#but there are no 'rules' to being a woman beyond identifying as a woman in some way

[aroceu]

honestly shout out to girls who have no actual depiction of them in most (if any) form of media. girls who can't see themselves physically represented by any fictional characters; girls who can't relate with the largely tropey writing of any female character that exists. womanhood--and frankly, general personhood--is not restricted to how it is depicted in fiction or on screen. your identity as a person and as a woman is not tied to what other people think women should be like; it is tied into your acceptance and love of yourself.

[velvetvexations]

I'm now going to conclusively prove beyond all possible doubt that TERFs hate cis men, people they perceive as men, and masculinity in general. No, seriously, this is going to have less holes than relativity. Darwin wishes he could have demonstrated the reality of evolution like I'm about to take down the idea that TERFs don't come from a place of violent hatred towards masculine people and those they perceive of as masculine.

Some ground rules, because I'm so good at predicting counter-arguments:

I have only included cases where posts are completely, 100% unambiguously about cis men or "all men." No posts complaining about "men" without further elaboration, to avoid the argument that it's just being used as a dog whistle.

I have excluded cases that could be brushed away as only racism rather than hatred of men specifically, although yes, obviously they are also extremely racist.

I did not repeat a single TERF to dodge claims these are mere anomalies.

"but they team up with cis men" the Nazis teamed up with Asians and tried appealing to Native Americans and Arabs, people are perfectly capable of being logically inconsistent or temporarily suspending their feelings for one group to combat another - also, many TERFs do actually bemoan the way others have started warming up to conservatives.

The "claiming TERFs don't think I'm a woman is misgendering me" people are going to be upset. Or at least they would be, but transradfems will not engage with this, they will do everything in their power to ignore it. I invite everyone to use this post whenever they say TERFs uniquely hate trans women and only trans women. It's necessary to make the facts inescapable.

Okay, here we go after the cut. My own commentary will be Biggest as well as bold and italicized for readability. CW for hateful rhetoric.

Here she's saying that Western white women have extra capability to fully sever all relationships with men, not that white women have a greater need to do so, and thus does not fall under "can be brushed away as racism" like it may read at first.

This is in response to statements of others that identify men in a sympathetic way ("not all men," "normalize men crying") and therefore cannot be about trans women.

"Stop calling men boys" means the people she's ranting about call them boys, which again means this post isn't about trans women.

I'll end by noting that I'm not comfortable platforming the content itself, but if you google "Dworkinstan Tumblr" (yes, even the actual URL is that bad) you will find the crowning example that really cherries the top of this sundae.

[drainslo]

Brains & Brawn- Chapter 12: Sorry

You reread the note until the words seemed to blur together: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, “I’m sorry.”

That was all which kept running through your mind after you picked up the gun and raced to the Beach’s lobby. You held it behind your back in a way which you hoped was at least somewhat discreet. You blinked dizzily in the lobby. It seemed like the whole Beach gathered in that one spot. 

You spotted the phones for registration, and snatched one up aimlessly. Your eyes drifted, scanning each face looking for one in particular. For once, you couldn’t find the only one you wanted to see.

You barely were able to pay attention to the instructions of the game. There was a witch you all had to hunt down, one which had killed a member of the Beach. Once you found the witch, they had to be burned in the fire of judgment. You vaguely recognized the dead girl. The only notable thing was that she always stuck next to her best friend.

Immediately after the rules were stated, came the people accusing her friend. You watched as she blinked tearfully that she didn’t kill Momoka. 

You didn’t think that it was her friend who did so. The solution was too obvious for the highest ranked hearts game. It was sure to be something more cruel beyond measure.

An had tried to mediate as the only reasonable executive there. She was of course promptly ignored for proposing a sensible way of finding the witch. The hysteria of the crowd, and the dismissiveness of the militants shut her down swiftly.

The crowd began to break as a group of heavy footsteps forced itself into the middle. 

“Doesn’t the solution seem simple,” said the last voice you wanted to hear running this game.

“Niragi,” Aguni lowered his voice dangerously. The two exchanged a meaningful look, one where they somehow reached a mutual understanding without anyone else being part of it. The rest of the militants behind them shuffled nervously as they awaited further instruction from their bosses.

“Does the witch want to reveal themselves now?” Niragi teased, his tone indicating he had no delusions about the question he proposed.

“Well–” Niragi began shooting into the crowd without any warning and the rest of the militants drew their guns as well. 

“We have to kill everyone, burn them until we find the witch” he shouted at the rest. 

Before running with the rest, you stole a glance at Aguni. For a moment, he paused before shooting the menacing automatic in his hands. You hoped with all of your heart that he wouldn’t pull the trigger at that moment. As soon as the hesitancy appeared, it vanished.

New sounds of gunshots exploded throughout the room as Aguni and the other militants joined the fray.

You stumbled to your feet very ungracefully, without any of the athletic skill you had learned from training with Kuina. You sprinted out of the room, the sound of the gunshots fading as you left.

You almost began to panic when you tried to think of a solution to this crooked game. You were essentially blacklisted from the militants now. You weren’t even supposed to have a gun.

If not for Chishiya, you would be entirely defenseless and alone. You almost laughed to yourself as you realized that because Chishiya left, now you were alone with a gun.

In the midst of your thoughts, you almost sprinted directly into An. You halted before you collide into the woman who was carrying a knife.

“You armed yourself too?” You attempted to joke lightheartedly. 

An instead did not seem quite amused, choosing to reply seriously. “This is the knife that was lodged in Momoka. I’m going to try to lift the fingerprints off of it to identify the witch.”

“Ah, I can stay with you. Make sure that Niragi doesn’t try to kill you,” you responded somewhat cheerily. You were glad now that you were no longer walking through the hallways alone.

As you trailed through the hallways with An, you passed more than one dead body. Some you recognized, more you didn’t. None of them were Kuina or Chishiya. You knew that they were both likely to survive, but you still checked every body you passed nonetheless.

Continued screaming and loud gunshots filled the Beach’s once drunk-on-happiness crowd, disrupting the chances you had for a conversation with An.

“How are you going to, you know,” you gestured at the knife when you failed to recall what An said she planned on doing.

An opened the door to the little lab area she had led you to. The faint fume of some unknown chemical made you cough quietly in the sterile room. You had only seen this part of the Beach once in your initial tour of the Beach, before Hatter had ushered you quickly out. “I was in forensics for the police before and we lift fingerprints to identify suspects when they’re left behind at crime scenes. Normally we have better technologies to do it but we’ll have to make do. It can be done rather crudely, like with a faint powder and tape.”

An placed the knife on a tabletop and laughed almost to herself. “I’m not going to do that obviously. It’s possible to lose the prints that way and I’m not willing to risk it knowing the stakes. I’m going to fume them rather.”

“Fume? Like with heat?” You were completely out of your element with forensics. You had barely passed science classes in your youth, all your teachers seemed to enjoy almost flunking you out of pure malice.

“Something like that,” An said and began shuffling through the miscellaneous items scattered throughout the room. “Can you help me look for super glue?” 

You sifted together through the magazines and papers piled on the desks. Theories about what the Borderlands was filled the pages in presumably An’s handwriting. “Afterlife???” was written on one of them in red ink, and circled multiple times. 

“I found it!” An yelled, and began rummaging throughout the room once more to grab a glass tray. 

“I would try to make a fuming chamber, but I don’t think we have time,” she said quickly while pouring the glue onto the tray. She grabbed a lighter that was strewn nearby and held it out to you with the tray.

“Hold it like this, with the lighter underneath,” An demonstrated and pulled on gloves after passing the items to you. She grabbed the knife and carefully held the handle directly on top of the fumes that the superglue was now creating.

“Try not to inhale too much,” she said almost like an afterthought.

“I thought you knew I loved the scent of superglue,” you said drolly. You held your breath deliberately as the faint outline of fingerprints barely materialized. You squinted to try to visualize them better, but to no avail.

Once the outline appeared, she inspected them carefully with a magnifying glass that appeared out of nowhere. She gasped and checked them again when she saw something you didn’t.

“The fingerprints are backwards,” she said suddenly.

“Backwards?”

“Normally when someone stabs someone they grip the object this way.” An showed you how she would grip the knife. “But when someone stabs themself–”

“They hold it the way the fingerprints are oriented on the knife,” you concluded. 

An nodded grimly, but almost absentmindedly kept holding the knife over the fumes. She seemed to be pondering the implications of the fingerprints. You couldn’t understand why Momoka would kill herself-- for the game? Why would someone die to trigger all these deaths?

The door creaked open and you immediately pointed your gun at the intruder. “Woah there!”

Kuina raised her arms high above her head and watched you lower the gun. “That’s better. I was looking for An in case she needed someone to look after her, but it seems like you’ve got it covered.”

You grinned and walked over to hug Kuina tightly. 

“You’re okay, right?” you murmured into the hug.

“I am, but (Name), I was also looking for you,” Kuina said slowly. She avoided meeting your eyes as she continued to speak. “I think Chishiya is going after Niragi.”

“What? Where the fuck is he?” No matter how smart Chishiya was, you couldn’t believe that he was this stupid. Niragi had access to all of the guns the Beach had to offer, while Chishiya gave up his only line of defense to you.

“Last I heard, he was heading up to the roof. He said he was scoping it out as a hiding space, but I’m pretty confident Niragi is sniping people from there.”

Without saying anything further, you rushed out of the room and almost ran into a militant with a gun. He promptly attempted to shoot at you. You drew your handgun and without hesitation, purposefully missed him.

“(Name)!” the militant gasped when he recognized you. He lowered his gun and bowed. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

You shook your head and brushed past him to go to the stairs. You didn’t realize that your lack of militant status wasn’t entirely publicized yet. But with this game wreaking havoc everywhere, there must’ve not been enough time for Aguni to let everyone know. 

When you arrived at the top of the stairs, you inhaled deeply before you pushed the door open quietly. Niragi had his back to you, sitting on the edge of the roof as he fired shots while humming.

He carried his huge sniper rifle on his shoulder with multiple rounds of ammo strapped to his chest. You didn’t miss the other guns on his sides.

You glanced around the rooftop to find a noticeable lack of anyone else there. It was just you and Niragi. If you drew your gun to his back– you could stop him from killing dozens of other people.

You carefully aimed the gun, ready to position it for firing when someone carelessly pushed open the same door you had come from.

Niragi whipped around as you felt a weight drop around your shoulder. Without dropping your hand, you saw in your peripheral vision Chishiya had placed his arm around you.

Niragi heaved his sniper off his shoulder and laid it to the side carelessly. “Has the happy couple come to kill me together?” he sneered and began to load a smaller firearm.

“We’re not together,” you blurted on instinct. You silently cursed yourself that you chose to respond to that part of his sentence and didn’t dare to glance at Chishiya.

“Please,” Niragi scoffed. “I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“I would beg to differ,” Chishiya said quietly.

Niragi paused before cocking his revolver. “I can’t fucking stand your smugness. What makes you think you’re so fucking clever?”

“But I am clever,” Chishiya responded with a smile on his face. 

“What are you doing? Are you trying to get us killed?” You hissed at Chishiya by your side.

“Now what I don’t understand is why you’re fucking here, lover-boy. This is between me and her.”

Chishiya only smiled and you felt him prod something that felt like hard plastic at your back that he was holding in the hand that was slung around your arm. He was trying to tell you that he was carrying something, but you had no idea what it was even after that. 

“I hate you outside of Chishiya,” you confirmed for Niragi. He looked briefly offended, before he settled back into his sneer.

“Bullshit. This all started when Hatter set you up together. It was supposed to be you and me.”

You almost dropped your gun in disgust when you heard Niragi say that. “I would rather shoot myself.”

Niragi pushed himself upwards without pointing his gun at either of you. He drew his gaze to the gun you held that was still facing him and scoffed. “You can barely harm people in games. What makes you think you can kill me?”

“Don’t threaten me,” you lowered your voice dangerously and cocked your own gun shakily in a mock threat. The truth was, he was right. No matter how much you hated Niragi you still couldn't do it. Niragi didn’t miss your trembling hands and deliberately stalked closer to the two of you.

“Face it, (Name). You’ll never be able to hurt me,” Niragi laughed. “Now, which of the two of you should I kill first? Romeo or Juliet?”

“We’re not together,” Chishiya affirmed once more suddenly as his arm dropped off of you while your heart dropped as well. You had said it to minimize the threat of Niragi, but Chishiya didn't have to reciprocate. Niragi paused, almost in confusion and Chishiya took it as his opportunity to strike.

He pushed you to the side without warning and you yelped in pain when you hit the floor. Niragi immediately moved to pull the trigger of his gun when Chishiya threw up a deck of cards which you recognized to be the ones in Hatter’s office. You had no idea how he had acquired them.

“The fuck?” Niragi watched the cards fall for a moment but that was all Chishiya needed. He pulled out a child’s toy gun which somehow spurted fire on Niragi. He stumbled backward by the force of the makeshift flamethrower and fell off the edge of the roof screaming.

Finally, you were able to lower the gun and it clattered to the ground as you squatted on the floor. The stress of the situation being over washed over you at once and you started shaking visibly.

All you saw were Chishiya’s shoes, then he suddenly became eye-level with you too. He wiped the tears threatening to leak from your eyes carefully and pulled you into his arms. 

He kept repeating, “I’m sorry,” while stroking your hair as you sobbed. You stayed like that not because you were crying. He continued to hold you long after the sobs subsided. You stayed like that with him only because you were able to calm down from watching the glittering stars behind him which so closely resembled his own eyes.

[blueiscoool]

Coin reveals little-known Roman ruler

Treasure hunters have unearthed a coin bearing the head of a virtually unknown Roman ruler who briefly held power in Gaul around A.D. 270 as the empire teetered.

It is only the second coin ever found showing the head of Domitianus, who seized power — and the mint — in the breakaway Gallic Empire, which included modern England, France and parts of Germany and lasted for 15 turbulent years.

“We know next to nothing about Domitianus, except that he was ‘punished’ by the Roman Emperor Aurelian for treason,” Richard Abdy, curator of Roman coins at the British Museum, told Reuters. “But at least now we know what he looked like.”

Studied by coin experts

The first coin bearing Domitianus’ head was found in the Loire area of France in 1900, dismissed as a fake because his name was unknown and then lost from sight in a small museum in Nantes until very recently.

“It is now being studied by numismatists. When I showed our coin to the woman who has been working on it she jumped for joy because it bore out everything she had said about hers,” Abdy said, noting the French coin had been dated to A.D. 271.

The Gallic Empire was established in 260, when rule from Rome was weakening, by Postumus. He was succeeded nine years later by Marius, who held the throne for a matter of weeks before being strangled and in turn replaced by Victorinus, who ruled until 271 when he too was murdered.

Domitianus is believed to have murdered Victorinus, who had a habit of raping the wives of his subordinates, before himself being ousted by Tetricus. Tetricus ruled from 271 to 274, when he was defeated by Aurelian and the empire was restored.

Found on farmland

The British coin, which goes on show at the British Museum starting Wednesday, was found on farmland near Oxford just under a year ago as part of a hoard of 5,000 Roman coins fused together in an earthenware pot.

“It is a type of coin we know as a ‘radiant’ because there are rays radiating from his head. It is a two-denarii piece, which at that time, when they were coining money as fast as they could, would have been worth a couple of hours’ work,” Abdy said.

The base metal coin, which originally had a surface coating of silver, is now conservatively estimated to be worth a five-figure sum, Abdy said.

At the time it was minted, the once-mighty Roman Empire was undergoing a period of intense flux.

The years between 270 and 285 were marked by chaos in the empire, with more than 20 different emperors and 30 different pretenders fighting for power. Only one of these leaders died a natural death.

By Jeremy Lovell.

Original posted Feb. 24, 2004.

The Coin Hoard

Until this discovery was made some scholars doubted the historical significance of Domitianus who is named just twice in the historical sources. The Oxfordshire coin provides archaeological evidence suggesting that he successfully proclaimed himself emperor of a breakaway part of the Roman Empire during the reign of Aurelian (AD 270-5).

Richard Abdy (Curator of Roman coins at the British Museum) said that ‘during the 270s AD the fabric of the Roman Empire had become strained. Breakaway empires, like the so-called ‘Gallic Empire’ that included Britain, were established and ruled by a succession of rebel emperors. Finding a coin produced in the name of Domitianus means that he should now be recognised as one such rebel emperor.’

The failure of Roman writers to identify him as a rebel emperor even led the only other coin of Domitianus – found in France in 1900 – to be dismissed as a modern fake. The new discovery was struck from the same dies that were used to produce this earlier find and has therefore put its authenticity beyond any doubt.

Ian Leins (Finds Adviser, Iron Age and Roman coins, Portable Antiquities Scheme) said ‘the portrait on the new coin very closely resembles that of the rebel emperors Victorinus and Tetricus. It is highly possible that other coins of Domitianus exist in the collections of museums and individuals but have escaped detection. It is important that people start to pay more attention to these often neglected finds and record them with their local Finds Liaison Officer.’

[sylkishagsuperiority]

It’s fascinating how two years after the show so many people still wholeheartedly believe the TVA propaganda of Loki and Sylvie being “the same person” and that Loki “fell in love with himself”.

Neither of those statements is true beyond the most surface-level interpretation, and while it works for the casual audience on some level (since most of them will look at it like “oh how funny, of course Loki would fall for himself”), it’s also been used to justify a hate campaign on a completely harmless ship.

Loki and Sylvie are only considered “the same person” because when HWR isolated the events of the Sacred Timeline (presumably the sequence of events that would lead to his birth and not any of his variants), he needed everything in every enslaved universe to happen the exact same way. That means every universe had to have the exact same people in it, making the exact same choices over and over again. But because every universe is its own reality, it wasn’t possible to make everything perfectly identical, and it only worked as long as the TVA was pruning branches 24/7. The universe wants to break free, after all. People want to make their own choices. But under HWR’s tyrannical rule, everyone was allowed only one singular path, a role to play.

That’s what “a Loki” is, at the end of the day. A role, an archetype, a catalyst to the Avengers. As long as the person assigned that role fulfilled their part, it didn’t matter if they were a white man, a Black man, a woman or an alligator. But at the end of the day, every person saddled with that role was their own individual. They’re not one person in multiple bodies. They’re not clones. They’re all completely separate, autonomous beings that exist independently of each other.

That’s where the accusations of Sylki being “transphobic” fall flat, because Loki and Sylvie are not, and have never been, the same person. Sylvie was never meant to be a fem Tom!Loki. She’s from a separate universe and never met him until they were both adults and probably well over a thousand years old. She led a completely different life and has entirely different memories, experiences and skill sets. People who purposely reduce her to a female version of someone else only do it so they have an “ethical” argument against the ship, but their misogynistic refusal to see Sylvie as her own separate person doesn’t change the fact that she’s exactly that and always has been. At no point in time did she ever exist as Tom!Loki, nor did he ever exist as her.

The TVA propaganda reduced variants to the same person because they only saw them as their assigned role on the Sacred Timeline and nothing else. And a lot of people bought it without giving it even a moment’s thought. But now that the Multiverse is free, the concept of variants doesn’t even exist anymore. Now there are bound to be universes where there is no Loki at all, or where the “God of Mischief” isn’t Asgardian, or where they don’t have powers, or a million different possibilities. And all of those people are only bound together by temporal aura - the only indicator the TVA used to identify variants, since DNA is useless (once again, Loki and Sylvie are not genetically related, which frankly should be obvious given we’ve seen an alligator variant and now also a Skrull Kang variant). Hell, for all we know, the temporal aura thing might not even work anymore either, given that the universe is free to do as it pleases instead of following a single predetermined path.

Tl;dr: Loki and Sylvie are not the same person, it was TVA propaganda meant to justify their 24/7 genocide of realities, and Loki didn’t fall in love with himself; Sylvie being as different from him as it gets is kind of the whole point.

[techgirltourney]

TECH GIRL TOURNEY

Hello @doomface here again with another tournament! 

This time I wanted to make a tournament for all the girlies who are robots, cyborgs, programs, or otherwise made of technology somehow! Originally this was gonna be a “robot girl rumble” but I ultimately decided to expand beyond just robots!

---

Some blogs that inspired this one: @artificialkids-2k23-official @yellowcharactershowdown @orange-magicalgirl-showdown @blueboybracket @super-shapeshifter-showdown @autisticgirliesbracket @ghostpolls​ @terrible-child-tournament​

---

RULES.

1. Play nice with each other. No harassment or bullying of any kind will be tolerated. It’s a silly little competition! Stay silly! Stay kind! (Propaganda is okay just be nice to your opponents, don’t just trash talk!) 

2. No irl people, live action characters played by real people are fine though.

3. To be considered a “tech girl” for this competition the character must identify as a girl/woman (or would be comfortable being identified as such or is widely headcanoned as such, I won’t be super picky about this part tbh) and be mostly or entirely made of tech. If your girlie just has a robot toe and nothing else techy she’s probably not gonna get in. (I may put some of these characters up for pre-tournament votes if I’m personally unsure whether or not they count for this tournament so potentially be on the lookout for that!)

4. I reserve the right to reject a submission for any reason. 

5. Please be patient with me. This is my second tournament ever and I have a feeling it’s gonna end up a lot bigger than my first. I may be slow, I may get burnt out, but I hope to be able to see this competition through to the end even if it takes me a while. 

6. Nominations will be accepted only through the google form itself so please don’t send nominations into my askbox/dms thinking they’re gonna count because they won’t!

7. Additional rules regarding nominations will be found in the nomination form itself.

8. If you have any questions not covered by the rules here don’t be shy to ask!

---

NOMINATIONS.

Nominate your tech girls in the google form below!!

Nomination form - closing submissions on May 13th 2023!!!

Nominations now closed. 

[spiderfreedom]

not gonna effortpost about this today because I gotta get work done but real short

I notice this argument being used all the time: "you can't make a definition of 'woman' that does not exclude some people that we call women. therefore, the only good definition for 'women' that includes all people we call woman is 'people who identify as woman.'"

and the thing is, philosophically, "you can't make a definition of {thing} that does not exclude some examples we also call {thing}" is something that applies to almost every category! it's literally a whole philosophical problem of "what is the definition of a chair?" didn't we have a whole meme about how nobody can even agree on what a sandwich is?

it's not something unique to women, tables, horses, sandwiches, salads, or anything else. it is a problem of language itself.

you can apply the exact same argument to other categories: "how do you define 'blackness' without excluding some people we call 'black'?" if you're american, maybe you will use the one-drop rule, in which case halsey is black and anyone who had a single black ancestor four generations ago. but is that actually how we use the word black? does that capture something meaningful about being black in america? how about being black in the world?

let's go further: "how do you define 'transgender' without excluding some people we call 'transgender'?" within the transgender community, there is no real agreement on what it means to be transgender! beyond a vague sense of "identifying as the gender society assigned to you", but even that can be challenged. if a cis (female) woman takes testosterone, starts hanging around trans women, calling herself a trans woman, is confused for a trans woman by the people that she talks to, experiences oppression on the basis of being perceived as a trans woman... can she be considered a trans woman, despite being female?

ultimately "how do you define things" is a philosophy of language question more than anything else. perfect definitions that encapsulate sets neatly do not exist, because the terms we use are socially contingent. when people came up with the word 'table', they didn't also create a logically rigorous definition for it. they just said 'well, this thing here is a table.' and then people argue about the edge cases. because also, nobody actually agrees on the members of sets of every single word!! just like how we all have different ideas of what is and isn't a sandwich!

that's the other thing, people already disagree about what words refer to. someone who has the 5ARD intersex condition has testes but may be raised and socialized as girl because their parents think their genitals kinda look like a vulva. is this person a 'girl/woman'? people are not sure... which makes sense... because it is an edge case. is a stool a chair? is a hotdog a sandwich? is an open sandwich a sandwich? the further you get from the 'prototype', the more people are going to be disagree.

so the entire question 'what is a woman' is just an exercise in confusing philosophy of language framed as saying something very meaningful about the social category of woman. it is not! it is a problem of language that we cannot define 'woman' or 'chair' or 'salad' or 'horse' or 'gamer' in a rigorous way. it is nothing inherent to women, chairs, salads, horses, or gamers.

(but what about science?) good question, what about science? science tries to operate differently from the way laypeople talk about things. scientists take common words, like 'energy', and give them different, more rigorous definitions in order to try to figure something out about the world. for laypeople, 'energy' is something vague and diffuse. for physicists, 'energy' is the force that causes things to move, and its behavior is described by certain mathematical models.

similarly, laypeople may take 'woman' to mean 'a person with breasts and vulva/vagina', but a biologist may have a more rigorous definition of 'female': 'producing large gametes.' this is useful because it helps us see commonalities between creatures that may look really different, like flowers, bedbugs, asparaguses, cats, and humans - all very different creatures where sex looks different, but still have a distinction between 'producing large gametes' and 'producing small gametes' - there's no intermediate gamete. biologists have a different word for what people/animals look like, and that is 'phenotype.' when a parent looks at a child with 5ARD condition, they see the child has no visible penis and thus 'looks 'looks female.' a biologist would say that the child's sex is male (because they have the reproductive equipment to produce sperm, and none of the reproductive equipment to produce ova) but that their phenotype is ambiguous. sex is a binary variable, but human development is a long process where are a lot can happen, and so sexual phenotypes are not variable.

so already we're pretty far from the lay definition, because laypeople don't have the same idea of what sex is as scientists do, and don't distinguish between someone's sex and their appearance - for them, the sex is the appearance. who is right? it depends on what you want to do. scientists want to discover meaningful things about nature, and their definitions are far more useful than the layperson's for that purpose. which definitions are useful is also socially determined - we may feel sympathy for the child with 5ARD, told they were a girl their whole life, but who learns that they have testes. should we continue to treat this child as a girl/woman, or should we encourage them to view themselves as a boy/man? that is a social, cultural, legal argument, not a scientific one. the biological truth is the same regardless of the social, cultural, legal arguments, but there may be a compelling case to act differently. that's on us as humans to decide!

so yeah I'm just tired of hearing the same damn arguments over and over again. "what is a woman? is someone with CAIS a woman? is someone with 5ARD? what if we take a young non-intersex male and give them female hormones?" like this will never take us to where we want to go because it's a philosophy of language question disguised as a scientific one. the real question is, what are we talking about and which definitions will help us in that? if you believe that female people are exploited on the basis of their female bodily functions, then obviously you want to bring attention to that by using the word 'female'! if you want to focus on feminine socialization, then it may be useful to bring up cases of people who may not technically be female but were still raised as them, like Erika/Erik Schinegger, a male (possibly with 5ARD) who was raised as a girl and believed he was a girl for most of his youth.

trying to make a single catchy response to a question of what is 'x' is never going to satisfy everyone, because it cannot, because language is imperfect and real life is messy. scientists try to cut nature at the joints, but their cuts may not look like laypeople's! (and don't get me started on scientists disagreeing on what is a joint and what is not, metaphorically.)

and at its worst, when chasing an ironclad definition, you get bizarre answers that seem detached from reality, like saying 'people with CAIS condition are genotypically male and have underdeveloped testes, so we should treat them as males'. they may be reproductive males, but they have a female phenotype, and are raised as girls, and are literally unreceptive to testosterone - to treat them as 'men' on the basis of developmental or reproductive sex certainly seems to be missing something very important from the picture! see below: a person with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS):

does it really make sense to say this person is a man due to her having testes, which technically makes her reproductively male? is that capturing reality? or are you trying to force reality to fit into your definition because you're afraid that if you cannot create a perfect definition of 'woman', that we will never be able to talk about biology and female oppression?

tl;dr: questions like 'what is a woman' are designed to be time-wasters because they are not actually answerable because language sucks. argue for your operative definition, your context, and move on. and don't be afraid to change definitions based on the context... sometimes reproductive sex is relevant, sometimes phenotype is more important, sometimes socialization is more relevant. this is not weakness, it's recognizing that reality is not so rigid and sometimes you must use a different model to get the understanding you want.

[mouseratz]

hey guys I know there's a lot of anti-trans shit but this one's from Georgia. they're calling it "the woman's rights bill".

I think there might actually be more, but this one caught my attention first. Basically it changes everything relating to gender in many bills to regard to biological sex specifically, and while that's worrying, it doesn't stop there. (it includes obviously making it very difficult to change your license or any kind of ID.)

(14) Laws, rules, and regulations that distinguish between the sexes are subject to intermediate constitutional scrutiny. Intermediate constitutional scrutiny forbids unfair discrimination against similarly situated male and female individuals but allows the law to distinguish between the sexes where such distinctions are substantially related to important governmental objections: and (15) Notwithstanding any provision of state law to the contrary, distinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, living facilities, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, restrooms, and other areas where biology, safety, or privacy are implicated that result in separate accommodations are substantially related to the important governmental objections of protecting the health, safety, and privacy of individuals in such circumstances.

basically, you could get in trouble for "sex discrimination" by not being in your biologically sorted bathroom, locker room, etc. this seems very easy to weaponize.

individuals in such circumstances. (c) Any local school system, or public school thereof, and any state agency, department, or political subdivision that collects vital statistics for the purpose of complying with antidiscrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic, or other data shall identify each individual who is part of the collected data set as either male or female at birth."

pretty much any governmental place, specifically including public schools, can record your sex, that's information they're entitled to.

Title 17 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to criminal procedure, is amended by revising subsection (a) of Code Section 17-4-20.2, relating to Bias Crime Report, requirements, use of reports, and publication, as follows: "(a) Whenever a law enforcement officer investigates an incident of a crime in which it appears that the defendant intentionally selected any victim or group of victims or any property as the object of the offense because of such victim's or group of victims' actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability, or physical disability, whether or not an arrest is made, the officer shall prepare and submit to the law enforcement officer's supervisor or other designated person a written report of the incident entitled 'Bias Crime Report.' Forms for such reports shall be designed and provided by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The report shall include: (1) Names of the parties; (2) Relationship of the parties; (3) Sex and gender of the parties; (4) Race of the parties; (5) Religion of the parties;

SECTION 5. Said title is further amended by revising subsection (b) of Code Section 17-10-17, relating 107 to sentencing of defendants guilty of crimes involving bias or prejudice and identification of 108 increased sentenced, as follows: "(b) Subject to the notice requirement provided in Code Section 17-10-18 and in enhancement of the penalty imposed, if the trier of fact determines beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally selected any victim or group of victims or any property as the object of the offense because of such victim's or group of victims' actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability, or physical disability, the judge imposing sentence shall:

also, very worryingly, sexual orientation & gender are no longer included as reasons for a biased/prejudice crime investigation (aka a hate crime). yup. sexual orientation has been omitted here, not just sex/gender. how are you "lgb without the t" types feeling? it's not a hate crime anymore if you attack someone because they're gay, either, if this goes through.

I don't have a succinct call to action here, I just figure it's good to know. apparently they just.....all decided at once to try to push transphobic bills through.

[charminglygrouped]

Portrait of an Indian Lady, traditionally called the Bibi of John Wombwell (d. 1795), Arthur William Devis

In Calcutta [Arthur William Devis] quickly established himself as one of the leading European painters in India, painting portraits of a number of the most eminent figures among the British community, including Warren Hastings, the Governor-General. [...]

More so than most European artists working in India, however, with the possible exception of Renaldi, Devis’s work in India demonstrates a clear interest in the native population of the Subcontinent – a sensibility that some historians have credited to his experiences in the Pellew Islands. Whilst principally based in Calcutta, he made frequent trips out into the surrounding country to sketch Indian villagers at work. In the autumn of 1786 he travelled as far as Patna, on the south bank of the Ganges in the north eastern state of Bihar. There he made studies of local people engaged in their traditional industries, including paper and saltpetre making, as well as the weaving of stripped cotton carpets, known as satringis, for which Patna was famous. It may be to this trip that the present portrait relates, particularly with the richly stripped textiles of the lady’s divan and the notable cusped archway in the background, typical of India’s northern cities. [...]

Reclining on a richly cushioned divan, wearing a saffron coloured sari and sumptuous jewels, the unknown Indian lady depicted in this portrait is clearly somebody of noble birth and high social status. At her side is a gilt stemmed cup overflowing with jewels, while a bihishti lays the dust in the courtyard beyond. It is a scene of opulent leisure and casual refinery. The composition closely relates to a portrait of Anne Heatly, probably the bibi of Suetonius Grant Heatly, an American born East India Company official who held positions at Chotanagpur, Palamu and Purina. Both paintings share the same compositional elements, including the red bolster and cushions with their green and yellow stripped bordering; the tazza like cup with its hanging pearls; the archway and the background figures; whilst the sitter’s themselves share the same heavy-lidded eyes; soft, flowing drapery and elegantly reclining pose. The portrait of Anne Heatly, which appeared at auction in 2006, was also previously given to Charles Smith. However, following subsequent cleaning and restoration, it has also now been correctly identified as being by Devis. The two paintings, almost mirror images of each other, save for the difference in format (the portrait of Heatly being in landscape), clearly belong to the same moment in the artist’s career.     

Whilst the sitter in the present portrait remains unknown, as Mildred Archer noted, she is too confident in her poise to be an orthodox Muslim woman of rank – who would not have allowed herself to be painted in public – and is most likely the bibi of another high-ranking British official. The term bibi has its roots in the Indian word for ‘princess’ and served as a personalised or intimate reference to the women who first formed relationships with European traders in the seventieth century who were, in fact, mostly princesses of Indian royal families. Young women taken from the royal zenana – sisters, nieces, daughters of the ruling nawab or his brothers – and given in arranged marriages to important European officials, they played an important role in strengthening the diplomatic alliances between a reigning nawab and powerful Company representatives that promoted the political and economic interests of both parties (much in the same way that European royal courts use arranged marriage as a means of strengthening diplomatic ties). Well educated at home by elderly scholars, these noblewomen were literate, often able to speak and read several languages and regional dialects, and schooled in the study of mathematics, history, the natural sciences and medicine. In many cases these marriages produced genuinely happy unions, with the multi-racial offspring they produced further helping to knit the Indian and European communities together.

The custom of high-ranking British Company officials taking an aristocratic Indian mistress continued as both a social and political necessity well into the eighteenth century, to which a number of known portraits of the mistresses of British officials by the likes of Zoffany, Renaldi and James Wales attest. The practice was finally ended by the Marquess Wellesley when he was Governor-General in the 1790s, following which the British and Indian communities became increasing segregated through the course of the nineteenth century.

[Text from Sotheby's]

[coochiequeens]

The same country that convicted a woman of "political gendered violence" for calling a man a man as a while Mexico is "Ranked as the second-highest nation for femicides in Latin America, just below Brazil, Mexico's cases show a sustained rise, recording over 920 in 2022."

By Nuria Muíña García February 17, 2024

The Electoral Tribunal of the Judiciary of Mexico (TEPJF) has convicted Congresswoman Teresa Castell of “gendered violence” towards a trans-identified male politician, Salma Luévano, for referring to him as a “man.” This incident shortly follows news that a former Congressman had similarly been convicted for the exact same “crime” against Luévano.

Castell’s incident date back to March 2023, when Luévano, a Deputy with the governing Morena Party, reported her to the National Electoral Institute for referring to him as “a man” on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). Two months later, the Electoral Tribunal issued a ruling stating that Castell had been found guilty of “political gendered violence,” a conviction which was confirmed by unanimous vote this past week.

The ruling states that Castell’s views constituted “political violence against women because of gender due to several statements made on a YouTube channel … and several posts made on [her] Twitter profile … against trans women and a federal deputy.”

As punishment, Castell must take a course on political violence, both against women because of gender and against LGBTTTIQA+ people. She must also extend a public apology and publish an excerpt of the sentence on her X account.

In addition, she will be catalogued in the National Registry of Persons Sanctioned in Political Matters against Women for Gender Reasons of the National Electoral Institute, a registry that was created to protect female politicians from political violence. Her sentence will also be recorded in the Catalogue of Subjects Sanctioned in Special Sanctioning Proceedings on the website of the Specialized Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal.

In accordance with her sentence, Castell has posted her apology to X.

“An apology is offered to Salma Luévano Luna, because the statements that I proffered on a YouTube program, and on my [X] profile, the latter in collaboration with Oscar Limeta Meléndez, were offensive, stereotyped and generated political violence against his person on the basis of gender.”

Speaking to Reduxx, Congresswoman Castell said there was a silver lining to her conviction in that she felt Mexicans were now becoming aware of the dangers of gender ideology.

“The people of Mexico are beginning to realize what is happening, that this is not a simple matter of dressing as a woman and wanting to be called by a feminine name. No, it goes far beyond only dressing as a woman. It is our rights, it is our victories, and it is our liberties that are being appropriated, that today are being usurped and we have to put a stop to it,” she said.

“It is not a fight of woman against woman and man against man. Here we are fighting a totally unequal and unjust battle: it is a fight of women against men who believe, feel or disguise themselves as women.”

Castell went on to explain that the recent efforts of trans activists to pursue incidents of so-called hate speech have been “backfiring” in the eyes of the public, with more scrutiny being placed on the validity of the “trans genocide” they claim is taking place.

“In these last few months several [trans people] have died, and [activists] wanted to blame me for my hate speech. They vandalized Congress with the word ‘murderer’ and made a lot of fuss. But in the end, the only thing shown was that their deaths are caused either by each other or because of the lifestyle they were leading,” Castell said.

“The problem with them is that they call everything ‘hate speech.’ Well, I will not stop saying that the truth is not hate. What they really hate is the truth.”

Laura Lecuona, the head of WDI Mexico and author of Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers, praised Castell for being vocal in her opposition to gender ideology.

“Teresa Castell is not the only congresswoman who does not agree with the transgender doctrine, but she is the only one who dares to say it out loud, without fear of the consequences,” Lecuona told Reduxx.

Castell was not the first to be targeted by Luévano, who has a well-documented history of suing his political adversaries.

In April of 2022, he sued Federal Deputy Gabriel Quadri for “political violence against women based on gender and violence against LGTBQ people” for 11 posts Quadri made on X.

The court concluded that Quadri had committed political violence against women for calling Luévano “sir” and sentenced him to take two courses, one on political violence against women on the basis of gender and another on violence against LGBTQ people. He was also required to post a public apology to Luévano, and to refrain from “acts that generate violence or discrimination” towards any person.

Most recently, former Congressman Rodrigo Iván Cortés was also convicted of “gender-based political violence,” for social media posts on X and Facebook in which he referred to Luévano as a “man who calls himself a woman.”

Luévano filed a complaint against Cortés, arguing that 9 social media posts on X and Facebook violated his alleged right to be “recognized as a woman.” Cortés was also charged with “gender-based political violence” because Luévano is a deputy in the Mexican Congress.

Following his conviction, the Superior Chamber imposed a fine of $1,130 USD, and ordered Cortés to publish an apology daily on his social media accounts for 30 days.

Cortés was also ordered to take a course on “gender-based political violence” and was entered into the National Registry of Persons Sanctioned in Political Matters against Women.

Luévano celebrated the ruling against Castell on social media.

“Another blow to the far right and to transphobia! No freedom of expression should infringe on people’s rights, so misgendering and invalidating a trans woman’s identity is VIOLENCE and should be punished.”

Luévano is not the only trans-identified male representative in Mexico’s congress, and his Morena Party colleague, María Clemente, is similarly known for attacking those opposed to gender ideology.

Meanwhile......

In 2022, it was estimated that the national femicide rate in Mexico stood at 1.43 cases per 100,000 women. Three years earlier, the number of Mexican women murdered on account of their gender reached the highest rate at least since 2017, exceeding 1.5 victims per 100,000 female inhabitants.

Femicides still on the rise

Ranked as the second-highest nation for femicides in Latin America, just below Brazil, Mexico's cases show a sustained rise, recording over 920 in 2022. This count is perceived as even higher by most of the population due to the substantial number of unreported and uninvestigated instances. The prevalent concern among the public centers around the consistent nature of these aggressive crimes. A disconcerting pattern emerges, with many perpetrators having familial or communal affiliations. In response, the government has introduced social initiatives, including helplines, but the outcomes have fallen short of expectations. Moreover, the government's lack of interest and effectiveness has spurred social activism, advocating for justice and enhanced safety measures for the female population.

Gender gap in the economy

Embedded within a cultural framework marked by entrenched sexist attitudes, stereotypes, and patriarchal norms, Mexico holds the 32nd position on the global gender index. This index underscores a heightened gender disparity concerning economic participation, culminating in a widening gender pay gap. Over time, female labor force participation has consistently trailed that of their male counterparts, with women predominantly occupying informal employment positions and accounting for around two-thirds of the female population working non-remunerated jobs. Furthermore, glaring disparities are more evident in media and governmental roles.

[velvetvexations]

This Warless Weekend...I accidentally broke the one rule of Warless Weekend sending "Maya Henry is in fact a trans woman lol" to a TERF. Sigh. Forgive me, Velvet Nation.

The post was discovered because I was once again going through radblr looking for screenshots to prove beyond the shadow of the doubt that radfems hate even cis men, let alone trans men. It's going to be a multi-day affair because I want to include so many examples that when you click "read more" it'll be like unraveling an ancient scroll that drops to the floor and rolls down several flights of stairs in a cartoon.

I've also been debating a radfem who's not...the TERFiest? Hard to classify someone who thinks private spaces should be sex-segregated for now but corrects anons who misgender me and believes radfems shouldn't be so hostile to trans women* because they're "allies of the feminist revolution." My only concern is that my (mostly AFAB trans!) followers would see me interacting with someone who has those radfemmy beliefs in a way that isn't pure hostility and be made to feel unsafe as a result. I have no illusions that his radical feminist beliefs are harmful. But am I being too nice, regardless? I've been personally convinced he sincerely holds beliefs that makes other radfems hate him, thus the anon he got misgendering me and saying he should stop talking to me because I'm a homophobe.** Sometimes good people get praxis wrong.

And TRFs will say "ooh, look at Velvet, being courteous to people who self-identify as radfems, she'd never do that for transfems she slanders as TRFs." First of all, I think a lot of non-transfems are TRFs. Secondly, I do do that for TRFs, all the fucking time! As with anyone else when they're not just horribly cruel I do actually go to extreme lengths to be polite, approaching them as a submissive doormat of a person, offering the most politely worded but in-depth critique of their bullshit you could possibly imagine. I've started several posts of such a nature with "please take this in good faith" and at least once I've DM'd someone after reblogging them to go the extra mile assuring them I'm not trying to take a swing at them.

I think talking to people is good and healthy and should be encouraged, idk. That doesn't go for someone who thinks all trans women are monsters who want to abuse Trve Wymbyn, or that all trans men are deluded victims/fetishisers of cis gay men/escaping into privilege.*** Most radfems, like outright conservatives, are 100% bugfuck evil and do not deserve anything other than mockery and scorn. But if there's a chance you might be able to connect with an intellectually and morally honest person who seems to be going for what they truly believe is best for everyone...I think you should go for it.

I desperately want to believe people when it seems like they're really honestly trying out of sincere moral impulses and are truly capable of treating others with respect rather than it being an enemy psyop. I'm trying to not let my fear of being gullible deter me from offering my hand to people when our differences might be bridgeable.

*and other trans people, plus those who are dysphoric but do not consider themselves trans

**I believe they were referring to when I said homosexuality was also an atypical arousal pattern in response to someone pointing at a basic ass furry to say trans people were ridden with paraphilias

***I just realized how diverse the "explanations" for AFAB trans people are. With how much transphobia relies on being offensive to Trve Wymbyn you have to get creative to explain why it's also bad when one of their own contracts the mind virus and it's so obviously completely incoherent

[womenvoices]

Transgenders Should Not Enter Single-Sex Spaces That Do Not Align With Their Biological Sex

Single-sex spaces are single-sex for a reason. Bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, prison cells, and more are more often than not separated by sex to ensure the privacy and safety of those within; however, gender ideology threatens the privacy and safety provided by these single-sex environments by advocating for biological men to be able to enter women’s spaces. While many say that transgender people should have access to places that correlate with their self-identified gender to promote equality and inclusion, in practice, this actually harms people, especially women and girls by putting them in vulnerable situations, villainizing them, and pushing them aside to accommodate the feelings of a small group of people.

Allowing biological men to use the same facilities as women puts women and girls in vulnerable and potentially dangerous situations. When changing in a female locker room, the women inside are consenting to seeing and being seen by other women in various stages of dress. Allowing men, no matter how they identify or present themselves, into a female locker room opens a door that would allow opportunities for assault, harassment, and overall discomfort of the women inside. This is not just hypothetical. This has happened and will continue to happen unless men are banned from women’s spaces. In Xenia, Ohio, a trans-identifying biological man entered a female locker room at a local YMCA and was reportedly entirely exposed to the women within the locker room who did not consent to seeing or being seen by an indecent man (Faith). An inmate by the name of Rose Doe was raped and is now “scarred for the rest of [her] life” by a trans-identifying male who she was forced to be cellmates with (Glorioso et al.). A self-identified trans woman known as Desiree Anderson admitted to climbing into the same bed as a woman residing in a women’s shelter in Ontario, Canada and sexually assaulting her (Brown). Another trans woman, known as Isla Bryson, was placed in a female prison in Scotland and took advantage of this by raping two women inside the prison (The Guardian). These are just some examples of biological men using their self-proclaimed identity to have access to female only spaces and take advantage of those within said spaces. These instances are not isolated. Allowing anyone who “identifies” as a woman into single-sex spaces grants them access and opportunity to take advantage of those within. To stop this from happening, trans women need to be banned from female-exclusive spaces, so that women have a safe space away from the opposite sex. An exception for even just one trans woman to this rule is a gateway towards an exception for all.

Biological men using female-only facilities contributes to the silencing and scrutinizing of women speaking out. Many women are reasonably uncomfortable with biological men in single-sex spaces; however, when opening up about their discomfort, women are often met with backlash from people accusing them of bigotry or “transphobia” for not letting men in their spaces with no questions asked. J.K. Rowling, famous author of the Harry Potter book series, receives constant threats because she has spoken up about the issue. She is portrayed by the media as problematic and bigoted, all because she advocates for women’s rights and safety. Paula Scanlan, a former swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, also spoke out about having to share a locker room with biological male, Lia Thomas. She says that would open her phone and have hundreds of hate messages all because she spoke about her experience and how it was unfair and made her uncomfortable (Mew). The backlash these women and many others like them have received discourage other women like them from speaking up about their experiences with biological men in female spaces, and this can even have effects beyond this particular issue. Seeing women be scrutinized for speaking out discourages women who have suffered all kinds of harassment and misogyny from speaking out about what they have experienced. Allowing biological men into female only spaces and disguising it as equality and progressiveness sets women up to be villainized when they oppose the intrusion of biological men in female spaces.

Allowing biological men access to female-exclusive spaces also pushes aside the rights and safety of women to affirm the feelings of trans-identifying biological males. Recently, a woman who was a member at a Planet Fitness in Alaska had her membership revoked because she saw a man in the women’s locker room and took a photo to show to the staff. The presence of a man in the female locker room made the woman uncomfortable; however, upon reporting the incident, the woman had her gym membership revoked and the man continues to use the female locker room at the gym without so much as a slap on the wrist all because he is a self-proclaimed woman. In her testimony, Paula Scanlan says that when she and her teammates spoke up about the discomfort that a transgender teammate in their locker room was causing them, the university responded by essentially saying that the girls were the problem and they needed to be more open-minded or as Scanlan put it, “move over and shut up” (Scanlan). These instances are not isolated either. Women all over are forced to comply with rules that accommodate transgender women being allowed in their spaces. These women’s feelings are dismissed and minimized all to affirm the “identity” a biological male has chosen for themself insinuating that these men’s feelings are more important than the feelings, rights, and safety of women.

In conclusion, single-sex spaces need to remain single-sex. While no one has a right to choose how someone else presents or identifies themselves, women do have a right to female-exclusive spaces that should not be compromised because a small group of people want to feel validated. Allowing biological men in female only spaces can make the women inside very uncomfortable or even put them in danger, the ideology discourages women who have experienced this from speaking out, and sends the message that the feelings of trans-identifying males triumph over the safety of half the population.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Works Cited

Brown, Jon. “Trans woman crawled into bed with, assaulted female resident at women’s shelter:police.” Fox News, 20 April 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/world/trans-woman-crawled-bed-assaulted-female-resident-womens-shelter-police. 

Glorioso, Chris., Sola, Kristina. “Man posing as transgender woman raped female prisoner at Rikers, lawsuit says.” NBC New York, 24 January 2024, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-transgender-woman-raped-female-prisoner-at-rikers-lawsuit-says/5067904/. 

Mew, Andrea. “From Athletics to Activism, Paula Scanlan Isn’t Afraid to Rock the Boat.” Independent Women’s Forum, https://www.iwf.org/female-athlete-stories/paula-scanlan/. Accessed 7 May 2024.

Penley, Taylor. “Woman banned by Planet Fitness for photographing trans member vows to keep fighting.” Fox News, 29 March 2024, https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/woman-banned-planet-fitness-transgender. 

Paula Scanlan. U.S. Congress. Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.” 

“Trans woman guilty of raping two women remanded in female prison in Scotland.” The Guardian, 25 January 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/25/trans-woman-isla-bryson-guilty-raping-two-women-remanded-in-female-prison-scotland. 

[shannendoherty-fans]

August 1995 - Sky Magazine

Shiny Happy Person

She was the tantrum-hurling, prime-time bad chick. Not any more. Shannen Doherty has just finished filming what promises to be one of the most exciting films of the year, Clerks director Kevin Sith's second movie Mallrats.

Martin Pearson talks to the new soft-centred Shannen. Photos by Naomi Kaltman.

"If somebody came to me now," says Shannen Doherty, looking me straight in the eye, "and said 'Let's go out,' would I go to a club? No way! What's the point? This morning I forgot I was coming here and I was like, 'Mmm, this could be good. Sit here in my sweats, hang out in my house all day with my dogs and just kick back.""

Gone are the days when Shannen Doherty and her 90210 alter ego Brenda "The Bitch" Walsh seemed virtually indistinguishable and Doherty apparently used to spend much of her time being ejected from just about every nightclub in Los Angeles, usually in tears.

Over the past year, 24-year-old Doherty has been quietly working to turn her career around. And it may well have worked. Kevin Smith, the young New Jersey director who made the brilliant, micro-budget comedy Clerks, about a day in the life of two bored convenience store workers, has chosen Doherty as the star of his next, considerably bigger budget movie Mallrats. Filming – two months in a shopping mall in the depths of suburban Minnesota – has just finished, the movie is set for an autumn American release and no, there weren't any fights on the set.

"Working with Shannen on the film was a dream," says Smith, a scruffy, distinctly un-Hollywood, non-luvvie type still in his early 20s, and the kind of guy you can't imagine sitting around watching Beverly Hills 90210, unless he was heavily taking the piss out of it with his mates. "Her reputation may be unmatched," continues Smith, "but people grow and change. You can't stay an asshole forever." Doherty returns the favour. "I think Kevin is one of our great new talents," she says. "He's a brilliant, brilliant writer."

Mallrats takes place in a suburban shopping mall instead of Clerks' corner store, but, according to Doherty, despite the budget and the buzz around the project (Smith is one of the hottest of the post-Tarantino young directors) the same easy-going mentality rules. "Mallrats deals with relationships, kids who hang out at the mall and don't do anything." Doherty plays a young woman who is seriously frustrated with her under-achieving boyfriend. Though you can't see Doherty, a self-confessed "Southern Baptist Republican", approving of the lifestyle in Mallrats, as in American she must at least approve of the mall bit.

"I hate malls!" she laughs. "What could be worse? You're trapped in a closed building and getting out is so much effort. I don't understand why people like hanging out there, except that it must be something to do with safety."

The mall mentality may be beyond her understanding, but Doherty strongly identifies with her character's emotions. In the film, what she wants is a mature relationship, instead of having to sneak past her boyfriend's parents - he's the kind of guy who still lives at home - every time she wants to see him. "She just wants what every woman wants." Doherty says. "She's a little further along than him. She wants a mature, stable relationship, where he's attentive. The whole deal - someone who tells you that he cares about you and loves you every single day, tells you that you're beautiful and pulls the chair out for you. He's not even meeting her halfway on that.

"It's like when you love someone and sort of excuse them for their faults," she continues. "That's what I've found in my life. Anyone I've loved before had so many faults that you could fight over them every single day-and you usually do- but then at some point you have to say, 'OK, so this is what they're actually like, and you have to excuse them for that."

Doherty has evidently learned a great deal from her ill-fated, tabloid- trumpeted five-month marriage to Ashley Hamilton, son of wrinkly old supertanned smoothie George Hamilton. Ashley turned out to have a serious drug habit, something Doherty says she found out about too late.

"I married him not knowing," she says, "and when you find out some- thing like that it's a different emotion. 'You lied to me: you're not the per- son I thought you were. I still think he's very sweet and kind-hearted in- side. He's just going through a lot of problems right now, and unfortunate- ly I stuck it out for as long as I could before I had to worry about myself."

Shannen Doherty is surprisingly soft-spoken, loud only when animated, smokes endless Marlboros, and for our interview turns up wearing a Gap-ad-simple outfit of blue jeans and white T-shirt with next-to-no make-up. At the interview-lunchtime on a baking hot afternoon in an LA garden-she exudes a quiet but serious selfconfidence.

We chat about Marlon Brando's book and the tragedy of his daughter's recent suicide. Shannen tells me she has recently moved into a three-storey Spanish-style house in a secluded valley of the Hollywood hills (she's a compulsive house-mover: "I have a problem with staying in one place too long"). She lives there alone, with her two dogs, a German Shepherd called Alfic and an 18-month-old Rottweiler pup called Myra, which apparently likes nothing more than shagging people's thighs. Doherty is already thinking ahead to the day when Myra grows up. "Can you imagine having this hundred-pound Rott attached to your leg?"

In person Doherty looks barely older than the teenager who began her TV career in Little House on the Prairie (Shannen-junkies can currently catch the very young Ms Doherty in C4's Sunday repeats). "Going from child star to adult was very easy," she says of her early days. "I grew up on TV – it was like, 'OK, let's put her in this series and this series and this series. The most difficult transition is going from TV to film, though people always forget I was in Heathers (the gloriously bitchy 1989 black come- dy co-starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater). That's hard."

Doherty is no trendy 90s slacker movie star – she was a child star who considers herself primarily a working actress. If anything has helped Doherty come back from the brink of permanent tabloid notoriety, it's the tough Protestant work ethic that was, she says, impressed on her by her parents.

"They made me the person I am today, instilling my beliefs inside of me," she says sternly. Doherty was born in the God-fearing South and reared as a conservative, a Baptist and "a total goofball". The family moved to LA when she was seven. Her mother runs a beauty salon; her father's a New York-born banker, "very serious and very intense, but light-hearted as well. I'm very like him." She insists she was always a quiet child, either working or studying, not even rebelling against her family as a teenager. She never listened to music like other kids, and never hung out at the mall or got into trouble with boys, booze or drugs. In other words, she was anything but a normal American teenager.

Instead of a Beverly Hills High-alike, Doherty went to the Lycée Français, an old-fashioned, European-style school which emphasised hard work and discipline over convertible Corvettes and breast enlargements. "From that school I could have gone to pretty much any Ivy League college," she says. But that never made sense to the ambitious young Doherty. "What was I going to do? Go study for four years to be a lawyer and still make a fraction of what I'm making now."

All this sounds weird coming from the woman who has spent the last few years as the subject of ugly stories of tantrums on set, of guns pulled and boyfriends bashed.

"Reflecting on it now, I wonder where all that press came from," she ponders. "I don't know how much 90210 thrived on it. If you think about it, that press did quite a bit for the show… who knows? It benefits everyone but the actor. Everybody else makes out fine; everybody else gets out without a wound and meanwhile I come out crippled. I certainly went through that – oh my God!"

So is she saying that all those stories were made up by the press? Well, she had her bad days, she admits. Some of those scandalous headlines were true. "In all fairness, to myself and to people who gave it to me. I would say…" Doherty agonises for a few moments… "I'd say it was true maybe… 50/50? But not really… maybe 60/40, or even 70/30." Whatever the precise percentage, it's clear she had a major attitude problem. "I can certainly recall times when I was up at my house, going 'Ohhhhhhh! What am I doing?" she admits, clutching her head in her hands and laughing. "I was literally hitting myself over the head. But that was then. Now I look back it's something that, in a very, very odd way, it's good I went through." (Not so good for everyone else, maybe, but hey, let's be forgiving here.) "Most people go through that when they're a little older. I went through it very early and that's great, because now I'm in this very stable place."

One thing she says she could never come to terms with was her reputation as a hardcore Hollywood-brat club-fiend. given "the 5am starts, 16-hour days" she was working at the time on Beverly Hills 90210. "I'd go out on the weekends so what?" she splutters indignantly. "The people who gave me that reputation were the club owners who wanted me to go there all the time. It was like I'd been there once, then all of a sudden I'm a regular." Nowadays clubbing is the very last thing she thinks about. "I'm a workaholic by nature," she explains, "so for me to have downtime is really unusual. When I can, I do nothing. I'm a homebody. It takes a real effort for me to leave my house."

Part of the "very stable place" she refers to is provided by her current partner, Amongst Friends director Rob Weiss. Doherty appears to be taking the new relationship a lot slower than her last disastrous whirlwind romance, and given that her personal life has often been front page news, is understandably reluctant to talk too much about it. For example, she's recently been said to be up for a part in Weiss's latest project, a violent thriller tentatively titled Milk Bar. True?

"I read that article too," she shoots back, smiling. "I don't know if it's true. He is doing a film, but whether I'm going to be in it or not is yet to be decided. It'll probably clash with another film that I'm committed to, so in that sense it probably won't happen."

On the topic of what it would be like working with Weiss she is diplomatic: "It would take a lot of thinking about, because to have a personal and professional relationship is really hard. I think he's a brilliant director, and he's only going to get better the older he gets and the more he learns and opens himself up. Eventually I'd like to work with him, even if we're not together any more. Actually," she wriggles in her chair, then laughs, "it'd probably be easier to work with him if we weren't together.

"I've never let my personal life interfere with my work." she continues, surely a little ingenuously, as if in explanation. "The most important thing to me right now is my work. It's something I'm extremely passionate about, and I would never do anything to jeopardise it. I always show up on time, I always know my lines and I always give 100 per cent to my job. I pride myself on being professional."

Doherty is used to being a Hollywood insider, after all she's been in the business since she was a kid. But she still enjoys a good gossip. Like the time she met Jack Nicholson on a movie set and ended up having a cosy chat in his trailer. When Nicholson made his inevitable pass Doherty was so nervous she turned and fled. "I just said, 'Uh, I've got to find my friend and ran." she laughs. "But when I got to the door I was so flustered I couldn't get it open. So he came up behind me and kind of brushed against me as he opened the door. I almost fell out. It was a very undignified exit… but he's so charming, he's a brilliant man."

Like most actresses, though, she's keen to point out the downsides of fame: "Sometimes you do realise that you're different. But for the most part it's just something I'm used to. Like recently, one of my friends was having a birthday party at a nightclub and I had to explain to her that I couldn't go. How could I go in without being noticed and then harassed by the paparazzi outside? And then I'd see myself on TV with them attaching some stupid remark to it." Doherty says that she deliberately chooses her friends from wider circles than Hollywood's incestuous club circuit. Her fellow actors, it seems, are not her favourite kind of friend. "Why would I want to hang out with actors? That would be like surrounding myself with a bunch of Shannens," she squeals. "With people that are identical to me? What am I going to learn from them? Nothing. I do have a couple of friends who are, but… I mean, I wouldn't go out with a male actor…"

Doherty is, she says. "very picky, very protective" when it comes to forming close friendships. Possibly as a result of being confined to the restrictions of a formula teen-TV show for such a long time, she's now determined to expand her horizons. She intends to work on an "amazing independent New York street movie" soon and has written her own script, which she plans to make herself.

"It's twisted," she says, smiling, "It's about a woman who is extremely strong and a man who does her wrong. She goes insane. I wrote it because I think that there are so many male characters in the movies who go completely psychotic and hurt women. But you never see a woman doing that. I wanted to make a movie where men would be sitting in the theatre going 'Oh my God!" And women were like "Yeah!' I'd just like women to live out their fantasy, maybe in one of my films."

If the tabloids are to be believed, Doherty is alleged to have once pulled a gun on a former boyfriend. So what exactly do her revenge fantasies involve? "Well… I've never really wanted to kill a man before," she deliberates, choosing her words carefully, "but I would imagine that… Er, well, I've had some friends who have…"

Doherty says she's now almost certain that LA is not the place she wants to live. In a week or two she's going to New York for a film, but plans to go house-hunting too. She half expects to end up staying there for good. She seems more than ready to make the final move. A new home, a new city, a new career. But that doesn't mean abandoning the determined – even headstrong – Shannen Doherty of old.

"I'm never going to be the type of person who walks away from those things I believe," she says evenly. "I would always take my stand. But now I know there's a right way of doing it and a wrong way. I think recently I've really learned," she clears her throat, lights the last Marlboro and grins checkily, "…the art of diplomacy."

[genderkoolaid]

do you have any advice for figuring out if you're multigender? i think i might be, but in a kind of "both all and none" kind of way? (i actually use the term schrodigender like schrodinger's cat) but i'm really interested in hearing any thoughts you have on determining if you're multigender!

To give you a feel for what my personal journey of multigender discovery was like:

It heavily involved me going back and forth between identities, basically constantly questioning, since I first realized I was queer. I would identify as one thing, then start questioning it (often out of longing for another identity), and then be thrust into the questioning cycle, find something I felt worked, and rinse and repeat. I'd go from being a gay trans guy to a nonbinary lesbian repeatedly over months and years, and it caused me a lot of distress because I felt completely unable to understand myself on any level. At lot of this was worsened by the fact that I was influenced by a lot of exorsexist exlus rhetoric, so any connections I had to multigender identities (like omnique, for example, or even genderfluid!! exclus exorsexism was/is actual poison) was cut off and I forced myself into the idea that my identity had to Make Sense and Fit The Rules. At some point I started getting out of that worldview and accepted, on some level, that I was multigender, but I mostly identified as transneutral and kind of downplayed every part of my gender. It wasn't until I started learning about the idea of transandrophobia that I really started embracing my male identity strongly, which then allowed me to interact more strongly with my womanhood & really, truly accept the entirety of my multigender, multi-sexual identity.

If you have found yourself constantly going back and forth, never being able to be satisfied with one identity for long and continuing to find yourself envious or longing for other identities, that may be a sign you are multigender. For me, I've also experienced a weird mix of... every gender option, including neutral, feeling like a "technically yes, but actually no" kind of thing? Like, if I have to check a box, picking "woman" doesn't feel like the worst, but it also doesn't feel right. But the same goes for "man" or "nonbinary" (which is why I usually pick "decline to say"). Every option feels like its almost right, but the assumption that I have to be only one makes any one response feel like a lie. There's also a sort of feeling of never being entirely comfortable in any gender-based group, like you can never fully belong no matter where you go and will always be some kind of pretender. On a more positive note, I've found myself the happiest so far when I have multiple different groups of people gendering me differently. Last semester I had some teachers/classmates that called me Antonia and used she/her, some that called me Antonio and used he/him, and some that used either/or and would use they/them, and it made me really happy! Being able to be seen as one thing by one person and something totally different by another has been the most validating gender experience ever, far beyond any single incident of gendering.

This is all just my experience, but I hope it might be helpful to compare it to whatever you have experienced and see if anything strikes you. Gender is a messy thing & I wish you good luck <3

[theravenpiper]

The Color of Éowyn’s Eyes: Economy of Description

You remember Éowyn, the niece of the King of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings? The killer of the Nazgûl , for whom the confines of a woman’s life were not enough? You should remember her; she’s one of Tolkien’s only woman characters as well as one of his most fully realized. So try to tell me what color her eyes were, and I’ll suggest something important about description.

From the movies, or the fact that Rohirrim were based on the Anglo Saxons, you might deduce that her eyes were blue. However, no one can be sure, because her eye color is never mentioned. Not once. The closest Tolkien comes is when Aragorn observes a feeling of compassion in her eyes for her uncle’s condition. Éowyn’s eye color is irrelevant to her story and those who want to know it are likely to fill in the details for themselves. Readers don’t need to be given everything about her to appreciate her.

This observation runs contrary to the advice often given to beginning writers. Take, for example, bibisco, an open source equivalent of Scrivener. Bibisco’s first tip to users is that “in order to write believable characters, you must know everything about them.” All of them, apparently, from your protagonists down to the walk-ons. To help you, bibisco offers nearly a hundred different categories to fill, divided into categories like personal data, physical description, behavior, attitudes, psychology, ideas and passions. Under psychology, for instance, you are asked for “Each and every aspect of psychology.” The idea is silly beyond words, yet reviewers nod solemnly at it.

I don’t know about you, but that level of preparation would leave me with no desire to write at all. Just as importantly, it allows no space for the alterations of character due to the development of the plot, whose discoveries are one of the delights of writing.

Moreover, most of that information will never fit into the story. The days of Thomas Hardy starting a novel with a whole chapter of description are over a century past. Modern novels have no place for more than the essentials: the relevant physical descriptions and gestures are mostly all that readers will endure. And even then, you generally have to be selective. It is considered clumsy, these days, to pause the story for an info dump that reads like a police dossier. If more details prove necessary, you can give them as they become useful. For example, Tolkien might have chosen to give the color of Eowyn’s eyes from the perspective of Faramir as he proposes to her and gazes soulfully into them. Be careful, though, not to overdo the gradualism and have a character refer to his pale forehead as he brushes his ash-blonde hair out of his sea-green eyes – that’s just clumsy writing.

So how do you decide how much description is enough? In his master class, Neil Gaiman suggests that the general rule for any description is to ask how any object stands out from the rest. In the case of characters, I suggest asking yourself what you would notice when meeting the character for the first time. Is there a physical feature that is unusual? Something about the way they move? Or talk? Occupy physical space? Interact with others? It could even be the fact that nothing about them stands out (which might be a useful trait for a spy). Probably, you only have space for two or three features before the patience of the modern reader wears thin, so you can choose only what helps identifies the character, or anything that advances the plot. For instance, if you know there’s a scene coming up where the character needs to shout a warning, you could add some drama and character development by giving them a stutter to overcome. But you need to be economical.

One effective but difficult way to be economical in your description is to choose a theme in the details you choose. For example, if you describe a man as being as expressionless as a sheet of iron, and standing as immobile as a suit of armor, you create the impression of a hard, formidable person. Similarly, if you describe a woman in terms of the rich fabrics and embroideries she wears, you make her sound rich and fashion-conscious.

More simply, you can use a metaphor. The past master of description by metaphor was the mystery writer Raymond Chandler,who not only created vivid characters using metaphors, but let readers fill in the details and gave an impression of the viewpoint character in the description. Often, too, the metaphors were hilarious. For example, Chandler described one character as being “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” Another character described himself as being “an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” Probably his best known description remains, “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Notice how these examples concentrate on the impression that a character creates, leaving the reader to fill in most physical details. Chandler has been parodied so many times that many of his descriptions seem too over the top today, but a more subdued version of his technique remains possible. For instance, I recently described a character as looking like a plant that had been left unwatered for too long.

All these approaches to description demand thought and economy. All, too, are far more demanding than the encyclopedia-like info dump that novice writers often feel is required. But they are also more effective and efficient, and can move a story along in more way than one.

[maklodes]

Sometimes you’ll see stuff like leftists saying “people who call themselves ‘centrists’ are really just right-wing” or hardcore MAGA Republicans saying “Liz Cheney is really left-wing” or the like.

How common is it for people to be deceptive or delusional about their political orientation? In some cases, there are political views that are just beyond the pale of polite society that many people might be inclined to hide, like fascists, Marxist-Leninists, Islamic theocracy advocates, etc. This doesn’t seem to be the case for things like “that self-proclaimed ‘centrist YouTuber’ is actually right wing” and such.

I suppose one circumstance in which people could end up being incorrect about their political orientation – or, at least, that their terminology for their political orientation has become idiosyncratic –  is when their substantive views have changed to one thing, but their identity lags behind. You’re a Conservative. You’ve always been a Conservative, just like your parents were Conservatives. Donald Trump’s brazen criminality offends you! Of course that doesn’t make you not-a-Conservative. Conservatives believe in the Rule of Law!

So you’re an anti-Trump conservative. You engage more with anti-Trump people – a few fellow conservatives, many not – and read more op-eds and such from people who believe in holding Trump to account. You also read some of their other points – about how much more unequal income distribution has become since the 1970s, about how weak the evidence is that taxes are as destructive of prosperity as you had thought, as demonstrated by natural experiments involving Kansas policies, etc.

So now you’re turning into a Conservative who also thinks maybe we should tax the rich more in addition to being a never-Trumper. Meanwhile, you’re reading a story about a woman who really wanted a baby, but when she got pregnant the baby had a disorder that would render it incapable of life outside the womb, and also probably render the mother sterile and possibly kill her if the pregnancy proceeded to birth, and the challenges she faced in the light of pro-life laws, and you’re starting to turn into a Conservative who wants Trump in jail, wants higher taxes on the rich, and is pro-choice...

Another circumstance, I suppose, is one in which you’ve established connections and a certain pre-established cachet as having one orientation. Openly switching would burn too many bridges. Maybe you’ve identified as a Liberal, and you think putting trans women on the same sports teams as cis women is ridiculous. You start seeing a lot of other things you don’t like in liberal ideas. Maybe deep down, unlike the self-identified Conservative in the paragraphs above, you recognize that liberal is no longer the best label for you, but you just don’t want to throw away the ties that you have with liberalism, so you continue to insist – not entirely honestly – that you are a liberal.

Are there other circumstances in which people are likely to be wrong about their politics? IDK. What do you think, chat?