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This is a controversial take that everyone will hate but it's one thing to feed your kid better, more wholesome food than twinkies and hot pockets daily, it's another thing to force them to adhere to a crunchy granola beige colored diet where they cant share the snacks their peers are eating or have a normal childhood or have fun. None of you were raised like that and if you were you know what im talking about.

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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.

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*grabs your hands and speaks to you in a tone that is so gentle* they/them pronouns stop being universal once you learn a person's pronouns. Sometimes that person's pronouns will include they/them and in that specific case you are allowed to keep using those pronouns for that person. In any case where you learn a persons pronouns and that person doesn't use they/them, you should no longer use those pronouns for that person. If you continue to use they/them pronouns knowing that person doesn't use them, you are now misgendering that person. Kindly stop doing that please. Thank you, I love you.

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i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

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Prescriptivism : Prude :: Descriptivism : Dude

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anyway

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joints will see you taking a step & be like "i bet i could improve on this with my Cool New Trick." & theyre wrong

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coworker: hey you should come look at the results of a ph test for a customer’s water

me: I’m king of busy rn

coworker: no really just come here

the ph test:

my honest reaction:

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something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

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New drawing

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IF YOU LOVE FAT WOMEN HIT THAT MF REBLOG

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I love my people and it's amazing to see so many of us turn up today, but it's like herding very friendly cats 😂

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Here's my (probably only, sadly) post for Solarpunk Aesthetic Week! Originally made for Andrewism's 2023 Solarpunk Art Collab!

This digital painting depicts the Southern Great Lakes Ecoregion, within the Interior Plateau & Southern Great Lakes Forests Bioregion, within the Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forest Biome.

I chose a suburban setting for this piece because I've not yet seen a Solarpunk artwork that features this. I'm aware of the problems with the suburbs, but it seems to me more sustainable to try to adapt them than to demolish them and start over. So instead of lawns I've depicted beds of native Indiana plants, including but not limited to:

Amsonia Tabernaemontana (Eastern Bluestar)

Spartina Pectinata (Prairie Cordgrass)

Echinacea Purpurea (Purple  Coneflower.

The roofs of the houses are either white to help reflect heat, or green roofs. Some of the houses are equipped with solar panels on the south sides, and one is shown with a greenhouse on that side as well.

While perhaps not explicitly ecologically focused, I have shown there to be more art in this setting than is usually found in american suburbia. The sidewalk has a mural painted with hydrochromic paint, which only appears while it is raining. The houses are painted bright colors (white or greige is  considered  'Normal' ) and are occasionally decorated with murals.

This particular area is among the cloudiest in the so-called U.S.A. To reflect that, the weather is overcast and it is currently raining.

Hope y'all enjoy this, and Happy Solarpunk Aesthetic Week!

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People will be like I love Greek mythology but I hate everything that involves incest, infidelity, violence, slavery, misogyny, undeserved suffering, questionable relationships, ethically dubious heroes and gods,and morality that is foreign to me.

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Geometric Shapes / 241120

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if you truly wanted to remake american psycho for the modern day you would cast a young 20 something hot woman and make it about social media “amazon must buy” influencers and how it’s a shallow, empty, and extremely copy-paste job where you turn yourself into a salesperson for the smallest amount of commission and lose all originality of yourself. bc those girls that go to bed with literal tape over their mouths and after doing a 10 step skincare routine are closer to being patrick bateman than literally any man alive