Melody Time

Melody. She/Her. TMA 🚙🔨

[melodefunct]

i'm doing my best to leave this website again because everyone here is a stupid fucking idiot and i become dumber and eviler every second i spend on here

[melodefunct]

sometimes i see some idea that's basically along the lines of "ugh, trans women make transfeminism all about themselves." and i'm just like. yeah??? that's who it's for primarily??? i understand there's transfeminized groups that are not women but my primary concern is the liberation of trans women. because i am a, maybe you haven't heard this term before: fem-i-nist. not a "groups-that-are-also-affected-but-are-not-women-in-ist". so yeah my primary concern is women and if that becomes a fringe position within transfeminism i will abandon it.

[melodefunct]

"you stupid bitch, how dare you prioritize women within feminism!! we all know transfeminism is about liberating the most oppressed tma people ever: femboys."

[melodefunct]

imagine saying "having feminism organize coalesce around "woman" is an error" and thinking you're not a misogynist.

[melodefunct]

transfeminism is already a dead end movement before anyone even tries to do anything. no transfeminist group has achieved anything substantial at anything beyond the personal level. even in latin america the best they can do is make transfeminicide a recognized crime statistic. wow, big fucking whoop. it's still perfectly legal for the media and the government to deadname me and misgender me in the report so i don't know what the fuck kind of victory that's supposed to be.

as nice as it is that they can do mutual aid, this ideology has demonstrated that it does not have any survival rate with actual reality. that the holders and advancers of such theory care only for yelling at each other on the internet. they hold all the answers to every theoretical question one might ask, and yet they don't have any idea how to do anything of value to protect trans women in real life. as a matter of fact, prominent transfeminists on this and other sites have made it very clear that they resent the centering of trans women in what should in theory be a feminist movement.

meanwhile, the only country in the world with meaningful protections for trans people in general and trans women in specific is cuba, and they didn't get those protections from yelling at each other online. they got those protections by getting the regular people of cuba to see them as part of the necessary fabric of their society, as fellow humans that want to be respected as their actual sexgender. those protections were not won by de-gendering the movement and centering everyone but women.

so cling to your useless movement. center it around everyone but the women it was originally created to protect. i know i don't have all the answers, and i know i'm not going to ever change the world in a meaningful way. but i am also done pretending that that's not true of basically every so called theorist in this movement. we're all equally useless, and at least i can admit it to myself and stop wasting my life and others' life chasing an impossible dream. the abolition of sexgender is not happening for a thousand years. you need to stop wasting time planning strategies for the year 3000 and focus on actually LIBERATING WOMEN, TODAY. and the very few of you that actually have interest in liberating women have no idea how to actually go about it.

i would love to be proven wrong. i doubt i will be.

[captain-price-returns]

California farmers to destroy 420,000 peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

Del Monte Foods shuttered its Modesto and Hughson cannery plants in April. 

[fidelcostco]

WAIT HOLD ON I cannot fucking believe when I was like four years old my parents were cajoling me to walk with the family and trying to get me to keep up even though I kept insisting that I was "tired" until they took me to a doctor and found out my LUNGS DIDN'T WORK. how insane that we live in a world where reasonably loving parents think their FOUR YEAR OLD is trying to be LAZY. like they were mortified to be clear. adults are just so trained to ignore children's complaints as untrustworthy, kids just need discipline, they can't possibly speak for themselves. what the fuuuuck.

[fidelcostco]

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE BTW you should always be trying to take children seriously, especially very little ones but definitely all of them. the most disempowered class basically legally defined as property and most people are like "yeah that's good actually I hate when they Loiter lol they're stupid and loud and i actually think children should stop existing. restrict their personhood more actually"

[miamicommune]

you people can't even boycott chick-fil-a.

[melodefunct]

tme transmisogynists: how dare you want to be a woman. how dare you act like you can be a woman. at best you should be aiming to be a femboy or a drag queen. femboys and drag queens are more important and more human than you and should be centered instead of you.

me: damn, that's exhausting. let me go on tumblr for some transfeminism

tumblr """transfeminists""": how dare you want to be a woman. how dare you act like you can be a woman. at best you should be aiming to be a femboy or a drag queen. femboys and drag queens are more important and more human than you and should be centered instead of you.

me: i hope a meteorite destroys the planet.

[communistojousama]

Anyway, stop listening to miserable pieces of shit who constantly try to drag others down to bring themselves up about trans womanhood and instead listen to me:

Insofar as trans women are, fundamentally, just an ordinary class of women, what we need to strive for is material liberation first and foremost in our positionality as workers, like the whole rest of the proletariat: no woman, real or cis, needs to center her identity and every little aspect of her personal life around being a martyr for feminism so, by all means, play with the significations and accoutrements of womanhood all you want, because they belong to you, and don't let miserable people convince you that you have a feminist duty to misery; our goal is liberation and not deification of the status of victimhood.

[valtsv]

this is like basic foundational misogyny 101 but the fact that it's almost unconsciously ingrained to consider trousers a more "practical" alternative to skirts across the majority of human cultures does make me feel a little kicked in the head. this isn't even anything against pants, it's just that skirts are functionally not dissimilar at all. they're comfortable, capable of being tailored to suit a variety of purposes both aesthetic and functional, and simply what some people prefer. and yet, because they're so strongly tied to women and femininity, they're derided. a long skirt is an impediment; shortening a skirt is a sexual act. throughout history humans of all demographics have worn skirts and skirt-like clothing for a variety of purposes, but to wear a skirt in our enlightened modern age is a heavily gendered and politically loaded notion. and we just tolerate living like this. fucking unreal.

[mousidy]

I'm sorry if this is an ignorant or misinformed question, but it just keeps nagging at me. When you say trans men weaponize their agab to shout down trans women trying to discuss their oppression, is that not equal if opposite to the de- and misgendering done to trans women? Like I can recognize the material differences at play here, given both arguements come from the same camp, but on some level I can't help but feel even entertaining that rhetoric sorta undermines the whole counter-arguement?

the problem in both cases is the bioessentialism. if a trans man brings up his agab to paint himself as the fragile victim and a trans woman as the violent aggressor, his strategy relies on bioessentialist assumptions about sex and gender. and if assumptions are made about a trans woman because of her agab or she's degendered/misgendered about it, that's bioessentialist too. I don't see a contradiction there--in both cases, agab is being weaponized against trans women

[realflaminglily]

i would argue there is literally not even two separate cases here. i would completely say there's no material differences and the weaponising of "afab-ness" is explicitly just demonising "amab" women and nonbinary people

Strictly speaking cis woman TWERFs and trans man TWERFs can both weaponise AGAB against trans women, but like. a cis TWERF would just call it "bio sex" or something, so with that in mind the focus lies on trans man or TME nonbinary TWERFs.

When a TWERF like this weaponises AGAB, this materialises in one of two ways, as anon has noted:

"Trans women are dangerous because they are AMAB"; or

"Trans men are more oppressed because we are AFAB"

You'll note that the throughline here is reducing all trans people to their AGAB. This, obviously, is just a parroting of TWERF rhetoric but pretending like AGAB is more valid use here than "sex" (frankly, I would argue the use of AGAB is more insidious than just using "sex", because sex can fucking change. AGAB language is more beneficial for TWERFism than fucking "biological female" could ever be. I digress.)

So, with that out of the way: Reducing a trans person to their AGAB is the same act in both cases, but the rhetoric is still different between the two groups, right?

I would say there's still no meaningful difference. The key words in the above two statements are "dangerous" and "oppressed," which begs the question: Dangerous to whom? Oppressed by whom?

AGAB is a binary system. It's based on false pretenses, but it is a binary in function.

The only possible answers to those questions are the other side of the binary.

"Trans women are dangerous and oppressive to trans men, because they are AMAB and we are AFAB."

It's one ideology. One tactic.

A trans man who states his AFAB-ness makes his position more defensible than a trans woman is explicitly degendering himself and implicitly degendering that trans woman.

A trans man who says our AMAB-ness makes trans women less acceptable in women's spaces is explicitly degendering us and implicitly degendering himself in the process.

This is why we call trans men who attack the basic principles of transfeminism by weaponising their AGAB TWERFs. It's because their rhetoric is no different than a TWERF calling trans women biological males. It's arguably even stronger.

[halorvic]

The Close, Prolonged Contact Myth

Knowing how a virus spreads is essential to public health, but people keep getting it wrong.

A man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone with hantavirus, catches it, gives it to his wife, and dies. His wife then infects 10 more people at his wake. Another guest at that same birthday party has no interaction with the index patient except to say “hello” as they cross paths, but that person gets sick too. One index patient, 33 subsequent infections, 11 deaths, four waves of transmission. This is from a meticulously documented hantavirus outbreak in Argentina in late 2018 and early 2019, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Nearly the exact same Andes strain of hantavirus caused the recent outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. Yet from the moment this latest outbreak hit the news last month, public-health officials have been claiming that this virus is spread through “prolonged close contact.” The evidence is not nearly so reassuring.

[...]

As an expert in what we call “exposure science,” I have spent a career conducting forensic investigations to understand how diseases spread and what we should do about it. As a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, I chaired the Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel task force, and was an early proponent of the theory that COVID spreads through the air. There was evidence early on of airborne transmission, which my colleagues and I tried to draw attention to. We modeled the early-2020 outbreak of the disease on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and found that 90 percent of the spread was through aerosols, not contaminated surfaces, but the CDC didn’t update its guidance until late 2020. I am alarmed to see the same pattern playing out now. Hantaviruses usually originate in rodent feces. Someone cleans a dusty area that has rodent droppings, inhales the particles, and gets sick. Only the Andes strain of hantavirus is known to be transmitted from human to human. In the outbreak documented in NEJM, the virus spreads without physical contact or prolonged exposure. One patient gets sick after simply crossing paths with someone who was ill. Two others are infected while seated at tables meters away. One person infected five others within 90 minutes at one party. The NEJM authors suggested that the virus spreads through the air. Although the NEJM evidence is clear, officials have kept repeating “prolonged, close contact,” so I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. Last week I spoke with a physician who was on the MV Hondiusas a passenger but who jumped in to help treat infected passengers after the ship’s official doctor got sick and was evacuated. He told me that the original treating doctor and staff were definitely in close contact with the first patient. But the others who got sick? They had merely shared space in the dining room and the lecture hall, and had not had close contact. We’re now at 10 confirmed cases from the ship, which aligns with the prior outbreak dynamics: one person infecting many, no close contact required.

[...]

This matters because medical teams treating patients need to know how they might be exposed. When infected passengers go home to quarantine, their households need to understand the risk. As passengers fly back to their home countries, contact tracers need to know which exposures matter. The doctor who treated patients on the cruise said on CNN that he relied on goggles, a gown, and hand-washing to protect himself. But given that this virus spreads through the air, an N95 mask and a strong ventilation and filtration system would have served him better.

[...]

This outbreak is not likely to spark a pandemic, mostly because the hantavirus is less contagious than influenza, measles, and SARS-CoV-2. But given just how little experience we have with this virus, any certainty is hubris.

May 12, 2026

[covid-safer-hotties]

From three cases two weeks ago to more than two dozen confirmed and a couple hundred possible cases across the world today. "The risk to the public is low" and "it doesn't spread easily," though.

[woodwool]

imagine if you hired a painter to paint your house and you tell them you want it blue and then you come back to see theyre in the middle of painting your house pink so you go hey stop. thats not what i asked for. and theyre like i just dont want to ruin your lovely house this color suits it so much better trust me. and you go No, i asked for blue give me blue??? and the painter is like alright alright. and then they paint your house purple and when you go this still isnt blue they say i simply cant paint your house blue. this is the compromise. and then you still have to pay them for their work even though you are now going to have to either hire another painter or just figure out how to paint ur own house to get it how you actually wanted. thatd be crazy right. so anyway i prefer to cut my own hair at home

[hagiomoto]

[moveslikekeithrichards]

you know when you get Autism Mad. like something happens in a non-ideal way and in your brain you know it literally doesnt matter but in your other more autistic brain youre like screaming & scrying & shitting the bed etc. i think you should be able to go into settings and opt out of that. i have better things to get upset about than failing to put up a decoration on the optimal day or being too stubborn to solve a problem via simple communication

[closet-keys]

a lot of people heard "believe survivors" and instead of understanding it as a call to internalize that people in your life have survived and/or will survive sexual violation at some point, and when they do open up to you about that, you should believe them instead of immediately telling them that "it was probably a misunderstanding and also your fault"

they took it to mean "if someone calls someone else a rapist then immediately treat it as fact, even if the person saying so isn't the survivor, even if the survivor didn't ask them to tell you, even if the survivor has no idea who this person even is, even if there is no evidence or indication of there being any survivor connected to this claim at all"

like y'all managed to take the survivors part out entirely and replaced it with accusers and that really kind of gives the game away about your actual relationship to sexual violence, doesn't it?

you don't care about making life easier for people who have experienced it. you mostly just want to use their traumatic experience as an excuse to hurt someone without consequence. it's so extractive that now there don't have to even be real human survivors who you have personal relationships with, now there's just the ideological figure of "the survivor" that seems to function as a saint of retribution to invoke before you start a harassment campaign

[petulantpony]

when i was a very young child, the woman who titled herself my mother decided that she needed to check to ensure i was sleeping through the night. this involved coming into my room at random and scolding me if my eyes were even open. obviously, i learned quickly to pretend to be asleep if i heard her coming.

fast forward to literally every doctors visit i had after learning this: every year, on my checkup, the doctor asks if i have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep through the night. every year, i say “yes” only for my mother to stop me and say “no you don’t, i check on you every night and you’re always dead asleep” and for whatever reason the pediatrician never once asked to have a checkup without her in the room or asked her to stop interrupting me. so i waited until i was 16 and under the care of OTHER abusers who my mother payed to hold me on a ranch against my will. those caretakers found that i was unable to sleep though the night and THEY were the ones to advocate for me to get sleeping meds. not so i could have a more comfortable rest, but so that i wouldn’t be so tired on the ranch.

anyway i smoke weed now and i don’t dread bedtime anymore because falling asleep is easy now, and even when it isn’t, i know i won’t be in trouble for it anymore.

[petulantpony]

i bring up the weed for a very important reason. many people believe that using weed to fall asleep will remove your ability to fall asleep without it. people will see me struggling to sleep without weed and they will assume that i’ve done this to myself, that i’ve smoked so much i cant be without it. many people even believe this about themselves. weed is not the reason you cant sleep without weed. most people who cant sleep without weed COULDNT SLEEP BEFORE WEED!!!!!!!