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.
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Strange thing I've noticed on the website but the Welcome Home logo is looking... dirtier?
Here's what the home page logo looks like:
And here's what the logo looks like on every other page:
It's easier to notice on the orange, yellow and pink letters.
Probably isn't anything too significant but I figured it was worth pointing out after the mentions about mold
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For Liefer to pull up a Camus quote like this is quite laughable because of how the dynamics mirror each other. In the modern day, we have a status quo where Palestinians continue to be imprisoned and murdered and raped and segregated, denied basic medical care for years on end, all on their own land — while Jewish Israelis (to make distinction from Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, as many liberal zionists love to point out) suffer no consequences for anything, even if they play a direct role in the continued erasure and genocide of Palestinians. So if given a choice between suffering no consequences while benefiting from the status quo (that will not change unless the oppressed take it upon themselves to change their circumstance) and suffering consequences in the form of direct personal loss (with the strategy of forcing things to change by ennacting the same type of violence that the occupied experience on a daily basis onto the occupiers), of course someone who stands to lose nothing from the continuation of the status quo would rather the status quo continue if he has something to lose otherwise. Camus, when he said this quote, was not being righteous or overly sensitive. If anything, it shows how little he understood at the time of saying this quote. Because he didn't understand that an Algerian will suffer in both scenarios even if he (Camus) is safe, and for him to say something like this when people lived generations worth of violence for his and his family's (social) benefit is annoying and just plain offensive. Who is he, as a Frenchman born in occupied Algeria, to say what is worth justice when he only stands to lose anything in one scenario but not the other? He did not experience life as an Algerian native in French occupation. He might have observed it, growing up poor, yes, but he never LIVED it. Liefer might have observed the horror of settler colonialism, but that's nothing like experiencing it firsthand. To be the object of hatred to people who have higher status and more rights than you. It's just not his place as a person with nothing to lose if the status quo continues to comment on anything like this. What's the underlying meaning of this quote? "I'd rather others continue to suffer than myself experiencing suffering once."
I'm not saying Liefer doesn't have a right to mourn whoever. Im not even saying he has a duty to accept the consequences he experiences. But to say something so heartless as "I prefer the safety of my own rather than justice" within the larger, nearly century worth of context, is just insensitive and really belies his true opinions of the liberation of Palestine if he's so comfortable saying this outloud with moral authority in the middle of what is an outright bloodbath of Palestinians across Palestine. It's the timing of saying something like this because to say it now of all times when the entire world ignores or even encourages the violence in Gaza but mourns the death of Israelis? An Algerian born Frenchman and Israeli are going to be mourned on an international scale... but Palestinian and Algerian natives? Their deaths are regarded as facts of life by the rest of the world.
This makes it seem like I hate Camus, but I honestly don't, but I think the way Leifer is holding this quote up at face value and as the height of reason really is annoying. People like to mention Camus' "if" in this case as proof that he's actually saying "this is not real justice so therefore I do not have to accept it," but who is he to say what is or is not justice? The point I'm getting at is the people who benefit from occupation, in this case, Camus and Liefer have no right to determine what is or is not justice, despite their personal beliefs. The occupier has no right to tell the occupied what they should do to get freed. That alone is an arrogance in assertion that is so offending — the assertion that the occupier knows how to free the occupied in what *he* considers justice and the occupied just need to do whatever the occupier tells them to do. Because whether they both like it or not, they still benefit from and are part of the occupying force, and therefore have no real reason to fight the occupation at their own expense — the occupation is a violence that they are alright with inflicting if it means they cannot lose anything or anyone.
Also the idea that liefer indirectly compares himself to Camus is a little funny to me.
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