When Fire and Sky meet we prove how little we know

Run by the Choir System, age 26, posts activist stuff or fluff, depends on fronter. If looking for Phaeo, check @of-plants-and-pluribi

[amps-speak-louder-than-words]

excellent genre of image

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

[allegedly-human]

I will. I WILL!!

[depsidase]

[grapeearrings]

[canineblood]

Reverse Therian

[radio-jupotter]

[catilinas]

i love shipping magazines and i especially love them when they sound like they were written by a mildly aggravated cargo ship

[unashamed--felinity]

Tbh there is an overabundance of media about a nonhuman creature's deep desire and journey to become human, and so very few of the opposite

Many of those movies/shows are very good and I like them but the whole time I'm feeling like it's tragic in a way. The thought of a creature giving up its otherness to assimilate into humanity is really fuckin sad to me. Or a human getting the chance to be something else freaking out and rejecting it.

Just makes me feel all the more alienated, y'know. Like "damn why don't I relate to this allegedly universal enthusiasm for being human" and "why is the desire to be anything else always wrong"

[emiratexaaron]

I want more stuff where a human chooses to stop being human, and this is portrayed as a reasonable choice, and the person is happy as a result.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

it's exhausting to see constant TMA/TME discourse that fundamentally does not understand intersectionality. Transmisogyny affected, TMA, describes someone who cannot leverage your assigned gender to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. Transmisogyny exempt, TME, describes someone who is able to leverage their assigned gender in some way to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. They are not identity labels; they describe a person's relationship to transmisogyny.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

these labels also do not categorize people as ontologically "victims" or "oppressors". everyone, including TMA people, can wield transmisogyny and everyone can wield it most effectively against TMA people. just as cis women can perpetrate and enforce misogyny against other cis women, so too can trans women leverage transmisogyny against one another. however, given the relative lower social status of TMA people, we are less able to advance their own social standing by leveraging transmisogyny. Caitlin Jenner is both TMA and openly transmisogynistic, but she is less successful in advancing herself compared to TME people like Marjorie Taylor Green. this is similar to how cis women can wield misogyny against men (like suggesting that an fashionable man is inherently less masculine), but a similar criticism from another man will generally be a more potent attack.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

oppressions can look similar: racialized women, particularly black women, are often degendered in ways which superficially resemble transmisogyny. for example, Michelle Obama was mocked for having supposedly "mannish" features. to the extent that transmisogyny might have impacted her, she was able to mitigate it by leveraging the fact that she was assigned and conformed to expectations of women. she was unable to leverage her race to deny the full extent of this public abuse because degendering is a tactic empowered by both racism and transmisogyny. a black trans woman who is similarly degendered cannot leverage TME privilege because of her gender assignment at birth. both people are targeted and harmed in some way by degendering, but one is more able to mitigate that harm due to being able to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

in a similar example, Imane Khelif was subject to simultaneous pressure from transmisogyny, racism, and intersexism. because she is TME, she could leverage her gender assignment and was not barred automatically from competing in women's events at the summer Olympics (an option unavailable to TMA athletes facing similar scrutiny). she also enjoyed an outpouring of public support in favor of her continued participation, whereas TMA athletes received little sympathy or support in the press (in fact, the event that prohibited them was hailed as especially inclusive for lgbtq+ athletes). however, she was still pressured sufficiently by racist and intersexist policies to undergo invasive medical procedures and to publicly reveal medical details that she might have preferred to keep private. the fact that Imane Khelif was subject to other systems of oppression in no way disproves the validity of transmisogyny because she was able to do the thing that defines being TME: she leveraged her assigned gender to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

in Kimberlé Crenshaw's formulation of intersectionality, she describes the unique marginalization of black women. unlike white women, black women cannot leverage their race to mitigate the impacts of racism. unlike black men, black women cannot leverage their gender to mitigate the effects of misogyny. thus, black women are demonstrably subject to a unique synergy of white supremacy and misogyny (misogynoir) from which others are able to exempt themselves to varying degrees and by various means. the same formulation can be applied to TMA people, who are unable to leverage either their gender assignment or social identity, to mitigate oppositional and traditional sexism, thereby rendering us uniquely vulnerable to the synergistic oppression of those forces. (and of course, we cannot forget that TMA people can also be subject to other discrimination from which they cannot exempt themselves; TMA people can also be variously racialized, disabled, poor, intersex, and so on.)

[doe-eyed-disaster]

great tags from @futchlingg

[doe-eyed-disaster]

I'm glad the tone i struck was accessible to you. I'm going to continue to be very generous right now: this response is transmisogyny. one of the kinds of privilege that TME people experience is getting to be judged as individuals whereas TMA people are always judged collectively. TMA people should not have to be as precise, nonjudgmental, and even in tone as i was in this thread. i chose to put in the effort to explain things in these terms, but i did so because when TMA people like me aren't, we get taken with the worst possible faith.

if a cis woman wrote a post like mine about the ways in which men leverage misogyny against her, it would be obviously misogynistic for someone to reply "oh thank goodness. i never really got feminism because they're always just so bitchy about men". this would be the case regardless of who said it or what their proximity to misogyny is. the same is true here: i made a long post with very precisely chosen language, and this reply contrasts me against all those other, apparently uncouth trans women who don't haven't decency to be nice about our oppression. (if you know trans women like that, please send them my way. they sound based.).

TMA people do not owe any deference to TME people's feelings when talking about our oppression. y'all can get away with shit on the regular, usually against us, that is far crueler than incivility. TMA people shouldn't have to make posts that are hundreds of carefully chosen words long with step-by-step logical constructions from first principles and real-world illustrations whose relevance is spelled out on exacting detail. this was a high effort post and WE DON'T OWE THAT TO ANYONE. we shouldn't have to do that every time we want to talk about the fucked up things that happen to and around us, especially not to TME people who benefit from doing those fucked up things to us.

(and if you think my reply here is veering into incivility, let me invite you to examine why it is that you're feeling so defensive. let's internalize and practice those analytical skills which i described apparently so well in those first canonically non-bitchy posts.)

[doe-eyed-disaster]

a common (and exhausting) misconception seems to happen around the word "exempt". let's be clear: transmisogyny isn't just "misogyny that happens to trans women". transmisogyny is a social force which influences *all* people which posits that differently gendered people are intrinsically different in some meaningful way and that one gender is in some way socially superior to another. the ways that we construct, define, inscribe, navigate, and relate to gender are all influenced by transmisogyny. if getting to wield misogyny without consequence is the carrot of patriarchy, then the threat of faggotization for being too great a failure to one's assigned boyhood is the stick. I've seen transmisogyny described as the psychological lynchpin that holds patriarchy together. some people can leverage their gender in some way to mitigate the impact of this force, but it is a fundamental part very sea that we all must swim in.

the same can be said for other marginalizing forces. temporarily nondisabled people can experience negative consequences of ableism, but feeling burnt out from an excessive workload is a fundamentally different experience when not fully exposed to ableism. for instance, you might have your exhaustion taken more seriously by your doctor if you are not yet disabled and consequently receive better medical care. a straight man might be mistreated if others believe him to be gay, but he's dealing with one moment of interpersonal bigotry rather than an entire lifetime of being under threat (for example, his right to the social and financial benefits of marriage are far more guaranteed than they might be if he was gay). and so on.

TME people experience transmisogyny but they are not its primary targets and can exempt themselves from scrutiny and mistreatment by leveraging their gender in some way that TMA people cannot. one pernicious way that this happens is through a kind of affected incompetence, positioning themselves to always be seeking education from TMA people about transmisogyny and offering shallow rebuttals and critiques such as the images attached (which they may not even consciously recognize as such). this positions TMA people as bearing the expectation of answering and clarifying on demand and being held to account for all the other TMA people who have come before her.

like i just spent nearly a thousand words giving the piss easiest "intersectionality 101" and you're complaining that the language is unclear or flawed in some way that precludes your understanding or prevents you from internalizing what you've just read, complaints which would be irrelevant if you just read the first paragraph again in which the terms were defined in clear, simple language. if this is your response, you are exactly who i was complaining about from the beginning.

[tankie-transfeminist]

This is transfeminism!

[kayandp]

Another big bug from the BOXED series - you can a print or sticker of it in my INPRINT store - check it here!

[fangs-4-fags]

Sherlock holmes doesn't know about the fucking solar system ?

[worldssmallestlizard]

puppy sized cockroach that you cant bring into public spaces

[worldssmallestlizard]

[winonaparadise]

support girls with horns!

[melongifts]

Hey anyone notice how google translate is being pretty liberal with their translations as of late? Takin some real liberties to infer tone.

[melongifts]

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings? I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this. I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.

[melongifts]

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

I AM SO SICK OF DEFAULT AI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[eridan-ampora]

girl what the hell is that

[tastylemonbread]

my #radiantworm

[ruinedchildhood]

This is how the world should be ❤️

[cryoverkiltmilk]

At no point did I predict what happened next in this video.

[coppercreationcreator]

(Tags by prev)

[captain-starskull]

There are many benefits to having a robust transit system.

[chongoblog]

Last thing a trans woman sees before getting banned

[abymint]

My handler told me the weeds keep florting her hounds so I asked how many hounds she has and she said she just goes to the shelter and gets a new hound afterwards so I said it sounds like she's just feeding hounds to the weeds and then her hounds started crying