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You can call me Smoke.
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Are we ready to talk about fatness as an identity category and fatphobia’s place in intersectionality. The way I am treated as a fat transsexual is very different than how I was as a skinny one, and I am tired of “who has it worse” discussions conducted by skinny people who haven’t even conceptualized that my fatness might be just as informative to my manhood as my transsexuality is.
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hi yall don't actually need to debate if this is real or like what they could possibly mean or if it holds any substance because the comment was on this post on mine specifically
so like understand that this is very clearly a bot and move on. i did mention that it was on a post about transandrophobia but i guess i didnt mention that the comment was very obviously not applicable to my actual post which made it obvious that its not a genuine comment. they might've commented on this account specifically as an anti trans troll or it couldve been because ive said on this account that im aromantic but regardless this is just nonsense and its on purpose so dont try to understand it, its not something thats meant to be understood
update: this was another comment they left on another post about specifically trans men experiencing misogyny and then having it denied because we're not women (it wasnt a hypothetical situation btw, trfs do this all the time and then deny it happens, much like regular terfs and transphobes, because they are ideologically aligned) so ive gathered that they just hate trans men and comment this shit on our posts. unfortunately this does mean that the first comment i saw mightve been written by a real person
anyway, the comment on this post is much older, but i didnt recognize the username until i happened to come across the thread again
trfs love to do shit to trans men and then deny that it ever happens to push their narrative that trans men aren't oppressed, so there you go
It's a copypasta, if that helps.
People say "intersectionality was bastardized to talk about how men are affected" about trans men because "the original isn't about that because it's about how women with other identities are treated" but like. Intersectionality was coined because black women thought feminism was too white and there was not enough thought into how being a black women affected that and the specific ways that being a black women was punished by society, because the original feminist theory only considered white women, so they were expanding on that. Saying "trans men are oppressed because they're men" isn't bastardizing intersectionality because it's literally about how you cannot untie transmascs' manhood from their transness and the same way femininity is different in black women, transmascs' masculinity is different from cis men and they're affected by things cis men aren't affected and things cis women aren't affected by and they're affected by misogyny in different ways than cis women are and in ways that heavily mix with transphobia that's. Like. Textbook intersectionality. Because you cannot untangle the trans from the man the same way you cannot untangle the black from woman and put both in neat boxes.
Plus I've seen a lot of TERFs use the exact same principle on why feminism isn't for trans women. They used to say that feminism wasn't for trans women because they were raised as men therefore they didn't have the forming experiences to have a stake at feminism and not they're saying trans men can't talk about intersectionality because the original was about (ignoring black people) women. Those same people saying trans men can't use intersectionality totally ignore that the term was firstly coined by black women and they'll say well since it's for women, of course (white) trans women can apply that. And that's hm. Not good y'all.
If you agree that intersectionality can be expanded to white trans women because even though they're white they have different experiences than white cis women but deny the expansion for trans men idk what to tell you.
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.
to explain what i mean by "coerced":
i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.
this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.
now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?
and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.
does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.
the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.
i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.
this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.
*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand
i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.
#eh.#full disclosure: I am Black and queer and poor#and I have had the immense displeasure of being the victimized party during such attempts at “restorative justice”#my experience was basically a room full of breathless white people demanding my public forgiveness#because their transgression became public knowledge when I refused to protect them#and all anyone wanted to talk about was the reputational damage of these whites#there was vague lip service about policy changes#but mostly I was just so mean for not keeping the situation “private” (read: secret)#I'm willing to humor the idea of restorative justice when y'all can implement it better#because too often it requires the transgressed upon to forgive and the transgressor to...what?#guess what op! some racists mean it#MOST racists mean it#YOU can feel free to throw your titty in their mouths if you want#my Black ass will be cutting losses#I'm too fucking old and I've been in this shit too long to keep playing house with white radicals#sorry this a really sore topic for me because I've experienced the worst version of it#and I don't trust radicals who wanna put all of their eggs in the restorative justice basket#very white very low effort very exploitative of marginalized laborrrrrrrrr#this was a neat read but I'm not holding hands with you bitches anymore#if someone calls me the N word I do not immediately think “oh they've been coerced!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”#notice who makes the effort there!#once again putting the onus on the transgressed upon to do all of the work
^ wanna add these tags to the post if you don't mind because this is a vital issue to restorative justice being restorative and just and not just a smokescreen for further violence, and I want to give my thoughts on how we might navigate this (pre-emptively sorry for the very long post incoming, I'm incapable of making a succinct point when it comes to this topic).
I don't think restorative justice should be thought of as a fundamentally white thing, frameworks of restorative justice built by white people are frequently shoddy and poorly thought out. The idea of restorative justice being "a brand new radical theory invented by white leftist intellectuals" turns it into a hypothetical that fundamentally emerges from European culture, when restorative justice was initially introduced to modern Europe through centuries-old existing practices of various Indigenous nations. Restorative justice has been done better, by Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.
I include some quotes in this reblog of this post about the Wendat nation's traditional framework for justice (which is only one version of restorative justice, ofc). I also touch on the justice system of DAANES / Rojava, a modern autonomous administration in Syria which uses restorative justice. Rojava is a Kurdish term, and the Kurds are an Indigenous ethnic minority that has faced intense oppression throughout West Asia, and as a result their model for governance in Rojava is built around being explicitly multiethnic.
Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.
Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.
It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.
The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).
Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.
If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).
& to be clear: when I say "coerced" I don't mean "people don't really mean it when they are racist." I definitely think they mean it. The fact that racist thoughts and desires and actions are socially constructed by systems of power and taught to people to maintain power, rather than being natural expressions of inherent badness or entirely neutral objective observations about the world, don't make them any less real. My point with describing this as coercion is to emphasize how integral socialization & culture is to people's choice to do harmful things, not to say they don't really believe in those harmful things or are simply tricked into doing them. People's racist thoughts and feelings can be as intense and genuinely held as they are the result of people socialized into a certain way of thinking. My goal is to make it more obvious to the racist people that the things they feel and think and do came from somewhere, because somebody is benefiting from them feeling and thinking and acting that way. They don't just coincidentally happen to believe racist things because they are such smart independent thinkers from such an objective superior moral culture; powerful people made them racist to facilitate their own greed and power, and they should be angry at those people for socializing them into immoral beliefs instead of getting angry at non-white people for pointing out that their beliefs are immoral.
Not to throw fuel on this particular fire but are there any transmasculine eggs in media? Are there any men who realize their gender on-screen? Are there any female characters who fandom broadly agrees can be read as trans men?
Sorry this ended up being a ramble to a very brief question because I got caught in the reeds about it.
Most stories that can be read as transmasculine are of two types - you have the Mulan type, where a female character assumes masculinty for some purpose, and then gets feminised after the temporary masculinity has fufilled its purpose. Naoto Shirogane is a good example here as well,
The second type is what I'm going to call the Gwyndolin type, after Dark Sun Gwyndolin from Dark Souls. This is where a male character is forcibly feminised against his will and desperately wants to cast off the shackles of feminity to return to the masculine. Chihiro Fujisaki is another good example of this as well.
Transmasculine stories really only get told in these margins because we're not seen as subversive to queer (or non-queer) authors, and pre-transition or pre-trans realisation we typically don't have access to a lot of the opportunities or connections of our cis male counterparts, but we also lose access to anything designed to help marginalised identities because they focus on women.
I guess what I'm trying to say is - please we need more stories about all kinds of transmasculinity if you are transmasc or a trans man please if you have a story in you there are so many people who want to read it or play it or listen to it or watch it.
Ah, never apologize for length.
Looking through the various replies to this post I’m finding a third category- “the actor playing this character transitioned so we’ll write it into the story”, ex. Victor from the Umbrella Academy- but as is also pointed out, the handling of these stories… varies.
Admittedly this post was inspired by a character from the “Gwyndolin” type category; while everyone can agree the man-forced-to-be-a-woman trope is trans-coded, it’s often a hot-button issue whether these characters should be interpreted as transmasculine or transfeminine.
And to be clear, there’s a very good argument for both! These characters are clearly dabbling in the transmisogynistic “trap” trope, so it’s quite reasonable to want to reclaim them as true trans women. (Sometimes creators agree; see Bridget Guiltygear).
But nevertheless, it’s deeply frustrating that when a femininely-presenting character all but looks at the camera and says “I’m really a man, and I want to be a man,” the broad fandom response is usually to look back and say “no you’re not”.
“Why are all the trans lesbians transmasc” is a bit like asking “why are all the drag performers transfem”*. Like on the one hand, there’s a rich historical continuity and enmeshment in those communities- the idea of “transgender” as we now know it is quite a recent one, societally speaking, and it takes time for social dynamics to shift. But on the other hand they’re not. They’re not. You do know it’s not all of them, right?
*I am well aware drag is not transition and of the transmisogyny within the drag community, please be civil, don’t make me bring out the reading comprehension questions
Motherfucker, sorry uh
YOu reblogged from @tpwrtrmnky 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤢
Pretty sure that animal is not on ur side. Or on our side. Please don't let that trash on ur blog 😭
As I have mentioned elsewhere, a reblog-without-comment is an endorsement of that particular post, not everything someone has ever written. More importantly, this is not an appropriate way to speak about people. Even someone you disagree with or who might be saying harmful things herself. If this is how you plan to conduct yourself, then please do everyone a favor and don't interact with any discourse-oriented blogs.
needless to say, no trans people structurally benefit from the patriarchy. this is because we are trans. obviously instances of privilege can and do occur, but the system is not set up in a way that benefits any trans people of any kind! again. this is because we are trans.
#You might as well argue that every woman not drafted to fight in a war structurally benefits from patriarchy#Like technically correct but what the fuck are we even talking about here???? (via @lilietsblog)
this was about the people who say that trans men transition into privilege over cis women, not about whether trans men or trans women are more oppressed! please notice how *all* trans people earn significantly less than cis people in this study :)
"Data represents earnings from workers employed full-time at nonfarm jobs." So unemployed and under-employed workers, disabled people, full-time parents, and of course farm workers are not counted at all. I wonder who is more likely to be un- or under-employed, disabled, work on a farm, or be a fulltime parent? Anyone's guess, but I have some hypotheses.
Also, I highly doubt the 10% difference between trans men and women is statistically significant - the CIs aren't even shown here - especially since I have seen other studies with contradictory or more nuanced results e.g. this one stating that trans men have a higher rate of poverty (shown below):
Frankly, we don't even know the sampling method used to generate the BoLS chart just based on this screenshot of a bar graph, so assumptions that comparisons between groups are appropriate (as opposed to a group vs baseline) seem suspect as well without an actual citation of the original analysis. The multiple comparison effect also becomes relevant here once we start comparing groups to each other (since the number of comparisons goes up geometrically with each new group studied), meaning failure to control for other variables in the BoLS set (e.g. age, level of education, exposure to developmental adversity, etc - discussed in the study linked above) get amplified if we attempt to draw those conclusions inappropriately.
"Some oppressed people can take actions that let them get some benefits from the same systems that oppress them, typically at the expense of other people oppressed by that same system" is like. True for a wide variety of power structures, but getting too trigger-happy about pointing that out proactively at demographics you're not part of is questionable.
Very quickly turns into a "yet you participate in society, curious" type of deal aimed specifically at marginalized groups, you know.
I think it's a point that very often doesn't need to be made at all, basically. Especially if you're going to approach it with zero nuance from a position of relative privilege. Especially especially if you approach it like a dunk.
The “submissive and breedable” meme is transandrophobic, by the way.
Remember the bbno$ and smosh song? It’s pretty good. Isn’t it funny how three cisgender men can make a song that hinges on the joke that they’re so sexually available it’s as if they could get pregnant? Haha, so silly, it’s not as if there is a type of man who can get pregnant and faces fetishization and the threat of forced femiziation via impregnation. 12.9 million Spotify streams -> approx $40,000 to $50,000+ btw.
The “submissive and breedable” meme is transandrophobic, by the way.
Not only is gender a social construct, but so is the cis/trans divide. There actually isn’t a singular trait or hard line you can draw between cis and trans people. It’s not linearly separable!
Did you make an interesting horror premise or did you just find a young, attractive white woman and hold her up going “ooooh she’s in danger! Watch out! She’s in danger!”
Not to throw fuel on this particular fire but are there any transmasculine eggs in media? Are there any men who realize their gender on-screen? Are there any female characters who fandom broadly agrees can be read as trans men?
Very very obnoxious to me when a transandrophobe says “trans men have it better because they’re just seen as butches” in what universe are butches treated well???
Being a killjoy will not make anyone agree with you.
I say this in response to the Artemis II mission. It’s correct that the American space industry is built on imperialism, exploitation, and blood. But pointing that out in the replies of a tumblr post gushing about the stuffed toy they’re using as a gravity indicator will not get people on your side. At best, you make people mildly uncomfortable. At worst, you make people defensive, at which point they’re going to double down on what they already believe. They’ll lean harder into the nationalism this mission seeks to foster. In the future, they’ll be less likely to listen to you and your allies; they’ve been primed to see themselves and the space mission on one side and you and your debbie-downer nonsense on the other.
If you want people to grapple with the depth of cruelty required to make this moon mission a reality, at bare minimum make your own post.