[beccs]

SHANE HOLLANDER & ILYA ROZANOV Heated Rivalry | 1.01 - Rookies

[vancouver-lord-goldeneyes]

I need her carnally

[trixdraws]

"𝙄𝙛 𝙄 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙗𝙪𝙧𝙣, 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙄'𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙡𝙡."

~~~

A fanart of Princess Malini from 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗱𝗼𝗺𝘀 books by Tasha Suri 🔥 I'm soo excited for The Lotus Empire release. Another reason why November can't come soon enough!

And this is actually my first piece done with Clip Studio Paint! Been trying to dump Adobe for a while now but the recent AI news was the last straw for a lot of artist including me. So. Here we are.

[ghostongasoline]

Palestinian ButchFemme wedding, 2022, @/leilanations

[littlestar2rayoflight]

In honor of her passing, here’s the full pdf of the autobiography of Assata Shakur, pictured here in Cuba with her daughter.

[crimson-femme]

1950s Butch-Femme wedding, seen in Before Stonewall (1984)

[sapphling]

the resurgence of Thin being In has made thin people so much more fucking annoying i keep seeing recipe and gardening videos or tiktoks that look good or are informative but the (very much thin!!) creators can't stop going "oh gotta get my FAT ASS to work in the garden!! 😂 making some tortillas because i'm a FAT LARD ASS, sorry for adding two tablespoons of oil to this i'm such a fucking BIG BACK FAT DIPSHIT aren't i 😂😂" are you not embarrassed

[sapphling]

a lot of the time people talk about this as "self deprecation," and while i think there's a lot to be said about, well, why is fatness such an insult to you as to use it in your self effacement, i think the gleeful nature in which it's delivered betrays that it's much less about self-insult and much more about confirmation of the in-group. i think this is well illustrated by the way people will re-appropriate language around mental illness and substance use disorders, and most especially highly stigmatized diagnoses. when people call themselves "schizo" because they looked at their ex's Instagram, "ocd" because they showed up five minutes early, "a total crackhead" because they made a joke etc. it's typically not an expression of sincere negative self image or identification so much as a joke which presumes the absence of the referenced group; you're non-psychotic, i'm non-psychotic, and in the comfortable absence of anyone actually different, their life/identity/disorder/experience etc. can be used as a joking reference towards the other which, through hyperbole, affirms the norm; my experience of reality is so in line with psychiatric normalcy that asking you to text when you get home is so totally psychotic of me, an affirmation that my relationship to psychosis is so distanced as to make it more representative than anything. and in a similar way, fatness and fat bodies are so intentionally absent from these spaces that they're shouted out only as playful insults towards the behavior of skinny people, or at their most serious as a warding spell against the horror of gaining weight. when you have no fat friends, loved ones, lovers held in esteem in your mind, the idea of fat rolls or a belly or thick thighs are made references to bodies which are less human than symbol; calling yourself a "big back" when you eat works the same as calling yourself a "dog" when you express too much interest in somebody or a "snake" when you're duplicitous. we don't have to worry about offending them via the comparison, we can assume they're not present here. but isn't it funny that of all the traits and cultural products of fatness that are endlessly more praised and rewarded when taken up by our thin peers, even referencing your own body as fat is among them?

[kunosoura]

egg jokes can be overbearing sometimes but they also provide the crucial notion to a future girl that a world where she becomes what she wants to be is not only possible but so in reach and normal that people around her can see it coming. They’re proof against the idea that is very easy to internalize which makes a girl think that being trans will end her life when the reality is there’s already people in her life who accept the person she wants to be

[closet-keys]

reading about the social construction of "gender" (by money, stoller, etc.) really does affirm for me that dykes were not conceived of as "women"-- like desire for particular kinds of relationships with men was very much in the foundational definitions of what it meant to be gendered as a woman. despite the essay "compulsory heterosexuality" being written by a TERF which inhibits the basic coherence of her analysis, the notion of the class of "woman" being structured around economically and legally incentivizing relationships with men and punishing relationships with women was very explicitly present in the origins of the current intersexualization, transgendering, and transfeminization processes. and of course, trans women today still deal with being coerced into performing a particular kind of feminine heterosexuality to access medical care, because to access "womanhood" one is required to be heterosexual (or, at the very least, temporarily imitate heterosexual femininity). I am obviously biased as a dyke myself, but I think overlooking this aspect of the construct of womanhood denies us the analysis to understand why the caricature of the "predatory trans woman" used to motivate laws that keep trans people from public spaces is always a trans woman who is attracted to women. why the idea of her being attracted to other women is leveraged as shorthand to dogwhistle her not "really" being a woman at all. I think trans women who are bi or lesbian really need to have their voices elevated on broader discussions of transmisogyny, and on discussions of misogyny in general.

[that-butch-archivist]

"Dyke March 1994" by Morgan Gwenwald

source: The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love, edited by Beatrix Gates

[devilsskettle]

When The Pink Opaque is on tv, it’s a different ratio aspect then the rest of the movie (i.e. the “real world” portions of the movie) and as you can see there is that black border on the sides indicating that it’s what’s being seen on tv. But when Isabel is being buried alive, it’s in the same ratio aspect as the “real world,” filling the whole screen, indicating that it’s not just what’s happening on tv but also in reality. Anyway I thought this was an interesting editing choice it kind of supports the idea that her death is real etc

[eraserheadadult]

when you go to the gender clinic you can ask about being buried alive left to scream and claw at the lid of your coffin until you emerge into your real body & your real name but idk if it's covered by insurance

[taiturner]

But I know that's not true. That's just fantasy. Kid's stuff.

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

[medusadyke]

i subscribe to the mimi zima school of "you cannot clock something that is actively being presented to you"

[medusadyke]

[mayra-quijotescx]

[Image description: Two tweets from High-Ranking Party Girl.

"I do not get 'clocked' you cannot 'clock' something that's being actively presented to you I'm aggressively transsexual in all areas of my life there's no 'clocking' there's just obtuse and disrespectful behavior and THAT is what *I* am clocking constantly"

"If you think I move through the world attempting to be understood as a cis woman you know nothing about me my point is I should be able to move through the world as a trans woman without people acting fucking stupid and pretending they don't know what that is." End description.]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I think a lot of what's currently informing my fellow white people curdling like milk and shitting their pants when asked to interrogate their relationship with rap is the way many people (especially well-meaning white people) still can't help but think of racism as something that you get accused of rather than something that influences the entire world in pernicious ways.

like, I think a lot of people currently posting the most cringe takes about rap right now would very much agree that Racism Is Bad and probably even acknowledge that rap has been and is still widely maligned and devalues for racist reasons.

but that last step, acknowledging that your personal tastes and interests are also influenced by systemic racism, is where a LOT of people stumble. it's very easy to assume that because you consider yourself against racism, then your tastes and interests cannot possibly be at all informed by racist. if you're a white American, that's simply extremely unlikely to be true.

speaking from personal experience, I had to Work to decenter whiteness in my media tastes. when I was like 19 I listened to a podcast where a white Jewish man talked about keeping a spreadsheet of the books he read to make sure he was reading a roughly equal number of men and women, and I started doing the same thing to track how many authors of color I was reading. at the time I took pride in my belief that I was reading diversely, but when the year ended I was shocked to discover that people of color had written barely a quarter of the books I'd read. I had been giving myself way too much credit while still unintentionally prioritizing white authors, because white authors were the ones I knew best. so I started making an extremely conscious effort to seek out books by authors of color, both fiction and nonfiction, that sounded like my kind of shit.

music was extremely similar. I grew up a little white girl in a very white city in a very white state; nobody was offering me an education in rap or r&b or soul or hip hop. as an young adult there were definitely some Black artists I liked, like Janelle Monáe, but I had to take the initiative of seeking out more artists to find out who I fuck with. you're not going to like everybody, which is fine, but are you even giving anyone a chance? are you even looking?

racism has roots everywhere, bro. it's not enough to just acknowledge it, you have to actively get digging.

[scientia-rex]

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

[diamondsandphoenixfire]

In addition to the fact that it kills you and the people around you, you should quit because Big Tobacco are smug, queer-hating assholes who named their campaign to hook gays “Operation SCUM” and, cross my heart, I am not shitting you. They also made the playbook used by Big Oil and antivaxx conspiracy theorists.

So, just a reminder that spite is a great reason to quit smoking.

Also, I keep hearing people RAVE about the book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr. You can do this - other people have done this! There’s help out there. And spite.

[scientia-rex]

Good addition! Quit smoking to stand against capitalism!

[iscariotsss]

HI harm reduction for anyone who just picked up the habit and feel very black and white about everything! Or anyone feeling too black and white and going well I guess I'll die then who cares! Harm reduction here

- smoke less! Make arbitrary rules about when you get to smoke. Tie smoking to some thing you hate to do but need to get done. Like, I only get to smoke when I do (thing I gotta do). Or I only get to smoke... when I am dressed for the day and have left the house. Whatever works from where you're starting. No smoking indoors, whatever, only 1 cigarette after work, make shit up

- If you're doing the "i only smoke when I drink" or "I only smoke socially" and it's becoming hanging out w smokers more often or drinking more often -> switch it up w prior thing new rules. I only smoke... alone. I don't smoke... with coffee. Whatever. Smoking w other smokers IMO only leads to more smoking don't do that for either of you

- Get your space smelling less of cigarettes. Like, wash your clothes all of em, designate one item your smoking jacket or whatever. Basically work to overcome the olfactory fatigue so you can actually smell how much you stink. I swear this one works even if you currently feel that you like the smell

- if you JUST STARTED, but your mental health is so shit that you don't have it in you not to smoke, moderate as well as you can to stave off the actual addiction part. Like, switch to lower nicotine cigarette brands (lights don't mean less, google this one). Don't smoke every day. Go every other. Make that your hard line - not every day. Give future you a better chance at kicking it

- In any context of this any starting point, supporting yourself through other avenues will help. Quality sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health care, whatever all the basics anything achievable for you do those things if you can

- Substitute treats. Pick other things to treat yourself. Food, tv, bed rot, whatever. Let your id have other stuff that's not smoking

Ok im done this is all just. Idk stuff I wish I'd known decades ago that I hope can help others. There can be more to it than just quitting or not quitting if you feel stuck or hopeless in it cheers on the nebulous other

[scientia-rex]

It’s also worth noting that people get discouraged by repeated attempts to quit, but the people who succeed at quitting and making it stick? Are people who have on average tried many, many times! Don’t beat yourself up if you struggle. The struggle is not weakness, it’s where the success comes from.

[communistkenobi]

we never should have let cis people get away with “sex is biological, gender is social”

[pfaugh]

can someone explain this one pls

[communistkenobi]

sure thing! It’s a fairly mainstream “trans-inclusive” opinion that while sex is still biological (which is to say, binary, “real,” outside of social opinion, it exists in nature), gender is socially constructed. This frames being transgender as having a socially constructed gender that ‘conflicts with’ biological sex. This conforms to mainstream psychiatric models of transgenderism, which frames trans people as having an identity disorder or something psychologically wrong with us that makes us ‘want to have a gender that is different from our biological sex.’ It is a handy way of conceding that gender is social while still maintaining the belief that sex is a real biological thing. It is very common among doctors, cis allies, policy documents about trans inclusivity (the ones I’ve read, anyway), and is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience.

I really dislike this framing for several reasons - one is that it is in fact arguing that gender is biologically based by tying it to our ‘natural sex’ (if our gender ‘conflicts with’ our sex, then gender is still biologically based, and if the reason you want to change your gender is because of mental illness, then a desire to change one’s gender can only be gained through psychological abnormality). It also maintains sex as something that is real, unchanging, natural, and universal across space, time, and culture. It is none of those things -

sex can change (HRT, surgery, and so on changes our sex, in fact it’s called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and HRT is comminly understood as initiating a ‘second puberty’),

sex is not binary - a belief that it is binary is what constructs the category of ‘intersex,’ ie people who don’t fit this supposed universal sex binary, and this construction produces medical violence against intersex people by positioning them as medically defective/abnormal,

sex is not ‘real’ in the sense that the category of ‘sex’ is a social construction that bundles a complex series of properties of the body (external genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, etc) together by claiming they always 100% coincide with each other and form a coherent whole (this is not true, ‘sex’ is a spectrum because sex refers to many, many things). You can read the work of Julia Serano, a trans biologist who has published many open access essays on this subject. I believe she recently published a piece critiquing the idea that gametes are binary

The process of assigning sex at birth does not even follow this supposed scientific fact properly, because we don’t run chromosome checks on infants, we don’t do ultrasounds on them to see what their internal organs look like, we don’t measure their hormone levels, and so on. Sex assignment at birth is a social process of doing a quick genital inspection of infants and then writing down their sex on birth records based on that inspection, and if those external genitals don’t conform to binary understandings of sex (eg the infant is intersex), these genitals are surgically altered to fit this binary model. I believe Adamson describes this in Beyond the Coloniality of Gender as preparing children for a life of ‘good heterosexual sex’ (this is a paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote)

Because sex is a socially constructed category, it is not universal, because social constructs are dependent on the social context they arise in. I’ve read a number of papers from postcolonial/decolonial scholars in particular critiquing this supposed universalism as a form of colonial domination (María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, Sally Engle Merry’s Colonial and Postcolonial Law, Boris Bertolt’s The Invention of Homophobia in Africa, Jenny Evang’s Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, B Binaohan’s Decolonising Trans/Gender 101. These last two aren’t postcolonial works but they’re very instructive for understanding sex assignment as a deeply oppressive and non-scientific practice: Heath Fogg Davis’ Sex Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique and Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices)

essentially, “sex is biological, gender is social” is a massive cop-out that still accepts the framing of binary sexual biological legitimacy, which is the foundational belief that produces transphobic violence and discrimination in society. I really like Judith Butler’s framing of it Bodies That Matter: if sex is this supposedly biological reality that can’t change, but our understanding of sex is only always in reference to our social interpretation and application of it in the world (eg gender), then sex is also socially constructed