He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
PlayStation putting out a legal notice saying they’re removing 500+ movies from user accounts days before announcing they’re getting rid of physical discs for games is an interesting choice
having thought about it this is a generationally anti-consumer announcement that will have a profoundly detrimental impact on consumers and retail markets. this will price out new consumers even more than a $600 PS5 and $80 games will. this will make games less accessible and more nickel-and-dimed. this will make games impossible to share irl without giving your console up, and will stop institutions like libraries from being able to loan copies of modern games. and most importantly, it will be for a minimal profit, as most of the sales in video games are already digital.
this is such a staggeringly catastrophic piece of news that i'm shocked it wasn't said by nintendo. congrats to sony for one-upping them in anti-consumer practices.
Discord is supposedly saying this is going to affect "only 10% of users", but I really don't believe them at all. It's always going to be way worse and affect more people than what they claim.
So in case anyone needs it:
After Discord announced plans to require age verification for all users, a free, HTML-based tool emerged that aims to bypass facial scans on
really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up
This is why Pride is not just a party. It's a joyful celebration, but it's also a pointed and colourful two-finger salute to a world that stood back whilst so many of us died. And we'll never go quietly, never again.
Also while we're all talking about anti-racism, here's a helpful tip:
Performative self-flagellation over being white is not a substitute for doing serious introspection about the ways you have been complicit in or rewarded by a white-supremacist society, nor doing the work to dismantle white supremacy.
A white person chiming in to a conversation about racism to say "I'm sorry for being white" or "white people suck, I say this as a white person" is just a masturbatory way to try to assuage your own feelings of shame without actually doing anything. It doesn't make you look like "one of the good ones." It makes you look like someone who centers your own feelings about it.
i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it like…impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
turns out i wasn't making that up, his name is Dr. Toru Miyazaki! he also wrote a book called "The Day Cats Live To Be Thirty", so cats are kind of his thing.
apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.
As they age, almost all cats develop kidney disease, from which they eventually die. Just as in humans, kidney disease i
Dr. Toru Miyazaki’s AIM injection for cat kidney disease enters trials in 2025, aiming for a 2027 release. Greycoat Research supports the sc
whoa wait i actually read the articles and it's so much cooler than just that!!
dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!
although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!
on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.
furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.
annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D
man just think, not only could our kitties start living longer, healthier lives, but just maybe dialysis will become as rare and obsolete as the iron lung is for people. what a badass Dr. Toru is!
Update: So they have done clinical trials and have submitted it for approval as of april 2026. They are expecting it to be available late 2026/early 2027
The AIM protein drug for feline chronic kidney disease has been submitted for approval in Japan (April 2026). We break down clinical trial d
As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%
New 2026 study: AIM protein boosts cat kidney disease survival from 20% to 80%. Discover how this scientific breakthrough is changing the fu
one of my patients came in for an emergency visit, because she snapped the wire on her retainer watching the movie when MBJ took his shirt off she clenched her teeth so fucking hard she snapped it. that is the fucking funniest shit ever to me this tiny 17 year old girl thirsting so goddamn hard she busted steel
So much of cis and trans radfeminist discourse is like throwing a grenade into every room you think has a man in it, then when 99% of the people killed by the grenade are women you go “well, you shouldn’t have been in the room where a man might have been” and somehow it’s feminist praxis
Penis makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. People who fuck with a strap get hit. Being a top gets you hit. Got penis envy? Must be evil. Can accuse you of penis envy? Evil.
Testosterone makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Intersex people get hit. Masc women get hit. Women of color get hit. Anyone you can force a masculine label on or deny of a feminine label gets hit.
Male privilege is a moral failing you both somehow choose but also cannot opt out of rather than a set of conditional circumstances society imposes on you that may temporarily benefit you? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being too close to maleness gets hit.
Masculinity makes you evil? Trans men get hit. Trans women who are masc get hit. Trans women who you can accuse of being masc get hit. Masc women get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being masc get hit (woc, intersex people, ethnic minorities with features assumed ‘masculine’, anyone who rejects aspects of femininity or doesn’t perform femininity in a way you think they ‘should’)
Proximity to men makes you evil? Anyone who dates men is hit. Anyone who likes men is hit. Anyone who is friends with men gets hit. Ultimately people assaulted by men suddenly “had it coming” because they dared stand next to a man, and you call yourself a feminist spouting the biggest rape apologist catchphrase???
You wanna “kill all men” for what theyve done to you, but you’re not doing anything to hurt OR change cis men or society but you are wracking up a body count of women just as hurt as you.
“Feminist” when you’ve pushed more women towards suicide than an incel has? Gimme a break.
“Misandrist” you wouldn’t dare say that shit to a cis man, but you sure have a lot of gas in the tank for the woman standing near him or the trans man who *just* started using he/him after 20+ years of the type of misogyny you are going to gleefully throw back in his face
we are broadly so fucking bad at being good friends to people who Cannot Leave
there are people who Cannot Leave. hopefully it's not the case for their whole lives but it is the case for them RIGHT NOW. and even trauma and abuse aware communities are shitassfuck bad at knowing how to be a supportive friend to these people and I find it soooo fucking frustrating. it's condescension and scolding and unrealistic standards and victim blaming and minimizing all the way fucking down .
It's so important to educate yourself about why people stay in bad situations and how to help someone who can't leave or goes back. Any sentence starting with "You should just" is bad, but "You should just leave" is one of the worst.
hey i have unfortunately become mired in trans discourse lately and i was trying to find what privileges people seem to think trans men have and found this
and well, they did not include sources for their claims, so i was wondering if you had come across anything to support or refute these stats since I believe you are a bit better read than i am in these areas. And also if you had thoughts on this „male privilege in comparison to xyz demographic“ especially as it relates to trans men (when the intersectionality here is entirely gender/sex related) because it doesnt sit right with me but i cant tell if thats bc i am resistant to the idea or if its bc it actually doesnt make total sense.
The thing is, studies that discuss wages, housing, hate crimes, etc have the same pitfalls that intimate partner violence and sexual assault studies do. Which I talked about here.
Trans people are underrepresented, trans people are misgendered in studies that includes them, trans people are often lumped in as one category in studies not about being trans, there is never clear distinction between stages of transition (ie trans man who goes by he/him and doesn't pass vs a trans man who passes well and is stealth) so what Trans Man are we comparing to what Trans Woman? Trans men are often extremely underrepresented in studies even about trans people ("4 out of 5 trans men had a great time versus only 25 of 40 trans women", and now in studies where we see more trans men than women, the bias is pointed out--which is good, but when it's only one side the biased results still win out). Sometimes a study comes out marginally higher for one side and then another study comes out marginally higher for the other, and then regardless of marginal difference one way or the other trans people as a whole are WILDLY disadvantaged compared to cis peers.
"Only 30% of trans men have to worry about this while 35% of trans women do" and then the stats for cis people are like 2% and 5% for cis people respectively.
The last thing I will say before getting into actual findings is that these people never use the word "intersectional" correctly, which is always a big red flag for me. First, marginalized identities are not multipliers for being "most oppressed" or to say, the inherent oppressed vs the inherent oppressor. Second, "who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor" is still contextual, and failing to grapple with that is how you get weaponized victimhood.
You can have a queer disabled neurodivergent woman and if she is racist to a Black cis man, she is still the "oppressor" in the situation. Power is situational, and so is oppression. For the thousandth fucking time, trans men are marginalized because of their gender. If they were not men, they would not be facing transphobia in this way. This is an experience that is not comparable to "poor men" "gay men" as classes--those classes (devoid of other intersections) assume cisness, which these men are not.
Now, all of this is using primarily US studies cause that's the perspective these debates come from, right? Occasionally the UK, or Canada and sometimes sparingly somewhere else in Europe but with no mention of even how non-English language affects transness let alone cultural and ethnic factors, and never with non-western, non-northern hemisphere perspectives included. Countries where people viewed as women are not viewed as people at all have some wildly different experiences when it comes to both gendered violence and transition opportunity. If your goal is to be a troll only, you can say "well women in x country are property so trans men cannot ever transition and trans women can retain male privilege" and that would be just as unhelpful and lacking in understanding anything about the situational nature of transness.
This cyclical argument is never about making things better, it is about being justified in one's isolationism and misery.
A widely held up study about the specific plight of trans women claimed that the average life expectancy of trans women was 35. This has filled people with fear for YEARS. I can't tell you how many birthdays I've seen where you celebrate having beaten the statistic. But it's not true. 30-35 was the high end age of Brazilian trans women who were murdered at the time. This is not a universal statistic. It is very specific and situational, and not just "trans women" but Brazilian trans women of color, most of whom were in sex work. Their race is a factor, their class is a factor, the lack of protections for sex workers is a factor. Brazilian politics is a factor. Many were elated to find out that they actually weren't doomed to die by 35. Others were upset to lose this stat as a talking point.
At the end of the day, information revealed that things were not as bleak as we thought, and this makes material difference in people's lives, especially the relief at no longer needing to count down to your assumed death. But if your motivation is internet fights splitting hairs, this was a blow to your arsenal. Different priorities I suppose.
Pay
This study says that for every dollar earned by "the typical worker", trans women make .60 while trans men "and nonbinary people" make .70. It raises a lot of questions about how many of each group were polled and also the association of trans men with nonbinary folks with no further explanation is not great, but sure, here is one that says that trans men make slightly more. The same study says that lesbians make .87 while bisexual women make .75. The gap between lesbians and bi women is larger than the gap between trans women and trans men (and nonbinary people I guess?), all trans people make less than cis people, and everyone is making less than cis men and even the "typical worker"
This Canadian study cited by American institutions actually separates nonbinary people by AGAB (and is seemingly the only to do so), and so while trans men in this situation actually were the highest group relatively across the board, they were still 20% below cis men at a maximum. And then it gets interesting when you look at NB folks, because nonbinary people assigned female at birth PLUMMET below all other trans people. I'm actually attaching the graph cause it's wild to look at.
According to this, trans men *do* slightly benefit but transmascs are extremely extremely behind everyone else. Do we take the average then or....?
Most other studies do not actually do their own polling and continually quote the study that said .70 trans men and .60 trans women, and then omit nb folks from the conversation.
Job Security
This study suggests similar unemployment rates among trans men and women (some others say a percent or two higher for trans women) but both have rates 2-3x higher than cis peers--9-16% vs 5.3% for cis folks.
The same study also says "those assigned female at birth tend to have lower incomes and are more likely to work part time than their similarly situated counterparts assigned male at birth."
BUT it also says that nonpassing out trans women receive harsher penalties than nonpassing trans men
AND suggests that gender pay discrepancy and job security comes more from the gap between trans men who pass and trans women who don't. Duh! Of course someone you think is a cis man is going to be out-rewarding people that someone thinks is a woman or specifically a trans woman.
Some studies from 2016 found that outing significantly increased the chances of a trans man being fired while not really increasing the chances for trans women, while more recent find similar rates.
Housing Security
An interesting 2019 study found that gender nonconforming people in general were at even higher rates of homelessness than trans people (and both were much higher than cis people). I can imagine there is a correlation between having the language to describe yourself and access to transition materials that correlates with having basic needs met, essentially "how many of these people are also trans but have no way to know or pursue transition and so are just gnc?" on top of just the chances that general nonconformity will get you kicked from your homes.
The Trevor Project found in 2022 that trans boys were slightly more likely to be homeless than trans girls, but race is much more of a factor than gender in disparity
This study suggests that trans men report extremely high rates of homelessness as well as an extreme lack of resources. The study wonders if the disparity is so high because of trans women being underrepresented in the study, which I agree with, but this is also a rare housing study where trans men DO heavily outnumber trans women reporting, and the same discrepancies can be observed. Essentially: the studies where there is actually a huge gap between trans women and trans men are the ones where there is disparity in polling. Go figure. Many studies for adults cannot meaningfully separate the two, and even the ones with bigger gaps pales in comparison to the rates for cis people, even cis women.
Hate Crimes
While trans men have higher rates of sexual violence (in several studies higher than cis women), the one category where trans women really take the cake is in murder. It is true that trans women are more likely to be victims of violent hate crimes, but the truth is that trans women of color are most likely. In 2024, 87% of trans murder victims were women of color. When comparing white trans people, there is significantly less difference, though still a higher rate for trans women. Race is again much more of a factor than gender alone in these scenarios, a staggering majority are women of color.
Survival Sex Work
Unfortunately we do not have good studies on trans people sex workers--partly due to the criminalization and partly due to gaps in who is talked about/permitted to speak. Essentially, there are comparable rates of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness between trans men and women and the pivot to sex work is comparable.
As lamented in this article by Professor Angela Jones, studies ONLY talk about trans women and never trans men (and assume any male sex workers are cis and that nonpassing trans men are women) but this is not simply just a case of erasing trans men, but also of demonizing trans women. These studies do not care about the safety, health, and livelihoods of trans women sex workers, but dare to mention them at all as public health crisis due to fears about HIV exposure. So everyone is really fucked in this, being erased and being accounted for are both bad.
Trans men are also typically at risk of pregnancy. In sex work, as victims of sexual violence, and in their daily lives. Also true of HIV, with a lot of cis studies on the matter forgetting about trans men entirely. And with pregnancy comes all the misogyny of reproductive care battles AND the transphobia of being a pregnant trans man--which, by the way, is the story of the first trans man I ever heard about. Deeply dehumanizing and condescending article, so warning for that.
Imprisonment
It's difficult to categorize rates when trans people are misgendered and sent to prisons that do not align with their gender, and often the only way that news reaches the outside is through LGBT orgs dedicated to this. There are lots of things that affect the results
Number fucking one always and forever is race
Trans men and women both are arrested at higher rates than cis peers
Background environment: foster care, homelessness, records from their youth, or 1. race 2. race, and 3. race
Trans men's hormones are controlled substances, where trans women's are not, though it's not clear how often that becomes an actual factor in criminalization vs a massive deterrent to DIY
Trans women are more likely to be violently attacked and if they fight back they are fucked. Trans men are more likely to be raped and if they fight back they are fucked
Old crossdressing laws seemed to hit trans men and trans women pretty evenly, with both at risk of sexual violence in jail.
AKA these days, jailtime is influenced by factors beyond trans identity or even gender, and all of those are influenced most by racism
Trans women are abused in prisons and handed over to violent inmates in what is called V-coding
Trans men are abused in prisons by staff and inmates, and it gets very little attention and are rarely included in prison studies at all
Healthcare
I noticed this was mysteriously absent from the list, and I'm sure I know why--it makes everyone very uncomfortable (cis and sometimes trans alike, it seems) to acknowledge the deep disadvantages trans men face in healthcare--particularly reproductive care. It's hard to dismiss trans men without dismissing cis women, and it's difficult to downplay the role of repro care for trans men without connecting what it means for trans women too. I think for some there is both resentment and disgust that trans men might choose to carry their own children, but whether its personal or the fear that highlighting an area where trans men may actually have it considerably worse, the thing I want to say is, this gap doesn't really matter either. At least not as a "gotcha."
Trans women also have a dogshit time in healthcare. Both are misgendered, have care redirected to their genitals, are assaulted by hospital staff, are held hostage to invasive questioning. And trans women are not not involved when it comes to repro care. So many trans women don't understand what's happening to them when they experience periods. They aren't thought of when it comes to new developed tissue (similarly, trans men aren't considered despite new studies showing growth of prostate tissue). They aren't thought of for post-bottom-surgery vaginal care. Reproductive care is about more than being pregnant. STI information, safe sex practices, and issues of sterilization impact trans women as much (if not in some cases more) than others, especially cis peers.
Trans women shouldn't be pushed out of the conversation, trans men are simply asking that we do not erase them.
So to sum up...no. lol There are some areas where trans men are marginally better off, but there are areas where trans women are marginally better off, and I don't think those areas deserve exceptionalism either. Every study polls very small populations within a small population, and a lot of the heavier statistics are hard to track due to criminalization or are stats that only exist once we are dead.
In no category is the difference between trans women and trans men a big one, incorporating nonbinary people and gnc into the mix makes it even less clear, the largest divide comes between passing trans men and nonpassing trans women, and studies assume closeted trans people are cis men and women respectively--where the gap between men and women is larger. And still, money made by a closeted trans woman paid cause they think she's a cis man is not really a privilege compared to the cost of inauthentic living. Beyond that, no gap between trans women and trans men is bigger than the gap between trans people and cis people. And beyond even that, all divide between trans women and trans men is also wildly eclipsed by the divide between white trans people of any gender and trans people of color, particularly (in the US) Black trans people.
White trans women have closer stats to trans men than either do with Black trans women. And STILL separatism isn't the answer. True intersectionality recognizes how struggle overlaps and how it might not.
What we need to do is make space for people to talk about their experiences. We need to recognize where we relate and where we don't. There is no one label that holds a person in the most marginalized position above all others, and it certainly isn't "woman"--this is TERF rhetoric.
The statistics are lacking, our representation and recognition is lacking. We are misgendered. We ALL have experiences outside of our gender identity--pre-transition, passing and not-passing. These "who has it worse" fights are both needlessly divisive but also misunderstands our experiences.
I had experiences as my AGAB before I knew I was trans. I had experiences when I knew but couldn't do anything about it. I faced barriers accessing transition care. For the entirety of my care. I had experiences when people assumed I was my AGAB, when people assumed I was the "opposite" cis gender, and when people were threatened because they weren't sure. I HAD binary trans experiences and cis experiences. And THEN I realized I was genderfluid. I've passed as "both" cis genders, I have passed as my desired gender, I have been read as neither or something else--with admiration and danger stemming from it. My fluidity has caused me to be mistaken for a range of things, and with it, treated as if I was that thing. It made me even more sympathetic to people whose gender identity I do not share.
I've seen white trans men who pass and are rewarded for seeming to be cis get sexually assaulted at the OBGYN. I've seen trans women wrestle with guilt because she knew she climbed ranks higher than her cis women peers before she came out, and now transition could cost her the position she has climbed to.
It's not cut and dry.
While we are shit-sling, trans folks are in material danger.
A 19 year old trans girl was stabbed to death at her uni. Now you could say "well, many trans people cant even go to college", or "the suspect is Black, would they be looking for the killer if he wasn't?" or "her identity is being concealed, out of privacy? Out of respect? For her family safety? How do we know she was a trans woman? Is this police speculation or did someone who knew her verify?" or "an american college student is not misgendered, but sex workers are deadnamed in their murder reporting"
All of these things are on some level worth considering, but in the long run, none of that weighs against how the college has been stoking anti-trans resentment and platforming nazis like TPUSA. None of it fucking matters next to murder. She is being treated differently to plenty of other trans coverage, and it's fair to wonder why--the intense effort of local community to honor her?--but she's still dead! And the context of her murder is not infighting, it's anti-trans posturing on campuses by cis people.
39 year old Lucas Redbeard Knapp was murdered defending someone from harassment, and the killers had been hostile towards him in the past for his trans identity, and nearly all reports of the incident leave out his murder, degender him, or vaguely reference that someone has been killed in favor of focusing entirely on the suspects, going even so far as to humanize them. Is erasure privilege? Is being omitted in the report of your own murder a sign of your overwhelming oppressor status?
Why are we doing this? What does this do? Who does any of this help?
We are getting nowhere with this while actual danger spreads. And at the end of the day, the people holding funerals, speaking out, fighting for our rights are fighting under united fronts. Trans men and trans women have been each others biggest champions in court, in legislation, in orgs--there IS a sense of unity among the ones doing the work out there.
I'm sorry to folks who have bitter resentment to the people in as much danger as them. I'm sorry to folks who think that oppressor is an inherent state and not something people opt into and out of all the time.
There IS no great divide between trans men and women. And frankly no great divide between the both of you and the rest of us nonbinary people these discourse stirrers love to forget about or sort into a binary to suit their arguments. And even beyond that, there is no great divide between trans and cis people--because cis people can realize they are trans, because all of us have been assumed cis at one point or another in our lives, and even cis people as a class are not our enemies, because they have a deep overlap in our struggles and have ALSO been some of our biggest champions.
These people want proof we are all segmented clans with hard borders and isolated fights? Look elsewhere.
everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs
“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*
It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.
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