#and making discrimination legal

[iwatcheditbegin]

The US just continues to go backwards

[marzipanandminutiae]

Of course, the burkini ban is messed up on grounds of religious freedom and racial discrimination. But also

Under any other circumstances, people would be HORRIFIED at a government mandate that women have to show a certain amount of skin. Like. That’s fucking dystopian, and the absolute opposite of feminism. If a government tried to pass a law that all women had to wear tube tops and miniskirts to go outside, people would rightfully be up in arms demanding blood

But because it’s targeting a marginalized religious group, many folks are lauding the blatant forced sexualization of women. Appalling

(apparently the ban also outlaws things like sun – protecting bathing suits if they cover too much skin. Which like. Yes, let’s give everyone skin cancer just so we can spite a religion we’ve decided to hate. Sounds like a good plan </s>)

[girderednerve]

the theory of law that says it matters a lot what the particular text of a given policy says, what loopholes the specific language might leave, &c., is best described as "LSAT prep" or perhaps "wishful thinking." the actual practice of the law is not a rhetorical exercise, it is a power negotiation; these executive orders are written to signal clear intention to judges & create chilling effects for people who are bound by the law but not empowered to interpret it. the viciously transmisogynist executive order signed yesterday says "at conception" because it's a popular phrase among people who oppose abortion, & the violent repression directed at trans women is connected directly to all other attempts to subjugate women as a class, not least by suspending safe, legal access to reproductive care

[tevatron]

i'm so glad i won't be working with my pi after this month. i think i've reached my limit. i just can't deal with her anymore

[batemanofficial]

does anybody know if automattic/tumblr/whoever the parent entity is nowadays receives any federal funding? like grants or FCC funds or anything? if so avery may have grounds to file a title vi discrimination suit against staff

[fizzlehead]

at a certain point i think that the people on here who insist on making destiel confession meme format posts about every single news story that ever breaks need to perhaps consider if using said meme format is really appropriate or not in the context of the individual news stories they are using it for. just thinking

[red-dragon-archfiend]

I'm gonna be honest, the reason I haven't been posting much about Affirmative Action is because until today I didn't quite understand what it meant, and didn't think to look it up. Now I get it

[samuraisharkie]

fuck this site, a Zionist CEO, transmisogynistic and antiblack staff, unethical and discriminatory business practices, and predatory and underhanded moves like this one tell me this site is not worth it. let it fucking die. it’ll suck to lose a lot of the stuff that’s built up on here, but I don’t think content should be at the expense of the PEOPLE responsible for it. Also, heartily disagree with the reasoning that “opt-in” is the default. No one should automatically be assumed to consent to data scraping, and anyone that IS ok with it should be expected to go enable it instead of forcing everyone else to work around their greed. Also the insidious irresponsibility of the way this update was rolled out tells me this is not for the sake of any sort of care for the users or the site. If it was, everyone would have been notified outside of a fucking text post you may not even see. There would have been a pop up like there was for all the other shit features tumblr has rolled out in the last few years. And honestly, I’m not giving a single cent to a company that profits off of bigots to moderate their site and throws a hissy fit when it’s been caught. If they want a sustainable business model, the first step isn’t ai. It isn’t the “tumblr steals people’s ideas and sells them without compensation’ merch store. It isn’t the fucking checkmarks. It’s actually doing something about their shit spaghetti code, the bigots being allowed to throw their weight around and discriminate freely and illegally and hide it on made up bullshit like the “Russian psyop bots”, and actually take the time to make this place worthwhile for the people that matter, the ones that have BEEN here. They need to stop this “how do you do, fellow kids?” bullshit, this quirky adaptation of “hellsite” which fundementally misunderstands why people were talking about this place that way (it wasn’t positive), and get their act together. None of these little band aids are going to work until that happens, and until they do those things, they’re going straight into the trash along with all their investors.

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

[si-cucumber]

I love ableist fuckwads 😀 Just the highlight of my week. The perfect way to start the weekend

[fatliberation]

anti-fatness is not just body shaming.

anti-fatness is discrimination. anti-fatness is having next to no legal protections for being discriminated against. anti-fatness is being denied housing, jobs, receiving less pay and promotions (legally) because of your size. anti-fatness is being denied access to clothing, seating, transportation, and other human rights because infrastructure has been designed to exclude you. anti-fatness is less likelihood of receiving a fair trial. anti-fatness is dehumanization. anti-fatness is being denied necessary surgeries, but not surgery that amputates the digestive tract with the intent to starve and shrink you (it doesn’t work either). anti-fatness is mutilation. anti-fatness is being subject to torture devices that bolt your mouth shut. anti-fatness is being told by close friends, family, and professionals that you are better off living with an eating disorder or other life-threatening illness. anti-fatness sells you starvation as a guaranteed opt-out of oppression, but doesn’t tell you that bodies will always regain weight to survive. anti-fatness blames and punishes you for failing at an achievement that is quite literally impossible. anti-fatness is a $90 billion dollar industry. anti-fatness is being denied gender-affirming care. anti-fatness is being barred from in vitro fertilization and reproductive healthcare. anti-fatness is being barred from adopting children. anti-fatness is being removed from your loving parents because they couldn’t make you thin. anti-fatness is intentionally starving your own baby so they won’t get fat. anti-fatness is disproportionately high suicide rates. anti-fatness is being killed at the hands of medical neglect and mistreatment. anti-fatness is the world preferring a dead body over a fat one.

[maxbegone]

The election doesn’t start tomorrow, it ends tomorrow.

If you haven’t already, please make sure you are registered to vote and know where your polling place is (vote.org is a great and easy way to get that information). Additionally, please make sure you have a way to get to your polling place. Uber and Lyft often give free or discounted rides to the polls, and this year the car rental company, Hertz, is allowing free one-day rentals to get to the polls. More information on that here.

EDIT: NAACP has a discount code to use for Lyft, valid for two rides up to $20 ($40 total). Use code: NAACPVOTE24

The following states allow same day registration for general elections, ie: the presidential election:

California

Colorado

Washington DC

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Iowa

Maine

Maryland

Michigan

Minnesota

Montana

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Mexico

Utah

Vermont

Virginia

Washington

Wisconsin

Wyoming

Note: North Dakota does not require formal voter registration, and upon presenting valid identification at a polling place, eligible citizens receive their ballot to vote.

all info here

The following states are required by law to give you time off to vote (between one and three hours):

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Georgia

Illinois

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky

Maryland

Massachusetts

Minnesota

Missouri

Nebraska

Nevada

New Mexico

New York

Ohio

Oklahoma

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

*Most states requiring employers to permit voting leave also require that this time is paid. Among the above, the following do not: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Dakota. (info here)

Again, it is your right to vote. If you are in line when the polls close, stay in line. It is your legal right to vote.

If you are turned away at the polls, say the following verbatim: “Give me a provisional ballot with a receipt as required by law.”

If you make a mistake on your ballot, you have the right to ask for a new ballot. Don’t cross anything out, simply ask for a new one.

Poll workers are required to make reasonable accommodations for voters who need, including ballots in other languages or translators.

Canvassing is not allowed at polling places, and no one is allowed to threaten or intimidate voters. You have the right to report anything of the like.

All info taken from here

Some tips:

Don’t wear political merch to the polls.

Don’t engage with anyone about your politics at the polls.

Don’t take phone calls inside your polling place — it can wait, please be respectful.

Research who is running locally and see what their policies are. Additionally, research any local propositions that may be on the ballot. The language on ballots is made to be purposefully confusing, so make sure you read everything carefully in addition to your research.

If you’re able to get up early on Election Day, go right when your polling place opens to beat the line.

REMEMBER: IT IS YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE!

Here are a list of state-by-state voter protection hotlines, as well as hotlines in various other languages:

Please vote tomorrow if you have not already. It’s so important, and choosing not to vote or voting for a third party is a vote for extremist measures. Vote down the ballot, and do not let anyone bully you into voting one certain way.

What we are seeing throughout this election cycle (and the last two election cycles) is entirely abnormal. The bullying we see from a certain side and its supporters is childish and dangerous. They spew false information, make racist remarks, and sexualize and discriminate fellow candidates. No single presidential candidate is completely and wholly good, so criticize accordingly.

Vote with those you love in mind, vote with your safety in mind, and vote for those who will be affected for decades to come. Vote for someone who speaks coherently, not for someone who is, let’s be honest, not cognitively alright — and that is the bare minimum of the issue.

If you have anything to add to this post, please do. If anything is incorrect, please let me know and I will gladly change it.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

[chaossmagic]

50 MPs currently sitting in Parliament (that we know of - there may be more) have sexual abuse and/or assault allegations against them, but sure, banning trans women from female hospital wards and forbidding new buildings from having gender-neutral bathrooms is "protecting women".

[metanarrates]

I haven't seen a lot of coverage in the news about this, but my state has just advanced legislation on a bill that would criminalize trans bathroom use in publicly owned buildings. this could mean up to 6 months in jail and up to $1000 in fees for those convicted.

most alarming aspects of this bill:

-"publicly owned buildings" include airports, schools, libraries, government offices, some hospitals, and most terrifyingly AND explicitly within the bill, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis facilities. transgender people, who are estimated to be almost 4 times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than cisgender people, could become criminalized in the very spaces they seek out to shelter from abuse.

-on that note, the bill potentially threatens federal funding of already-underfunded domestic violence and sexual assault facilities. to recieve federal grants, facilities are required to follow nondiscrimination laws. this law could place the facilities in danger of losing the grants they rely on. this is severely going to impact victims' abilities to access critically needed services.

-the bill legally defines "sex" in a way that has a lot of potential impact across state legislature. according to the bill’s text, HB 257 would legally define a female as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is of the general type that functions in a way that could produce ova,” and a male as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is of the general type that functions to fertilize the ova of a female.” this could effectively end the state's legal recognition of trans people.

-the bill demands that trans people who DO use bathrooms in publicly owned buildings must have undergone both gender reassignment surgery and have had their birth certificate changed. this has several issues, obviously, but the biggest one I want to highlight is that this opens the door to potential genital inspection by law enforcement if someone is accused of being transgender in a bathroom. in addition to any other indignities suffered by being harassed by cops when trying to use the restroom, it is completely possible for law enforcement to now demand to see whether someone's genitals are in compliance with these laws. it's an unconscionable and humiliating invasion of privacy.

-the bill requires trans students to develop a "privacy plan" with their school in order to arrange access to unisex spaces. if unisex bathrooms are unavailable, the student can be granted access to a sex-designated space “through staggered scheduling or another policy provision that provides for temporary private access.”

-the bill allows the state’s attorney general to impose a fine of up to $10,000 per day on local governments that don’t enforce the bill. in essence, any government that isn't sufficiently committed to enforcing these draconian laws may face massive fines until they have reached the attorney general's standard of enforcement.

this is one of the most unbelievably severe anti-trans laws that have ever been proposed in the united states. it would effectively ban trans people from participating in public life, harm nearly every single victim of domestic violence and sexual assault who seeks services in the state, enforce criminality on random trans people in bathrooms, and open every single person who could be potentially accused of being trans up to a wave of harassment and discrimination from both private citizens and law enforcement. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that this law would literally force me and my transfemme fiancee to flee this state.

the law's been fast tracked to an insane degree through the legislature. similarly to the anti-dei bill currently making its way through, it's only been a week since it was introduced, and it's already passed the house, and is now up for vote in the senate. if it passes both sets of votes, the only thing left in its way is the governor's decision to veto.

please share this post. make as much noise as you can. if you live in utah, please call and email your district senator as soon as possible. it doesn't matter how late you see this. the bill is up for vote this week (1/23/24 at the time of writing) and we need to do whatever we physically can to protest its passing. we've already moved past the opportunity for public comment on the bill, but a few organizations have called for a rally at the capitol steps on thursday (1/25/24) at noon. if you are in the salt lake area or are able to make it there, please consider attending. wear a mask and bring a sign. we are stronger together.

[biggaybunny]

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[genderqueerdykes]

14 year old transgender girl Pauly Likens was unjustly robbed of her life due to trans panic between the dates of June 22nd and July 3rd, 2024. say her name.

i have seen only one or two posts about this, but none of them include her name and it sickens me. Her name is Pauly Likens, a 14 year old transgender girl from Sharon, Pennsylvania who met up with a 29 year old man whom she met on Grindr who was brutally murdered and her body was dismembered because she was a trans girl. she went missing on June 22nd, and her dismembered body was found on July 3rd, 2024. her body was DISMEMBERED and thrown into a river. she was not only murdered but BRUTALLY murdered. she was 14 years old. 14. she couldn't even legally drive yet in the united states. she just barely graduated elementary school.

her mother is fighting for her case to be processed and acknowledged as a hate crime. i am disgusted to find out that my home state of Pennsylvania only considers racial discrimination as real discrimination that can be persecuted by law. gender identities and sexual orientations are not considered at all. lawyers and government officials are also trying to deny that it was a hate crime, because her murderer was a self admitted gay man. i don't care what type of queer you are: there is never an excuse to lay hands on a transgender person just because you don't like how they identify.

this is utterly sickening. to say this wasn't a hate crime is living in denial. i don't care if her murderer was gay. he's a murderer who had a clearly charged reason for doing this. he stole a life from a young transgender girl for no reason other than she identified in a way he didn't like. he's not dangerous because he's gay, nor is he exempt from being transphobic. his sexuality had nothing to do with this. not only was this man a dangerous transphobe, but a predator. a 29 year old man willingly met up with a 14 year old child. this man is dangerous for reasons that have nothing to do with his sexuality. he's a transphobic child predator. he deserves no sympathy or to get off scott free just because he's gay. he willingly met up with Pauly. she didn't force him to do anything. she was a child, and he is an adult.

please say her name. while talking about the dangers of Grindr and how minors should not use it, please include her name. yes Grindr is an extremely dangerous platform for trans women, men, and trans people in general, but that shouldn't be the focus of your conversation about her. don't use her death as a platform to discuss how fucked up grindr is without acknowledging who she was as a person. don't just make her another statistic on a page. she was a real person, a child, who was robbed of her life, and robbed from her community. she is not just another number in a long list of trans panic murders. her life meant something. say her name. fight like hell for Pennsylvania to acknowledge that her death WAS a hate crime. their archaic outdated laws need updating.

her family has a GoFundMe to give her a proper burial, please consider donating or spreading the word about it:

here is a news article that genders her correctly where you can read more about what happened:

rest in power, Pauly Likens, we miss you. you are loved. we will fight like hell for you and your family. remember her.

[communistkenobi]

Would you be willing to dunk on speak more on mainstream feminist theory you're reading? And/or share some of the non-juvenile feminist theory you've read?

(Note: I will try to link to open access versions of articles as much as possible, but some of them are paywalled. if the links dont work just type the titles into google and add pdf at the end, i found them all that way)

If there’s any one singular issue with mainstream feminist thought that can be generalized to "The Problem With Mainstream Feminism" (and by mainstream I mean white, cishet, bourgeois feminism, the “canonical feminism” that is taught in western universities) it’s that gender is treated as something that can stand by itself, by which I mean, “gender” is a complete unit of analysis from which to understand social inequality. You can “add” race, class, ability, national origin, religion, sexuality, and so on to your analysis (each likewise treated as full, discrete categories of the social world), but that gender itself provides a comprehensive (or at the very least “good enough”) view of a given social problem. (RW Connell, who wrote the canonical text Masculinities (1995) and is one of the feminist scholars who coined/popularized the term hegemonic masculinity, is a fantastic example of this.)

Black feminists have for many decades pointed out how fucking ridiculous this is, especially vis a vis race and class, because Black women do not experience misogyny and racism as two discrete forms of oppression in their lives, they are inextricably linked. The separation of gender and race is not merely an analytical error on the part of white feminists - it is a continuation of the long white supremacist tradition of bounding gender in exclusively white terms. Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (2000) engages with this via a speech by Sojourner Truth, the most famous line from her speech being “ain’t I a woman?” as she describes all the aspects of womanhood she experiences but is still denied the position of woman by white women because she is Black. Lugones in Coloniality of Gender (2008) likewise brings up the example of segregationist movements in the USAmerican South, where towns would put up banners saying things like “Protect Southern Women” as a rationale for segregation, making it very clear who they viewed as women. Sylvia Wynter in 1492: A New World View likewise points out that colonized women and men were treated like cattle by Spanish colonizers in South America, often counted in population measures as "heads of Indian men and women," as in heads of cattle. They were treated as colonial resources, not as gendered subjects capable of rational thought.

To treat the category of “woman” as something that stands by itself is a white supremacist understanding of gender, because “woman” always just means white woman - the fact that white is left implied is part of white supremacy, because who is granted subjecthood, the ability to be seen as human and therefore a gendered subject, is a function of race (see Quijano, 2000). Crenshaw (1991) operationalizes this through the term intersectionality, pointing out that law treats gender and race as separate social sites of discrimination, and the practical effect of this is that Black women have limited/no legal recourse when they face discrimination because they experience it as misogynoir, as the multiplicative effect of their position as Black women, not as sexism on the one hand and racism on the other.

Transfeminist theory has further problematized the category of gender by pointing out that "woman" always just means cis woman (and more often than not also means heterosexual woman). The most famous of these critiques comes from Judith Butler - I’m less familiar with their work, but there is a great example in the beginning of Bodies That Matter (1993) where they demonstrate that personhood itself is a gendered social position. They ask (and I’m paraphrasing) “when does a fetus stop becoming an ‘it’? When its gender is declared by a doctor or nurse via ultrasound.” Sex assignment is not merely a social practice of patriarchal division, it is the medium through which the human subject is created (and recall that gender is fundamentally racialized & race is fundamentally gendered, which I will come back to).

And the work of transfeminists demonstrate this by showing transgender people are treated as non-human, non-citizens. Heath Fogg Davis in Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination (2014) recounts the story of an African American transgender woman in Pennsylvania being denied use of public transit, because her bus pass had an F gender marker on it (as all buss passes in the state required gender markers until 2013) and the bus driver refused her service because she “didn’t look like a woman.” She was denied access to transit again when she got her marker changed to M, as she “didn’t look like a man.” Transgender people are thus denied access to basic public services by being constructed as “administratively impossible” - gender markers are a component of citizenship because they appear on all citizenship documents, as well as a variety of civil and public documents (such as a bus pass). Gender markers, even when changed by trans people (an arduous, difficult process in most places on earth, if not outright impossible), are seen as fraudulent & used as a basis to deny us citizenship rights. Toby Beauchamp in Going Stealth: Transgender Politics & US Surveillance Practices (2019) talks about anti-trans bathroom bills as a form of citizenship denial to trans people - anti-trans bathroom laws are impossible to actually enforce because nobody is doing genital inspections of everyone who enters bathrooms (and genitals are not proof of transgenderism!), but that’s actually not the point. The point of these bills is to embolden members of the cissexual public to deputize themselves on behalf of the state to police access to public space, directing their cissexual gaze towards anyone who “looks transgender.” Beauchamp points out that transvestigators don’t need to be accurate most of the time, because again, the point is terrorizing transgender people out of public life. He connects this with racial segregation, and argues that we shouldn’t view gender segregation as “a new form of” racial segregation (this is a duplication of white supremacist feminism) but a continuation of it, because public access is a citizenship right and citizenship is fundamentally racially mediated (see Glenn's (2002) Unequal Freedom)

Susan Stryker & Nikki Sullivan further drives this home in The King’s Member, The Queen’s Body, where they explain the history of the crime of mayhem. Originating in feudal Europe (I don’t remember off the dome the exact time/place so forgive the generalization lol), mayhem is the crime of self-mutilation for the purposes of avoiding military conscription, but what is interesting is that its not actually legally treated as “self” mutilation, but a mutilation of the state and its capacity to exercise its own power. They link the concept of mayhem to the contemporary hysteria around transgender people receiving bottom surgery - we are not in fact self mutilating, we are mutilating the state’s ability to reproduce its own population by permanently destroying (in the eyes of the cissexual public) our capacity to form the foundational social unit of the nuclear family. Our bodies are not our own, they are a component of the state. Situating this in the context of reproductive rights makes this even clearer. Abortion access is not actually about the individual, it is the state mediating its own reproductive capacity via the restriction of abortion (premised on the cissexual logic of binary reproductive capacity systematized through sex assignment). Returning to Hill Collins, she points out that in the US, white cis women are restricted access to abortion while Black and Indigenous cis women are routinely forcibly sterilized, their children aborted, and pumped with birth control by the state. This is not a contradiction or point of “hypocrisy” on the part of conservatives, this is a fully comprehensive plan of white supremacist population management.

To treat "gender" as its own category, as much of mainstream feminism does (see Acker (1990) and England (2010) for two hilarious examples of this, both widely cited feminists), is to forward a white supremacist notion of gender. That white supremacy is fundamentally cissexual and heterosexual is not an accident - it is a central organizing logic that allows for the systematization of the fear of declining white birthrates (the conspiracy of "white genocide" is illegible without the base belief that there are two kinds of bodies, one that gets pregnant and one that does the impregnating, and that these two types of bodies are universal sources of evidence of the superiority of men over women - and im using those terms in the most loaded possible sense).

I realize that most of these readings are US centric, which is an unfortunate limitation of my own education. I have been really trying to branch into literature outside the Global North, but doctoral degree constraints + time constraints + my own research requires continual engagement with it. I also realize that most of the transfeminist readings I've cited are by white scholars! This is a continual systemic problem in academic literature and I'm not exempt from it, even as I sit here and lay out the problem. Which is to say, this is nowhere near the final word on this subject, and having to devote so much time to reading mainstream feminist theory as someone who is in western academia is part of my own limited education + perspective on this topic