You Know That Post That's Like "if Thinking Naruto Would Be Proud Of You For Brushing Your Teeth Gets

ultimately a lot of feminists will look down on or outright condemn transmasculinity and transmanhood simply because it is not narratively satisfying. because transmasculine identity and joy does not mesh with their feminism-as-defined-by-cis-women. they see trans men&mascs and, immediately or deep down, feel disappointed. by the womanhood dropouts. feel that transmasculine people will always be less feminist, or that they relinquished their place when they "quit" or "betrayed" their "sisters." they may not even hate trans men, they may not even be cisgender, it's just that they think it would be such a better look for the movement if you didn't... you know.

anyways. without acknowledging this feminist discomfort with transmasculinity and transmanhood, how it's caused by the friction between trans m&ms and cissexist feminism, we'll keep being failed over and over and over again by our own communities. we need to change the narratives we prize instead of treating trans men's identity as a problem to be solved.

every day i think about the cat on twitter who looks more like a scheming eunuch than any creature has ever looked

monkey i love you beloved little freak i would die for you

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

This was published weeks ago, yet I haven't seen a single mainstream news source covering this massive scandal. Read the full article here: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trans-youth-suicides-covered-up-by

There was a time when women did these jobs.

Some of them really liked the work and were keen to continue doing it. But society basically told them to collectively "get back in the kitchen" when the men returned home from war.

The tradition of conditioning women, from birth, to have a distaste for these jobs continued. Young girls are discouraged from even taking an interest in the toys representing these occupations. God forbid they put Barbie in the firetruck.

The truth is, most men do not want women doing these jobs. They complain about how dangerous this work is and use that as a metaphorical bludgeon in debates about equality. But when women actually try to be firefighters and combat infantry, they are told they *can't* do these jobs. They are inferior. Those who are hired have to work twice as hard to get half the respect. They are inundated with sexism and misogyny. And many end up quitting, not because they aren't qualified or they don't like the work, but because their male coworkers make the jobs intolerable.

And instead of fighting to make these occupations safer and valued properly, these men just complain that feminists don't know how hard it is and how they don't understand what it's like to risk their lives for no money or benefits. And then rich assholes like Elon stoke these flames because he doesn't want these men to realize this is a class struggle rather than a culture war. And that feminists and "woke activists" would actually be wonderful allies in helping them get better conditions.

Lastly, there are feminists talking about this. There are plenty of non-men interested in these jobs. But I doubt Elon keeps up with very much feminist discourse other than what he invents in his imagination.

Beyond that, feminists can't seem to prioritize stuff like this in the mainstream because they are too busy trying to regain control of their uteruses.

Did I miss anything?

Oh yeah, fuck Elon and fuck "End Wokeness".

I’m a patron of the arts (I leave nice comments on aO3).

Ars Technica

Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever”

Casualties afoot as Sony merges Funimation with 2021-acquired Crunchyroll.

reminder that digital libraries aren’t owned, also why pirating digital content is a necessity

hello again (bill clinton limewire voice) my fellow americans

There are a few states that actually have Shield/Refuge laws designed to help trans people fleeing from trans-unsafe states, which also guarantee trans folks access to healthcare. These states are:

California

Colorado

Illinois

Oregon

Vermont

Washington

Minnesota

New Mexico

Maine

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

Washington D.C.

Additionally, some states have "trans sanctuary" executive orders signifying safety for trans folks seeking healthcare. These states are:

Maryland

New Jersey

New York

Living as a resident in these states means you are protected by state's rights and state government to continue or begin receiving trans healthcare. These laws have been codified in their states so everything has been a-ok'd by their state governments.

Stay alive. You got this. I love you.