quark-nova

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TRANSUNITY

Transunity is a political theory that was actively talked about on Tumblr a couple of years ago, but has since fallen out of the public spotlight. And this is unfortunate, because it could have really improved a lot of the discourse around gender.

There exists a blog under that name ( @transunity ), but it has been inactive for a year. I am not affiliated with that blog anyhow, I never had any personal contacts with its mods, but I want to get their general ideas to circulate again, so I'm trying to bring this back up in a semi organized fashion. My take on transunity is just my take, if you're one of the original coiners, and you disagree, I encourage you to talk about it, because we still have much more in common with each other than different.

GENERAL VIEWS

I believe that one of the fundamental ideas more trans people need to understand is that we're all more or less in the same place in the eyes of the society (when other factors, such as ethnicity or disability, are considered). To be trans is to fail the gender role system, from the point of view of cis people we can no longer be proper men or women. All kinds of trans people regardless of identity are affected by misogyny and misandry (not a type of marginalization by itself, but turns into a vector of oppression when overlapping with a different marginalization), which forms the foundation of transmisogyny, transandrophobia, and exorsexism*. These types of bigotry are not exclusive and unique to specific gender identities either and may be applied to any trans person for as long as it's convenient to the oppressor.

Trans people do not have gendered power over each other, and intra community bigotry is better conceptualized as a form of lateral aggression.

Gender assignment and sex are never strictly binary (especially with inclusion of intersex people, who belong in gender conversations even if they don't identify as trans) and need to be understood as much more fluid and not strictly correlating with one's actual position in life.

WHAT WE NEED TO REDUCE

The following things should be discussed more critically:

- "Powerjacketing" - implying someone has gendered privilege as a means of delegitimizing their words, while in reality they do not have this privilege;

- Malgendering - forcing trans people to choose between being gendered correctly and speaking up about their mistreatment (e.g. questioning trans women's womanhood on the basis of them aggressively defending themselves or trans men's manhood on the basis of them asking for help) or implying there's something wrong with them in a way that reinforces gender stereotypes;

- Assuming that some trans people are exempt from some forms of oppression on the basis of gender assignment/sex (e.g. by calling all trans people who were assigned female "tme"** or claiming trans people who were assigned male are inherently incapable of understanding fear of sexual assault);

- Assuming that oppression of trans people is rooted in gender assignment/sex (such as, calling reproductive oppression "sex based oppression"***);

- Gatekeeping certain identities, such as "transmasc", "transbian", "femboy" as exclusive to any gender assignment/sex;

- Creating a duality out of "transsexual" and "cissexual", where not medically transitioning trans people are assumed to have some kind of a gendered privilege, or to not be trans in any meaningful material way. Various transmed ideas about dysphoria and transition go there too;

- Accusing trans people who take inspiration from each other of appropriation (trans headcanons, kinks, drag culture, etc).

SYMBOL

The following image is the official transunity symbol developed by the original transunity bloggers. Sorry about the glitch effect, I wasn't able to find one without it.

* Transmisogyny, transandrophobia, and exorsexism are not exclusive to specific identities, although they do primarily target traits associated with these identities. They can be conceptualized as bigotry and oppression towards people who are recognized as incorrectly entering respectively womanhood, manhood, and a status beyond gender binary (for the latter no normative form exists****). However, it's not wrong to use them to mean "oppression of trans women" and so forth, for as long as you're not claiming it's exclusive.

** Labels like "tma" and "tme" still may be used, but solely in a self assigned manner. I believe that an individual trans person is capable of evaluating whether they're affected by transmisogyny and in what way, and they should be trusted on this. However, no gender assignment and no current gender identity makes anyone inherently tme.

*** "Sex based oppression" instead of "reproductive oppression" reinforces the idea that people who share a specific body part (e.g. an uterus in context of conversations about abortion) are inherently of the same sex. This type of essentialism is desperately needed by terfs in this discussion, as they're trying to sell the ideas of "sex based oppression" and "sex based privilege" to people they want to recruit in their ideology. Invoking the idea of "sex" as something trans men and some nonbinary people are oppressed through is not the correct way to respond to people who say we don't experience any gendered violence besides "just transphobia", it has shitty implications and helps shitty people.

**** Lack of existence of normative nonbinary gender does not mean that these genders are not recognized by the society as a deviant, marginalized identity, and that binary people cannot be pushed into this zone.

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ground sloth before ground sloths

11/28/2024 Therizinosaurus

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Cuttlefish can change color to fade into the background. It can do it amazingly fast.

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As an incredibly mature 22 year old adult, I decided to give my duck a shower today while my parents weren't home >:3

Video sound might be loud for people with headphones/auditory sensitivity. (Just sounds of the water running)

Her name is Norris, (Duck Norris), and she is my 7 year old Khaki Campbell.

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also I don't think the numbers of followers is even public. like, I know that two of my mutuals have around 20k followers because they told me, but otherwise I have absolutely no clue who among my mutuals has more/less followers than me

For those who’ve migrated from TikTok: there’s no reward for harassment on Tumblr. You won’t gain a heavy amount of likes, reblogs, and followers for leading harassment campaigns; if anything, it’ll make people block you.

On Tumblr, there’s no popularity contest because many don’t care about the amount of followers, likes, and reblogs you have. A lot of users even hide their likes and who they're following. Users heavily encourage blocking people and filtering out tags. This is why online discourse is more confined to its bubble instead of being so widespread on this website: because people curate their experiences.

If you want to have an enjoyable experience on Tumblr, then you need to use the block button and filtering system. If you don't, then you're going to be extremely miserable.

EDIT: Interesting additions to the post-

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linsang walking across your dash

I love when two friends of mine who don't know each other at all reblog the exact same post, just a few days apart

(hi @quark-nova @adhdo5)

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i’m still figuring out how redbook works so i can’t share the video here yet, but y’all.

a woman made a post on tiktok talking about li hua, a pseudonym students in china learning english would write under to american “pen pals.” these letters were never sent. apparently it was crazy common, hundreds of letters have been written from li hua.

and people have started saying they feel like li hua is getting a response.

this woman posted this on tiktok and the comments were full of people writing responses, apologizing to li hua for not being in touch for so long. and one american mentioned how when they were a kid they dug holes in the beach and thought if they dug deep enough they could reach china all the way on the other side of the world, and that just awoke some MEMORIES. like, i did that. i dug holes in the sand and wondered how close i was. “as children we dug holes at the beach to try to get to you. we wondered what you’d be like our whole lives.”

the same woman made a post talking about THAT on redbook, saying it feels like we’ve both been just struggling to reach each other for so long. “i suddenly realize, this meeting was actually a two way effort. it’s like you’ve done a lot of hard work and come a long way before a date, and the wait was too long that you gradually started to forget the original intention of embarking on this road, and began to doubt, is your date real? suddenly one day, they really appeared in front of you and tell you i also made an effort to see you. and that’s a wonderful thing.”

idk that just made me cry a bit. i’ve seen a couple people refer to the feeling of being a little kid at the playground again, awkward and clumsy and sometimes hurting each other but everyone just eager to meet and share what they love.

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That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.

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It's a long story, but it started with early taxonomists trying to classify mammals based on morphology only: at first, everything with hooves was grouped in the order Ungulata, the ungulates.

The thing is, the presence of hooves alone are not a very good criterion to classify mammals on. With the advent of more modern methods, we found that a lot of them (like elephants) were completely unrelated, having evolved hoof-like nails on their own. The remainder were called Euungulata, the "true ungulates".

It turns out that true ungulates have a surprisingly neat classification: on one side, the ones with an odd number of toes (horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs), and on the other side, the ones with an even number of toes (everything else, like cows and giraffes).

But, the real surprise was that cetaceans (orcas, whales and friends) actually evolved from a group of even-toed ungulates, most closely related to hippos! Since modern biologists prefer to use groups containing all of their descendants (which they call "clades"), cetaceans are now included as even-toed ungulates too!

A small error I made in the previous post was saying that cows were more closely related to orcas than giraffes: that's wrong, as giraffes are from the same lineage of even-toed ungulates as cows (they're both ruminants, while orcas are in the hippo lineage (they're whippomorphs). They are still all more closely related to each other than to pigs, camels, and llamas (which branched off earlier), while odd-toed ungulates (horses and rhinos) are even further away!

if you have biologist friends you need to ask them questions about their interests and let them ramble for 5 to 115 minutes. it's really important for their enrichment

i like to ask if two similar-looking animals are even particularly closely related (squid + octopi, hares + rabbits, orcas + cows, for example) and see where that goes. just be sure the questions are relevant to their specific field and let em explore + teach whatever flows

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if you have biologist friends you need to ask them questions about their interests and let them ramble for 5 to 115 minutes. it's really important for their enrichment

i like to ask if two similar-looking animals are even particularly closely related (squid + octopi, hares + rabbits, orcas + cows, for example) and see where that goes. just be sure the questions are relevant to their specific field and let em explore + teach whatever flows

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Just had a dream where I redesigned the cells to have skeletons.

What a nightmare... The subconscious can be so cruel. Thank god it wasn’t real

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Yep, usually the PhD theses that have useful material we'd like to cite as sources are those same ones that have already been cited and/or reviewed previously, so they're usually fine. I concede I might have been a bit too optimistic about masters theses however.

My one complaint about Wikipedia sourcing is: I sort of understand why any work produced by a student would not necessarily be considered a reliable secondary source by their standards. BUT. If it is a masters thesis, or even a PhD? Like clearly at least this is not just some bozo. Original research I can maybe see, many MA and PhD theses are, many also aren't. Especially in some fields like history, which rely on interpreting primary sources and so are pretty reliably a secondary source.

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Some of you need to stop treating gender like sports. Just because you support trans men/mascs doesn't mean that you hate trans women/fems. This isn't like football where if you love the Steelers, you have to hate the Eagles, else you're a traitor to Steelers fans.

We can support many genders without hating others.

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hank green's 2025 bingo card is gonna make me pass out

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As a regular Wikipedia editor, I can confirm that PhD theses are usually considered pretty reliable by the community, and often relied on as sources. Masters theses can sometimes be more iffy, but can often come in clutch if there isn't any better source.

My one complaint about Wikipedia sourcing is: I sort of understand why any work produced by a student would not necessarily be considered a reliable secondary source by their standards. BUT. If it is a masters thesis, or even a PhD? Like clearly at least this is not just some bozo. Original research I can maybe see, many MA and PhD theses are, many also aren't. Especially in some fields like history, which rely on interpreting primary sources and so are pretty reliably a secondary source.

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Today's Card Is: Snom

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I'm having doubts about the whole "adjective + noun" thing, like, we say "stem mammal" without implying that they are mammals

(left: stem mammal, right: mammal in STEM)

the thing is that whenever someone says "pluto IS a planet" you don't know if they're actually a space fan who is prepared to love and cherish all the other bodies that would become planets if pluto was promoted again or the dumbest motherfucker on earth who thinks science should have stopped when they left 3rd grade