#for the americans reading this that's $90

[wirewitchviolet]

That thing about 'the arc of history bending towards justice...'

I'm pretty sure I've gone on about this before, and I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir, but I just had a well-intentioned acquaintance try to give an inspirational speech about American trans people's fears right now, and his heart was in the right place, but all his facts were wrong, in some really important ways. I feel like the perspective he has is the same one as... basically every decent person who isn't like, intimately familiar with WPATH, so please spread this around, and please if you only read one rambling history lesson from a trans person about the current state of things, make it this one.

So here's the big problem. Trans people get brought up in the mainstream media a LOT these days, but the framing is totally wrong. The impression people get is that there is presently a big push for new trans rights, where we want proper government recognition, and trans women in particular want to be able to use public women's restrooms, and play on girls-only sports teams, and a dozen other things. That is a lie you are being fed. These are all rights we ALREADY HAD, for decades. Possibly centuries depending what we're talking about specifically and where we're talking, even. The big issue right now is that a bunch of bigots just woke up one day about 10 years ago and decided that nothing else they were angling for was getting them anywhere with the general public, so hey let's make a boogieman out of this minority of a minority nobody knows the first thing about and act like all the horrors they're inflicting are just them enforcing some totally fictional status quo.

Speaking personally, I can say that The Trans Agenda in like 2014 was something like: 1- I'm gonna make a nice big pot of chili. 2- I'm gonna maybe replay some old video games from the '90s I haven't taken down off the shelf in a while. And OK maybe 3- It'd be cool if it weren't just the medical professionals who specifically specialize in trans stuff had enough of an education to know that when there's a difference in how a drug is going to effect men vs. women, it's for reasons directly tied to the levels of various hormones, or would at least trust their trans patients to know what we're talking about and not give us the wrong doses of things and maybe kill us as a result. And also like, treat us for regular things like broken arms (real example) without weirdly panicking about some prescription we're on they don't recognize.

There was absolutely not a point where some trans woman started petitioning the government or whatever to let her pee in a toilet with a little placard of a stick figure in a dress in front. We've just been doing that the whole time. Nobody's ever had a problem with that. You didn't know we were in there? OK. If I'm like at a restaurant and have to use the bathroom, I don't know how many of the other women in there have like, type O blood. I also don't care, and I think everyone would agree it was weird if I suddenly did care, and demand they post a guard out front asking to see driver's licenses. Just completely out of the blue some nutcases from the UK started foaming at the mouth and writing weird tabloid articles about their completely unfounded fears that... I don't even know. Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs might put on a wig and follow them into the bathroom, dose them with chloroform, and drag them to some basement dungeon through some series of secret passages or something.

This was based on literally nothing at all, to be clear. Like, people pushing for this went and did serious research for anything even anecdotal to back them up on this, and didn't actually find anything. Then they started walking into public restrooms with cameras throwing doors open on people and going "see? See? Some creep could totally do this if we don't ban trans people from using bathrooms!" And... somehow this got traction? I figure it's because coincidentally there was this whole other thing going where people were looking at how every building had equal numbers of men's and women's rooms and saying "you know, like, 90% of people who come in here are the same gender and we end up with really long lines, what if we just took the signs down and told everyone to just use whichever?" which... when it's happening at the same time Chicken Little is ranting and raving about the boogieman wearing a cheap wig, wires got crossed? And suddenly we've got waves of legislation passing all over about who's allowed to use what bathrooms with weird standards that'd involve like DNA tests to actually enforce properly. Absurd stuff.

Meanwhile, your average trans activist at the time was just like... sitting there eating a sandwich and going "huh, they're making a TV series based on Fargo? That's an odd thing to happen out of the blue. And yeah we started going "hey, what the hell?" when this stuff started passing because like... yeah that's what you do when you see an article in the local newspaper that says you can't go to the bathroom at work or whatever without swabbing your cheek and waiting for lab results for 3 weeks first or whatever.

Same deal with sports. Major sports organizations like the Olympics have been weirdly paranoid about men pretending to be women since 1950. And there have been, to the best of my ability to research... zero men who have actually done this. And while the weird standards used for this have been used to kick a good number of women out over the years, none of those women have been trans, for what that's worth. Really, the whole gender testing thing has only ever been used for horrifying stuff like forcing women to strip in front of random creeps, or let them do "invasive internal exams" and of course so many incidents where some woman who isn't white wins at something and people move the goalposts to in some way to get her specifically banned. You may be thinking, "wait didn't I just see a whole bunch of news coverage about someone getting banned after some gender testing thing? She was trans right?" No. You're thinking of Caster Semenya. She's a woman. A cis woman. F on her birth certificate, born with standard issue female genitals, has periods, all that. People are just being weird racists there and crossing the streams with random transphobia. That and just... half-reading stories and making stuff up.

To the best of my knowledge, the total count of trans athletes who have competed in the Olympics would actually be... three nonbinary people, who so far as I can tell all competed against people with the same gender they had on their birth certificates, nothing done medically, so, nobody should have any problem there. Caitlyn Jenner, who didn't come out as a woman until like... 40 years after competing, on the men's team, and Laurel Hubbard, the first and only trans woman to compete at the Olympics as a woman, who placed... dead last, flubbing all three of her lifts.

If we just look at sports in general, OK, there WAS one big famous where a trans woman wanted to compete in a major sporting event, was banned from it, took the organizers to court over it, and the eventual ruling was there was no reason at all she shouldn't be allowed to play against other women. Renée Richards. And this was all the way back in 1976. Nearly 50 years ago now.

And of course in more recent years, again, after a bunch of random bigots just completely out of the blue started losing their minds about trans people with no prompting and started lobbying for new laws banning us from all kinds of things nobody had had a problem with us doing forever, there was Mack Beggs, a trans guy, who was forced, by one of those aforementioned baffling reactionary new laws, to compete on his high school's girl's wrestling team. He didn't want to be there, they didn't want him to be there, but the law said hey, F on your birth certificate, we're classifying you as a girl despite how clearly wrong that is. And then there's been a bunch of other weird cases like that like one state banning trans girls from playing any sports with other girls which only affected one single girl in the entire state, who was playing lacrosse on a team that wouldn't have even existed if she hadn't personally organized it.

But the point here is, trans people aren't asking for anything here. We're just standing here, and people are flipping out and banning us from doing all these things without any prompting. And hell, I THINK this one got shot down in higher courts, but when Florida got the brain worms on this and started passing all the anti-trans legislation they could think of, they actually included a ban on us just standing there! The wording was something like (and I apologize that I can't find it, search engines are useless now), "if a child can potentially see someone who was assigned male at birth who is wearing women's clothes, it's considered sexual assault."

It's important to understand what's actually going on here, both because what's going on here is just plain terrifying, but also because there is this huge segment of the population who has this weird idea that people's rights only ever get better, there's just some weird arbitrary ratcheting where you have to take a number and get in line. Like, "hey, used to be only white men could vote, then eventually the Progress bar filled enough that we let white women start voting too. Then we had to wait for it to fill up again, hey, we're ending this whole segregation of black people thing. Gotta give it another 30 years or so to fill up, now hey, gay people can get married! Don't be impatient trans folks, you just need to stay in line and wait for it to fill again for your turn!"

That's not how anything has ever actually worked. It would frankly be absolutely insane if it actually did, but like, this is an idea people get in their heads because history textbooks really like to gloss over all the stuff that makes the country look pretty bad and promote this whole "stuff is just always getting better!" vibe. But no, sometimes, things just straight up get worse for people. Ten years ago I could go to the damn bathroom, I could have social media accounts, I could access all the medications I need to live, I could safely set foot in any given state in the country... at least if I kept some witnesses around at all times to verify I was not in fact hitting on my would-be murderer in any of the black states on this map.

The problem is NOT that with Trump in power, the pause button is getting hit on trans people climbing towards some state of finally getting to be regular people. We were (largely) already there, and there's been a huge push over the past decade to strip that away from us. And Trump plus the rest of the Republican party in general have made very specific promises to make that way worse real real soon, including several things that will straight up kill a ton of us.

Like, when I'm talking about losing access to necessary medical treatments, I'm not talking about "THE SURGERY" and magic pills that give you boobs or beards. A lot of trans people are trans because there's weird medical stuff that in addition to messing with what does and doesn't grow mess with things like whether your blood flows properly and whether various organs do what they should. Just one of those many things the average person doesn't know, because everything written about us is from deranged bigots making crap up.

[jakeperalta]

got tempted to buy the original cardigan but as soon as I saw that £70 price tag the temptation promptly died lmao it's daylight robbery

[uproariousscarecrow]

i've been reading dolls of our lives the past week or so and have been nostalgic for my favorite girl!!

[robot-singularity]

If I had a nickel for every piece of media from the '00s with a British policeman named Sam suddenly time travelling 30ish years into the past, I would have two nickels. Which is weirdly specific, but I'll take it.

[aro-culture-is]

Fandom aro culture is wanting to be obnoxious about your arospec headcanons but the idea of anyone coming after you for them makes you want to scream

.

[aahsoka]

The accents weren’t the whole reason the Trade Federation was racist?

maybe its just a me thing and im seeing stuff that isnt there but the combo of the accents (which were apparently…. white british men doing thai accents??) and the look of the neimodians and the clothes (tho everyone has asian inspired clothes in star wars; specifically they are reminiscent of court officials in historical china) and them being an evil corporate entity ….

just reminds me of like the fear of chinas growing economic power in the west ? (at one time this also was a fear people had about Japan)

sorry my cat desperately needs my attention apparently so this isnt super well thought out

i might be reading too much into it and im sure it wasnt like super intentional. most star wars racism seems to be george lucas being a white american and just not realizing it could come across that way.

[13eyond13]

Remember that movie Saltburn. Wtf was that all about lol

[ellynneversweet]

‘Person who thinks the whole thing is a hoax’ is a vastly under-explored urban fantasy plot line.

Imagine if you turned on the news today and the headline was ‘fairies/vampires/werewolves exist.’ The social media civil war in the lefty skeptic science fan crowd would be incredible. People making deepfakes to prove the proof of life footage were themselves deepfakes which split the ‘deepfakes are unethical’ and ‘AI will destroy humanity crowd’ over whether this is a greater good/ends justify the means issue. YouTubers doing three hour long takedowns of each other after a notable YouTuber comes out as 1/32 fae on his mother’s side and another comes out as 1/2 fae and calls the first a cultural appropriator whose only fae-related issue is that he can’t use a steel shell laptop without getting a mild rash. Environmentalist groups schisming over whether it’s okay to be a vegetarian now we know trees have sentient souls. The fans of last week’s headline going ��this is all a distraction from the disaster that is drone strikes!’ Long time LARPers vs neo cultural enthusiasts vs people arguing that that’s Vampface now, bigots, vs the vampires who were larping as vampires this whole time because it’s a great way to get an easy meal. Someone would go ‘isn’t this just the lizard people hollow earth antisemite QANON crowd in a new shirt?’ and be immediately attacked from every side.

It would be delicious.

[ineffectualdemon]

I will never forget that in middle school because I have no musical talent I didn't join band or choir and I also had no athletic ability so I wasn't on a sports team so during the period everyone was else was doing one of those things the rest of us no talent kids had to take "Reading class" where we just read books

And that sounds nice except I was a fast reader and I was only allowed to read 2 pages of the book in question a day. I was not allowed to read ahead of the class and I was not allowed to read my book from home or even work on my homework.

But if I looked too bored the teacher would get mad at me for that and for not reading and "I read it already" was met with a look of disgust and being told to read it again.

So for like an hour I would either stare into space or read the same 2 pages over and over and over again

And I couldn't even hide my book from home behind my textbook because she watched me like a hawk

Why?

Because the teacher of that class fucking hated me for god knows what reason

Anyway I hated the Odyssey for years because I was forced to read it at an absolute snails pace in middle school and it took me a long time to separate out the story from that experience

[swag-system]

slender-swagsystem: collect my canadian friends&mutuals..

[novelistparty]

today I remembered something my mom used to say all the time. she'd talk about her fears that "they" would eventually come for her and take away her home and make it illegal for single woman like her to even own anything I used to blame it on general boomer brain worms but today realized it was really genuine because those property rights weren't available to any women until about the time she became an adult. She was the first woman in her family to own her own home. She could feel that it wasn't a settled and sure thing. She could sense that the culture she lived in didn't really want her to have those rights.

[wolf-twenty-one]

are you being challenged? are you trying new things and getting new experiences? are you different from who you were 5 years ago? are you compromising? are you seeing things from another perspective regularly? are you getting better?

are you stagnating? are you prioritising comfort? are surrounding yourself with people and places that let you stay in place? have you compromised recently? are you aware that yours is not the only way?

[chadsuke]

Books Read in 2023:

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (2019)

Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling (1996)

The Last Sun by K.D. Edwards (2018)

The Little Book of Lykke by Meik Wiking (2017)

American Cozy by Stephanie Pederson (2018)

The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian (2021)

The Conscious Closet by Elizabeth L. Cline (2019)

My Happy Marriage Vol. 1 by Akumi Agitogi (2019)

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

[ID: Covers of the aforementioned books. End ID.]

[90smovies]

[aeolianblues]

Occasionally I get messages from people that only know my music taste from the radio show I do, which in fairness to them is close to my actual taste in music because I wouldn't ever play something I genuinely disliked, but the radio work doesn't cover all of the music I like. And so people are sometimes surprised when, for example I end up talking about well-known American bands (the show is on new and upcoming British and Irish music). I closed out last week's Osheaga-themed show with Green Day and Chappell Roan, and had someone say they hadn't had me down as a Green Day listener because I guess they'd imagined I was on the Britpop side of the 90s rock music scene war. When in fact I grew up 90s grunge!

[magentagalaxies]

god it's such a shame that i only discovered my ideal vocal range isn't soprano + which songs best fit my voice type + how much i really love belting songs like my voice is gonna cause a sonic boom only after i stopped being involved in theatre productions multiple times per year. like ugh so many years of being a random background character in school/summer camp productions bc sure i technically could hit the high notes but i was always slightly off pitch, why did no one ever take me aside and be like "let's see if this kid can belt a green day song and give her some self confidence"

i deserve a do-over of all my middle school/high school theater productions thank you very much