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during this kerfuffle, i was asked many times "why should a transfem be able to critique the terms that transmascs use to define their own oppression?" and its like, because i share a community with you. and all else equal, you hold power over me. i reserve the right to tell you if your terms ride on transmisogynistic assumptions. it is telling that in an attempt to defend against the obvious, I was immediately cast as a "white woman" picking on a vulnerable group of marginalized men. the fact that I'm a transfem having this said to me is important, and I get the feeling that they knew this.

"oh, so you're saying a black trans man has privilege over you?" no, because you changed more variables, that's not what anyone was saying. you are indistinguishable from TJ Kirk trying to debunk racism by noting that a white homeless man has less privilege than beyonce. the arguments I've received to prove that transmascs face equal oppression as transfems is either the strictly absurd notion that theres a bias against masculinity in queer spaces, or the slightly more defensible argument that transmascs are seen as women and face misogyny as a result, but if you want to argue that trans women hold similar structural power as cis women you're also going to run up against a hard wall in material reality. transphobes see us as women too, guys, racists don't treat michelle obama as a man when they make conspiracy theories about her secretly being one.

If you were one of the people in my askbox who moved the goalposts and decided that yes, while transmascs do face less opposition than transfems, they still deserve to define their own terms, I'm just gonna say... no, for that exact reason, they don't. no more than I would have the right to say I suffer from "transmisogynhvit" for being a white transfem. that's not how this works, and threatening me further isn't going to convince me. thanks.

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Trans and intersex people in the UK need you to be loud and angry about the new "deception as to sex" guidance released which makes trans and intersex people legally guilty of rape if we don't disclose our gender identity and/or the sex we were assigned at birth to sexual partners.

This is particularly going to harm trans and intersex sex workers, who often have a higher number of sexual partners who we might keep our trans or intersex identity from for our safety.

"To summarize this guidance in the simplest terms, it treats a trans or intersex person not disclosing their gender identity and/or the sex they were assigned at birth as a form of deception which negates consent."

"This interpretation of part of the existing Sexual Offences Act (2003) places an unreasonable burden on trans and intersex people to inform our sexual partners of our medical history, while no such burden is placed on cis perisex people who are allowed to rely on assumption."

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this callout couldve been a block button

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…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.

– Kiera Lyons, “The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration” (2023)

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there's people on this site with such talent for filling out forms, and they squander this talent on the tumblr registration page to make several sockpuppet accounts per day to harass random trans women in their inbox or in the replies of a post instead of using that talent to fill out several job applications on indeed.com per day

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when i was a kid i had moments of being so fucking diabolical because i realized at some point the best way to leverage power over my family was to do shit that would make everybody late

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its been about 6 months

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any transmasc or tme nonbinary person who could hear a trans woman express discomfort or fear around tme trans people as based on transmisogynistic harassment and violence she's experienced and meet that sentiment not with self reflection/empathy/a desire to do better by the transfems in their life, but rather with resentment and anger, deserves 0 sympathy or accomodation for their oh-so-delicate masculine ego. i've seen a lot of these guys who I recognize as having been in feminist tumblr circles during the initial "not all men" shit and who correctly identified those cis men as deeply entitled to the spoils of misogyny; their sudden 180 when the conversation turned to transmascs speaks to a purely self-serving gender politic which aims not to liberate but to position them as eternally and unquestionably in the right as beneficiaries of transmisogyny. if a transfem stranger's stated fear of tme abuse has made you feel "unwelcome" in any kind of space, you'd do well to consider why you were so immediately able to identify yourself as the abuser she was talking about

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this random but should be heard:

you are not and will never be a bad person for distancing yourself from someone who was destroying your mental health/making you want to relapse. no matter how hard they guilt trip you.

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Starting to think it's just straight up incorrect analysis to view terfs as even viewing trans women as men, and that they hate trans women for their masculinity (and by extention being characterized by hatred for men and masculinity). Instead, i think you have to view their comments on trans women and their bodies as intentionally and forcefully masculinizing a woman, excluding her from womanhood for not fitting into white women's beauty and body standards. Many people have noted that this is similair to how black women are historically and today masculinized in society, and indeed terfs commonly attack women of color for similair things. If it is about hating men it's noticable that they don't talk about men the same way, "men" are only ever a threat if she's a woman. Any other man is allowed to be an ally to the terf movement if he's "protecting women" (by excluding certain types of woman). It's misogyny, it's transmisogyny, everything about this structurally replicates the ways women are mistreated by society generally, and excluded from femininity, just lazerfocused on targeting trans women.

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According to a WHO (World Health Organisation) report in 2014, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had a lower death rate by malnutrition (per 100,000) than France.

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I think the weird thing people do of "doctors need to know your 'biological sex!'" is weird. like no, not really. A lot of general practitioners make routine assumptions based on assigned sex that lead to medical malpractice and missing important conditions. "EMTs need to know!" The body is not so radically different between "the sexes" that emergency help is going to change unless its damage directly to genital regions, I mean most EMTs do not even want to look at your ID or anything and if they need to know that badly they can ask you/look. "Biological sex" in the scientific sense is not what society uses, there's more than genital configuration when figuring that out, "biological sex" in the societal sense is just oppression grouping based on genitals and has no actual value. Get over it.

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i think it's really an essential skill for anyone - but especially communists - to be able to really accept the fact (and this might sound obvious to you) that people can be right about some things and like. horribly wrong about others! somebody can have something worthwhile to say about sexuality and have horrible takes about race. somebody can something worthwhile to say about race but horrible takes about economics. and while like - it's absolutely true that the beliefs people hold are not independent of one another and will thus in turn affect one another - what i really mean more is that i don't think it's useful to completely dismiss everything a person has to say because of a completely separate bad take they have. i guess this is a roundabout way of saying we should be doing our best to evaluate the things people say based solely on what they are saying, not based on preconceived notions we might have of them or their other past takes.

(there is obviously exceptions to this rule - for example, it's right to be very wary of any discussions about sex work coming from a radfem, for example - context is always important. but you get what i mean)

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how do you feel about a heavy portion of communists being ableist? sending disabled people to prison for being physically unable to work and then acting like that didn't happen doesn't make disabled people confident that communism won't hurt them just as bad as capitalism (I'm not saying billions of trillions dies from communism I'm just saying ''those who won't work won't eat'' is fucking evil especially when I see that rhetoric in modern day! You can say 'oh a wheelchair user can do teaching or archiving' but that ignores how many disabled people are bedbound or fully paralyzed!)

ARTICLE 12. In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."

The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism : "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."

[...]

ARTICLE 120. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to maintenance in old age and also in the case of sickness or loss of capacity to work.

This right is ensured by the extensive development of social insurance of workers and employees at state expense, free medical service for the working people and the provision of a wide network of health resorts for the use of the working people.

This is the USSR's 1936 consistution, emphasis mine. Not a perfect constitution by any means, but this is very clearly antithetical to what you believe happened. Disabled people in my own country today have less rights and even less guarantees of those rights being respected. Again, the USSR was not perfect and I'm not saying it was. But you're ascribing willful malice that is embedded in marxism to circumstances that were not easily circumvented. The USSR was an imperfect state lacking in sufficient social protections, which came from times of feudalism without any kind of protection in any aspects save for the nobility, and whose collapse led to unparalleled misery and war. "He who does not work shall not eat" never included disabled people. It's a slogan, and slogans are not nuanced. What the USSR never did was enshrine that slogan into law literally, it always explicitly addressed able-bodied people.

Let's also look at a more modern constitution, Cuba's, from 2019

ARTICLE 42. All people are equal before the law, recieve the same protection and treatment from authorities and enjoy the same rights, freedoms and opportunities, without discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, ethnic origin, skin color, religious faith, disability, national or territorial origin, or any other condition or personal circumstance that implies a harmful distinction before human dignity.

All have the right to enjoy the same public spaces and establishments.

Likewise, receive the same salary for the same work, without any discrimination.

The violation of the principle of equality is outlawed and is sanctioned by law.

[...]

ARTICLE 64. The right to work is recognized. The person in condition to work has a right to obtain dignified employment, corresponding to their selection, qualification, aptitude, and economic and societal requirements.

ARTICLE 65. Every person has a right for their work to be compensated as a function of its quality and quantity, expression of the socialist principle "from each according to their capacity, to each according to their work".

[...]

ARTICLE 68. The person who works has a right to social security. The State, through the system of social security, guarantees their adequate protection when they are unable to work because of age, maternity, paternity, disability, or illness.

[...]

ARTICLE 70. The State, through social assistance, protects the people without resources or refuge, not capable of working, who lack family members able to bring them help; and to families who, due to the insufficient income they recieve, if they so choose, in accordance with the law

I don't see anywhere a part that says all disabled people are jailed. Cuba definitely does have effective and real protections for all kinds of disabled people, and just like the USSR, the principle of the duty to work is not applied directly to disabled people. It's hard still to find information on the practical application of disability protection that's not funded by Radio Free Whatever, but here's an article about Cuba's:

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you should kill yourself