perhapest the dumbest motherfucker to grace the annals of tumblr

merle | he | 8 years old | TME | white

[sexandmagic]

i'm merle and this is my blog for reading transfeminist posts and occasionally blogging about my life. i used to have another blog but i blew it up by accident. i'm an english + film studies major in american college. i like martin scorsese's creative debut film Mean Streets (1973). i am a transgender man. my favorite animal is the otter 🦦

[berrytart]

i think the entire vegas golden knights team belongs in prison. (remembers i dont believe in incarceration as a solution for anything) we should restructure society so that the vegas golden knights cannot exist within it

[sexandmagic]

every few months i check back in on this site to see if it's become more tolerable and every single time it is just worse. is there black mold in the reblog button or something

[pjackk]

Dont be very woried about me since i deserve all of this

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Anyways to follow up on a post I made a while ago, I've been a trans woman for about a decade now and I haven't played Fallout: New Vegas or own the programmer socks and I don't have a Blahaj. I do have a whale shark plushie but that's because whale sharks are really cool. I've never bought a Bionacle. I do play card games. That's on me I suppose, but I started that before I was trans so I never really saw that as anything other than a funny quirk.

I've never been made to feel lesser as a trans woman for having not had any of those experiences. Meanwhile there's like a million different artists and movies and TV shows you're just kind of expected to be into if you're queer and people will give you weird looks if you don't show interest or don't like them. (By far the weirdest of these is Hocus Pocus). I think if you want to make a point about consumerism in the queer community, you gotta start from the fact that queer community is pretty consumerist. If you're starting from trans women in particular I'm just going to think you're being a prick.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

I do think there is a lot of credence to the centering of white imperial core voices when it comes to what is considered "trans culture", but again, that's less of an issue with trans women specifically and more of an issue with like...the internet at large. I'm not really lumping those criticisms in with the above because they're ultimately pretty valid. We gotta be a lot more accepting of the cultural experiences of trans women outside of the imperial core (hell, even just cultural experiences of trans women in the US tbh).

[communistkenobi]

If I were a more conspiratorial person I would say these graphics are designed to make people transphobic

[communistkenobi]

Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.

First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components. 

I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.

So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.

So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:

(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)

The brain 🧠 - this is where identity is ‘stored’ in the human body. Identity is a thing inside you that arises from your thoughts, the ‘contents’ of your brain. If I were being really uncharitable towards these diagrams, they argue that gender identity is the delusion of how you see yourself that doesn’t interact with/reflect the rest of your body or person. I can “identify as a man” while every other gendered component of myself “is a woman.” Which like, I don't “identify” as a man, I am a man lol. More charitably, I think it’s trying to communicate the fact that trans people discover that their gender identity is in conflict with the rest of themselves, and seek to address this conflict through various forms of transition.

Even taking the charitable view, I think this is still deeply problematic. Just using my own experience, I did not ‘discover’ my gender identity in my head, I discovered it socially - dissociating during sex, friction in romantic relationships, problems with family members, difficulty socialising, being ostracised by peers, forcible assignment of femininity by my parents and especially my mother, and so on. Placing gender identity in the brain visually argues that gender identity can be discovered/thought of in isolation to the social world, because it is a symptom that comes out of a discrete organ, the brain (this is the transmedicalist view of transgenderism - gender identity is a mental illness that needs to be medically treated). This is where the visual tradition of anatomical diagrams works against these gender diagrams, reinforcing the biological view of gender despite the attempts to challenge it. 

The heart ❤️ - Now this one is a bit more abstracted and ‘apolitical,’ because the diagrams all use the heart symbol ❤️ as opposed to the anatomical heart 🫀, but I think my criticism still stands, because it is part of the anatomical metaphor of the diagram. I don’t think you can extricate the fairly inoffensive visual association of heart = attraction from the rest of the diagram. The heart is the organ that stores sexuality and attraction, just like the brain is the organ that stores identity, and this sexuality/attraction can be isolated and identified from the rest of yourself. It is just as internal and divorced from the social world as identity is. It’s also bizarrely disaggregated in the unicorn and bear diagrams as physical and emotional attraction lol? What does emotional attraction even mean. I became emotionally ‘attracted’ to all my friends after getting close to them even though I’m not physically attracted to most of them, so I guess I’m demi-pan-emotional? This feels like a more minor nitpick, but it’s part of this containerisation of gendered traits, the idea that you can neatly divide emotional and physical attraction. They are ‘separate symptoms’ of the heart.

The chromosomes 🧬 - probably the easiest one to critique, and imo is the most egregious. Even mainstream pro-trans critiques of sex, which heavily rely on medical authority as the basis of their critique, argue that chromosomes are not “what sex is.” As I laid out above, sex is an assemblage of things that are ideologically bundled together for the purposes of enforcing a set of social systems, such as patriarchy and cissexualism. Using chromosomes to represent sex is an argument that sex is an immutable facet of the body that cannot be changed - even if you take HRT, have surgery, change all of your sex markers on your documents, and live your life as your gender, your sex hasn’t changed because you didn’t “change” your chromosomes. You will always be a biological male or female. Sex, these diagrams argue, is a biological essence, and ‘biological’ is a stand-in for immutable, mutually exclusive, and unalterable. 

The other insidious part of this is that the chromosomes replace genitals in the diagram - you can’t show a penis or vagina to your audience, that’s icky and gross, so you use chromosomes instead. It’s the only place on the anatomical diagram where the organ is replaced by a non-organ, and the absence of genital organs only draws attention to the ‘genitality’ (to use Butler’s term) of chromosomes as a stand-in for sex. It is straightforwardly a transphobic and intersexist depiction of sex. The associated graph with it is even worse, placing “intersex” in between “male” and “female,” as if intersex is an undifferentiated amalgam of male/female sexual traits. It upholds the idea that intersex people are just sexually fucked up and have the “wrong” parts of M/F sex combined together, which again, can’t be altered. Which is ridiculous and contrary to reality! One of the core bases of intersexism is that doctors are very much invested in changing the sex of intersex infants, children, and adults through forced surgery and hormones to ‘correct’ a pathological incongruence of sex to either an acceptable ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex. This is what I meant earlier when I said this diagram might attempt to challenge was gender is, but not sex. It partitions sex off from gender as the stable immutable part of the body, which gender is then overlaid “on top of” (Butler also critiques this view in Bodies That Matter), which is, again, a transphobic and transmedicalist view of sex and gender. These diagrams beat you over the head with this point - the gender expression component is a dotted line traced over the body of the unicorn/bear/ginderbread. It is segmented and ephemeral in contrast to the solid lines of the body. Crucially, gender expression never touches their bodies. Gender expression is a thing that can be removed or changed, revealing the true biological essence of the body, which remains intact beneath its facade.

My more minor grievances are that these diagrams are visually ugly and infantilising. It is the queer equivalent of telling children to call a vagina a hoo-ha and a penis a ding-dong. I hate how infantilised and cutesy mainstream queer art and branding is. I’m an adult, I’m not a fucking unicorn or bear or “gingerbread person,” use plain visual language in your educational guides for the love of god. Trans minors also deserve proper representation and education that isn’t this quirky horseshit. The amount of abstraction going on in these diagrams, coupled with the ugly-ass cutesy aesthetic, obfuscates what is trying to be communicated and ends up (imo) being a poor educational tool, even setting aside the many, many ideological problems with them. 

So I think these diagrams are deeply transphobic. They represent “components” of gender by assigning them to various organs, which re-inscribes gender as biological. They are also really ugly

[mothcpu]

“Please answer.”

17776 excerpts + photos i took

edit: please read 17776

[archiveroll]

[dumbpuppyfag]

so like. okay so like you have this online ecosystem where everyone's all fractured and algorithmically siloed into their little groups, right?? and the only contact they have with outsiders is through screenshots, meaning you're only ever seeing the stuff that's objectionable or funny enough to be screenshotted in the first place. and the people who rise to the rank of screenshot curator are the people who spend all day sniffing around the other camps for stuff to screenshot. so you have this epistemological chokepoint dictated by someone whose main hobby is sneaking around with a camera getting all up in someone else's business and making it into a public spectacle. and the easiest way to make it into a public spectacle is to make your audience scared and angry. and the easiest way to do that is to play on existing negative biases, like pushing an open door yknow?? so you have this dynamic that rewards prejudice and elevates it to a position of narrative authority. and the people who can do this the most effectively and consistently are the ones who have no qualms about stalking marginalised people and crafting narratives about how they're scary and evil. and you reeeaaally gotta question whether or not any of this is actually beneficial to anyone or if it's just doing to you what fox news did to your dad, yknow??

[crumb]

Conner O'Malley - Irish Zionism

[philosophybits]

“Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.”

— Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity

[maykitz]

[fatartappreciation]

Monumental Woman by Miami sculptor Mary Ellen Scherl

[bimboficationblues]

Scorsese's gangster movies form an interesting chain about US society as a "society of rackets"

[afloweroutofstone]

Ernst Bloch, "Critique of Propaganda," 1937, translated by Chrysa Katsogridaki, published by CrisisCritique:

Perhaps people want to be deceived, certainly not bored... After a communist orator, who was addressing the employees, had presented his figures, statistics, and some final resolutions in the usual terminology, before a completely indifferent, indeed weary audience, the Nazi orator jumped to his feet, swept away the numbers with a wave of his arm, and exclaimed: “Your orator spoke of numbers, the same numbers you spend all day working with on the adding machine; I, however, speak to you of Germany’s happiness and greatness, and I speak on a higher authority.” Immediately, the circuit was closed; the audience accepted all the ensuing nonsense, listened to the promises, felt their anti-capitalist longing ignite, along with their private desires for revenge, and was carried away into the abyss. The Nazi played the piano of seduction with technical mastery, and only gradually did its effect diminish... ...even the truth, in its directly presented, let alone in its powerless and skeletal form, fails to penetrate... trickery can be a kind of theft, not in terms of its deceptive glare, but in terms of its brightness, its reflection in the puddle; for the lie has no light of its own. In short, truth itself demands, in its appropriate fullness and pedagogical mediation, that it not only exists and becomes, but also shines... Truth does not entice, certainly not, but it woos and affects; it does not dazzle, but it becomes ingrained over time; truth especially is full of form... The Nazis spoke deceitfully, but they spoke to people; the socialists quite truthfully, but only about things; what matters now is to speak completely truthfully to people about their things.

[guiltfactory]

[whiteshakira]