Remember to take breaks and cool down! You're not lazy, rude, or invalid for needing to disengage from stressors of any kind. Discourse is not easy.
Pinned Post (explanations on what you're working with here):
This Blog:
The ask box is open, and I'll happily have a civil discussion-- one free of ad hominem remarks, and where all involved parties are aware they may be disagreed with-- from all sides of any discourse, barring plurality discourse. I don't do anons anymore.
Tagged "#muted notifications," I occasionally have to mute notifications for various posts of mine. So, don't try getting my attention on anything I've given that tag.
OP:
I'm a disabled, perisex, bigender adult living in the USA. When referring to me, do so with (he/him) and (she/her) pronouns, and call me either OP or Sage.
One such disability of mine is albinism, and I'd love it if people were to ask me questions about the condition. I wish more people cared about albinism beyond the aesthetic, or would at the very least get the aesthetic right.
Due to anti-transgender aggression where I live, I'm birth-stealth to all but my closest friends offline. Still, I call myself transmasculine, and I someday hope to evolve to transfeminine as well-- a femininity that is achievable only after masculine transition, that doesn't give me dysphoria, that meshes in beautifully with my being. (These are my own feelings with my gender; I'm not labelling anyone else.)
Lastly, I'll never ever disclose here whether I'm "TMA" or "TME." I have many reasons, but my biggest one is that I love it when bioessentialists don't know whether to treat me like a fucked-up "female" or "male." I hate the sex binary, and I hate TERFs.
Some of OP's Views (Warning: LONG):
Pro-Landback. Indigenous people have right to the land of their ancestors. Landback isn't about forcing non-indigenous people off the land to get the land back, or making non-Indigenous people second-class citizens.
One's religious beliefs (or lack thereof) should not affect the people who don't share those beliefs.
Pro-self diagnosis. Healthcare systems tend to be shit; tons of people go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for very real struggles, and they still deserve resources.
Pro-choice. People should be allowed to do with their own bodies what they want, especially if it's to protect themselves and their livelihoods. This also includes that genital-altering operations should not be forced upon people, such as with many intersex infants having their genitals surgically altered (read: not gender-affirming surgeries that people consent to have done to themselves.)
Sex traits are naturally varied and malleable, and binaries in both sex and gender alike should be abolished.
White people (in the USA at least) can be resented and treated indecently, but they are not oppressed for being White. There is no such thing as "reverse racism."
Men (in the USA at least) can benefit from the patriarchy only if they participate in it. The patriarchy affects people of different genders differently, but everybody is hurt by it in some way or another.
Benevolent sexism exists and is harmful. Nobody is helped by the idea of "pink jobs" and "divine femininity." Capabilities are not inherent to one's gender.
Being oppressed and acknowledging that will never inherently mean you blame other oppressed people for it.
Trans people can and do experience unique struggles that cisgender people of the gender they identify as doesn't usually experience, by virtue of being trans. We need to stop referencing cisgender people as gender standards.
Transfeminine people don't have AMAB privilege / male privilege, transmascs don't have "AFAB / female privilege" (those are not real), and non-binary people do not have privilege from their ASAB. Additionally, one's ASAB refers to an event, and is not accurate to describing one's body or mind ("gendered brains" aren't real.)
Pro-MOGAILIOM, radinclus.
Anti-radqueer, pro-alternatives, pro-recovery.
Pro-paraphilia, however, people attracted to beings who cannot consent shouldn't hold contact stance besides anti-contact. "Cannot consent" includes bodily minors, who do not have the life experience and privilege to readily protect themselves from the risks that intimacy with bodily adults carry.
Youthlib, but bodily minors being unable to safely consent to sex with bodily adults is not something they need "liberating" from.
Transracial belongs to people adopted into families of a differing race, and only to those people.
You can identify as homosexual but have experience with others of a different gender. You can also identify as multisexual (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual) but have experience with others of only one gender.
You can be both sexually active and asexual. Asexuality and aromanticism revolve around attraction, not action.
Kink should be done with all participants aware of risks and consenting. RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) is better than SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual).
Not all coping mechanisms are healthy and productive, and not all facets of the human mind are beneficial-- however, neither is repression.
If I must don a shipcourse label, then I'm neutralship, through a mix of views cemented in both antiship and proship conversations.
Anti-harrassment. Engaging in discourse is not harassment until the arguments "break containment," such as with ad hominem attacks. I hate echo-chambers.
From time-to-time, I hear non-binary positivity breach the topics of going on HRT, as well as top surgery (usually for transmascs, but I will get into this separately)...
But almost never bottom surgery.
So I am here to say this:
If you presently have a penis and to ANY degree would be happier without it, this doesn't automatically mean you must be a woman. You don't have to be a binary woman to be valid in wanting to have a vagina. Vaginoplasty and/or orchiectomy aren't just for binary women.
If you presently have a vagina and to ANY degree would be happier without it, this doesn't automatically mean you must be a man. You don't have to be a binary man to be valid in wanting to have a penis. Metoidioplasty AND phalloplasty aren't just for binary men.
Being non-binary doesn't mean you have to "make peace" with your natal parts, you are allowed to transition your body in whichever way validates you the most.
Your body is yours, and only you get to live with your body for all your life.
Remaking this post since I’m pretty sure it got deleted, and a lot of people found it very helpful. This is a medical diagram of before and after bottom surgery for trans femmes.
you literally can not have a vagina without paying for it. vaginoplasty for some, period products for others, if you want to stop buying period products that’s gonna be expensive medicine or an expensive procedure, recovery from surgery requires time off work and vaginoplasty specifically requires money spent on dilators. our bodies shouldnt cost us this much on baseline. having a vagina shouldnt have such a hefty tax on it. it makes me feel like i’m in a fictional dystopia written for middle school classrooms when i think about it.
This kind of response to things I say about sex work, which isn't always phrased like this but almost always focuses on me being male or a man or my pronouns, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why mansplaining is bad.
I am a sex worker. I have been for a decade. The majority of people I know are sex workers and I'm embedded in sex worker community. I started before 18 and have done it in brothels, cars, my own home, clients' homes, saunas, and hotels.
It's absolutely reasonable to criticize men who speak on issues they don't experience like an authority, especially when they speak over women to do it. It is not reasonable to raise someone's gender (or in this case, pronouns) as a reason their thoughts aren't worth hearing when the issue is one they do face.
I see people bringing up that I'm trans in response to things like this, as a way to legitimize my speech. The reason I refuse to do so, despite many of my experiences selling sex being pre-transition, is that I equally do not want cis men who have done sex work to be silenced on the topic.
We need more active and former sex workers to speak out. That won't happen if we're dismissing those who do.
My brother @transfaguette went missing last Tuesday. The family was left a suicide note on a hard drive similar to the one posted on this platform 2 nights ago. His last known location was Chittenango Falls, New York, our hometown. You may have seen the selfie of him standing in front of the falls. The park was turned upside down by the most qualified personnel in the state, including SWAT and cadaver dogs. Ansel is nowhere to be found. You may have seen the news reports.
We suspect he may be alive somewhere with somebody. The police have been on top of this investigation 24/7 and have gone to every length to help us. There is one major piece missing to this puzzle that we feel could provide us some answers - his online presence. If you interacted with Ansel on Tumblr, X, and specifically Discord, *please* reach out to me. Accessing this information would require dozens of subpoenas that would take months. If you have any screenshots or anything you’d like to share, pm me and I will give you my personal number. If you would like to just talk to the police, you can call the tip hotline at 315-366-6000.
Take care of each other. Look out for each other. Thank you.
The way that a lot of feminists will receive, "marginalized men need advocacy," and process it into something like, "Oppressor Class needs reinforcement" just tells me these things:
The only thing stopping them from treating disabled women as burdensome is their gender.
The only thing stopping them from treating women of color as threats is their gender.
The only thing stopping them from treating queer women as perverted is their gender.
And it becomes even clearer to me that this is true when I watch how these people treat these individual marginalized women whom they dislike. They're investigated for being burdens, threats, perverts, etcetera. Their womanhood is socially revoked.
It really is just gender that holds back bigotry sometimes, and when you fail to strive for gender equality, this will remain true. We need gender equality in feminism-- that should be a no-brainer, but alas.
a misogynistic society is so threatened by the concept of trans women - women that "had the opportunity" to be privileged men and chose not to - that they start making up privileges women have in order to explain why trans women exist. going into womens restrooms isnt a privilege, playing womens sports isnt a privilege, lesbianism isnt a privilege, yet they present them as such to try and explain why trans women are women for nefarious reasons. a misogynistic society will never understand that trans women have no ulterior motive for being women
I know anti-lesboy and anti-turigirl rhetoric is just utter purity-respectability politic bullshit when I've got those crowds coming after my ass for saying that I'm gay for men, women, and many enben as somebody who's bigender (identifying simultaneously as both binary genders, technically considered non-binary.)
if you think that intersex people existing within your spaces is 'co-opting' and 'appropriating' your language, you should probably evaluate why you feel that way about intersex people and why you think you're different than your average peri-cis intersexist (hint: you're not).
it's just irritating as an intersex person to be forced into peri-centric standards of what is 'valid' when it comes to my own gender identity. I feel similarly as somebody who's also nonbinary and multigender, since these things have a huge hand in why I identify the way I do, as well. it's honestly pretty exhausting to be seemingly exempt from the average peri-binary person's trans 'activism' when they are part of the reason why more people should include those like me in the first place.
Hate it when I'm talking about queer inclusion, and somebody with a stick up their ass saunters up, and they pull out the stick to show me, and it's:
The Mighty Cishet Man
"Bisexuals being queer? Cool, love it when women bring their cishet boyfriends to Pride and ogle the lesbians together. Can't ever have enough centering and catering to men in our lives, can we?" (ironic, also)
"Do you really want to empower the cishet man with a female harem fantasy? Is polyamory really something you want in our community?
"Cishet man who only enter relationships for sex flood every dating app, we don't need aromantics in our community."
"If you want to share community with asexuals, just go to your local Catholic Church and talk to the cishet man whose job is to shame people for their sex lives."
"Intersex people being queer? What, so cishet men with a micropenis and manboobs can have more people to whine about his emasculation to?"
A lot of people seem to mix up ‘community’ with ‘friend group’ so when they read ‘no one should be abandoned by the community. No matter what they did’ they think it means ‘you have to be friends with abusers’. When in reality it means ‘no matter what someone does they shouldnt be left to go homeless and be denied financial, housing, medical, etc aid’
You don’t have to be friends with these people, no one is saying that. It’s just saying that you should support rehabilitative justice, support programs that help homeless people, support funding for free medical services, and make sure they don’t turn away anyone who needs help.
image description: quote by Tupac Shakur reading "Just because you lost me as a friend, doesn't mean you gained me as an enemy. I'm bigger than that, I still wanna see you eat, just not at my table." /end id
apart from the exorsexism, "there is no such thing as a binary trans person" is also just a generally transmisic take??
like if you genuinely think no transgender person is exclusively, fully and always either male or female, you have more problems than just exorsexism.
if you can only conceptualise trans men and women as being some flavour of nonbinary, and never "just" men or women, you don't only have a problem with nonbinary people but with trans people in general.
"some trans people are always, only and fully men/women" isn't the hot take you think it is, it's literally just acknowledging people's identities and how they fit within the gender binary of "always, only and fully either male or female".
My first thought when seeing that argument was, and still is, that it rings incredibly similar to "I'm not a cisgender, you're misgendering me!" But I just realized something else, and I feel like it shouldn't have taken this long for it to occur to me:
Nobody would ever argue that there aren't binary cisgender people; in fact, the expectation is that cisgender people are intrinsically binary.
"No such thing as binary trans" is just an inside-job attempt (and a successful one in some circles) at separating trans people from their gender identity. At categorizing "transgender (man/woman)" and "cisgender (man/woman)" as different genders entirely, instead of just different gender modalities.
It’s clear that some trans people genuinely think the only issue with legal definitions equating binary sex and gender are how it affects sex-segregated or gender-segregated spaces for perisex binary trans people.
Nonbinary and intersex people are defined out of existence in almost every anti-trans bill I’ve ever read but so many of y’all only talk about how these bills affect binary perisex trans people. As if you either think these bills have no impact on nonbinary and intersex people, or you think that impact is so unimportant it’s not even worth a footnote.
Defining the legal gender/sex binary has had massive implications and impacts on nonbinary and intersex people. It’s not a “mild side effect” within these bills. These binaries are enforced on purpose to eradicate us.
