Sex Not Gender

PRO-FEMALE. SEXNOTGENDER.COM reblogs by Elizabeth Hungerford

[tejuina]

I don’t think y’all want to hear this, but the right is gaining a lot of ground in the US and I believe it’s found a way to replicate the success it’s had in radicalizing men by taking a different approach with women: pretending to be the only ones willing to listen to women’s concerns over trans issues and then slowly introducing anti-abortion, anti-gay, and other conservative rhetoric.

I just got an ad on youtube from a rightwing legal organization that framed the issues around trans athletes and female sports as an attack on personal freedoms and said it was on par with gay couples adopting. this organization was instrumental in overturning roe v wade, and it is not stopping any time soon.

make no mistake: these people are not radical feminists. and they don’t pretend to be. but I need y’all to start paying attention to the feminists who call out rightwing rhetoric in trans discourse and stop dismissing us as “divisive” and “too focused on ideological purity to get shit done.”

if someone questions why pediatric transition is being framed as a matter of “parental rights” (which this legal organization is also heavily pushing for) instead of, say, framing it as a matter of patient/children rights, take a moment to understand why that may be problematic down the line. do we want a parent to have the right to put their gay kid through conversion therapy? do we want a parent to have the right to stop their daughter from having an abortion?

I don’t care for ideological purity, I care about not empowering an already powerful group of people that is directly attacking women.

[sexnotgender]

I read a response that said literally no one has changed their views…and I was like, ummm…check out Feminist Current. https://www.feministcurrent.com/2022/03/20/its-time-to-rethink-the-abortion-debate/

It's time to rethink the abortion debate

We are letting feminists make a mockery of women in their abortion activism.

[archive-8180]

“Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, broader, more open and sharper; and this is what we want […] The more democratic the system of government is, the clearer it will be to the workers that the root of the evil is not the lack of rights, but capitalism.”

— V.I. Lenin, “The Other Political Issues Raised and Distorted By P. Kievsky”. (via proletarianfeminism)

[flakyseasalt-deactivated2020102]

will she ever stop talking

[adoboqueen]

Source

OH MAN. No, but watch them defend her or excuse this???

[nostraights]

Literally not surprised

[emptycicada]

Full article http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/17/jk-rowling-defends-donald-trumps-right-to-be-offensive-pen-america

What if you read the whole  thing for once and face reality as it is, you goddamn fragile kids. 

[kimbawolff]

If only common sense was common.

[steven-universe-official-deacti]

Think before you shade.

[pattythenest]

It’s almost like tumblr doesn’t check for facts…

[virtual-tonks]

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” - Noam Chomsky

While the majority of tumblr believes that being offended is enough to shut someone down, without thinking what this even implies.

[catlogicdefiesall]

Especially when that someone’s a woman.

[i-dream-of-dapper]

It is remarkably easy in this society not to look like a woman. It is relatively difficult, by comparison, not to look like a man.

Judith Halberstam “Female Masculinity” (via i-dream-of-dapper)

I don't know about that. It depends on your facial features and body size.

[twentythreetimes-deactivated201]

I’m not dysphoric anymore.

I’ve sat with this realization for a handful of months now: that I can say that dysphoria is no longer a part of my daily life. It’s not even really a part of my occasional life. I have had four (4) difficult days in the past year or even more. Those days are barely blips on my radar. I also experienced these bad days very differently than I did in the past when dysphoria was a regular thing in my life. 

It’s as if I had this bad, painful thing inside and now my interactions with it are from the outside, where I put it, and said “you’re no longer welcome here.” Yes, I would still recognize it standing in front of me, but now I walk away instead of feeling eaten alive by it for days, months, years on end. We say hello occasionally but I don’t linger. I am not dysphoric anymore. Dysphoria is an infrequent freak hail storm, not a part of who I am. 

I got here slowly. From 19 to 22 while I was transitioning, dysphoria was a constant, which worsened the longer I was trying to live as a man. Then from the time when I first started detransitioning until recently, my dysphoria slowly got better. I worked very hard to get here, healing in intense difficult ways from age 22 to 25. I didn’t actually think I would get to this point - but I knew it was worth it to see even small improvements in a condition that had strongly contributed to my frequent suicidal ideation. 

I’ve spent about a year now away from publicly discussing my detransition. I’ve come to understand myself much better as a womon, as a lesbian, as someone who can now afford to take a break from making anatomical diagrams of my trauma. 

I wanted to come back to this. I needed to say that I made it out, that I feel very firmly on the other side of being ftm, being dysphoric, and even on the other side of the bridge of actively detransitioning. There’s no big secret to how I got here - it’s the same things that I wrote about doing in the past to help me. 

I sat with the incongruity between the “map” in my head and the body I was in. I recognized this incongruity as a symptom of trauma, as a symptom of something I may never be able to tell a coherent story about. I worked with the symptoms instead of the idea that they meant I was trans. I let my dysphoria deflate into a neutral phenomenon, unattached to judgements about good or bad or being terminally different. 

I talked to other women with this experience, a lot. I recognized over and over that I was not alone. 

I wrote and drew.

I got and stayed sober.

I walked, and did pull-ups, and sit-ups, and jumped around. I found ways to be in my body in a way that was actively-doing instead of passively-being. 

I continued to move on with the rest of my life. I went back to school and worked towards achieving my goals. 

I continued to reconnect with my sense of self as a lesbian, in a way that grew way beyond the overshadowing of having a history of transition. 

I found it helpful to take all the posts off my blog and stop being a public voice on detransition for the past year. After sorting through so much and sharing it with the world, it was good to take my words back, and to take my life back fully from feeling stuck in the past at all. I don’t have to share anything of mine. I exercised my knowledge that I am not just an idea or a resource and just focused on me. 

I lived with myself. I learned that I could make sense of my life without re-writing my whole story. I learned that I could sit with painful things and find real ways to heal rather than always reaching for the more immediate ways to cover it up and let it fester. 

The most important factor in my healing has been time. This is something I could not understand at nineteen. Healing from anything takes time. It takes sitting with something difficult and not destroying yourself over it. Time allowed me to understand that I could make it through a bad day because I had done it before, over and over. Time allowed me to look back and see that I had made progress. Understanding that healing takes time helped me keep moving forward without a clear path, knowing that I would reach another lookout point again even though I did not know when. 

I want women, ftms, and other female people with dysphoria to know that healing is possible. I am not dysphoric anymore. 

[attndotcom]

[lavenderlibrary-deactivated2017]

If you don’t know who Johnnie Tillmon was, look her up.

Welfare is a Women’s Issue (1972) by Johnnie Tillmon

~ Read More

[fuckyeahjaniceraymond]

It is not co-parenting, and the inclusion of the male in equal parenting responsibilities, that will restore (among other imbalances) the lack of female friendship, because then presumably women will be free not to hate or be ambivalent about other women. Rather, co-parenting under present conditions, enhances male supremacy because it gives men more power than they now have; this time, emotional presence and power within the family. To continue to ignore women’s lack of power in all other social institutions and to prescribe male parenting as the solution to our oppressive “sexual arrangements” is a lop-sided vision indeed.

Janice G. Raymond. “Female Friendship: Contra Chodorow and Dinnerstein.” Hypatia 1.2 (1986). 37-48. (via fuckyeahjaniceraymond)

[thegynocrat-deactivated20170306]

 [PDF] Raymond, Janice G., The Transsexual Empire (1979) 

[thegynocrat-deactivated20170306]

Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women’s Freedom By Janice G. Raymond

Spinifex Press, 1993

Originally published: 1993

[transgender-harms-women]

We know that we are women who are born with female chromosomes and anatomy, and that whether or not we were socialized to be so-called normal women, patriarchy has treated and will treat us like women. Transsexuals have not had this same history. No man can have the history of being born and located in this culture as a woman. He can have the history of wishing to be a woman and acting like a woman, but this gender experience is that of a transsexual, not of a woman. Surgery may confer the artifacts of outward and inward female organs but it cannot confer the history of being born a woman in this society.

Janice Raymond (via transgender-harms-women)

[brutereason]

The take-home from that study is that most women are having an abortion because they say they can’t afford to have a child. And it turns out that they’re right: Two years later, women who had a baby they weren’t expecting to have, compared to the women who had the abortion they wanted, are three times more likely to be living in poverty. They knew they couldn’t afford a kid and it turns out they were correct.

Real Talk About Abortion - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society (via staininyourbrain)

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

are there any breathing exercises/helpful stretches you know of that could be useful against the effects of binding?

Emery says:

Besides generally making sure you’re not binding for too long and you’re never sleeping in a binder, every time you take your binder off, you should take some deep breaths, force a few coughs to rattle around any mucosal buildup in your lungs/chest, and stretch your back/shoulders to release any tension. I just do some simple trunk twists, arm circles, pull each arm across my body, and tip my head side to side to stretch my neck. And always listen to your body - pain means something is going wrong.

[ftmbasterd]

If words could kill

[sexnotgender]

Radical Feminist Serenity Prayer

Goddess, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [sexually dimorphic human reproduction and the natural form of bodies],

The courage to change the things I can [social enforcement of binary sex-roles in the form of “gender”],

And wisdom to know the difference [radical feminist theory and analysis].

[mgrable]

As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!

Jonathan Marks - Anthropology and the Bell Curve (via mgrable)

When I was getting my Masters in Education, I was told the story of how Alaska had to request the lower 48 for certain questions on the SAT and CAT tests to be changed, basically every test needs to be ‘Alaskanized’. 

Because we don’t know what Lobster are. 

No joke- the first instance of them noticing was when they had a question about Lobster in Maine in the math section, and pretty much no one in the bush communities knew what a lobster was, and you can’t ask questions during those tests like ‘WTF is a lobster??' and it sort of doesn't come up in a lot of general education, you'd be lucky to find imported lobster in a store in AK. But all these kids got these answers wrong on these tests because some council somewhere thinks that all education and cultural teaching styles should be and are universal. 

(via nerdofmany)

Yeah, elementary school kids where I’m from (Southern Arizona) were having trouble with intelligence and basic knowledge tests that asked them to match pictures of sledding with “Winter” and falling leaves with “Autumn”.  In Tucson snow falls once every 2-3 years and is usually just enough of a layer to coat everything with a bit of white.  Not enough to sled in.  Unless they were rich enough to take vacations out of town - most kids wouldn’t have seen a sled in action. Oh, and our trees lose their leaves in the spring & summer and go dormant in the hottest and driest part of the year! 

And this are just the environmental differences - not even going into differences of culture & values!

(via soilrockslove)

[germanpostwarmodern]

Koningkerk (1926-27) in Haarlem, the Netherlands, by B.T. Boeyinga

[plansfornigel-deactivated201703]

[sexnotgender]

The comments do not address the criticism in any way. If male bodied and (therefore) male socialized people are a danger to transwomen in the bathroom, then why would male bodied and (therefore) male socialized people not be a danger to women in the bathroom? This makes no sense.