originalshin

[originalshin]

ok so i am gonna paraphrase and compile some stuff from a conversation me and alessa and bec had abt this

part of the issue with the complicated issue of chasers is that most of the ways that chasers are discussed or addressed tend to delineate tmes who are attracted to/date/fuck trans women into two boxes: chasers and nonchasers. even the lowerkey ones are generally sorted into a secretly chaser category. but in reality, there’s no neat line where cultural fetishization ends and personal relationships completely entirely free of some aspects of those ideas and dynamics start. cuz at the end of the day, this is not a matter of behavior, it is an unavoidable phenomenon that results from the oppressive power dynamic between tmes and tmas; transfems are not societally considered to be whole people, we are considered to be sexual objects and tools for other people's enrichment, pleasure, and subjectivity enhancement; meanwhile, we are simultaneously considered to be incapable of goodness to the degree where we poison the personhood of anyone who loves us or engages with us as a fellow human. thus, in any gendered paradigm we are sought after by tmes for the purposes of fulfilling sexual desires, using us for social climbing or scapegoating, or for turning us into theoretical analogy for other phenomena, but without the privilege of being publicly and intimately affiliated with the real humans; we are simultaneously consistently recursively abjected by the tme component of any group. a common experience for a trans woman is to be kept around, but at arms length, as a resource, not as a companion, to exist only when needed, and only until her usefulness in a given setting is exhausted.

chaserdom is not a kind of person that creates this paradigm, it is a function of this paradigm that can be utilized by anyone with gendered power over us (aka tmes), regardless of whether they care for us or see us as humans equal to them. most people on some level know this whether they can directly articulate it or not; it is a very common experience to be approached by tme partners for reassurance that they are not chasers/fetishists. and that's the thing: prioritizing trans women in your life to the point where you want to have a transfem partner actually does involves a fair bit of "preferring" trans women because it is pushing back against a mountain of expectations of the opposite! which brings us to the final component of this: there is no consistent intrinsic difference between a "chaser"'s and a "nonchaser"'s attraction to a transfem! when tmes ask for this kind of reassurance, what they really want (regardless of whether or not they know it) is the assurance that they are innocent of the ability to weaponize/inhabit the paradigm of the chaser against the transfem they love. and the reality is they never are.

i want to call this a kind of fundamental misunderstanding of what a chaser is, but i think that on some level most people are aware of this, whether they can articulate it or not. but framing chaserdom as a behavior or inherent kind of attraction is still a very common line of reasoning, which can lead to absurd or insane takes when combined with the reality of there being no hard delineation of attraction, such as the hilariously common kind of scolding towards trans women expressing attraction to other trans women decrying the manner of their attraction as chasery (whether by talking down to transfems "honestly" but paternalistically, or by gleefully and transparently pretending that this t4t attraction is something coming from nontransfems - remember all those posts about how "girldick" is a chaser phrase despite it being coined by and almost exclusively used by transfems? lmao), betraying either incredible delusion about how chaserdom even works (it's a power imbalance you fuckin idiots, not the aesthetic window dressing!), or just a fresh coat of paint on the classic old idea that transfem sexuality is inherently predatory. usually both, lbr. another stupid result of this worldview is the paranoid scolding of trans women expressing any kind of fondness for chasers (or for loved ones they are affectionately calling chasers as a joke. or for halimede. jfc how fucking condescending can you get.) and the ascribing of some kind of naivety upon them, insisting that ohhh these poor girls just don't know that what they want will hurt them or that they are so used to being fucked over that they don't care....and like not to be rude but trans women are not naive idiots and you are not the smartest person in the room who alone can see the truth. i even see other transfems pull these kinds of shit sometimes and it is extremely annoying at a minimum. at some point, you need to recognize that the reason that so many trans girls make so many chaser jokes about tme bitches who love them and that some of the tme bitches who love them play along with these jokes is because they are well aware of this paradigm and are riffing on it. and if you have a problem with that, you need to just get over it, because it is the opposite of a big deal.

[originalshin]

Blackout Poem Made of Disability Benefits Applications and Denial Letters:

[Image ID: A blackout poem. The edges of the black are straight and rectilinear. I will indicate breaks in the line using the slash symbol /. Some of the excerpts include boxes where you could draw a check mark. I will indicate these by writing (box). The poem goes

Answer every question. / Please tell us if you want us to return them to you. / Select the heaviest weight lifted. / Using fingers to touch, / (Box) One hand (Box) Both hands / Using hands to seize, (Box) One hand (Box) Both hands / reduction / refusal / Termination / Penalty / You can give us more facts to add to your file. / You do not meet with the person who decides your case. / Notice of Decision — Unfavorable / Disabled worker’s name / Date given when disability began / Date of death. /end ID] 

The final three lines are from denial of benefits paperwork for workers who died before the end of the mandatory five month waiting period. How many of those deaths are connected to poverty? I don't know, but I can guess.

[originalshin]

let me talk abt this for the first and last time because i still see people repeating this everywhere and i think people miss a really significant aspect of what happened this past year

arab votes didn't actually swing to trump in any notable way despite trump openly appealing to and campaigning for the arab and muslim community. most people understood this was a cynical move, and the "leaders" he paraded around are people who would have voted for him anyway and he simply did not give them a reason not to. some people also wanted to curry favor with him because they would need favorable connections in the event that he did win (this is called the arab despot approach).

but i think people who aren't arab or muslim don't understand what the democratic party actually did here

kamala and her staff rejected repeated offers from arab leaders to campaign for the dems. they sidelined rashida tlaib, their only palestinian rep, who still held GOTV campaigns and encouraged people to vote dem without explicitly endorsing harris because the entire biden admin iced her out once her people started being genocided. they also refused to appear with arab leaders and even elected officials who did endorse harris. they simply did not want their campaign to be perceived as a campaign arab or palestinian voters would endorse.

this is because the democratic party understood that they were campaigning on murdering muslims and arabs, and being associated with them might give the impression to the neocons they were courting that they were soft. this wasn't an accident, this was a calculation they made. they wanted to spurn those communities in order to win the votes of those who hate them and those who profit from their deaths.

there's a reason they didn't let a palestinian onstage at the DNC, there's a reason they sent bill clinton and ritchie torres to michigan, and there's a reason kamala could not express sympathy for palestinians without being careful to say "the greatest tragedy was october 7th" first. all the charades about the ceasefire and the two-state solution are for israel's benefit before they were for electoral benefit, because from the outset the democrats had made the decision not just to ignore muslim and arab voters, but to campaign on their suppression.

this is what people scolding arab and muslim voters miss: the dems were hoping to gain votes by spurning these communities both domestically (when it came to crushing and defaming pro-palestine supporters, michigan arabs, americans killed in palestine, lebanese americans they left stranded in lebanon) and abroad (they were campaigning on a more lethal military and launched a regional war in the middle east). biden's decision to support israel's insane escalation was not just incidental and ideological, it was part of a cold calculation made by the biden admin after 2022 to tie american economy and political power to interventionism regardless of global consequences, even as the atrocities mounted.

this wasn't something kamala could've (or was willing) to stop once the ball was rolling. this is a bipartisan consensus that underwrites the logic of the US as a world power. trump probably can stop it because he has the kind of mandate that allows him to make unilateral decisions like that, but he won't because he's not interested in it, hates iran, and he's well-paid by zionist and arab leaders who both have an interest in "reshaping" the middle east, as jake sullivan put it.

in the most cynical view, kamala didn't need to campaign on it the way she did. the US war machine remains unchanged and is usually not championed by democrats in such stark neocon terms. but kamala, as a woman of color facing accusations of "woke" wanted to double down on it so people understood she meant it. in other words, she was vice-signalling. kamala campaigned on the strength of this war machine, and demonstrated that by not giving an inch to the ideological enemies of this war machine—arabs, muslims, palestinians and their allies. her campaign in and of itself was designed to target these communities, from the cynical "what has palestine done for black people?" khive campaigns to "i'm speaking" to "if you don't like it, go vote for trump and see how you like the muslim ban." and you know it worked because even when she lost her supporters continue to vilify them and are openly calling for further violence against them and identifying them as traitors, backstabbers, and enemies.

islamophobia in the west is openly accepted, even hegemonic, and it's not potentially going to result in hate crimes, lynchings and deportations: it's already reached and passed that point long ago. but it also resulted in much worse. the US and the west have killed millions of muslims and arabs across the years. the US is currently carrying out a genocide of indigenous palestinians as we speak. i'm not speaking speculatively about the warnings of fascism, i'm speaking historically about the atrocities already committed against whole nations. hrw released the report of ethnic cleansing in gaza today and ohcr finally admitted israel's actions in gaza are consistent with genocide. this means the genocide has already been carried out for a while, which genocide conventions, US law, international humanitarian law, all the protestors since last october, and the international court of justice were supposed to prevent from happening ever again—but joe biden and his admin prevented any of that from stopping israel.

in this campaign in particular, kamala was running not only on the strength and triumph of the crimes previously committed against those people, but on the promise of crimes to be committed against those people, and the assurance that the domestic objection to those crimes will be thoroughly ignored. and she demonstrated that by ignoring that voting base. if they had tried to court them, it would have undermined her whole campaign. on the other hand, it undermined nothing for trump, who (for all of his flaws and open support for it) was not the one personally carrying out a genocide the past year.

once you understand this, you understand it wasn't a matter of "kamala promised a ceasefire and trump wanted to finish the job" or "vote blue no matter who." if you are not part of this community or the region that kamala was campaigning on destroying, you missed the point of her campaign. she wasn't trying to win their votes despite biden's genocide, she wasn't doing her best with things out of her control, and she wasn't making promises she wouldn't keep like trump. she was campaigning against us. for many other demographics, this was a campaign of faux joy and vague promises of protecting democracy. for the arab and muslim communities, this was a campaign where "protecting democracy" necessitated their families being slaughtered live on everyone's timelines and smearing the voters who had the audacity to ask for it to stop.

but to their credit, most of them still didn't vote for trump. they didn't believe him. they just sat it out. what else can you do? not only is the person running part of the admin killing your cousins, but they're also campaigning on excluding and vilifying you even if you want to vote for them.

i've said this before but a great majority of the people organizing for palestine were previous dem canvassers and local organizers. they arrested their own campaign infrastructure over the year and smeared them as hateful antisemites. they pretended they had only targeted arabs and muslims and 'hamas supporters' and kept the fact that most of those protestors were antizionist jews, students of color and regular kids out of mainstream media. their youth vote tanked but they still continue to pretend the genocide was not a factor in their loss.

despite that they make sure to stress that muslim and arab voters "voted for trump to punish harris" even though exit polls and election data show otherwise. this simply wasn't true, and she lost in all seven swing states. this is because she ran a campaign that vilified arabs and muslims, and the narrative now demands it. liberals want them perceived as having "punished" the american populace so the american populace punishes them while the US continues to massacre our region.

she lost, but her hateful campaign lingers. i think a lot of people find comfort in saying "you'll get what's coming to you" or "trump is gonna turn gaza into a parking lot" because violence against these communities is the status quo. they're scared of the uncertainty of what trump will do to america, but they're comfortable with what he might do to us. because that's some semblance of normality in an unstable time. america will change and trump will put your institutions to the test, but at least killing arabs will stay the same. and that was, in short, kamala harris's campaign pitch.

[originalshin]

okay ill concede to the liberals that I dont think kamala harris would have put elon musk in charge of a government department called doge.

[originalshin]

When people talk about 'building community', usually the peak they aspire to is some form of mutual aid group. There are two main problems with this.

Firstly, mutual aid is a defensive tool, not an offensive one. It can only soften the blows of capitalism - it is the naive, bourgeois view of communism that our goal is the redistribution of wealth, when it is in fact the reorganisation of production. A network of mutual aid will level out the harshness of deprivation between those more and less vulnerable within the network. But it cannot actually lessen deprivation, and it cannot actually produce any food or blankets or medicine outside of its members earning a wage and buying them on the market. Under a system of mutual aid, everyone's life will slowly sink further and further into immiseration at the whims of capital, but it will do so at a (somewhat) consistent rate between them.

Secondly, most 'mutual aid' is not, actually, mutual aid. It is charity. Ask yourself: is there an intended recipient and an intended provider of this aid? Is it carried out by one group in order to help another? This is charity, a system of donation between a designated needy and general better-off. It is not that other thing: mutual aid. Mutual aid is characterised by its mutual character - that is, it is a community effort in which all members engage with it as both providers and recipients. There is nobody involved for who the supplies 'are not for you', because there is no separation between them. Like the 'community gardens' whose owners suddenly become upset at the food being taken, people are wearing the names of (honestly very minimally) more radical formations than the ones they are actually carrying out. They think that when they have changed the name of things, they have changed the things themselves!

Again, mutual aid is a fundamentally flawed, fundamentally defensive tactic - but people aren't even actually doing mutual aid. An offensive tactic, one that can actually improve people's quality of life and weaken capitalism, inherently means taking command of production, not merely adjusting consumption.

[originalshin]

it sucks trying to tell people not to appeal to nebulous constructed rights in their criticisms of things because you do genuinely start saying shit like "nebulous values like "human rights" and "justice" which sounds so bad even when your point is sound.

these are constructed ideas ppl have decided to go along with and sometimes enforce, instead of inherent truths about the world and your arguments shouldn't be relying on simple appeals to essentially just the law.

but it's hard to explain that without people thinking you're saying you want to put everyone in a prison camp and poke them with sticks.

[originalshin]

if you are part of a community space where there are no trans girls, and you recognize that as an issue, the next step is not "find trans girls and convince them to join."

The next step is consistently and actively confronting transmisogynist language, behavior, and views within that community space, and taking a role in sitting down and talking with other TME people about transfeminism.

if your space is filled with constant unchallenged transmisogyny and made up of TME people who have no practice with (or interest in) unlearning these views when confronted with them, then inviting trans women there doesn't make the space better, it makes those trans girls' lives worse.

[originalshin]

When people said fascism is globalized, it means the perpetrators are both white and not whites lol. Don't you forget about the later. We laugh about it true but it is serious. Multi-ethnic, multiracial fascism is here and prospering.

[originalshin]

[originalshin]

"you don't know how fucked up the voting system is here!" really? as if the Philippines wasn't the experimental grounds for Cambridge Analytica to test the efficacy of AI misinformation campaigns and its potential to affect election turnouts? how the strategic intent to manipulate voter opinion to steer the upcoming Philippine presidential elections was exposed to be a profitable venture for them? did you think the figure of Duterte as a populist champion and the strategized amnesia of the Marcos dictatorship came from just nowhere? I think I'm well aware of how the former Trump administration utilized the same tools that victimized our country

[originalshin]

Zionists love to ask me, "How would you fare in Gaza?" to which I love to respond, "How would I get to Gaza?" This first question, like many transphobic heckles that I have received from Zionists, is an Althusserian hail. According to Althusser (1971), the hail serves to interpolate the individual into the subject, to bring the individual into ideology. The noble identification of "gay friendly" Tel Aviv's gift to all queers is a hail—an interpolation of the transgender body into an always already indebted subject position, one enmeshed in a "cycle of debt." Under the Zionist economy of gratitude, the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West for allowing her to exist. The properly delimited space for the transgender subject within this ideology is essentially one confined to an apoliticized space of pride parades and gay bars, but never the front lines of an anti-imperial or anticolonial project. It is a queer/transphobic assault against those visibly queer bodies who refuse to be properly disciplined neoliberal queer consumers—and transgender bodies are often the most visibly queer bodies and hence the ones singled out for attack. As one cannot return the gift to the one who gave it (in this case because the Zionist disidentified from his own queerphobia), the transgender subject is forced to pass it along—to Palestinians. Hence, the queerphobic Zionist can pass the gift of his racist colonial phobia as well as his queerphobia on to the transgender subject. The projection allows the Zionist to disidentify from the transphobia inherent in his hail. This is particularly important, since it is precisely the violent transphobia—"what are you?"—that is an incitement to vulnerability. I am supposed to feel vulnerable, afraid, attacked by this hail, in order that I may pass on that gift of death to the supposedly transphobic Palestinian.

Papantonopoulou, Saffo. “‘Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv’: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1/2 (2014): 278–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24364930.

[originalshin]

in hard moments there's always a beautiful mantra "at least im not religious"

[originalshin]

most infuriating comment I've seen on the internet was on some video I forgot what it was about but I think it was talking about petra in jordan or something and the commenter was like "this is why we need to take those artifacts to our museums where they can be appreciated because otherwise they will be destroyed by the wars there" and literally the blood boiled up to my head I honestly threw my phone away and had to go do something else for a bit. this was years ago. it is absolutely insane to me that there are people who exist out there who truly think this way and have no shame in it. they like our things and our culture but value their ability to "appreciate" them more than the peoples who made them and preserve them.

the oldest city in the world is in iraq and there were artifacts there that stood the test in time until fucking usa started a war there. reminds me of lebanon recently when israel bombed baalbek which is famous for old ruins dating back to phoenician and roman times.

westerners destroy our lands and steal our history and make up rules of "civility" based on what works for them then call us savages for "not maintaining our culture" or sometimes "not having" one but they somehow always want our things, completely ignoring the human factor and counting our lives as meaningless or disposable. fucking colonizers.

[originalshin]

literally insane to me how you can shove military propaganda in a show for actual preschoolers and that's considered fine but god forbid you find it weird or sad or else someone will pen a whole article discrediting the horrors millions are going through because having dog soldiers in the cartoon for 3 year olds is more important

[originalshin]

the insinuation 'binary trans people' have simple genders or w/e is fraught & flawed in innumerable ways but chief among them is the fact being boring while nonbinary is veryyyyy common

[originalshin]

it would be nice if more people on here viewed fundraising efforts as like. something to just add to ur daily schedule, like checking email or doing dishes.. no one has the time or energy to do this 24/7, but can you write a post for someone once a week? can you write people short updates on their own posts to keep them circulating? can you sit down and learn how to host a gofundme, if you live in a country where they operate? can you spare a few minutes or a few dollars, once a day or once a week or whenever you're free?

this isn't like a fun activity that people are doing to relax, it's a necessary thing that keeps other people alive... i think it's fair for those of us who are safe & housed & fed to just pitch in a little where we can. i think obligations to others sometimes need to take the same weight as the chores we hold ourselves to in our individual lives.

[originalshin]

See I genuinely think it transcends any identity for people my age: looking an elder in your family or community or just period and saying ‘no, I’m not going to hit a child. They’re okay:’