jax, look. i know we don’t get along, but i think tigerclaw killed redtail
d e v o n
todays bird

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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
AnasAbdin
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Origami Around

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Kiana Khansmith

tannertan36
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
macklin celebrini has autism
Claire Keane
tumblr dot com

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we're not kids anymore.
Jules of Nature
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

seen from Malaysia
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seen from United Kingdom

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@sneefss
jax, look. i know we don’t get along, but i think tigerclaw killed redtail
My favorite purple floof
why would u wanna kill me ):
US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & GLOBAL TERRORISM (An incomplete list)
US Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction The indiscriminate use of bombs by the US, usually outside a declared war situation, for wanton destruction, for no military objectives, whose targets and victims are civilian populations, or what we now call “collateral damage.”
Japan (1945)
China (1945-46)
Korea & China (1950-53)
Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69)
Indonesia (1958)
Cuba (1959-61)
Congo (1964)
Peru (1965)
Laos (1964-70)
Vietnam (1961-1973)
Cambodia (1969-70)
Grenada (1983)
Lebanon (1983-84)
Libya (1986)
El Salvador (1980s)
Nicaragua (1980s)
Iran (1987)
Panama (1989)
Iraq (1991-2000)
Kuwait (1991)
Somalia (1993)
Bosnia (1994-95)
Sudan (1998)
Afghanistan (1998)
Pakistan (1998)
Yugoslavia (1999)
Bulgaria (1999)
Macedonia (1999)
US Use of Chemical & Biological Weapons The US has refused to sign Conventions against the development and use of chemical and biological weapons, and has either used or tested (without informing the civilian populations) these weapons in the following locations abroad:
Bahamas (late 1940s-mid-1950s)
Canada (1953)
China and Korea (1950-53)
Korea (1967-69)
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1961-1970)
Panama (1940s-1990s)
Cuba (1962, 69, 70, 71, 81, 96)
And the US has tested such weapons on US civilian populations, without their knowledge, in the following locations:
Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950)
SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67)
Minneapolis (1953)
St. Louis (1953)
Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967)
Florida (1955)
Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58)
New York City (1956, 1966)
Chicago (1960)
And the US has encouraged the use of such weapons, and provided the technology to develop such weapons in various nations abroad, including:
Egypt
South Africa
Iraq
US Political and Military Interventions since 1945 The US has launched a series of military and political interventions since 1945, often to install puppet regimes, or alternatively to engage in political actions such as smear campaigns, sponsoring or targeting opposition political groups (depending on how they served US interests), undermining political parties, sabotage and terror campaigns, and so forth. It has done so in nations such as
China (1945-51)
South Africa (1960s-1980s)
France (1947)
Bolivia (1964-75)
Marshall Islands (1946-58)
Australia (1972-75)
Italy (1947-1975)
Iraq (1972-75)
Greece (1947-49)
Portugal (1974-76)
Philippines (1945-53)
East Timor (1975-99)
Korea (1945-53)
Ecuador (1975)
Albania (1949-53)
Argentina (1976)
Eastern Europe (1948-56)
Pakistan (1977)
Germany (1950s)
Angola (1975-1980s)
Iran (1953)
Jamaica (1976)
Guatemala (1953-1990s)
Honduras (1980s)
Costa Rica (mid-1950s, 1970-71)
Nicaragua (1980s)
Middle East (1956-58)
Philippines (1970s-90s)
Indonesia (1957-58)
Seychelles (1979-81)
Haiti (1959)
South Yemen (1979-84)
Western Europe (1950s-1960s)
South Korea (1980)
Guyana (1953-64)
Chad (1981-82)
Iraq (1958-63)
Grenada (1979-83)
Vietnam (1945-53)
Suriname (1982-84)
Cambodia (1955-73)
Libya (1981-89)
Laos (1957-73)
Fiji (1987)
Thailand (1965-73)
Panama (1989)
Ecuador (1960-63)
Afghanistan (1979-92)
Congo (1960-65, 1977-78)
El Salvador (1980-92)
Algeria (1960s)
Haiti (1987-94)
Brazil (1961-64)
Bulgaria (1990-91)
Peru (1965)
Albania (1991-92)
Dominican Republic (1963-65)
Somalia (1993)
Cuba (1959-present)
Iraq (1990s)
Indonesia (1965)
Peru (1990-present)
Ghana (1966)
Mexico (1990-present)
Uruguay (1969-72)
Colombia (1990-present)
Chile (1964-73)
Yugoslavia (1995-99)
Greece (1967-74)
US Perversions of Foreign Elections The US has specifically intervened to rig or distort the outcome of foreign elections, and sometimes engineered sham “demonstration” elections to ward off accusations of government repression in allied nations in the US sphere of influence. These sham elections have often installed or maintained in power repressive dictators who have victimized their populations. Such practices have occurred in nations such as:
Philippines (1950s)
Italy (1948-1970s)
Lebanon (1950s)
Indonesia (1955)
Vietnam (1955)
Guyana (1953-64)
Japan (1958-1970s)
Nepal (1959)
Laos (1960)
Brazil (1962)
Dominican Republic (1962)
Guatemala (1963)
Bolivia (1966)
Chile (1964-70)
Portugal (1974-75)
Australia (1974-75)
Jamaica (1976)
El Salvador (1984)
Panama (1984, 89)
Nicaragua (1984, 90)
Haiti (1987, 88)
Bulgaria (1990-91)
Albania (1991-92)
Russia (1996)
Mongolia (1996)
Bosnia (1998)
US Versus World at the United Nations The US has repeatedly acted to undermine peace and human rights initiatives at the United Nations, routinely voting against hundreds of UN resolutions and treaties. The US easily has the worst record of any nation on not supporting UN treaties. In almost all of its hundreds of “no” votes, the US was the “sole” nation to vote no (among the 100-130 nations that usually vote), and among only 1 or 2 other nations voting no the rest of the time. Here’s a representative sample of US votes from 1978-1987:
US Is the Sole “No” Vote on Resolutions or Treaties
For aid to underdeveloped nations
For the promotion of developing nation exports
For UN promotion of human rights
For protecting developing nations in trade agreements
For New International Economic Order for underdeveloped nations
For development as a human right
Versus multinational corporate operations in South Africa
For cooperative models in developing nations
For right of nations to economic system of their choice
Versus chemical and biological weapons (at least 3 times)
Versus Namibian apartheid
For economic/standard of living rights as human rights
Versus apartheid South African aggression vs. neighboring states (2 times)
Versus foreign investments in apartheid South Africa
For world charter to protect ecology
For anti-apartheid convention
For anti-apartheid convention in international sports
For nuclear test ban treaty (at least 2 times)
For prevention of arms race in outer space
For UNESCO-sponsored new world information order (at least 2 times)
For international law to protect economic rights
For Transport & Communications Decade in Africa
Versus manufacture of new types of weapons of mass destruction
Versus naval arms race
For Independent Commission on Disarmament & Security Issues
For UN response mechanism for natural disasters
For the Right to Food
For Report of Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination
For UN study on military development
For Commemoration of 25th anniversary of Independence for Colonial Countries
For Industrial Development Decade in Africa
For interdependence of economic and political rights
For improved UN response to human rights abuses
For protection of rights of migrant workers
For protection against products harmful to health and the environment
For a Convention on the Rights of the Child
For training journalists in the developing world
For international cooperation on third world debt
For a UN Conference on Trade & Development
US Is 1 of Only 2 “No” Votes on Resolutions or Treaties
For Palestinian living conditions/rights (at least 8 times)
Versus foreign intervention into other nations
For a UN Conference on Women
Versus nuclear test explosions (at least 2 times)
For the non-use of nuclear weapons vs. non-nuclear states
For a Middle East nuclear free zone
Versus Israeli nuclear weapons (at least 2 times)
For a new world international economic order
For a trade union conference on sanctions vs. South Africa
For the Law of the Sea Treaty
For economic assistance to Palestinians
For UN measures against fascist activities and groups
For international cooperation on money/finance/debt/trade/development
For a Zone of Peace in the South Atlantic
For compliance with Intl Court of Justice decision for Nicaragua vs. US.
**For a conference and measures to prevent international terrorism (including its underlying causes)
For ending the trade embargo vs. Nicaragua
US Is 1 of Only 3 “No” Votes on Resolutions and Treaties
Versus Israeli human rights abuses (at least 6 times)
Versus South African apartheid (at least 4 times)
Versus return of refugees to Israel
For ending nuclear arms race (at least 2 times)
For an embargo on apartheid South Africa
For South African liberation from apartheid (at least 3 times)
For the independence of colonial nations
For the UN Decade for Women
Versus harmful foreign economic practices in colonial territories
For a Middle East Peace Conference
For ending the embargo of Cuba (at least 10 times)
In addition, the US has:
Repeatedly withheld its dues from the UN
Twice left UNESCO because of its human rights initiatives
Twice left the International Labor Organization for its workers rights initiatives
Refused to renew the Antiballistic Missile Treaty
Refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming
Refused to back the World Health Organization’s ban on infant formula abuses
Refused to sign the Anti-Biological Weapons Convention
Refused to sign the Convention against the use of land mines
Refused to participate in the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban
Been one of the last nations in the world to sign the UN Covenant on
Political & Civil Rights (30 years after its creation)
Refused to sign the UN Covenant on Economic & Social Rights
Opposed the emerging new UN Covenant on the Rights to Peace, Development & Environmental Protection
Sampling of Deaths >From US Military Interventions & Propping Up Corrupt Dictators (using the most conservative estimates)
Nicaragua – 30,000 dead
Brazil – 100,000 dead
Korea – 4 million dead
Guatemala – 200,000 dead
Honduras – 20,000 dead
El Salvador – 63,000 dead
Argentina – 40,000 dead
Bolivia – 10,000 dead
Uruguay – 10,000 dead
Ecuador – 10,000 dead
Peru – 10,000 dead
Iraq – 1.3 million dead
Iran – 30,000 dead
Sudan – 8-10,000 dead
Colombia – 50,000 dead
Panama – 5,000 dead
Japan – 140,000 dead
Afghanistan – 10,000 dead
Somalia – 5000 dead
Philippines – 150,000 dead
Haiti – 100,000 dead
Dominican Republic – 10,000 dead
Libya – 500 dead
Macedonia – 1000 dead
South Africa – 10,000 dead
Pakistan – 10,000 dead
Palestine – 40,000 dead
Indonesia – 1 million dead
East Timor – 1/3-½ of total population
Greece – 10,000 dead
Laos – 600,000 dead
Cambodia – 1 million dead
Angola – 300,000 dead
Grenada – 500 dead
Congo – 2 million dead
Egypt – 10,000 dead
Vietnam – 1.5 million dead
Chile – 50,000 dead
Other Lethal US Interventions CIA Terror Training Manuals Development and distribution of training manuals for foreign military personnel or foreign nationals, including instructions on assassination, subversion, sabotage, population control, torture, repression, psychological torture, death squads, etc.
Specific Torture Campaigns Creation and launching of direct US campaigns to support torture as an instrument of terror and social control for governments in Greece, Iran, Vietnam, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama
Supporting and Harboring Terrorists The promotion, protection, arming or equipping of terrorists such as:
Klaus Barbie and other German Nazis, and Italian and Japanese fascists, after WW II
Manual Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Osama bin Laden (Afghanistan), and others whose terrorism has come back to haunt us
Running the Higher War College (Brazil) and first School of the Americas (Panama), which gave US training to repressors, death squad members, and torturers (the second School of the Americas is still running at Ft. Benning GA)
Providing asylum for Cuban, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, Chilean, Argentinian, Iranian, South Vietnamese and other terrorists, dictators, and torturers
Assassinating World Leaders Using assassination as a tool of foreign policy, wherein the CIA has initiated assassination attempts against at least 40 foreign heads of state (some several times) in the last 50 years, a number of which have been successful, such as: Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dihn Diem (Vietnam) Salvador Allende (Chile)
Arms Trade & US Military Presence
The US is the world’s largest seller of weapons abroad, arming dictators, militaries, and terrorists that repress or victimize their populations, and fueling scores of violent conflicts around the globe
The US is the world’s largest provider of live land mines which, even in peacetime, kill or injure at least several people around the world each day
The US has military bases in at least 50 nations around the world, which have led to frequent victimization of local populations.
The US military has been bombing one Middle Eastern or Muslim nation or another almost continuously since 1983, including Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq (almost daily bombings since 1991)
This, then, is a sampling of American foreign policies over the last 50 years. The FBI uses the following definition for Terrorism: “The unlawful use of force or violence committed by a group or individual, who has some connection to a foreign power or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” This sounds like the terrorism we just experienced. It also sounds a lot like the US policies and actions since 1945 that I’ve just described.
This is a version of an an original page atributed to Robert Elias, a US Professor of Political Science , a list which, like so many others, has otherwise ‘disappered’
via https://web.archive.org/web/20161125052245/http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/whocares/popups/warcrimes.htm
im too fuckin fat for this shit I think
WAIT IS THAT WHY I LIKE CHRIS FLEMING SO MUCH
The thing is trans women in general are not assertive, like, at all. But you have to learn to assert yourself to transition in the first place, because if you don't you will be shoved violently back into the closet. So the idea that "male socialization" somehow made trans women assertive or aggressive is just absurd. Being addressed as boys throughout our childhoods is specifically the thing that held us back from asserting ourselves.
Yeah newly cracked transfems tend to have the self worth of a flaming dumpster with clown makeup, if the assertiveness of transfems who've been out for longer was due to some supposed masculine socialization, you'd expect them to have that confidence through their entire transition.
my youtube favorites playlist is a horrible place
ALL BAGGAGE NO BREAKS!!!
listening to recordings of vocal training exercises call it vod review
taken from me bitching on discord, again
gender is absolutely fake but something to think about is that like i've never been able to relate to that
like, society made up a lot of this bullshit sure but at the same time, was gender fake when i wanted to wear a dress at the age of like 6? was it fake when i first started growing facial hair i started cutting my arms & legs instead of my beard because i was so afraid of being seen as what i knew to be unmasculine?
and etc etc
it's a tough circle for me to square because these are all things i know to be true, that society makes the rules of gender and it isn't something innate, but also, i have what i know for a fact to be a physiological condition that makes me one of those and not the one everyone else wants me to be
how i choose to interpret that, i feel, makes the average difference between myself and any number of nonbinary or gnc people (I ASSUME) but materialistically, my brain expects a certain hormone composition it did not have until i started taking estrogen, and now i am noticeably materially better off, more mentally well, happier and more confident
a lot of the time i feel like i sound like a transmedicalist but that's really not the case, it just so happens that to me it makes the most sense to view it as a medical condition that can be treated with healthcare; just like my other endocrinologically significant condition
if i don't take insulin shots multiple times a day, i am extremely physically unwell and have to see a doctor
if i don't take estrogen, i am physically unwell and probably should have seen a fucking doctor (to get estrogen)
& the same goes for many other problems & gotchas that go with being fucking trans that i didnt have a fucking answer for until i started seeing it this way (purely materialistically)
like why should i expect a lesbian to be attracted to me, a woman with many undesirable masculine features
if youd asked me a year ago, i would have just said idk i shouldnt expect that and apologize for having the audacity
now i have to ask the question, idk, would the average lesbian be attracted to a woman with six fingers? or scoliosis? or a deviated septum? or a club foot? or a harelip?
and the answer is fucking yes, obviously, because none of those conditions invalidate those women's feminimity
and those same terf lesbian women who would reject trans women because of their being transgender, as it so happens, are perfectly fucking fine with sharing spaces with men
like, in the past 30 years the average transphobic lesbian event or gay bar or whatever, routinely are fine with trans men, who, if you're not aware, are men, on the basis of some imagined connection to a womanhood he meaningfully did not experience even growing up AFAB
because that isn't how the phyisology of the human brain functions
and of course i don't actually give a fuck who gets in where outside of the real scientific sociological function patriarchal ideation serves
but again looking at it purely materialistically, what does matter to me is that the enumeration of the biological facts behind gender keep accumulating
gender is real to me (in a specific sense) because it's what fucking tells me i'm not delusional
because learning the biological reality behind what makes me feel the way i do & backing those findings up with tangible medical care is what it took for my body to start fucking healing
because when my ex kept asking me what kind of idiot would just "feel" like a woman and what that even meant (even though i'd never once claimed to "feel" like a woman) i didn't have a fucking answer because that question isn't a valid question; it can't be answered because the general whimsy behind "being a woman" isn't a measurable qualia
what is, in fact, is the fact that i have a brain that functions in a certain way, that has a predisposition for the same gendered experience every other woman has
call it what thou wilt, surely, but the obvious answer to these and these things is that it makes me a fucking woman because those are the same biological criteria that makes anyone a woman
and let's not mince words here that's the only fucking valid definiton of "a woman" there possibly could be, because it is the only one that allows no exception
the epistemology of this is a solved issue & i will brook no argument here, like, genitals don't make a woman a woman because trans people exist (or, if we accept this to be a tautology, intersex people exist); chromosomes for the same reason, organs have a whole fucking array of interstitial variance
ok ill stop now
hope that answered your question lmao
damn, does patriarchy do brain scans now?
for someone claiming to have a "purely materialist" worldview where the epistemology of gender is a "solved issue," your arugment is remarkably detached from material reality.
to claim that trans men and cafab trans/nonbinary people "meaningfully did not experience womanhood" growing up is an astonishly privileged blind spot to have. patriarchy and misogyny do not check your brain chemistry or your internal gender identity before deciding how to treat you.
as a cafab intersex trans person, let me tell you how this actually works in the material world:
a massive, ventral source of trauma for CAFAB trans people is the violent, non-consensual imposition of womanhood. I have been socialized, perceived, categorized, and abused as a woman by a society that demands I fulfill that role, no matter how much it felt wrong and no matter how hard I tried to reject it. To deny that this is a lived experience of womanhood (even an alienated or forced one) is completely ahistorical.
and your logic is entirely circular. you argue that your internal biological predisposition makes your childhood distress a "women's experience" despite being perceived as a boy, yet you deny CAFAB trans people the same courtesy. you claim our actual, lived history of navigating misogyny is just an "imagined connection" because it does not fit into your neat, pseudoscientific box you've built to protect yourself from your ex's bad-faith questions.
furthermore your history of lesbian spaces is totally backwards. transphobic cis lesbians didn't routinely allow trans men into their spaces out of a gentle respect for "shared childhoods"; they did it (and STILL do it) via the patronizing and transphobic rhetoric that trans men are just "confused sisters" or butch lesbians lost to the patriarchy. It is an aggressive denial of their manhood.
I'm truly glad HRT healed your body and gave you clarity but you don't get to flatten the trauma, history, and material realities of other trans people and intersex people just to make your personal defense mechanism look like a universal law of science.
listen. i did not claim that trans men did not pre-transition or do not experience womanhood. i don't fucking decide that and i don't have the fucking knowledge and confidence to claim otherwise. i'm not really interested in having that conversation, even, because frankly i wouldn't know what i'm talking about. it's not something i'd want to claim, given the opportunity, because i'm actually not really that into fucking diagnosing the experiences of other people who aren't in the room with me who i'm not talking about. what i was talking about, in fact
was the specific womanhood that the strawman (that i did not imagine, mind; i was referencing a thing that did and i assume does still happen. i dont fucking give a shit about how true what i was saying happens or did happen on an average level because how the fuck am i supposed to measure that; only that it did happen at least once because i heard a fucking anecdote.) lesbian i imagined was ascribing to the theoretical trans man. whatever mystical connection to womanhood that this trans man has that i do not fucking have doesn't exist and he cannot have had it because it isn't fucking real. there is no fucking womanhood you can have that makes you any more of a fucking woman than anybody else because that isn't how fucking gender works and there's no goddamned way you don't know this. this, to me, is the same fuckin shit as what you're saying? like, a patronizing proscription of womanhood onto trans men that isn't real. right??? like, even if i'm mischaracterizing a person who isn't real while genuflecting at other more real people who i'm personally unfamiliar with in a casual conversational sense, why in gods name is the pedantry of the motivation behind the transphobia more important than the fact that- and we agree about this- it is transphobic for this to be the case.
like wtf are you even talking about? i've said it many fucking times and you'll have to fucking forgive me but i don't really understand intersex and nonbinary issues because i'm very undereducated about it, but insofar as binary trans people are concerned, i'm pretty certain i have a handle on the fucking fundamentals.
genuinely enlighten me as to what experience binary trans men have that i'm denying. as far as i fucking know, binary trans men are men, and therefore i'm ascribing the same circumstance that i'm ascribing to myself. maybe a trans man wouldn't frame it that way, and in fact that's kind of the whole fuckin thing i'm saying, that this is the way that i personally frame it in my head and it's what makes sense to me. i wouldn't contradict someone who feels otherwise just because i have like two fucking anecdotes that make what evidence i have seem to support my interpretation.
i get that the way i said what i said and frankly my bias makes it sound like i'm saying that binary trans men don't experience womanhood, or misogyny etc. & while you might fuckin catch me saying something like that at some point, in this particular instance it wasn't what i was getting at.
i'm at a point in my life where i'm trying very hard to change my own attitude with regards to what i allow myself to think and believe. if you'd asked me a year or two ago if i had literally any ability to speak about the experience of being trans, or being a woman, or being any number of things i fight myself pretty fucking hard to recognize as objective facts i would have told you no.
however, to me, right now, the prospect of a binary transgender man deserving more of a seat at the womanhood table than me, doesn't fucking seem right. that's the sort of fucking thing i believed at the same time as i believed i was a fetishist. that's the same sort of shit i believed at the same time i was getting told i had AGP. if i am to believe the things i actively assert are true for other people i by necessity must also believe them of myself.
i'll fucking say it again what womanhood does a man experience while being coerced into being a woman? it doesn't make sense to me. i'm obviously not fucking saying he doesn't experience oppression of any kind, or bigotry, or anything like that and why the fuck would i??? i'm trying to say that this hypothetical trans man has as much of the same experience of gender as i do. if you want to view your disagreement with my rant about my own goddamned experience as adversarial then fine whatever fucking congratulations, you've earned your fucking victory. but i don't understand what it is you're trying to claim victory over.
I am not a trans man. I explicitly stated in my first reply that I am an intersex trans person, so let’s start by not flattening my stated reality because you’re too busy panicked-typing to read what I wrote.
Nobody is playing an adversarial game of 'who deserves a bigger seat at the womanhood table.' I am not trying to take your seat, and I am not trying to validate the TERF logic of your 'strawman.' You are projecting your deep-seated defensiveness regarding your own validity onto a critique about structural power.
When you ask, 'what womanhood does a man experience while being coerced into being a woman?' you are entirely proving my point about your massive blind spot. You are treating 'womanhood' purely as a clean, internal, biological qualia—which, ironically, you claimed earlier wasn't a thing. In the real, material world, womanhood is also a socio-political caste. When the state, medical systems, and abusers violently force that caste onto CAFAB and intersex people, the resulting trauma is a material experience of navigating womanhood. Acknowledging that forced structural reality does not threaten your internal identity as a woman.
You claimed your epistemology was a 'solved issue' and a 'universal law of science,' but the second you get pushed on how intersex and CAFAB people fit into that law, you immediately backpedal into 'well it was just a casual conversational rant based on one anecdote and a strawman, and also I don’t understand nonbinary or intersex issues.' If you don't understand the fundamentals of intersex and CAFAB structural oppression, then don't write sweeping, universal declarations about gender epistemology that inherently erase us. It's great that you are unlearning the bad-faith psychological metrics your ex and transphobes threw at you. Truly. But you don't need to overcorrect by building a flawed, pseudo-scientific fortress that locks out the material realities of other marginalized people just to feel secure in your own skin.
i didn't call you a trans man. in fact i don't recall actually calling you anything, or trying to reduce your experience to anything. i did make an allusion to your authority on intersex/nonbinary issues (at least as compared to me) in the paragraph where i admit to being uneducated on the topic. i don't appreciate being characterized as hysterical. notice how i'm making similar claims as you about how much of my words youve read and yet i didn't go out of my way to paint you as lesser for it.
and "nobody"? really? you think so? i mean really now, nobody? you and i perhaps not but i'm specifically speaking about transphobic people here. i'm not accusing you of following the same logic as the hypothetical, i'm accusing you of not actually acknowledging it. if the material experience of womanhood that society enforces upon people who are not women is semantically identical to the womanhood imagined by the TERF hypothetical that strictly claims that trans men are women then that's both transphobic logic and certainly invalidates me.
i obviously hadn't meant to draw such a line between the sociological womanhood of transgender men and the gender identity of transgender men because i wasn't disagreeing with the first to satisfy my characterization of the second.
but yes, this is indeed a solved fucking issue scientifically. is it not? how we know what we know about the biological mechanics of gender is a solved issue insofar as it is a variable spectrum and a reflection of the brain and not assigned sex at birth. that's all i'm saying. you seem to believe i'm making some sort of claim that isn't that, and i admit that in this particular instance, it might as well be a truism, but what could you possibly point to about intersex and nonbinary people invalidates the fact that gender cannot be determined by looking at chromosomes?
i haven't actually walked any of what i said back. i said that i didn't mean it like that, and admitted that you're probably right in magnifying my bias here, but what i didn't say was that i was wrong. the sweeping generalizations i made, or at the bare fucking minimum attempted to make, was that nobody experiences the womanhood ascribed to them by transphobes because it isn't real.
and listen, i get that you're trying to point to me saying that "trans men did not meaningfully experience womanhood (in this context)" and extrapolate that i meant "trans men do not experience womanhood (of any kind)" and you have what i'm sure to be persuasive argumentation on the topic and many compelling invectives (i'm not going to pretend you're not being a bit rude about it) besides, but that wasn't what i was saying.
it would be cowardly of me to not admit i don't see the appeal in that rhetoric, and like i said before, you might actually catch me saying something to that effect, because when i see trans women saying that "i was always a woman" i identify with that and find it compelling because i'd like to see it as true. if i were to extrapolate that to "trans women have always been women and thus experience womanhood even before transitioning, and even before figuring out for themselves that they are women", i also identify with this and would like it to be true. i see what evidence i have seen as supportive of this. in my opinion, the next thing that would be true as a consequence is "trans men have always been men and thus did not experience womanhood etc".
now, that's a statement i don't personally identify with, and hold mixed feelings about, but it's the statement that is the logical synthesis of the previous two, is it not? for this to be true would necessitate then that the oppression experienced by trans men that is in some way an extension of misogyny that in the context of this conversation constitute a form of womanhood would have to be non-contradictory. and in reality i don't see it that way; i realize that the language i use to say what i'm saying does sound awfully contradictory but i don't actually think it is. the reality of the situation is that in my opinion for those of whom this statement applies the gender identity of a pre-transition child does not contradict the oppression they face in spite of or because of it. i feel like this is what you were trying to argue against and as much as i have a degree of ambiguity on the subject (i didn't mention how intersex and nonbinary people would apply to my framing of the argument here, this is because i am largely unsure of how it would) i have to reiterate that this wasn't what i was actually saying here, because that sort of bigger picture thought doesn't really factor in to my having complained about transphobes casually to a nonbinary friend of mine.
it could be that i'm wrong and pseudo-scientific, i'm not a scientist or what the fuck ever, but the studies i take the time to read seem pretty fucking persuasive that gender has a biological component and isn't "when you have xx chromosomes you're a woman". that's a solved issue to me. i'm not saying the science is done or there's nothing more to be learned or fucking whatever because that isn't how science works and you know that, what i am saying is that transphobic (lack of) interpretation of the science does not and will not change the reality of gender identity having a material basis. none of us are making this up and none of us are delusional and that is as much of a fucking fact as the earth being round is. oblately spheroidal.
i'll say it again i made 0 attempt at any point to try and deny the societal reality of the oppression people experience and that whether any particular individual is a woman or not has no bearing on whether or not they will experience one societal repression or another. this conversation is predicated on the question of whether or not an individual experiencing the oppression aimed at women constitutes a "womanhood", and with regards to the oppression that specifically trans men face sure, i don't disagree, it is obvious the types of oppression that trans men face is a constituent part of what makes up womanhood for women. it's also true, however, and again this is what i was highlighting in my original post, that this does not make trans men women and importantly a TERF might say that it does, and that TERF would be fundamentally incorrect.
it isn't that i want to walk my statements back or that i want to shy away from being decisive on the subject, only that my original post wasn't that conversation. i believe that justly softens the blow of my having mistakenly erased the experience of intersex/nonbinary people.
even if i did want to walk my statements back, shouldnt i be able to? if i'm wrong i want to be able to walk that shit back. i mean really now.
taken from me bitching on discord, again
gender is absolutely fake but something to think about is that like i've never been able to relate to that
like, society made up a lot of this bullshit sure but at the same time, was gender fake when i wanted to wear a dress at the age of like 6? was it fake when i first started growing facial hair i started cutting my arms & legs instead of my beard because i was so afraid of being seen as what i knew to be unmasculine?
and etc etc
it's a tough circle for me to square because these are all things i know to be true, that society makes the rules of gender and it isn't something innate, but also, i have what i know for a fact to be a physiological condition that makes me one of those and not the one everyone else wants me to be
how i choose to interpret that, i feel, makes the average difference between myself and any number of nonbinary or gnc people (I ASSUME) but materialistically, my brain expects a certain hormone composition it did not have until i started taking estrogen, and now i am noticeably materially better off, more mentally well, happier and more confident
a lot of the time i feel like i sound like a transmedicalist but that's really not the case, it just so happens that to me it makes the most sense to view it as a medical condition that can be treated with healthcare; just like my other endocrinologically significant condition
if i don't take insulin shots multiple times a day, i am extremely physically unwell and have to see a doctor
if i don't take estrogen, i am physically unwell and probably should have seen a fucking doctor (to get estrogen)
& the same goes for many other problems & gotchas that go with being fucking trans that i didnt have a fucking answer for until i started seeing it this way (purely materialistically)
like why should i expect a lesbian to be attracted to me, a woman with many undesirable masculine features
if youd asked me a year ago, i would have just said idk i shouldnt expect that and apologize for having the audacity
now i have to ask the question, idk, would the average lesbian be attracted to a woman with six fingers? or scoliosis? or a deviated septum? or a club foot? or a harelip?
and the answer is fucking yes, obviously, because none of those conditions invalidate those women's feminimity
and those same terf lesbian women who would reject trans women because of their being transgender, as it so happens, are perfectly fucking fine with sharing spaces with men
like, in the past 30 years the average transphobic lesbian event or gay bar or whatever, routinely are fine with trans men, who, if you're not aware, are men, on the basis of some imagined connection to a womanhood he meaningfully did not experience even growing up AFAB
because that isn't how the phyisology of the human brain functions
and of course i don't actually give a fuck who gets in where outside of the real scientific sociological function patriarchal ideation serves
but again looking at it purely materialistically, what does matter to me is that the enumeration of the biological facts behind gender keep accumulating
gender is real to me (in a specific sense) because it's what fucking tells me i'm not delusional
because learning the biological reality behind what makes me feel the way i do & backing those findings up with tangible medical care is what it took for my body to start fucking healing
because when my ex kept asking me what kind of idiot would just "feel" like a woman and what that even meant (even though i'd never once claimed to "feel" like a woman) i didn't have a fucking answer because that question isn't a valid question; it can't be answered because the general whimsy behind "being a woman" isn't a measurable qualia
what is, in fact, is the fact that i have a brain that functions in a certain way, that has a predisposition for the same gendered experience every other woman has
call it what thou wilt, surely, but the obvious answer to these and these things is that it makes me a fucking woman because those are the same biological criteria that makes anyone a woman
and let's not mince words here that's the only fucking valid definiton of "a woman" there possibly could be, because it is the only one that allows no exception
the epistemology of this is a solved issue & i will brook no argument here, like, genitals don't make a woman a woman because trans people exist (or, if we accept this to be a tautology, intersex people exist); chromosomes for the same reason, organs have a whole fucking array of interstitial variance
ok ill stop now
hope that answered your question lmao
damn, does patriarchy do brain scans now?
for someone claiming to have a "purely materialist" worldview where the epistemology of gender is a "solved issue," your arugment is remarkably detached from material reality.
to claim that trans men and cafab trans/nonbinary people "meaningfully did not experience womanhood" growing up is an astonishly privileged blind spot to have. patriarchy and misogyny do not check your brain chemistry or your internal gender identity before deciding how to treat you.
as a cafab intersex trans person, let me tell you how this actually works in the material world:
a massive, ventral source of trauma for CAFAB trans people is the violent, non-consensual imposition of womanhood. I have been socialized, perceived, categorized, and abused as a woman by a society that demands I fulfill that role, no matter how much it felt wrong and no matter how hard I tried to reject it. To deny that this is a lived experience of womanhood (even an alienated or forced one) is completely ahistorical.
and your logic is entirely circular. you argue that your internal biological predisposition makes your childhood distress a "women's experience" despite being perceived as a boy, yet you deny CAFAB trans people the same courtesy. you claim our actual, lived history of navigating misogyny is just an "imagined connection" because it does not fit into your neat, pseudoscientific box you've built to protect yourself from your ex's bad-faith questions.
furthermore your history of lesbian spaces is totally backwards. transphobic cis lesbians didn't routinely allow trans men into their spaces out of a gentle respect for "shared childhoods"; they did it (and STILL do it) via the patronizing and transphobic rhetoric that trans men are just "confused sisters" or butch lesbians lost to the patriarchy. It is an aggressive denial of their manhood.
I'm truly glad HRT healed your body and gave you clarity but you don't get to flatten the trauma, history, and material realities of other trans people and intersex people just to make your personal defense mechanism look like a universal law of science.
listen. i did not claim that trans men did not pre-transition or do not experience womanhood. i don't fucking decide that and i don't have the fucking knowledge and confidence to claim otherwise. i'm not really interested in having that conversation, even, because frankly i wouldn't know what i'm talking about. it's not something i'd want to claim, given the opportunity, because i'm actually not really that into fucking diagnosing the experiences of other people who aren't in the room with me who i'm not talking about. what i was talking about, in fact
was the specific womanhood that the strawman (that i did not imagine, mind; i was referencing a thing that did and i assume does still happen. i dont fucking give a shit about how true what i was saying happens or did happen on an average level because how the fuck am i supposed to measure that; only that it did happen at least once because i heard a fucking anecdote.) lesbian i imagined was ascribing to the theoretical trans man. whatever mystical connection to womanhood that this trans man has that i do not fucking have doesn't exist and he cannot have had it because it isn't fucking real. there is no fucking womanhood you can have that makes you any more of a fucking woman than anybody else because that isn't how fucking gender works and there's no goddamned way you don't know this. this, to me, is the same fuckin shit as what you're saying? like, a patronizing proscription of womanhood onto trans men that isn't real. right??? like, even if i'm mischaracterizing a person who isn't real while genuflecting at other more real people who i'm personally unfamiliar with in a casual conversational sense, why in gods name is the pedantry of the motivation behind the transphobia more important than the fact that- and we agree about this- it is transphobic for this to be the case.
like wtf are you even talking about? i've said it many fucking times and you'll have to fucking forgive me but i don't really understand intersex and nonbinary issues because i'm very undereducated about it, but insofar as binary trans people are concerned, i'm pretty certain i have a handle on the fucking fundamentals.
genuinely enlighten me as to what experience binary trans men have that i'm denying. as far as i fucking know, binary trans men are men, and therefore i'm ascribing the same circumstance that i'm ascribing to myself. maybe a trans man wouldn't frame it that way, and in fact that's kind of the whole fuckin thing i'm saying, that this is the way that i personally frame it in my head and it's what makes sense to me. i wouldn't contradict someone who feels otherwise just because i have like two fucking anecdotes that make what evidence i have seem to support my interpretation.
i get that the way i said what i said and frankly my bias makes it sound like i'm saying that binary trans men don't experience womanhood, or misogyny etc. & while you might fuckin catch me saying something like that at some point, in this particular instance it wasn't what i was getting at.
i'm at a point in my life where i'm trying very hard to change my own attitude with regards to what i allow myself to think and believe. if you'd asked me a year or two ago if i had literally any ability to speak about the experience of being trans, or being a woman, or being any number of things i fight myself pretty fucking hard to recognize as objective facts i would have told you no.
however, to me, right now, the prospect of a binary transgender man deserving more of a seat at the womanhood table than me, doesn't fucking seem right. that's the sort of fucking thing i believed at the same time as i believed i was a fetishist. that's the same sort of shit i believed at the same time i was getting told i had AGP. if i am to believe the things i actively assert are true for other people i by necessity must also believe them of myself.
i'll fucking say it again what womanhood does a man experience while being coerced into being a woman? it doesn't make sense to me. i'm obviously not fucking saying he doesn't experience oppression of any kind, or bigotry, or anything like that and why the fuck would i??? i'm trying to say that this hypothetical trans man has as much of the same experience of gender as i do. if you want to view your disagreement with my rant about my own goddamned experience as adversarial then fine whatever fucking congratulations, you've earned your fucking victory. but i don't understand what it is you're trying to claim victory over.
i'll say it again for the people in the back:
terf lesbians, would you refuse to date a cisgendered woman who is physically disabled in some way? in some way that affects her appearance? in some way that affects her ability to present as femininely as you? would you refuse to date her if she had a disability that affected her genitals? with hormonal issues? with a unibrow? with a moustache?
i bet you would.
taken from me bitching on discord, again
gender is absolutely fake but something to think about is that like i've never been able to relate to that
like, society made up a lot of this bullshit sure but at the same time, was gender fake when i wanted to wear a dress at the age of like 6? was it fake when i first started growing facial hair i started cutting my arms & legs instead of my beard because i was so afraid of being seen as what i knew to be unmasculine?
and etc etc
it's a tough circle for me to square because these are all things i know to be true, that society makes the rules of gender and it isn't something innate, but also, i have what i know for a fact to be a physiological condition that makes me one of those and not the one everyone else wants me to be
how i choose to interpret that, i feel, makes the average difference between myself and any number of nonbinary or gnc people (I ASSUME) but materialistically, my brain expects a certain hormone composition it did not have until i started taking estrogen, and now i am noticeably materially better off, more mentally well, happier and more confident
a lot of the time i feel like i sound like a transmedicalist but that's really not the case, it just so happens that to me it makes the most sense to view it as a medical condition that can be treated with healthcare; just like my other endocrinologically significant condition
if i don't take insulin shots multiple times a day, i am extremely physically unwell and have to see a doctor
if i don't take estrogen, i am physically unwell and probably should have seen a fucking doctor (to get estrogen)
& the same goes for many other problems & gotchas that go with being fucking trans that i didnt have a fucking answer for until i started seeing it this way (purely materialistically)
like why should i expect a lesbian to be attracted to me, a woman with many undesirable masculine features
if youd asked me a year ago, i would have just said idk i shouldnt expect that and apologize for having the audacity
now i have to ask the question, idk, would the average lesbian be attracted to a woman with six fingers? or scoliosis? or a deviated septum? or a club foot? or a harelip?
and the answer is fucking yes, obviously, because none of those conditions invalidate those women's feminimity
and those same terf lesbian women who would reject trans women because of their being transgender, as it so happens, are perfectly fucking fine with sharing spaces with men
like, in the past 30 years the average transphobic lesbian event or gay bar or whatever, routinely are fine with trans men, who, if you're not aware, are men, on the basis of some imagined connection to a womanhood he meaningfully did not experience even growing up AFAB
because that isn't how the phyisology of the human brain functions
and of course i don't actually give a fuck who gets in where outside of the real scientific sociological function patriarchal ideation serves
but again looking at it purely materialistically, what does matter to me is that the enumeration of the biological facts behind gender keep accumulating
gender is real to me (in a specific sense) because it's what fucking tells me i'm not delusional
because learning the biological reality behind what makes me feel the way i do & backing those findings up with tangible medical care is what it took for my body to start fucking healing
because when my ex kept asking me what kind of idiot would just "feel" like a woman and what that even meant (even though i'd never once claimed to "feel" like a woman) i didn't have a fucking answer because that question isn't a valid question; it can't be answered because the general whimsy behind "being a woman" isn't a measurable qualia
what is, in fact, is the fact that i have a brain that functions in a certain way, that has a predisposition for the same gendered experience every other woman has
call it what thou wilt, surely, but the obvious answer to these and these things is that it makes me a fucking woman because those are the same biological criteria that makes anyone a woman
and let's not mince words here that's the only fucking valid definiton of "a woman" there possibly could be, because it is the only one that allows no exception
the epistemology of this is a solved issue & i will brook no argument here, like, genitals don't make a woman a woman because trans people exist (or, if we accept this to be a tautology, intersex people exist); chromosomes for the same reason, organs have a whole fucking array of interstitial variance
ok ill stop now
hope that answered your question lmao
the clothes have started to like actually fit
So there was this group of guys that walked past me, and one of these dudes says....
Did you, the reader, imagine a single one of them was a woman? No, obviously you didnt. No one does, because these are not gender-neutral terms.