#as if trans women aren’t murdered constantly!

[unlimitedbutchworks]

'[S]ocially murdered,' an AFAB nonbinary child was LITERALLY murdered this week, the predstrogen situation sucks massively but PLEASE try to have a little perspective. When the fuck are transmascs supposed to talk about the violence we face if not now.

suck my dick you disingenuous shit. i never say transmascs cant talk about transphobic violence, all i said was derailing the transmisogyny discussions re: predstrogen with “listen to trans people” is shitty when the events being talked about are very obviously against trans women (and have non transfems contributing to the problem, such as transmascs and trans men). it’s not my fault you cant read a trans woman talking about intracommunity shittiness without (transmisogynistically) assuming she hates all people who were afab.

[spacelazarwolf]

thoughts on passing privilege? ive seen it tossed around a lot

honestly, i think most discussions about passing privilege (in terms of queerness and transness, as i’m assuming that’s what you’re referencing) are fucking annoying and lack so much nuance. so many of them focus on hypotheticals rather than reality. a bi woman could date a man. but she also could date a woman or she could be very butch or very open about being bisexual. a trans man could pass as cis. but he could also not go on t or he could go on t and wear a dress or he could be very open about being trans. “could” means absolutely nothing when someone’s actual lived reality doesn’t reflect that “could.” some bi women and trans men do feel like they have passing privilege, and that’s fine. but their experiences aren’t representative of all bi women and trans men.

also i have a huge problem with the way people present street harassment as like The Truest Form Of Queerphobia bc y’all i promise you are more likely to experience life altering homophobia or transphobia from a doctor or employer or teacher or family member than you will from a stranger on the street, especially if you’re white. this framing also really fucking sucks for groups like bisexual women and trans men who both experience extremely high rates of abuse and sexual assault, but those statistics are constantly being dismissed bc “well ur not literally being murdered in the street so!!!!!!!!!” (as if the people they’re talking about who are actually being murdered in the street aren’t black and brown people, but i guess that ruins the White Woman Victim Fantasy that fuels the true crime industry…)

also as per usual it’s just a bunch of white queer people playing oppression olympics and expecting people to be able to chop their identities into pieces for tumblr analysis. you’ll just sit there and watch white woman after white woman tell a black man he’s privileged because a stranger on the street won’t call him a dyke for holding hands with his girlfriend, meanwhile he’s just trying not to make eye contact with cops because they might shoot him in front of his kids for looking at them wrong.

so yeah i think the vast majority of the time it’s just a bunch of white queer people arguing about who gets the Most Oppressed gold star while ignoring any and all nuance and intersectionality like the plague. we should be able to have conversations about how some people are in more danger in public because of features they can’t or choose not to change, but the internet is the internet.

[technicolor-swarm-of-bees]

the onion really pulling no punches huh

some sections that really hit

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.

It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals.

Indeed, there are critical questions to be asked about the social complexities of gender, as well as medical ethics in a profit-driven healthcare system. We are simply not interested in any of that. Instead, we will use flawed data and spurious logic to repeatedly write the same hand-wringing arguments asking whether there are suddenly too many trans people around. Journalistic integrity demands nothing less.

Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of transphobia and are trying to murder us online, with their online mobs. They want to destroy our right to free speech and have us arrested by all the police. What gives? Why would you arrest us, when it’s those deviant trans people you ought to be arresting instead? Do you know what the science says about trans people getting arrested, huh? What if we could find data saying trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What will our detractors say then? They’ll be silent, as well they should be, and free speech will survive one more day. For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to endangering lives, please see our previous coverage of gay people, immigrants, Black people, and women.

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals. Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

[exxhaustedhope]

reply to the gender war polls. I think it’s really both sides. Men are sent into a meat grinder to die for pointless wars (women are exempt from the draft or were until very recently, men are still targeted more for that+ the self deletion rates are higher) and women have to deal with the “it didn’t happen” from men about SA experiences and catcalling and the “women can’t drive” attitudes. men are mocked when they show emotion or when they don’t and women are mocked for being too emotional even if they’re not. also men are constantly invading women’s spaces and going “uh I’m trans bigot”

It’s an interesting view to call them ‘gender war’ polls. I didn’t intend them to be a war, just a survey, but I suppose they could be depending on someone’s level of engagement with them. I haven’t observed any debates in the notes though. I won’t even know what the results look like till the end since I am not voting in them.

I agree that there is hatred and cruelty on both sides, but I cannot honestly say that it’s equally bad. The men who are sent to other countries for war go after the women and children there just as much, sometimes even more, than they do the opposing soldiers. And after raping them, they are just as likely to murder them as they are to leave them traumatized, humiliated, beaten, and destroyed.

Rape is used and has been used by men as a weapon of war since humans have existed. Can you name one military force exclusively of women who has gone to another country and conducted a massive scale rape on men and children? Can you name one military force exclusively of women who forced hundreds of thousands of civilian men and boys into sexual slavery? Can you name one military force exclusively of women who set up camps specifically to brutalize and rape the civilians of the country they were fighting? Can you name one military force exclusively of women who terrorize their own country into giving them any man or boy they want to rape? I can’t. But I know about the multitudinous military forces of men who have done these things to women and children over the course of human history and continue to do them today.

And what of the women in the military (of any country that allows them, not just USA) who are raped by the male soldiers who are meant to be their brothers in arms, or the ones raped by commanding officers?

There are not entire countries of women starting wars. There are not entire governments of women trapping their countries in cultures that perpetuate hatred and violence against men.

Male socialization is vastly different from female socialization all over the world, from the poorest nation to the richest nation. Men do not grow up being taught that they will inevitably be sexually harassed, probably be raped, possibly be beaten by women and that it will be because they, not their attackers and abusers, were at fault. Men aren’t at risk, when they are boys, of being legally forced into becoming child-husbands. Men don’t have sexual behaviors and clothing and aspirations meant to please older women pushed on them as little boys. Men don’t look at women they don’t know every time they step outside and wonder, ‘Would that woman beat/rape/kill me if she had the chance?’ Men don’t have to worry about women beating them to death with their fists or strangling them if they hurt their feelings. Men aren’t guilt-tripped for feeling wary around women. Men don’t feel women staring at them and mentally undressing them every time they’re at school, or at work, or getting inside a car, or reaching for something, or grocery shopping, or taking a walk. Men aren’t physically endangered by misandrist traditions of entire countries, like cutting off half their genitalia and letting them bleed out, sometimes to death. Men don’t have to worry about violent groups of women taking over their country and forcing them to wear sacks over their whole bodies and not be allowed to talk or walk outside. Men don’t have to fight and stand up to women for their rights over the course of centuries.

I know there are women who are abusive, cruel, hateful, and violent to men and boys. They are just as wrong as men who are abusive, cruel, hateful, and violent to women and girls. I know there are many individual women who have done evil things to men and boys. They are just as wrong as men who have done evil things to women and girls.

That doesn’t change the fact that men have abused, raped, and/or beaten women of color more than any other group of people on the planet. That doesn’t change the fact that they are statistically more at risk of male violence than anyone else on earth. That doesn’t change the fact that women of any ethnicity do not oppress men on a global scale, that it has been the standard for all of human history and still is the standard for men to oppress women.

Women need to be able to talk about the men hurting us without having to constantly give this disclaimer. Both men and women discuss men’s specific problems and experiences without being inclusive of women. That is reasonable and normal. We need people to realize it is just as reasonable and normal to discuss women’s specific problems and experiences without being inclusive of men.

If a man speaks up about the issues women and girls specifically face, he is hailed as an ally, a knight, an exceptional man who deserves a good woman. It doesn’t matter that more often than not, he finds a way to turn it into something about men, or to demean women as inferior. If there is a rare man who sincerely speaks up in good faith for women, no one takes him seriously.

If a woman speaks up about the issues women and girls specifically face, the right will accuse her of being a crazy liberal feminist, and the left will accuse her of being a conservative ____phobic bigot. Often this is accompanied by threats of violence. And that’s in developed countries. In poorer or theocratic countries, if a woman speaks up this way, she is more likely to be beaten, mutilated, even killed than denounced and threatened.

It is not a political ideology to care about women and girls’ pain and suffering. It is wrong to push women and girls into thinking that valuing and caring about each other is political nonsense.

Girls and women are just as much human beings created by God as are boys and men.

[lycandrophile]

tw: discussion of a trans man being murdered

i want to say something about what happened to malte and the quite frankly disgusting reactions that people have had to him being killed, but i’ve been struggling to find the words and the energy necessary.

it really feels like there are only two things that can happen when a trans man is killed: either people just don’t say shit about it and everyone acts like nothing happened, or the internet decides to turn an actual fucking person’s violent death into a discourse battleground where they can debate about how oppressed we really are or if it’s even possible that one of us could be killed for being trans men.

y’all will tell us until you’re blue in the face that it’s our responsibility to “use our male privilege” to defend women from cis men, but when one of us steps up to do that and gets fucking killed for it, you try to say it had nothing to do with him being a trans man as if the (presumably cis) women he was killed for defending aren’t still out there living while he’s gone now.

how dare you encourage us constantly to put ourselves in harm’s way and then turn the other way when it ends in fatal violence toward one of us just like we said it would — or even worse, spit on the dead trans man’s memory by using his death as an excuse to deny that the violence he was killed by even exists? it’s fucking shameful, it really is.

it’s bad enough that he died, but of course y’all couldn’t just leave it at that, you had to have the most immature possible reaction to it, just to rub salt in the wound.

what he did was nothing less than fucking heroic and what happened was a tragedy and this is how y’all respond? he died because he wanted to protect the people in this community; the absolute least you can do is show some fucking respect.

i promise, you can have your shitty little debates over our existence without dragging a dead man into them. if you have even a shred of decency left in you, stop fighting for two seconds and just let him rest.

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

honestly just white women constantly profiting off of and sexualizing woc is so awful like the way they’re always trying to look racially ambiguous with big lips, imitating east asian eyes, tanned skin, like to the point where middle eastern women are being called “white”

It’s gross.

Like it makes me so mad.

Because woc can never have anything. Like poc in general can’t have shit, but woc?

They’re constantly sexualised, masculinised, called ugly whilst white women get praised for having their features, and, y’know, woc get murdered. A lot.

Black women are either ‘men’ or ‘too sexual’, and almost always both in the eyes of racists. Megan Thee Stallion, for example. Whilst white women tan so dark that they’re mistaken for black women, and whilst black culture is stolen and adjusted to fit white standards whilst the thieves try to claim it as their own. Black people, especially black trans women are murdered at a disproportionate rate and their murderers are walking free. The only man who got arrested for shooting at Breanna Taylor was the one that missed.

East Asian women are thought of as subservient and ‘cute’, and are overly sexualised and called anime girls, whilst white people pull their eyes and mock their languages. They’re accused of eating dogs and blamed for the Corona virus and were murdered violently as a result of White people getting mad over it.

South Asian women are called dirty and smelly because of their food (which is stunning btw), whilst people casually throw around the p slur and racial stereotypes about taxi drivers and corner shops, and ‘Indian men’ on Instagram.

Native women are literally going missing, and getting murdered and the media hardly ever covers it because it’s not trendy or cool. It’s what america was built upon, so no one is surprised, it’s old news. And funnily enough, if a native woman was to speak the language of her tribe in public, a white woman is sure to tell her to go back to her own country. And their culture becomes an accessory. ‘I’m a descendant of a Cherokee princess’ is a sentence white women throw around too much.

Romani women are over sexualised and under represented. And attacked when they get popular for being a fucking fan cast for a character. Their slurs get thrown around like jokes and their culture is stolen so often sometimes it takes me a while to see when white people are misusing it.

And those aren’t even all races I could name.

And let’s not get into woc being called ‘white’.

when white women tan, and curl their hair as tightly as they can, and fill their lips with filler, and pull back their eyes, and use makeup or surgery to make them appear more ‘slanted’, or claim to be native, or mock foreign food, they’re hot, they’re lucky, they’re fucking hilarious. But woc get killed for it. And you can claim it’s racism or misogyny, but it’s both. It’s just both.

Let’s not even get into how Trans woc are treated because that whole thing makes me actually sob because it’s that fucking horrific.

[butterflyy-goddess]

lesbians are fake because we're all socialized straight. that's how you sound. also as a gnc lesbian who sometimes gets read as a man you really aren't fucking helping me when you encourage people to police who is "woman enough." this is all just repackaged misogyny and it hits women marginalized in multiple ways the hardest. shit like this gets black trans women killed, gets intersex women banned from women's spaces, gets gnc women harassed in bathrooms, etc. it's vile. it's thinly veiled cryptofascism and phrenology.

It’s pretty clear that you’re ignorant if you think I — as a black woman — would EVER support fascism or phrenology which has had a particularly negative impact on my community. Medical and scientific racism is disgusting and if you had any grasp of history as it relates to black people, you wouldn’t say that shit.

Now as it’s clear your critical thinking skills are lacking let me clarify this very simply. I am not policing who is “woman enough”. I’m drawing a boundary for natal women versus biological men. This is not policing, this is just facts. You might be confused on what a fact is. It’s something that’s known to be true. I don’t need to police womanhood because nature has already done this for us.

Once again, TRAs want to hide behind black trans people and intersex people to try and make your point. Do you know why black and other POC trans people face more harassment/assault/murder? Because of racism — otherwise the numbers wouldn’t be so drastically different for white trans people vs black. You might not want to accept that trans women are men but stats don’t lie. White men are far safer than their black/ POC counterparts because they’re seen as white men who are literally the most protected class lol.

Intersex people have their own problems which are unique to each person. Stop using them in every example. They’re policed so to speak because it’s a medical difference they were born with and people suck. I’m not saying it’s fair because it isn’t but it’s not the same as a grown man throwing on a dress and makeup and proclaiming to be a woman. I don’t pretend to know much about intersex people. But I know their life is probably hard enough without being thrown into conversations that aren’t about them in any way. I wonder if intersex people enjoy being compared to trans women all the time? You don’t care about intersex people except to use them as a gotcha against your critics.

I am not saying lesbians are fake, that’s just a terrible interpretation of what I said. How you are socialized has long term effects. For example, I am a bisexual woman, but I can’t deny that being socialized to think only heterosexuality is normal doesn’t leave a lasting impact. I can’t erase that. Just like a man can’t erase how being raised as guy leads a lasting impact. Being socialized as male, but more importantly NOT being socialized as female is important. A lifetime of being treated as less than, being talked over, going over how to stay safe constantly, hearing messages that reinforce how weak we are, how dispensable we are, how less than human we are is part of female socialization. And men are just not socialized like that — and it shows in their behavior when they transition. Their behavior always reveals the male socialization.

Also please stop acting like you care about marginalized communities when TRAs are pro prostitution and other so called “sex work” which disproportionately hurts women of color and trans people of color. Marginalized groups aren’t a prop. You can’t use use our oppression as a reason you should be able to invade women’s spaces.

[weaver-z]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if radfems actually cared about dismantling the patriarchy, they wouldn't give a fuck about ~nasty wicked trans women~. Period. Full stop.

(TW for mentions of trans death/transphobia under the cut)

In the USA, trans women are <0.5% of the population by even generous survey estimates. That's less than a million people. For fuck's sake, every time I go to a terf's blog (and I've tested this theory), 3/4ths of their posts or more are wailing about Wicked Genderists with the exact tone of a 1950's father terrified that his son is going to turn into one of those damn homosexuals. Instead addressing CIS MEN, 50% of the population, terfs spend all their damn time and energy on a tiny minority constantly bullied into suicide and murdered for the crime of "presenting incorrectly."

Not to mention the fact that a lot of terfs claim to support cisgender crossdressers/drag kings/drag queens who "aren't confused about their gender," but are actively making the world so much less safe for all people who dare to present outside the gender norm, including cis people. Do you think the average transphobe you cheer on for killing trans women is going to stop and say "Oh, dear, my bad, sorry, I thought you were TRANS, but since you're a cisgender crossdresser, it's fine!" By fostering transphobia, you are fostering an environment where ALL presentation beyond "acceptable" gender roles is met with violence and aggression, not just the kind you find personally gross.

Stop focusing all of your energy on a tiny minority on the receiving end unbelievably high proportions of violence, murder, and abuse and focus on the 50% of the population (cis men) that you claim to be railing against! Dear god! You don't actually give a shit about women. You're members of a hate group against trans women, not a group meant to combat male privilege.

[azulapropaganda]

Hello everyone. Today (August 2nd 2020) I noticed a blog who earlier tried to accuse me of being a terf has once again made another post about this. This time she accused me of some other things and since her post suddenly started gaining attention, I decided to clear some things up and reply to every single claim she makes in her post.

I’m genuinely tired of all of this.... So, there’s a insanely popular atla TERF (@what-would-azula-do) blogger that’s been attacking me and my friends, and she worked with a group of TERFs to ban my og spop blog. I literally just made this blog but I’m tired of getting attacked by TERFs, so I’m making a call out post (ew ikr) to end this.

I am not a terf. I did not work with a group of terfs to ban your blog, you did this to yourself by tagging your post with “terfs please interact”, “terfs do touch” and other tags. You’re attacking a minor with false claims that are easily debunked. I have not been attacking you or your friends, I don’t even know who your friends are. I specifically added the “please do not send op any hate” tag when I called you out so my followers wouldn’t harass you.

First off, what-would-azula-do is a pretty obvious crypto TERF. She reblogs and creates a ton of TERFy posts that might flow off the radar of cis people, but directly harms trans people. She constantly reblogs and makes exclusionary feminist posts that exclude trans women, and use TERF rhetoric, and she doesn’t have any trans or non-binary mutuals. She also just posts full on TERF shit a lot, and whenever she gets called out she gets defensive and deletes the evidence. I got this info from an anonymous trans woman that pmed me, but she also used to just be a full on out TERF in 2016, and posted transphobic slurs and memes regularly, and also was a SWERF. Allegedly she deleted the blog and remade with her new main and the what-would-azula-do sideblog. Again this is just an alleged anon tip but I believe it. She also ships a pretty TERFy atla ship (tyzula) that à ton of TERFs on tumblr ship. Now I’m going to go to a huge pile of shit already, ONE OF HER MUTUALS IS LITERALLY AN OPEN TERF.

You say I reblog and create a ton of terfy posts. Which ones? I only talk about atla on this blog and actually make an effort to tag anything else as “off topic”. I don’t think I even made a post about feminism on my blog. You also say I don’t have any trans or nonbinary mutuals, do you have any proof of that? You contradict this claim further in your post (“Has trans mutuals even though she’s a TERF”). You say I post “terf shit” a lot, could you provide screenshots of that please? And according to you, “whenever” I get called out I delete the evidence. I got one anon once when I accidentally reblogged something from a terf I wasn’t aware I was following. I personally wouldn’t call my reply to this anon “defensive”. You say you got info from an anonymous trans woman that I used to be a full on terf in 2016 and that I posted transphobic slurs and memes regularly. In 2016 I was 13-14 years old and I didn’t even have a tumblr blog. I don’t even know how to address the tyzula thing. How is a ship “terfy”? And just because I reblog art, doesn’t mean I actually ship it? I reblog art of several ships just because I like the art.

Unholy-lesbian is one of what-would-azula-do’s TERF mutuals (she has about three crypto TERF mutuals too) that’s just a full on TERF. She was really into the TERF sphere a month ago but went crypto when she became mutuals with what-would-azula-do (probs to protect her crypto TERF identity) she said she’s not a TERF anymore, but she still reblogs TERF rhetoric and all her mutuals are TERFs. She also put TERF in quotation marks which means she probs thinks it’s a slur, which is TERF rhetoric. She’s also a gold star lesbian which means she excludes trans women from her dating pool. I’d go into this bitch more, but this callout ain’t for her.

Could you please give me the usernames of my three cryptoterf mutuals? Look I’m not going to deny that unholy-lesbian was a terf a while ago. She told me this yesterday or two days ago when I talked to her about your post. She also told me she was done being a terf because the community was so hateful all the time. She’s 15 years old, don’t pull her into this.

I’m friends with her so she can find a welcoming and nice community in the atla fandom. She’s on the right path now, do you seriously want to go hate on her for this?

This is a lighting round of all the shit she did, and also her track of aphobia and ableism, so here we go:

I literally have autism and adhd myself.

Used the t slur on her old blog (alleged)

No I haven’t? Could you provide proof of this please?

Has trans mutuals even though she’s a TERF

You contradict this earlier in this post, once again without any evidence.

Misgendered an artist on what-would-azula-do and didn’t apologize

Who? I use “they” whenever I don’t know the gender of an artist. I wasn’t aware this ever happened and I’d like to apologize to said artist of this claim is true

Liked an aphobic meme

Which meme? Also my likes aren’t even visible.

Mutuals with an aphobe that bullied an ace kid off tumblr

Who?

Uses her queer followers as props to denounce her being a TERF

This is ridiculous. My followers know I’m not a terf so of course some of them are going to defend me and support me.

Gaslight her former nb mutual

Who?

Reblogged from a TERF with TERF in her username

Yes and I addressed this already. Someone sent an anon about this, I deleted the post, unfollowed the user I wasn’t even aware of following in the first place, and thanked the anon for telling me about this.

Said the r slur on her main

No I didn’t? Do you have a screenshot of or a link to this post? Also I literally have autism, as I have mentioned earlier on this blog.

Slandered a queer artist on what-would-azula-do

Who?

WORKED WITH TERFS TO DEPLATFORM ME (A NB LESBIAN OF COLOR)

I reported your post once because you were accusing me of untrue things and harassing me, a minor, and you were threatening to murder my followers. I didn’t work with terfs at all, they came to your post after you tagged it with “terfs please interact”

And what does your sexuality and gender even have to do with this?

Even if she wasn’t a TERF (which she is lol) she worked with TERFs to ban my blog that exposed her, which is violently lesbophpbic and nbphobic.

Your blog was banned because you were harassing a minor and throwing around false accusations, not because you are a lesbian or nonbinary. I did not work with terfs to ban your blog, as I have mentioned twice earlier.

So y’all really shouldn’t follow or support her anymore, unless you’re a TERF just like her. (Dm me for screenshots, I didn’t want to post them here since she’d just gaslight me)

Please post all of the screenshots you have in a reply to this post.

Also, could you stop harassing my followers. This is just incredibly gross behavior.

PREVIOUS POST

[a-room-of-my-own]

A bit of reading : orwomen.()scot/did-you-know/?fbclid=IwAR0H7TqxQNqemZcAGFtvR_HLkbkxmZ4FY6srcgrULWxGPyWuc6QPTmDQfVI

Did you know…

…that 80-95% of people who say they are trans choose to have no medical treatment at all – no surgery, no drugs, not even therapy? Transwomen are just male people who subjectively believe that they are female. That’s it. That is all that’s required.

Despite some commentators describing an “epidemic of violence against trans people“, transwomen are no more likely to be murdered than anyone else, and the best data available shows it’s half as likely. In Scotland, zero have been killed. In fact, transwomen are almost twice as likely to be the perpetrator of a murder than to be murdered in the UK, which is not surprising since a male pattern of violence is retained regardless of any transition or cross-dressing.

The 48% of trans youth have attempted suicide statistic is nonsense too. It was based on just 27 trans people (aged 26 and under), from a self-selecting online survey – which made the data worthless. Yet that hasn’t stopped the TIE Campaign peddling similar in Scottish schools (or is it 27%, they seem confused?), contrary to Samaritans advice on avoiding attributing the cause to any one incident. The NHS Gender Identity Development Service actually says “suicide is extremely rare” and rates of self-harm, distress and suicide ideation are similar to other children seen by CAMHS.

Did you know that 1 in 50 males in prison now self-id as trans according to Ministry of Justice figures? If it is so dangerous to be trans why do so many choose to come out when in jail?

Were you aware that 95% of prisoners are men, and 5% women? That most women in prison are there for financial crime, and most men are in for violent offending. Did you know that men commit 98% of sex offences? That 48% of transwomen prisoners are sex offenders (compared to less than 20% in the general male estate) and would swamp the female estate if they all transferred.

What makes these convicted sex offenders, who were born male, women? Why should female prisoners be locked up with rapists if they say “I am a woman”? Are you willing to be in a prison cell with a male rapist on that basis? And if not, do you think other women should be? Are you aware that women have already been sexually assaulted and raped, in several countries, because of this policy?

Did you know that Scotland already has a policy significantly more liberal than England’s, stating that transgender prisoners must normally be housed according to the “social gender” with which they self-identify? And that this policy was brought in by a senior prison officer, himself now a convicted sex offender? A policy put in place without even talking to women’s groups or considering that there would be any impact on female prisoners at all. Despite warnings of abuse, including from former women’s prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, the promised policy review has not been forthcoming.

What about women’s refuges, have you considered what it could do to a woman fleeing male violence to encounter a male in that refuge? Read why the CEO of a domestic violence charity, Karen Ingala Smith, considers it imperative that refuges remain women-only, and her speech at the Scottish Parliament.

Did you know that a woman was asked to leave a shelter because, as a rape survivor, she couldn’t sleep in the same room as a strange male, regardless of how he identified? Are you aware that a man used self-id to access a women’s shelter where he sexually assaulted vulnerable women? Are you aware that a rape relief shelter in Canada lost all public funding for insisting they remain women-only, and had a dead rat nailed to their door?

Are you aware that the Scottish Government imposes a transwomen inclusive policy on Scottish Women’s Aid as a condition of funding and that Rape Crisis Scotland refused to guarantee a female counsellor for a traumatised teenager? We know from private meetings that they erroneously believe they cannot provide a single-sex service due to a lack of ‘case law’, despite having previously done so for many years. Did you know there is a male manager of a rape crisis centre, who failed to disclose his sex at interview, and which still claims to be women-led?

Are you aware that despite less than half of changing rooms in swimming pools and sports centres being mixed sex, 90% of sexual assaults have happened in them? Yet mixed-sex, ‘gender-neutral’ facilities are constantly pushed, including in schools – contrary to law and building regulations requiring separate sex provision – when it would be more responsible to increase third space unisex provision for the comfort of those who need it.

That’s before you even get into the issue of how to keep out predatory men who aren’t trans, if you say that any man who ‘identifies as a woman’ can use communal changing/showering areas at will. A man exposing himself in a park commits a crime. A man doing so in a women’s changing room, where you’re also naked, who need not have even told staff he identifies as a woman, may no longer be committing an offence.

Did you know that the Scottish Government funded LGBT Youth Scotland, a spin-off group from Stonewall, to write guidance for schools that breaches children’s rights in at least eleven ways? This includes the unscientific belief in gender identity, which even the Justice Minister is at a loss to define, the promotion of harmful breast binding and the removal of all single-sex spaces and sports. No-one should be surprised at this as Stonewall have long campaigned for the removal of women’s rights, although single issue political pressure groups should have been no-where near schoolchildren.

It took the Government until June 2019 to commit to replacing this guidance, having privately received advice that it was “not legal“. Yet, this new legally compliant guidance is seven months overdue and the Education Minister is refusing to withdraw LGBTYS’s guidance in the interim.

Why should we accept smear tests from any male who feels they have a womanly gender identity – what does that even mean (let’s ask the Justice Minister again)? And yes, it is happening. A rape survivor who wanted a woman to carry out her breast screening found her letter used as an example in hospital trans guidance as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘highly discriminatory’. And a woman in a psychiatric ward who was terrified at being locked in a ward with an “extremely male-bodied” fellow patient was regarded as a transphobic bigot. The truth is that women in mixed-sex hospital wards, particularly psych, have very real reasons to fear men.

Did you know that 35 clinicians have resigned from the Tavistock (children’s gender clinic in London) over their failings, including the Governor? Who later wrote a damning account of the abject failure to heed evidence that their affirmation-only policy is harmful to children, especially to the huge influx in girls who may suffer other complex problems, such as trauma, autism, a history of sexual abuse or discomfort with their developing sexuality. A staggering 48% of children referred to Tavistock have ASD traits, and a BBC Newsnight investigation revealed significant numbers of children seeking transition treatment based on their family’s homophobia.

Are you aware that studies show that puberty blockers result in 100% of children progressing to cross-sex hormones – whereas, if left unmedicated, the Tavistocks’s own research shows over 90%, if supported by counselling, are happy with their sex once they emerge from puberty. Did you know hormone blockers may cause sterility, a large decrease in IQ, bone density loss, and more? An investigation by the Health Review Authority concluded that blockers are really the start of irreversible physical transition and recommended that “Researchers and clinical staff should…avoid referring to puberty suppression as providing a ‘breathing space’, to avoid risk of misunderstanding.” This led to a major overhaul of the NHS UK website which no longer considers blockers to be fully reversible and confirms long-term effects are unknown.

The young person’s gender clinic at Sandyford, Glasgow has recently withdrawn their information booklet and we trust it will be similarly updated. Do you think all the government funded trans organisations will be scrupulous in updating their information too – including LGBT Youth guidance in Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Trans/NHS guidance, and Stonewall advice, among many more, including of course the already deemed “not legal” school guidance by LGBT Youth?

Are you aware that the number of children referred to Sandyford is rising at a faster rate than the rest of the UK? Yet they don’t actually know how many girls have been referred as children can select what sex they want recorded on medical records – although unofficially, clinicians report similar concerns as elsewhere about the huge proportional rise in young girls seeking to transition. Did you know that bias, and not evidence, dominates the WPATH transgender standard of care followed in Scotland? And it is woefully out-of-date considering the fundamental change in patient make up since it was written in 2011.

Read the speech given by Dr David Bell at the Scottish Parliament and consider why, if his report about issues at the Tavistock prompted the Director to resign, was it not enough for the Health Minister, Jeane Freeman, to instigate an enquiry into identical practices at Sandyford? Perhaps the Government will listen to the outcome of a Judicial Review that is being sought by Keira Bell, a detransitioning woman, who wants to protect other troubled young girls from similar treatment.

Are you aware that women with our views are threatened with violence, rape and death, almost as an everyday occurrence? We are told TERF is not a slur, but I challenge you to find any instances of it being used without abuse or threats attached to it. Do you think it’s in any way acceptable for lesbians to be on the receiving end of these menaces for asserting, or even just trying to be proud of, their right to be same-sex attracted? Do you really think there’s such a thing as a lesbian with a penis?

All that hate is from transactivists, and is aimed at women with our views. I challenge you to find anything remotely equivalent from here, from our recorded talks, or indeed anywhere else. This is NOT a case of two sides as bad as each other. And it’s notable that the hate is not aimed at genuinely transphobic, aggressive men. It’s aimed at women. It’s aimed at us.

And JK Rowling. Read the tweets she posted and look at the replies. Read the essay further explaining her thoughts and ask how anyone could possibly think she deserved such atrocious abuse, or how transactivists thought it in any way acceptable to post penis images in retaliation (don’t worry, it’s been edited!) on a child’s thread about Ickabog art.

Did you know women can be, and often are, fired for believing sex is real, that humans cannot change sex, and women and girls are entitled to privacy when undressing or otherwise vulnerable? And yet poll, after poll, after poll, after poll show that this is the majority view, by at least 80%. You may well wonder why then, is the Scottish Government proposing to bring in Hate Crime legislation that would see even JK Rowling imprisoned for up to seven years for expressing views deemed abusive by transactivists, yet affords women no such protection in law, based on their sex.

Innate gender identity is a belief system. There’s no evidence one exists. If our Government cannot even define it, then it should not be presented as fact to our children. It should not over-ride women’s hard fought for rights.

Do you know that the very word ‘woman’ will change definition, if the trans lobby succeed? If we can’t define what a woman is, how can we accurately capture data? How can we record male violence, the pay gap, our representation in government, business, finance, law, media…anywhere? Police Scotland already record incidences on the basis of gender identity, but can’t seem to recall when, or why that happened, and the census looks to be going the same way, despite the importance of recognising sex being shown quite dramatically by COVID-19.

An influential lobby loudly insisting that they won’t be erased (when trans organisations are heavily state funded and train all major businesses, branches of government, school teachers, universities and NHS boards) are actively campaigning to erase the very definition of what a woman is – best archive it, just in case! Have you noticed how easy it is to define a woman when we’re being aborted, subjected to FGM, married off, denied the vote, raped, murdered, paid less, represented less in every single sector of government and industry, expected to perform most of the world’s unpaid labour, and constituting 71% of the world’s modern slaves? The only places that seem unsure on what a woman is are the places feminism was starting to make inroads. It’s almost like there must be some sort of a connection, isn’t it?

We don’t have any fear, resentment or hatred for trans people. We agree there should be protection in law against discrimination and violence. We just don’t agree that our rights need to be railroaded over in the process. We don’t agree that male people should access women’s spaces, or benefit from women’s provision, at will, without our consent. Our name is WOMEN and our rights matter.

Don’t you agree…?

[margridarnauds]

So, I’m trying to articulate my thoughts on Valhalla and gender, which is sparked by the fact that, while Lagertha is prominently mentioned as the mother of the Ragnarssons (and you can find her axe), we never hear so much as a word about Aslaug/Thora, who is pretty much the real protagonist of Ragnar’s saga. 

On one hand: Lagertha is pretty much at a high of popularity right now, courtesy of Vikings (derogatory). On the other hand: Aslaug is in Vikings (derogatory) too. We see her AS THE MOTHER of most of Ragnar’s sons. There’s no reason for her NOT to be recognizable enough to be included. (Lagertha’s inclusion is also problematic - Instead of being able to divorce Ragnar and have her own life, they went the cheap route by having her being shot by a Finnish arrow.) But, at the end of the day.....it feels like, while Valhalla DOES include a diverse range of women (including our protagonist), ultimately there is....some sort of hierarchy involved, where women who fight, or at least wield weapons are automatically seen as better? 

Of our two longterm romantic interests, neither one wears a dress, both of them in traditionally masculine clothing, likewise for Ciara in WOTD. With Randvi, we’re first really invited to pity her/consider her as a really viable romantic option when we hear that she COULD have been a Jomsviking....had she not been married off to Sigurd. We see her taking down bandits, drinking ale, and we’re supposed to think, at that point, that she’s a worthy love interest. 

There’s this rather confusing line from the artbook, which says: 

“As a strategist, Randvi does not dress in a warrior’s outfit, but neither does she wear the typical women’s clothing of her time.” 

Which...seems to imply that being a strategist (a role that primarily involves her being behind a table), is automatically at odds with wearing a dress. Even if 9th century Scandinavian clothing was restrictive (it isn’t - We’re well, well before the days of tightlacing here, and women had to be able to go about their daily chores, and even IN the days of tightlacing as the peak of fashion, plenty of women didn’t, or went about their daily chores), she’s not doing anything that involves intense manual labor. Putting her in pants is simply a way of saying “Look! Look at Randvi! Look at how independent she is!” which....actually doesn’t work, when almost EVERY OTHER major female NPC is ALSO in pants. Including Valka who, as a völva, ergo a non-combatant role that mostly involves eating shrooms in her huts, has no practical need for pants, even if, once again, the clothing was impractical. If I didn’t know What A 9th Century Norsewoman Should Look Like, I would just assume that this was something that all noblewomen did. 

It’s very rare to see women actively weaving, as I’ve discussed before, with Eivor only weaving as one of the disguises that she can take to blend in. As a shieldmaiden who’s up and about constantly, I honestly wouldn’t expect Eivor to devote that much time to weaving, but it is a little jarring when the women who are constantly at the settlement don’t so much as mention it, since this was a great opportunity for women to get together, share gossip, tell tales, talk shit about the men, etc. in their own spaces. And there was a bit of an anxiety around it, because, while this was a necessary function for the creation of clothing (which, in the game, seems to just materialize in chests over the game world), it also was tightly associated with magic and sorcery. (Hence why there was a stigma against men practicing magic....unless you’re Odin, in which case Loki will talk shit about you but is anyone else? No. Because you’re Odin.) I want to emphasize that my issue here isn’t “STAY IN THE KITCHEN AND BE A PROPER WOMAN, EIVOR”, it’s more....erasing what the vast majority of women in the Viking Age DID. 

The closest we get to more traditional, more conventional women would be in the form of the religious women, but, from the Anchoress to the one murderous nun in the mysteries event to Frideswid in the Lunden Arc to Acha in the Lincolnscire arc, they tend to be portrayed as either zealous and evil or confused and easily manipulated, which ignores the reality for many medieval women, which is that, for many women who didn’t want marriage for one reason or another (whether it was that they were facing the possibility of a forced marriage, or they had no dowry, or they were lesbians, or they were ace, or they were any combination of those things), it was their one chance at a life of their own. I’m not saying that it was IDEAL, or that the medieval church was ideal, but it did give them options (that, incidentally, in the pre-Christian times....you didn’t have. Which is why I don’t attach any real sense of horror to Christianity coming to Ireland, at LEAST from the standpoint of women’s rights. There are other aspects to that, but we’re here, in 9th century England, so I won’t go into it.) No, it has to come from some moral defect, otherwise, they would be independent, like Eivor, like Randvi, like Petra, like Eadwyn, like Valdis, or even like Fulke, who is a religious figure referenced, extensively, as mad and heretical, but who makes a large impact on the plot and at least earns some level of respect, as opposed to the others who make relatively brief appearances.

Now, when discussing women warriors, there tends to be some moral value attached to it: “Women warriors DIDN’T EXIST, and if you argue that they DID, you just want women to be men, ignoring that non-femme women might find comfort in the knowledge that they aren’t alone”, often with a sense of moral guilt-tripping over “Erasing women’s suffering” (which also falls into the trap of assuming that being a woman = suffering, or that that’s the defining experience of being a woman) VS “Women warriors EXISTED and they were #NotLikeOtherGirls and that’s ALL we’re going to talk about as far as women at the time, as well as ignoring any potential evidence for trans or otherwise nonbinary identities”. Both options have the potential to erase or diminish what either option can mean to people. I hate both options equally, and I find that the way they’re brought in is incredibly manipulative. I’m not interested in saying that putting an axe in a woman’s hand = setting back feminism for twenty years. I’m not interested in saying that having essentially no more conventional women in the main cast = feminism. Both are bad, but what I’m concerned about is the lack of nuance in Valhalla and how it seems to assume that there’s ONLY ONE WAY to have power. (I’d hoped that Lady Eadwyn would be cool, and she is....even though we only see her in armor, she’s kind of what I would expect from a medieval woman, in the sense that her husband was Ealdorman and now she’s following in his footsteps, defending her rights as his widow, but then we replace her with a dude.)

As someone whose relationship to gender is Weird, I actually really, really enjoy playing a female character who has the kind of independence that Eivor has - I enjoy getting to jump around, killing things in a gloriously rendered historical environment. I enjoy that, with the exception of Dag, no one really questions it (though I would have been down for a more in-depth examination of gender in the Viking Age). I enjoy that Eivor is compassionate, clever, and aggressive, and that she’s able to have romances with both sexes. I’m not trying to nuke her via historical accuracy here (especially since the historical reality of shieldmaidens is SUCH a hot topic, I feel like wading into either end of the historical accuracy pool is a recipe for disaster) because I actually really, really like her as a character. There are relatively few times where I really, really identify with and love a main female video game character, especially since, so often, even into the present, when things are supposed to be better, I can still TELL that they were made by and for straight men, and this is one. What I AM saying is that I hate that it comes at the expense of basically every woman who ISN’T a warrior or otherwise “independent” by the game’s standards. You do have merchant women, the tattoo artist in camp, Valka, as mentioned before, but it all goes back to that point - We never really see a prominent woman running the household, managing the money, giving orders, which was an immensely important, powerful job, and as a result, it always feels kind of halfway done, that we’re over-representing one relationship to gender at the expense of another. 

[evilelitest2]

So how do the rest of us get the dirtbag left to piss off?

You are speaking my language.  Its actually less hard than it should be, the dirtbag left isn’t that large it just seems larger because of how Twitter and Tumblr works.  The big thing we need to do get ride of those fuckers is to tap into their recruitment which means we need to very publicly talk about their issues.  THere are three main things we need to openly talk about, two of which are easy and one of which is...hard.  

1) Making it clear from the start that leftism and progressivism go hand in hand, that both of them come from the same place, the belief in human equality and justice.  

2) Make it clear that the so called “woke” values aren’t just good because they are morally good (though they are) but also because they are an objectively good idea and helps any real form of socialism.  Because again, treating gay people better isn’t just the right thing to do, it helps the nation.  Because having a large percentage of the population actually able to spend their time earning money, paying taxes, spending money and supporting social structures (to say nothing of their personal contributions to art/culture/science/entertainment ect) makes the society as a whole more healthy and productive.  Just to give a few examples

Keeping qualified women from working jobs that they can do better hurts everybody 

The sooner trans people can transition and get access to hormones and reach a state of emotional health the sooner they can actually live productive lives (constant misery does not make for a good citizen) 

The fact that about 40% of the US population is constantly denied access to good jobs, wages, education, opportunities, and cultural employment due to racism means that the nation isn’t benefiting from their possible contributions 

Making workplaces, even capitalist ones more gender neutral, racially/sexually diverse will produce better policies overall, because a lot of shitty elements of capitalism come from toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalisms  and white supremacy as much as it does from a pure profit motive

And even beyond those issues, no socialist policies are ever going to be enacted as long as otherwise marginalized people aren’t able to benefit from it  

Those are pretty easy arguments to make, we just need to make them loudly and do so even when the dirtbag left isn’t around.  Like we need to just openly state why intersectionality is a practical policy not just a moral one.  The last thing though...thats tricky because I think a lot of leftists don’t want to deal with it.  Which is

3) We need to do a better job of understanding conservatives

See we tend to understand Rightist as...failed leftists.  Like they just don’t know any better, if they weren’t so ignorant, they would accept our world view.  We just need to find a better way to explain equality to them and suddenly they would magically be on board.  And that ignores the biggest problem when you are dealing with a movement made up of bigots, fundamentalist's and conspiracy theorists, led by grifters and megalomaniacs...they like the policies that are enacted.  

The left has long believed that poor white men are voting against their own interest when they support bigoted policies that hurt them economically, but in many ways they are voting for their own interests if they view the world through a tribality “us vs. them” mindset...which they do.  ANd if they are a bunch of people who revel in the idea of hurting the weak and defining themselves as the sense of normal, and rejecting any notion of intellectualism.  I think Trump’s election really eye opening because every single evil, cruel, stupid, incompetent, and absurd policy was...openly cheered on by his cultists.  The notion that conservative voters are “misguided” or “misled” is hard to reconcile when you see how much they reveled in the images of immigrant children being taken away from their families, how much they delighted in Trump rejecting science and intellectualism, how they cheered him on every time he advocated torture, deportations, abuses', cruelty, and violating human rights, and finally how they were delighted when the police opened fire on unarmed protestors.  The Dirtbag’s left argument is that the average MAGA voter is a good old boy who is really just a good person who disagrees with you and wants to be able to swear, and that image is one that leftists created because white people don’t want to acknowledge that their family members would have been little Nazis if they had been around in 30s Germany.  And that is the big hurtle we have to address, that a about 60-74 million Americans are not just ok with but actively rooting for conspiracy theories, anti intellectualism, mass murder, torture, child abuse, dictatorship, racism, sexism, homophobia, and above all cruelty.  And that they will do so at the expense of their own self interest, these people are letting themselves die of Covid in order to support a man who will hurt the people they hate.  

And that is sort of the most difficult pill for the left to swallow, because the left still is in love with the Roussouian idea that most people are fundamentally good and its just systems that make them bad, and we don’t want to abandon that. And the dirtbag left takes advantage of that to provide a really comforting narrative to a lot of leftistst

“Oh Trump supporters aren’t really cruel selfish cultists who worship willing ignorance, they are just misunderstood, if we just use more slurs they will come around to our way of thinking”

The left really needs to understand that they really do believe what their actions indicate.  Its the same problem we had with post war Germany, the whole idea that “oh only the leadership were evil, most Germans didn’t know anything” when in reality most Germans (and really most Europeans) were complicit in antisemitism and dictatorship long before Hitler came to power.  The left never likes to believe the worse in people, the right is always too willing to do so.  

[thelast-genderbender]

At the age of 15 I had terfs harress and constantly sexually assault me online. A minor. Terfs don't care about women's rights, they only care about owning the 'trans' cult, that in the process that have hurt masculine woman and woman who are intersex. Many of your ideals have fuelled abuse of transgender minors from parents, they feed into the lies that the detransition rate is higher, that we are dirty and unworthy of love. I've never had such low self confidence until I learned of terfs. After I came out as trans I was happy to be myself, I went to doctors and they signed me up for a clinic to diagnosis me with gender dysphoria. After publicly stating I am trans, I got terfs trying to convert me, saying fucking awful shit and objectifying me to what's in my pants. Never have I ever got that sort of treatment even from men, it's always been women. There's nothing wrong with being a woman of course they are wonderful and deserve respect, I'm not one. It's honestly disturbing to see a person my age actively in terf circles, terfs are literal predators, who bitch about conversion therapy because a trans woman loves a woman, while actively seek out trans men to try and convert them to lesbians, to make them love their 'womanhood' it's disgusting, the stories I've seen these women post about trans men are r*pe, plain and fucking simple. Terfs will talk big about being welcome of detransitioned women but as soon as that woman still supports trans rights, she is labelled 'handmaiden' it disgusts me deeply. Many women are traumatised by men and I've seen terfs twist this so much and turn it on trans women, telling young traumatised women that they are going to come into your bathrooms are r*pe you. A lie from terf circles debunked by common sense. It's honestly upsetting to see radical feminism is nothing more then a transphobic dogwhistle. Some of the sweetest people I've known have been trans women, many have been scared to even dress a certain way in public incase they get murdered on the streets. I've never met a trans woman who is a predator. Being a terf is a choice being trans is not.

I'm in a much better place now and I will be much happier after transitioning. I hope you can find happiness too, as terf circles are filled with negativity and predators. If you are going to just misgender and invalidate my and every trans men experiences, then don't bother replying. This is just my personal experiences and an hopefully eye opening read.

Just a heads up, if you want to start a meaningful conversation with someone that has views that contradict your own, you probably shouldn’t start your message with a narrative that is incredibly vague and disingenuous. I want to talk with people that disagree with me because it’s important to me that my beliefs aren’t based on inconsistent logic or cognitive dissonance (because they 100% were when I was a liberal/”intersectional” feminist), but in order to have those meaningful discussions you need to make arguments that are based on something more than anecdotal evidence. Even if the story you just told was 100% true, it’s an undeniable fact that what you experienced was abnormal and that virtually every woman on the planet has been abused by a man- and those who haven’t are still living in the same patriarchal world that the rest of us are in. I’m not going to try to prove to you that sexism exists, but if you’ve been living under a rock since the beginning of civilization here’s a link to a WHO report over global rates of femicide. 

I wanted to go through this ask more thoroughly, but I’m studying for midterms and I just don’t have that kind of time. Believe me when I say that your understanding of radical feminism is incredibly flawed. It seems as though everything you think you know about us was fed to you by someone who knows that if you took the time to understand our views you would probably agree with us. Please try to think outside of yourself and your interests for 5 minutes; think about victims of male violence, think about the women who are having their job opportunities and athletic victories stolen from them. Think about the women who are being forced to share sex-specific spaces with males, after those spaces were earned by feminists who dared to argue that women should have safe spaces outside of their homes that they can retreat to in order for them to be able to participate in the public sphere as much as men can. Maybe open your eyes and read the articles written BY TRANSWOMEN about how pretending to be female is sexually gratifying to them! How about this article by a transwoman who was sexually aroused by “breastfeeding” their child? Or this one about a transwoman who thinks that what makes them female is their desire to be treated as a sexual object? Do I really need to explain to you how transwomen perpetuate horrifically damaging ideas about women when they will do the explaining themselves in articles that they would NEVER have been featured in had they never began identifying as women? 

Believe me, I would love to read something eye-opening about radical feminism. The fact that I’ve never seen a compelling, well written, or logically sound argument that even briefly threatened my stance on this subject is the reason why I’ve settled with these beliefs. It is going to take more than your “personal experiences” to prove to me that a male can become a woman.

[copperbadge]

Do you have any thoughts about the announced adaptation of 'the City Watch' books by BBC America? Opinions seem pretty mixed in the fandom and I'd love to hear your take?

For a show I was almost definitely never going to watch from the outset, I have more thoughts about the Watch adaptation than I really know what to do with, to be honest. It’s actually hard to assemble them coherently. 

There are basically three strands of opinion I have about watching The Watch: personal, critical, and literary. 

The personal: 

I don’t have a great history of enjoying media adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s work. One reason I didn’t watch Good Omens until a month or two after its release is that I knew this about myself and I didn’t want to turn it on, get disappointed, and turn it off, as I’d done with The Hogfather (we need not speak of The Animated Soul Music, lord). Granted, the Death books are not my favorites, so I was never going to deeply engage with The Hogfather, and then they came out with The Colour Of Magic, another non-favorite, so I skipped it, and so I was super disengaged by the time Going Postal came out (though I should really give Going Postal a chance because I do love Going Postal as a book). So I acknowledge this isn’t objective, this is personal, but it’s still a factor.  

So I’m not coming into this whole situation with The Watch as someone who actually wants, or enjoys, TV adaptations of Pterry’s books, Good Omens notwithstanding – and let’s be real, Good Omens is an outlier. It was a collaboration, one of the original authors had deep control over the adaptation, and also Good Omens isn’t a Discworld book. It’s much more thoroughly rooted in our known reality, which makes it easier to convey to television. But my ultimate point is that when I hear about a Discworld book being adapted to TV, I shrug and move on. I have the books. I don’t need the shows. 

The critical: 

I think it is a bad habit of fandom that we extrapolate a lot of inference from a relatively small amount of data – we tend to take a couple of photos, a press release, some casting information, and very quickly make a large set of assumptions. It’s not necessarily that these assumptions are wrong, but we jump to a lot of conclusions. I’m thinking of early backlash over Good Omens, which I don’t even remember what it was about but I remember Gaiman having to get pretty stern about “could you wait until at least the trailer is out before jumping down my throat”. I’m also thinking of the casting of David Thewlis as Remus Lupin, which was not well-received until we saw more than blurry set photos. 

Now, all that having been said, some of the casting news has been…difficult. On the one hand, a Black Sybil Ramkin? Sign me the fuck up. On the other, I know that for a lot of people, having a Sybil who is both large and older is really important (I think it’s important too). Especially if Vimes is older, it’s creepy and backwards to have Sybil be young and hollywood-idea-of-pretty (even if the time travel element is involved, it gets into a weird area). Also, I’m really over only ever casting people of color as villains or supporting-role-women. Vimes canonically comes from a “poor but respectable” neighborhood that could easily be reframed as an ethnic neighborhood, which would be especially pointed and interesting given his family’s long connection to the history of the city. An Indian or part-Indian Sam Vimes would be really, really interesting and cool, for example. 

There’s also a lot of discussion about casting a nonbinary person as Cheery and explicitly setting Cheery up as nonbinary, as opposed to explicitly a trans woman*, especially since in the books she identifies as a woman, not as nonbinary. But I’m not entirely sure if Cheery as nonbinary is actually going to be canon or if that’s just the reporting on the show not knowing how to handle the whole Female Dwarf situation. Not everyone interprets Cheery as trans at all, either, because of how dwarf gender identity works, which complicates matters somewhat, so I’m not going to wade too far into these waters. I do think it’s great enby actors are getting work in enby roles, but there’s some issues there that need further examination. 

(* Note -- corrected the above after it was pointed out to me that NB are not trans light; I’ve changed it to trans woman rather than trans-as-umbrella-term, more here.)

So I think overall it’s early days to make a lot of calls about what The Watch will and won’t be, but I also think there’s a lot of reason to be concerned and annoyed, and that brings us to the real, hardcore reason that I saw the first reporting on The Watch and immediately noped out: 

The literary:

“Punk rock thriller.”

Oh go fuck yourself. 

Despite everything I said above about not making snap judgements I immediately read that it would be a dark punk rock thriller police procedural and went “Well, guess that’s that” and walked away from the idea of being even vaguely excited about this show, because what I read demonstrated a basic, fundamental lack of grip on what the Watch books are about. 

One, the Watch books aren’t about crime. They really genuinely aren’t. The crimes are macguffins on which to hang social commentary about other things entirely. Even in the very earliest Watch books, when Pterry was still mostly making fun of high fantasy, the crimes the Watch investigated were committed in the service of a larger discussion about things like totalitarianism, interculturalism, and civic life. There’s at least one moment, and I believe several but I’d have to re-read the books to be sure, where Pterry explicitly makes fun of murder mysteries where the hero Solves Crimes Like Sherlock Holmes. Vimes hates clues. Feet Of Clay has an extended subplot about how you 100% cannot trust clues even when the author is the one feeding them to you. I do not want a Watch series that is about Clues.  

Two, the Watch books are explicitly the antithesis of the action genre. They have action in them, but the point is that nobody in these books are action heroes; they’re ordinary people attempting to go about their jobs in a situation where that constantly becomes increasingly difficult. I read “punk rock thriller” and I thought to myself of the dedication of Guards! Guards!: 

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

This does get a bit tricky because by the end of Snuff, Vimes is very heroic, almost too heroic for my comfort, but at the same time his heroism is of a very specific sort: he is heroic not because he slaughters the palace guard who get in his way or shoots the baddie or blows up a cop car with a helicopter (or vice versa) but because he deeply, intensely hates those things, and wants nothing to do with them. He is heroic because he is forced into it by circumstance, but spite in the face of monstrousness is what powers him. I think of The Fifth Elephant, where Vimes has just killed a werewolf: 

There were a lot of things he could say. “Son of a bitch!” would have been a good one. Or he could say, “Welcome to civilization!” He could have said, “Laugh this one off!” He might have said, “Fetch!” But he didn’t, because if he had said any of those things then he’d have known that what he had just done was murder.

I don’t trust someone who thinks The Watch should be reimagined as a thriller to understand Sam Vimes. Like, there’s room for interpretation as to Vimes’ character, but there is a fundamental underlying bedrock Vimes is built on and if you don’t grasp the broad points of that, you’re just writing a cop show with some names stitched on.  

Three, the Watch books aren’t a static series, they aren’t like cozy mysteries where the circumstances change but the hero rarely does. That’s nothing against cozy mysteries; I love mystery novels and some of my favorites involve characters who don’t even age over the course of the forty years the books were written in. But you cannot pastiche the Watch and expect it to work. 

Again this is a bit of extrapolation based on low amounts of data but I think it’s probably accurate – the casting indicates that either we’re dealing with the events of Night Watch or at the very least heavily engaged with aspects of it. But Night Watch, while I think it’s one of Pterry’s best books hands down, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is one point in a very specific developmental arc, not just for Vimes but for the entire Watch. If we’re dealing just with the plot of Night Watch (which I don’t think we are) that’s tough to pull off. If, as I suspect, they’re going to be pulling from various aspects of various Watch books, then that’s just fucking nonsense. 

Even Carrot, who is a very constant figure, undergoes some fundamental shifts in personality between Guards! Guards! and, say, The Fifth Elephant. Vimes, while maintaining his personal moral and ethical code, undergoes a radical shift between Guards! Guards! and Night Watch, and he continues to develop emotionally and in some ways spiritually up until Snuff. The Vimes who bitches about diversity in hiring in Men At Arms will not react to any given situation the way the Vimes who befriends the goblins in Snuff will. 

And because these books also all address very specific issues, you can’t just slam them all together and expect to get anything resembling the Watch as Pterry envisioned it over the course of the books.

So while I love the comedy, the characters, the plots, even the macguffin crimes, I believe that a Watch book – a Discworld book of any kind – without that satirical bite is just a high-fantasy husk. There’s no point to it, nothing that sets it apart from a bad Saturday Night Live skit about Game of Thrones. The tv series might actually turn out great and all my concerns will have been unfounded, but first looks aren’t promising on a number of really basic levels. 

So we’ll see. If I’m wrong, great; the show will probably electrify fandom in the same way Good Omens did. If I’m right, well, I had no hopes to begin with, so I’ll just enjoy re-reading Night Watch, which is the book that got me back into fandom and which you can all blame for my presence here today. :D

[flyandfamousblackgirls]

6 Things Intersex Folks Need to Know About How We Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism

1. The Segregation in Our Intersex Movement Is Real

The intersex movement has been mostly white since day one. Consequently, it’s necessary to ask ourselves if we’ve inadvertently created an atmosphere that urges Black intersex people to put aside their Blackness — and the oppression linked to it — in order to focus on our collective goals.

In creating this type of environment, it appears our community hasn’t yet been able to connect the dots between Black and intersex people’s oppression — which Saifa reminded me are both rooted in state violence — and our liberation.

Black intersex folks who’ve lived in isolation and have dealt with segregation in their daily lives shouldn’t have to contend with similar experiences once they’ve finally found, and entered our community.

I’m not talking about highly visible institutionalized segregation like the Jim Crow era when Saifa’s uncle, who was also intersex, was forced to sleep outside on the porch of his hospital after a surgery.

I’m talking about the low-key, harder to detect, segregation.

The kind that just takes for granted that the majority of people in the room will always be white. The type that may have a few Black and Brown faces sprinkled here and there, but on a vanilla frosted cake. Is there a path forward?

Sean Saifa Wall, a Black trans intersex activist and collage artist based in Atlanta, reflected on this question by looking back on his time spent as the former board president of an intersex non-profit. Saifa captured why increasing representation shouldn’t be the endgame.

“I think I made the mistake of thinking we need more people of color… but what does institutionalized white supremacy do? It brings in Black or Brown faces who won’t challenge white supremacy — and that’s how white supremacy perpetuates itself. You don’t need white folks to perpetuate it, you just need folks who are invested in white supremacy.”

When I was younger and mistakenly believing that whiteness was the norm to strive towards, I ended up internalizing racist ideologies and, as a result, never fully connected on a truly deep BFF level with my Black friends. Perhaps our movement, and its longstanding quest for acceptance, has created a similar divide.

The global intersex activist network consists, to my knowledge, of less than only 5 Black intersex activists. One of them is Saifa.

2. One’s Race and Intersex Identity Overlap

Born amidst racist flames that attempted to level his neighborhood, Saifa was brought up whilst his borough, The Bronx, was attempting to rebuild itself.

“When I was younger,” Saifa recounted, “I realized I had a different body. Then, due to interactions with NYPD, I was made to know that I was different in another way as well.”

As he got older, Saifa came out as queer, intersex, and trans to a mother — and a world — who wasn’t always ready or eager to respect his intersecting identities. Regardless, his Blackness, sexuality, and intersex identity were always interwoven.

“I cannot separate my intersex identity from my Black identity,” Saifa said. And he shouldn’t have to.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid our community hasn’t figured out ways yet to allow people to show up as their whole selves.

For instance, on the international level, it’s become a known issue that intersex activists from African countries don’t get similar amounts of representation, or speaking time at gatherings. And nationally, our support group meetings rarely, if ever, have been led by Black intersex folks or had sessions dedicated solely for Black intersex community members to come together.

It’s only in the past few years that single Black folks are sitting on boards, or in staff positions of our organizations. There’s also never been, to my knowledge, any Black clinicians present at our Continuing Medical Education (CME) sessions that happen before our support group conferences each year.

Race, especially as it relates to anti-blackness, feels as though it’s at times an elephant in the room.

For me, this elephant peeped its head out when I realized it had become a tradition for one of our non-Black community members, who I love and cherish dearly, to sing Macy Gray’s “I Try” — in Gray’s uniquely raspy voice — at the annual talent show, which is supposed to provide a fun contrast to the rest of the conference.

The audience, if it’s a diverse year, might have a handful of Black folks. This year, there was only one person. I can’t imagine how isolating that experience might have been for them.

And this bring me back to the story I shared at the beginning, about the person who had Obama on a hit list.

Often, racism perpetuates itself by wearing the mask of a “joke” or “fun,” but racism is never a joke and the mask just presents one more hurdle in calling racism out.

It’s time us non-Black intersex people become more aware of our whiteness problem.

We need to keep having difficult conversations about race and oppression every step of the way.

Most importantly, we need to show up the few Black intersex people we do have in our small community, and check in with them to see if there’s anything else we could be doing to have their back.

We can challenge white supremacy in our movement just by asking Black intersex folks in our community what they need to feel safer in our collective spaces.

For our movement to be successful, it’s imperative that Black intersex folks feels they can participate as whole persons.

3. We’ve All Been Dehumanized

The list of atrocities against people of color, especially Black folks, carried out by the medical industrial complex and other agents includes: “the father of gynecology” using enslaved Black people as surgical research subjects, being disproportionately targeted by the US’s eugenic sterilization program that served as a catalyst for Nazi Germany’s and today’s “population control”policies, and the shackling of pregnant women inmates — who are disproportionately Black — in labor delivering children whom they most likely will be immediately separated from.

Likewise, intersex people have been rendered hermaphrodites and featured in freak shows, gawked at as monsters to at on TV, disproportionately put up for adoption, pumped with artificial hormones, robbed of their reproductive organs and genitalia, selectively aborted, raped, and brutally murdered.

Lynnell, a Black intersex lesbian activist, was born intersex but raised male by a single mother in a low-income household. She grew up in Chicago’s mostly Black, hypersegregated, South Side where her family — unlike mine on the North Side — was forced to deal with the effects of the city’s racist public policy and divestment responsible for the destruction of local economies, public schools and affordable housing.

Hyde Park, a pocket of wealth and whiteness on the South Side and home to the University of Chicago (UofC) Hospital, is where Lynnell’s mother took her as a child for doctor appointments.

Lynnell shared memories of that time stating, “My mom wasn’t given the tools she needed to make informed decisions.” As Lynnell grew older, she also “wasn’t taken seriously at first by [her doctors] either.”

Low-income and single mothers of color, labelled unfit by society, experience discrimination. Lynnell’s mother went to U of C seeking care, not charity, for her child. Seeing a golden opportunity, Lynnell’s doctors manipulated her mother’s financial status and turned the situation into a charity case anyway.

“They told my mom they were doing her a favor because they weren’t charging her.” In the doctor’s mind, they were participating in an equal trade with Lynnell and her mother.

To Lynnell, it was torture. “For eight years, every summer, for at least a month, I was put on different drugs, experimented on, given unnecessary procedures and manipulated.”

Exploitation of marginalized people by the MIC for their gains, especially in teaching environments, has been well-documented. Exploitation specific to Black intersex patients has yet to be researched. Lynnell’s doctors, I imagine, took one look at Lynnell’s mother and decided a poor Black woman wasn’t powerful enough stop what they had in store for Lynnell.

“I don’t know many white people that were used as guinea pigs like me,” Lynnell said.

4. Doctor’s Aren’t the Only People Attempting to Erase ‘Difference’

Intersex people are pretty familiar with secrecy, shame and stigma thanks to the pathologization of our bodies. As such, it’s important we have spaces to process our stories with each other. Yet, it’s important to note that as oppressed people, we are still capable of participating in the oppressing others.

The few times I’ve witnessed our community attempt to break down white supremacy and talk about racism, white intersex people successfully shifted the conversation, almost immediately, back to a conversation that centers them and their experience with intersex oppression.

Spaces where intersex people get together and talk are rare, so it makes sense why someone would want to relate and process, but in doing so, we are inadvertently preventing Black intersex folks in our community from expressing their unique experiences.

Saifa recounted a time when he “was trying to bring up the topics of anti-oppression, racism, etc., in the movement and people lost their damn minds. People were like, ‘we cannot hear it.’”

He also shared, “Anti-black racism showed up when I went to South Carolina on behalf of the MC case [a lawsuit involving the parents of a young Black intersex boy and his doctors] and one of the lawyers was condescending, talking down to me as the only Black person in the room. I was constantly pushing back against his patriarchy and racism.”

He continued, “I feel like people don’t care about issues related to anti-black racism in the intersex community.

“I think there’s some intersex people who really see those intersections, who really are affirming of people of color, but for the large part I feel that the level of anti-black racism awareness ranges from hostility to apathy.”

I asked if people ever seemed to care and he replied, “When funding is involved. That’s when people start to care more. Or, when a group wants some representation of diversity—but I found they wanted a Black face, but weren’t necessarily committed to issues around anti-Black racism.”

As a movement, we can’t only focus on these issues when funding dollars are at stake. That tokenizes Black folks.

Instead, we have to stitch anti-Black racism training, and education around white supremacy, into the fabric of our work together.

Saifa pointed out, “In the world, I’m confronted with anti-Blackness, and it’s par for the course, but it’s particularly more devastating when it’s from intersex people. Why? Because I think, ‘Oh, you understand.’

“Or at least I think they understand, until they say or do things that’s really racist and are unapologetic about their racism.”

5. We Need an Intersectional Analysis to Combat Racist Stereotypes

One of the white people present at Lynnell’s first intersex support group meeting recently told her that she was “afraid” of her at first, “because [Lynnell] had on leather and dark sunglasses.”

I asked Lynnell why she entered that support group meeting dressed in leather, sunglasses, and the rest of her leather daddy alter ego outfit. She responded, “Because I was the only Black intersex person there.”

Lynnell shouldn’t have to feel the need to protect herself like that in a room that was supposed to feel like home, a room where she was supposed to be able to let her guard down amongst people with similar experiences.

Unfortunately, this is the type of thing that can happen when a community doesn’t have a firm commitment to operating with an intersectional lens — one that places its most marginalized folks at the center.

Lynnell needed to protect herself at a support group, and in doing so, made a white person feel afraid, circles back to my main point.

We need to place Black intersex folks and their particular needs, struggles and desires at the front and center of our intersex activism.

If we don’t, we risk ostracizing Black intersex folks, again, within spaces meant to be a reprieve from shame and stigma.

6. Confronting White Supremacy Means Confronting Disembodiment

Disembodiment, or feeling detached from your body, often happens as a coping mechanism in response to intense trauma. Intersex activist, Mani Mitchell, once described it as feeling like a “floating head tugging around a body.”

Saifa, someone I admire for their commitment to somatic healing work, believes that white supremacy is rooted in disembodiment “because you have to be disembodied in order to not allow your self to be impacted by the inequity or suffering of others.”

Regardless, Saifa thinks it’s “imperative that white intersex activists feel their feelings regarding any shame they may have as they interrogate white supremacy and its brutal history.”

“It’s only fair that white intersex activists start to acknowledge, as much as their embodiment can hold, the shameful and disgusting emotions that come up after hearing the bitter truth and realities of Black folks and people of color.”

“Doing this work is difficult,” he acknowledged, “and it can bring up things we’d rather not have to face about ourselves.”

Still, non-Black intersex folks need to “confront those feelings and allow themselves to be impacted, then hopefully they can be motivated to action, and allow that empowerment to impact others.”

In taking Saifa’s advice, we can create positive ripple effects throughout our whole community. Doing the work to steer our movement towards becoming an intersectional, anti-racist, intersex movement is a win-win for everyone involved!

[midnight-fox-boy]

LISTEN UP

Trans people don't have to medically transition to be valid

Trans people dont have to ""fully*"" medically transition to be valid

Many trans people physically can't medically transition

Many trans people don't want to, or don't want to take any risks in that regard medically

Trans people don't owe anyone hyper masculinity/femininity/androgyny

Trans people don't owe you kindness when you constantly misgender them, are ignorant, or blatantly transphobic.

Trans people don't owe you education, google exists and trans people who actively WANT to educate exist

Trans people don't suddenly stop being trans if they're bad people

Trans men aren't straight if they are attracted to other men

Trans women aren't straight if they are attracted to other women

Nonbinary people are not "seeking attention"

You are not pansexual just because you're attracted to (binary) trans people. Stop it. Pansexuality is attraction to all genders or regardless of genders, not attraction to "cis and trans people" trans is not a third gender. Trans men are men, trans women are women.

Trans people are allowed to not want to date cis people

Trans people are allowed to be gender nonconforming

Trans people who reclaim the terms "tucute" and "trender" are literally doing that to take power away from shitty people, it isn't because they "aren't actually trans".

Medical transition is a privilege that not every trans person can get (if they want it)

Being "out" isn't something all trans people can do. It can literally get you murdered depending on many factors

Trans women are not automatically predatory for existing.

Reproductive health is not a "women only" thing. Trans men and AFAB nonbinary people can have uteruses and issues that can come with that as well

Trans men CAN want biological children and give birth

Trans women CAN want biological children, and impregnate someone

Not all intersex people are trans.

Trans people are not "intersex in their brain"

You CANNOT "transition to intersex" you CAN transition to appear more androgynous or have mixed sex characteristics, but that does not make you intersex.

Never call anyone a derogatory term unless they've reclaimed it and have given you permission to use it for them.

Trans people do NOT "want special privileges" we want basic human fucking rights and to not be assaulted, murdered, fired, refused housing and resources for being trans.

Trans///me/ds are scientifically wrong. According to the DSM V and science, you DO NOT NEED GENDER DYSPHORIA TO BE TRANS.

Dysphoria is not the same as gender dysphoria, many trans people will just use the term "dysphoria" in community conversations because we know they mean "gender dysphoria"

If you wouldn't misgender a cis person for being a shit person but would misgender a trans person for being a shit person, you're transphobic. Period.

Trans people can have transphobic ideologies and be transphobic to other trans people. Being trans does not exempt you from being transphobic.

Nonbinary people are trans, but do not have to identify as such if they dont want to.

Trans people are still a part of the LGBTQ+ community if they're straight.

Unfollow me if you're a transphobe. Period.

(* "fully" transitioning is when one has reached their own personal transition goals, it does NOT mean getting every gender affirming surgery possible + hormones)