#intersectionality of personhood

[dowiththatwhatyouwill]

I Won't Hurt You: Isle of Dogs Inspired Hyper-Specific Imagine

This started as like three thoughts that quickly spiraled into a lengthy almost-essay of word vomit. Written for my younger sibling, cousin, and co. but also for myself. Might not be relatable for everyone, but maybe you'll enjoy it anyway.

This whole soundtrack is amazing, but this track sparked something in me. "I don't know why I bite" is the perfect intersection between having trauma, being trans, and being neurodivergent and mentally ill to me. And then this song: "I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you"

Disclaimer: I do not headcanon Chief as trans, neurodivergent, etc. but nor is there anything wrong with any of these states of being. This is just a flow of consciousness half reflecting on Chief's journey and half contemplating the intersectionality of personhood with a dash of venting on top. Also I wrote most of this at work so it might not make total sense lol

You're Chief. You're not a violent dog--even though your friends think you are--and you don't know why you bite. You're different though, you know that. You're told there's something wrong with you. Maybe they're right. You have trauma. You're trans. You're neurodivergent and mentally ill. Sick. A life waster. You aren't like the others and they know this. They don't say as much, but you dare them to say it:

You're a stray.

You live on the streets, you expect you'll die on the streets. You've had a hard life, and you suppose you're more or less used to it. You don't have the strength nor the desire to change who you are to fit into what society expects you to be.

"I've lost all of my pride." Not that you had any to begin with.

You're disobedient. You do not like being told what to do. You don't even fit in with the other strays. On some level you understand, logically, why you are the way you are: all parts of yourself come together in a potent mix of suffering. "Torn apart by a fiery wheel inside me," and yet "I don't know why I bite."

Part of you is fine with being an outcast. After all, you've made it this far. You don't even feel this way all the time. Once in a while someone will try to pet you. It doesn't happen often, and there's no malice to it. You don't know why they're trying, but there's probably a reason. So you bite. You aren't sure why. It's just part of who you are now.

Maybe you're afraid. They're normal, and the simultaneous proximity and distance to that normalcy scares you. They might hurt you today, soft touches turning to claws and chains and a cold dark cage; or they could hurt you later, by seeing you and abandoning you as does each that has the misfortune of knowing you. It keeps happening, and you say you're fine, so your friends think you are. After all, you've made it this far.

None of your relationships last very long. You're hard to be around, you know that. But you don't mean to bite. You seem to have an innate ability to drive people away without meaning to--family, friends, potential lovers.

But then someone comes around and despite your warnings--I bite--they don't leave. You make it clear you don't want them here--I am not your pet, I never liked you, I don't care about you, I won't wait for you--and they seem to sense that you don't actually want to be alone.

"I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you," they say, with more patience than you've ever known. They promise over and over again because for some reason you need to hear it. They just... know.

"My rainbow, how good it is to know you're like me."

They give you a bath. They swab at your sores, clean your wounds, and brush your fur. You growl while they do it, even when it doesn't hurt, but you still feel better after. You aren't used to anyone touching you, but this person has reached inside you and found that tiny glimmer of light left tucked somewhere under your heart. This is someone worth taking the effort not to bite, you think.

It doesn't fix everything, of course. You'll never be normal. But having someone who loves you unconditionally, even on the days you can't help but bite, makes it easier to bear the weight of who and what you are. So maybe it's alright to be a stray, to be lost. In any case, now there's someone around to find you again.

"I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you," you say. You have to reassure them, even when they say you don't have to, that you never want to hurt them. You're begging them to understand. You have claws and fangs and you've had to use them, but "I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you."

Maybe you're still waiting for that person. But it's nice to imagine they're out there, even if most of the time you don't believe it.

[sk3let0rz]

I wish Hollywood didn’t show women making an effort to be romantic to men who reject them and then they end up with that shitty man. It reinforces this idea that men are unaware of the emotional consequences of their actions and allows them to avoid responsibility for treating people as disposable.

Men are allowed to be flawed, struggle morally, cause harm, and then overcome that without ever doing the internal work to become a better person. Because men have inherent value and if a man has to consider that he acted in an unethical way, that means his value is less (this is specifically about America’s prison slavery system and it’s ’othering’ of groups like women, poc, lgbtq, disabled). Men have inherent value and they can struggle without that value coming into question.

Women can NOT make mistakes. Because they do NOT have inherent value. Women are valuable on a conditional basis. Can you (as a women) provide sex, companionship, validation, housework, children? If you stop providing these things or are unable to provide certain things a women’s value goes down.

This is why women have to answer for their actions while men only have to answer for their intentions.

Back to the Hollywood trope- women are shown as having romantic daydreams and wanting those dreams to materialize. They try to encourage or support the man in carrying out those dreams (do you remember what day it is, honey?). This doesn’t go well and we as the viewer are encouraged to side with the man.

Be clear in your message = the woman’s actions are judged as most important.

The man was tired or there were other external factors = the man’s intentions are judged as most important.

This is bad because it encourages men to act as if there are no consequences to their actions as long as they mean well. It’s bad because it teaches women that men should not be judged for their actions. It’s bad because it encourages certain people to treat others poorly and another people to accept poor treatment.

Women who do not receive reciprocity in their romantic efforts should cease all romantic efforts with that person. GIRL there are millions of people out there one of them will treat you right. Stop trying to teach a man how to treat you.

[communistkenobi]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[lurkingshan]

Only Friends and Engaging with Queer Male Media as a Cishet Woman

I’ve had some good conversations this week with friends as we’ve been unpacking our early reactions to Only Friends, which has only just begun getting into the messy dynamics we know the show is going to explore. One of the things that has come up in conversation is our different reactions to the scene between Boston and Top in the shower stall, and how we each read that in terms of consent, sexual coercion, and what it says about each of the characters. Some of us were relatively unfazed by the scene, finding it to be a fairly realistic depiction of a pushy aggressor and his conquest who is not that into him, but also not really opposed to getting sex anywhere and any way he can. Some were more uncomfortable, recognizing behaviors we might call assault in other contexts and wondering whether we should be condemning the character or the scene for the behavior depicted.

For me, this discussion brought up a lot of my previous fandom experiences, taking me all the way back to ye olden days when Queer as Folk (US) was airing and the majority cishet woman fandom spaces were scandalized, scandalized I tell you, by some of the aspects of gay male culture it depicted. It was not the first or the last show to do so, but it stands out in my mind as an important cultural moment at the turn of century as I was coming of age, when the internet was booming and the proliferation of online fandom spaces was rapidly accelerating. Because QaF did it all—casual sex, cruising, group sex, very public acts of indecency, aggressive boundary pushing and peacocking, open and polyamorous relationships, cheating and betrayal, age gaps—and it depicted it all quite explicitly, which made a lot of people uncomfortable. Especially women who were used to thinking about sex and relationships through two primary, and heavily socialized, lenses:

heteronormative romance, and

heterosexual rape culture.

Let’s take a moment to unpack those terms. Heteronormative romance is a big, broad term that I’m using as a kind of container for a lot of things, including patriarchal structures, misogyny, rigid gender roles, purity myths and fetishization of virginity, courtship rituals, promiscuity and respectability politics, the madonna/whore complex, sex as an act primarily for breeding and procreation, expectations of sublimating sexual desire in service of caretaking for others, and so on. Basically, all the bullshit cis women get jammed into our heads from birth that gives us so many hang ups about sex and love. With heterosexual rape culture, I am referring to the undeniable culture of sexual violence women also endure in a majority heterosexual society, in which we are in constant danger of having our boundaries transgressed, being physically and psychologically hurt, and then being told it doesn’t matter because our personhood has always been in question and never mattered as much as any one man’s power or pleasure. I’m not going to drop a bunch of citations for the above because this is tumblr and I have escaped the icy grip of graduate school, but if any of these ideas are unfamiliar to you, google is your pal (and please read about intersectionality as it relates to these concepts while you’re at it, because there are layers of identity that make these dangers worse for some, like our trans and BIPOC sisters, and all of this is undergirded, as ever, by white supremacy).

So, yes, engaging with media about sex is fraught for women, especially when that media does not conform to our heteronormative ideas of morality that have been shaped by all of the above, and particularly when we as individuals have not done the work to unpack and interrogate our socialized beliefs, which is often the case for cishet women especially. Many of us instinctively cringe away from unromantic depictions of sex. Many of us can’t stand cheating and betrayal in our love stories. Many of us shy away from media that depicts the unfortunate reality of grey and dubious consent. All of that is valid, to an extent, and rooted in the way we have been taught to think about this stuff from birth, and the ways we’ve had to adapt to survive. 

But, here’s the thing, girlies: most of those socialized hang ups I just talked about? Do not apply to a story by, for, and about queer men. 

Before you start yelling, here is your disclaimer: of course patriarchy and misogyny also hurt men. Of course rape culture also exists in queer communities, and of course some queer people engage in heterosexual sex, so these are not mutually exclusive categories of people. And, importantly, cishet women are not the only ones who struggle with these tensions—just the ones who are most relevant to this particular post. 

So, after that long and winding road, back to the point: this debate about the bathroom scene in Only Friends is the same shit that’s been debated in majority female fandoms around depictions of queer male sex since time immemorial. And whatever your personal feelings are on that scene, or the no doubt numerous other depictions of questionable romantic and sexual etiquette and dubious consent coming our way in this show, what it boils down to is this: can a majority cis woman fandom step outside of our own conception of sexual morality to engage with this show not with judgment, but with curiosity about what sex and relationships look like for queer men? This show has an entirely queer male writing and directing team. It is made with love by people of the community, for the community. They know what they’re about, they have resumes demonstrating they are damn good storytellers who understand safe sex, consent, sexual health, and sex work, and they are here to tell us a story grounded in their reality. BL has been moving in fits and starts toward depictions of sex that are more honest about queer male experiences, and Only Friends, spearheaded by the Jojo Tichakorn Phukhaotong (who demonstrated quite ably that he has a firm grasp on consent, sexual assault, and the damage that dubious consent can cause in The Warp Effect), is the next step in that evolution. The key point is that sexual activity simply does not mean the same thing or carry the same associations and hang ups for queer men as it does for cis women. With that in mind, can we try our best to process and critique this story on their terms, instead of our own?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Only Friends is not going to be a good time for people who are looking for romantic depictions of relationships and sex or invested in identifying heroes and villains amongst this cast of characters. This show is about deeply flawed people hurting each other, rooted in the lived experience of the Thai queer male community—and those of us who do not share all of those lived experiences may not understand the nuances of every single thing that is happening. We can be sure that the characters will all be wrong sometimes and they will all do things we think are stupid or reckless or unkind. Does that mean we can’t have empathy for them? Do they have to act in a way we think is morally “correct” in order to love them? You don’t have to be comfortable with the things these characters do, and it’s certainly valid to point out when you think lines have been crossed. But attempting to sort them into “good” and “bad” camps is pointless, and moralistic judgment of their behavior is out of place, particularly when it comes from a place of trying to force them into our own irrelevant frameworks for sexual politics. 

And with all that said, I am passing the baton over to my dear friend @waitmyturtles, because there’s an entire aspect of the intersectional cultures at play here that I have barely touched on—Only Friends as an Asian queer story that is building from a specific lineage of Thai queer media. I’m gonna let her take the mic for that part, and say thanks to her, @bengiyo, @neuroticbookworm and @wen-kexing-apologist for reading this over and helping me think through what I wanted to say here, and shoutout to @williamrikers whose post I also linked to above. 

[canichangemyblogname]

I think a lot of you on here wildly misunderstand intersectionality. Because it accounts for the fact that men are not oppressed for being men *and* the fact that man-ness is and has been inaccessible to black, brown, indigenous, disabled, and queer men. Man-ness is narrowly defined to exclude the most, but that does not negate that men are not oppressed for being men. One may, however, be oppressed for not fitting into that narrow definition of manhood.

Intersectionality accounts for the fact that white women are oft second best in a racialized sex-caste system. It accounts for the fact that they, too, oversaw the plantation and garnered wealth on the backs of enslaved men and women. It accounts for the fact that white women were the homemakers of the land they or their people helped steal and the mothers of children meant to supplant the indigenous population of the area. And it accounts for the fact that denying black men and gay men and disabled men access to manhood was a way to also strip them of personhood. Because humans have a gender; animals only have a sex.

It accounts for the fact that M > F is not the sole or predominant dynamic in the world, but is only one dynamic. It accounts for the fact that a woman (often white) can hold all the cards and the sociopolitical power in a relationship (dynamic) when the other half of that dynamic experiences specific marginalizations. It accounts for the fact that blackness and transness affect a man’s relationship with manhood and the sex caste system.

And it accounts for the fact that while men may be oppressed, they are not oppressed *for* being men.

[lemonhemlock]

Daenerys’ people were not slaves, they served her because WANTED to because they were grateful.

She didn't profit from any previous slaves selling themselves back into that because actually it made the masters think they could do it to anyone. Only out of a hundred wanted to go back and that is mostly cause they were stuck there and they didn't know how to live.

I don’t see how any of that changes the fact that she is nothing like the people who abuse people for fun.

i'm not sure what you're trying to get out of this conversation because you're not addressing any of the points i've actually even made in relation to daenerys recently.

daenerys owned slaves when she was khal drogo's wife because that's part and parcel of being the wife of a khal. or, rather, so you won't say i'm being unfair on dany's own victimhood, let us allow that drogo was the one who actually exercised ownership over the slaves since i'm not sure the dothraki would recognise dany's legal personhood beyond herself being the property of the khal

but, genuine question, why are you so resistant to familiarise yourself with the concept of intersectionality? do you think it will bite you or something? ponder on the situation of white women in the american south whose husbands owned slaves. say they had a gentle heart and felt for the plight of this historically brutalized minority. what then? does it mean they didn't simultaneously profit from the slaves' economic subjugation?

dany is not like the people who abuse slaves for fun because she has different character flaws, like poor planning for the future and entitlement. no one is actually debating that daenerys doesn't feel sympathy for the slaves and thinks it's an appalling practice. that's a strawman argument. what her critics are pointing out is that she's not good at governing, you know, the kind of thing westeros is in great need of

[skincareroutine]

im just soooo against making specific people the face of social liberation movements. especially in retrospect cus when u think about past historical figures who were the face of movements theyre sanitized of ALL personhood n mentioned akin to saints n then when it comes out oh what they did was illegal at the time or their views on other movements/intersectionality werent as liberating for all. theyre demoralized and suddenly theyre like the devil cus we have insane PURITY culture now. it also just freaks me out because we all live under the dome of white supremacy where historical social movements are sanitized to make it more compelling to people.

[samasmith23]

Viewing Kamala Khan as a mutant through a queer lens

I’ve gotta say, after having read Issue #3 of Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant miniseries yesterday, one of the elements that I’ve really grown to love about this book is how well it functions as a metaphorical coming out narrative for Kamala Khan! In addition to the previous issues showcasing Kamala struggling with the newfound pressures that being a mutant comes with, especially during a time when anti-mutant bigotry is at record levels following Orchis’ genocidal attack on Krakoa, during this issue’s dream sequence we’re introduced to the idea that Kamala’s hesitancy to accept her newfound identity as a mutant and inability to access her new powers is all due to a mental roadblock inside of Kamala’s own psyche. However, when the villains try to force Kamala to accept her mutant powers before she is ready by invading her dreams (as part of a Trojan horse to activate a psychic bomb against other mutants), Kamala refuses her “dream-self’s” offer upon realizing that only she alone can decide when she’s ready to define who she is, countering Orchis false anti-mutant narratives and defining her solely by her latent powers by proudly proclaiming, “It’s not about the powers. It never was. It’s about the why we fight. The who we fight for. My powers don’t define me! They aren’t the testament to who I am, in here! I was afraid that being a mutant meant that I was no longer anything else. But that doesn’t erase any other part of me. It just makes me more… me. Who I am — that’s up to me to decide.”

Kamala’s story has always been one about identity, self-acceptance, and intersectionality. This has been evident since her initial run by G. Willow Wilson & Sana Amanat, where Kamala was at a crossroads in regards to figuring out who she was as Pakistani-American Muslim from an immigrant family who had just obtained Inhuman powers, eventually deciding to embrace the best aspects of each part of her respective identities.

Discovering that she now also happens to be a mutant doesn’t erase those previous aspects of who Kamala is, but simply adds to them. Additionally, several X-Men stories in the past have framed the mutant allegory through a queer lens, and there’s a lot you can read into Kamala’s journey of self-acceptance as a mutant in regards to both queer theory and intersectionality. I’ve mentioned before how the recent spike in anti-mutant bigotry amongst the general public following Orchis’ attack on Krakoa Island bears a lot of real-world parallels to the recent upsurge in homophobic and transphobic legislation by Republican politicians here in the US, and Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3 further expands these parallels. Similar to how Queer people of color are the groups most severely affected by homophobic and transphobic legislation, Vellani effectively demonstrates how Orchis anti-mutant hate campaign significantly impacts Kamala as a woman of color who just found out that she’s also a latent mutant. Orchis’ attempt to try and play on Kamala’s fears of being rejected by her non-mutant superhero friends while framing mutants as inherently arrogant beings with god-complexes, feels eerily similar to how Republicans have recently tried to push false “groomer” conspiracy narratives in order to frame LGBTQ+ people as inherently “predatory towards children,” further isolating an already vulnerable community by falsely defining them solely through the lens of sex. But similar to how sex & sexuality does NOT entirely define a gay or trans person’s identity as an individual, mutant powers do NOT solely define the sum of Kamala’s identity either. It may be an important aspect of who she is as a person, but it is NOT representative of the whole of her identity. Just like how being a Muslim from an immigrant family is an important facet of her personhood, but it is not the sum total of her personality. People are more complex than the narrow-minded stereotypes that bigots like to falsely project onto them, and Kamal effectively demonstrates this by accepting her newfound status as a mutant as merely another facet of personhood. She’s a mutant, as well as an Inhuman, a Muslim, a woman of color, second-generation Pakistani immigrant, nerdy fan-fiction writer, and a compassionate human being who simply wants to help others in need!

From Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3 by Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Carlos Gómez & Adam Gorham.

[canisvesperus]

Here's a question it thinks and asks about often that you can totally ignore:

what are some significant things that are common in veganarchist spaces that more spaces should adopt, and

what are some of the biggest issues in veganarchist spaces where they could learn from other spaces?

Hey there,

Big questions! Here’s what I think.

One thing I have always appreciated in veganarchist spaces is a frequent willingness to deconstruct explicit and implicit biases of all kinds. Nonhuman animal suffering is often an afterthought or a non-issue in other anarchist and leftist spaces, especially those that are rampant with class reductionism. To most veganarchists, concern for very basal and widely normalized forms of oppression opens the door to truly reexamine and continuously reevaluate their thoughts and behaviors across the board. Nothing is too “ridiculous” or too “inconsequential”. For example, the first time I ever heard somebody else speak on youth liberation, it was in a veganarchist community. Unfortunately youth liberation is a topic that is ridiculed by many self-proclaimed radicals who cannot conceptualize autonomy and personhood as something worth respecting in anyone who is unlike themselves and their peers. Saneism and lookism are also frequently discussed, similar situation. Concepts that are considered fringe in other spaces are more likely to be lended consideration in a serious manner, intersectionality is a massive priority, and generally they are more functional, more informative, more liberatory environments for human people of intersecting identities as well as the nonhuman people whose experiences are in many cases informed by collateral effects of human-on-human discrimination. Our experiences are tightly intertwined and this is considered to be a vital tenant informing the opportunities for our collective liberation.

Mainstream veganism is populated by a significant portion of “apoliticals”, single-issue activists (including genuine unabashed bigots), green capitalists, and generally an emphasis on consumer activity over all else in terms of praxis. I cannot overstate how much these types need to open their minds to comprehensive anti-oppression politics. Some of the attitudes in the mainstream undoubtedly influence vegan anarchist thought and it’s essential that we stay aware of how liberalist veganism for example may affect how we approach veganism. I’m going to be completely honest, a lot of human people I know are not knowledgable enough about nonhuman animals themselves, which leads to frustrating debates with respect to non-native species and the the best ways to go about acting as allies to them and to native species alike. Likewise, there is occasional misinformation circulated with respect to nutritional and climate science that we should not allow to go uncriticized. This is also a wider issue in vegan communities— I don’t see enough evidence and fact-checking for popular claims. Science is not the enemy. It’s vital that we work with accurate data for honest problems to find solutions that work for all of us.

I would also say that there is often too strong of an emphasis on insurrectionary activity and not enough attention given to the long-term recovery and support for emancipated nonhuman animals. This does tie into the issue of freeing farmed animals yet leaving them to fend for themselves in a foreign environment. I realize there are very few of us and we are not a wealthy demographic, but I simply do not see enough support for our sanctuaries. There are repatriations to be made for those sanctuary members; we cannot abandon them. Direct action is important, yes, but caregiving is just as important. I suspect some folks are overcompensating for the prevalence of “cute animal” media content in mainstream communities. We should prioritize an appreciation for nonhuman animals as they exist as individuals and unique cultures beyond their struggle for liberation. This in no way detracts from serious conversations about their liberation. Not every discussion and narrative about trans, brown, autistic, humans should be centered around suffering, and this should apply to every person, including those of other species. We need to celebrate their joy too, and have genuine investment in their self expression and daily lives. And I definitely don’t believe that my human peers don’t care about that, after all I would say many veganarchists are “animal lovers” and “nature lovers”—it’s more so an area they must improve upon and learn about from other spaces. There’s a fine balance to be found but in doing so it would be to the great benefit of our nonhuman peers.

I hope this is insightful! My apologies for the late response; my inbox is very full and I’ve been quite busy with my studies.

[writerswhy]

Instead of trying to critique the patriarchy and moralize the characters who rebel “the right way” through a modern day lens, the writers can focus on these four dynamics that explore the intersectionality HOTD is sorely missing: 

Rhaenyra’s idolization and even fetishization of men and manhood through Criston and Daemon.

Criston’s and Aegon’s inability to meet the ideal of manhood so they exploit their (male) privilege and turn to extreme, toxic expressions of violence and sex. 

Alicent and Aegon, mirrors of each other. Everything Aegon does Alicent cannot, and everything Alicent does Aegon cannot. Both need to conform to their stations to save their family but sacrifice their personhood.

Alicent and Rhaenyra, but acknowledge the class and power differences between the both of them.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Kimberelé Crenshaw literally disagrees with you.

“Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them.  Intersectional erasures are not exclusive to black women. People of color within LGBTQ movements; girls of color in the fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; women within immigration movements; trans women within feminist movements; and people with disabilities fighting police abuse — all face vulnerabilities that reflect the intersections of racism, sexism, class oppression, transphobia, able-ism and more. Intersectionality has given many advocates a way to frame their circumstances and to fight for their visibility and inclusion.” -Kimberlé Crenshaw

Transphobia 🎶 🎵

Feminism is a movement to uplift and empower and liberate women, That includes trans women. It's not a costume. They're quite literally women. They go about life being women, treated like women, experiencing the same oppressive forces of sexualization and fetishization and a lack of bodily autonomy and the demonization of femininity and womanhood and assault and harassment as most cis women. In fact, trans women are at a higher risk of violence, harassment, and assault than cis women. They understand the nuances perfectly well, you've just never spoken to a real life trans woman before. The only trans woman that exists is the caricature in your mind.

Never mind that trans women are literally out there fighting for bodily autonomy and the right to love and the dismantling patriarchy's tendency to arbitrarily gender things and assign them to a specific sex and writing about and speaking about how to empower and liberate women and championing legislation and movements for exactly this. You just refuse to listen to them because you hate that their existence makes you anxious; makes you question the foundations of your ideology and the social structure upon which you were raised.

You can say you're a communist all you want dear, the only allies you have and people who agree with you are Christo-fascists and religious fundamentalists. Those are who are championing your ideology. Those are the people Radical Feminists have gone and allied with.

You're literally already aligned with fascists.

(Also, for a supposed communist, you really do not understand the meaning of class.)

I think you like to think you're on the "left" because it allows you to feel more comfortable about your hate. Admitting that you are not working with any actual communists would means admitting you are not working on the side of history that will be remembered fondly.

It's likely a sunk-cost fallacy for you. You have gone so far down this road that you feel there is no incentive to turn back. You dedicated all this time to hate, so you feel the need to make that time worthy by convincing yourself you're fighting for women and against the patriarchy. The cost of admitting that you're surrounded on all sides by snakes in your mind is much greater than hate you can continue to spew if you continue ahead.

Meanwhile, Incels are lauding your efforts. They need you. They cannot destroy feminism without women and they have found the perfect wedge to drive you from it and inspire you to take a sledge hammer to a liberation movement. They cannot get feminism to fail without people like you.

You aren't "turn[ing] in[]to a fascist," you already are working with them, already uplifting them, already campaigning for them.

As for your insistence upon "definitions":

[M]ale dominant society has long striven to define "woman" as a discrete biological category: female, with the purpose of stripping certain people of personhood can really challenge so much of the pro-gender/sex binary bull we are all fed from childhood.

We can no longer ignore how biology, biological discourse, and the terms and words we use to refer to our material reality are structured by historic and current social and political views. A biological reality becomes cognitively significant through this discourse and these terms we use and concepts we engage with. So, defining 'women' as 'females' -- and thus emphasizing a label that is ascribed to all at birth along patriarchal standards of 'correct' genitalia and 'best' fertility -- is itself a political choice influenced by one’s socialization rather than one that can claim to neutrally reflect what the world is 'really' and 'materially' like.

The fact society already defines 'women' as ova producers and child bearers (i.e. the very definition of human female; the sex that has the ability or potential to bear offspring or produce eggs) or even as vagina havers and uterus havers (i.e. the insistence that, 'only someone with a uterus or vagina is a woman') is a result of socialization in a male dominant society that has striven to define 'woman' as a discrete biological class, female.

Even radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon (an actual radical feminist, and she supports trans women) understood that to be defined as female is to be an object. You do not get to consent to yourself; to your femaleness. It has been defined and ascribed to you and for you. Because male dominant society must see to it that female is a woman and "clearly" a woman, opposite that of "man." It must see to it that women are women and men are men and that the two ought be separate because this allows said society to prescribe certain bounds to each group.

Certain bounds of behavior. Certain bounds of public life. Certain bounds of private life. Certain bounds of presentation.

And this all helps foster the reification of gendered associations that decrease the perception of women as empowered agents and even human. These bounds of behavior assign to men the role of Aggressor and to women the role of passive Recipient, helping to reproduce sexual violence against women by decreasing their agency. These social prescriptions encourage men to act on behalf of women from making financial or relationship decisions, to deciding when and where and how a woman has sex, to the definition and social prescription of 'female,' and to the reproductive alienation of those assigned female.

Thus, 'female' is far from a neutral scientific observation and 'woman' is far from a scientific category. It was defined by the patriarchy and the white supremacist power structure and it was designed to strip certain people of their agency and humanity. It is a classification that popped up during the period of post-enlightenment rationality as the European colonial system controlled the world. Enlightenment rationality brought to Europeans a renewed fascination with analyzing and categorizing the world, most especially its people. The enlightenment fascination with categorization was the justification for the colonization of and dominance over non-white, non-European people.

But from the enlightenment also emerged the idea that a 'natural law' governed all people; that we were subject to a natural hierarchy; that there were some individuals more human than others. The modern definitions of "male" and "female" evolved alongside our creation of the definitions for "black" and "white" and alongside our definitions of and prescriptions of personhood.

'In the United States, the man known as the father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, built the field in the antebellum South, operating on enslaved women in his backyard, often without anesthesia—or, of course, consent. As C. Riley Snorton has recently documented, the distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female—making Sims’s research applicable to his women patients in polite white society—without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.'

The insistence upon one standard definition for the female-experience, is laughable, at best. And not just because definitions are inherently imprecise and inadequately encompass the entirety of our lived experienced and the material world. But also because the definitions of words are literally socially constructed. They were created and have since been defined and influenced by oppressive structures like the patriarchy and white supremacy and colonialism. This defining of human experiences is influenced by cissexism, intersexism, heterosexism, and sexism.

There isn't a single property that makes 'femaleness.' And that's pretty widely accepted. There's no single thing that single-handedly makes for 'womanhood' or 'female.' It's not like after a certain number or configuration of properties converging at a particular time, you get 'female.' There should never be some one standard against which all bodies are compared or measured for the correct amount of 'femaleness.'

So, when people want to create a standard measure for 'femaleness,' we need to ask WHO gets to set these standards or properties of 'femaleness' and WHY they're the authority. In any claim about which measures or properties are adequately 'female-enough' are assumptions about power and authority. Who has the power and authority in our society to decide who is 'female-enough?'" X

First, "Transgenderism" does not exist. Trans people exist. But there is no trans ideology. It's just trans people living and letting live.

Second, intersectional feminism- which you're actually critiquing as it is the one ideology or paradigm which consistently advocates for trans inclusion and liberation of *all* women- is notoriously not a white movement. It was literally coined by a black woman and seeks to decolonize sex relations.

The issue with modern feminism you have is simply it's inclusion of trans women. Because you cannot stand their existence, that much is clear. You clearly find them disgusting and reprehensible and abominations of the gender binary.

Well, that's... wildly incorrect. Although, black and brown trans people do face more violence than white trans people. Most trans people and all intersectional feminists agree with that.

And what sort of wild conspiracy are you spewing here? You know the majority of trans people work low wage jobs, right? They're not working in the Tech industry. They face staggering rates of poverty.

I do believe trans women are women. They are completely and totally women. I accept them in my feminism because I am an intersectional feminist and I understand the intersection of sex and cisgendered status and how they play off each other.

I treat no one with misogyny. Because I have a deep understanding of the benevolent sexism they brain wash people into accepting, something which you have yet to address in yourself. Unlike you, I also do not demonize or shit on anything people associate with women. There is no such thing as "inferior" or "superior."

I also understand that the patriarchy has a stake in maintaining gender differentiation and the gender-sex binary.

A trans woman made you your coffee the other day. She handed it to you. You are none the wiser that her trans hand touched that same coup you drank out of. A trans woman packaged your latest Amazon shipment. She's not allowed to use the bathroom; has to use bottles to pee in. A trans woman answered the phone when you called customer service, and you were none the wiser. A trans woman sorted and packaged the food you eat-- from those chips you enjoy to that drink you really like to the cereal you eat, and the tea you buy.

She helped make the chips for the computer or smart phone you're using to harass me and hate her.

Me: "Many of those pussy hats and pins and t-shirts with catchy slogans you all love are made in sweatshops. The women making them make cents on the dollar and get raped by the foreman, daily. Because the patriarchy is trying to sell you your empowerment; convince you that buying from these billionaires is "liberating" because the billionaires happen to be women."

You: "This is oppression!"

Die mad about how you're supporting sweatshops in the global south every time you buy one of those shirts.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I've been sitting on this post since I saw it on my feed because something is being demonstrated here about one of the biggest misunderstandings people often have about intersectionality as a framework of approach. I have absolutely no idea if I can articulate my thoughts in a way that can be heard, but I think I need to try.

I'm feeling a resonance to growing up hearing white people breaking down their ethnic background into rigid fractions purely based on which relative last lived in the old world. We've all seen the math. 20% Irish, 50% English, ⅛ Cherokee on my mother's father's side.

Except that they got to that math by subtracting their "ethnic eccentricities" from a default White American Experience. In this framework, one imagines A Person as being the same as the hegemonic default, with each "marginalized intersection of identity" acting as a sifting filter that removes your access to certain Personhood Privileges. At one end of the experience is the Unfiltered Person, wholly privileged and never at a disadvantage. At the other, the Most Oppressed Class in America, with their scant smattering of remaining humanity at the bottom of a tall tower of sifting trays. To be marginalized in some way is to be Without Privilege, as if privilege and oppression are mutually exclusive states of existence. A black man is no longer fully a man because he is black, and therefore while "he still has male peivilege" the assumption is that some of these privileges aren't accessible to him. That one can confidently say "these are the male privileges a black man doesn't have, but always remember that he's still more privileged abd therefore less disadvantaged than any woman."

This obviously makes (white) people squirmy because they recognize they're treading into territory of "white women are more oppressed than black men" which is an argument with immediate and obvious counter (see above). But trying to walk this tightrope allows them to leave the underlying framework of hierarchy within systemic oppression while laying claim to "intersectional" politick.

Perhaps the black man isn't MORE privileged than a white woman, but at least **equally so on a different axis**. Perhaps he can both oppress and be oppressed because his manhood is inherently dominating, but his blackness is inherently deemed subservient?

Except that black men aren't (only) harmed by systemic oppression in the direction of timidity/subservience. Their perceived "hyper-aggression" is itself a form of embodied violence against them.

So perhaps it's not about positioning, it's about the manner of violence! Surely we could claim that black WOMEN are the ones who experience sexualized/gendered racial violence, while black men only experience *racial* violence!

Except that's not true either. Racial violence against black men has ALWAYS been gendered, and OFTEN been sexualized. Black men and boys being treated as inherent sexual predators ISN'T because they are men. It's because they are black men. For decades, we have understood that positioning men from racial minority groups as inherently hyper-masculine and as default potential sexual predators has been used as described above to enact gendered violence (e.g. revenge killings related to the "ruin" of a family woman). But we have also understood for just as long that it is also used to deny the higher rates of sexual abuse these racialized men and boys endure (see the positioning of racialized "othered" men and boys who are raped using phalluses and phallic like objects by members of the dominant racial group, often REGARDLESS of the gender of the perpatrator).

But to acknowledge that black men experience gendered and sexualized racial violence, is to acknowledge that men of ALL groups may experience gendered and sexualized violence related to their marginalized identities. A concept easily confirmed simply by looking at the ways that trans men and gay/bi men experience gendered and sexualized queerphobic violence. Acknowledging these things means accepted that gendered violence is not the domain of women or other gender minorities, but rather **the impact** a person's gender has on how the violence they experience when they are exposed to systemic violence for ANY REASON.

I think this is the piece people struggle with. They imagine "axes" of oppression being different algorithms charted on a graph where each person inhabits the whole of the algorithm, and is simply experiencing separate but interacting relationships to systemic violence.

Instead I would recommend people imagine a spiderweb. Every web is unique in how it is woven around its spider. The different "threads" of self that make up the whole of "me" are not separate from each other but actively comingling, connecting and reconnecting, and entirely one comprehensive self that is far more than the sum if each thread combined. The web includes all the components of self at once, not distinct but in tandem with each other. A black man is no more "only black" than he can ever be "only a man". A man of mixed race is each of his races and is SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER- the **synthesis* of each of his races. That's what it MEANS for race to be a social construct. For gender to be a social construct. A man who is mixed black, white, and latino for example is never just black, never just white, never just latino. He is all of those things together and he is also NONE of those things, because he is HIM and race isn't actually something you can quantify.

We CHOOSE to construct meanings, and as long as we accept the premise that the meaning of each component of self is in any way separable from the others, we are truly failing to deconstruct the supremacy underlying those meanings. We NEED to understand that "privilege" is not a state of being. It is a permission slip from authority. The ENTIRE POINT is that as long as authority gets to decide whether or not you get to access your rights, then NO ONE HAS RIGHTS, because authority is far less worried about having an internally consistent logic between their prescribed (the values we SAY we have) and described (the values we are OBSERVED to have) values, and far more worried about wielding power to enforce their described values. They WILL happily revoke the permission slip to people who "aren't oppressed" for the simple reason that they ARE otherwise a threat to the dominant order (see the white preachers lynched alongside black civil rights protestors as "race traitors").

We need to be able to understand that intersectionality isn't about dividing people down into fractions of self. It is about recognizing the way every facet of self interacts and expands upon each other and themselves. If we can't get there? If we can't ACTUALLY let go of the hierarchies used to enforce the oppression? All the "good talking points" in the world mean literally fuck all.

So here is my problem with the "by virtue of being a man, you have to make your peace with the fact that some people will be uncomfortable with you, and thus you have to make yourself a safe person"

I've heard the same thing about being black. A lot of people have taken my very presence as hostility. I have had people escalate situations just because I am present as a black person in front of them. Before, and after transition.

You know what the problem with bending over backwards to make other people comfortable with your presence even though you haven't actually done anything to them besides breathe the same air?

It's never enough. You can be One Of The Good Ones for ages and at some point you will fail your Good One inspection and people will turn on you at the drop of a hat. People who you thought you had a good rapport with. People you thought were your friends.

I have *experienced* this, both online and in person.

The onus is on everyone to be safe people to be around. Singling someone out and blaming them for daring to share a demographic with someone else who has caused harm isn't cute when people do it to me because I'm black, and it's also not cute when they do it because I'm a man.

People are uncomfortable about my blackness all the time. I didn't magically stop experiencing racism when I started taking testosterone. So it's absolutely wild to me that people think "well, you know, with what you look like, some people won't want you around" is going to fly when I was explicitly taught *not* to tolerate that shit by every single one of my black relatives.

Someone doesn't like that I'm occupying a space? Well I'm not hurting them, so that's a them problem and not a me problem. That's how I've learned how to exist as black in white-majority spaces. Why do you think you can change the demographic and get me to agree with you?

[feralfungii]

Small rant

terfs rly are some of the most misogynistic pieces of shit out there and they seem totally unaware of the irony of it. Claiming to be feminist but then the moment someone dfab is like "i dont identify as a woman" theyre like "OH YOU POOR CONFUSED LITTLE GIRL. You clearly have been so terribly misled and tricked!!!! Not to worry, I know you are incapable of critical thinking or making your own decisions in life, so I'M here to tell you your business, to dictate what you do with your body, and to tell you how you, as a woman, should behave!!!!"

Like wow yeah youre such a feminist, trying to dictate what other people do with their bodies and lives and telling them they don't know any better. That's definitely not at all anything like our society's tendency to tell dfab people they're irrational and reactive and don't know what they're talking about and cant be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies.

Terfs are like the pro-lifers who insist theyre feminists - they don't understand that feminism is more than just "yeah i dont think dfab people should live to be subservient to dmab people" or "men suck" or "women are angels and goddesses who can do no wrong." You arent a feminist just because youre a cis woman who's full of herself and raging at people she doesn't consider to be her equals. Feminism is such a huge and nuanced thing and it drives me nuts to see people directly undermining what feminism actually is while insisting to be championing it.

Also, any real feminist would be unabashedly supportive of trans women, that's just a fact. Real, actual feminism is not based in sexist fake science, it's based on "the way we as individuals and as a society treat people needs to be considered in context of many layers of intersectionality, privilege, oppression, and every nuanced thing in between. No one's experience and life should be invalidated and taken from their control based on gender, race, religion, class, or sexuality."

Insisting on gender roles and specific gender presentation and policing of other peoples bodies, harassing and bullying people who dont conform to your personal preferences... I cant think of anything less feminist than terf ideology. There is nothing more harmful to the true purpose of feminism than their weird self-righteous misogyny and transphobia. There is nothing more insulting to the spirit of feminism than to totally invalidate anyone else's personhood and identity based on sexist gender ideology.

If you think that chromosomes and genitals are deciding factors of who people are, who they're capable of being, and what they're capable of doing, you have a lot of internalized sexism to work through. If you think someone's entire life needs to be dictated by their gender, you also have a lot of internalized misogyny and sexism to sort through. You cannot claim to be fighting for women while excluding people who are also suffering under the system feminism is supposed to be fighting against (spoiler alert, the system is run by a bunch of old rich white guys, not by trans people who want to be able to use the public bathroom without getting literally attacked) and also promoting and spreading the same hurtful, hateful rhetoric that people have always used to say women aren't really people. They will literally parrot archaic gender ideology from times when women weren't fucking allowed to vote and claim they're feminists, it's absolutely nonsensical.

Im sure many of them dont actually believe in their own righteousness and just hide behind the smokescreen of feminism so they can use it as a defense when theyre called out for abusing and harassing people. They can just say it's in the name of feminism. They're not abusing and ostrasizing marginalized groups because theyre bigotted! Oh no, not at all, they're just soooo feminist.

But im sure there are also plenty who are genuinely just... women who have been deeply hurt and are lashing out at oppressed groups and minorities in some attempt to offset the sense of helplessness that comes with the fact that so much of their pain is being caused by people in power. They cant punch up high enough for those people to even notice, so they punch down instead. And they get the temporary feeling that they're doing something to counteract whatever or whoever hurt them, that they're helping a just cause by hurting the big bad scary trans people who are clearly the driving force behind the mistreatment of feminine people in our society, and then any time they might have an inkling of "Am I hurting people who are already suffering?" they can turn around and be assured by their echochamber that no, you aren't, because the transgenders aren't people, their suffering is faked to invalidate the suffering of "real" women, and your actions are beyond reproach because the other terfs all agree youre in the right

Cause, yknow, people who dehumanize entire sections of the population and want them eradicated or controlled can usually count on others of that mindset to be able to objectively identify when they're being hateful or going too far. Groups that shamelessly take pride in being "radical" while targeting minorities, who seem to base their victories on "how much harm can we cause to the people we dislike," and whose talking points often seem to be scarily along the lines of eugenics, conversion therapy, or straight up eradication of real people are usually totally reasonable and rational and definitely in the right. Not hateful or bigotted at all.

I get that they hate trans people but man they really fucking hate feminism too for people who include it in the name. Feminist should never have been used to describe such evil.

[baphometsss]

“we need terms like woman and man to exist bc they describe two sides to an axis of oppression” idk how to tell you this but oppression is not nearly that black and white. for one thing, (and i know you guys don’t like to talk about intersectionality) that doesn’t mean shit like racialised sexism and sexualised racism don’t exist, or that there are no people for whom rigid binaries generally don’t work (myself included, for both gender and sex related reasons). that doesn’t make me any less likely to experience discrimination and oppression as part of my daily life.

also if you think trans and gender variant people are even tolerated in society, i’m gonna need you to take the confirmation bias glasses off for a sec and pay attention to people whose plights for bodily autonomy and basic respect for personhood are being denied at every turn, plights that are in fact very much aligned with those of feminism and any other human rights movement. the more you ignore our plights for the same basic rights as you, the more you undermine your own politics.

the fact that gen z and younger millennials are generally more lgbtq friendly is being used as a marketing tool by large corporations for the simple fact that younger people have more disposable income, which means they stand to make more money off us than any other demographic

also younger people tend to be more naive and less likely to notice this. people who are supposedly more enlightened have no excuse

it has nothing to do with large scale acceptance and if you think it is you’re falling for capitalist bullshit at the first hurdle

[userkathryn]

Intersectionality in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures

This post contains spoilers for Hidden Figures (2016).

Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures examines race and gender through an intersectional lens.  Katherine Johnson overcame innumerable hardships that stemmed from being marginalized in society, as well as in the workplace.  STEM was (and remains) a male-dominated field of work—in consideration with the segregated nature of their environment, the challenges that working black women faced in pursuit of a successful career are obvious.

Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician who aided and advised NASA in a number of missions.  The film illuminates perhaps her most noteworthy achievement: calculating the trajectory along which Apollo 11 would travel to the moon and back.  Katherine faced a great many hardships while working for NASA.  To even exist as a woman in a male-dominated field could be incredibly difficult.  To this day, many women struggle to receive benefits and treatment equal to that of their male counterparts.  While Katherine confronted every one of these hardships that came with being a woman in STEM, she was also reconciling what it meant to be a black woman in a country that did not respect her personhood.  This film examines racial segregation in the workplace and its impact on black employees.  Despite overwhelming odds, Katherine excelled in her role while challenging the institutions designed to keep women, and especially black women, from attaining any significant measure of success.

While the film as a whole in incredibly moving, this scene is perhaps the most poignant.  The tension that has long been simmering has reached a boiling point, and bubbles over in a powerful monologue.  Katherine calls out the discrimination and mistreatment from her coworkers, and the countless inequities that impact her performance on a daily basis.  Her’s is a call for acceptance and accommodation.  And while the film does highlight several of the measures eventually taken to remedy these issues, black women continue to encounter many of the same barriers to this day.

Katherine was, however, not the only black woman to break new ground at NASA in the ‘60s.  An entire cohort of women worked to build it into the prestigious agency it is today.  Yet, despite their efforts and dedication to the cause, they are rarely accredited for their successes.  This film serves as a but a small step in a larger effort to recognize the black women who committed themselves to science in order to help build the world we know today.

[rareblackcat]

I think that part of this also applies to the black community too.

Our humanity had been denied for hundreds of years. People fought, died, and spent their whole lives scientifically providing that we are in fact human. That our bodies are the same as our white counterparts. And that any differences you see come from the way we've been treated and natural evaluation.

We've been denied personhood too. Our culture has been dumb down and bastardized to nothing (especially in the u.s.) Our brains said to be less then than white peoples. We aren't as smart, as sophisticate as them.

And this sacrifice should be honored and acknowledged but it shouldn't fully define who we have to be. We are more then just black. And you see this isolation a lot in the black community. Anything not considered black is immediately dismissed. And this phenomenon is understandable. No one wants to be like their oppressors or abusers. And no one wants to lose a part of their culture by mixing it with something else.

But we're hindering our growth as living beings by forcing ourselves into this little box of blackness. We can be black and enjoy being black and also be queer, nonhuman, an anime fan, alternative, like other music genres, ect. (Though things like anime and nerd stuff is more normal nowadays) Intersectionality exists for a reason!!

I am a black person who is also a cat, an anime fan, dresses alternatively, and like pop!

I feel like I don’t see a lot of trans women in alterhuman spaces, in therian spaces, in my spaces, now this could be just me but hear me out…

Why?

I feel like it’s becuase of this intersection of misogyny, transphobic narratives, and the need to be “digestible”

As a trans woman it becomes apparent that you need to “put the effort in”, you’re a predator if you look like a “man” or if you look like anything but a perfect woman.

If you want to not be lumped in with the // “bad trans people” the gals who don’t medically transition, the gals who “don’t even try” or whatever, the picked out members of our community who neoliberals quickly label a “straw man that doesn’t exist” when in reality no, trans people have a massive range of appearance and expression// if you don’t want to be lumped in with them then you need to be perfect.

To be an animal is to reject that, you become somthing not normal, not standard, not beautiful in the eyes of others. You become a straw man, the people that neoliberalism is fast to forget, “no one actually identifies as an animal, that’s just transphobia” is half the picture, I’m the other half.

So trans girls can’t be part of that picture, can’t be abnormal, as women we are held to a far too high standard, as trans women we are held to a standard even higher, and as animals we destroy all those standards all together. It’s “giving up” no longer being some sort of digestible cis normative being

I don’t wanna bash t girls who have that goal, it’s just that the goal that is often pushed on us, I think means a lot of us are scared to explore divergent queer spaces becuase if we do, then in the eyes of the public, we’ve given up.

Stay safe everyone, and if any trans girls are seeing this, stop pretending to be somthing you’re not, whether that be you pretending your ugly, pretending your a man, or pretending that you’re still fully human. Live true

Love you guys, and I hope this doesn’t go over like a lead balloon