Product Placement
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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JBB: An Artblog!
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oozey mess
Xuebing Du
cherry valley forever
todays bird
we're not kids anymore.
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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Stranger Things
⁂
shark vs the universe
🪼
$LAYYYTER
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@rain-rome
Not a lesbian but I believe in their beliefs
What happened next will shock you!
Happy International Lesbian Day to eggs who are really sure they've thoroughly considered the possibility and definitely aren't transfem (which is kind of a shame because they relate to a lot of their experiences and also love & appreciate dykes and wish they could fit in with them)
‘Trans Men Have Male Privilege’ =/= ‘Trans Men have the same exact privileges as Cis Men and are treated as such’
“But society doesn’t recognize them as-”
that’s lacking cis privilege
The Rise of the Transmasc Researcher
Until around 2000, transfems were mostly studied by "chasers," men fascinated by trans for academic-sexual reasons that are difficult to disentangle [1]. This essay is about another kind of dude. The late 1990s saw chasers and gays lose (reject) their claim to the transfeminine subject, and the term "transgender" sutured transfemininity to a new group: transmascs/men. By 2025, this shift was more or less complete, with transmascs/men serving as the primary stewards of transfemininity, maintaining dominant positions in trans studies, health programs, and NGOs. Our question is how exactly this has changed trans research. Both gays/chasers and transmascs/men have a connection to transfemininity, gays through common sexual circuits, transmascs/men through the common framework of "gender variance." They have, historically, wanted different things from us: gay research has often positioned racialized transfemininity as a kind of "living past" of modern gay identity, a consequence of needing a dress to fuck men, while for transmascs/men transfemininity has served to negotiate medicalization with feminism.
Most immediately, transmasc/male researchers maintain strong divides between trans medical and social organization: essentially, the "social" contains feminist potential, while the "medical" can (at most) avoid getting in the way. This involves a series of (often-assumed) moves: the detachment of DIY from formal medical knowledge, the partition of "medical advocacy" and (nonmedical?) "activist" groups, the racialization of trans-medicine as white, and the disconnection of trans-medicine from the actual day-to-day of how we are treated in the world. In practice, hormones/surgery are intimately tied to trans employment; more "respectable" positions, even, but more clearly in forms of beauty/gender work which require you to advertise, or have great tits, or to have a dick, or to have it get hard [2]. Seeing Don fucking Kulick (1998), prick and chaser extraordinaire, actually discuss this when I have never once seen it in any recent academic text is utterly infuriating. It turns out that unlike the noveau-academic tboys, chasers care very much if you can get hard or not.
Simultaneously, the new transmasc/male research aims to split good from bad trannies with the aim of providing a model for ethical transgendering. Because it is so common for transmasc/male researchers to transmasculinize over the research process itself, the chronic guilt of daring to trans in their rancid academic environment ends up being rather anxiously negotiated through their studies of transfemininity. Their task is to discover and embody a trans(femininity) that is both radical and palatable to their colleagues; this requires (1) a strong separation from all prior attempts to devour transfemininity, (2) an evacuation of the "new" transfemininity of both context and content. The result is a rapid-fire of piecemeal transfemininities that carry different names and contexts, painstakingly sealed from one another, largely framed in terms of each researcher's personal gender negotiations.
All this results in a strange set of common tropes rooted in the gender negotiations of a specific subset of transmascs (the academics). Because academic transmasc/manhood is so often rooted in feminism, medical transition is almost invariably antisocial for them, and so medical and social organizations are split. Transmasc/man negotiations in this context center on "proper" transition while maintaining feminist subjecthood; so studies sharply demarcate proper and improper feminist subjects.
The clearest example of this is in Aren Aizura's "Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment." Aizura is studying medical tourism in Thailand, and he mainly discusses Australian trans women getting surgeries done in Thailand after trying (and failing) to receive such authorization from Australian medical authorities. On its face, this is a clear case of medical injustice (solved using another privilege), but Aizura argues that his informants "tended to phrase their issues in terms of dissatisfaction." When an interviewee described looking for services outside Australia after her doctor demanded unusual procedures in order to receive care, Aizura argues that she (and his other subjects) were simply "understanding themselves as consumers," in contrast to Aden, an interlocutor who (after being refused by a doctor) describes his treatment as "bigotry" (and who never attempts DIY!). After deciding to seek care in Thailand, the social-medical regulation of trans women simply vanishes, and it's a question of neoliberal economics. Aden, who is refused care and actually listens to his doctor, remains a proper feminist subject, capable of undergoing injustices like "bigotry."
If his trans women exist as economic and paradoxically non-medicalized subjects, Aizura's kathoeys appear as a vague radical shape in the distance, difficult to study because "surgeons performing GRS for a Thai clientele tend not to advertise as widely online." This allows them to be the perfect radical subjects in his analysis; kathoey apparently have little chance to obtain GRS due to lack of "professional employment," and anyways are "not defined within Thai popular discourse by a demand for GRS," with only 40% (!) undergoing it, in stark contrast to the incessant vagina-lust of Anglosphere trans women. More generally, there is a "relative absence of medicalization and pathologization" in "Thai cultural understandings of gender nonconforming embodiment;" he immediately follows this up by discussing "kathoey and sao praphet sorng who begin taking hormones in adolescence." By making a rapid set of unstated moves between "medicalization" (is this psychiatrization?), "GRS," and apparently nonmedical practices like hormones, Aizura is finally able to disentangle good from bad trannies: the proper transfeminist subject either listens to the doctor and rots (as Aden), or undergoes cosmetic/hormonal operations in the same (presumably unproblematic?) ways as cis Thai women ("in lines with broader ideals of modern Thai femininity").
Aizura's bad subjects are socially sutured; there is no discussion of the ways that doctors' reviews are traded between trans women, no discussion of the community funding and care around these surgeries; they exist in a closed loop of advertising and individual consumer practice. His good subjects are lobotomized, split from their own reality in order to allow Aizura to collapse them into cisfeminine Thai beauty practice under the apparently unproblematic assumption that (citing Natiya Sukontapatipark) "many kathoeys work in industries like cabaret or sex work, where maintaining physical beauty is necessary to continue working." Kathoeys are basically just a kind of cis woman that's inclined to sex work, oh thank you, you fucking lunatic.
So the new transmasc frameworks are heavily invested in splitting medical from social practice and splitting good from bad trannies. Crucially, this is largely absent from gayguy/chaser studies of us: they are very interested in exactly who's on hormones (they need to know who they can fuck), and they're less interested in salvaging "good trannies" because we've mostly been useful to them as a living trainwreck that overdoses on estrogen and dies. Tguys do some things the chasers can't, but ultimately their assumptions about what "trans" is, adopted from years of negotiating semi-willing testosterone poisoning with their shitty academic coworkers, have been pasted onto the trans mass in ways which ruin most of their work. The reality is that trans life is deeply social, entwined with passing off hormones and funding surgeries and warning people off that shitty fucking doctor. Just as critically, gender has consequences: having a shitty twisted gender leads to a lot of shitty twisted social interactions, and trying to make the "good tranny" has led, repeatedly, to the casting of racialized trans women as "third genders" who are unproblematically accepted and social and are also inherently inclined to sex work and begging for some reason and are also basically women but also not women (can't get preggo) in a way which is very respectable, and also sacred, which is why they can't touch normal people. Fuck off.
Footnotes
[1] Among others: Don Kulick, Lawrence Cohen, Tom Boellstorff, Walter Williams.
[2] Pezzutto, "From Porn Performer to Porntropeneur" discusses this a bit.
i think a lot of criticism of callout posting is not very considered, & is more concerned with preserving one's image of oneself as refusing to perpetrate social harm/harrassment (or morally incapable of doing so) than it is with actually reflecting on the social obligations we have to one another and the ways we harm each other. the reality is that social exclusion and unpersoning are probably not ever going to be eliminated as practices, i would wager everyone has participated in this and probably will again, and sometimes it is not only defensible but, i would argue, necessary. pause here to reflect on scenarios hypothetical or experienced. the practice of callout posting a stranger, whose conduct you may know nothing about, with whom you may never have even interacted, is i would say irremediably broken, abusive, unverifiable, and structurally always takes the form of a popularity contest; i don't have any interest in defending or participating in this practice. but i think it's unwise to pretend that unpersoning cannot or does not happen in other ways, and it would be better as a starting baseline if more of us at least reflected on our capacity to participate in such actions, on when they are appropriate or necessary, on the degree of harm we are capable of inflicting by even the most microscopic social gestures of inclusion/exclusion/validation/condemnation. put more bluntly: if you are cheering on, for example, a classroom of people chasing out an avowed nazi, you already agree that unpersoning is sometimes good, necessary, or imperative. but if you play rhetorical games about this, because you're uncomfortable owning that statement and feel the need to call that practice something else, then all you've done is accede to a social system where people you already like (why?) ontologically never 'deserve' unpersoning, and people you don't like haven't 'really' been unpersoned (we don't support that here!), they've simply 'faced consequences'. it's not conducive to social responsibility in any direction, but rather to preservation of your own ego and refusal to interrogate or develop your ethical impulses and conduct toward others
late to the party but in addition to all the other issues that everyone else already talked about, the new shaun video take on opioids is also abysmal dogshit
shaun begins by stating, in a pretend scandalised tone, that prescription opioids are derived from opium, "you know, like heroin." i am too tired to write an essay on this rhetorical strategy wrt street drugs but suffice it to say he tips his hand when he later describes adderall as "adhd medication" in a section explicitly framing it as a 'soft drug' more akin to alcohol and nicotine than to "fairly hard drugs" such as "cocaine, hallucinogens, and benzodiazepines."
shaun quotes the claim that war-on-drugs anti-opioid policymaking is harmful to chronic pain patients, but his only attribution for this claim is an op-ed written by steven milloy, a former fox news commentator and avowed opponent of public health and environmental policy (and former oxycontin sales rep). as the very first paragraph of the article makes abundantly clear, milloy was not interested in defending pain patients but in dunking on "liberals," and he is cynically using a reference to chronic pain to do so. nowhere in the oxycontin section of shaun's video does he take seriously the idea that some people may, in fact, need or benefit from long-term opioid use, or may be harmed by having their access to those drugs restricted. indeed nowhere in this section of the video does shaun seem to consider the needs of either addicts or chronic pain patients to be topics worth taking seriously at all.
shaun is correct that purdue pharma and the sackler family engaged in misleading campaigning about the addiction potential of oxycontin in order to gain fda approval. however, it is dispiriting that his only example of such behaviour is the claim that the extended-release mechanism of the drug decreases its abuse potential, because shaun seems to have zero understanding of why such a release mechanism is relevant to a discussion of recreational use. extended-release formulations are often thought to be less 'addictive' and less frequently 'abused' because recreational users are typically seeking a rapid release of larger amounts of a drug, rather than a controlled and consistent release over time. this is the same reason many doctors still prefer to prescribe, for example, extended-release stimulants (vyvanse, concerta, adderall xr) over the short-release formulations, and consider themselves to be protecting patients/the streets from drug abuse when they do so.
shaun is correct to drive home the pharmaceutical industry ties of people like sally satel. however, by failing to say literally anything about the massive financial interests motivating war-on-drugs rhetoric, he presents an incredibly one-sided narrative of big pharma vs the people. from prosecutors to the prison industry to the 'pain management' industry to rival drugs and drugmakers, clamping down on opioids is in fact an incredibly lucrative practice as well—just not for the oxycontin portfolio of purdue pharma specifically. these days chronic painkiller patients must navigate a byzantine and punitive maze of referrals to for-profit 'pain clinics' that chronically undermedicate pain; patients in transitional care units (post-op recovery) and long-term 'care facilities' (institutions) are often serviced by contract pain management companies whose travelling practitioners may evaluate each patient for minutes at a time before making pain management decisions. again, undermedication is rampant, from lowering or denying doses to forcibly switching patients to less potent and sometimes inappropriate drugs (tramadol and gabapentin prescription practices only widen as rhetoric on oxycontin hardens). this is all the best-case scenario for painkiller use, and again i don't have the time right now to rehash how criminalisation enriches governments, prison companies, and the firms and states that exploit prison labour. sally satel is an industry stooge, but while going to lengths to demonstrate this extremely well-documented and googleable fact shaun spectacularly fails to understand that her opponents equally serve powerful and complex commercial interests that co-produce the 'war on drugs.'
The situation has gotten even worse for @abed-6 and his family in Gaza. Here are some messages he sent to me today, expressing the severity of the situation. Many of his family members were recently massacred. His two young children survive. They need to escape.
Literally any amount helps. If several people donate a small amount, it's equivalent to a large amount. If you can spare any money at all, please donate it. And if you cannot, share. PLEASE. they have been VERIFIED by @gazavetters at #620 on the spreadsheet
Hello, I am Salma. I am raising funds for a dear friend of mine, to help his family survive. Here is his story:
Transition holds the same role in crossdressing manga that Marxism holds in all cyberpunk media
The Faithful Man: thank you god for inventing patriarchy i love it soso much <3333
The Atheist Man: its seriously incredibly beautiful that women are biologically inferior like. we got this social structure from the monkeys. woww.
The Feminist Man: no one knows where misogyny comes from 🥺
It's bewildering to remember that NATO's 2011 bombing and naval blockade of Libya was justified on the basis that Gaddafi had verbally threatened to commit war crimes (the infamous 'cockroaches' speech). Now, a NATO ally boastfully perpetrates a genocide for all the world to see. And all efforts at armed intervention to stop it, from Lebanon and Yemen, have been met with destruction and war crimes in turn. Such are the privileges of being a settler outpost of American power.
The situation has gotten even worse for @abed-6 and his family in Gaza. Here are some messages he sent to me today, expressing the severity of the situation. Many of his family members were recently massacred. His two young children survive. They need to escape.
Literally any amount helps. If several people donate a small amount, it's equivalent to a large amount. If you can spare any money at all, please donate it. And if you cannot, share. PLEASE. they have been VERIFIED by @gazavetters at #620 on the spreadsheet
Hello, I am Salma. I am raising funds for a dear friend of mine, to help his family survive. Here is his story:
you know that classic ui design adage, the more clicks you need to access basic functions the better, users love clicking and want to have to click as much as possible,
next tumblr update will make you click through a new meatball menu to look at each post on your dash
disgusting sicko addicted to comfort and a personal sense of security
how age regression haters sound
He needs your help.
My friend, Ibrahim @aburakhiaibrahim is suffering right now and you could help him. Please, donate. He has received very little money for him and his large family recently. Can you imagine being trapped in the same situation? Try to donate and save them.
He tells me that his brother, abroad, had to borrow that one thousand to transfer to them. It feels like so much money to ask for, and yet it's still not enough. Can you help? Please donate, and if you can't, please share with as many people as you can.
You could save so many people's lives.
Go to paypal.me/motazmsaburakhia and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
Dear Compassionate Community, My name is Samah, and I com… Samah Aburakhia needs your support for Seeking Safety: Support My Family's
vetting proof here
My brother Moataz, who lives abroad, borrowed more than the amount I made to help my family. Weeks pass without a donation to my campaign.
The situation has gotten even worse for @abed-6 and his family in Gaza. Here are some messages he sent to me today, expressing the severity of the situation. Many of his family members were recently massacred. His two young children survive. They need to escape.
Literally any amount helps. If several people donate a small amount, it's equivalent to a large amount. If you can spare any money at all, please donate it. And if you cannot, share. PLEASE. they have been VERIFIED by @gazavetters at #620 on the spreadsheet
Hello, I am Salma. I am raising funds for a dear friend of mine, to help his family survive. Here is his story:
no one says "ive read enough hentai to know where this is going" anymore
because they dont read enough hentai
so they dont know where its going
dr strangelove glasses?
The guy from marvel? He love glasses
girlfriend tries to suck my penis but she doesnt know i just got back from spending millions of years in the galapagos islands evolving eye spots down there so she gets spooked and flies away for fear that i am a hungry predator
