Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
occasionally subtle
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Cosmic Funnies
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
roma★
macklin celebrini has autism
we're not kids anymore.
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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YOU ARE THE REASON
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Not today Justin
Noah Kahan
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@pingersnotpiv-blog
While discussions around the Nordic model vs decriminalisation are vital we must also remember the important underlying question: do you stand for the ultimate abolition of prositution? If people in a discussion don't believe in these same ultimate goal of course this will colour the way they believe the issue should be approached. It also should be made clear that a lot of liberals don't want the abolition of prositution. Never forget how toxic of an ideology liberalism is.
How do you know if your just making up your dysphoria?
If you’re asking the question, you probably aren’t.
People who detransition don’t question, they don’t think hard about their choices, and they don’t wait. They are just immediately sure.
This is… not accurate.
This is...not accurate indeed. I waited and questioned for almost two years. I wrote, I read and I thought. I read blogs by detransitioned womyn, I waited for months before I so much as cut my hair short. And yet...
LGBT
Let's Get Busy Tribbing
This survey is for anyone female/AFAB who formerly self-described as transgender. This includes women who transitioned, whether socially and/or medically, and have subsequently detransitioned, as well as individuals who still identify as nonbinary or genderfluid, but have desisted from medical or social transition. The purpose of this survey is to provide information about the demographics of those who detransition and reidentification, motivations of individuals to detransition, and survey general attitudes of female detransitioners towards transition.
Please signal boost!
where's the logic in supporting both: a) a post that suggests women can just 'opt in' to being lesbians and b) posts that suggest people cannot just 'opt in' to being women.
Since this is the most polite question I’ve gotten on this I’ll bite.
To put it simply it’s a false equivalency. There are different conditions for womanhood than lesbianism, which is why is it possible to apply different ideas about being/becoming to each.
The easy bit: what is a woman? I’m sure we all agree an adult human female. There is no component there which is changeable. We can’t change age, species, or sex. That’s why no one can “opt in” to womanhood. Because no one can actually change their sex, at best a trans woman will be a chemically or surgically changed male, which is still different in terms of material reality and lived experience to a woman. So no opt in available.
Next; what is a lesbian? To borrow from wikipedia
A lesbian is a female homosexual: a female who experiences romantic love or sexual attraction to other females
I’d add “exclusively experiences” to that.
Defining both romantic love and sexual attraction is difficult. Women are conditioned under patriarchy to interpret their feelings towards men as love and sexual attraction. Even feelings such as fear or revulsion can be interpreted as love or attraction. Our entire culture is geared towards manufacturing this. We accept abuse as love, pain as sexual pleasure, and fear as arousal.
Everyone accepts this. But there is a blanket refusal to accept that this affects women to our core. That is affects our thoughts, our feelings, and our instinctual perception of what we think we want.
Compulsory heterosexuality doesn’t only result in lesbians engaging in heterosexuality with an awareness that they are closeted or feeling very distressed. It results in women believing that they are genuinely attracted to men. We understand a need for approval as love, and fear as attraction, and fetishise our own degradation. All while believing we are experiencing a genuine and internally motivated attraction.
That’s my experience and that of many other women.
In this context women can actively choose to unlearn what patriarchy has taught them. Women can make an active choice to change where their attractions are directed. This can happen because we can choose to unlearn how we interpret those feelings of need for approval, degradation, and fear.
The end result of this process is that a woman is exclusively attracted to other women. I am by no means saying that a woman can experience a desire for men and be a lesbian. I think it is possible for a woman to experience a change in what she understands as or how she experiences desire, through political awareness, and thus no longer experience desire for men.
The fact is that our understanding of our own romantic love and sexual attraction changes. Mine certainly did. I used to think I was genuinely in love and attracted to a man. Now I think differently. I’m not going to reject another woman who interprets that change in a political way, or had that change come about because of political awareness. While I don’t understand myself as a political lesbian my own experience of discovering that I am a lesbian was directed by my political learning and beliefs (thank you to Andrea Dworkin for writing Intercourse). I think it’s possible for a woman to choose to walk that path of understanding, rather than stumble along it.
I’ve witnessed people claiming that reasoning similar to my own is supporting the idea of lesbianism being ‘fluid’. The way I see it nothing is further from the truth. Wether women have a born orientation or it results from a series of choices the fact is that we have all gotten through men’s attempts to hide this possibility from us. Lesbianism is a truth, and the fact that one reject it and then return does not make it ‘fluid’. That’s a queer concept, it doesn’t fit in this framework.
The anti political lesbian discourse on tumblr is terrible, frankly. I realise that most of us youngsters are mostly piecing the concept together from a few posts and a few PDFs. That doesn’t change the fact that women exist who came to lesbianism this way and have lived lesbian lives for decades. I would like to see more respect for those women and the theory they created from those who disagree. I can easily see how women would understand their lives in that framework, it fits many parts of my own life.
TLDR; sex can’t change, attraction can.
A lesbian who comes out through feminism, who had an “ah ha!” moment or awakening or got courage through feminist writing, should not threaten the validity of your own journey. A lesbian who sees lesbianism as inherently political in a heteronormative, patriarchal world does not negate your own perspective. A lesbian who sees lesbianism as an active choice rather than homosexuality as a genetic characteristic that others lesbians from other women is not telling you that you cannot believe you were born as a lesbian or that you can’t disagree. A lesbian who hopes other women awaken and choose to act on their desire for other women and separate from men shouldn’t threaten you.
I’m damn tired of being told I have to toe the line and “change my language” or I’m a “fake lesbian” or lesbophobe.
I’m tired of feeling pressured to discredit political lesbianism just because some other lesbians disagree with it or don’t understand my reasoning behind it. I’ve done that before in the past, because I wanted to be the “right” kind of lesbian. But the only reason I was able to come out was because of radical lesbian feminist writings giving me the courage and confidence to live as a lesbian. I’m not going to smear political lesbianism, because that’s the only reason I am where I am today. At what point does a political lesbian become a “real” lesbian? Especially when some of y'all’s definition of “real” lesbian is only lesbians who have had the same life experiences as you.
I don’t see myself as inherently different from all other women. I don’t think homosexuality is purely genetic- that’s a dangerous road (see medicalization of homosexuality and eugenics). I honestly believe that lesbianism is the natural default sexuality for women and that we are trained out of it from birth. I believe the majority of women have the potential to “wake up” or “awaken”, tap into that desire for women again, and choose to be a lesbian. You don’t have to agree with me. But this belief does not negate my lesbianism, it does not make me a lesbophobe, and it is not a belief that is somehow going to change the way you relate to yourself.
A new study investigating found that psychiatrists responded to patient complaints about their relationships by prescribing antidepressants
“As it became less acceptable to overtly diagnose homosexuality, it became increasingly acceptable to diagnose threats to female-male relationships as conditions that required psychiatric intervention,”
Tag yourself im Lunch
like alcohol-free beer is fkn great and i lov it but MAN i wish they made alcohol free vodka omg
Tasty, tasty “vodka flavoured drink.”
So way back I implied that no one actually does the gold-star discourse (i.e. non gold-stars aren’t Lesbians) but having seen some shit since then I would like to retract that statement.
Some day I will go through and answer all the messages in my inbox but it is full of messages saying I’m not a Lesbian and I just can’t really be bothered looking at that sort of stuff. Enjoy saying I’m disrespectful for calling myself a Lesbian and I’ll keep loving my beautiful girlfriend.
I’ve had my eye on Changing our Minds for ages now and I really should get it. Thanks for the book recs!
The trauma thing is an interesting point. I am pretty sure the reason I started being the mad way I am was because I was bullied in primary school. Other than that I had a really good childhood. Certainly nothing that would be called traumatic happened to me. The thing that started off my madness was being bullied (other stuff later in life certainly compounded it) but that it has never been examined as a cause of my intense social anxiety by any mental health professional. Being bullied was seen as something that happened because I had inborn mental health problems/because I am autistic.
Basically what I am trying to get at is that the narrative of the innately mentally ill person is just used to brush off life experiences that did mess you up. I’ve been viewed as that person through all of my contact with the mental health system and it prevented me making any real progress in therapy. I was just born to be mad and should just take pills because I’m a lost cause with a sick brain. For years I would have called myself the “non-traumatized mentally ill person” but now I realize I just got messed up by something that sounds a little bit silly.
In case you were wondering why I haven’t been posting much discourse on here lately I’ve been a: busy with uni and b: trying to work on writing out stuff properly rather than in tumblr post format and c: the tumblr drama has been getting me down so I’ve been staying away.
The good news here is that eventually I should be posting some top quality divisive PingersNotPIV discourse in essay format. If you have any of my yikes-inducing politics you would like to hear more about send me a message and inspire me.
Yes I am still hung up on the ward what of it?
The actual worst discourse I see commonly in radfem circles is “If you are anti-psychiatry/psychiatry-critical you are ableist.”
It makes me feel sick. There is nothing radical or feminist about calling out someone for being critical of psychiatric medication or the psychiatric system. It has been the system historically used to brutalize Lesbians (i.e. psychiatry historically sanctioned corrective rape for Lesbians) and continues to the modern day to do so in a million different ways.
Need I remind you all that transition is sanctioned by psychiatry. Need I remind you all that womyn are being locked up and drugged and raped in wards around the world. Need I remind you that companies are making billions off medicating away the most obvious symptoms of womyn’s distress under patriarchy. Need I remind you that we should be critical of anything that is primarily sold to womyn and that this includes psychiatric medication. Need I remind you that psychiatric diagnoses are socially constructed with an agenda. Need I remind you that the monoamine hypothesis is unproven at best. Need I remind you the government can lock you up, drug you and induce seizures in you basically whenever they feel like it if you are mad.
I am disgusted that there are people who would think I’m ableist for hating a system that transitioned me and later locked me up, tried to get me to transition again, threatened to send me to an institution rampant with rape and deaths for not taking medication, put my freedom in the hands of a man who hated that I wouldn’t do as he said and finally tried to get me to take an anti-psychotic because I was crying about all of this.
If you think being anti-psychiatry is ableist I don’t know what sort of liberal analysis you are using but it is one that accepts the brutalization of the mad, especially mad womyn. That doesn’t sound very radfem to me.
I really shouldn’t have but I went and looked at the booklet they gave me in the ward about “recovering from a mental health crisis” in the ward and they crossed out every page on treatment expect for medication. Like, when they gave it to me they had drawn a line through every page about treatment other than meds with a permanent marker. Even the page about discharge planning.
