The first EVER physical copy of Changelings: An Autistic Trans Anthology arrived today!
I'm so excited to show everyone this beautiful book that I've been working on for the last year and a half!
Changelings is an anthology of short fiction written by autistic trans masc and non binary authors focusing on autistic trans characters, showcasing the creativity and talent from within our community!
The book will be released 2nd November 2023 and is now available to pre order from amazon and can be ordered on request by most other book retailers.
Thank you so much to everyone who helped bring this book to life! (And yes, there probably will be a sequel anthology)
today is the ten year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. a full decade ago, i lost a friend and a coworker. i was lucky. i had friends that lost several people. today, please remember and fight for all those that have died to live the live they should have been free to. i'll always remember you, Cory.
Transphobia is about to be signed into law in the UK. We can fight this.
I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.
Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be
The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.
Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or donât pass too well.
A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.
Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.
Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns
Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.
I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.
It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:
Worried about what to say?
Bring your personal worries about transphobia being signed into law, and trans friends being excluded from public spaces. You are a living person who deserves dignity. Remind your MP of that. You will also get guidance and brochures from Trans Solidarity Alliance that outlines our demands. This is mine from last year.
Money issues?
Trans Solidarity Alliance provides a travel bursary that you can sign up for via the link.
Got a refusal or no response from your MP?Â
Come anyway! You can request a same-day appointment with your MP through a process called greencarding. They will come and see you if theyâre already in Parliament. Even if they donât, theyâre made acutely aware of your cause because you showed up in person. This is my greencard from last year.
Here is the EHRC Code of Practice in full. It's a tough read, but some highlights are:
Organisations canât provide trans-inclusive, single-sex services, or they risk being sued for discrimination.
e.g. domestic violence support for women including trans women, menâs rugby group including trans men (12.68).
Trans people will have nowhere safe to pee.
If youâre a trans man, businesses can't allow you to pee in the men's, and you can also be ejected from womenâs bathrooms if youâre perceived as a man. Vice versa for trans women. EHRC suggests a âthird spaceâ bathroom, which is discriminatory and unworkable for most businesses. (13.130-133)
Sports organisations must exclude trans people from single-sex competitions (13.73).Â
A womenâs only sports competition must exclude trans women because of their biological advantage or face potential lawsuits (13.74), but a trans man who has undergone testosterone treatment can also be excluded based on fairness rules (13.81).
Trans women are stripped of the legal definition of âlesbianâ, and therefore no longer have legal protections if theyâre discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. (2.50, 2.92).
Here is the Good Law Project's better explanation of the EHRC Code.
I have also made a PDF printout of QR codes for the government petition, email your MP tool, and mass lobby link to pass around your communities. DM me and I'll send it to you.
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
Okay, but are they willing to take the biggest risks to make things right?
Like, if these people have done the most damage to society, to the safety and dignity of minorities, to the basic decency upon which the world functions, are they willing to stand at the front of the effort to fix that damage?
As a trans person, I'm not particularly inclined to forgive transphobes unless they've put themselves in harm's way instead of us.
And many do. Why would we waste that desire? Just because many people don't? It's a pessimistic perspective that only hurts the goal of meaningful progress. Progress will not happen because all the Bad People just stop existing.
I am genuinely begging people on this post to realize that our current system CREATES the issues y'all come onto this post to use as proof restorative justice won't work. There are many reasons people resist change, but one very relevant one is that a system where accountability is inherently tied to suffering does not motivate people to put in the effort to change. A deeply hurt person who has developed a lot of very toxic habits, who struggles to imagine a life for themself where they don't rely on those habits to have a sense of identity and safety, may seem like someone who "doesn't want to change." If we assume that is true, then no one tries to help, then there is no reason for that person to believe change is possible or that they could ever be cared for by society given what they've done, so why try?
I am truly fucking begging y'all to talk to like. Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is, and becomes extremely personally invested in fighting that in their community. This is not some abstract hypothetical. & there are MANY people who would very much be willing to change, if change actually seems feasible. If you see yourself as unforgivable, because everyone around you seems to see you as unforgivable, is it not easier to just dig your heels in?
We NEED!!!!!!! people to be willing to come over to our side and that simply will not fucking happen if your every reaction to "we need to have a process that allows people to make amends and which incentives meaningful change" is "ohhhhhh but that's hard tho :("
Compassion is a practical revolutionary necessity. It's not a thought experiment. Yes, it will be hard, and complicated, and cause a lot of discomfort for everyone on a lot of levels. It will take a hell of a long time to get where we actually want to be. We will fuck it up a lot along the way. There is still no other choice. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it does nothing for anyone.
You're moving the goalposts and I'm starting to lose my patience. Your original post started with this premise:
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left
Then, when me and @magicrainbowkitties rightfully pointed out that people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right.
You then promptly shifted entirely to
Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is
Motherfucker, I'm not fucking talking about some guy from Biloxi who said slurs a couple of times - and neither were you, until it became useful to completely misrepresent our caveats.
"people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right."
That is literally what this post is saying we need to have a process for. What exactly are you caveating here????????????
I'm not moving any goalposts. I didn't say "someone who said slurs a couple of times." In the notes of this post, I have elaborated on how this post was prompted by reading about a woman who worked as a fucking drone operator for the US military. I have also responded to people talking about child rapists.
I am really frustrated and annoyed by your "caveats" because they make no sense. I do not fucking understand what you people think I am saying with this post. Like, genuinely, what the fuck did you think I meant by this section:
I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
Did you think I was just fucking around and smashing random keys when I wrote this? By "process" and "there is no shortcut" I meant "people who did the worst things don't need to accept they've done anything bad and don't need to accept that making amends means accepting a great amount of risk"? Is that what you think I meant?
Its not just y'all. Other people keep coming on this post and adding "caveats" because, as far as I can tell, y'all cannot see a person talking about restorative justice without immediately assuming that they don't understand that bad things require actual effort to amend. The point of this post is that it is necessary to have systems for people to make amends, that actually facilitate and incentivize people to do that hard work, rather than providing zero support or clear pathways to actually go about doing that.
Not a SINGLE part of this implies anything remotely like "you should just forgive anyone whose done anything horrific even if they have done nothing to make amends simply because they said sorry." In fact I LITERALLY included a part of the original post where I explicitly said that's not what I'm saying. So why do people keep feeling the need to come onto this post and just restating the things I already clearly said as if its something that I left out of the post? Why is there this need to keep reiterating, on a post about how it is important to provide mechanisms for people who caused harm to make amends, that people who caused harm need to make amends?
Okay, having calmed down a little bit, I want to make myself clearer. @vexwerewolf blocked me (after coming onto my post calling me a motherfucker unprompted, but whatever) but still:
My original post is about the need for a formal, explicit process that facilitates people making amends. These caveats seem, to me, to suggest that people want those who have contributed to harm to make amends, but then get defensive at the suggestion that communities need to put effort into actually allowing that change to happen, making it clear how it needs to happen, and having that change actually matter, rather than simply talking about it in the abstract but doing nothing to facilitate it.
I will never disagree that people need to actually make amends and take on responsibility. I am saying that we need to make it clear what we expect from people and actually let that change matter and reintegrate them into our communities. What is best for victims is what actually works to prevent harm, not just in the moment but on a systemic level. If we want people to change, we have to actually make change possible, we have to make the mechanisms for change explicit and accessible, and make it actually matter.
We can talk all day long about how people need to take responsibility and it needs to actually matter and they need to be willing to take risks etc etc, but we do at some point actually need to grapple with what that means. If someone does harm, we need to be able to actually say "okay, this is what the process for taking accountability looks like," and then we need to live with the fact that the end point of this process is that person is still a part of our community. I see a lot of people talking about wanting folks to take accountability, but then also don't seem to want to discuss what that would actually practically mean, don't want to imagine being in a community with people who have done harm, don't want to imagine what social changes would need to occur for this process to be as productive as it could be. And then you end up with this fixation on people who don't want to change, itself a product of a system which does not incentivize meaningful change, used as a cudgel against any discussion about how to incentivize meaningful change.
I understand why people immediately go to "but will they actually take accountability? but will I be expected to personally make a person who harmed me a better person?" but there is a reason I distinguished between social vs interpersonal forgiveness and emphasized this being a process with no shortcuts. Trauma causes an aversion to nuance, because nuance is discomfort and vulnerability and risk, and that's all entirely understandable. But we can't just sit here in our trauma responses forever and talk about how much we want a better world while also being viscerally uncomfortable with what getting to that better world actually involves.
Once again: Yes, it will be hard, and complicated, and cause a lot of discomfort for everyone on a lot of levels. It will take a hell of a long time to get where we actually want to be. We will fuck it up a lot along the way. There is still no other choice. If we cannot hold multiple concepts at once and synthesize them productively, then our great-great-grandchildren will be dealing with the same trauma and horrific systems we are right now, because we want the fruits of a better world without doing any of the labor to get there.
What is frustrating to me most is not people pointing out that those who have done harm need to really take on the burden of accountability and repair. It is the attitude that this is not inherent to the restorative justice ideal I am describing, that clearly I must be forgetting that harm is real and serious or that accountability needs to be equally real and serious. Its the reading into my post some innate dichotomy between being victim-centered and try to keep our community pure of all perpetrators of harm, or being perpetrator-centered and utterly naive to what harm actually means and how it occurs, when the entire point of restorative justice should be that this dichotomy is fake and unhelpful to actual, long-term healing.
#you people will do Anything to avoid even the thought of potential future discomfort i s2g#i think people see ''we need clearly defined processes for people to make amends & reenter the community''#and read it as ''MY community? My PERSONAL friend group?? you want me to go out for beers w/ my abuser & be besties & let them move in???#why would you say that?!''#nobody is saying that you personally ever have to want that person back in your life#what people ARE saying is that after they've participated in a process of restorative justice & made amends you don't get to-#-demand that they be fired from their job bc seeing them exist in public makes you uncomfortable#in a world where restorative justice has been successfully implemented sometimes your childhood abuser is going to be a teller at your bank#and that has to be okay. you don't have to go through their line! but you do have to accept that they have a right to be there.
This, exactly.
In a world where restorative justice has been successfully implemented sometimes your childhood abuser is going to be a teller at your bank. And that has to be okay. You don't have to go through their line! But you do have to accept that they have a right to be there.
"absolutely fucking wild shit" and its the idea that people who have abused others will have jobs and exist in the world, as opposed to idk being stood against the wall and shot. because that's working out so well for everyone right now. 99% of punitive justice advocates stop just before the emotional catharsis of violent revenge actually leads to meaningful safety and prevention of harm!
at some point people lost the plot and went from "trans women have no unfair biological advantage in sports, and attempts to paint the situation otherwise are clearly a fig leaf for transmisogynistic discrimination" to "trans women actually never win at sports they're weak and unthreatening and won't take away medals from AFAB athletes"
It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.
itâs so special to me that so much of fan culture is textual analysis for the love of the game. like thank god there are people in my phone who are also thinking about this thing i love so much that they are writing transformative fiction as character studies and setting clips of the show to music with theme-relevant lyrics and writing long text posts analyzing every line of dialogue like!! yay!!!
Okay but do you accept intersex people who are happy in their bodies? Do you accept intersex people who don't experience body dysphoria? Do you accept intersex people who are cis and comfortable with it? Do you accept intersex people who don't need/want medical interventions? Do you accept intersex people who have no interest in sport or other gendered activities?
Do you accept that all these people still experience discrimination and hate, often from gay and trans people as well as cishet people?
Or are we just your logical strategy to win an argument against transphobes?
that "I consent" "I consent" "I don't consent! (isn't there someone you forgot to ask?)" meme, but with me, any plan ever, and my chronic health issues
I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while theyâre growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think theyâll get bulky as though bulking isnât a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density đ„
if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like youâre insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like âgirls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]â nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old
youâre not hopeless youâre just really really tired and in desperate need of a break and im shaking you by the shoulders and telling you that all is not hopeless but you do need to rest
youâre not an inherently bad person youâre just exhausted and youâre thinking about all of your mistakes but forgetting the good you do. fatigue is lying to you, just take a nap if you can for the love of god before you start apologizing just for existing
this pride month, keep the disabled queer people in mind who can't celebrate pride the 'regular way' aka by going to parades and lots of events. keep the homebound, bedbound, and other disabled queers who can't go in mind. those people who see everyone else party and are unable to attend. text them, wish them a happy pride, visit them and celebrate in a way that works for them. it's already hard not to be able to go to all of these events, it's even harder to be left behind because of it.
"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.
You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.
"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.
You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.
