#YGender

[coochiequeens]

Trans community: “misgendering is literal violence” Also trans community: will violently attack from behind over an accidental use of the wrong pronouns

Content Notice: This article contains photos of bruising and physical injury. Reader discretion is appreciated.

A woman in Melbourne, Australia was hospitalized and left with horrific injuries following a brutal attack from a trans activist over what she speculates was retaliation for her gender critical views.

On September 24, 2022, Ruby* and her partner were attending the Punks Pub Crawl, an annual barhopping event for those in the punk rock scene which has been held in Melbourne since 1982. Ruby, a bass guitarist in a local band, had been attending the crawl since she was a teenager. Though she was excited to return to her tradition following the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, Ruby’s evening turned into a nightmare.

“I had only just arrived with my partner sometime around 3 p.m. There were about 70 people or so attending the crawl. The whole group of us stopped at Carlton Gardens for a group photo,” Ruby recounts, explaining that immediately after the photo was taken she would have an incident that has since left her with a debilitating injury.

“I was walking away, talking to a friend when I noticed one male walking beside the group but in the opposite direction to the rest of us,” Ruby says. “As he passed me he shoulder-barged me hard, and I stopped to address him.”

Ruby describes her attacker as “male, but not obviously ‘trans.’” As she was with a group of individuals belonging to the punk rock community, she didn’t immediately believe he was attempting to present as the opposite sex, and simply thought he was donning classic punk attire. 

“He just looked like a metal head with lipstick on, and I had never seen him before in my life,” she says. According to a police report Ruby provided Reduxx, the individual is described as approximately 5’7, with long dark hair. He had been wearing a black shirt and black pants.

Startled by the body check, Ruby confronted the male.

“I said something very close to, ‘Is there a problem here? Do you and I need to have a conversation?’ He started denying and gaslighting. He claimed it was an accident and one of his friends backed him up. It was clearly no accident so I replied, ‘No, he just shoulder-barged me as hard as he could.’”

Ruby says the onlookers immediately seemed to take issue with the pronoun she had used for the man.

“I heard a few murmurs of ‘He?’ Like people were offended at my choice of pronoun,” she says. “I stood facing him for another [few seconds] waiting to see if he was going to kick off, but he seemed to have nothing to say so I turned and walked away.”

But just as she did, Ruby says she was suddenly attacked from behind, with the man pushing her onto the concrete with tremendous force.

“I was wearing a heavy studded leather jacket so I went down hard and fast. I put my left arm out to break the fall with anything other than my head and the impact reverberated all up my arm, shattering my shoulder and breaking my arm at the joint.”

Ruby says other pub crawl goers told the man to back off, and she says that while she was in extreme pain, she didn’t immediately recognize the extent of the damage. A friend of hers who knew first-aid put her in a makeshift sling, and it quickly became obvious to Ruby that she needed to seek medical treatment. 

She first attempted to go to a public hospital, but was left in the emergency waiting room for agonizing hours without proper attention, so she left and later sought help at Austin Hospital, which is reputed for its trauma care. Ruby was sent for a CAT scan and X-Ray where she was diagnosed with a fractured shoulder.

Ruby provided Reduxx medical records from Austin Health showing she was admitted to the emergency short stay unit, and that she was initially slated for a surgical intervention by an orthopedic registrar. 

A second orthopedic surgeon Ruby saw while in hospital decided not to operate, feeling her outcomes would be better if she were simply closely monitored and sent for physiotherapy after the initial injury had healed. The surgeon left the possibility of operation open if anything were to come up with the injury in the future.

In the chaos of her attempts to get medical treatment, Ruby had managed to track down the individual who had assaulted her through a band contact. She recognized her assailant had been friends with an individual who her band had performed with in the past, and skimmed his socials to find more information. She managed to identify the attacker, and, armed with the information, went to Melbourne Police and filed a report after being discharged from hospital.

Ruby supplied Reduxx with the statement she signed and witnessed with a Constable about her ordeal. In the statement, she names Sarah Cadzow, a male who identifies as a “woman,” as being her assailant. 

She speculates that their mutual band contact had alerted Cadzow to her views on gender ideology at the Punks Pub Crawl, and that he had body-checked her in retaliation. 

“It became clear that someone had been showing the attacker my Facebook posts. The attacker had never been on my Facebook friends list, as far as I know, but his friend was. My Facebook has been all about women’s rights and spaces for about 4 years now, since I found out about men in women’s prisons,” Ruby says. “We messaged the friend shortly afterwards and he helpfully agreed in writing as to what happened, but attempted to justify it because apparently [Cadzow] was ‘defending his community’ by attacking a middle aged woman from behind.”

In his youth, Cadzow had been associated with LGBTQ youth charity Minus18.

Cadzow was listed as a development team member of the Trans 101 project, a “gender diversity crash course” aimed at youth supported by Minus18, YGender, and the Sydney Myer Fund. He also penned a biography for the Rainbow Story Project, praising Minus18 and boasting about the fact he transitioned when he was approximately 14 years old.

Despite having provided Melbourne Police with two witness statements as well as the identity of her attacker, Ruby explains that it took months for Cadzow to finally be charged in a process that initially left her feeling abandoned.

“I can’t speak for police resources or procedures, but it was very concerning to me that it took so long to charge him. They seemed to be handling the assailant very delicately,” she says. “I wanted there to be some immediate disincentive for him to do this again – to me or anyone else – and the police didn’t seem to take that concern seriously at all.”

Ruby says she observed a definite “tone shift” when police learned her assailant was transgender.

“The delay in charging and the manner in which they went about it certainly felt to me like a reluctance to act. This was very serious violence and all I could think about during that waiting time was ‘Where are the consequences? What’s stopping him doing it again? What happens if he sees a woman in an Adult Human Female t-shirt?'”

On January 25, almost exactly four months after the incident, Cadzow was finally handed charges related to Ruby’s assault. He is currently scheduled for a hearing at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on April 14.

While Ruby expresses some relief that Cadzow has now been charged and the legal component of her ordeal is moving after months of stagnation, she has been left with the lingering impact of her attack.

“I play bass guitar, and at first we weren’t sure if I was going to be able to play gigs anymore. Fortunately, it’s looking like I will be able to, just not too often and it hurts like a bastard to tune up,” she says, explaining that her impacted arm can no longer be lifted above the shoulder

“I will never swim again, [or] shoot hoops with my son, get things from high shelves, or hang washing. The doctor said: ‘your ability to lift that arm above your head ended when you hit the ground.'”

In relation to Cadzow’s upcoming hearing, Ruby says she hopes the consequences for Cadzow are serious enough to act as a deterrent. 

“I hope others who may have similar ideas realize that you simply can’t just go around attacking women with impunity.” 

But even then, Ruby explains that she has concerns about how the case will be handled by Australia’s criminal justice system, which has become notorious for its position on gender self-identification. 

“This was a clear-cut act of male violence but I have my doubts as to whether statistics or records will reflect that in the end,” she says.

“It’s getting very scary to be a woman speaking up about women’s rights these days. This kind of violence is going way, way too far and it has to stop before something even worse happens.”

* – Subject has been assigned a name to protect her privacy.

By Anna Slatz Anna is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Reduxx, with a journalistic focus on covering crime, child predators, and women's rights. She lives in Canada, enjoys Opera, and kvetches in her spare time.

[agentukelele]

mogai community unlearn forced helplessness 2k25

you dont need permission to use a term

you dont need to as if theres a mix of x and ygender. its xygender now go

you DO need to learn how to do a basic google search if youre asking if things like femboygirl exist. it does. 5 seconds of searching

[swan2swan]

SHE MADE IT INTO TWO WHOLE SHOTS

or they

looked ver ygender ambigious

So I like how Liza Koshy's character started off going "Hey this girl asked me to prom and I said yes" and the prom date hasn't shown up at all, executive meddling

[cripdeaf]

I wrote a thing for Intersex Awareness Day!

[dork5-in-5pace]

I was passing through the everyday posts on facebook but cried in joy when I saw this person WEARING THIS SHIRT! TO SEE KORRASAMI OUT IN THE WORLD GIVES ME JOY AND HAPPINESS!!! HONESTLY CLOSE TO CRYING RIGHT NOW This is not to gaslight the super important message this video holds about being transgender and some language that comes with. This post is just me being a korrasami fan

THANK YOU WHOEVER YOU ARE https://trans101.org.au/

[tvranny]

do you know hjow great of a feeling it is to be 99% sure that you’re attracted to men exclusively with a very limited amount of iffiness on that and knowing you’re a trans man and yet due to the latter aspect, being utterly unable to call yourself gay because it makes you feel intrusive and invalid???????????? because it’s a great fucking feeling

[manonamora-if]

CRWL - Week 1 : Variables

Notes: While today's discussion is specific to the variables, this is the work of multiple days during that first week. I have a queue that posts once a day, so there might be some backlog between the time I am typing this and the time it is posted. This also means that I may have edited it to reflect on new things happening in that week. Cheers!

On the topic of variables, this project is seeing multiple categories:

Variables related to Characters (player and NPC) characteristics (pronouns, appearance, name...)

Variables related to choice made by the player during the story (picking up an object, picking one line of dialogue...)

Variables used for Scripts

Variables related to Characters

While the first one is obvious, I made it harder on myself by making a NPC's gender related to the sexuality of the player (there will be more than 1). For example, if the player is attracted to women, this NPC will be a woman; and vice versa.

Since the core story is not dependant on romance, I also wanted to add the option for the player to choose whether they were attracted to both gender or none. In both cases, the gender will be randomize.

With this in the saddle, I had to think how to change the NPC's pronouns during passages, depending on their gender. I could create a conditional statement where a paragraph is based on one gender, with the second one underneath. But that would be a lot of editing and very long passages, which is not ideal with the things I planned.

So I created a variable for pronouns, and its many grammatical forms (ex: he/him/himself/his) along with their gender and whether the first letter was capitalized. So far, that last point is only valid for the He/She with how the story is in its current draft. Damnit

We have then the regular Player characteristics (gender, sexuality, name) and some more descriptive ones (skin/eye/hair colour, hair length or bold, favourite colour). There may be more in the future, depending on how the story evolves.

Variables related to Actions

This one is a bit empty for now. There are not many choices in the prologue. If I had some in the future, it will probably be because a part of a passage needs to be tweaked to take into account a choice. For example, the player will be able to choose an outfit, and depending on the choice, they will get a different reaction to NPC around them.

In the future, I would like to have some variables that shows whether a NPC likes the player or not. That would be useful with any romance or friendship side story to include. Maybe one variable to show the court's view on the player as well? In any case, that will be for future chapters.

Variables related to Script

Since the player can choose their sexuality and the gender of some NPC is related to that choice, I needed to create conditional statements to set it up. If the player is attracter to women, the NPC will be a man, and their pronouns will follow along. Adding the layer of needing to change pronouns as well, that code portion can be been quite long.

For better visibility during proof reading, Sugarcube has an option to introduce text or run the code from a different passage with the <> function. That way, I just need to add two/three words in the regular passage instead of multiple lines of code.

For example, the player meets Character Y and thinks: I wonder who this Y-gender is. On Twine, the sentence looks like this: I wonder who this <> is. And in the "YGender" Passage, you can find the conditional statements.

You can find on the internet many widgets or scripts (Java or HTML) that will help do certain things but that might need to be modified to fit your profile. Some are easier than others, especially if you understand coding (which I don't really, I struggled so hard to make this one work).

Final Notes

Some variables don't appear until you start writing the story. Hell the plan you have might change during writing. I have some ideas I want to implement here, like affection level, but I am not yet sure if the story demands it or how I could make it work just yet. As long as I don't have a need for something, I try not to spend too much time on it until the time comes.

I mean, that's the reason I have been putting off worldbuilding for so long..

Still gonna wait a bit longer. Let's start doing a bit of writing and put down some idea into some sensible (or not) sentences.

[fromchaos]

gansey stands for

girl

announcing

new

sensational

exciting

ygender

[xxalienfaeprincexx]

I made badges today :D #ygender

[gghero]

People who dont want to be called queer are valid. I respect yall

But could you PLEASE not add the mandatory "queer is a slur" discourse onto personal posts of people using that word? We know. We fucking know. We are reminded it is a slur constantly and its tiring and stressful, do you think its easy to reclaim a word?

Before you say something like "that literally never happens" please just look at the notes of every popular post that uses the word queer, and listen to us.

We need you too to end the stigma we are trying to fight. This includes: if you know a person feels only comfortable being called queer because its easier to explain than their actual sexuality/gender, you should minimize the exposure they get to rants against the word queer because... idk man it wears you off. To interiorize that your identity is less valid because some of your fellow lgbt people refuse to call you that, because you should just call yourself Xsexual Ygender for them to be comfortable adressing you... its exhausting.

i get that some - no, a lot of pro-queer - folks have been loud jerks before, overstepping boundaries, being annoying, we are aware of this. I cannot speak for their actions and im sorry and ashamed that the lib kweer has become the visual representation of us. So dont become like them in retaliation, and dont boss around and annoy people who just want to call themselves queer.

[autisticadvocacy]

Neurodivergent trans folks share their experiences and information about how to be more inclusive of us. #QueerAndDisabled

[assignedmale]

Created during a workshop with Melbourne’s trans and queer youth group Ygender <3

[casekt]

God the cis when they're like "my xgenderfriend came out as a ygender, what should I do for xpronouns" like... don't use the wrong shit maybe?

[ygender]

Gender diversity is part of so many different cultures around the world. In the latest instalment of Trans 101, our gender diversity crash course, listen to trans people of colour talking about their experiences!

This video was written, filmed, and edited by trans young people. Donate to support more trans-led content at https://donorbox.org/ygender or learn more at https://www.trans101.org.au/

[tiredlinguist]

THATSM YGENDER RIGHT THERE. THATS HIM

made this for a friend, releasing it into the world

[punky-funky]

I want a cozy datemate.

I want go in cute dates at the museum with them, I want to paint with them, I want to go to minus and ygender events with them I want to hug them I want to kiss them I want to tuck them into bed I want to love them Gosh I'm so needy