pomodoko

[pomodoko]

Refuge.

[pomodoko]

Even if you were a difficult child, you didn't deserve to be hurt.

[pomodoko]

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

[pomodoko]

You won't get media with messier, more nuanced, more realistic queer characters if you keep flying off the handle the second a fictional character has sex, does drugs, swears too much, or acts vaguely like an asshole.

You won't get more diverse queer media with wider stories if you can't handle it when queer artists make art that is raunchy, crude, edgy, and gross.

You won't get more diverse queer media if you shut everything down the second it does something you, personally, get squicked out by.

You will never get more diverse queer media if you contribute to the way queer media is picked apart, raked over the coals, and held to unreasonably high standards.

You will never get what you want if you keep tearing queer artists down for their weird experimental art instead of learning how to say, "this isn't for me, that's fine, and I'll be over here in my own space."

[pomodoko]

bonus

[pomodoko]

[pomodoko]

A cosmic tribute to my current favourite comment in YouTube history

[pomodoko]

[pomodoko]

My brother recently bought a house in the rural outskirts of his city, and apparently it's a real fixer-upper, but that's always been the kind of thing he loves doing. So he has a truck now (to haul stuff for all the repairs he's doing on the house). He's already fond of flannel. He bakes his own bread.

And now a cat has turned up, so he has a cat.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, it's dawning on me that my own brother is, in fact, Hallmark Christmas Movie Small Town Man.

If he shows up to Christmas dinner with a bewildered hedge fund manager who got stranded in his town and fell in love with him over an ice sculpture carving competition or some shit, I'm gonna have to stage an intervention.

[pomodoko]

I was rambling on the issue of museums and human remains and how certain populations are more likely to have their bodies put on display to be gawked at and then went "well I guess the Pompeii casts were of Europeans. there are bones in there right?" and Googled it to make sure, at which point I confirmed that yes there are bones in there, but more interestingly DNA testing revealed that a cast of an adult holding a child everyone assumed was a mother and child were, in fact, a man and a kid entirely unrelated to him. Honestly that's more moving to me. Maybe they were connected in a way other than blood, but maybe a stranger saw a child when the world was ending and thought the one thing he could do was hold them.

[pomodoko]

[pomodoko]

I love that every year fire departments are like "hey. maybe DON'T fry your turkeys?"

and across the nation, patriots rise up and shout "FUCK YOU" bc surely it'll be fine for THEM

and then start massive grease fires in their backyards

it is my most favorite thanksgiving tradition

[pomodoko]

I started in either 2010 or 2011 I’m not exact but like it’s crazyyy.

Anyway

Did you know for families who can’t get vetting through one of the major blogs it can be nearly impossible to get access to support from us?

These children are thanking Geena @stealing-from-walmart69 in a language they do not speak for the food she was able to provide. I censored their faces bc tbh they look very shy and it’s very unfair to have to expose them like this for support as well as the other version of this is floating around anyway if you really need more proof. You should really share. It’s free and easy and actually does make a difference.

[pomodoko]

So in the Egyptology group chat this morning, we were having a discussion on Amenhotep II’s ‘mesh underwear’ that he’s depicted wearing under a sheer top cloth. They’re made of Gazelle leather, and each hole is hand cut with a modesty panel for butthole and structure. This led to some back and forth about examples, like this one:

Soldiers are depicted wearing them too:

And then we came across one with much larger holes cut in the leather:

Which led to a discussion about Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep II being balls out in flexible leather fishnet style underwear….

[pomodoko]

Arrest warrants have been issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence secretary Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The warrants are for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the war in Gaza that Israel launched following the 7 October attacks by Hamas.

[...]

In its update, the ICC said it found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Netanyahu and Gallant "bear criminal responsibility" for alleged crimes. These, the court said, include "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts".

21st November 2024