LarryDerPirat

This isn't a blog, I just store stuff here.

[pastperfectcontinuous]

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

[ritavonbees]

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

something needs to change here

this is urgent

I don’t know how to do it

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

[anoctoberpepper]

I always want to push back against the idea that you can will your way out of depression, but I feel the need to tell you all about my suicide salesman.

Four years ago I was massively overworked, stressed, undiagnosed bipolar and ADHD, actively delusional and still I was pretty cool with it. I was tough and could get through, ‘cause what else are you supposed to do?

Cue my suicide salesman.

At the time I fully thought he was a voice in my head telling to kill myself which is kinda true and kinda the ramblings of an undiagnosed crazy person. But HE WAS INSISTANT. Oh you can’t kill yourself that way, how about you try this way? Have you googled this poison per chance I hear it’s all rage? Thank god at the worst of it I was trapped at a campsite surrounded by people and without access to many of the easy ways to die. He wouldnt shut up though. If I told him I couldn’t die because it would make my family sad he would come back with reasons they didn’t care. If I said I didn’t want to die that way he would suggest another way. It was driving me absolutely fucking crazy(er). By the end of that weekend I was calling doctors and walking into urgent cares until I found someone willing to call in a crisis team. Your girl got grippy socks (I actually didn’t, COVID shortages meant they didn’t have any and I’m still bitter about it). No one really understood what I meant when I said “I don’t want to die, the guy in my head wants to me to die.” But whatever, they stamped me crazy and a danger to myself and locked me up. Thank god.

The odd thing was that he shut up instantly. As soon as I was on the boring side of lock up my salesman bro dissapeared into dust.

Then as the meds started to kick in and my brain started to click back online I realized my suicide salesman saved my fucking life. I would have kept running stuck in overworked emotional pain forever. He was screaming the worst possible solution so that I would face the fact that the life I was living was untenable.

I didn’t hear from him for a long time.

Two weeks ago I heard a familiar voice. After the initial two weeks of freaking out that I'l was going crazy again I remembered why this guy shows up when he does. I’m taking a look at my life and what I’m doing and what needs to change. It’s easy to dream of death when the other option is change. I hate change. Change is hard and uncomfortable and stupid and embarrassing at times, but it’s vital to our survival. I often find myself the frog in the slowly heating up pot. Suicide man points out the fire. It’s up to me to figure out how to crawl out and to safety.

My suicide salesman and I are not friends. I do not like him. I find him annoying and abrasive and he makes me cry all the time. But ☝️ he’s a good warning sign.

After the first time he showed up I had to change so much in my life. Less work, more reliance on others, shit ton of meds, counceling, but I think I’m doing better. At least now, with him hovering about, I know I’m not a danger to myself. I know why he’s here and I have a general idea about how to make him go the fuck away.

So yes, this is all right. I agree.

[pastperfectcontinuous]

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

[ritavonbees]

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

something needs to change here

this is urgent

I don’t know how to do it

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

[luckyladylily]

The thing is, simply by the fact we are so rare, unless a problem is within the trans community itself exclusively then trans people are never the problem. We represent somewhere around 0.5% of the population and have virtually no political or societal power. Even in queer spaces we still represent a small fraction of the group. We are the edge case of the edge case.

So if you ever find yourself mad at a subset of trans people and focusing on what you see as their part in an injustice, meaning you are focusing on a fraction of an edge case of an edge case, for any issue that isn't exclusively part of the trans community, then you need to figure out why you are being prejudice because I promise you the 0.2% of the population that are heavily marginalized are never the driving force of a large scale injustice.

[a-book-dragon]

You don't have a male or female brain – the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences

Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.

rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3

[liminalweirdo]

“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”

[mckitterick]

the notes on this are toxic - to help clear up any misunderstanding, here’s the actual science paper:

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three dec

in short: brains are brains

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

A lot of lefties acquired their leftism through academia rather than through empathy with other human beings and it really shows.

Full transcript below:

"A lot of lefties acquired their leftism through academia rather than through empathy with other human beings. And it really shows, because the culture of intellectual supremacy—the idea that you can be fundamentally better than someone else because you know better than someone else—is evident in the way that they behave and the way that they interact with other people. Unless we are able to identify and rectify this schism (because it is a fundamental difference in how you are relating to these concepts), we can't effectively move forwards.

Now, the reason for me that this is so important is because that concept of intellectual supremacy—that you can be better than someone else because you know things that they don't—is rooted in a western Eurocentric colonial mindset. And it is typically internalized at such a deep level that it is fully embodied. Meaning people are not consciously aware that they are doing that. That's just their default understanding. So they don't recognize the nature of the problem that they are perpetuating.

It's normally pretty easy to identify these differences in people, because it's the difference between punching down or uplifting. Either you're trying to be better than other people and prove how much better than other people you are, or you're trying to make sure that everyone can be better together.

Now, the thing is, I get it. There is a big, big draw towards feeling better than other people. It feels good. That's literally what it's about. You feel good because you feel better than someone else. But it's something that we need to be constantly addressing and resisting, because it is a fundamental lynchpin piece of the psychological paradigm that we are trying to uproot.

For me, I think the solution centers around humanization of the enemy. We need to be able to look at the billionaire class. We need to be able to look at Israel as a nation. We need to be able to look at the far-right resurgence across the world and ask ourselves: what happened to those people? Why are they doing that? Not just "they're awful, scummy people"—they can be that too, because that's how they're behaving.

But we need to address the recognition of what went wrong. Yeah, it is insane and totally unacceptable to just assume that they are like that from birth, that they were born to be bastards. Doesn't work like that. If you've ever spent any time working with children and been able to actually do a fucking good job of it, you will recognize that no children are born evil. But you should have also been able to have recognized how rapidly pathological mindsets take hold of a child in this society.

We need to be constantly attempting to humanize everybody, no matter how much we disagree with them."

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

[iz-robin]

Wish I could send this to the person in the comments of a post a few weeks ago that was telling me I needed to un-learn my colonial ideas because I think we shouldn't farm animals....

[prettyasapic]

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

[dragonofeternal]

Oh! Oh! I got one! Meet Edward V. Roberts-

Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.

Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.

This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.

Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.

Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.

After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.

Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a "hopeless cripple" whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.

[egg-squid]

Partners in Time

Visit the post for more.

Here is a great online course for disability history!!

[cwipple]

“Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in.” – Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco

”Along with all fair and good-thinking people, The Black Panther Party gives its full support to Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and calls for President Carter and HEW Secretary Califano to sign guidelines for its implementation as negotiated and agreed to on January 21 of this year. The issue here is human rights – rights of meaningful employment, of education, of basic human survival – of an oppressed minority, the disabled and handicapped. Further, we deplore the treatment accorded to the occupants of the fourth floor and join with them in full solidarity.” – Black Panther Party media release on the protest, from website Disability Social History (click thru to see pictures of BPP news about the success of the protest!)

According to disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole, these advocates “showed us what being an ally could be. We would never have succeeded without them. They are a critical part of disability history and yet their story is almost never told.⁠”

They were running a soup kitchen for their black community in East Oakland and they showed up every single night and brought us dinner. The FBI [guarding the building entrance] was like, “What the hell are you doing?” They answered, “Listen, we’re the Panthers. You want to starve these people out, fine, we’ll go tell the media that that’s what you’re doing, and we’ll show up with our guns to match your guns and we’ll talk about who’s going to talk to who about the food. Otherwise, just let us feed these people and we won’t give you any trouble” – and that’s basically what they did.

Please read up on the Black Panthers' involvement in the 504 movement, they were integral to the occupation lasting as long as it did and were INCREDIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS! They are more than a footnote in that part of disability history, and I want more people to know this part of their legacy!

Read about Bradley Lomax (and his aid and fellow organizer Chuck Johnson, who I've struggled finding sources on outside of articles on Mr. Lomax :( ) here and here! Together the two were integral in bringing Black Panther Party organizing and activism to the disability rights movement!

I wish there were more information on Mr. Johnson, as his work is dear to my heart as someone who also requires caregiving. ;3; <3 Considering how little information there even was available online for Mr. Lomax just ten years ago I am hoping we get more coverage of Mr. Johnson's contributions to this important part of disability history sooner rather than later. I do not want his activism ignored!

Do not let the full richness of our history be whitewashed! The Black Panthers kept the protestors fed, they HEAVILY publicized the protests in their paper The Black Panther and agitated on the protest and protestors behalf, and paid organizers' way to Washington to pressure the HEW secretary to actually sign the damn act. In turn, the Panthers did this because the Oakland ILC did outreach to them, and helped Mr. Lomax with transportation. This is solidarity buried under focus on the white organizers. Please please please cherish it. Keep it close to your heart, read about it, celebrate it, share it!

Obviously there were more Panthers who helped but I have already lost the first draft of this and I'm starting to fade -- here's two more detailed sources to read for more, and I highly recommend you do!

The Intersections and Divergences of Disability and Race

Lomax's Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504

[lastoneout]

Sorry to add to an already long post, but re: the sanitized history of Hellen Keller, I highly recommend this video:

It's not perfect, and the creator openly admits that at the beginning, but it does a really good job of bringing issues around disability to light AND tackles the absolutely abhorrent way misinformation spreads online.

[cock-holliday]

Think it would do more people some good to understand that they are victims of bigotry because society is bigoted and not necessarily "because" they are the thing people are bigoted towards. Their victimhood is a portion of a larger animal that is not shy about "collateral damage", because the dissent from kyriarchy is always threatening to supremacist structures.

Straight people are absolutely victims of homophobia. Girls too close friends with other girls. When a woman turns down a men and gets called a slur. Men doing anything perceived to be feminine. Years ago a cop tortured and killed his small child because he said the boy was gay. We will never know if that kid turned out to be gay because he wasn't killed for "being gay" but because his father's violent homophobia had him on the hunt for "signs" his child was queer.

Cis people are constantly victims of transphobia. Cis people get transvestigated, gender nonconforming people are attacked in bathrooms, people who "look" or "seem" trans are followed by cops and attacked by security guards. Anyone presenting in a way that doesn't align with the most rigid ideas of male and female are potential deviants who need punished.

White people are absolutely not victims of "reverse racism", but are still not necessarily "exempt" from being victimized by racism and antiblackness. The bar has shifted, and now more groups of white people enjoy being accepted into white supremacy who hadn't been previously--or were conditionally-- for example: Italians, Irish, and Jewish people. The entire concept of "race traitors" is a study on white people being brutalized by anti-Black racism. Racists hate Black folks so severely that white allies and partners are sometimes attacked and killed for it.

None of these people are the main targets of these bigotries, but their privileges are conditional still. Nonconformity and association with the "other" can get those privileges revoked.

But what we need to understand and understand well is that their victimhood in these scenarios is crucially not accidental. It is always a punishment for stepping out of line, either by potentially being the feared/hated category, or for "taking the side" of the feared/hated category. This is always intentional, and framing what happened to them as catching strays or that they aren't even really victims because they aren't the thing that they were hurt/killed over is extremely misguided and dangerous.

Defining ourselves by the violence done to us supports the idea that to exist as we are means to suffer. That a world where we can be ourselves without pain for being ourselves is impossible. It traps us in a cycle of hopelessness. And when we define ourselves by what is done to us, then those who experience what we do must be infringing somehow, because they ARENT us, so they cannot be victims like us. It cheapens their suffering, especially those harmed for allying with us because if to be one of us is such a doomed reality, what does that make someone who chooses to stand with us?

And it also cheapens our identities. It makes our identities and harm synonymous, creating a loop where violence is inevitable and a lack of violence is a lie. Anyone who isn't us is dangerous, and anyone who is us is only ever a victim like us.

It creates insular community that is just as capable of harm as the outsiders, and it deprives us of loving community who actually do know a bit about what it's like to be us, even if they aren't exactly like us.

We are not what has been done to us.

[fatliberation]

hi, i'm a fat person who is just starting to learn to love and appreciate my body and i'm very new to the fat community and all that.

i was wondering if you could maybe explain the term ob*se and how it is a slur. i've never heard anything about it being a slur before(like i said, i'm very new here) and was wondering if you could tell me the origin and history of the word or mayy provide links to resources about it? i want to know more about fat history and how to support my community but i'm unsure of how to start

Welcome!

Obesity is recognized as a slur by fat communities because it's a stigmatizing term that medicalizes fat bodies, typically in the absence of disease. Aside from the word literally translating to "having eaten oneself fat" in latin, obesity (as a medical diagnosis) straight up doesn't actually exist. The only measure that we have to diagnose people with obesity is the BMI, which has been widely proven to be an ineffective measure of health.

The BMI was created in the 1800s by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who did NOT sudy medicine, to gather statistics of the average height and weight of ONLY white, european, upper-middle class men to assist the government in allocating resources. It was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health. 

Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology. Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics.

Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called "normal weight" people are "unhealthy" whereas about 50% of so-called "overweight" people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone. "Healthy" lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.  

While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national "obesity" rates, the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as "overweight" overnight—to match international guidelines. Articles about the "obesity epidemic" often use this pseudo-statistic to create a false fear mongering rate at which the United States is becoming fatter. Critics have also noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. Interesting!!!

So... how can you diagnose a person with a disease (and sell them medications) solely based upon an outdated measure that was never meant to indicate health in the first place? Especially when "obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition?

There is a reason as to why fatness was declared a disease by the NIH in 1998, and some of it had to do with acknowledging fatness as something that is NOT just about a lack of willpower - but that's a very complicated post for another time. You can learn more about it in the two part series of Maintenance Phase titled The Body Mass Index and The Obesity Epidemic.

Aside from being overtly incorrect as a medical tool, the BMI is used to deny certain medical treatments and gender-affirming care, as well insurance coverage. Employers still often offer bonuses to workers who lower their BMI. Although science recognizes the BMI as deeply flawed, it's going to be tough to get rid of. It has been a long standing and effective tool for the oppression of fat people and the profit of the weight loss industry.

More sources and extra reading material:

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon

The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index by Adele Jackson-Gibson

What's Wrong With The War on Obesity? by Lily O'Hara, et al.

Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

[tpwrtrmnky]

Please read up on what terfs actually believe so you're not going around seeing actual terf rhetoric spread around like "wow, what an interesting new take on trans politics!" and then see a trans woman say "we live in a patriarchal society" and go "oh shit, trans woman terfs? 🤯🤯🤯🤯"

[tpwrtrmnky]

"oh but the amab socialisation and the oppression of afab bodies are some interesting new ideas that—" they have been saying this shit since before you were even born and it's not made progressive by saying it with a tumblr accent

[animentality]

[toothbrushunicorn]

No, those options are still available. Do you for some reason think your ancestors had it easier? That they didn't suffer if they participated in mob violence or strikes? People died, nekosattva_chan. DIED.

Just because you have decided those options aren't available to you personally for some reason doesn't mean they no longer exist. You don't speak for everyone.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tweet from (@/ nekosattva_chan) reading: average people rightfully feel powerless because historically their power has either been through mob violence or the withholding of labor, since neither is an option, the only thing left is a vague sense of "activism--" a kind of institutionally-sanctioned form of group therapy. /End ID]

[larryderpirat]

Screams in labour union.

Screams in anarcha-syndicalism.

[transfaguette]

when you’re a little girl boys will say “so if boys and girls are equal that means I get to hit you right?”

and then you grow up to be a trans man and people will say to you “oh i thought you wanted to be a man, that means you have to put up with [abusive behavior]”

and they will tell you these 2 things do not stem from the same desires of gendered punishment and control

[philomonstrum]

For those wondering why males always jump to

"Oh you want an equality? Have some violence!"

It's because the male experience is a constant gauntlet of violence. Pretty standard.

Young boys? Rough house to expel energy or do sport which is competition. Both groom you towards outward aggression and power dynamics.

Teens? Fast cars, fights, fucking. All competition. You need to stand out and have measurable skills or no one will like you. Broke boys don't prosper.

Adult men, measure worth with your wallet or your muscles. No one wants to support a poor man. No one wants to protect a weak man. We will watch you die and cheer before we support your softness. It gives the ick.

So to recap, whenever men hear someone who hasn't been in the game the whole time wants to join up, they immediately go to the standard programming. "There will be violence here" because there always is. In male culture, equal means you have to withstand the constant (threat of) violence.

It's not good here. No one will save you other than your friends, who will also do a lil violence to keep your skills sharp in case they need you to back them up. Because there will always be violence.

Dunno if this helps, but now you know. It's not (usually) personal, but it is relentless. And the only way to stop it is with greater (threats of) violence, so 😅

[larryderpirat]

I think it helps! Often men are spoken about as a "neutral human", but no, you voiced how men have specific experiences of being coersed under patriarchy. We can notice that, look at that and organize against that.

That's why I don't agree with the solution in the last sentence. There are so many different solutions and methods already being used for gender liberation. They came to be by theory and by struggling thru actions.

I think men of all kind can (and do) struggle thru that process too. So using the masters tool of greater violence against each other is not the only "solution".

I find works of men doing this struggle by looking for more specific intersections than "men and feminism", like in prison (abolition) I found Richie Reseda:

[alienlike]

the "transfeminist" discourse on this website is so like... white trans women need to be more aware of the fact that asians assigned male at birth are often perceived as more feminine than their white counterparts. if you're black, it's the opposite. they speak like everyone starts out the same, but that's just not true. you, as a white person, are far more free to explore femininity/masculinity than people of color are.

[alienlike]

they also don't seem to understand the ways in which cis women of color are forced to interact with western ideas of gender. the darker your skin is, the more masculine you're often thought of being. i said this the other day, but not all cis women get to enjoy the cliche soft femininity filled with flowers and rainbows. darker-skinned women are not handed femininity on a silver platter. maybe take that into consideration the next time you try to pull some theory out of your ass

[syzygyblvd]

this. another reason why the TMA/TME binary doesn't work. cis black women are far more likely to be transvestigated, but I'm supposed to believe they're exempt from experiencing transmisogyny? no, that's fucking bullshit. everyone can be affected by transmisogyny, or transandrophobia, or just transphobia period. even perisex cis people.

[discoasphodel]

this is something i see missed a lot in white transfeminist spaces and that i'm grateful for the chance to hear folks discuss. i think the tma/tme binary also fails to support our two-spirit and transgender native relatives whose genders and gender presentations are violently policed and managed by colonialist gender standards.

and it abandons ALL native people who experience this gender-coercive violence. a cisgender lakota man whose gender is wičháša is cisgender and yet also white colonial violence will be done against him on the basis of his gender expression. he will be policed on his hair and sacred braids, he experiences increased risk of violence and sexual assault, he lives with the effects of trauma and their relatives alcoholism and addiction and suicidality, and ultimately has a far higher likelihood to attempt suicide. or be murdered.

Remembering Cole Brings Plenty - ICT

Indigenous people continue to honor the Mniconju actor and call for justice

this is not a hypothetical lakota man. justice for Cole Brings Plenty now, and remember that your campaign to guarantee freedom from medicalized coercive assignment of sex and gender needs to also defend the gender expression of native peoples.

the crisis of MMIW and MMIP directly reflects how limiting and violent white colonial expectations of gender and sex are for First Nations, pueblos originarios, indigenous, native, and American Indian people.

[ftmtftm]

Just a reminder that oppression is what happens under institutions of systemic power.

Transgender people of every gender do not have the systemic power to oppress each other along gendered lines because we are not accepted as our genders by the system of gender hierarchy. We are oppressed by the same systems in different ways, but they're still literally the exact same systems.

Lateral transphobia/transmisogyny/transandrophobia/exorsexism/etc. exists in the trans community and there are trans people out there who will go out of their way to police and throttle other trans people — but that is not oppression. It's called lateral bigotry for a reason.

I'm really sick of seeing predominantly white trans people who are absolutely obsessed with trying to find a hierarchy of gendered power and privilege within the trans community under the guise of intersectionality while also completely ignoring the fact that race statistically has a larger impact on a trans person's access to housing, access to economic stability, their ability to transition, their experiences with violence, etc. etc. than just their gender alone.

It's straight up just white feminism. It's part of the well documented history of racist/race blind white queers subconsciously thinking queer identity somehow exists void of race because they view themselves as void of race. It's the white logic of "race is something that happens to PoC, not white people" and it is the exact shit that was alienating queer, Black writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde 40-50 years ago. Nothing has changed. It's still the same shit that continues to alienate trans PoC now.

Do better.

[ipostradicalfeminismisntrad]

[zmpl]

a lot of the DSM’s very clearly prejudiced diagnoses (e.g. hypoactive sexual desire disorder, gender dysphoria, transvestic disorder, etc.) try to skirt around the prejudice by saying “the disorder lies in the patient’s distress over being this way, not the behavior itself :)” like hmmm do you think their distress has anything to do with societal expectations around “normal” sexuality and gender? or is distress just this magic thing that exists in a vacuum with no outside influence

like keep in mind that homosexuality was in the DSM until pressure was put on the APA by gay rights activists, and they “removed” it in 1973 and replaced it with many different diagnostic labels over the years to describe “this person is gay and distressed over it so we’re treating the distress with conversion therapy. blease don’t think we’re homophobic.” it wasn’t until 2013 that distress over one’s own sexual orientation was removed entirely from the DSM. do what you will with this information and begin to wonder what psychiatry’s actual motives are for continuing to pathologize queerness and gender nonconformity.

[ilokilok]

btw ICD-10, which is still widely used elsewhere in the world, is not much better. take a look at dual-role transvestism, which essentially boils down to... wearing gender non conforming clothes. and there's still mention of the distress over one's sexual orientation

[larryderpirat]

OPs wikipedia source is wrong. To this day distress over ones sexual orientation is still part of the DSM.

Quote from page 491:

"For a diagnosis of female sexual interest/arousal disorder to be made, clinically significant distress must accompany symptoms in Criterion A. Distress may be experienced as a result of the lack of sexual interest/arousal or as a result of significant interference in a women's life and well-being. If a life-long lack of sexual desire is better explained ny one's self-identification as "asexual," then a diagnosis of female sexual/arousal disorder would not be made."

Worse, there is no equivalent sentence for "men" and/or "male" persons, so their asexuality would straight up be pathologised and diagnosed as Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.

Furthermore quote from page 779:

"A paraphilic disorder is a paraphilia that is currently causing distress or impairment to the individual [...]"

(Don't get me started on the constant mixing of paraphilia together with abuse.)

[socialistexan]

Same exact playbook, down to the "but it was based on a lie."

[socialistexan]

It's kind of amazing how much this is the identical strategy. Focusing on the distress and harm of parents over the trans or autistic person themselves. Pathologizing the condition treating it as an epidemic, including calling it a social contagion causing a worrying "explosion" of diagnosis because it is "trendy."

Ignoring the experts on the subject while also appealing to "common sense" and dismissing all research that contradicts them while also appealing to "basic science."

Plus it's all the same quacks and actors behind previous medical and social moral panics saying them same things in the same ways and no one seems to acknowledge that.

[boybeetles]

It is identical to the detransitioner playbook - because she directly says she was inspired by debtransitioners in the article and in the tweet she made to promote it ! Detranitioner rhetoric was already based on a lot of anti-autism ableism so I’m not surprised they are now jumping to this

[adiabat]

i’m not aromantic but i believe in their beliefs

[adiabat]

for me being bi has contributed a huge amount to noticing all the ways in which romance and friendship run together and i think in general people would benefit from recognizing that romance and friendship are socially constructed categories used to describe a vast, nebulous, and often overlapping range of feelings

[asteroidtroglodyte]

My way of parsing it:

Every Relationship is actually a specific, unique thing. We invented Shorthands, such as Friend or Husband, to help describe recurring motifs in Relationships. But. The labels are simplifications. They will always fail to adequately contain the entirety of the Relationship.

[revolutionarygirllapis]

I think the philosophy being described here is Relationship Anarchy, which makes sense as it's essentially a complete deconstruction of amatonormativity rather than simply a response to specific symptoms of it

[queeranarchism]

Kinda, but incomplete. Relationship anarchy, coming from anarchists, also sees these relationships exist in the context of capitalism and the authority of the state. The labels aren't a random convenience, they're tool of oppression.

There is societal pressure to concentrate almost all human needs (physical touch, deep affection, financial support, care for the sick, growing old together, etc) into one sexual relationship and to tie that relationship to sexual reproduction and raising children.

That creates closed units - nuclear families - that the state can more easily control because their strongest feelings of solidarity are limited to their household and their biological connections outside it. It discourages communal living, communal child raising, sharing of resources in larger groups. It makes singles easier to control because it makes people desperate to achieve the kind of relationship in which this full care-package is available.

The state enforces this, giving benefits to married over unmarried relationships, only recognizing certain rights between partners and family members, and limiting the number of legal parents a child can have. Those who defy norms might have more trouble with the state. But a lot of the enforcement of these categories is social. Much like gender and sexuality, amatonormativity is policed by family members and random strangers who correct 'deviants'.