#especially when all of this trans/non-binary stuff is still so new and radical

[allisonreader]

My heart hurts. Not physically, but emotionally. I don't like the news, I tend to avoid actively searching it out, for that exact reason. I ache because as people we just can't seem to get along. Learn to compromise and fully try to understand the other side. It's exhausting to understand why people are against certain things, even when it's the opposite of what I personally believe in.

[randomizepoem]

Yeah sorry this will be long a fuck.

I'll be honest and say I'm guilty of being an ass to people a lot on the internet. It's a bad behaviour I'm trying to correct.

We're reaching a point in this conversation where I don't have much else to contribute: I don't live in the US, I don't know you or your life, I cannot possibly give more specific ideas. More so, I can't really tell you to do stuff I believe is useless in general.

I'm a brazilian non-binary communist, organized in a party. Brazil is a country that had less years in a "democracy" than it spent under various dictatorships, and is one of the countries that most kills trans woman in the world.

This is what I meant at the end there: being trans in Brazil is already dangerous by itself. They'll come for us even if we do nothing wrong, nothing against them, just existing is dangerous enough.

And yet, we live. And yet we fight. In our last congressional elections we elected two trans woman to federal congress. One of them fights like hell for everyone and everything that is important to the minorities and working people of Brazil.

There are absolutely things that can be done under the current system. My party is new, can't participate directly in the municipal elections this year, but we have a set agenda, and by these guidelines we'll support some candidates.

But only the candidates that align with our goals. The goal of revolution? Preferably, but no: the goals of the working class and the oppressed minorities of our country.

Do we believe that's enough? No. We're leninists, we believe that the participation on elections and even in the government itself serves only to expose the system for what it is and whose it's for. We understand that even if we elect a true communist as president, that won't bring the revolution alone - but signals that were very close.

However, I understand that you don't believe a revolution is possible in the US, and is afraid of losing people during one. That fear is not unfounded. It's true: revolutions tend to be violent and the US bourgeoisie won't go down passively. Yes, being a organized communist in the US is a dangerous thing.

Though luck, guys.

Have you noticed how the system reacts to even tame reforms, political programs that don't even aim to change the system, just improve it a bit in favor of poor folks?

Brazilian last dictatorship was in response to a fucking land reform much like the ones the US did. Nothing socialist about it and yet we lived 20+ years under a very brutal regime because of it.

I jumped into this conversation because I see the you guys - and when I say you all, you guys, I'm not taking about you especially, in talking about US leftists and liberals in general - going into the same stupid soft lock that the militants of the Workers Party (PT) here are in right now.

In 2002 Brazil elected Lula as president. You might have heard of him. In the 70's and 80's, during the dictatorship,he was a big radical union guy. A big leadership on general strikes in the heart of Brazilian capitalism. In the 00's, he became very liberal. Progressive, yes, but liberal, in the correct sense of liberalism. His first two terms were great, Brazil became very rich and he lifted a lot of people from poverty.

In 2010, we elected his protegee, Dilma, first woman president of Brazil. During the dictatorship she was a guerrilla warrior. Got arrested and tortured by the regime. In the 10's, she was even more liberal than Lula. She did everything the bankers and political elite wanted and she still suffered a coup d'etat for it.

It was a perfect shit storm: In 2013 the bus fares got raised by 20 cents, prompting a huge movement of protests across the country that quickly got out of control and became a very bland "against everything" protest. Regardless, it plummeted dilma's popularity and she did absolutely nothing about it. By 2016 she was seen as the devil incarnate and got impeached, which in Brazil actually means something, as she immediately got booted out of the presidency.

She did everything the bourgeoisie wanted and got impeached for it.

This was extremely traumatic and we did not recover from it at all as a nation - be it emotionally or economically. Temer, her vice, ruled for two years. In 2018 we had our first "the most important election of our lives": Bolsonaro, a extremely shirt literal fascist got immensely popular by then and absolutely demolished the Workers Party candidate, Haddad, on the second turn of the election.

The Bolsonaro years where absolutely hell. He managed to be actually worse than trump, his idol, as during the pandemic he refused to act in any sensible way. He tried to corrupt even the process of buying vaccines, trying to make Pfizer charge MORE for the vaccines just so he could pocket some of the money. Because of him, over 700.000 Brazilians died due to Covid.

And still, Lula barely beat him in 2022.

Mind you, Lula got arrested in 2018 in a very shady decision by a judge that later became Bolsonaro's ministry of justice. So even with Lula having everything going for him - he was the most popular president ever, 80%+ approval rating, a strong political case for democracy after being unjustly removed from the 2018 race, and going against a literal genocider, Lula still almost lost.

So now, the workers party militants (petistas) became almost the same as the Maga people, absolutely cult like around Lula. Everything Lula does is great, he's our savior, and can do nothing wrong.

To the point where absolutely ANY debate about the past and current failings of his government is quickly derailed and locked up by petistas who absolutely forbid you of criticizing him. It has even become a mantra: you can't criticize Lula or else Bolsonaro will be elected. This behavior already existed during his first terms, but it ramped up to absurdity now. They'll actively cancel you for criticizing him.

And he's doing very shitty! Inflation is under control but prices keep rising. He's trying to privatize our already shitty and overcrowded incarceration system, among other national companies. His gov proposed a ceiling for his own public spending. He makes promises that he legally cannot make real under this spending limitations. Come 2026 he'll lose so fucking hard because no one is happy with him in an already polarized political climate.

And you're not allowed to criticize him.

Does this all ring a bell? It should, Brazilian politics is heavily influenced by US politics, be it with the US interfering here or by us copying the US. Bolsonaro's son even tweeted this: "It happens in there, it will happen here".

How do we combat this? Brazil has like, 30-50 parties and still since our redemocratization the presidency has always been a dispute between the two giants: PT (workers Party) or PSDB (party of the Brazilian social democracy, in name only).

Well, Bolsonaro wasn't elected by PSDB. In fact, Bolsonaro's election (by the PSL -Social Liberty Party, in name only) actually destroyed PSDB, they're utterly irrelevant now. And still: Bolsonaro hopped to another party in 2022, the PL - Liberal Party (in name only. Yes, it's a different party).

Do you see the pattern? The alt right has this power: they don't need the party, they need the personality. In fact the alt right here is currently in crisis because Bolsonaro was deemed unelectable by the supreme court. Since he cannot run in 2026, they don't have a strong name to go against Lula yet.

Translate it to the US: if trump ran under the Tea Party, do you think he wouldn't be as much of a threat as he is now? Of course he would! He could run independent and still win against Biden.

Now, ask yourself: is Kamala a strong name by herself, or is it because of circumstance? Are you voting for HER, or AGAINST TRUMP? Isn't the reason Biden dropped out the fact that even in this scenario - against the return of fuckin trump - no one wanted to vote for him? It what happened in Brazil: even against Bolsonaro, no one wanted to vote for Haddad. Even against Trump, not enough people wanted to vote for Hilary. Even against Bolsonaro AFTER Covid, half the Brazilians didn't want to vote for lula. And our vote is mandatory.

Kamala has better chances than Biden did, but are you sure that she will have a organic support? In this political climate, where the teens just spent months protesting for Palestine,and her first response for the protest against Netanyahu's visit was to condemn the protestors? Like, if we spend some time on YouTube and Google we can find some pretty shitty thing she said as a vice president. Like her anti immigrant stance, her pro incarceration stance, har tip tapping around Palestine, etc.

Do you think that acting like she has good politics will work? Will "brat Harris" work? Is "the first black woman president of the US" really a win? Do you believe she will stop Israel?

To me and to a lot of people, the answer is no.

And so they won't vote for her, nor for trump. They will either vote third party or not at all. Because it's 2024 and we're all tired of the same old politician lies, we're tired of the "lesser evil" scare, we're tired of "the president has no real power".

Well, if Haris doesn't have the power to do good, why would Trump have the power to do evil?

You're at the end of the line for the democrats. They can't keep their bullshit anymore, and the fascists are only getting more powerful. It's time to ditch the Dems and bring up something new. As Gramsci said once: the old is dying and the new is struggling to be born. In this interregnum, we find morbid symptoms.

Biden and Harris are the left's morbid symptoms.

*this is the most important thing to understand*

Electing Harris is better then electing trump, but won't solve anything. Won't solve Palestine and won't solve trans and reproductive rights. It's not Trump alone attacking you and it won't be Harris who'll defend you; only you and your comrades can defend yourselves.

Sorry for the log ass post

You motherfuckers yes I hate Kamala too but when she is announced to be the Democratic candidate we are all going to shoot fireworks and go to the goddamn polls

[writterings]

Hi I appreciate this is a personal question so if you’re not comfortable answering there is absolutely no pressure to, but how did you know you were a trans guy and not a butch lesbian? Because I’m having a bit of an identity crisis atm and I’m finding it hard to find resources etc to help me. I hope you’re having a pleasant day/evening/night

well first i figured out that i wasn't a lesbian to begin with. i genuinely was attracted to men, but i didn't really acknowledge that aspect of myself because loving women felt more radical to me and, tbh, i was also afraid of men at that point in my life for trauma reasons. also i had been raised catholic and so loving girls when i was a girl was just so liberating to me and felt so good. but i was still attracted to men and getting a crush on a dude helped me first realize i wasn't a lesbian. this is obviously just my experience, of course, and isn't universal.

and of course, there can be GNC/butch bi women - but this next part is what really cinched it to me.

when i had a crush on that guy i mentioned, he actually had assumed i was a trans guy/non-binary but trans masc leaning. and he was gay, so he was only attracted to me if i was a man/man-aligned. we didn't know each other that well so there was so there was a lot of miscommunication on each of our parts about my gender and his sexuality. but him seeing me as a guy and me liking that he was attracted to me as a guy -- well, just opened up a whole new world of gender euphoria. i had never conceptualized myself as a guy before and having someone else view me as such without me telling them explicitly how i wanted to be viewed?? that was gender euphoria to the max. again, not everyone's experience, but that was mine.

after that, i started experimenting more. changed my identity to "nb trans masc bisexual" or smth along those lines. it probably switched per week and i probably even went back to butch lesbian at times just because it felt right. (this guy and i never dated, and i wasn't dating anyone else at the time so i had a bit more freedom in switch my labels without people being like "if you're a lesbian why are you dating a guy??") eventually my mom "accused" me of being a trans guy (she wasn't accepting at first but now is very supportive) and pointed out all the obvious "facts" towards it and i was like "oh fuck i guess i'm a trans guy, huh"

("facts" here being stereotypes and the assumption that just because an AFAB person dresses masculine that they're trans, but that's besides the point)

but even after that, i still struggled with whether i was actually a butch lesbian/bi woman or a trans man. this is mainly because in my relative case, being a butch lesbian would have been easier as my parents at the time would have preferred me being GNC & gay but cis (or nb but not open about it), instead of outright trans. (again this is in my relative case, and is not a statement that reflects everyone's reality nor how systemic oppression works)

right now i'm happy as a trans man and i think this is the label that describes my experiences the best and it's the label i prefer. i'll probably die with this label, though the one for my sexuality often changes.

SO basically i just said all this to kinda give you an idea of how fucky gender can be, especially with the added equation of figuring out your sexuality. as a society, we often associate loving women with being a man, and loving men with being a woman, so we always have to deconstruct these internalized aspects of ourselves whenever figuring something out like this. or, at least, that's how i feel about it as i only realized i was a man when another man i wanted to love recognized me as one, shattering the internalized idea (that i wasn't even aware of) i had that if i loved a man, that it made me a woman. so, basically, if you're struggling then i recommend analyzing your sexuality a bit too and your concepts of how love/sex relates to gender for you.

also, if i'm honest, a good way start to determining your gender is just finding out what label is the easiest for you to exist in. i identified as a butch lesbian for a long time because it was the easiest for me to identify as, and because it felt better than anything i knew before. when i realized i wasn't a butch lesbian, and even after i realized i was a trans guy, i still didn't give people a label if they asked me. it wasn't their business and i was ultimately unsure. it was easier that way to identify unaligned or as another gender, despite how it wasn't reflective of how i actually felt. and that's a valid experience in itself!

but after you are finally to a point in which you don't have to care about "easy" over "happiness" then i recommend trying to discover what gender/label makes you the happiest. being a trans man has been hard and the opposite of easy, especially in the early years when it came to my parents and me acknowledging my gender dysphoria, but it is what makes me the happiest. being a butch lesbian was a great experience for me, and i have a lot of love for that version of myself. however, being a man is a whole other level for me - to the point where every moment ISN'T euphoric. it's just normal, it's just right, it's just who i am. i no longer get excited when being gendered or seen as a man - just because it's normal. the happiness of it is just now a regular part of my life. whereas when i was a a butch lesbian, i was constantly aware of how happy my presentation made me feel - or how unhappy i was still being seen as a woman.

at the end of the day, you don't need a label unless you want one. you're allowed to just exist however you are. you can even use multiple labels, mess with typical ones, or even make stuff up. there's no rules to this shit.

anyways, again, these are all just my experiences and my life. my advice may not be applicable towards you, but i still hope there was something you could glean out of it. good luck on everything!

[dmitri-smerdyakov]

The Fantastic Beasts Franchise and JK Rowling

Alright, so...hi everyone.

I don’t know how many people follow this blog anymore because my main blog of operation is now @alwaysahiccupandastrid - I still try to keep this blog relatively active though, just because it was my original blog, I’ve had it since I was 13, and I have so many memories attached to it.

I’m aware that a lot of the people who follow me, especially since late 2016, do so because a) I was a loud and proud Fantastic Beasts fan, b) I wrote some Newtina and Jakweenie fic, and c)...I don’t know. I literally don’t know why people bother following me anywhere because I don’t feel like I have a lot to say. But, anyway, many people probably follow me due to Fantastic Beasts and my posts/fanfics within the fandom.

Those who follow my active blog will already know my feelings and thoughts, but because of the fact many things about this blog - me, the posts for the last four-ish years, the url itself - are Beasts related, I felt it was necessary to come and write an actual post here instead of just reblogging things and calling it a day. I’ve always been very outspoken online, but I’ve been avoiding a certain topic of conversation on this blog for years now, and I’m finally in a place where we can discuss it.

I am, of course, talking about the hot topic that is JK Rowling.

Back in the days between FBAWTFT and FBTCOG, I was a very outspoken defender of JK Rowling and her decision to defend Johnny Depp’s inclusion in the films. Now, this is something I still stand by to this day, and due to the evidence that has since come out, I’m even more steadfast in the opinion that keeping Depp was a great decision. I am fully in support of him and the way he’s currently battling against his abuser. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about right now. As I was saying, back in the day, I was outspoken about the opinion that “we don’t know the full story” etc., and as a result I received very colourful anon messages. Now, to my knowledge, none of these were about JKR being a TERF/transphone, but I think it’s important to mention that at the time I scoffed at the idea she could be one. I openly admit that I didn’t listen to what other people - including actual trans individuals - were saying about JKR and her transphobia because I frankly didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to admit that the person who wrote something that saved my life could be so hateful and a bad person - that, and at the time I passed it all off as “wokeness out of control”.

It is now 2020. Up until last Saturday night, I was still in support of JK Rowling - I didn’t agree with some of the stuff she had said, but I was trying to be positive and have hope by telling myself that she didn’t mean to be transphobic, that she just didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, even though the evidence clearly showed otherwise (I.e. her liking transphobic / radfem tweets). I said to my followers on my Beasts page that instead of cancelling people outright, we should be attempting to educate them instead, and if they choose not to learn then fine. And, being 100% obvious, I didn’t want to admit it because I frankly already was feeling annoyed at two different Beasts cast members for different reasons: Ezra Miller (for choking a girl) and Dan Fogler (for his tweet about BLM - admittedly that was probably him being well intentioned but not saying it right). So yeah, I didn’t want to cancel another member of the Beasts “family”.

I had JKR’s tweets on notifications, and for the most part over the last few weeks, it was all about the Ickabog. However, on Saturday night I noticed that she had suddenly tweeted something completely different, and I looked at it. Given that I had adamantly defended her and said “freedom of speech” for so long, it’s telling that my first thought upon seeing her tweet was literally “for fuck sake, Jo, why”.

I won’t post her tweets here but to sum that first tweet up, it was her being annoyed over the term “people who menstruate” being used in an article instead of “woman”, and mockingly saying “there used to be a word for that” before pretending she didn’t know the word. She knew that tweeting it would start arguments and anger, and yet she still made the decision to do so. Her follow up tweets frankly dug the hole deeper; she tried to defend herself by saying, to sum it up, “I have a butch lesbian friend who agrees with me” “I just care about women’s rights!” And “IF trans people were marginalised I’d march with you!” (“If”, of course, being the real kicker here because what do you mean IF. They ARE. Every DAY.)

Since then, JKR has written an essay on her website defending herself and her opinions, and yes, I read it. I read it a few times, in fact. At first, I felt my anger simmer and felt I had been too hasty to make anti JKR jokes, that I was wrong...but then I read it again properly and realised that what she had written was a piece that turned herself into the victim, and that despite putting on the appearance of her saying she supports trans people, including the phrases “I support trans people” and “of course trans women are real women”, she still spewed much transphobic vitriol and hate. She cited no sources for any of her proclamations or statements about statistics, implied that trans men transition to escape their “womanhood”, that trans women are men in dresses, that trans women are dangerous to “real” women (aka cis women) and shouldn’t be allowed into women’s changing rooms or toilets. There was also the autism comment, and the implication of autistic girls somehow not being able to make decisions or whatever.

I’m going to get straight to the point: I don’t support JK Rowling or her radical feminism.

As someone who is a proud feminist (libfem?), I can honestly say that never have I felt threatened or like I was being silenced by the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces or conversation. Never. In my second year at sixth form, I was in charge of the LGBTQ+ club until a new leader with better leadership skills could step in, and - put simply - that year, the club was made almost entirely of first year transgender students. Even though I had called myself a trans ally for years, I realised there was a lot I didn’t know, and I learnt quite a lot from these students. I continue to still learn today. They were some of the nicest and most intelligent people I got the chance to meet, and I can truly say that at no point was I ever worried to be in a room alone with a trans woman, nor was I concerned about which bathroom they went in - bathrooms are bathrooms. Speaking of bathrooms...when I was at uni during a particularly tense rehearsal a few weeks before our final show last year, a guy in our group made me cry and I ran to the women’s bathroom to escape. Not only did the other girls come to comfort me, but you know what? The guy came in and apologised profusely to me. Did any of us girls give a shit about having a guy in our toilet? Absolutely not. It’s a fucking toilet. And, on that note, I was never worried about a trans woman or even a cis man attacking me in the toilets. You know who DID attack me in the toilets regularly? Other cisgender women.

As a feminist, I fully support trans women and am not threatened by the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces or in women’s rights discussions. While I agree that cis women and trans women inevitably go through different struggles, at the end of the day, we all identify as women and are women. I think that if your feminism is so threatened by the existence of trans women - TERFs, RadFems, JKR, looking at you - then your feminism is flimsy and not feminism at all.

As a woman, I find it highly offensive that JKR and many RadFems focus so much of womanhood and feminism on an involuntary biological function that, frankly, many of us would rather do without. Yeah, I’m talking about periods - no matter how proud I am to be a woman, I still fucking hate periods and would get rid of mine if I could without erasing my chance of having kids someday. I can hear the RadFems accusing me of “internalised woman hatred” for saying I hate my periods, but you know what, they suck and they hurt and fuck them. The fact that JKR (also the the radfem movement) reduced “women” to just people who menstruate and can have children, and vice versa, is incredibly offensive and misogynistic. For a start, trans men menstruate, intersex people can, non binary can etc. Next, not even ALL cis women have periods - women who are menopausal, young women who haven’t started puberty yet (some do start very late), some women don’t have regular cycles, some women have medical problems that affect their cycle, some women are on birth control that can stop their cycles. So the idea of women being defined as “those who menstruate” is offensive not only to trans/intersex/non binary individuals but also to cis ones too.

As I write this, I’m a 22 year old woman who is still learning and changing every day, and one of the things that I’ve found myself thinking about recently - especially since we’re in lockdown and we have nothing BUT time to think - is about myself and my identity as a woman. What prompted this was when I saw Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved book, “Little Women”, which I’ve since read, for my birthday back in January, and I left the cinema feeling exalted and powerful with my own identity as a woman. (I’ll be returning to LW in a bit)

After some thinking, I’ve realised some things. For me, my identity as a woman is not just because once a month my uterus decides to shed; I do not identify as a woman just because I have certain physical features. I am not a particularly feminine person either, and I’m what some may call a “tomboy” (a phrase I actually don’t mind but I know a lot of people do for understandable reasons since it’s a phrase designed to differentiate people who don’t conform to society’s expectations etc) because I prefer video games and more geeky stuff to shopping or dressing up or make up.

For me, there is no one way a person has to be or appear in order to identify as a woman. Women are beautiful, complex human beings; we are not defined by our genitalia, by an involuntary biological process. Women are strong, intelligent, and interesting people - no two are the same. For example, some decide to raise families, some choose to pursue a career, some do both - all of these are valid and none are more “feminist” or “womanly” than the others, because it’s our as women. I guarantee that if you lined up every single woman in the world - cis AND trans - no two would be the exact same.

I mentioned “Little Women” earlier, and as I was pondering over what makes me identify as a “woman”, I thought a lot about a certain quote from the 2019 film that has stayed with me since it was first said in the release of the trailer. It’s spoken by Jo March to her mother, and I’ve started to understand what for me makes me a woman.

For me, being a woman is all of this: having minds, hearts, souls, ambition, talent, and being beautiful each in our own ways. Women are capable of love and empathy, capable of desire, capable of the most complex and human feelings and emotions, and coming out the stronger for it.

Sex is one thing; gender identity is another.

I won’t dissect every single thing JKR wrote in her essay, but I will just say this: her comments regarding autistic girls are extremely tone deaf and she does not speak for those with autism. I’m going to be honest and admit something here I haven’t before: I have not been diagnosed with autism or aspergers but I AM currently on the waiting list to see someone who COULD diagnose me. Apparently I show signs of a potential diagnosis, so...we’ll have to see. But I have friends who are autistic, and they’re disgusted by JKR trying to use them to support her TERF arguments. Autistic and other neurodivergent people are absolutely capable of making decisions and are NOT people who need to be babied or have their hands held, to be told who they are. It’s incredibly ableist of JK Rowling frankly.

I would also like to point out... I’ve seen people saying “but she doesn’t hate autistic people, Newt is autistic!!!” - yes, but JKR didn’t write him as autistic. Eddie Redmayne chose to play Newt as autistic - JK Rowling didn’t do shit.

It’s also time that I acknowledge that both Potter and Beasts inevitably hold JKR’s problematic views, and that by denying her ownership of her work, we’re not holding her accountable for the horrible things she’s done. This includes - but is not limited to -:

Anti-Semitic stereotypes in the goblins

Lycanthropy being used as a metaphor for AIDS - an illness that is heavily associated to the gay community, and also there was the panic of the AIDs crisis in the 90s where much misinformation and homophobia was generated and spread because of it.

Adding further to the lycanthropy point, one of the infected individuals - Greyback - is stated to have a sick preference for infecting children. Not only are werewolves tied to harmful gay/AIDs stereotypes, but also to the disgusting and frankly wrong notion that gay people are pedophiles.

The only Asian character is called Cho Chang. Cho Chang. That’s two steps away from outright just calling her “Ching Chong”. It’s not a name an actual Asian person would have.

The Goldstein sisters are probably distantly related to Anthony Goldstein, who JKR confirmed (on Twitter of course) is Jewish, meaning that Tina and Queenie are most likely Jewish too (and Goldstein is a Jewish surname). However, despite the fact that the first FBaWTFT is set DURING Hanukkah in 1926, there’s zero signs of them celebrating or observing it. Maybe that’s more on set design than anything else, but come on - if I, a fanfic writer, can do some research, JK/the crew of a major movie can too!

Adding on from that, gotta love how one of the JEWISH main characters then decides to join the Wizarding world equivalent of Hitler. I already had problems with Queenie’s characterisation in CoG, but that’s the icing on the cake.

POC/Black characters - in both series but since I’m a Beasts blog... Seraphina Picquery, a Black female president serving a term during a MAJOR wizarding world crisis, is severely reduced to have only 3 lines in CoG. Nagini’s only purpose is to be the only friend of Credence, a white man, before he joins Wizard Hitler and abandons her; she’s also an Asian character who we know one day permanently becomes a SNAKE, and who goes on to actually have a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside of her?? And some do see her as his slave, though you could argue that she’s actually the only being that he holds any love or respect for. Leta Lestrange is a half-black woman who is killed/literally sacrifices herself for TWO WHITE MEN, and who’s death was literally confirmed to have been added in last minute.

Also, the whole Lestrange storyline was fucking nasty: white Lestrange Sr imperius-ed a black woman (Yusuf Kama’s mother), raped her, and she then died in childbirth. I’m sorry, what the fuck??

In Harry Potter, Seamus is a terrible stereotype of an Irish person - he likes to blow things up. Look up the IRA and their bombings. Fucking Irish stereotype. As someone with Irish grandparents and who is proud of their Irish heritage, this really pisses me off.

Let’s not forget the whole Native American cultural appropriation. That truly speaks for itself.

So here is where I speak candidly to everyone who follows me and/or sees this post. While Beasts is no longer my No. 1 fandom these days, it and Potter still hold a huge piece of my heart. I have 5 wizarding world tattoos, so much merchandise, and I can safely say that being a fan of both series has shaped me as a person. Both of those series helped me get through the darkest days of my life, including bullying at school, my Nan passing away, and my mental health struggles.

This is why what’s happened has impacted me so much and broken my heart. For me, it feels like it’s tainted now because of Jo and her views. I know that we should separate the art from the artist, but when her views are so clearly woven into the very fabric of the Wizarding world, it’s a huge problem.

Here’s another part of the dilemma - I do not wish for the Beasts films to be cancelled. I’m well aware that the *cough* people who dislike me will say I’m trying to be negative, trying to boycott the series blah blah blah, but that’s truly the last thing I want. I still love the story, the characters, the soundtrack, and I want to know how it ends, if only for my own piece of mind. It’s also important to add that by boycotting Beasts, it’s also harming the hard working thousands of others who worked on the films: the cast, the crew, the extras, the musicians, etc., not to mention the fans who actually are invested in the series and have taken solace in it. It’s not fair for them to all suffer over the actions of one TERF.

This is one of my biggest worries, however: the Fantastic Beasts films do NOT have a good reputation as it is. The second film was boycotted by some due to Depp, and now there’s talk of people boycotting number 3 because of JK Rowling. Lots of people already talk hatred about it, and this will only fire that hatred up even more.

There’s also talk of Eddie Redmayne potentially being kicked from the franchise due to a “leak” that he doesn’t want to work with JKR anymore, but this could be sensationalist news reporting. But if it came down to it, I can honestly say that I would rather continue to have Eddie play Newt than keep JKR as a writer. Eddie has done more for Newt than even JKR has, and if he goes, then that will be the last straw for me within the fandom. That will be when I take a sharp exit out, sell my FB merch and have my tattoos covered.

To add, the Fantastic Beasts scripts are...not great. Or, at least, what we saw on-screen wasn’t. Maybe that’s David Yates being the literal worst (fuck you, Yates, you suck) and cutting all the parts with strong female characters, but I honestly don’t think that JKR can write screenplays well at all. I think she’s clearly better at writing books, and that’s fine - books obviously allow for more time to explore characters and story/plot arcs etc, and film scripts offer way less of those chances. I don’t think screenplays allow her to write what she needs to in order to tell the story she wants to, hence why CoG was kind of a hot mess. So maybe it’s just that she’s not suited for screenplays and should stick to books.

Honestly, I kind of just wish that WB would hire another person to finish writing the Fantastic Beasts movies - obviously they’d have to keep JKR on board to tell them the actual plot, but get someone who can actually write screenplays and not be problematic to write them.

By now I’ve gone on long enough that I’ve forgotten my original intent while writing this, so I’ll try to sum up and end now. In short, I am extremely disappointed in JK Rowling and do not support her or her views any longer.

I don’t know how any of you guys are feeling but I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts, especially other Fantastic Beasts fans. I want to also add that, as always, my DMs and inbox are always open - if not here, then always at @alwaysahiccupandastrid where I’m more active nowadays.

Finally, you guys don’t need me - a white cis woman - to tell you this but you’re all valid and magical and fuck JK Rowling. Her characters would all be ashamed of her, and the characters we grew up with would not stand for the bigotry and vile hatred she spreads under the guise of ““protecting women””. Several of the amazing actors from Potter and Beasts have spoken out against her and her tweets: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright, Katie Leung, Chris Rankin, Eddie Redmayne. Some have been...less inspiring (Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, looking at you two 👀)

I’m sending love to everyone right now. I wish I could say something more useful but I’ve spoken enough - I’ve made my opinion clear. I love you all, please stay safe.

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

werewolftrial​

I'm curious about your bringing up Jack Halberstam for critique in a recent post. To clarify, is it the combination of his platform + politics with his gender situation that makes the latter feel weird to you? Because I can definitely understand resenting someone who's got a platform from which to say weird stuff that affects people who face trans issues he mostly doesn't face (e.g. healthcare, making more "demands" in terms of names and pronouns, whatever).

Though I don't really think there's anything wrong with his gender situation in abstract, and wouldn't want to give extra scrutiny to someone who's non-normative in some ways. Maybe if I read Female Masculinity or more of his writing I'd feel less sympathetic, though, since he IS a professor with influence in his field, not a teenager trying to figure out their gender on Tumblr.

Good question! It’s a couple of things.

1) The first was how terrible Female Masculinity made me feel. That’s a personal problem, to an extent, but there is a serious dearth of good books for trans men, and when I had a role on a book project esp for transmasculine people, I found maybe one book (that’s Testosterone Files) which I felt was written by a man, for men, about men, in a large sea of basically post-lesbian-butch-cusp-genderqueer-postmodernism.

Which is a fine gender place to be, but its frustrating to have these books constantly recommended to you because those are the writers who dominate our academic space. In contrast, look at how many fantastic trans women there are in both fiction and non-fiction contexts.

2) The second is...I do have a suspicion of what I’d call, political genderqueerness? And that suspicion, like all gatekeeperly urges, is not necessarily the best place to be politically.

But as part of that, I tend to be impatient with discussions of transness which seem to be taking pleasure in radicalism or illegibility, because it doesn’t vibe with my materialist experience of...how terrible it is for you to have an incongrous gender presentation.

So like, their description of how they came to identify in more of a genderweird space is:

When I was doing all that research on drag kings, I was like, well I’m not going to be Judith in this world of genderqueerness, I’m going by a male name. And at that point, I kind of wish I’d gone with the name Jude, because it would’ve been an easier transition for everybody, and for me too, and instead I just picked a very masculine name, I picked Jack, and now it’s stuck. So I’m Jack. But now I’m going more and more by Jack—I’m not transitioning, necessarily, but I’m in a lot of genderqueer contexts where people do gender by gender preference, not by your body, and I totally appreciate that. But then I suddenly had to face up to the question of whether Jack was my preferred name or not. So some people call me Jack, my sister calls me Jude, people who I’ve known forever call me Judith—I try not to police any of it. A lot of people call me he, some people call me she, and I let it be a weird mix of things and I’m not trying to control it.  (source)

And that seems so off to me; although there’s not really any harm or wrongness in changing your name or gendered presentation for light reasons instead of heavy ones, its not necessarily something I feel much connection to. It reads to me like a cisgender person’s understanding of what genderqueer people are - you know, “when you cut your hair and dye it blue and ask for different pronouns to explore gender”; but perhaps we can attribute this to the fact Halberstam is an older writer, with different ways of understanding language and identity.

It’s not totally important to my understanding of self that other people read me as a man. It’s important that they read me as masculine, and it’s important that they read me in some way that I’m at odds with female embodiment. But it’s also important that they read me as someone who is not going to have that tension resolved by getting some surgeries.

And that’s not a terrible place to be, nor is she the first or last person to value being visibly queer - but then that’s her point of entry to transness, and so her interest in a book like “female masculinity” is in that incongruity/contrast, and her book about “passing” is as someone who still finds butch a useful term and tends to understand himself politically as lesbian adjacent, and....

I suppose in some ways, my worry is that writers like Halberstam are (inadvertently) part of a trans respectability politics, presenting as radical ideas which are really quite normative when it comes to actual binary transsexuals. For actual binary transsexuals, the idea that transition is a site of political radicalism, fascination, part of a gender-divergent tradition linked to their asab, a third gender neither male nor female space - those are often the roots of oppression.

It’s just less legible because Halberstam is not a gay man writing about the history of trans women as a series of radical cross-dressers living as a kind of third sex. I think people would be a lot quicker to see why that approach did not pass the sniff test; but we’re so used to accepting this vision of transmasculinity that it’s harder to call out.

3) and finally, I’ve read the first chapter of Trans and you know, it just seems off.

Within the first 21 pages, Halberstam wades in in defence of the bar named “Trannyshack” and defends RuPaul’s use of the word; and then goes on to use the comedy trans woman scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian as an illustrative example of the pointlessness of trying to control language. There’s definitely a “oh no I will be arrested for using a wrong pronoun :(” vibe to it.

And while I can get on board with that to an extent, I also don’t think it’d be the main thrust of page 14 of chapter one of my book on Transness, was I ever given the opportunity to write one. 

For example, I would not prominently quote Monty Python as a source on transgender politics.

Nor would I be referring to critics of a 1970s comedy skit featuring a non-passing trans woman character written by a bunch of posh cis blokes as “defensive”, and like, is this really the first depiction of a trans woman in a text that comes to mind for Halberstam to use, in the introduction to a new major work, seen as worthy of serious analysis as a representation of transgender politics?

It feels woefully out of touch, and if a cis person tried this we’d rightfully shred them for it - it’s uninformed, detached from real-life activism, it blithely speaks over trans women twice in the first 21 pages without recognising the limits of his perspective, and - you know. It sounds awfully cis to me, and not in ways that can be understood as an older queer person with outdated terminology. 

4)

It feels like Halberstam is using the malleability of queerness and queer gender identities as a kind of shield against critique. So as you say - I agree, there’s definitely nothing wrong with this kind of gender place, and I don’t want to start making demands on who’s “really trans” based on trivial things like, surgical status or choice of terminology. At the same time, people have to be honest about their limitations.

I feel that Halberstam is presenting themselves as an expert on this topic, without recognising why a cisgender establishment finds her work more palatable and praiseworthy than that of others. Halberstam has a sense of their own radicalism which is inaccurate. Seeing trans people as some weird experimental variant of their birth sex is a standard cissexist trope, as much as Halberstam et al would like it to be the more radical perspective.

We can see it in - for example - seeing physical transition as “resolving gendered ambiguity” in a way that, I think, few transsexual people would agree with. Post-transition bodies rarely resolve gender ambiguity in a straightforward way, and often remain incongruous on a physical level.

So, you know, something just seems...very off-base.

And then to have a book like Female Masculinity maintain status as one of the very few available academic texts theorising transmasculinity. & its basically because its underlying argument is cosy and does not challenge the status quo.

tl;dr as an individual, I’ve nothing against her gendered embodiment; as a thinker, I think she needs to acknowledge her limitations, and especially to read up seriously both on trans feminism and writing by actual transsexual men before approaching this topic again; or to make it clearer that the perspective she’s coming from is a specific niche

& thanks again for a good question

[soulvomit]

I mostly care about people’s praxis, far more than their analysis or their fandoms. You will reach that point, too.

I feel like a lot of the culture of young Millennials and Gen Z hitting “cancel” on friendships with people who aren’t ideologically identical, is kind of interesting, because there are only a few ways that could have come about. This filtering is something I can apply to *new* friends, certainly - I have, and I do - and my newer friends are much more “like me” in terms of how I presently am. But it’s harder with legacy friends, and it’s harder with people who are clique members. There is very little way I could do this because of what the general social shape of my life is like. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you feel the same way in your 40s, once you’ve had a chance to make a bunch of different friends in the non-digital world - at your jobs, in your neighborhood, etc. - and once you find that your same-age friends that you had in your teens and 20s, have either changed, or *not* changed (and *you* have changed). One of my groups of mismatched, imperfect people goes back to the 1980s. We are in our mid to late 40s now. This is the group I run into the most issues with, with politics. Many of them were oddballs or even radical in their day.  It’s not that they are now Trump supporters or anything. They aren’t. They largely either voted for Bernie or Hillary and not a single one of them voted for Trump. But after I moved away, I got involved in LGBTQ culture... and they simply stayed the same. Being actually in LGBTQ culture in the Bay Area, in the 90s, isn’t the same as being a hetero person in a heterocentric world who doesn’t hate gay people. Most of my friends up here are actual allies or activists. Most of my friends in LA, who I grew up with, are simply not haters. Most are super progressive by 1990s LA standards. They support trans rights and gay rights and bi rights and women’s rights at the most basic and active level I actually require from cis het middle class people: as a non-hating outsider who will back up LGBTQ people at the polls and who will back up their LGBTQ friends when there’s trouble. They call people out when people tell gay jokes. They use people’s preferred gender pronoun, respect trans people’s identities, and probably even have friends who are trans. But they have no idea what’s actually going on in the LGBTQ community or what conversations are being had or even what those conversations are being called. I’m pretty sure they don’t “get it” about any gender identities besides male and female, on a deep internalized level. But they will respect your identity despite not “getting it.”    They are not the perfect kinds of 100%-validating all-accepting friends *now* that I needed as a teenager and 20something. The funny thing is, they *were* the 100%-validating all-accepting our-politics-100%-match friends when I was initially friends with them. But people change. They meet the minimum requirement I have of family members, to be able to sit at the same dinner without me raging and walking away. There are things I simply don’t talk to them about, because I feel like they live on a different planet from me and just don’t get all the finer points of political or social stuff I’ve dealt with since leaving LA. While they don’t particularly do anything that is harmful or racist by today’s terms, I also can’t really talk about them about that stuff, because they just Haven’t Kept Up. It’s annoying sometimes, because I love to talk about that stuff and think about that stuff and a lot of them seem like they’ve closed themselves off since their early 20s.  And that’s the thing - lots of people, particularly people who are not that marginalized themselves, simply Do Not Keep Up with the latest discourse around every new movie or piece of media or every new offense. And even older marginalized people don’t necessarily have the same analysis as younger marginalized people.  The group I grew up with, knows what’s on the ballot, they support their real-life friends, but it is the kind of thing of “I don’t know your life experience, but I love *you.*” No, that is not the same at all as “hate the sinner but love the sin.” The shape of this is more like, in real life, “I support your rights and I support *you* and I voted for the right things, but I don’t get what’s wrong with the representation in that movie nor do I even know what people are saying about it.” They have no problem with analyses of racism and other forms of prejudice as a more binary thing but aren’t up on the latest analyses of it as a pervasive cultural thing or The Invisible Knapsack or 2019′s construction of cultural appropriation. I can’t even talk with some of these people about these things. They don’t even know these conversations are happening any more than they know what music the young people are listening to. Their whole world consists of other people their age, older people, and their own children. Actually the ones with teenagers more up on the issues. This will happen to you, too, because chances are, you will either politically drift from your high school and college age friends, or they will drift from you. Some of you will “keep up” more than others have.  Sometimes you’ll educate them - but sometimes you’ll just leave those topics alone. Most of the time, you’ll just leave it be. Especially since so many people past their 20s have just frozen in place, culturally and socially (those of you who are a little older know this, just think about your high school reunion).  There gets to be a point at which you just end up accepting that there is such a thing as Woke Enough.  Here is the thing: It’s a stark truth that a lot of you, in your 20s, are probably at the peak level of engagement that you will ever be. And some of you who go on being activists, will be burned out by this age. Even those among you who are LGBTQ may find a partner then just kind of close yourself off inside your world of partnered friends, and move to the burbs away from where all the discourse is taking place. And with the discourse swinging younger and younger - you may eventually find yourselves totally out of the loop. Eventually, you will find that your friends that once matched you on everything, no longer match you on everything... but provided they don’t do anything too horrific (and you get to decide what your limits are, and yes you will probably have to pick and choose your causes because by your 40s you’re going to find that it’s impossible to be all things to all people and “not being a dick” is the best you can offer.) You won’t even know it’s happening until it’s happened. And it WILL happen and there is pretty much nothing you can do about it. There are a couple of them whose politics infuriate me, because of how oblivious they seem to be about anything that has happened since 1999.   Honestly, these people do piss me off, and I feel like there is a lot of willful ignorance among a lot of cis-het white middle class people in my age group. Especially the ones who didn’t lose privilege in some major way. And honestly. I have to just hold my nose. Because after 30 years of friendship, they’re still the group in which I’m most likely to find a place to live should I need one, or a kidney donor.  It would be almost impossible to “cancel” them for not being perfect. For not knowing the newest and most woke terms. Here is a way that in your teens and 20s you get to more play “pick and choose” - if your friends are all individual people whom you met as an individual person. None of them know each other. You aren’t in some enmeshed group with a lot of overlapping, intersecting interdependencies. Small town and clique and workplace dynamics almost always have a little bit of “Geek Social Fallacies” to them, because it’s not like you can just push someone out of the group, not when they’re married to your other friend and their wife is your kids’ babysitter.  I have a couple of legacy friends from the high school days who were progressive for the 80s and 90s. Not a single one of them would ever vote for or support Trump and plenty would defriend you over the same. They’re not progressive by Gen Z standards. I just have to be okay with them not being transphobes, not being racists, not being homophobes or biphobes. I have to be okay with them backing me at the polls and boycotting problematic companies, even when their analysis is not all that. There is a lot of indirect problematica in 90s progressive politics. People just didn’t have as much information. Here’s an example. You get a lot of political analyses that are the product of people who know about the Civil Rights Movement, who generally are the most generous definition of what the 90s thinks of as “not a racist.” They voted for Obama, are great with their kids marrying a black person (or they married one), are great even with living in diverse communities. They may even be against police brutality. They grew up in upper middle class communities that weren’t necessarily ethnically or racially exclusive. But they don’t have the analysis that Gen Z leftists have, or that the LGBTQ community has, or that poor marginalized communities have. They don’t use the same framing or same words to talk about these issues. They don’t think they are racist, because their main connections with POC are with other second-generation middle class people. Their analyses almost always exclude generational poverty.   So what happens is because they’re so clueless, they support policies that they think are not racist, but lead to racist results. Because this cause and effect  can be almost invisible to someone not actually living in poor, diverse communities. They genuinely think gentrification is awful but at the same time they don’t actually know anyone who’s ever been gentrified out. Or their friends moved away who were poorer, but it’s “a mystery,” because the thing with Bay Area gentrification is that it was happening one family at a time as far back as the 90s and no one was talking about it. Most of them are well-intentioned but the particular set of issues are so incredibly nuanced that somebody on the outside just probably won’t understand unless they’ve grown up around that group or put a lot of time into learning the problem. Like, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them, as good as they are about relating to other ethnicities, don’t really get Native issues. I’ll have to settle for the fact that they know enough to only buy Native art from Native people, and they know not to wear war bonnets. But I don’t expect them to know a single thing about S’Klallam land management crises. It’s only recently that any of them would’ve had any context regarding residential schools like the one my grandfather was in. And yes I like when people listen and actually grasp what I’m saying from real empathy and understanding and interest in knowing. But you’d be surprised how short this is, about so many things, in the real world. Most people are not that interested in my long stories about ANYTHING unless that’s what they actually came for. I have to be okay with the fact that my friends that I grew up with, are not “with it” as much as I’d like them to be, and decide how “with it” I require - then once I have decided, I have to be okay with the fact that they would probably give me a kidney. My more recent friends are the ones who are more “with it” about the same things I care about.  But you’d be surprised how little a lot of subjects ever, ever actually come up in a conversation of longstanding acquaintances - when the acquaintanceship runs a decade or more. And the main metric for “listen” is, “if it DID come up, would I be able to tell them? Would they get it?” A lot of them won’t Get It to the degree that someone just like me would get it. And I’m so many things in one person, that nobody is ever going to be Just Like Me. So others’ empathy and understanding, for the purposes of my own life, has to be Good Enough. Everyone has to make an individual choice on this one and decide how much sameness they need in certain areas, how much empathy. The people who really fucked up - like the couple of people who really did turn out to be racists - I’ve long since canceled. I’m no longer friends with any radfems, either.  And what’s more is that I have a big extended world of people, but I also have a “circle of trust” that is only a few. Those are the handful of people who know me, get me, I can fully be myself with. And these are not my high school or college era friends. These are worth three times their weight in gold. But most of what younger Tumblrians expect in their dealings with people - that’s stuff I only really get out of the people in my circle of trust.  For everyone else, Good Enough will have to be okay. What’s more is that I bet a lot of you will come to the same conclusion one day.  I realize this sounds like middle class white normie neoliberal apologia. But there’s a difference between “people who are my very best friends, who I can tell everything to” (which is not actually THAT many people, but it’s enough) and “people I generally otherwise enjoy and wouldn’t kick out of an AD&D game, but can’t talk about EVERYTHING with.”

[thomdunn]

On “Hamilton,” Brexit, and Irish Independence

In June 2016, my wife and I headed to Ireland for a week-long vacation. It was my first time on Emerald soil, despite my unabashed affection for my cultural heritage. While I certainly wish I’d had the chance to visit earlier, there was also something poetic about making the trip during the centennial celebration of the Easter Rising, the first major conflict in the struggle for Irish Independence.

For those who don’t know their Irish history, the Easter Rising was actually kind of a massive failure. But that horrible defeat is also what made the rest of the soon-to-be-Republic wake up and realize that their sovereignty was no longer optional. In a way, it was also the beginning of the end of the British Empire — Ireland was the first major colony since the United States to fight for its freedom, and over the next half-century or so, the crown would its relinquish its rule on pretty much everywhere else.

(Admittedly, Ireland is still not entirely free, but that’s a whole other complicated topic. Tiocfaidh ár lá, as they say.)

My wife and I did not intentionally plan our trip around this centennial celebration, but it did add a certain heft of historical importance to the whole thing.

On that same note, we didn’t expect to hop on a plane to Ireland the day after the Brexit vote, either.

Ireland is now comfortably a part of the European Union, of course, so Brexit didn’t impact most of the people we met on our journey across the southern half of the island; indeed, most of them heard our American accents and immediately asked, “Are yourselves from the States? Sure, sure. What the fuck is up with Donald Trump?” to which we both replied with eyerolls, shrugs, sighs, and “I’m gonna need another pint for this.”

But the talk radio and newspaper headlines told a different story: Brexit had the potential to radically change the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, since they share the only physical land border between the UK and the EU. See, while the fight for Irish Independence began in 1916, the battle wasn’t over until 1923, and the conflict between the the Republic and the British-controlled North raged through 90s (though there are some who are still fighting war today). The border there was heavily militarized until 1998, when the Good Fridayagreement was signed, marking an endpoint to a long and complicated peace process —in which, coincidentally, the Clintons played a small but not unsubstantial role.

Also coincidentally, that trip to Ireland was the first time I listened to “Hamilton.”

We spent 2+ hours in the car every day, alternating between “Hamilton” and The Pogues because relationships are built on compromise (but it was mostly “Hamilton” because I understand and accept that Shane MacGowan’s toothless drunken ramblings don’t appeal to everyone in the same way).

Between “Hamilton,” Brexit, the Easter Rising centennial, and all of the other stunning history we saw as we made our way across the Irish countryside, this got me thinking about politics and revolution, and the roots of where we today—which of course is the kind of stuff I tend to think about anyway, but especially as we enter the third month of Donald Trump’s presidency and celebrate Irish heritage along with St. Pádraig’s Day here in the United States.

As someone who has spent their life in liberal New England, “State’s Rights” had always seemed like something the South made up in order to pretend the Civil War wasn’t about slavery (it was).

More recently, “state’s rights” have been used to block any efforts to curb gun violence, and also to punish trans* people for having to poop (yet somehow not weed?). But listening to the story of our nation’s founding as so eloquently rapped by Lin-Manuel Miranda while driving around Ireland, I came to realize that perhaps the original intention of “state’s rights” was to essentially create 13 separate countries on American soil that had pre-established trade, border, and immigration agreements.

In that context, states like Massachusetts and North Carolina could be as radically different as Germany and France, each with their own unique culture and language or dialect. State identity would not just be an arbitrary moniker; Rhode Islanders and Virginians would almost be separate nationalities, with their shared label of “American” being almost as vague and non-committal as it is on, well, any other continent. The United States would be less of a “country,” in the sense that we know it now, and more of an economic union.

The US then would have been what the EU is today.

An EU citizen can live, work, or travel in any EU nation. They share the same currency, and observe the same charter of fundamental human rights, but other than that, each country is pretty much free to do what it’s going to do, with culture and traditions and other specifics of living that remain unique to them and them alone.

That’s pretty much what Thomas Jefferson argues for in “Hamilton” when the eponymous immigrant first tries to establish the national bank. But it’s not at all what happened — for better, or for worse. Our governors today are not at all comparable to European Presidents, and the power that is currently yielded by Donald Trump is vastly different from Donald Tusk’s authority and influence.

The question of state’s rights could have changed our trajectory 250 years ago. But that didn’t happen.

If the United States had actually been setup to recognize the cultural autonomy of each individual nation-state, we probably wouldn’t be where we are today. We probably wouldn’t have grown as fast as we did (also for better or for worse; remember, our early growth and success was also intrinsically tied to slavery), and the distribution of our wealth and economy would be even more radical than it is right now, reshaping the domino chain of events that we currently know to be the foundational moments in the story of our nation.

Because of this, it’s almost impossible to imagine what this alternate history version of the US would be like today, with 50 separate nation-states working together while also forging their own paths (assuming that we still “collected” those nation-states the way we’ve done with our current spread of states, which may or may not have happened).

And that’s the thing: that divisive tension of potentially-50 different countries, and the fractured state of our collective national identity, are intrinsic parts of America. When Trump supporters opine that we need to “come together as country,” they’re willfully ignoring the fact that we’ve never been together as a country. And that fact has shaped everything about the United States. (To be fair, Trump supporters tend to willfully ignore all facts in general. Ba-dum-tisch!)

How much time, energy, and resources have we spent trying to define and lock down a singular vision of “America the Beautiful Abstract Concept?”

Guns. Religion. Marriage equality. Whiteness and race in general. Immigration, and the overall influx of Spanish language and culture. Taxes. Welfare. Healthcare. Crime, Free Speech, and Policing. Education and “choice.” Basic science. Environmental issues. Land rights. Public or private services? Innovation! Are we a society that looks out for each other, and the individual choice embodiment of everyman-for-himself? Do laws exist to protect the people, or to serve businesses? What would my personal sense of abstract identity be then, as a Nutmegger by birth and a Masshole by choice (and soon-to-be-New Yorker)?

American identity is intrinsically fractured, because it’s always been fractured, because that’s how our country was formed, regardless of the original intention. By this point, we’re too large and unwieldy to steer ourselves smoothly as we bumble towards the future. And so these divisive socio-political issues are trapped in a constant state of tug-of-war, and it’s only made worse by the fact that our cultural obsession with binary thinking (perhaps the only thing we’re unified on) has forced us all to conform to one choice, or the other, jerking back and forth forever. Whichever side you’re on is socially expected to dictate your concept of American identity for you.

There are two ironies to this situation that both stand to sting the most adamant Trump supporters:

According to that traditionally reductive left-right spectrum of America, liberals are the ones who are supposed to favor centralized or “big” government. This is demonstrably untrue, but I digress. Because now under President 45, Blue States are finally reaping the residual benefits of the same state’s rights that we once found futile, for perhaps the first significant time in US history.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that, though it certainly makes me appreciate the Devil’s Advocate arguments I’d been hearing from my Libertarian friends for years. For the most part, I’ve always thought that those who most adamantly insist on flying the standard of “state’s rights” were fighting a losing battle, and only ever using it to hold onto power. I certainly don’t think US states will ever enjoy the same autonomy as the countries of the European Union; but I still think it’s something worth noticing, and thinking about.

The other irony is of course the overlap of Brexit and Trump campaign in their shared appeals to economic strife and xenophobic philosophy. Despite the fact that the British Empire literally ruled the majority of the world—and thus, that any immigration or cultural mix that they might be facing in the UK is their own doing—Nigel Farage and company were somehow still able to convince people that the European Union (and by extension, all countries outside of the British Isles) were bad, evil things.

Trumpers share a disdain with their Brexit Brethren for “The Establishment” and “New World Order,” as embodied by NATO, I guess, and the UN as a whole (and also Muslims, and false flag psyops, or something). And yet, for Trumpers, particularly in the South and Midwest, the autonomy of the European Union actually represents everything they’d supposedly desired for years: cultural autonomy. Except that the EU also expects all of its member-nations to uphold the same respectful standards of equality for all people regardless of race, religion, gender, creed, or sexual orientation—which, sadly, is not an agreement that half the US would be willing to uphold.

This is not to say that all Trumpers and Brexiteers are homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic jerks, of course; just that the politicians at the forefront of their respective campaigns capitalized on these qualities and fears, and that even in the absence of any conscious intent of discrimination, it’s not hard to follow the path from all their other rhetorical arguments and end up right smack in the middle of Bigotry Road.

(Best case scenario, it was an appeal to their basest, animalistic instincts to preserve the self at the sake of others, and they all fell for it.)

And that brings me back to 1916 Ireland.

Pádraig Pearse was among the men who fought and died in the Easter Rising. He was a poet and a thinker, who believed in democratic socialism and feminism, and who struggled to retain his indigenous tongue in the face of colonial oppression.

He also had a gun. (It didn’t help him, but still.)

Hamilton had a gun, too. So did George Washington. Hercules Mulligan had pants and some dopeass rhymes, and presumably a gun as well.

As we drove through Ireland last June, I was reminded of how these revolutionary leaders were all philosophers, sensitive souls who still fought physically for freedom because they saw it as their only choice. It’s not unlike the great Sioux leaders such as Sitting Bull, who walked with a chanunpa in one hand and a skullcracker in the other, always offering the peace pipe first, but keeping his club handy, just in case.

And yet, in the modern day United States, guns and militarization have been almost exclusively associated with right-wing culture and violent white extremism…until now.

Suddenly we’re debating whether it’s okay to punch Nazis. Antifa is starting to get the same news coverage as the alt-right, and gun sales are up among liberal women and minorities, but down across the rest of the country (it’s almost like…all those right-wing gun sales were previously driven by irrational fears of crime and racial paranoia?).

Now the same people who used to tout their Second Amendment rights are more upset about property damage than human rights violations. Now they’re willing to outlaw the rights of the people to assemble and subject citizens to arbitrary purity tests before those same people are allowed to defend themselves from violence, all because they think it helps to uphold some semblance of “order”—or at least, order as it serves them.

The implicit message here is that our American exceptionalism is the central rule of the land.

It’s as if to say that the fight for Civil Rights was won some 50 years ago, and now things are totally different and will still that way forever so every historical example of self-defense or armed insurgence is irrelevant. It’s okay for “real” Americans to stand their ground, but everyone else is just disrupting the “natural” order of things, just like they have at every other point in history.

Except that sense of status quo order has only ever worked to keep a chosen few people in power. Or, as Sinclair Lewis once prophetically said, “It can’t happen here.”

But it can happen here. The only thing exceptional about America is that it hasn’t happened recently in our collective cultural memory.

Europeans understand the serious dangers of fascism, violence, and war, because they’re constantly surrounded by reminders of its horrors. In the United States, anything that predates World War II is practically ancient history. Our American grandparents went off to fight in Europe, then came back to unprecedented levels of prosperity—because Europe was ravaged, and not for the first time, either. By the time the US was born, most European countries had seen their centuries-old landmarks ransacked and destroyed several times over.

Barring a few horrifically tragic but isolated attacks, the US has not.

So what seems so distant to us is a natural part of their lives. The ruined remnants of feudal castles dot the Irish landscape with little preservation or oversight, for example; the woman we stayed with outside of Dublin had a grandfather who was killed in the Easter Rising, and kept a photo of him hanging over the stairs next to a copy of Forógra na Poblachta.

Sure, we have American Civil War re-enactors. But that’s all about false sense of nostalgia (a distinctly American psychosis, to be sure). In Europe, on the other hand, the wounds are genuinely more fresh, the historical damage all within eyesight.

Yet for some reason, here in the States, we think history is settled; that any seemingly-important moment will be remembered and preserved forever, even though we can barely remember what happened when our parents were teenagers. Our political system is great and all, but that doesn’t make it the One True Way that perseveres without question or conflict.

The only thing exceptional about America is our size, and that we’ve had the same identity crisis for 250 years, taking two steps forward and one step back.

Our insistence on being so “exceptional”—on being naive enough to think that we’ve somehow evolved to the point that we’re immune to the same failings of every empire and revolution that came before—is exactly what prevents us from seeing the patterns of history staring back at us.

But “The past isn’t past; it isn’t even over;” “As above, so below;” “This has all happened before;” et cetera, et cetera. Basically this is all a long-winded way of quoting a 30-year old Billy Bragg song:

“The cities of Europe have burned before, and they may yet burn again. But if they do, I hope you’ll understand that Washington will burn with them; Omaha will burn with them; Los Alamos will burn with them.”

None of this is to say that I’m condoning (or condemning) insurrection of any kind. This is all just to say that we should not ignore history.

Let us not conserve or recreate the past, but learn from its lessons, and expect that we’re all inclined to fall back into its worst patterns — then do everything we can to make sure we don’t make those mistakes.

[marcoshassanlevy]

fore the inception of Los Crudos in 1991, U.S. punk and hardcore already had a handful of Latinx figures involved in the genre’s biggest bands. Artists in The Bags, Black Flag, Descendents, Adolescents, Suicidal Tendencies, Agnostic Front, and so many others made their mark on the scene, yet they rarely confronted their unique life experience in the U.S., instead focusing on general themes of alienation and social unrest. Los Crudos, on the other hand, composed lyrics explicitly about their experience as people of color and immigrants.

Los Crudos played a radical take on hardcore punk – one of austere musicality, maximum speed, and overdriven guitar tones. Vocalist Martin Sorrondeguy spewed concerns of an immigrant in the United States almost exclusively in Spanish (in the spirit of true rebellion, their sole English track was titled “That’s Right We’re That Spic Band“). Their impact shook punk far and wide, and not only for those who spoke Spanish – they influenced non-white and non-binary folks across the scene. The band toured relentlessly throughout the decade, creating connections with groups like Spitboy and even touring south of the border. When Los Crudos hit Mexico, mobs showed up and bum rushed the venues to get inside.

After Los Crudos broke up, Martin formed Limp Wrist, an equally radical band both musically and thematically. Limp Wrist embraced Sorrondeguy and the other members’ queerness to challenge heteronormativity in the punk scene. Again, LGBTQ punks were no strangers to the scene at the time, with political bands like The Dicks, Big Boys, and MDC singing about queerness in the 80s. The movement formalized under the term “queercore,” with bands like Fifth Column, Pansy Division, and Team Dresch. Limp Wrist made their music harder and faster without sacrificing any part of their identities.

Ever the punk lifer, Martin Crudo (as he’s known to fans far and wide) has also been documenting punk through his photography, which he has exhibited internationally. He published a collection called Get Shot! in 2012, and has been invited to talk about the intersection of punk, Latinidad, and LGBTQ identity at various universities.

On September 30, Sorrondeguy hosted the launch of Desafinados, a 9-day event that celebrates all things Crudos as well as the Latinx punk scenes in the Chicago neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village. Along with performances, Desafinados will feature talks, lectures, readings, and art exhibits from Latinx punk icons like Alice Bag, Michelle Gonzales, David Zamora Casas, Dorian Wood, Gerardo Villarreal, Cristy C. Road, and many others. We sat down with Sorrondeguy to get his perspective on the event and reflect on the 25th anniversary of Los Crudos.

Organizing a retrospective required Martin to revisit his past, and Los Crudos’ reunion has certainly made the identity of the band clear. The crew decided to reunite in 2013, after learning that a friend – who is a trans woman and played in peer bands in the 90s – had been diagnosed with cancer. “On the spot, I called all the members of Los Crudos and everybody said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ It felt right under the condition that it had to be done Crudos-style. It had to be done in a way that felt authentic and comfortable.”

“That’s the true spirit of punk, to challenge within it. We need the rule breakers.”

Martin is not one to dwell on the past, and though reuniting a group he first started when he was young might come off as pure nostalgia, he says it made as much sense in 2016 as it did in the early 90s. “The thing about the lyrics that we wrote 25 years ago is that they are completely relevant today,” he explains. “For me it’s not hard to scream these lyrics and still feel very strongly about them. It’s all still happening. The U.S. is very anti-Latinx and the world is very anti-immigrant, and that also includes us.”

Because those lyrics remain relevant, Sorrodneguy continues to be vocal about underscoring Latinxs’ pivotal role in punk history. He’s brought his expertise on the scene to academic settings, but is reluctant to fully support roundtables on the genre at universities – for justifiable reasons. “I still go to basement shows and I’m still pissed off [laughs]. I never left that. I don’t do many lectures in universities. I see that they invite a lot of scholars who study punk but often they don’t invite punks [laughs]…If I get invited, I’m glad and honored and I do my best to give a true sort of representation of what punk is. I also don’t have a problem with challenging these ‘punk scholars’ because I think sometimes they’re wrong and need to be challenged before it gets written down in their books,” he avers.

Identity is crucial to the style of punk Martin has been playing since he first started his career. “Sometimes people get into punk because they like fast, aggressive music,” he says. But for Latinx punks, the genre encompasses more than teen rebellion. “For Latinxs in punk, living in the U.S. is different than angry suburban white youth…In the lyrics, you find [that] some of those songs are against Mom and Dad, and it’s like ‘I don’t have problems with my mom and dad.’ [laughs] We were living in different realities. We weren’t living in the suburbs and then came to the city. We grew up in the city in gang-infested neighborhoods, [with] corruption and all this stuff. We came from aggressive and violent areas and upbringings as young Latinxs,” he describes.

So Sorrondeguy set out to address that reality with Los Crudos, writing songs about his experience as a child of Uruguayan immigrants. “There was a dictatorship and most American punks would go ‘What? What are you talking about?’ It was one thing to write a song about El Salvador from a U.S. perspective – and that was cool, I think there were some great bands who did good stuff – but when you have people coming from certain places and have dealt with these ugly realities and they go writing songs, then it’s a little different. It got to a point where we needed to write our own songs about these things that were important to us.”

“I like punk too and I like to suck dick and I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like it.”

Ever since Los Crudos first started, there has been a huge movement of Latinx punk and hardcore in the U.S., as well as bigger exposure and scene unity between bands from Mexico, Central and South America, and Spain. As a sort of godfather to so many things happening right now, from Downtown Boys to Latino Punk Fest in New York, I ask him what he thinks of the proliferation of Latinx punk. “I think it’s cool. When you talk about Latinxs in punk, there are so many, and not all of them sing about identity. I think that’s what’s differentiating when you say ‘Latinx punk’ instead of just regular punk, because it’s sort of a statement. You’re putting a stamp on yourself which is good, but you have to be careful because some kids might go, ‘This is just for us.’ And I’ve never been into that mentality. I’ve always been into making connections with people who weren’t from where we’re from. Los Crudos spread out to so many communities and different people because we weren’t about isolating ourselves.”

“I fear the formula, you know?” Sorrondeguy continues. “Like, ‘Oh, I’m a Latinx in a band so I need to speak about politics and identity,’ and I don’t think you have to. If that’s not you, don’t do it.” Sorrondeguy favors authenticity and artistry over performative politics. “I want to see some totally freaky queer person doing something that has nothing to do with queerness as political…I’m curious about what people bring to punk or take or give to punk. I get bored easily when bands do the same thing over and over and over. I think kids are afraid to take risks, to look different from their peers and their scenes. When they step outside of their peers and scenes, te critican, but si te están criticando, maybe you’re doing something fucking cool, you know? [laughs] I said to people in the past who have interviewed me that I don’t believe all bands should tell me all their politics, after which they tell me, ‘But that’s what you do!’ Yeah, that’s what I do and what I have done, I don’t expect everybody to follow in my footsteps.”

Martin Sorrondeguy at University of Pennsylvania in March 2015. Photo by David Ensminger

Queerness has been a big part of Martin’s music, most notably in his work with Limp Wrist. Since LGBTQ communities have gained more visibility in both the underground and the mainstream, we wondered how Sorrondeguy saw things develop in the punk scene. “Over the years, there has been a much larger presence of queer punk and people coming out or being more visible. I’ve seen that there’s a lot more trans kids that are part of the scene and I think that’s amazing. You wouldn’t see that sort of thing in a hardcore punk setting 15 or 20 years ago. People were so afraid because punk and hardcore had a very macho exterior, and to a certain degree I get it, because you have to fight a lot, to be always ready to battle. Because you were a weirdo y la gente te veía raro and they would fuck with you. You’re fighting to create your own space within punk, to say, ‘I like punk too and I like to suck dick – that’s who I am – and I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like it.’ That’s the true spirit of punk, to challenge within it, especially once it became more codified and [adopted] more rules. We need the rule breakers.”

Martin sees the future of punk in empathy and positivity, as tools to counterbalance oppressive forces facing POC communities. “I fear that this younger generation will have this sentiment of defeat. One of the things I talked about [at a recent festival] was, ‘No matter what they do if they gentrify us out of our neighborhoods, or that this clown Trump is saying these horrible things about your community, your families, your people and who you are – no matter what, we will always survive; we’re not going anywhere.'”

Sorrondeguy is quick to emphasize that political progress comes from experimentation, rather than division and aggression. “[Right now] in politics, if you don’t think exactly like other people think and you don’t say exactly what they want you to say, they just insult you and call you a sellout. It’s almost like there’s a wave of fascism within the left. ‘Oh my god, you don’t think like me! You’re an asshole!’ That’s a really fucked up mentality to have. It’s bizarre; there’s no room for subtleties or mistakes or room for people to experiment, explore, and learn.”

The Desafinados festival is a culmination of Los Crudos and their peers’ longtime efforts to uplift Latinxs in punk history. “[The exhibition] is a history of how punk started happening in our neighborhood. It starts with the first show that occurred in 1987 and then the beginning of Los Crudos and all the other bands that came afterwards. We also invited artists from our neighborhood who were always supportive of our bands and used to come see us…it’s kinda of like a community.” Twenty-five years after Los Crudos’ inception, the project keeps the flame alive in this trying political climate, and celebrates the band’s continuing legacy.