#a single person perpetuates

[ickypuppi3]

it’s the way billy’s a scapegoat not only in show but for the duffers too like

people will spend all their time focusing on the actions of a fictional teenager rather than question the fact these two white men were all too eager to have a racial slur used against a literal child and have felt comfortable having racism in lucas’ story without it actually go anywhere all while putting no focus on him as a character

they use it as a thing, as a prop, rather than acknowledging it as the systemic issue it actually is - like they use it, have lucas canonically experience racism and then push his character to the back

it’s so blatant too, there’s nothing subtle about it but because everyone’s so busy focusing on big bad billy hargrove, racism doesn’t get discussed in the stranger things fandom the way it should because everyone’s too busy focusing on the actions of one single fictional character

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[sysmedsaresexist]

A kind reminder

That systems who use parts language aren't less of a system

That systems are allowed to enjoy and benefit from a parts-focused framework

That parts language means different things to different systems, and no one defines it the same way

That anyone and everyone is allowed to use parts language

That parts language says nothing about the validity, autonomy, or realness of the system, alters, or parts

That parts language is only dehumanizing if you view it as such, and that you need to be incredibly careful about how you talk about parts language and those who use it

Parts language is personal and unique to each of us, much like healing choices, like fusion or functional multiplicity

Don't let anyone make you feel bad or wrong about a framework that has helped you

Show the same respect for parts language that you would about any other personal choices

[novantinuum]

gnawing at the bars of my cage

can we please Stop telling SU blind reactors all the fandom drama and SU crit that came out of every episode so we can allow them to just enjoy the show like a normal person at their own leisure and make their Own opinions thank u

[clonerightsagenda]

While I am girlposting (waiting for my hair to dry) a while back I saw art for an AU where Lan Fan got possessed by Greed instead and I had the following thoughts in rough sequence:

That's one way to get your arm back.

Lan Fan lesbian awakening???

FMA can finally ascend to wizards versus lesbians status, specifically the "ah fuck there's a guy in my head" subcategory.

It would go so poorly for everyone. He would call her a brainwashed lapdog. She would call him a selfish monster. He would say her boss seems pretty shitty if he can't keep his possessions from getting maimed. She would suplex them both into the sewer. I would watch it.

[compassmili]

I kinda really hate how I've been treated throughout my life

[soullessjack]

being a jackgirl is terrible enough but being a jackgirl who understands dean is a burden I would wish on everyone so we’d stop having the same seven-year-old discourse about whether or not dean is really jack’s dad

[ardentadoration]

“Home” by Cavetown is the Oldest Dream being adopted by the outer gods of 999

Get a load of this train wreck, his hair’s a mess and he doesn’t know who he is yet. But little do we know the stars welcome him with open arms.

[kiradical]

Mom is watching some 9/11 shit and it is a constant battle for me to keep the thoughts inside.

There was just an ad for the wounded warrior project where they ended it with something like “help us help those who put their lives on the line to make sure we never experience another 9/11” and I literally had to bite my damn tongue not to say some shit about how we just do 9/11s in other countries. 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

I’m fine. This is fine.

[freebooter4ever]

I think the men should love you more it's because in general terms women are gonna get the short end of the stick regardless because of how society is structured. but we can think differently about that

umm why are random men insulting Geno tf???

but you see i enjoy heartache \o/ and anyway, i am wired to prefer being alone than to be with someone im not really that into. i mean ideally it would be equal one day, hahaha (in my dreams)

also im pretty sure its jealousy. i mean you see a girl is crushing on someone like geno, it must be hard to feel like you measure up \o/ (literally and figuratively i mean he's so tall)

[columblorbo]

.

[writers-dilemma]

This blog chose people over a video game

[drifting-knightjar]

Today I learned that the hole you see on the upper right side of slugs is not actually the genital pore, but is instead the breathing hole (pneumostome). The genital pore is in the same general place, but is too small to see, which means that i had misidentified this piece of slug anatomy to my friend a few years ago,

which means i spread misinformation, which means I feel compelled to correct my mistake,

which means I have just texted someone I haven't spoken to in months at midnight to nitpick a slug anatomy fact that they probably were not even paying attention to and have certainly forgotten by now regardless.

[servuscallidus]

.

[caruliaa]

op of a post is in the same ""cringe"" fandom as me so i can openly be a fan of it in the tags without the fear of being singled out and mocked by them and then all their followers for it incident 13 resurrected 27 healed

[tamedgod]

   gonna keep this for myself forever thank u