discourse of gender] in a really sophisticated way," like they are truly only able to conceptualize nonbinary identity as a political move and act helpless about their ability to talk to a nonbinary person and take what they say seriously without secretly re-interpreting it as whatever bullshit they want (such as "nonbinary people think they are soooooo much better than us binary people!" looking at you, Jules.)
More exorsexism:
But one of the things you and I have been trying to understand is whatās the historical trajectory here to nonbinary. For a long time, the line between a faggotāa really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queenāand a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture. That you might go all the way, that it might be horrifying and abjecting, or it might be something like the total freedom of feminization or castration, or even bottomhood (to which I laugh, as a femme top). Itās this sort of construct of the gay imaginary. But it also leads to this question: since thereās so little space for nonbinary trans femmes today and thereās a lot of pressure on them to put out something legible, they have to use this taxonomy of āoh, Iām not a man or woman, but Iām definitely not a manāāand then what? Iām always searching for the positive account that comes after āhere is what Iām not,ā and Iād like to see more cultural space granted to that. If youāre a nobinary trans femme that has a largely aesthetic component to your transitionāsay, makeup, clothes, and pronounsāwhat is it that differentiates you positively from the faggot as a gay boy or feminine person who is not a man?
I want to underline that there has been precious little oxygen accorded to that, so this is not a criticism of any of these people. Not enough has been granted to them to affirm their desires. And since there is so much pressure in our contemporary taxonomy to separate gender from sexuality, it seems to make the situation even more impossible.
I am just. so confused by her confusion here? Once again, Jules, JUST TALK TO NONBINARY FEMMES ABOUT THIS??????? Why in the WORLD are you having this conversation with a binary trans man. What purpose does this serve except jerking each other off on how much nonbinary people confuse you and seem to have no phenomenological basis for their existence.
[Kadji]: So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection. But as time has gone by, Iāve started to wonder if maybe thatās not what theyāre doing, and itās still unclear to me because of the lack of a space for that kind of discourse, or a refusal to explain themselves in that kind of way. Iām quite surprised, given the amount of space that was devoted in the late 1990s to early 2000s to figuring out the butch/trans man proximity, that thereās still a vacuum for that kind of discourse on the other side. How do you know if youāre a gay man or a trans woman? How do you know if youāre a trans woman or a nonbinary femme? This contributes to my lack of understanding of what a phenomenological position for nonbinary femme might be.
Again, I donāt know if thatās what any nonbinary femmes are trying to do, but if thatĀ isĀ what some are trying to do, Iām not sure itās working. As in, Iām not sure that enough people know how to read or respond accordingly to a trans femininity that isnāt either gay effeminacy or trans womanhood.
WHO GIVES A FUCK IF PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO RESPOND TO US. for a lot of nonbinary people its live illegibly but openly or be in the closet forever and want to kill yourself because there is no space for you. I hate to pull the "we have dysphoria" card, but like, WE DO HAVE DYSPHORIA TOO, YOU KNOW? for a lot of nonbinary femmes there is no fucking "project" other than living a life that makes you feel real despite never being given any social reality. They go on to talk about how butches apparently have more cultural legibility, but I do not understand why the "faggot" or femboy or drag queen is not seen as a nonbinary femme equivalent? There is plenty of hostility from cis woman butches towards nonbinary and transmasculine butches. I guess the point is that all of those rely upon the assumption of attraction to men.... but so does butch, and there are gay transmascs who still identify as butch, butch4butch (which for some was a way of being a gay trans men when the option did not seem available) has always been treated negatively, and once again. Why is nonbinary identity being judged around people can get what we are by looking at us?
& then there's the same old bullshit about how transmascs have always had more cultural space and "reasons to transition" (what?), alongside a quote in which she says "and who the fuck in this world is allowed to desire to be a woman?" tell me you know nothing about how misogyny works. People raised as women are expected to desire to be a woman, obligated to do so. I do not know why the fuck people cannot get it in their heads that yes, womanhood is treated as a lesser state of existence, but for those who are expected to fulfill the role of daughtermotherwife, that lesser state is what they are meant to be happy with. They also claim there is "so much more cultural space for mascs, including nonbinary, and thereās so much more history (for butches and non-binary mascs)." Which. Fucking. Where.
ultimately, i think this final part of this interview hits more clearly on what issue they are taking with nonbinary people:
[Kadji] This is a hypothesis, but I do think todayās taxonomies seem more confusing than everāthough perhaps that doesnāt feel true to people who are coming into their genders today. But I believe that they are more confusing than they are helpful to actual queer and trans people. [...]
And so, I imagine that today, when there is a huge proliferation of options and the options often overlap or are synonymous without substantial phenomenological accounts to differentiate them, and the pressure to come into a true self has never been greater than it used to beāit seems just flabbergasting and impossible.
What Iāve realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. Itās not about who you are inside, itās more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. Itās not Who are you? but How do you want to live?Ā
Had that been the discourse when I was coming up, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I donāt have to figure out who I am on the inside, I just have to figure out how I want to live.
look, i'm a pragmatist and a phenomonologist, i also see gender as being to some degree inherently practical and relational. but as a nonbinary person, i do not have the luxury of living the way that makes me feel fucking comfortable. my feelings of being nonbinary are not abstract, they materially impact me. nonbinary identity is about survival, to me, point blank period. survival comes first, survival is where the term nonbinary/genderqueer/whatever terms we use emerges because it emerges from us no longer being able to live without giving voice to our sense of otherness.
demanding nonbinary provide a phenomenological account that satisfies binary "transsexuals" who define their transsexuality opposed to nonbinary people, using the language of "gender is practical and relational, not who you are inside," maybe i'm being dramatic here when i say this, but its a threat to nonbinary survival. patriarchy makes us illegible and then we are punished i mean critiqued i mean "we're just asking questions!!" for not being legible. because we practice, in Jules' words, "nonbinary idealism" and are all rich white people who are just doing this to be heroic and make ourselves look more #woke than binary transsexuals.
anyways, shoutout to one of the people in the comments who said:
you two talk as though non-binary femmes (heroically, but also for fun) put on some makeup and change their pronouns and thereby become illegible. for my part, i have always felt illegible (how is that for a phenomenology of non-binary gender).
most of the answers to your questions here are in your own the text if you begin from the assumption that non-binary people have a genuine experience of their gender as neither men nor women.
^ literally exactly the point. Jules and Kadji are exorsexist and fundamentally do not seem to grasp the idea that nonbinary people feel nonbinary and that feeling nonbinary has a real impact on your life regardless of whether you want it to or not. They literally cannot, or refuse to, see nonbinary gender as functioning the same as their genders, and so treat nonbinary people like a peculiar species of not-quite-trans with mysterious motivations, and not just like normal fucking trans people.
All in all, as a nonbinary transsexual, everything JGP says about nonbinary people makes me feel like I am going fucking crazy.
It feels like Jules doesn't even talk to trans women who aren't strongly tied to cis gay culture that much, so a lot of this reads as "but how do non-binary transfems fit into cis gay culture?" Like, "For a long time, the line between a faggotāa really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queenāand a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture." And then Kadji saying: "So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection."
And, like, speaking for myself (as an agender trans woman), I just don't occupy a space in cis gay culture. So yeah they're going to have trouble fitting me in there. IDK this feels like high school when peers called me a faggot and thought I must be a cis gay boy because I was obviously queer and that was the only kind of queer they could think of. But I'm ace and I'm not a man and I'm not into feminine gender expression. I am definitely not a gay man being extra faggy about it. My relationship to the culture of gay men is that of an outsider with a history of people incorrectly thinking I'm one of y'all.
And in terms of internal identity vs. relational identity, my internal identity is "agender" and my relational identity is "trans woman". Reading through those bits from their conversation, I think I'm not even on their radar enough that it's occurred to them to interrogate my positionality or whatever. I'm not "brave" or trying to make a statement or primarily interested in the aesthetics or anything like that. In society I hope people read me as a woman who isn't into feminine gender expression, because that's a reasonably comfortable and reasonably socially accepted thing to be. I don't put the non-binary aspects of my identity front-and-center in my interactions with people because I don't want the hassle. It doesn't feel good.
Anyways yeah they should both talk to more transfems. Sure, there are trans women and other transfems who are strongly associated with the culture of cis gay men. But if that's kind of the entire landscape they can imagine for transfemininity they gotta get out of their bubble every now and then.
The entire thing is based on the premise that nonbinary people are really part of the gender binary and just putting on an act to try and make a statement, which is made all the more absurd with how frequently they both admit they can't figure out what that statement is supposed to be.
"What are nonbinary people trying to do?" survive, mainly. Just be myself and survive. I'm not nonbinary because I'm trying to make a statement or be empowering or shit I'm just living my fucking life.
yeah, exactly. They genuinely can not imagine gender outside of the binary so hard that they have to twist themselves into knots trying to understand us, when they could literally just ask. They don't want to understand, because that doesn't get them attention and money or whatever reason they do this for
well okay i don't know who needs to hear this today but i keep seeing it far too much. you have to stop putting all of your personal information on your carrd or your about page or whatever you use. yeah it's a good idea to have one and share basic stuff about yourself and your interests, but putting a comprehensive list of your entire medical history and pairing it with everything that triggers you and how you can be triggered by those things is just blatantly unsafe. really young people keep doing this too, like i see 14, 15, 16 year olds with entire pages just listening all the issues they have. with all the kindness i can put behind this, stop doing that. no one needs to know this much about you except people you have complete trust in. while it is up to you to decide who those people are, it definitely isn't the entire internet
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a ācommon childhood illnessā with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since āsmallpox isnāt that bad.ā) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, āarenāt they the same thing?ā
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ā1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humansāit has no animal hostsāwhich is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variolaāEdward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirusāchickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashesāthus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practicesāpeople identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going onāwhich viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to anotherābut historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirusāit just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
What really gets me about a lot of the transandrophobia on this website is the fact that people love to ignore that tons of trans men are also barred from sports, except for us its silently, theres almost no fight about it and no support for us.
Do any of you know who he is?
This is Mack Beggs, a southern trans man. Mack is a wrestler who was forced to fight in the girls state championship which he had to fight tooth and nail to be included in at all. Even now when Mack fights on a mens team he engages in activism for mental health of trans youth and for other trans athletes and yet people have the audacity to come on here and say that transmasculine people contribute nothing to the movement. Have you ever heard of him? Or was it such a quiet modest celebration that you didnāt even know he existed.
And thats how it is with trans men. It is not better to be publicly shamed and harassed but being voiceless comes with its own struggles. When weāre allowed to compete in women's sports, something we shouldnāt be forced to do in the first place, itās almost always under the condition that we are not taking testosterone. When we are competing in mens sports, if weāre not turned away at the gate for being a āwomanā we face the physical danger of assault, sexual or otherwise, in the locker room. How can you call that privilege?
This post comes with no intention to invalidate anyone elseās experiences, only to uplift those of transmascs.
really sick of all that shit i keep seeing on instagram about the world cup being like "americas sleepover" and people are like "im so happy people are coming to visit to see america isnt all that bad!!"
nobody has ever fucking said that living or visiting the US sucks for white people. its not fucking about them
i have to ask actually. what happens when you go in someone's inbox and go "omg you should try being a girl i bet you're actually a closeted girl" and it's a trans man. does that ever happen. what then
I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!
I'll share some of the info below:
Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.
What to do?
-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides
- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!
To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!
Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In September 2026, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. Iām still learning about this.
Zoe Quinn also has a book called Crash Overdrive, which I feel should be required reading for literally anyone using the internet in any capacity, especially as more and more things get moved to online spaces, and especially for people who use the internet for their livelihoods. It's a fairly short read (I read the entire book in a single day, although I will note this was during and for grad school, so actual reading time may vary for normal, non-grad-student readers), and can be a bit depressing--Quinn details the years of harassment they received due to gamergate, it's not a pleasant read, but I do think it's an absolutely necessary book to understand what happened and why and how, and Quinn has a surprisingly resilient sense of resolve come the end of the book, which details all the safety measures someone can and should take with their online activity.
If you can't get out to your local library to borrow the book, you can also find it here on the Internet Archive (though it looks like the lending is limited? it doesn't appear to be an open text at least, so a library might be your best bet if you can't purchase the book). Of all the books I was required to buy and read for college classes, this is probably the most important and impactful, and it's the only one I'd strongly encourage everyone to read for themselves.
Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.
Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do toĀ feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.
I'm reminded of this post from 2017. To paraphrase, OP took part in community service via their university and part of that was cleaning the bathrooms at the local homeless community centre, which would frequently get trashed, not because the homeless people using them disrespected the work of the people cleaning them but because they had so little control over other things that happened in their lives, and the bathroom was something they could affect.
This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.
It's not worth it. Don't trash your community bathrooms.
I'm so sorry if this is off topic but remember that LNX post you made earlier this month? well, great news: he's back and doing well :] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZsWO0SyxHb/?igsh=aHltang0MW95N2ho
STOPPPPPPPPPP I'M SO HAPPY YOU SENT THIS!!!!! LOOK AT HIM!!! Oh my goodness I almost burst into tears at work. He just shared that he has bipolar disorder in front of the whole world, like.... To go through all of that, to finally admit to yourself that you needed help and then he's actually getting it and it's helping him....and then TELLING US when it wasn't our business... I'm so happy that he's doing better. You just made me get on IG for the first time in days like ššššš thank you so much for this. This is so hopeful. I'm so hopeful for him. I love it when Black men can seek help for mental illness and stress and their needs.
Hey so a small thing that literally everyone who sees this is capable of is correcting any āused toā statements about native people in this country.
āNative people used to live in this National Parkā No. They still do.
āNative people used to tell these stories-ā No. They still do.
āNative people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-ā No. They still do.
Better yet, familiarize yourself with the tribes local to you. Odds are, they do not yet have federal recognition. You can still read the stories they have to share, you can share their ongoing battle for recognition with others, you can sign petitions and spread the word to others to do so as well. But do something.
Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.
He said the exact same thing, which I did not know before that, so spreading this knowledge.
Something I donāt see talked about much is how predatorjacketing is a very common experience for trans men and mascs, especially from within our own community.
Our proximity to manhood and/or maleness is seen as a de facto link to predatory behavior, and in fact, is seen as somehow affirming to be called as such because man = predator. We are constantly told we must be held to account for the actions of (overwhelmingly and primarily) cis men, because otherwise weāre saying weāre not really men (ignoring that many of us arenāt, but thatās an exorsexist tangent for another day) because thatās what masculinity is. If we donāt identify with and apologize for it, weāre accused of not really being trans. It quickly becomes clear that a lot of these supposedly āwokeā and āgender liberationistā people still subscribe to the idea that men will always be the predator and women the prey, so in their eyes when a trans man says he is a victim he is basically calling himself a woman, and when a trans woman is accused of assault people are basically calling her a man. This outdated view of gender dynamics being transposed onto trans people isnāt altogether surprising, but itās incredibly frustrating how often itās used to categorize people with the insistence that itās just the way things are.
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