In honor of Women's History Month and International Women's Day, I would like to dedicate a post to ways we can help women around the world facing genocide and gender based violence. Below are a list of organizations and groups to donate to focused on bettering the lives of and providing direct aid to women and girls in areas of conflict. This is an evolving list/resource so I will gladly take suggestions or edit requests from anyone who knows of a verified group helping women and girls that could be added to this list.
Access to Menstrual Products and Repro Healthcare
Sudan, Palestine, DRCongo, Lebanon
Sudan
Periods don’t stop for war: For every $5 Donated a woman or girl in Sudan receives a menstrual hygiene kit for the month
Let's Talk Period: As disposable menstrual hygiene products are too expensive for most women, grassroots groups have popped up to make, distribute, and educate other women and girls on how to make their own reusable pads.
Sudan Charity Navigator: A list of charities including Doctors Without Borders and food assistance groups providing aid to Sudan
Darfur Women Action Group: DWAG advocates for the protection of civilians, promotes women’s leadership, provides elementary education for children in refugee camps, and provides trauma counseling for survivors of sexual violence
Amal for Women: Amal For Women was able to help people in Al-Jazeera state, Darfur and refugees in Egypt. GoFundMe/PayPal doesn’t release the funds raised until the 25th of March. Please consider donating to reach more people the rest of Ramadan and Eid. Other donation links and more info here
Palestine
Pious Projects: "At $20 each, this kit will include - but is not limited to - sanitary pads, a hair brush, tooth brush, toothpaste, cotton swabs, wipes, tissues, and other hygienic items depending on availability. Distributions will take place in various areas accessible to on-ground teams such as camps in Rafah and UN schools."
Anera: there’s a list of things certain amounts of money can get the people of Palestine, $10 can get a family a blanket for winter, $40 can provide hygiene kits that include menstrual products, and $75+ can get people a mattress and more
Arab.Org: Free daily clicks generate ad revenue that goes to UNRWA. This link in particular shows you a full list of specific projects in need of funds you can also give to with a click from poverty to the environment to a fund focused on women.
DRCongo
City of Joy: “The City of Joy is a transformational leadership community for women survivors of violence, located in Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Conceived, owned, and run by local Congolese, the City of Joy has flourished since it first opened its doors in June 2011, healing women from their past trauma through therapy and life skills programming while providing them with the essential ingredients needed to move forward in life – love and community.”
Panzi Foundation: “Every day, between 5 and 7 new survivors walk through our doors. For 20 years, we’ve not only mended each woman’s injuries, we’ve walked with them to healing—every step of the way.”
Lebanon
Global Giving | Days for Girls Lebanon: Health education and locally made washable menstrual kits to women and girls since 2011
Donate | iwrising
Products for Babies and Children
Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, DRCongo
Palestine
Care For Gaza: The work Care For Gaza does is all-encompassing by necessity. From food to money packages to winter clothes to diapers for babies and disabled or elderly adults, Care For Gaza is an on the ground group providing direct aid to Gazans.
Yemen
Go Fund Me: Food Packs and Eid Gifts for the People of Yemen
Sudan
Human Appeal | Sudan Emergency Appeal: Funds orphanages, food, and baby formula
DRCongo
War Child: Tiered donations can provide children with school books, meals, and toys
This is an evolving list/resource so I will gladly take suggestions or edit requests from anyone who knows of a verified group helping women and girls that could be added to this list.
the thing that infuriates me most about the sophie cunningham of it all is how profoundly performative the league’s response has been.
they were perfectly willing to respond to the alleged “backlash” surrounding paige and angel’s wager, and to make jonquel apologize for comments that were removed from their context during an all-star weekend stream - comments that ultimately have no meaningful bearing on the future of the league or any substantive impact on anyone’s life. yet when people ask the league to address the blatant transphobia being expressed by a player they are paying millions of dollars, suddenly the response is, “this is a new expansion of the league.” that is not an answer.
and then there is the argument itself, which is what frustrates me most about people like sophie cunningham, because there seems to be an almost complete inability to step back and consider what they are actually advocating for.
in the context of the wnba, there are not young girls in these professional locker rooms. there are adult women. so when the argument is specifically being made about transgender women allegedly entering wnba locker rooms and harming young girls, what exactly are we talking about? the hypothetical being presented is not grounded in the reality of the league or its locker rooms.
but more importantly, i think people are deliberately missing the larger point when they invoke the alleged protection of women and children. the issue is not whether a transgender person could theoretically be present in a recreational environment where children are playing sports. obviously, transgender people exist in every part of society. the issue is that you are taking the threat of sexual violence—which is very real—and assigning that threat disproportionately to a population that is not responsible for the overwhelming majority of it.
the people perpetrating sexual violence against women and children are overwhelmingly cisgender, and disproportionately cisgender men. so if your stated concern is protecting women and girls from sexual violence, why are transgender people being positioned as the central threat? why are you constructing elaborate hypothetical scenarios around a population that represents such a small proportion of the world instead of addressing the people who actually perpetrate the violence you claim to be so concerned about?
that is where the fearmongering becomes so transparent to me. you’ve taken a real and horrifying problem—sexual violence against women and children—and attached it to a marginalized group that has already been culturally constructed as suspicious. suddenly the conversation is no longer about preventing sexual violence. it is about whether transgender people should be allowed to exist in every day life. and because the original justification was “protecting women and children,” anyone who questions that premise can then be accused of opposing their safety.
and the consequences of that rhetoric do not remain confined to transgender women. once you establish that “woman” is something that must be externally verified in order to determine who belongs in an environment, you inevitably create a system in which women themselves become subject to suspicion: women with masculine features, women with higher testosterone, women who simply do not look the way someone expects a woman to look. we have already seen female athletes questioned, investigated, humiliated, and subjected to invasive scrutiny because somebody decided they did not appear feminine enough.
that is the contradiction i cannot get past. you cannot claim that you are protecting women from sexual misconduct while advocating for systems that make women more vulnerable to having their bodies inspected, questioned, exposed, and policed. you cannot say you are protecting young girls while creating an environment in which the solution to a hypothetical threat becomes determining of who is sufficiently female to belong in a space. eventually, someone has to decide what qualifies as “female enough”. and once that happens, women who fail to satisfy somebody else's arbitrary standard of femininity become collateral damage.
we have already seen how quickly this logic can be applied to women who have never had anything to do with transgender politics at all. imane khelif is a particularly obvious example: a woman who became the subject of global speculation about her sex because she did not conform to someone's expectations of what a woman should look like. that is the problem with turning femininity into a qualification that other people are entitled to authenticate. eventually, the question will stop being “how do we protect women?” and will become “which women do we believe are really women?” and it already has.
if your concern is genuinely about sexual violence, then talk about sexual violence. talk about the people who commit it, talk about why women and children are so often harmed by those they already know and trust, talk about institutional failures that allow abuse to continue. but do not take a problem overwhelmingly perpetrated by cisgender people, particularly cisgender men, and use it as an excuse to portray transgender people as uniquely dangerous. that is not protecting women and children. in fact it’s doing quite the opposite.
Things arent as bad this month but i still need money for essentals.
im finaly in with a therapist who seems like they're willing to help get me on disability but that will take months if not years. anything helps even just a reblog.
gotta say every ad turning into a repulsive AI image/ video in the past couple years has really solidified my aversion to being advertised to
like before it was just “ugh seeing these ads is annoying”. now it’s “wow proof that you don’t care about your product at all, or even the people that might make an ad for you, OR the public that might buy your product.” What a self-report. not one ounce of effort spared to sell the thing you wanna sell to me, the person forced to look at your stupid ad.
the thing about mothers in fiction is that a lot of fandoms seem to be under the impression that the worst thing a woman can possibly do is be a bad mother. like they can forgive deadbeat dads easily but the moment a woman is a bad or even mediocre mother she's the devil incarnate to them. and then you're like "i like her and i think she's interesting" and they immediately go "oh so you think it's okay to be a bad mother (which is the most evil thing a woman can be)". and don't even get me started on how they react to female characters who are bad stepmothers
i hope every lesbian gets to feel how it feels to have another woman be just as crazy about you as you are about them…. not having doubts or confusion.. I wish this with all my heart, for every lesbian, especially trans lesbians.
If youre a closeted person somewhere out there thinking "I want to transition but it would be less progressive/unique/countercultural for me to be that gender instead of this one" please know that you are a real person not a character in a narrative and cant live your life based on what is good media representation. You are real you can only be yourself and theres no moral weight to any identity over another
Liberal transphobes enjoy positioning trans identities as regressive compared to cis queerness or like non-transitioning transness or anything else they can leverage to make transphobia look progressive and I think its easy to absorb that message subconciously. But in real life we just are what we are and no ranking of validity can change the fact that you have an identity that is NOT chosen and is just your unchangeable truth. Not only should you not have to live a life dictated by what is most countercultural to identify as or whatever but also: being trans is extremely countercultural and feminist and leftist to begin with and theyre only trying to convince you otherwise bc theyre bigots
"Why cant you be a feminine man society hates feminine men 🥺" and "all the butch lesbians are becoming men we need u 🥺" = stay in the closet for the noble purpose of being an abstract representation point in my new york times opinion column. You wont actually be a gnc cis person youll be a closeted trans person who uses the wrong words but I need you to do that because i hate you
