#me being trans and gay directly effects everyone around me because of what they see and who i am and how they percieve me and who

[computerpeople]

i kind of dont understandd a lot of the way people talk about asexuality

[mariposakitten]

(I'm so glad someone clarified that; I almost got whiplash at the "her" and for a hot minute I wondered if *I* had been getting it wrong all this time.)

The thing is, there's three different phenomena here:

1) straight cis women who enjoy mlm erotica, and are also homophobic - sometimes being creepily invasive and objectifying to real life gay men, crossing boundaries and making people super uncomfortable (and also sometimes participating in more garden-variety homophobia, even while enjoying fictional gay men and/or sexualizing real life gay men.) This is a bad thing! Lots of gay men have talked about encounters with women who act like this, and their problems with it. (And it shouldn't have to be said, but sexual harassment and treating real people like objects for your sexual gratification is bad no matter who is doing it.)

2) A much larger group of women (usually presumed straight and cis, but not necessarily) are frequently shamed and demeaned for enjoying mlm erotica, despite being respectful towards actual gay men. Sometimes this comes from gay men who find it uncomfortable (your feelings are valid but your feelings don't get to control what someone else writes, reads, or looks at!), sometimes it comes from straight men or other women doing the white-knight thing. This can stem from purity culture, from a sincere but misguided conflation of "discomfort" with "harm," but most often it comes from good old-fashioned misogyny. (With a dash of racism, when people start throwing terms like "fujoshi" around like slurs.)

And 3) there is a terf psy-op, usually operating under the cover of Phenomena 1 or 2, where trans men (often gay or bi) are called "straight women fetishizing gay men", because terfs are awful and don't want trans men to be taken seriously. (And because they want to manufacture a parallel to their transbian fearmongering among cis gay men.)

All three of these things are real! They all happen! Depending on what circles you run in, you likely see more of one of these than thd others, but I promise you they're all real!

The problem comes when people on all sides conflate these. Someone talking about Phenomenon 1 is often mistaken for doing Phenomenon 2; people doing Phenomenon 2 usually try to justify it by pointing at Phenomenon 1; and terfs trying to pull off Phenomenon 3 try to disguise it as either or both of the above.

So like. When OP said "it's valid to critique straight women fetishizing gay men," I am assuming he was talking about Phenomenon 1, because I've followed @hadeantaiga for a while and his takes are usually good and reasonable! And he's right to say it - there are in fact straight women being gross and bigoted towards gay men, and it is good and just to criticize that!

But looking at the notes, it looks like a LOT of people instead assumed he was participating in Phenomenon 2. Which I get! Because that's also super duper common to see! But maaaaybe clarifying first would have been a good idea, because as it is a bunch of people are jumping on OP for something he didn't actually say.

However.

The thing that really gets me.

Is everyone is so caught up in arguing about Phenomena 1 and 2 that they are completely ignoring what OP was saying about Phenomena 3.

You know. The entire point of his first post.

This is why terf psyops are so effective, y'all. They're hiding behind all the rest of this shit, and even when it's being directly pointed out ppl would rather talk about the distraction than what they're actually doing.

"But it's valid to critique straight women fetishizing gay men!"

Definitely. But, is that person actually critiquing straight women?

Or are they actually talking about transmascs, and hiding it as "talking about straight women"?

Because that's what a lot of folks actually do.

[thechangeling]

For the Director’s cut edition ask, I’d love to hear about ‘Power’ and/or ‘You have found two’.

Hi!!

In my defense you asked for this.

Ok so Power is kind of like when cats push things off the coffee table just because they can and their bored. And sometimes it's a breakable glass but they do not give a fuck because they're having fun. Well that's kind of what Ty's relationship with sex is like in this fic.

He's basically playing around with something that he has been warned against either directly or indirectly. The ways people infantalize autistics aren't always super obvious. If people make you feel guilty and bad and dirty everytime you ask questions or bring up certain things related to sex then eventually you internalize that. Also people in this society have a tendency to create a culture of shame around sex in general. So a lot of parents see it as they are protecting their disabled child from the bad dangerous dirty thing that will inevitably change them in some way. And these attitudes are very gendered and misogynistic but also queerphobic.

I find it interesting how so much sexism can easily effect queer men as well and I definitely apply that to Ty in my writing. People act like sex with men, or more accurately sex with a dick damages you or dirties you in some way which is so unbelievably fucked up. My parents have this very weird way about praising me for being a lesbian where my step dad in particular talks about how glad he is that I'm not dating men because it means I'm not having sex with men which.... why???? Why would that bother you so much? I mean it's never gonna happen but still??? It's weird. And what happens if I date a trans woman who hasn't had bottom surgery? Basically the point is everyone needs to stop caring so much about dicks.

I also think it's interesting the framing of "fucking someone" versus "letting someone fuck you", like someone is framed as the person doing an action to someone else and the other person is framed as letting it be done to them. It's weird and unfair.

But anyways moving on. Ty, being disabled and queer faces a unique type of oppression where he is shamed on more then one account for having sexual desires. I find that being disabled almost strips you of your gender in the eyes of society which is super interesting because it leads to a lot of disabled people thinking about their genders in different ways and maybe not necessarily identifying with traditional gender roles.

I find that a lot of autistic people view gender differently then allistic people because we don't really see the point of the social rules of gender. Because gender is a social construct and we don't "get" social rules so we don't get gender. But honestly does anyone really???? And being queer just makes everything more interesting on the gender front. So people in society will seek to rob you of your gender for being gay/lesbian the same way they will for being autistic.

I really do believe that some of us are just naturally nonbinary but I also think that some people just feel so divorced from gender now due to our experiences.

Getting back on track. Autistic people have a wide range of sexualities and sexual experiences. I just pulled from certain specific ones to create Ty's. I was inspired by hearing a few autistics discuss autism and hypersexuality. Hypersexuality in the sense not referring to the trauma response just extreme sexual thoughts and intense and content sexual desire. I personally flip back and forth between hypersexual and having zero sexual desire or interest. Autism just changes so much of how you experience things, including sex and sexual desire.

A lot of autistic people grow up feeling like they wanna talk about sex and ask questions about it from a very young age but people get weirded out and shut you down or make fun of you. I think it's a social rules thing where we just don't care about the societal taboo surrounding sex. And you can't make me care. Why can't I ask people how to orgasm more the once consecutively at the breakfast table??? Why is that not "appropriate?" It's stupid!

Anyways so in Power Ty basically says fuck all of that and does what he wants because who cares. His approach to sex is very experimental like "what happens if I do this" but it's also about power and control. Autistic people often feel like we're powerless due to the way society treats us. So he uses sex and kink as a way to assert dominance over those who would oppress him and he gets off on it.

"He enjoyed the thrill of pushing someone to their limit, there was something almost poetic about the way he could make the most suave and collected person come completely undone. He loved tying them up, making them beg for it. Especially men. Ty honestly had no idea why. Maybe it was because so many guys thought they were so superior to someone like him."

Is this entirely healthy? Mehhhh?? Idk? I'm not an expert. But what I do know is that I hate it when allistic people, mainly doctors and researchers stick their noses in our business and make the way we naturally do things sound like a problem. There are so many articles written about the sexual "dysfunctions" of those with "high functioning" autism 🤮🤮 manly boys. Because of course.

It's always presented as this fake ass concern with barely concealed judgement and superiority. And it comes with queerphobia and kink shaming. Because society doesnt like people stepping out of the norm.

"But just like most things in life, Ty was undeterred. Nobody could ever tell him what to do. If he wanted to kiss and fuck boys and girls and everyone and anyone in between, if he wanted to defy these nonsensical and imaginary rules put in place by a world that was seeking his destruction. Then he damn well would."

It's partly about rebellion against authority as well as seeking his own pleasure. Like that damn cat knocking glasses off the coffee table.

Ty's a threat and a promise wrapped in devastating beauty and ecstacy. He won't necessarily break your glasses.

But he'll break you.

Thank you so much for reading!

[lazywitchling]

You know what’s scary? I came to tumblr in the height of fandom blog vs hipster blog, when superwholock was first getting started, before Disney had a choke hold on the entertainment industry, back when it was fun to get really really into tv shows and base our whole personality on what media we consumed. Looking back on it, it was... not a great way to be, but goddamn did it save me.

Not like in a dramatic “saved my life��� way, but I mean.

I could go back on my main blog and find my pro-republican posts. I could find my anti-trans posts and my “well okay, gay people can be gay at home, but I don’t want them out where I can see them.” I could find those. They’re back there, years ago in my archive. Because that’s all I knew. That’s all I heard. My community - I mean my real life one, my local area, my friends, my church group, everything around me - is very... monoculture. There aren’t a lot of people around here who don’t look like me, have the same economic background as me, raised in the same beliefs I was... it’s just a whole lot of carbon copies of me. So I thought... “ew, how can someone be gay? That’s gross. They’re going to go to hell.” Because what the hell else would I think? That’s all I knew! And I thought “that boy wants to be a girl? What’s wrong with him? He should see a doctor.” And I thought “why do some people not go to work and the government just pays for them to eat? That’s not right. They shouldn’t be lazy like that.”

And then fuckin’ fandom. It wasn’t fandom directly, but when I got really into a show, I’d follow so many blogs that posted about it. Fan art, discussions, gifs, episode recaps, ask blogs... and inevitably, some of those blogs would drop the occasional political post. Mostly about how we needed marriage equality in the USA. And I thought “well. I don’t agree with that, but their fandom content is good, so I won’t unfollow them.”

It’s how I got exposed to more and more people. People who didn’t think like me. People who didn’t think like my parents. And they weren’t just political posts, sometimes it was just blogging. An artist I like would post about finally getting started on T. He was so happy that he was finally getting T. And I started to think things like “well, she— I mean, he sounds happy. So I’m happy for... him.”

More people. More stories. And I slowly stopped thinking about other people as political issues or religious problems, but as just... people who were trying to live their lives.

It was slow, and it was rocky. I still participated in church discussions that involved phrases like “hate the sin but love the sinner”. It made sense... until college, when I was face to face with people who weren’t like me. Looking at the man in my theatre troupe who was talking about his partner, I couldn’t make the “hate the sin, love the sinner” mentality work. I just couldn’t. I knew I was supposed to, but I just knew that trying to say “he’s a good person, but he just needs to stop being gay” didn’t work at all. I couldn’t hate what he was without hating who he was. And I just couldn’t, because he was my friend, dammit!

Marriage equality passed. My Facebook feed turned into the proverbial wailing and clothes-tearing from my church friends. And I very slowly... very quietly... started to post the “let’s remember that we shouldn’t hate other people” stuff. The very subtle nudging, still Christian-focused stuff that was juuuuust starting to lean left. Not too over the top, not overtly in support, because I was supposed to be one of them, a member of the church, I had to play along with the mentality.

Playing along got exhausting. Someone would deadname Caitlyn Jenner, and I’d consider for a moment that I should just let it go, that I should just pretend that it was fine. But... what about my artist friend? Would I be okay with someone deadnaming him? No, I would not. And if I was pretending I was onboard with deadnaming Caitlyn, would I have played along with deadnaming my friend? Just so I could fit in and be comfortable? So I corrected them. Her name is Caitlyn.

I learned to listen to more people. I learned why “I don’t see color” wasn’t as good a mentality to have as I thought. I learned that “feminist” wasn’t a dirty word, and it also didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I slowly learned that I was one. I slowly learned, and still learn, how to further expand all the things that covers. I learned about intersectional feminism. I learned about white privilege. I learned about so much and so many people because I was actively listening to them, I was hearing their stories, and I cared about them, wanted them to have good lives, wanted them to be able to make choices about their own lives without people like me saying “I know better.”

I learned about myself, too. At twenty-six years old, I figured out exactly why I was always so baffled when my friends talked about sex like it was this big important thing. Surprise: asexual. A second surprise a few years later: somewhere on the aromantic spectrum as well. (Where? Idk. I’ll tell you when I figure it out myself.)

The point is... it was less than a decade ago that I was exactly the type of bigot that gets chased off everyone’s blogs. I was the everything-phobe, the one who would specifically vote against any type of aid, because bootstraps, amiright? I was a whole-ass bigot. Bitch, I owned a confederate flag ring, and I’ve never lived in the south. (It’s in a landfill somewhere now.) I only learned because I first heard from people not like me, and then I learned to listen. I participated in communities that were diverse, not because I wanted the diversity, but because I wanted the content. The diversity was a side effect. And it’s what saved me.

And it fucking terrifies me how close I could have been to being some alt-right and/or terf radical new-nazi or whatever. Because if I had got on this site about two years later than I did, I’d have been caught right in that echo chamber of radfems and nazis preying on anyone they can get their talons in. I was so close. And now I see these radfems pop up in my notes, and it’s like... that could have been me. That was me at one point. I had the ideology, I just missed the identity of it all by a few years.

I don’t have a “byf” list on my blog for a reason. I don’t go through my followers and weed out the terfs and the nazis and the bigots. If they’re in there, fine. I want them to see my words. I want them to hear from someone who doesn’t think like them. I want them to hear from someone who used to be like them, but then learned (and is always learning) to be better.

And yet when I see them in my notes, I’m obliged to weed them out. I feel guilty when it’s a young girl who has clearly been targeted by the radfems on this site, teaching her that she’ll be stronger if she hates everyone they tell her to. Of all the people on this site, she’s the one who I most want to keep out of the echo chamber. But I also have a responsibility to make sure the people who follow me, the people who I follow and reblog from, don’t get caught by the shrapnel. A radfem liking my post just means I have to pay closer attention to what I say and make sure I don’t fall back on old mentalities. It keeps me accountable. But a radfem in my notes means she’s in the notes of my friends, in my reblog chains. And it is my responsibility not to turn a blind eye when people around me can get hurt.

But goddamn, if ever there was someone who needed a community outside of that circle of bigotry, it’s that fourteen year old girl who proudly calls herself a terf. And I really hope she finds one. I really do.

[you-stand-corrected]

So, you’d rather be lobotomized and kill yourself than be as smart or informed as I am. Got it. 

I stated the fact that you’re projecting because you are suffering from the Dunning-Krueger Effect. You willfully know less than absolutely nothing about anything being discussed here, or anywhere else for that matter. Your entire diatribe here is nothing more than a classic textbook case of projection. You bright up the Dunning-Kreuger Effect because it applies to you, so you therefore think it applies to me, too. 

Now, you’re going to ignore everything I and everyone else who disagrees with you actually says because you know deep down that it’s correct, despite not fully understanding it yourself.

You’ve said there’s differences in the practical outcomes between Nazism and communism when there really isn’t, and that remains the case no matter how many times to deny it. 

Communsim has been around far longer, and has caused far and away much, much more damage than Nazism. Even if we’re counting just the numbers of their own people, let alone war deaths, we can see that it has caused more deaths. Ignoring the bullshit numbers you definitely pulled from nowhere and coming upon the very first Startpage result:    Communists: 178 million deaths and counting    That Nazis trash: 21 million deaths   And remembering that commies have been around for over a century and there are several communists nation-states, yes, we can clearly see which is worse. 

America is also not 50+1 mob rule yet, though retards like you want it to be. 

AntiFa is, in spite of your demonstrably false assertions, LARPing as an anarchist group. 

The fact that you pull up their flag which you directly stated is an anarchist flag tells me you don’t even fucking read what you post. Also let me remind you that anarchy and communism are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. They’re communists in fake-as-a-three-dollar-bill anarchist garb. 

So, no, you’re wrong about that, too. Just like you’re wrong about anything and everything else you talk about.    I rightly and sincerely doubt, what with all the reflexive defense of commies and all, that you didn’t know that they killed gays and Jews and all the rest. I rightly assumed that like an idiot liberal (but I repeat myself) that you’re historically-illiterate so you can be guilty of the same irrational hate that you falsely accuse me of once a group you favor is criticized, as liberals tend to do. 

All of your replies here could easily be pulled from an AI chatbox. Including all of your malformed political takes. So long as any political compass says that fascism and communism are on opposite ends of its spectrum(s), it’s wrong. Deal with it.    You’ll notice, if you had ever actually cracked open a history text, that dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao are absolutely necessary to faithfully implement communism at the nation-state level. So, yes, real communism was at work in Soviet Russia. Whether you personally like to think so, which is the only (non)argument you ever bring to the table, is irrelevant and inadmissible. So, you’re really arguing against material reality here. 

Yes, let’s address more of my correct opinions. 

You lie about trans people not being able to receive gender-affirming care in the first place, then consider it a genocide when it isn’t. 

You should know that women doesn’t include trans women because, get this, no matter what they might think or feel, they’re men since they’ve been male from birth and no number of outside interventions can change that. So, no, they’re still not allowed in the women’s room. Crazy, I know!

You know that hormones have in fact been given to children as young as 8, right? And, no, it’s still not a blanket statement. Just because a tiny minority of GOP dopes MISuse the Bible, and your views on it are irrelevant and immaterial to this discussion by the by, doesn’t make it applicable to a whole movement.    Oh, and here’s an actual direct quote from Michael Knowles: 

Now, take that caricature of him that someone else built in your own empty little head for you, which you've gleefully now allowed to live there rent-free, and give him a Russian accent. He'd sound like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and the rest of the refuse of humanity. Give that caricature a Chinese accent and he'd sound like Mao and Xi. Give that caricature a Cambodian accent and he'd sound like Pol Pot. Give that caricature a Vietnamese accent and he'd sound like Ho Chi Minh. Give that caricature a Spanish accent and he'd sound like Castro, Maduro, and Guevara.

I figured you’d be one of those covid hysterics. When you have verifiably shitty opinions, it follows that everything you think is wrong. 

Surely I don’t have to explain to you how a virus with a better than 99.6% survival rate doesn’t merit illegally shutting down the global economy, the knock-on effects of which will kill more people than the virus ever could have even if we had done absolutely nothing about it. You reek of desperation and hand sanitizer. 

And you back to reflexively defending lunatics because I have a bigger dick than you. The sexual predators among them are being defended and it’s illegal in a few states to receive cross-sex hormones and surgeries if you’re under the age of 18. That checks the boxes of you being wrong, and immoral. 

If you aren’t trans, people will accuse you of disgusting things, and you could go to prison for not using someone’s preferred pronouns. If you don’t transition your child, they could be taken away from you and you could go to jail for it. 

Back to this it-was-definitely-a-coup-attempt: 

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-evidence-us-capitol-attack-was-coordinated-sources-2021-08-20/ 

You pulled a quote from an opinion piece cited on not-a-source Wikipedia. But, go on, tell me why you don’t like common sense laws that you have to grossly misinterpret because you’re desperately looking for a dragon to slay. Tell me you haven’t bought hook-line-and-sinker into media hysteria.

Then, you lie about knowing how authoritarianism works, or what it even is. You falsely claim fascism isn’t radical, demonstrating that you don’t know what either is there, too.

You know precisely what I mean when I say you’re dirty. Any accusation from you is a confession, so I rightly treat it as such. Nevermind that you said “I wouldn’t want to be lobotomized if I were as smart as you”, which is something a totally sane and well-adjusted person says. Nevermind the fact that I’ve demonstrated being in a place so high above you that I’d need a microscope to see you. 

You don’t know jack shit about jack shit. You will either block me, as cowards like you tend to do, or simply stop replying because you know no amount of lying and twisted what I’ve said will ever change the fact that I’m right and you’re wrong. Every insult from you, remember, is a confession.

Yes, you certainly are as predictable as the next sunrise. I’ve already established that. 

Antifa literally fought against the nazis

They literally didn’t but it’s cute you think so.

Anyway, nazism is just an idea 🙃

[thesaltyace]

big rant/ramble below, you can safely ignore and move on to the next post in your feed.

Urgh

I shared the results of that autism screener with a quasi-friend who I thought would be "safe" (we used to work together and we connected over his being gay and me being visibly queer) but his response was blergh

Everyone has hints of autism.

okay yeah but this isn't just *hints* of autism. I'm answered yes to symptoms I've had since I was a kid that I've learned to mask or work around as an adult. But I still struggle with them.

He pointed out that he sees me as more ADHD than ASD.

Yeah, fair, and I'd need to see a professional to try to distinguish if my symptoms are ADHD, ASD, or both.

You don't hit the three prongs needed for a diagnosis.

But.... but I do. And the stuff I dealt with as a kid is still stuff I deal with today. I just mask it better. A short and not exhaustive list:

As I kid I had trouble interacting with peers. I didn't have friends, really. I didn't know how to make friends and I didn't try terribly hard to. I acquire friends when someone else "adopts" me and decides that we are friends. And once I became an adult, I have almost never had friends of my own - I share a friend group with my spouse who we're primary connected to through him. I'm okay with that. Maintaining a friendship entirely on my own power sounds impossible and exhausting.

I was okay with not having friends, I liked being alone, but my mom insisted on me being social. She made me join things so that I would have a list of people to invite to parties. I'd honestly have preferred a day of doing stuff I like or just a couple friends. As an adult, I want to be alone on my birthday. I will celebrate with certain friends, separately, usually over a quiet meal. That's it.

I had trouble understanding sarcasm and figurative speech. Like, I understand it now but I still think most figurative speech is annoying. I've been told the way I deliver sarcasm is weird, too.

I liked memorizing movies and quoting them start to finish, I thought it was fun but everyone else thought it was weird. I continued to do this into adulthood but I only quote aloud when I'm alone. Alamo Drafthouse quote-alongs are the BEST. I don't do this with every movie, either, just ones I really like.

Okay actually I also liked to listen to the same album or, in some cases, the same song over and over until I was sick of it (and sometimes even after that point). I mean, just endlessly looping on repeat. Not interspersed with other songs. I do this as an adult a LOT because it's easier with headphones to do this without annoying everyone else around you. Like, often it's fine for me to just put a playlist on shuffle, but I get into Moods where I just want the one album/song over and over. Yesterday I listened to Wellerman about 50 times in a row and only stopped because I had to get up and do something else and that song wasn't "good" for whatever I got up to do.

My special interest as a kid was cats. Literally everything cats, all the time - I sought out obscure facts and could tell you the difference between similar species, and wanted cats involved in literally everything I did. Adults laughed it off as childhood obsession. I was also pretty obsessed with the solar system. I thought asking my peers, as a trivia question, which of Jupiter's moons had its own asteroid (Io, in case you were wondering) was appropriate and interesting and was confused that they didn't know that. That was in fifth grade.

I watched the weather channel for fun. I would watch it for hours and absorb the weekly forecast info just... for fun? I never used it, could never tell you if you should dress a certain way or bring an umbrella or whatever. Everyone thought it was weird.

I was a know-it-all and literally could not stop myself from bluntly correcting people who were wrong. Didn't know or care that it was "rude". I'm still that way but I've learned how to sometimes swallow the urge long enough to find a more tactful way to point it out (but often fail).

I could read on my own before kindergarten, used vocabulary beyond what one would expect for my age, and had a special interest in spelling and grammar throughout my school years. I did not understand how other people weren't interested in learning about it and getting it right. I read at an undergrad level by 4th grade.

I hated loud noises and often covered my ears to block out irritating sounds. I could also hear high pitched noises that even other kids didn't seem to hear (or at least weren't bothered by them). Too much noise sent me into an internal meltdown, I'd just kinda shut down because I couldn't deal with it.

Textures and pressure on my skin bothered the absolute fuck out of me - sock seams, certain fabric materials, socks that weren't equally elastic, one shoe tighter than the other, tags.... all of that. (Also, fun anecdote I just unlocked - when I was 4 or 5 my grandmother started letting me use the soft silk sleep shirt she had as a young woman because I preferred it to anything else. Soft, smooth, no irritating qualities. Bliss. I wanted to wear it all the time.)

Don't get me started on food. Until I was in COLLEGE I mostly subsisted on pasta with either butter or alfredo sauce and chicken. I would eat other things, but pasta and/or chicken was (and still is) my biggest safe/comfort food. I'd eat other stuff mostly if I could control the balance of ingredients, get it made plain, or could confirm the texture wouldn't be offensive (so, like... plain burgers, plain cheese pizza, grilled cheese, mashed potatoes, etc.) I cannot stress this enough - from childhood through COLLEGE I did this. As a kid my mom had to make me a completely separate dish most nights to get me to eat something. My spouse was horrified at what little variety I ate. The only reason I eat so much variety now is that he knows what I do/don't like and tells me in advance if I'll find a texture or taste offensive. Of course, rather than wanting consistent texture like I did when I was younger, I now seek as much texture as possible (so long as they aren't Bad textures) so.... that's fun. But yeah most of my objections to Yucky foods is due to T E X T U R E. Even if I like the taste, the texture overrides it all.

I prefer animals to people. I will seek out animals and interact with them instead of people in the same room. And will pointedly focus on the animal to avoid interacting with people.

I'm perfectly happy with only myself for company. Being with just my spouse counts as me being "alone" though. Always has. I just realized last night that it's because I do minimal to no masking around him because he's a safe person to unmask with and always has been. Never batted an eye at the weird shit I do beyond asking questions about what I was doing or why. And then just "Okay."

Okay honestly just the fact that I want to vent into the void of tumblr instead of actually discussing this with a person - even my spouse! - pretty effectively shows how little it occurs to me to interact with other people directly. o_0

And there are so many more things that I won't list here because I could just go on and on. And like, sure, some of this may certainly overlap with ADHD but my point is that I have enough to point to ASD that it doesn't feel like having a "hint" of autism. And who knows - maybe it is mostly just ADHD and CPTSD stuff interacting in weird ways. Could be!

But just because I can make small talk and make eye contact and do the "normal" shit and I can interact "normally" doesn't mean I LIKE it. I had to LEARN to do those things to avoid having bad social interactions. When I'm by myself or with my spouse, I behave very differently than I do around anyone else. ANYONE. It's not just slightly changing my behavior depending on who I'm with - it's completely suppressing how I naturally would do things if left to my own devices.

Like, the things we recommended to our autistic students who wanted to know how to interact in ways that would help them blend in/be accepted by others ARE THE EXACT THINGS I ALREADY DO. Like, it did not occur to me at the time that neurotypicals literally do not have to think about doing those things. I thought, ah, these students just need to be told what the tricks are. Other people figure these tricks out on their own. It did not occur to me that other people, in fact, do not learn these tricks because they naturally do that behavior. They do not have to actively think about learning the trick, period. I literally thought other people also have to think as hard as I do about interactions. Evidently not.

So yeah, I'm feeling a little upset about the reaction I got from him because I'm like.... honestly, a diagnosis of ASD wouldn't change a lot about how I do things or think of things. But it would make me feel better about interacting with and participating in autism-related stuff if I am actually autistic. I realize I can use the resources and supports meant for ASD regardless, and for formal supports anything I can access due to my ADHD diagnosis likely covers anything I'd need for ASD. But having a diagnosis opens up more community. Right now I'm like yeah I'm ADHD but I totally relate to this ASD content. But I'm not going to interact much because I feel like I don't have the right to join in since idk if I do have ASD.

idk I have a lot of feelings. I had a bad email about the trans insurance coverage thing yesterday and I'm not in a great headspace, but finding out me and my spouse both scored very high on the autism screening stuff was honestly a high point because we ended up sharing a lot of how we view and interact with the world that was very eye-opening about why we interact the way we do, how we relate to others (and how other people think we're weird for how we relate to others), and just...everything. And having someone be skeptical after I've spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that I DON'T have ASD only to conclude that at the very least, I should probably be evaluated because I can't reasonably rule it out. Like, most people do not wonder if they have autism. The fact that I am spending this much time looking into it and trying to find examples to disprove it only to find I overwhelmingly can't in virtually every single diagnostic category.... just..... dismissing it outright is kinda hurtful.

Like, I recognize that ADHD symptoms overlap a fair bit, but seriously. My spouse (who definitively does not have ADHD) scored almost identically to me and we vibed on almost everything when we compared answers. We see most things similarly. We have similar areas of confusion about other people and for fundamentally similar reasons. I can't imagine all of the stuff that points to ASD for me is just ADHD in disguise, not when I vibe THAT HARD with someone else. Spouse does not vibe with me on ADHD content. At all. He can appreciate it since he does live with me, after all, and observes whatever's being discussed. But he doesn't vibe with it. He vibes with autism content, though. And I vibe with both.

idk this rant ended in rambling and I'm just going to go listen to Inside on repeat for a couple hours while I try to calm down a bit. o_0

[altik-0]

Personal Revelation

I've spent the last two weeks trying to figure out how to write this post, but my mind has felt like it's tumbling around a washing machine and trying to figure out how to straighten my thoughts into a coherent message has felt impossible. But I'm driving myself crazy continuing to hold off on saying something, so I'm going to just rip off the bandage now, and we can talk in more depth after the cut.

Hi! 👋 I'm Asexual and Aromantic! Let's talk about it.

Where to even start

This month has been a fucking trip.

On the one hand, this has been the fourth month of nearly continuous quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other, the end of May was the spark that began a wildfire of protests against police brutality that have swept across the country, including the seemingly milquetoast land of Salt Lake City. I found myself simultaneously figuring out the umpteenth way to keep myself entertained while being in home nearly uninterrupted for over 90 days, while also desperately searching for the courage to exit my home and join the marches against injustice.

And in the background of all of this, it was Pride Month.

On the 12th, a Youtube creator I follow released a video about their experience discovering themselves as non-binary. You should watch it, but what is important for the sake of this post is that the bulk of the video is an asynchronous telling of various moments throughout their life that, in reflection, show them that "[they] were who [they] are now, back then". These moments form a tapestry that tell a story of self discovery, and the result is incredibly powerful.

They released a rough cut about a week earlier for Patreon supporters, and I was immediately transfixed. I watched it three times in a row on the first day it was uploaded. I watched it twice more after the release. Hell, when I pulled this video up now to get the share link I couldn't help but sit and watch through it all over again.

At first I didn't really know why I felt so attached to this piece in particular. Yet still, I spent multiple nights laying awake for hours in what felt like a dreamlike haze at the time. It took three nights like this for me to realize I had spent all this time reflecting on my own past moments, and revisiting them through the lens this video had shared with me.

How I got here

It is September 2005. I am currently at a school dance. I know I am supposed to be finding someone to dance with and enjoy that for some reason, but all I want to do is go home. I might consider mustering up some courage and just asking someone, anyone, to dance, if it weren't for the fact that I still didn't have any friends. Instead, I feel trapped, wandering up and down the side wall, waiting for it to be over so I can finally leave. I stumble across a small group also sitting on the sides; a girl reading manga, and another playing Yu-Gi-Oh! with a boy across from her. I approach: "I didn't realize anyone still played this" They invite me to join, and soon I find myself with genuine friends at school for the first time in years. I never think about asking someone to dance again.

It is the summer of 2017. I am at a bar with some coworkers at the end of the week. I don't drink, but I've opened myself up to joining people for happy hour because it feels like a good way to socialize, and I've genuinely enjoyed getting to know folks. My team lead makes a comment that he feels it's impossible for a man and a woman to ever have a friendly relationship without having some element of sexual tension between them. I rebuff this comment -- initially I feel a sense of feminist frustration at the concept, as if it is implicitly saying that men and women should not work together. As the conversation continues, I realize the real reason I feel so sure this is wrong is because I have never felt this way toward anyone I've worked with.

It is the summer of 2008. I am in church, listening to the new instructor for my Sunday school class shift the discussion towards politics. Since he began, every lesson without fail will eventually derail into right-wing screeds. For him, any issue that is even vaguely left-leaning is a potential avenue for Satan to take hold of you: feminism, activism, even environmentalism. But lately he has had a particular fixation on the topic of gay marriage, and it is beginning to take a toll on my mental health. Being in these classes, hearing a man in a position of authority repeatedly say "it is not that we shouldn't love these people, but we need to still understand that they are committing a sin" has become physically painful to listen to. Of course, I am not queer, just an ally -- I can only imagine how painful this must be for those who are directly affected. I will nearly pass out from exhaustion and anxiety during sacrament meeting a few hours later.

It is February 2020. I am out to lunch with a friend and coworker. I have just recently changed jobs after less than a year, because I was hopelessly miserable at my last one. It should have been a dream job, marrying two of my closest passions, but instead I felt suffocated by being in a world where everyone seemed indifferent towards me at best, or actively hated me at worst. My friend invited me to join this job, and although it is a miserable job, I find solace in being able to go to lunch and have genuine conversations with someone I get along with. He mentions his wife is pregnant, and the stress of tending for his current child while she is resting. I acknowledge the frustration, though somewhat awkwardly since I am still single. "Oh, yeah, I sometimes forget you aren't married yet, haha. Well, don't worry, you'll get to join in on the fun soon enough!" I want to say "I very much doubt that"; instead I say "Well, I guess we'll see." The conversation does not feel so genuine anymore.

It is January 2009. I am watching House M.D. with my dad. We bond a lot while watching tv. We're both avid fans of MST3K, and we are invariably the obnoxious people in a movie theater a few rows down cracking jokes throughout the film. It feels fun and rebellious, even if we're doing it at home where nobody will be annoyed. This episode starts with Foreman and Thirteen waking up together in bed after clearly spending the night together. My dad cracks a joke about how "they're going to get in trouble, since they aren't married!" I quip back "nah, it's not a big deal, they just slept together, haha." My dad pauses the show and turns to me, deadly serious: "Who told you that was okay?!" I am a deer in headlights. I suddenly realize that I meant "slept together" literally, but nobody else uses it that way. I don't understand how I missed that.

It is October 2010. I am at home, speaking with my mother after coming home from school. She has always been a political firebrand, and especially after I left the church and started college the two of us have connected on this a lot. She has just read an article that mentioned the expanded acronym "LGBTQIA", and says she doesn’t know what all the "I" and "A" refer to. I don't yet know what the "I" refers to, but I suggest the "A" is probably for "asexual". She says she hadn't heard of asexuality, though that does make sense. I realize I don't recall hearing about asexuality before either. I don't actually know if anyone identifies like that. It just somehow feels like something that must exist.

It is the spring of 2007. I am at a local game store playing at a Friday Night Magic event for the first time. I suffer from very extreme social anxiety, and I spent the entire week a ball of nervous energy. Despite myself, I have managed to drive myself to the event and register. I have promised myself dozens of times over that I already knew Magic players were people similar to me, so there was no reason to worry. My first match is against someone wearing a frilly dress, cat ears, and tail. She mews at me several times while playing. On the surface I have frozen and only robotically go through motions of playing the game because my anxiety has boiled over to the point that I cannot quite function properly. Inside, I am filled with pure delight at realizing that someone could feel comfortable expressing themselves that openly in a space like this. I eventually become friends with this person who I will later learn is trans -- I had never met a trans person before. I will become close friends with three more trans people, at least two enbies, and countless other queer people over the next decade of playing this wonderful game.

It is November 2019. I am at work, sitting at my desk, feeling completely numb despite starting the day energetic to the point of mania. I've just had an argument with a close friend -- perhaps the closest friend I've ever had -- and it ended... poorly, to put it mildly. So poorly, in fact, that it is safe to say we are just not friends anymore. The reality was that there were always problems between us, and this was a culmination of conflict that never really got effectively resolved. It might not have even been possible to resolve. In the moment, though, I cannot escape the suffocating feeling that I am a failure as a human being; someone who simply does not know how to maintain a relationship. My mind goes through loops of how I could have said something differently to have it end better. The emotional pain will not fully make sense to me until several months later, when I realize this was the closest thing to a break-up that I've ever experienced.

It is January 2012. I am watching House M.D. with my dad again. Since leaving the church, watching shows like this has been a desperate lifeline for our relationship. We don't joke as much anymore. This episode features a side plot with an asexual couple, who House determines is simply impossible, and uses his power of supreme logic to prove the asexuality wasn't real all along. I have heard of asexuality, though I don't know where or when, so I am angry at this. Of course, as an ally. I want to joke with my dad to release some frustration, but he is still in the church, and I don’t think he will empathize. I stay silent, and do not enjoy this episode.

It is December 2019. I am scrolling through a Discord channel I was invited to from one of the leftist creators I follow. This community has been a breath of fresh air in many ways, and one I found surprisingly helpful was an NSFW adult content chat channel where people are open about sex, fetishes, and more. I've considered myself fairly open-minded and sex-positive, but I'm still a virgin at 28 so I've found there is a lot I just don't know about. Today, someone has started a conversation about what qualifies as "taboo" and relating it to kink-shaming. Another member replies, mentioning they are asexual and find the whole notion of taboos being kind of bizarre. My mind reels at seeing someone who identifies as asexual in this chat. Over time I find out there are several other people who identify at least gray-ace in this chat, some who even draw risque artwork for commission. I realize how little I actually understood about what asexuality really was, and begin scouring the internet for articles and wikis on asexuality.

It is April 2010. I am at an Apollo Burger across the street from the local game store where I am playing in a Magic prerelease. My friends I followed over are talking about weekend plans, and one of them makes a joke about doing some chores to butter up his partner to have sex. The joke does not go over my head -- I am straight, and understand sex, even if I am still a virgin -- but I still can't help but think out loud: "You know, I just don't get why people make such a big deal out of sex." The awkwardness and confused looks are suffocating. I drop the topic immediately.

It is June 2020. I have just watched a video from an enby Youtube creator about their experience discovering their own gender identity. Over the next three days I will see every one of these past experiences, along with hundreds of others, flash before my eyes in rapid succession, over and over, until I begin to realize that I haven't allowed myself to truly identify how I do. Every time I asked "am I asexual?" in the past, I would dismiss it because I understood sex and have a sex drive. Once I actually researched asexuality, though, I almost immediately found stories of people who identify as ace and still experience a sex drive. I also discover a lot of stories from aromantic people that sound painfully similar to feelings I hadn't even realized were not the norm. For the first time I begin to realize I may not just be an ally.

So what does this mean

I came to a sense of satisfaction with living alone and single a long time ago. At first this came with a certain level of shame, because I felt like it was only because I was too cowardly to enter the dating scene and try to find a relationship for myself. Over time the impact of the shame diminished, but it never went away; it just became a quiet background noise that I got accustomed to pushing back.

But now that I feel comfortable calling myself "Aromantic", I don't feel any shame. A romantic relationship is simply something I don't need. Instead, I can focus on fostering the kinds of deep relationships that do feed my soul. That will likely be a difficult thing to do -- awkwardly traversing intimacy was something most people worked through as a teenager or young adult, and I'm nearly 30, haha. But it at least feels possible now.

But really the biggest change for me is that I feel like I can be honest and public about who I am in a way I never was before. Simply being open about this piece of my identity somehow feels important if for no other reason than to let other people who felt like I did growing up that they aren't alone.

So... yeah. I'm aroace. And I always have been.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Punisher 2099 #1 Thoughts

This issue far and away blows every other one in this event thus far out of the water!Remember when I criticized the rebooting of the 2099 line on principle.

Remember how I said it was asinine to redo the 2099 line with a 2019 lens of the future?

Well I’ll have to admit to being somewhat wrong about that.

Its still insulting and dumb to reboot the line. And there is still precious little about 2019’s vision of the future that’d be all that different to 1992’s. Or at least if you were trying to still be similar to the latter’s vision.

Buuuuuuuut…whilst those things are still broadly dumb this issue makes excellent use of them. And does so in a way that almost  justifies this direct.

  Lonnie Nadler & Zac Thompson (who I’ve never heard of before this issue) have truly EMBRACED the sci-fi nature of this event and the mission statement of it to reboot and update this vision of the future.

  In this issue they present not just a new spin on Punisher 2099, but a wholesale new spin on the Punisher, at least from my own limited experience with the character.

  The original Punisher 2099 (Jake Gallows) is an important part of this story, but he is not the main character, rather that’s new character Hector Tago.

  At first glance you might think that we’re in a similar situation to F4 2099 wherein the title character is in fact not the main character, but thats not the case here.

  Hector IS the Punisher of this title.

  This is something of a mixed bag, especially if you liked the original Punisher 2099.

  On principle you aren’t going to like such a change, let alone rebooting Jake’s characterization. In all honesty at face value the story could’ve worked just as effectively had Jake been the lead character and someone else (Hector or another original character) filled his role  in the narrative. That also would’ve cut closer to the original character.

  On the other hand though...how many people honestly even liked the original Punisher 2099?

  Seriously, I’ve read it and seen multiple reviews of it and it comes up as unimpressive. It was really just ANOTHER Punisher book amidst the sea of them in the 1990s. What made things worse is that Jake Gallows wasn’t all that distinctive from Frank Castle. Whilst Miguel O’Hara zigged where Peter Parker zagged, Jake Gallows functionally simply wore a different outfit with more high tech equipment and had baseball bat.

  When you look at a lot of the best 2099 reinventions of classic characters they always take something intrinsic to the character’s power set, costume and name and take it in a different direction. Case in point, Cap 2099 does from a free single white male into a sort of enslaved married Hispanic female (who’s RIPPED). Black Widow 2099 is literally a black woman who eats her lovers post-coital. In fact a fair few of the 2099 reinventions of characters operated by taking characters’ names and powers more literally.

  Punisher 2099 wasn’t initially approached that way. But Hector Tago, the NEW Punisher 2099 absolutely was.

  A major theme of this story, perhaps THE major theme, is punishment.

Jake Gallows in his mind is punishing the Thorites for his family’s deaths.

Davis Dunn is punished for crimes he didn’t commit.

Everyone punishes each other via a form of social media (we’ll get back to that), Kenji Wallace being the most obvious example.

And Hector punishes Gallows, but more importantly he punishes HIMSELF!

He views being the punisher as a form of atonement for the sins he committed as part of the authorities, and he is seemingly committed now to fighting the system.

This is almost the polar opposite of Frank Castle isn’t it?

Frank was a man who believed in the system, but felt it wasn’t harsh enough. His objections to it were not so much that it hurt citizens but rather that it didn’t go far enough in protecting them by curtailing criminal elements. Thus when those criminal elements took his family away from him, he resolved to punish them and by extension ALL criminals.

The fact that Hector is in most respects on the opposite end of the spectrum from Frank makes the Gallows in truth all to perfect an antagonist. Due to being so similar to the original Punisher, Gallows on a meta level represents the typical depiction of the Punisher and thus through on the page contrast with Hector more clearly emphasises where Hector zigs where Frank/Jake zagged.

The one thing Hector and Frank do share though is their absolute commitment to their respective missions. For both men, becoming the Punisher was a rebirth and they lived for their missions. One of the best scenes of the comic is when Hector metaphorically burns his old life down. He’s not Hector anymore. He is simply the Punisher!

I pray for the original 2099 line to be restored but if there was some way to fold Hector back into it, that’d be just perfect!

The ONLY thing that doesn’t really work with his character is the fact that there was zero justification for him to adorn himself in the skull outfit. It kind of came out of nowhere and he does it simply because it’s a Punisher book and that’s just expected.

There are other great aspects to the book too.

As I said up top, the title embraces the sci-fi nature of the event and the mission statement of re-evaluating the 2099 from a 2019 perspective vs. a 1992 perspective.

Whilst that’s mostly pointless this book makes it work by zeroing in on several elements that were either not around in 1992 or at least not as talked about:

·       The prevalence of surveillance technology, including facial recognition technology (speculative science fiction in 1992, actual science reality in 2019). This was achieved through the IRIS drones among other security cameras

·       Deep fake technology (see above). This was conveyed through the alterations of the IRIS’s allegedly objective recordings. Its particularly dangerous as its used as propaganda by the authorities.

·       Police corruption and brutality, especially towards marginalized groups (definitely a thing in 1992, but the current zeitgeist in the 2010s is distinctly anti-cop). Literally everything the Public Eye do (especially regarding the Thorites), they reminded me of the Street Judges from Judge Dredd. I might be somewhat misreading the metaphor though because the Thorites aren’t exactly innocent, but one shouldn’t judge them as a monolith I suppose.

·       Greater exposure of homosexual people, trans people and social activists (again a thing in 1992, but very much not as talked about as it is now). Wallace’s character. The comic book presents him as a man in a same sex relationship and it’s no big deal. He then transformed for lack of a better word into a robot, a robot who literally preaches to the crowds about the ills of society. He’s wiped out by the police. What’s most interesting is that not only is being in a gay relationship no big deal but Wallace’s transformation was motivated BY wanting to reconcile with his lover.  

·       Social media and how it’s empowered the court of public opinion. Everyone gets rated by everyone else on social media and you can find yourself essentially exiled as a result.

·       Arguably dangerous prescription drugs, though I don’t know enough about that to really touch the topic.

·       Artificial intelligence, though this is very lightly part of the story, more a background fact rather than something really explored

·       The erosion of objectivity in favour of efficiency

For starters, whilst the text boxes doling out exposition about how technology and prison system work were interesting...maybe show instead of tell? This is a visual medium, showing is actually a lot easier than telling us.·       The Conan 2099 comic had a warning about mature content even though that amounted to Conan cutting some people up. Maybe that does warrant a mature content warning, but you know if so then maybe this comic with it’s literal tree made from corpses should get one too? Just be consistent is all.

One more sort of positive I’ve going to give out, this was the first issue that made the Alpha story seem relevant.

In the Alpha story you SEE stuff that either sets up directly events for this comic or thematically sets it up by establishing the Public Eye’s conflicts with the Thorites. The only downside is that the tease for Jake Gallows, in particular him being Punisher 2099, was false advertising.

Also, if this story was deliberately written with the intention of subverting your expectations by making Hector the Punisher instead then it failed. Because it was obvious from the moment Hector became the character we were following.

Over all I’d HIGHLY recommend checking this book out. Small problems aside it slapped hard!

[multibear]

the danger of speculations

one part of dan’s video that really stuck out to me was the part about speculating peoples’ sexualities, and the whole “lol wbk” thing. he’s so right. when you speculate things like that, you are either harassing someone who is actually straight or cis or whatever, or you are depriving an lgbtq person of the ability to introspectively explore their own identity before coming out on their own terms, and pressuring them to come out. straight people really don’t understand how damaging this is.

it doesn’t matter if someone is or isn’t gay, if people so much as think they are gay they will be harassed all the same. nobody should be subject to harassment based on sexuality or even assumption of sexuality. i was physically and verbally harassed for the first time when i was 12. a kid i’d known for a few years who i was stand partners with often, who always pushed my sheet music on the floor and poked me with his bow, pushed me to the ground and yelled at me, “nobody likes gay people. nobody likes trans people.” i wasn’t affected personally. i had thick skin and knew he was being ignorant, but i was afraid. i had never told him in particular anything about my identity, but that didn’t matter to him. whatever people said i was, i was.

i remember when i was in middle school and unsure about my gender. i finally seized a moment of courage to tell some my friends about this during science class one day in seventh grade. they weren’t even close friends. they were just there when the moment came. i remember, one of them was the girl who made me realize i’m not straight. she came out as bi in sixth grade and i had no idea what “bisexual” meant. i looked it up and i finally found a word that came close to describing me. after that, an lgbt account popped up in my instagram explore page and i was suddenly learning about different sexualities and gender identities and finding words to describe myself. anyways, i saw these people and decided to admit, “i don’t think i care abut gender. i don’t care about pronouns or anything at all.” except i didn’t. i said, “i’m trans,” and when asked about my pronouns i panicked, thinking that “anything” and “unsure” would make them think i wasn’t real or something, and said, “he and him.”

maybe i could have backtracked. maybe, at a later time, i could have said that i’m “actually kind of unsure and questioning” to that small group i initially “came out” to and the other friends i came out to directly following that moment, riding on the high of feeling satiated and freed from something i was taught to think to myself was a secret i was harboring from others. that didn’t happen. soon, word got around, but it was okay, because i came out, right? it’s okay that everyone knows now, right? this is what i wanted, right? coming out is freeing, right? otherwise, i’m just living a lie, right?

the first time someone i didn’t directly come out to called me by the pronouns and name i used at that time, i was terrified. this was a personal, confusing part of my life that suddenly everyone knew about. it only got worse. that same day, my english teacher asked my if i preferred to be called another name because a friend of mine in one of her earlier classes was talking about how excited she was that her friend [redacted lol] was back in the country. looking back, i was probably very obviously lying, and very obviously fearful when i shook my head and quickly said no. then, a girl sitting nearby harmlessly said, “but you do,” to which i replied, even quicker, “no i don’t.” i doubt my teacher bought it. that wasn’t the first or last time something similar had happened. but it was okay, because i had come out, right? this is what i prefer, right? i realize now, i didn’t get to come out. i was outed. i didn’t feel accepted, i felt exposed.

i crawled back into my closet a little bit. i mentioned questioning if i was a lesbian, because i wanted people to think, “hey, maybe sexuality isn’t the only thing being questioned here.” on a related note, i never was able to formally come out as any sexuality. it was always assumed i was gay ever since people found out about my other questionings. continuing onwards, by high school, people didn’t know what to call me. it was a mixture of different names and pronouns and i gave nobody any answer whatsoever. i was in my closet, and it’s the best thing i ever did. for the first time, i had my personal life personal again, and i could really figure myself out without the pressure of all these people thinking they know who i am. i could confidently say, “i don’t know.” if i didn’t know, then nobody else needed to know.

when i was 15 i started dating a girl. my mom found out. she was looking through my stuff without my permission and found a love letter. she asked me how i felt about her. i told her that she’s my best friend. i knew she was suspicious. she was asking about crushes, she was even asking about my guy friend who i have said is like a brother to me. i was pressured to tell her after five minutes of silence: “she’s my girlfriend.” it wasn’t liberating. it wasn’t freeing. it was enclosing and suffocating. i wasn’t ready at all, but i knew she knew. she said, “break up with her.” she doesn’t want her daughter to date girls.

there was only one time when i had ever felt something truly freeing in regard to my identity. in middle school, when everyone knew about me before i knew they knew, and i was scared all the time that i would be outed to people that could change the way i live my life, i had a fight with my best friend during recess. she felt the need to tell me her mom hates trans people because that’s “not what god intended” and she too thought “it’s not normal.” i was angry and devastated at the same, so i went to rant to my other friend. we were swinging around the bare tether ball poles. it was then i found out, that despite everything happening literally right in front of her (i had literally came out to people right in front of her while i was on the initial rush of telling my friends after telling that small group of three during science class), she was completely oblivious. at that moment, i came out to her, at least with what i thought of myself back then. i felt so naked, yet so comfortable. i was willingly laying all my thoughts and feelings out for her to see, and i felt safe. i didn’t have to be brave or courageous, i just had to be honest. that was the first and only time i ever came out to someone in a calm, comfortable, non adrenaline invoked space. it was one of the only times i came out rather than getting outed. it was the only time coming out ever felt liberating to me. to this day, it doesn’t matter that the first time i came out to her it was with a label that didn’t fit me, i can come out to her again and again. i can tell her whatever nuance i feel because i was never pressured with her. i can always go “wait, never mind” with her because that important, pivotal moment i had with her was in a calm mindset, in a safe environment.

despite everything that has happened, i am lucky. i am so lucky that i was outed to a mostly accepting environment. i am so lucky that i even had one person that could make coming out feel comfortable, yet bare, and so freeing (she had one grievance, though. that i had told her brother in that group of three during science class in seventh grade before i told her. she should know that with her brother, though, i was more exposed than comfortable, unlike how i felt with her). i am lucky that i was able to take a moment to enclose myself for my own introspection, then realize that i’m not what people have thought of me, and then for those people to be okay with it. 

being deprived of the opportunity to introspect and come out on my own accord was absolutely horrible, but it’s even worse for people who don’t get to have the luck i had. so please, please let this show you the effects of speculating someone’s identity. please let this show you that responding to people coming out with “wbk” and “not surprised” is more scary than it is accepting. please let this show you that you don’t have to tell people your identity for them to hate you for it. please let this show you that coming out is something a person nurtures on their own until the time is right, not something that should be pressured or forced. please let this show you that outing someone doesn’t show your support, it only shows your disregard to a person’s trust and level of comfort. everyone deserves to live who they are when they want. making speculations deprives both lgbtq and non-lgbtq people of that.

[lids-flutter-open]

Content warning: some spoilers, reference to author’s weird obsession with young trans girls’ genitalia and to sexual assault committed against main character

Basic boring and bad things about this book include:

⁃ all dialogue scenes are long and bland; there is no banter that is funny

⁃ The same points are hammered on again and again for hundreds of pages : again, Lily’s dad thinks hormone blockers are too expensive and she should be a boy. Again, Dunkin is afraid of his mental health issues. Again, Lily is called a slur and is upset. Again, Dunkin wishes he were braver than he is. There isn’t a lot of dynamic action.

⁃ Lily gets deadnamed in the cover flap of the book and in the family tree in the front of the book

⁃ Parents are one dimensional, either harmful or benevolent

⁃ Tween children never have violent or angry thoughts unless they are bullies, and politely respect adult rules

⁃ There isn’t any payoff to Lily standing up for what she believes in re: her tree, not even solidarity from other activists, sending kids the message that it is meaningless to protest things that are wrong

⁃ Dare, Lily’s best friend, is one dimensional and never emerges as an independent character, which sucks more because Dare is black . Dare only acts as an emotional support for Lily. Her own motivations and passions never fully emerge. She uses spurts of AAVE once in a while but her lived experiences as a black kid in south Florida do not come up.

⁃ Something that annoys me all the time in melodramatic kids’ books like this is where characters say something and then repeat the same thing with more emphasis on a separate line in a punchier way, such as : “(line break)I don’t say anything. (Line break) I never say anything.” This happens what seems like once every two to four pages. It disrupts the flow of the narrative

⁃ Kids lack agency and their resolutions come from adults changing their behavior , which doesn’t leave young readers much to go on in dealing with similar struggles

Aside from all that :

There are many things about this book that do more harm than good in terms of impact to the groups the book is supposed to advocate for. These can be roughly sorted into Trans Stuff and Mental Health stuff. First, let me get into the trans stuff.

First , technically speaking: a thirteen year old seeking hormone blockers will typically need to suffer through several quite arduous conversations with parents and psychologists and psychiatrists before accessing them. With the dawn of informed consent practices, this has changed a little, but the questions that Lily’s kind psychologist ask her barely touch the basics of what trans kids typically are asked to talk about in therapy. Additionally, we never see Lily or her parents learning any more details about her hormone blockers at the endocrinologist—essential details, such as the fact that their effects are reversible, that their side effects aren’t known to be substantially negative , that there aren’t yet many studies on their long term use. Even if Lily didn’t understand all that info, as a trans kid she would absorb at least a little of it. Additionally, I feel like her parents would talk to her more about their understanding of what trans people are or go through, with articles about detransition, etc —and Lily would counter with her own knowledge. The absence of any of this simplifies trans experience down far beyond even the most basic Oprah special and makes accessing hormones and blockers seem both easier and less involved /reflective a process than it actually is.

Another really major issue I have with this novel about an eighth grader is that Gephart seems obsessed with Lily’s body and specifically her genitalia. I cannot even count how many times the word “penis” appears in this book in reference to Lily, in what is otherwise quite a G rated book. Cis adults often fixate constantly on trans kids and their bodies and genitals and fertility in a way I find really creepy, and Gephart has continued this trend with an exuberance that makes me want to keep all young trans girls faaaar away from her. The fact that she has Lily undergo a demeaning public sexual assault from bullies in her class in a way that doesn’t at all serve the plot underscores how much Gephart is obsessed with young trans women’s bodies. While Dunkin also has issues with puberty, experiencing insecurity about his height and weight and hairiness, his sexual privacy is respected and we get no hint he even has sexual organs at all—I assume the cis characters in Gephart’s other stories get the same treatment. Meanwhile, we hear over and over again about Lily’s pubic hair, genitals, and fears concerning what will happen to them if she doesn’t get on puberty blockers. It is her main personal arc (seeing as the save-the-tree arc doesn’t start until a good 100+ pages into the text). While real young trans girls have a number of fears and passions having to do with school, hobbies, friends, etc , lily is almost completely absorbed by the author’s fetish for her body. She talks constantly about her “stupid boy chest”, her narrow hips, and a range of other body parts she hates and wants to alter. In a cis girl puberty book, this would lead to a conclusion where Lily realizes she maybe looks kinda cool as is, in the liminal state that is adolescence, but not here. Which brings me to another point —most trans kids never go on hormone blockers. They’re really expensive ! Parents who support their kids can’t necessarily afford this care, and many trans kids also come out after their first puberty. This book communicates, via Lily’s attitude and her mom’s attitude and everyone’s panic about Lily’s body, that non-puberty-blocked trans kids will have transitioned “too late” and be forever marred by hair, height, bone structure, etc. This perspective is a really ugly cis-normative one. It is based in the idea that trans people and especially trans women must look as much like cis people as possible, must know their intent from childhood, and must commit themselves to expressing hatred of their bodies and (violent) intent to alter them into something more socially pretty and socially acceptable.

What really makes trans kids safe is acceptance and support and emotional connections regardless of appearance and hormone desire/hormone access. Hormone blockers are Not bad, and I support kids getting them, but neither are they universal or necessary to live as a happy trans person.

Lily never experiences anyone telling her that in this book, and doesn’t meet trans women older than her who have had different experiences with transition trajectory who could advocate for her while also clarifying that Lily’s path isn’t the only one. This book is a cis mom’s vision of perfect medical transition —syrupy and gender-conforming and girlie and with a stamp of medical approval that ignores and disdains the experiences of trans kids and adults unable or unwilling to access early medical transition. It’s unnecessary and directly harmful. Trans people usually experience dysphoria, but many of us learn through practice and community that the ways we are special and unique are beautiful, that our medically altered adult bodies are cool, and that we don’t need to obsessively conceal our differences in order to be gorgeous and lovable. Gephart is determined to undermine such efforts, which sucks for cis readers too. I think we should all realize by now that standards of bodily appearance that oppress trans people also oppress gender nonconforming cis women and girls and nonconforming boys (at one point lily thinks : “I am not a fag, I am a girl!” What does that say to gay boys and butch girls?)

Second : mental health stuff.

Just as Gephart wishes to do away with the complicated other-ness of being trans, she also skips over the factual realities of being a young teenager with bipolar disorder. For one, diagnosis of bipolar in a thirteen year old is pretty rare. Having bipolar that young is also usually traumatic, in addition to being precipitated by stressful events—such as a death. Dunkin’s freakouts are understandable, but the narrative treats them as a major problem without explaining why and treats Dunkin’s bipolar as a frightening and slowly encroaching monster rather than a set of symptoms rising out of genetic predisposition plus life circumstances and maladaptive coping mechanisms. It dehumanizes him to treat his bipolar like this. Dunkin naturally resists the heavy level of control exerted over him by doctors —scenes of him skipping medications out of a sense that they hold him back are among the most realistic in the book. Similarly, the lack of communication and punitive attitude of doctors is also something many teens encounter when seeking care for mental health issues. These things could be addressed in text by Dunkin having a conversation with his mom and seeking a psych that makes him feel more comfortable or working on his own level of trust in her and her affirmations of what reality is. But they don’t talk. Gephart would rather teens blithely submit to treatment from doctors who call them the wrong name and be adequately sedated for the comfort of the adults around them —even though many antipsychotics and mood stabilizers don’t work well or work long term for large portions of the population and can cause negative side effects, and finding the right drugs requires hearing feedback from patients and often several trials of different drugs plus behavioral therapy etc.

A major issue for me is that Dunkin’s father —a man who also has bipolar—is cast as almost wholly incompetent and crazy and Bad with a capital B as a parent. Likewise, Dunkin’s mental illness is treated like a dark mystery for most of the book, and its slow reveal becomes an exhibitionist sort of revelry in how crazy he is acting —which isn’t how books about bipolar teens should treat this issue. Mental illness being the bogeyman makes people more afraid to get diagnoses or deal with symptoms and makes it easier for people to deny that there is a problem if they have less extreme symptoms.

While bipolar and other illnesses can ruin lives and cause families to hurt, it sucks that Gephart chooses to frame mentally ill adults as both totally irresponsible and totally doomed with no nuance and frames the medical industrial complex as a stern but ultimately benevolent force in Dunkin’s life that protects him from himself. Psychiatrists can help people access needed care, but just like Dunkin’s psych, they can also alienate and scare people. Especially for teens, psych facilities can cause trauma on their own, especially for kids of color or kids dealing with other issues like grief. They are sometimes the least of all evils, but Gephart treats doctors like saviors. Kids growing up with bipolar need to know adults who struggle with the same symptoms and to practice self reflection and engagement with communities of mutual advocacy and need to understand the various factors that can exacerbate symptoms and interrupt their lives. They don’t need to be told to shut up and take the pills doctors give them and to trust people in high places. They get that from other people.

Basically, Gephart has stuck her nose into two issues that do need representation but which she doesn’t adequately understand, and the result is patronizing hogwash in book form . Skip !

[irregodless]

ive just been thinking about that guys antifeminism speech for a while

so in case you havent heard, which you havent because this is only something that happened to me basically, in my class this guy in front of me was talking about how he had to give a speech in his next class too (incidentally so did i, but i stopped thinking about it and reading the book required by class to listen)

everything in quotes is paraphrased so keep that in mind, but it captures the essence

he starts by talking about the class and the speech. some friends ask what its about and hes like “its against feminism” and you can hear the “:/” in their silence

the group is a boy a girl and this guy who later in class confessed to eating horse shit. multiple times.

they clearly dont care much about feminism i dont think but theyre like “thats kind of a controversial topic isnt it! you think its going to go well since youre a man?” and shitmallet is all like “see THATS stereotyping and THATS bad.”

except its not because not only have men talking about feminism (particularly why its not good) proven to be awful, but also, they were justified because he was also awful

and like, i know that feminism can be hurtful to trans ladies and woc, but also, this is real life at community college and nobody even realizes these are even things let alone problems. but just hearing someone say “feminism is shit” immediately triggers a response in me like “I Don’t Trust Like That” to think theres a valid reason. its a black and white way of thinking but its telling when someone flat out says its bad, like, entirely. let alone this guy.

anyway he gives a good like two minute talk about how you should imagine a person in your life, a mother, sister, daughter, whatever, who you want to protect. it sounds like the justification people try to use to try and beg men to care about rape by appealing to their sense of family

and he goes “these are all people we want to protect. and im going to tell you all why you should protect them from....... Feminism” and i nearly fuckin DIED i had to hold back laughter

so this is where his argument starts to fall to pieces. understand im only addressing his argument and its lack of merit here. i think it goes without saying its just kind of generally shit

all like

protect yer womenfolk from catchin’ the Thinkin’ Disease, lads

or

yer womens will know endless untold agony and grief if they learn how shit theyre being treated...

like. as a man. you really dont have a right to be saying “no, honey, im protecting you FROM feminism.” thats kind of like going to pride, telling everyone why pride is bad because it does some things some times and being like “as a straight man i know whats best for gay people”

okay so moving on, he makes the only decent statement he says the whole while which is basically he doesnt like how it furthers the gap between men and women and it turns women into nothing but victims. like. hes got lots of shit missing but hes STARTING to get the point i guess. like. to stop women from being victims. but hes trying to do that by....... silencing the women

i guess women cant be victims if? nobody knows they are???

but heres where we get some fuckin good ol logical fallacies n shit

“its the mens jobs to look after the women” okay so: reinforcing gender roles. putting a gender role on yourself that youll just complain about for being expected to take care of women. you think women shouldnt be treated like helpless victims and should be able to (kind of) think and speak for themselves, and yet, you think that they HAVE to have men there to take care of them.

like can we just think on that for a minute

women shouldnt be treated like they cant take care of themselves. and we should accomplish that by not letting women take care of themselves

like just?????? how do you NOT see the contradiction. i wish i was his teacher. i dont think you can give him a bad grade for having a differing opinion but you can DEF tear him about for not having his shit together

which might nto be fair considering you might not focus on that if it was something you agreed with. but also, consider the following: fuck this guy

but like then he goes on about how “yeah i dont want to like remove womens right to vote or anything, but feminism is garbage now. feminism started off with good reasons [though i wonder if hed been born at that time if he wouldnt say “dont you miss it when women and children were seen and not heard?”] and its this third and fourth wave feminism thats shit.” and then he says, now get this, “i dont like all this nonsense with not wearing shirts and” pause for dramatic effect. “dyeing their hair green and shit.”

LIKE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

i like it when women do things as long as its things i like like being guilted into sleeping with me and throwing their lives away and making me breakfast

i dont like it when women do things i dont personally approve of >:(((((

like i genuinely wonder if he thinks that the hairdye is directly related to it, or if hes just saying like. its something that tends to happen around this generation of feminism

but GOD i hope he thinks women are dyeing their hair to personally spite him i can only fucking HOPE

anyway he closes it and the man with a copy of dbz on his backpack and the woman with a uninteresting voice are like “wow i was worried at first but you made good points.......................”

and im just writing half of it down and messaging izzy and justin about it because i cannot BELIEVE

like im just. so lost and dumbfounded at how shit that argument was. and also that hes apparently so offended by women not wearing shirts.

i just. im just. i wish i was in a debate class with him so i could tear him down

but im too lame of an ally to talk out about people in real life because im scared and dont have a chance to prepare which will lead to me either shouting crying or both and not having ANY of my facts together (not that it matters apparently considering you can just say whatever you want apparently)

also he says "men have problems too" and i almost rocketed into the sun

this speech was written by one of the founders of the republic of gilead i swear

[rabbitindisguise]

I'm also reading On Weaving and like, it's amazing how time passing let's people devalue incredibly historically important things. When I think "product of their time" it's less about "oh they're just sexist" and more like . . . a shaft stick, comb, and and stick shuttle are seen as almost peasantry today. People "only" do that because they can't afford a larger loom with a boat shuttle, and not because larger looms are actually worse (at least with modern artistic weaving because of more limiting weaving options- they are more efficient at producing cloth).

But shuttle stickers were revolutionary. And incredibly practical- though there was a reason why people didn't do it sooner, and it's because textiles just weren't a huge industry that needed yards of cheap plain cloth. Asia lead the advancement in efficiency because of silk. Silk was valuable no matter the weave. Simple cloth, the kind that efficient looms were producing in the beginning, was actually less valuable than the lace, tapestry, and functional cloth produced for cheap on a smaller scale. Some weaves keep in heat better and are more durable than plainweave- the edge weaving has over other textiles.

In a world where jeans are woven and sold for less than it would take to weave your own (and in twill at that), a shuttle stick can't even begin to compare. No one would weave their own pants, unless they had the expendable income to weave it. It's just not cost effective. But the tools themselves, they suit different purposes. You can make incredibly delicate, gauzy lace by using a tapestry loom and a shuttle stick. That's fairly valuable in the economy now because no one weaves anymore so looms aren't just, things people have laying around. Something that wouldn't have happened if we didn't have the luxury of efficient factory loom machines that practically make clothes on their own.

Women having the right to vote seems less revolutionary than women having access to contraception. Because we don't have real, protected, cheap, and available contraception. We also don't have reproductive rights and the end of forced sterilization.

But we have the shuttle stick of "voting" now. Birth control wasn't even a thing, it would have been like someone saying "a shuttle stick is great and all, but we really need a loom that doesn't even exist!" Like, sure, eventually it happened. But it still sounds weird and frankly, how can we know that voting, like the shuttle stick, didn't directly cause the later chain of events that we can take for granted today? How insensitive is it to get angry at someone grateful for some small step to improve the lives of thousands?

That's how I also feel about gay marriage. We can take it for granted now. We have an older, higher class, financially stable white base of LGBTQ+ folks because of gay marriage. This doesn't mean that not having it would directly mean a weakened institution of marriage. There's no guarantee of that. In fact, there's more gay people saying things like "marriage is stupid, everyone should have healthcare, I should get to give healthcare to my brother if I want" now than before. Getting accused of bitterness and jealousy every time makes it hard to have an argument against something you're actively already deprived of that carries weight. Making change now is just about turning that disgust with systematic oppression into systematic change to actually see the results of these efforts fully.

And . . . for what it's worth?

The people that hate shuttle sticks the most? That loathe them and think they're ridiculous?

They own boat shuttles. They're upper class. And they have floor looms, which run approximately $10,000 a pop. Those are mini industrial looms, made for massive production with little effort, that people weave from from the comfort of their own homes.

It's not a place of oppression that let's us dismiss needed human rights gains. It's privilege. The privilege of being the inheritors of the rights the people before us bled for.

Idk how to end this besides like, vote. Vote and get married and become a CEO and take a pay cut and call representatives and be politically active. The people that came before us as activists are waiting on us to see through the change they started. And if we don't finish that's all on us, not them. We cannot go around blaming historical figures for our fear of action because we're afraid what future generations will say about us. I hope I'm not radical. I hope me saying "trans rights" is barely even a controversial thing, I hope trans people are so safe and happy I look like a huge weirdo for being loud about it. Because that will mean we won.

[mars-ipan]

ok real quick? i never understood why people are exclusionists. why are you against neopronouns, aspec people, trans folks in general, bi/pan/poly/omni people, etc.? so what if it “proves homophobes right?” they’re gonna commit hate crimes regardless of what we do unless we crack down on it. whatever we do isn’t gonna have an effect on them. why do you care about the pronouns another person uses, particularly neopronouns? yeah they can be tough to learn, i understand, but if you need help you can just look up websites to practice or better yet, ask the person using those pronouns and they’ll gladly help??

why are people deciding if other people are “trans enough?” your being trans isn’t my business, and their being trans isn’t yours, either. and yes, some people transition and regret it. but that doesn’t mean being trans needs these big rules, it just means we need to stop encouraging immediate transition but instead encourage healthy gender exploration. like, i wondered if i was a demigirl due to the slight disconnect i feel from gender as a whole. you know what i did? i researched, and tried she/they pronouns. and while i learned that no, i am definitely a female and nothing more, i also learned a lot about being nonbinary, which helped me be a better ally. why? because i was around people who taught me how to healthily experiment. let’s do that? please? also like. don’t misgender people even if you doubt their transness. if you misgender someone intentionally fuck you. nothing else to be said about it. don’t do things terfs do, guys. you’re not protecting trans folk, you’re harming your own people.

why do people think aspec people are bad?? what did they do???? they’re just vibing who gives a shit if they don’t need sex or romance, or if they have to know someone well to want it. as a pan person and also a romantic person, good on them! that shit is tiring and confusing and if they don’t need it then cool! they have extra time to spend not worrying about it, and from what i’ve seen a lot of them spend that time cooking. that’s great! leave aspec people alone they’re literally just making food. you sound like you got rejected and just never stopped being salty. that puts you on par with a cishet dude who hates lesbians because one he’s attracted to won’t make an exception for him. shut the fuck up. oh and aspec people aren’t prudes. they just don’t feel attraction. this isn’t to say aspec people can’t have a high sex drive! attraction (or lack thereof) and horny do not have to be the same that’s not how things work. oh and stop saying they’re inhuman or broken or some shit. no they’re fucking not. plenty of people who feel attraction don’t want kids, and guess what? this isn’t fucking caveman times. we don’t really need everyone to directly pass on their lineage or really want to. gay couples do these things called adoption or surrogation if they want kids. ace people can do that too. wow. who knew. stop being an asshole and Let Aspecs Vibe.

on a similar note, bi/pan/poly/omni folk! what the hell did we do?????? we’re “hetero passing????” what even is that???? hey dumbasses everyone is hetero passing if they’re not in a relationship because we live in a world where people expect each other to be heterosexual. sometimes even people in Clear Homosexual Relationships get asked if they’re siblings or some shit. i’ve seen women post about their homo marriages and get comments like “awww besties! having your wedding on the same day as your best friend is such goals!” a lot of people have horrible gaydars (also that erases straight trans people who are btw lgbt it is in the name). we’re not gonna cheat on you or leave you. this one confuses me. how do you think we see people??? as food?? we don’t like. get sick of something and decide to switch over to something else. our whole thing is that generally we don’t really give a shit about your gender???? like it’s not really a factor? some of us have differing standards for different genders but like. overall it’s not that important?? so why do you think we’d get “tired of vagina” or “miss dick” or some shit??? that feels vaguely transphobic. why is it always about sex?? which leads me to my next question. how the hell did “you want attention/you’re a whore” become a thing???? bitch what??? say you’re a gay dude. do you want to fuck literally every man you see? “no, of course not?” huh, funny, since you seem to think that’s how attraction works. we still have fucking standards, same as almost everyone else. and even if we didn’t, then what? who gives a shit? it’s 2020 man why are we still slutshaming? some people are horny stop fucking caring. oh and also stop pitting bi/pan/poly/omni people against each other!!! what the hell!!! why is that a thing??? we should be loving each other guys!! everyone has their own definitions of labels and reasons why they use them. pan people, stop calling all bi people transphobes. they’re not. bi people, stop calling all pan people biphobic (but also bisexual at the same time??? ig they think it’s internalized?). we’re not. and let’s not erase polysexual (not to be confused with polyamourous) or omnisexual people. they’re here too and they are just as valid as us. we should be filled with solidarity and appreciation for each other, not hate and spite. there’s not a competition to be the one sole label that means “i’m interested in multiple genders,” literally just pick what you’re comfy with and respect other people. sorry this one is longer i just have more experience dealing with shit like this

in conclusion, why the fuck are our own people attacking us??? i can understand if the word “queer” is a trigger word for some seeing as it is used as a slur, so with that one we literally just let people use it if they want to and don’t force it on anyone who doesn’t want to. bam problem solved. however, why are trans people who don’t fit a perfect mold a problem? why are aspecs a problem? why are bi/poly/pan/omni people a problem? what the fuck? every group i’ve talked about has been here since day one, by the way. we aren’t new. if you’re an exclusionist i want you to please not interact with me, i’m tired and just as my points probably didn’t change your mind, your points will not change mine. dear god can we please just let people be stop giving a shit a label is something we use to feel comfortable go away

TL;DR: stop fighting each other and instead respect each other. we’re a family and we should love each other. also exclusionists don’t interact

cishets can totally reblog this btw! just don’t clown please and thank you

[smokeybrand]

Casting Call

I wanted to address this casting of Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano. Personally, i think it’s inspired casting. Seriously she’d be my first choice, acting wise. Dawson has grown leaps and bounds in her craft plus, she has a real passion for the lore. We all know Dawson is a total nerd but she adores Ahsoka as a character. That much passion for the role, coupled with the inspired direction and vision of Favreau, give me confidence that she’d be great in the part. The only actress i’d say would be a better fit would be Laura Harrier. She looks like Tano even before the makeup but her build might be slightly too large, i think. That, and the only thing i have to judge her acting ability on is Homecoming where her role was mitigated to a glorified cameo. Still, i can see why cats would want her over Dawson based on aesthetics. The other reason? Not so much.

Rosario Dawson is a transphobe? Really? Come, on man. I actually looked into that case a little bit and it kind of sounds like it’s a cashgrab by the complainant. I mean, the bulk of their case is discrimination but, after reading over the complaint, it skews more toward “hostile work environment” because they was misgendered on site or whatever. Being called your old gender is not the same as being called a faggot or freak but fine. I get that. Cats feel some kind of way about stuff. The thing is, though, f*cking quit. If it’s that bad, quit and leave. Why stay someplace where you feel uncomfortable or perceive yourself to be hated for being you?  I mean, this person openly admits that the Dawson family has known them for twenty years as whatever they were before. You show up at their door post-transition, sight unseen for years, and expect them not to have something to say about it? That’s jarring and takes time to accept. People have to adjust to such a drastic change. They have to learn how to live around your choice. Popping up and just expecting everyone to okey-doke such a drastic alteration to their perception of you is a little ridiculous to me. That acceptance sh*t goes both ways, you know? But, okay, they’re calling you your old name and referring to you as your old gender. Sh*t hurts your feelings, i get it. What i don’t get is how the f*ck you’re suing Rosario over that sh*t, even though she wasn’t doing it. How is she responsible for the actions of other people in her family? How are you mad she told you to suck it up and act like an adult? You’re fifty-years-old, man!

The other parto f her case is even more dubious to me. Apparently, Dawson and a relative went to the apartment they provided this person for free, because this transgender individual refused to leave. I assume it’s been several months of complaints and derision at this point so a clean break between parties would be best for everyone. This transgender person swore they had no place to go and that they couldn’t get back to New York, even though they freely admitted to having a support system out there and half a year’s worth of wages, plus a stipend from Dawson, herself. They were living rent-free in an apartment provided by Dawson and were only responsible for personal bills like food yet, didn’t have enough for a return ticket home? How? Full time wages for a carpenter in California, they moved out here to help with some of Rosario’s home renovations, is about $57,000 a year. Half that is $28,500 dollars. You made 28 grand, before taxes, and couldn’t get home? Really? You had no choice but to squat in a residence that was not yours, for what i imagine is several months, with damn near 30 racks in the bank? Seriously? You want to scream “hate-crime” when they physically drag your disgruntled ass out of their house after months of futile back and forth? Really?

I don’t think Rosario Dawson is a transphobe. I think she doesn’t suffer assholes and this cat sounds like an asshole. They’re not suing Dawson for hostile work environment, they’re suing for discrimination. You’re fifty-year-old, transgender, lesbian, who has known this family for decades. Dawson flew you out, hired you full-time at a comparable rate to others in your field, and gave you a rent-free place to stay. That alone gives you thousands of dollars a month in savings. I imagine all of this misgendering and sh*t was either them ribbing you or legitimate mistake because of the decades long relationship they had with you, as another f*cking person. As far as that assault? You were squatting in their property. I don’t agree with them getting physical with you, if they actually did, but, at the same time, you were effectively stealing from them by not leaving. It wasn’t like you couldn’t afford to go, you had at least three months worth of wages, probably closer to six. Bare minimum, you have 10 bands, fluid! You really saying you can’t make it back home with a minimum of $10,000 in your pocket and this expansive support system waiting on you? You have no choice but to slander Rosario in Out magazine, the most bias press available? This smells of bullsh*t to me.

I’m not a member of the LBGTQ community. I don’t consider myself an ally. I consider myself a reasonable, intelligent, person. I find it stupid to hate a someone for something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. If you’re gay, that’s your business. If you’re trans, that’s your business. If you’re Batman, that’s you’re business, Bruce. I don’t care nor do i need to. That’ a personal journey, a personal truth. If you want to share it with me, cool. If not, that’s cool too. That’s why, when i read this complaint, it looks suspect. Rosario Dawson doesn’t even come up until the end where the assault occurred and, even then, she was described as “holding her down” while Dawson’s aunt or somebody, fought with this transgender person. That sounds like there was an altercation and Dawson was trying to get between the two, probably so this exact situation wouldn’t occur, and that’s if she even physically intervened at all. I mean, Rosario Dawson is not only famous, rich, dating a Senator who is a staunch supporter of trans rights, but she, herself, identifies as bisexual - a part of the very community this person claims she’s discriminating against! For real? Why the f*ck would Rosario jeopardize all of that, over a squatter? No, i think that little part was tacked on so this person could go after Dawson directly because, literally, up to this point, it was everyone else AROUND Rosario committing the transgressions. Everyone around Rosario ain’t famous, though.

This whole situation sounds like an employee was unhappy with the terms of employment and decided to take advantage of their employer’s status as a celebrity for a quick cashgrab. The leaking of this case to the press was meant to damage Rosario’s image in a means to force a “go away” settlement. Do i think there was discrimination? Not any more than this person would have had to deal with as a fifty-year-old lesbian. There might have been ill-intent but never from Dawson, herself. I imagine she snapped and said what she said to this person, after weeks of complaints or a stressful shoot somewhere. Do i think there was an assault? Sure, maybe, but not in the way this person is describing. It doesn’t make sense to me that Rosario, herself, would put her entire career at risk over something so pedestrian. Dawson is well aware of the current political climate and cancel culture. She was right in the thick of the MeToo movement. Ma ain’t stupid. Rosario has wanted to lay Ahsoka for years. You think DIsney would let her if this suit had any teeth? Do i think there’s a semblance of responsibility that must be taken by the Dawson family? Of course. They were dicks to this person and owe them an apology. Do i think Rosario Dawson has to cash-out because her family were assholes? F*ck no. Sue them, they’re the ones who hurt your feelings and that’s the crux of this argument; Rosario is the famous one. Rosario is the rich one. Rosario has to be the target or no one gets paid.

There’s fault on both sides here, i freely admit that, but i don’t think Rosario is involved the way this person says she was. I think this person knows what side the bread is buttered on and is looking to capitalize on this whole SJW/PC, cancel culture, bullsh*t, for a quick payout. Believe all of the gender minorities before actual evidence because they’re so oppressed. Cancel everyone who doesn’t share our politics or, heaven forbid, waits for facts and uses logical assumptions to deduce bullsh*t. For all intents and purposes, this person sounds like an asshole to me. Look at it objectively; Rosario flew this person out from New York, put them up in a rent-free apartment, and paid them a full-time wage while also giving them a stipend to get on their feet out here. This person did nothing but complain and refuse to leave the apartment when both parties agreed for a separation. Instead, this person squatted for weeks to months, freeloading on Dawson, while pocketing thousands of dollars. Seriously, how do you think they’re paying for this Hollywood ass lawyer? They can’t get home but they got money to hire a lawyer, though. Okay. Like, you don't get to be magically absolved from the repercussions of being an asshole just because you decided to transition. No one committed a hate crime against you because they threw you out of their house, yo. You were being a dick and got dealt with as such. ll this “Believe everyone, all of the time” sentient is getting out of hand.

Or, i could be wrong and Rosario Dawson is ball of trans hate who spends her time keelhauling those people in between campaign stumps and acting roles, i don’t know. Pretty sure she’s not, tho. Also, Brie Larson as Mara Jade is a mistake. That’s bad casting, man. Alexandra Daddario, Emily VanCamp, or Alexandra Breckenridge fit that role much better.

[nicolesfaq]

Frequently Asked Questions

1. I was referred to this FAQ, why couldn’t you or a family member just talk to me? 

Great question! This FAQ, like many others, is the list of questions I’m getting repeatedly from many friend and family members. While I would love to talk to each and every one of you in great depth about what’s going on, it’s both exhausting to repeat the same information over and over again, and I would prefer to work on my medical school applications. These applications have a deadline, unlike our understanding of each other throughout the rest of our lives. 

I’m encouraging folks, however, to approach me directly or read this because I don’t want to be misrepresented by someone who is having a misunderstanding, and I don’t want to put that labor on someone else, either. Thank you for your understanding and patience!

2. What is going on with you? I heard you were applying to medical school? How is that going?

I am currently living and working in Eugene, Oregon, at a cool social service nonprofit called White Bird Clinic. My job duties include nonviolent crisis deescalation, reception, public health reporting, scribing, and data management, among others. I’m in the process of applying to medical school, which is over a year-long process. I have completed and submitted the primary application, a centralized application service (AMCAS: https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/faq/amcas-faq/), and am in the process of completing each college’s secondary supplemental applications. It is difficult and anxiety inducing, and please try to not ask me about it because it induces anxiety. 

I will hopefully be invited to interview from now until February, and will not hear back about acceptance decisions until March through May of 2018. Please refrain from asking me who I’ve heard back from; I will inform everyone as I find out. 

I am currently applying to: Drexel, Lewis Katz, Loyola, Tulane, Baylor, U of A Tucson, Icahn at Mt Sinai, Sidney Kimmel, VCU, NYU, St. Louis, George Washington, and Columbia. I am not applying to Harvard, Yale, UCSF, UCLA, or U Chicago because I was advised by the former head of admissions at Stanford that they are not good fits for my primary care career goals and I would prefer to focus my time and energy writing stellar apps for other institutions. Please do not encourage me to “just go for it” unless you are the current head of admissions at those medical schools. 

Additionally, I am receiving health care to be able to enter medical school as my best self as I begin one of the most tiresome and stressful processes I could possibly sign up for. I have been diagnosed with ADHD, and am receiving ongoing psychiatric prescribing and talk therapy to manage it. I have come out as trans, specifically nonbinary, and am seeking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to medically move my phenotype, or physical biology, more to an androgynous, or middle, physical presentation. 

3. What is “trans”? 

Trans means that I don’t identify with the gender that I was assigned at birth. I was assigned by the OBGYN as being female, and raised as a girl. However, this gender identity is not how I feel currently as an adult, and not how I felt as a child, either. I did not have the words to express it as a child and simply thought that it was discomfort that everyone experienced. 

The HRC has a simple FAQ: https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-faq

TE has a more in-depth one: http://www.transequality.org/issues/resources/frequently-asked-questions-about-transgender-people

4. What is “nonbinary” or “genderqueer”?

“Nonbinary” or “genderqueer” means that I do not identify as either a man or a woman, or that I fall outside of the socially defined male/female binary. I tend to be more genderfluid - sometimes I present as more feminine, and sometimes I present as more masculine. TE has a good overview of this: http://www.transequality.org/issues/resources/understanding-non-binary-people-how-to-be-respectful-and-supportive

5. Why are you focusing on this right now, and not medical school? 

Self-care is focusing on medical school. I cannot be at my highest performing for my work, interviews, applications, or enrolled in school while pretending to be something I’m not, and having the constant pressure of not feeling that I’m living in my own skin. "Being in the closet” has been found to be physically exhausting and psychologically damaging (http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out). This process is not a distraction or a fantasy, it is taking steps to take care of myself to improve my health, happiness, confidence, and quality of life. 

6. Why aren’t you just normal gay? 

Think of this as gay deluxe. Sexuality and gender are separate, but there is no heterosexuality for people who fall outside of the male/female binary as there is no “opposite” gender to couple with. I tend to be less attracted to women than men for a variety of reasons, notably that I’ve been conditioned to be more comfortable being romantic with men. I tend to be most attracted to other people who are trans or nonbinary, but they’re also harder to find, and in a small town like Eugene, everyone has already dated each other.

7. But you’ve dated men in your past, doesn’t that make you straight?

For one thing, dating men doesn’t inherently make any gay or straight. Sexuality is a spectrum, and people can be gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc., and dating one gender or another at any one point doesn’t change someone’s sexuality. 

For example, you’ve probably dated people you’re not currently with and that doesn’t mean you were inherently wrong about your choices or that it influences your current decisions or relationships right now. Dating is often about exploring and finding yourself and seeing who’s a good fit for you - and that’s what I did and am doing as a young adult. 

8. You’re too young to make this decision for yourself. What if you regret it later?

I’m old enough to buy a gun, cigarettes, alcohol, a car, apply for a loan, get a tattoo, and buy weed in the great state of Oregon - I’m also old enough to make medical decisions for myself. 

The regret rate for gender-related physical care is extremely low - a study puts surgical care, a much more intensive and risky procedure than HRT, at a regret rate of 1-2%. This is compared with plastic surgery regret rate of around 65% for people in the UK. 

Scientifically, HRT regret is virtually nonexistent (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24755998). Personally, it’s a decision I’m extremely satisfied with right now. If I regret this later on down the road - so what? It’s my choice, I initiated informed consent regarding the effects of my choice, and if I regret it later, it’s something that I’m going to have to deal with when it happens. Have you ever regretted a major life choice? A marriage? A birth? A job? Attending school? How did you deal with it when you realized? 

9. I hear you are struggling with depression symptoms. What if you just think you’re trans because something else is going on, like depression? 

This is a common misconception. Transgenderism is associated with depression, but studies strongly suggest that this is due to shame, harassment, intimidation, and negative social influence directed at trans people. The Williams Institute out of UCLA compiled a huge study detailing the possible factors that contribute to suicidality amongst trans people, and found that two of the groups least likely to attempt suicide were people who never revealed that they were transgender, and people who had strong family support after coming out. (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf) 

I had not meant to come out at this point, but the mailing of a prior authorization letter to my household from my insurance company outed me to my family. I do wish that that had not happened - not to keep it a secret, but to be able to maintain control over how I present and slowly introduce the idea of transgenderism, nonbinary gender, and other gender theory concepts to my family to reduce the level of shock that we’re now currently experiencing. 

In truth, before being outed by my insurance company, my mental health had been the best in years - I felt confident, happy, and accomplished. I had reduced my talk therapy sessions from every week to every other week, and was gaining hours and responsibilities at work. The new stress of navigating complicated family dynamics has been difficult, and I hope that everyone keeps processing this new information so we can continue to move on, grow together, and experience happiness, health, and success in our lives. 

10. I’ve noticed that Reed College and Eugene is very liberal, and I don’t see any transgender people around me. Are you sure you haven’t been tricked into thinking it’s a real thing? 

New data published by the Williams Institute estimates the adult (18+) population in the US to be 0.6% of the population, an estimate that has doubled since their last study. This is about half the prevalence of red heads in the US; there’s approximately 1.8 million trans people, about 50% larger than the population of Austin. This doubling hasn’t meant that there are more trans folks now - it means that there’s increased awareness and acceptance of trans identities, and more people have words for feelings that they’ve felt their whole life, or feel comfortable to be out and public about their identity. 

There are trans people in every culture, in every place, and there have been trans people throughout all of history. We don’t currently learn about that because much of trans history has been destroyed. For example, one of the largest trans libraries and research institutions in the world was burned down by Hitler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft). Some Native American traditions include the idea of people who are “two spirit” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit), and some South Asian cultures include the idea of Hijra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)). Trans history dates back to ancient Greece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history). 

11. Is HRT permanent? 

Yes and no. If I cease HRT, most changes will go back an estrogen phenotype. I will completely regain my fertility in 3-6 months, just like being on birth control. I am taking an extremely low dose, a dose at the lowest end of the spectrum recommended by the WPATH international standards of care (http://www.wpath.org/site_page.cfm?pk_association_webpage_menu=1351&pk_association_webpage=4655). The only permanent change is mild vocal cord scarring, not very noticeable at my dose. 

12. My male friend is taking the same dose as you, how can you say yours is low? 

Does your male friend still have his testicles, and has he already undergone puberty? If yes, then his body is already naturally producing testosterone, and he needs to be on a low maintenance dose that adds to the amount his body is already producing to maintain his desired masculine phenotype. A higher dose for him would put his testosterone levels at a dangerously high level, increasing the risk for cardiovascular diseases. 

13. Are you planning on undergoing surgery? 

Not at the moment, as surgery is expensive, scary, and time-consuming. I may want to in the future, but for now, I am happy with my physiology. 

14. Are you planning on having children?

Right now, yes! I want to graduate from medical school and find a loving partner to raise children with. I may decide to have children biologically, adopt, or my partner may decide to have children biologically - who knows! I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I currently love the idea of pregnancy, child birth, and breastfeeding, another factor to not seek surgical transitioning care at this point. 

16. “Pronouns”? Huh? Are you going to change your name? 

I use “they/them” pronouns, as in, “they went to the store,” “that is their jacket,” and “have you called them recently?” While the singular “they” has been in use since the 14th century and not criticized until the 19th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they), I understand that changing one’s language is a difficult and awkward process, and I’m not currently requesting that my family do it unless they want to. It would make me feel better, but it seems like too much to ask at this point. 

I have no idea if I’m going to change my name! Some of my friends call me Nick because I changed my name to Nick Coal following death threats from nazis of Reed College students, but I didn’t intend or request this. My work name is Olive because my coworker is named Nicole already. Basically, I’m bad at coming up with names, and I do like Nyx, Nike, Nikolai, Alex, Xan, and Xander, (middle name is Alexandra), but none of them seem to be “the one” so far. 

15. I read this article and it says something different than what you’ve said here. 

There’s actually a lot of information available on the internet, and it’s up to you to decide who to believe. Things to consider are: was this article written by a trans person? Is this article up to date? What are the credentials of the individual writing this article? Do I believe a stranger or someone I know? 

17. How can I support you during this time? 

Thank you so much! This website has a general overview on general trans allyship: http://www.refinery29.com/transgender-how-to-be-an-ally-faqs

Personally, any encouragement is always appreciated, and recognizing that I am currently feeling overwhelmed with managing the volume of family conflict that’s been placed on me. I like coffee, cookies, snacks, flowers, and money, you can always text me for my address. 

Supporting family members who are having a more difficult time with my transition than I am is the most important thing to do right now. I also encourage individuals struggling with this process to seek professional help in processing difficult emotions: https://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/prof_results.php?sid=1506214943.6657_13937&city=Austin&state=TX&spec=172&spec=200 

Taking care of yourself is most important, and doing that is crucial to maintaining healthy relationships with others.

18. I want to ask you more questions. How can I do that? 

Do you want to ask me questions about my sexuality, sexual preferences, genitals, genital makeup, or breast tissue? If so, please contemplate your question, and respect my personhood by refraining from asking me questions that you would not ask your other friends or family members who are not trans. 

If you have other questions, please feel free to text me at five one two, eight-hundred and fifty three, 0909, or ask in the ask box, linked at the top of this page. 

Love y’all!

[teachanarchy]

A few weeks ago, I got there. Peak liberalism. The moment I accepted that contemporary liberal politics are anathema to progress, social change, or, heaven forbid, economic change. Not just in terms of my own personal politics (that peak was reached years ago), but in terms of any political movement. This realization was a long-time coming. I never believed in Obama’s smiling message of hope, nor in Clinton’s starch-stiff entitlement to my support at the tail end of a career built on allowing the Right to dictate the parameters of American values. I still remember NAFTA and still work in a post-Clintonian era of neoliberal capitalism. And while I have inherited an inter-generational distrust of Democrats and liberal organizations, the peak liberalism I have reached lately is a rejection of the horizontal in-fighting popular of the center-leftish base.

I’ve gone through my own personal experimentation with liberalism’s identity-centered calling cards. When you’re trans, Queer, disabled, breaking free of public school indoctrination, and just beginning to understand class relations in the world around you, liberal identity politics offer power–the power to demand attention, to shut down conversation, to center yourself, and to be untouchable in your politics, along the same identity criminal code used to reduce Obama’s critics to “racists,” and Clinton’s to “sexists.”

I did my fair share of seizing power from those around me. At times, perhaps I was justified. But over time it became abundantly clear that these politics are a dead end. The decline in my health forced me to realize that solidarity is necessary. Allies are necessary. If I intend to survive, I cannot be too rich for good intentions and people unlike me who want to help. And in the eggshell world of identity politics, I’m one mistake, or one incorrect visual assumption about who I am away from losing whatever security this “community” purports to offer.

Reading Audre Lorde further helped contextualize liberal identity politics. Her speech Learning from the 60s isn’t the only analysis of early liberal identity sectarianism that should give pause to anyone serious about changing the world, rather than just pointing out its flaws.

My experience of peak liberalism however, comes at a time when my return to the public university system has led me to witness a new generation of angry young Queers repeating the same tired politics I engaged in a decade ago, which are in fact the same tired politics Lorde and others have been critiquing since before I was born. Somewhere along an infectious and arguably ableist resistance to understanding the necessity of solidarity politics, a moral myopia developed.

And when I stumbled upon a self-righteous Facebook argument about whether white cis gays or trans women of color have it “worse” in Chechnya’s death camps, I realized I’d had enough. The original poster called out the media for failing to center the voices of the most marginalized being tortured and executed in the camps, because apparently barely escaping with your life alone isn’t enough to raise the otherwise notably cautious ire of American college students.

It got worse. Others commented to decry that the media even covered the story while non-incarcerated Black trans women in the U.S. (who aren’t being directly murdered by their families) face violence everyday. Another rushed to post clapping emojis in response, adding that their professors don’t even ask for everyone’s pronouns before class–an act that was literally described as “violence.” The media was decried for not treating these topics equally. One, the rounding up, imprisonment, torture, and murder of Queer people. Two, the obliviousness or apathy of U.S. academia to some of its students’ desire to vocalize the pronouns they use before class. Both, under liberalism, acts of violence that require equal media time.

I tried typing out several responses, but ultimately gave up because, I mean, my god, the problem is the existence of death camps, not who is in them. And how do we even weight different experiences? Why do we even need to? Can we not oppose one state’s death camps and another’s structural injustices all at the same time? Is it okay for gay men to be rounded up, imprisoned by the state, shocked, starved, and murdered by their families just because someone else by some standard may have it worse somewhere else in the world? Or, more bluntly, is it okay for gays to be murdered since on the other side of the world an American student is experiencing the inconvenience of being misgendered in a private liberal arts college classroom? Even if the media is distorting the demographics of people in the camps, what does arguing that point or correcting that misinformation even accomplish? What did derailing reports on gay death camps accomplish for trans students or Black trans women in the U.S., or anywhere at all?

Where antiracist efforts in the U.S. were galvanized by U.S. fights against Nazis abroad following WWII (Taylor, 2016, p. 32), contemporary U.S. liberals can’t even muster a negative fuck to give about concentration camps without first ranking the prisoners by worth to a gaggle of college students halfway around the world, delighting in the privileges afforded them by Western imperialism.

Reeling from this gay-hating Holocaust denialism, I found myself asking how did we get here? Surely, at some point, these politics made sense. But somewhere along the way, whatever radicalism these politics held has become ensnared in the quagmire of endless one-upping privilege checks and ah-ha! call-outs, the intersectionality of indivisible identity narratives, and a campus-centering, politic-esque performance of activism thoroughly neutered by lack of discernible strategy, goals, or even radical values.

Concerns over “disproportionate” incarceration have replaced prison abolition, just as the “right” to military service replaced disarmament. In the course of editing this piece, the sheer toxicity of this culture I once actively contributed to hit me again and again. I encountered a feminist advocating the sexual assault of men to “level the playing field.” When it was brought to her attention that men are already raped, her concern was exposed to not really be sexualized violence but the fact that women are “winning” with regard to being raped. I think her choice of words is apt. For all the denials to the contrary, these are oppression Olympics. Rape, death camps, and other atrocities don’t matter. Who is winning does. The recognition that identity essentialism fails to capture lived experience or challenge the indiscriminate maw of society is rebuked in favor of an unspoken, unassailable, and frankly insane sectarian rule book we’re all already too late in learning.

And what can we show for it? The persistent fear of reporting violence and a reliable lack of community support because one is the wrong identity to be on the receiving end? Another ten years of crowd-sourcing survival expenses, no closer to revolutionary change than Sylvia Rivera clawing her way to that stage in 1973, and still shouting the same things? Is anyone listening? Is anyone benefiting?

How many years of the same mantras about centering must we endure, how many Queer people must revert to the closet, how many must die from violence and preventable disease, and how long must we ignore the plight of us all exploited in this global cancer called capitalism before we name the failures of liberal politics and try something different instead? It is not enough to simply outgrow these politics and hope others do as well. If leftists are to engage with liberals, we must be willing to name and challenge the toxicity, absurdity, and de-radical nature of their politics.

I write with around twelve years of experience in student, community, and workplace activism, including various supporting organizer roles. And the following essay explores the problems I see with liberal and identity-centered politics.

Intersectionality creates new identity classes.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is credited with conceptualizing intersectionality in her 1989 essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics to highlight the limits of civil rights legislation based on sex and race.

Essentially, Crenshaw asks us to imagine the intersection of two streets. For the purposes of her metaphor, they can be abstractly thought of as racial discrimination and sexual discrimination. Black women, positioned in the intersection, may experience injustice from all directions, but it is difficult if not entirely impossible to place responsibility on a single street for the harm done to them. Rather, their position within the intersection is the critical context for understanding the injustices they face.

To illustrate this metaphor, Crenshaw wrote on the 1976 case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors where five Black women sued General Motors over employment discrimination, yet were unable to effectively argue their case since the discrimination they faced did not occur clearly on the basis of race (i.e. affecting Black men too) or sex (i.e. affecting white women as well). Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality gave a name to this type of experience which Black women had already been describing for generations.

In her article, Black Feminism and Intersectionality, Sharon Smith writes:

“After Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality in 1989, it was widely adopted because it managed to encompass in a single word the simultaneous experience of the multiple oppressions faced by Black women. But the concept was not a new one. Since the times of slavery, Black women have eloquently described the multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender—referring to this concept as ‘interlocking oppressions,’ ‘simultaneous oppressions,’ ‘double jeopardy,’ ‘triple jeopardy’ or any number of descriptive terms.” (source)

The April 1977 statement by the Combahee River Collective demonstrates that what could retroactively be described as intersectional politics pre-dates Crenshaw’s essay. In it, a Marxist politic is identified as informing intersectional and identity-oriented work.

“We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” (source)

Has an intersectional analysis succeeded in confronting or dismantling either “the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism,” “patriarchy,” or any number of other targets identified by subsequent social justice movements?

In 1982, Audre Lorde presented her talk Learning from the 60s at a Harvard University celebration of Malcolm X, in which she highlighted a misplaced horizontal anger arising in activist movements:

“In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence.

Similarly, in her article The Politics of Identity, Sharon Smith writes:

“As the experience of the 1960s shows, it is not necessary to personally experience a form of oppression to become committed to opposing it. Yet the central premise of the theory of identity politics is based on precisely the opposite conclusion: Only those who actually experience a particular form of oppression are capable of fighting against it. Everyone else is considered to be part of the problem and cannot become part of the solution by joining the fight against oppression. The underlying assumption is that all men benefit from women’s oppression, all straight people benefit from the oppression of the LGBT community, and all whites benefit from racism.” (source)

And in his article The Limits of Antiracism, Adolph Reed Jr. comments on a shift in the targets of antiracist activism between the Civil Rights Movement and later waves of identity-oriented work, including those that inspired and followed Crenshaw’s conceptualization of intersectionality:

“Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of ‘prejudice’ or ‘intolerance.’ (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and domestic anticommunism.)” (source)

In comparison to the Combahee River Collective’s statement (above), later movements are notably hostile to Marxism. Reed Jr. continues:

“I’ve been struck by the level of visceral and vitriolic anti-Marxism I’ve seen from this strain of defenders of antiracism as a politics. It’s not clear to me what drives it because it takes the form of snide dismissals than direct arguments. Moreover, the dismissals typically include empty acknowledgment that ‘of course we should oppose capitalism,’ whatever that might mean. In any event, the tenor of this anti-Marxism is reminiscent of those right-wing discourses, many of which masqueraded as liberal, in which only invoking the word ‘Marxism’ was sufficient to dismiss an opposing argument or position. […].

This sort of thing only deepens my suspicions about antiracism’s status within the comfort zone of neoliberalism’s discourses of ‘reform.’ More to the point, I suspect as well that this vitriol toward radicalism is rooted partly in the conviction that a left politics based on class analysis and one focused on racial injustice are Manichean alternatives.” (source)

And Asad Haider likewise notes the erasure of communists of color from liberal identity sectarian framing of Marxism as “white”:

“Obviously it offends me if someone includes me in a list of white socialists who don’t care about race or something like that. These people who accuse me of being white, I want to know where they were when I was detained at the airport or harassed after 9/11. It would’ve been nice to have them there to say ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s a Marxist so we consider him white.’ But that didn’t happen. Despite the fact that identity politics is supposed to be about everyone’s experiences, it completely erases my own experiences of racism and it distorts the views I’ve formed to understand those experiences.

But what I really think is offensive is the erasure of all these figures from history—people of color—who took up Marxism and were engaged in a struggle for the freedom of every person. It’s just unacceptable to wipe them out of history the way white supremacy did and the way the mainstream political discourse tries to do. You know, a lot of people perpetuating identity politics are wearing sweatshirts about Assata Shakur and invoking the Black Panthers—but all of these people were communists. To now wear a shirt that says ‘Assata Taught Me’ and then talk about how all socialists are white—it would be funny if it weren’t so sad.” (source)

The erasure Haider describes is informed by the impotence of liberal identity sectarianism. Despite an oft-cited inspiration in the intersectional analysis articulated by Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and others, in practice, intersectional activists have been unable to escape inviolable and discrete hierarchies of identities. As such, Karl Marx’ maleness and whiteness are all that is necessary for anticommunist liberals to reduce the collaborative efforts of people across identity groupings into the most egregious sin an activist can make. These politics serve imperialism, and are not the allies of any leftist movement.

In discussing Betty Friedan and bell hooks’ theories on intersectionality, Eve Mitchell writes on the preponderance of sub-identities these politics have produced in her essay I am a Woman and a Human: a Marxist Critique of Intersectionality Theory:

“hooks is correct to say that basing an entire politics on one particular experience, or a set of particular differences, under capitalism is problematic. However, intersectionality theory replicates this problem by simply adding particular moments, or determinant points; hooks goes on to argue for race and class inclusion in a feminist analysis. Similarly, theories of an ‘interlocking matrix of oppressions,’ simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context. This methodology is just as ahistorical and antisocial as Betty Friedan’s.” (source)

The separatism so hated when engaged in by second-wave women’s libbers and TERFs is the essential structure of intersectional liberal identity politics. Now instead of being limited to white or cis women’s womanhood, liberalism proposes a cornucopia of womanhoods (“identity politics on steroids” in the words of Crenshaw), discrete and destined to individualism, unable to cooperate or even understand one another across an ocean of perpetually unexamined oppressive matrices. Intersectionality, though originally a critique of the limits of identity politics, can now be widely observed as a justification for identity politics, having been thoroughly appropriated (or perhaps a better word is colonized?) by liberalism (Is Intersectionality Just Another Form of Identity Politics?).

We remain trapped by intersections, unwilling or unable to examine the geographic bounds of the society they exist in–the whys, or any how regarding an escape–instead devoted to the micro-analysis of identity. In this sense, (neo-?)intersectionality is a fractal phenomenon. It is useful for identifying the particulars of the structures that oppress us, yet in practice, so far seems unable to direct our movement against these structures.

The dimensions of these identities are arbitrary.

Liberal identity politics are premised on false dichotomies–cis or trans, straight or gay, white or Black, man or woman, etc. One category is deemed privileged and innately discriminatory or even “violent” towards the category opposite it, if not out of biological necessity than by passively benefiting from society’s structural barriers. In this theory, interpersonal violence and social oppression happen because we are these marginalized categories and others are oppressive identities, and not due to the powerlessness of either’s material conditions expressed in convenient channels availed by capitalism (Wolf, 2009, p. 238-239).

But between those binaries of identity are a multitude of others not even best thought of as existing in the middle of a spectrum between the two false poles liberal identity politics name. In regards to sexuality for instance, would bisexuals or pansexuals be the middle of the spectrum between heterosexuals and homosexuals? And what about asexuals? Furthermore, as experienced expressly by trans people and people who become disabled later in life, these categories are not static, but are moved to or even through during the course of one’s life. Does one’s status as oppressor or oppressed move with these transitions? And if so, can momentary identity truly serve as an indicator of whether one is oppressed or oppressor? Reality complicates these politics.

Consider the idea of “white Hispanic” or “white Latinx” people. Among Latinx people, it is not even clear what “white Hispanic” means (Saenz-Alcántara, Who and What the Hell is a White Hispanic?). The use of whiteness vs. other racial categories also varies geographically, which Hector R. Cordero-Guzman suggests is due to the social constructiveness of race as encountered culturally:

“Race is important, and racism and colorism are pernicious. They negatively impact the lives of many. As a biological concept, race is meaningless, but as a sociological concept it is extremely powerful. Since it is a sociological construction, however, race is a contextual and situational concept that can also be fluid and dynamic for many populations. People’s biological make-up does not change over time but their conceptions of themselves and where and how they fit in evolving racial classification schemas can be influenced by many factors and can change depending on context and reference point.” (source)

Liberalism has no capacity for identities to be read conditionally or situationally. If one’s “whiteness” varies sociologically over geographic and cultural bounds, how can one’s experience be classified across the strictness of liberal identity hierarchies?

Furthermore, who benefits from creating this cultural phenomenon of a “white Latinx” class (while giving no similar focus to Afro-Latinx or other Latinx people)? To some, simply being “white Latinx” (whatever that means) is to be part of racist oppression. For instance, non-Black Latinx people acknowledging police violence against Latinx people is sometimes called “anti-Black violence” and a “distraction” from the movement for Black lives, rather than fertile ground for a larger movement against the police state. I have also experienced discussion of the ethnic white-washing of mixed race or Latinx people described as a “derail” from “real” racism, which presumably is only experienced by certain people of color, or people of a certain degree of color. These discussions mirror the racial essentialism of the Civil Rights era (noted by William García in his article White Latino Racism on the Rise), but with a more focused hierarchy within the diversity of Latinx people alone.

Again, who benefits? Given the rising growth of Latinx people as a whole, dividing the largest non-white voting bloc in the U.S., and arbitrarily conferring a status of quasi-white on some of these populations ensures continued racialized frustrations that may well serve to prevent more unified political resistance against U.S. imperialism. This surplus value of whiteness arbitrarily assigned to some Latinx people mirrors the larger function of white privilege W.E.B. Du Bois wrote on in Black Reconstruction. Essentially, white privilege works to create a false consciousness of superiority in difference, dissuading “white” workers from working class unity. Today it seems likewise accurate to observe that “white privilege” shuts down dialogue of antiracist or other identity sectarian movements including or even working with white-passing and some mixed race folks.

In A Marxist Critiques Identity Politics, Asad Haider also describes this:

“The idea was that white skin privilege was actually harmful to white people, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages. As a result, they did not build a movement across racial boundaries to fight their common oppression. The fact that the idea of white privilege is used today to show why we can’t possibly unify—that’s a reversal of the core idea.” (source)

Similarly, consider the Spanish government’s sudden romanticization of Sephardic Jews, expelled from the country in the 15th century yet still speaking Spanish or Ladino because of a love for the people who threatened them with death if they didn’t convert or leave. The Spanish state’s decision to extend citizenship rights to Sephardic Jews (who can prove their ancestry and love of Spanish culture), but not Muslims expelled from Al-Andalus serves to undermine global solidarity between diasporic Muslim and Jewish communities whose common treatment over the last several centuries is a potential source of unity threatening the imperial powers that be who gain more from perpetuating the occupation of the Middle East, fragilizing Jewish survival, and turning Muslim autonomy into a monstrosity to be warred against.

Both Jews and Muslims occupy simultaneous positions in imperial society as “white” and “not-white.” For instance, Middle Easterners in the U.S. are considered “white” on official census data, but rhetoric around the occupation of the Middle East and “threat” of Islam emphasizes their Brownness to justify imperial expansion and interpersonal violence. Jews likewise are generally considered “white” by default to liberals, but “not-white” by white supremacists. Liberal racial dynamics are insufficient to understand the nuance of how whiteness, Brownness, religion, and otherness are manipulated by the state to exploit and colonize both peoples, and perceived interpersonally as justification for conflict. To liberals, Jewish people, defaulted to white for convenience, are the victims of anti-Semitic hate crimes because of their religion, even when white supremacists target them because of their race. What informs anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic prejudice? Is it racism? Are “white” Muslims and Jews, Hispanics and Middle Easterners, victims of racism, or its perpetrators? The conditional context of race eludes the severity demanded by liberal identity analyses where one is either-or, oppressor or oppressed, oppressed by race or religion, but not in an intersectional way permitted to cross-over the boundaries of either. As such, these politics objectify Brown, multi-ethnic, mixed race, Muslim, Jewish, and other non-white/non-Black people whose experiences of racism are conjured for the illusion of solidarity but white-washed upon specificity to experience.

So too, consider the false dichotomy between cis and trans. If we accept the basic premise that cis people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, and trans people do not, where do feminists fit into this equation? Where does any man or woman rejecting any part of the gender roles assigned to them? What amount of resistance or questioning qualifies one as trans? Is simply existing as a gender outside a Western binary dynamic enough?

People whose experiences of gender thrive outside of the capitalist binary or a clear-cut transition between binary options also undermine an easy identity division of cis from trans. Plenty of straight people along with tons of gays and lesbians who wouldn’t consider themselves trans could all be understood to reject parts of the gender assigned to them. Gender policing affects everyone who visibly falls out of the expected conventions–not just people who identify as trans. Interestingly, while activists frequently read me to be a cis man, my femme-of-center Queerness never seems to escape the notice of straight people I encounter outside activist circles.

I first vocalized my objection to the gender I was assigned at birth in 1992. The 25 years that have so far followed that coming out have involved a lot of experimentation, trauma, power, self-actualization, and dramatic changes. Yet as often as I hear intersectional activists insist that no trans person ever has cis privilege or is ever a gender other than what they say they are, these are precisely terms applied to me when my transness is summarily erased, misgendered, or displaced by the cursory assumptions of “people-centered” intersectional activists. When these folks insist for example all trans women have always been women, the implication is that either my experience as a trans woman or as a cis man or as an agender person is irrelevant or false. It’s pushing the fake gender trope further down the line to people whose trans experiences fall outside more mainstream narratives. I have been a trans woman, a cis man, an agender adult, and a genderqueer child.

What matters more though than narrative inclusion is that a constructed capitalist norm of gender permeates the Western imperial world. How we relate to gender is a secondary concern at best to the fact that a system constructs the way we are permitted to relate to it and the difference of experience we live through because of how we relate to gender. Building on Andrea Dworkin’s analysis in Woman Hating, on the other side of capitalism, trans self-actualization is possible. Under capitalism, our abilities to express ourselves, identify, and change are limited by profit-maximizing culture.

Despite constant proclamations (often based on fictional statistics about average trans lifespans) that trans femmes face transphobic and misogynist violence in addition to more structural obstructions, there is an unacknowledged expectation that trans femmes must perform gender in a certain way before they are permitted recognition on those terms. I don’t wear makeup and I like my beard, but as “cis-passing” as identity police would like to rank me, neither how I choose to identify or how they assess my identity has the power to cis-pass me through the interpersonal violence and structural bullshit life in this capitalist system affords me.

And when does any Queer-basher ever stop to inquire about preferred pronouns or to clarify whether we self-identify as white or multi-ethnic, gay or Queer, trans or gender non-compliant before threatening or actually attacking us? Are they that polite to you? They have never been that polite to me or anyone I know. So are we attacked for the jobs we work? Our immigration status? Our sexual orientation? Our gender identity? Or maybe our gender expression?

If the answer is that we exist in the intersections of all of those identities, then logically can we conclude that some shifting along those identity spectrums still results in similar experiences? And if that’s the case, does ending this violence or ending structural oppression necessitate a hyper focus on specific identity sub-groupings, or does broader solidarity make more sense? For instance, if Queer-hating murderers in Chechnya don’t give a fuck if we’re trans or gay or pansexual and genderfluid, should it matter to us? If Christians in North Carolina don’t give a fuck if we’re trans or gay or pansexual and genderfluid, should it matter to us?

Likewise, the structural obstructions we encounter: lack of adequate healthcare, a work or school day and environment structured around an assumed able-bodied norm, coerced gendering by the state, inability to acquire goods and service where workers are paid fairly for their labor, etc. occur in more material terms than our intellectual identity or dis-identity as disabled, trans, or whatever else. Identity is rendered irrelevant to vigilantism against non-conformity and failure to be subsumed within the available social parameters. Yet we’re conditioned to believe dismantling capitalism, which defines these parameters, is either irrelevant or at best a secondary concern to ending our identity-based oppressions.

The cultural capital assigned to these identities is hierarchical, and totally absurd.

Visit any college campus protest, and the local activist performance troupe will inevitably feature at least one speaker leading crowds in a rousing recitation of their favorite mantra: especially trans women of color. When not the lyric of a pop song stuck on generational repeat and regurgitated by every non-trans women of color to demonstrate their profound goodness, this mantra gets translated into an act of centering, that is, at best passing the speakers’ mic to actual trans women of color, or at worst, derailing any other discussion of oppression to prioritize their specific experience and criticize movements and community organizing for failing to do this already. This line has been used so frequently, and in terms of actual practice, been made so goddamn meaningless, I know at least one group of trans women of color who made it into a drinking game nearly a decade ago.

The mantra is meaningless because in at least a decade of trans-centering, it is yet to end interpersonal violence against trans women or structural oppression faced by any trans person. We continue to crowd-source our healthcare and other survival expenses–no closer to a sustainable solution than we were in the Bush years (either of them), yet perpetually damselled by the same activist performers reflexively quick to accuse everyone else of seeking “ally points.”

Additionally, the factors that comprise especially trans women of color–gender identity, gender, and race–are arbitrarily limiting. Why are these three factors alone mentioned? Ask and you will probably be told that it is because trans women of color are the most marginalized people (or voices, or bodies–it seems like we rarely get to be people anymore).

This logic side-steps a few considerations. First, it speaks to economic conditions only indirectly. The city I live in for instance, sits in the county with one of the worst child hunger rates in the country. Layoffs and retail closure have created a perpetual cycle of unemployment and poverty here as long as I have been alive. Yet these conditions elude the liberal understanding of most marginalized. Do trans women of color deal with unemployment, homelessness, and hunger? I’m trans, I have, and I think it’s obvious that most of us do at least for some part of our lives. But centering any trans person neither centers these conditions nor proposes a solution directly related to them. This is not the failure of the individual. Ask me to speak as a trans person, and I probably won’t speak about hunger, homelessness, or unemployment either. These are the failures of selective identity-centering politics. And when the trans people being centered are 18-22 year old American college students with campus meal plans, an inability to qualify for need-based financial aid, and the economic confidence to pursue a private school’s liberal arts degree, is it really fair to say we’re talking about the most marginalized people?

What about being disabled? A sex worker? A minimum wage worker? An immigrant? A single parent? A trafficked worker? Anyone down supply chain from Western imperial markets? Who benefits from the silent hierarchy of centered identities? Is this ranking system useful to dismantling structural oppression off-campus or around the world?

It is virtually impossible to live a Western life not buttressed in some way by the economic exploitation of workers both here and abroad. And given the way race and sex are not clear indicators of oppressed vs. oppressor in light of this system of exploitation, is it not our capitalist class relations more broadly than our skin color or sex specifically that define this power dynamic?

Sweatshops routinely abuse and exploit the labor of children (along with lax environmental regulations) to produce a variety of goods we enjoy across the world. Interpersonal dynamics of race, gender, etc. are obscured by the drama between exploited and benefactor in the imperialist marketplace, bloodying us all in the dirty work of capitalism. If we choose not to do everything in our power to dismantle this economic system, if we choose to place our own oppressions ahead of or in place of those workers and communities directly exploited by this arrangement, are we not guilty of oppressing them, even if we are not the architects of capitalism, stockholders in international businesses, or necessarily enthusiastic consumers of sweatshop products?

I remember one night during the Charlotte Uprising when a march of protesters disturbed a Black man attempting to sleep on the streets. He spit in the direction of those marching and shouted something along the lines of: “I’m alive right here [or maybe: I live right here], when will my life matter?”

At another rally, speaker after speaker talked about the need for churches, teachers, and communities to open their doors to refugees and immigrants in need of protection from the threat of deportation. A group of people sleeping in a bus stop were awakened by our chants and drumming, yet few of us stopped to talk with them, and to my knowledge no doors in the community were opened to them although it was the coldest night of this past winter.

When will “trickle-down social justice” reach these folks? If not now, why? When? How can any of us with a roof over our heads, a meal today, running water, along with the freedom to voice our opinions, conceptualize ourselves as among the most marginalized either around the world or even in our own communities?

What makes gender identity, gender, and race the sole factors worth centering? And why do we have to frame our struggles against oppression on those terms rather than in economics terms? Furthermore, if we can understand that homelessness, hunger, and unemployment are all constructed material conditions borne of profit-maximizing capitalist interests and not actual deficit without necessarily experiencing them personally, why do identity politics put so much burden on those who directly experience oppression to lead movements dismantling it?

These hierarchies are often verbalized in individualist languages–one person becomes the monolithic voice for all within their identity category (see also: this phenomenon of recently out trans people appointing themselves “trans community leaders”). The concept of allies is summarily rejected. Innately, these politics benefit ableism and cissexism, pushing out solidarity in favor of a bootstraps rugged individualism disabled and trans people physically and statistically cannot survive through.

As an example, let’s assume that tomorrow the new mantra of the most cutting edge activist groups becomes especially disabled trans women of color. How many people even is that?

A recent study by the Williams Institute numbers transgender people in the U.S. at about 1.4 million, or roughly around 0.6% of the overall population. Momentarily assuming an unlikely even distribution across the 50 states (the actual study shows variance), that’s 28,000 people per state. And then assuming another unlikely even distribution across all 100 counties in North Carolina for instance, that puts about 280 transgender people in each county.

Now, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we can estimate that 13.3% are Black or African-American, 1.2% are American Indian or Alaskan Native, 5.6% are Asian, 0.2% are Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 2.6% are two or more, and 17.6% are Hispanic or Latinx (although this is not considered a separate race category, so it overlaps with “white” and other categories). Together, that totals at 40.5% (included people who identify as or will be “read” as white). When applied to our 280 transgender people per county in North Carolina, that comes to about 114 people.

Next, using another study by the Williams Institute, we can estimate that 41% of transgender people primarily identify their gender as female–although the study sampling is only a few thousand people and gender is widely varied in the data. This means that if we are looking specifically for transgender women of color, we can guess there are around 47 per county in North Carolina.

Lastly, if we were to include disability in this analysis–so, only looking at disabled trans women of color–we would be down to around 4 people per county in North Carolina, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate of 8.5% of people having disabilities.

If we accept that structural discrimination affects our politics and ability to engage in politics, who can even say if these 4 people will have the economic liberty to engage in activism, let alone be the visible “center” of a political movement? And perhaps more importantly, is the experience of oppression even an indicator of political insight, leadership skills, charisma, or strategy?

This does not mean that there are not badass disabled trans women of color out there doing critical work in the community. Nor does it mean that issues unique to disabled people, trans people, people of color, etc. are not critical to address in dismantling oppressive structures. Instead, it more vitally demonstrates that without solidarity our communities are too small to affect social change, particularly as modeled on larger civil rights movements.

In the words of the Combahee River Collective:

“Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.” (source)

Identity sectarianism under the guise of intersectionality simply relocates the hierarchies of the dominant culture, leaving us no closer to revolution or resolution.

Positive thinking does not directly address structural problems.

The obsession with identity is what made DADT repeal the LGBT+ civil rights movement’s priority in 2010. I was there when this bizarre effort became cause célèbre with the audacity to connect itself to broader worker struggles and to assert its connection somehow to reducing violence against LGBT+ people. I’m not the only total fool who swallowed the party line that we could end homophobic violence in the workplace and in the U.S. more broadly by bestowing American gays with the “right” to commit genocide for the empire.

Identity politics stranded trans people. I remember the shouts of especially trans women of color back then, but there was no politic behind it. There was no direction offered. I know that a muddled intersection of Queer people were targets of violence, but neither gasp of liberalism offered immediate aid. One side offered protest performance–young white collegiate activist after young white collegiate activist proclaimed the need for more marginalized voices to be centered and paternally protected, and critiqued everyone else for not doing so (perhaps inspiring the Democrat’s new crime bill: the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act). The other side swept in and announced that DADT repeal would be the next big issue. That was followed shortly by the campaign for marriage equality. In every direction, liberalism was convinced of its devotion to trans people, but not a goddamn face of it all offered more than words and magical thinking.

Magic words like especially, center, inclusion, and full equality diffused the material reality of a world more criminalized and more colonized. For all the civil rights advances gained, the movement still rejected a focus on the voter ID law and was unable to fend off HB2 or even depend on Democrats and national gay rights orgs to broker an actual repeal of it. The serpentine wit of capitalism still evades liberal politics. HB2 was fake-repealed over neoliberal concerns about money. DADT repeal put a fabulous progressive face on Obama’s drone genocide. The notion of “hate crimes” reoriented the police state and criminal injustice system as our friend, even as police outfitted themselves in preparation for the terror it is now commonplace to protest, and even as police and ICE colluded to deport millions.

Intersectionality failed to do more than congratulate a scholarly activist class on doing their assigned readings. And the more structural-leaning liberal side failed to offer any social change whose parameters are not dictated at the end of the day by capitalist conformity and use to the empire. Normalization and assimilation are preferred.

Intersectional activists seem to believe themselves to be more radical or outside the liberal fold, yet their politics mandate a focus solely on the identity one represents (or can position oneself as an acceptable ally to), so rather than form a broader coalition for something like universal healthcare (which is indeed outside the liberal norm), these politics narrow the LGBT+ focus to issues readily identifiable as LGBT+, for instance: the “right” to murder people for U.S. imperialism. Intersectional activists need not even name any goal–other liberals are already working to fill that void at every turn.

Identity politics, in fact, make it the responsibility of the marginalized to speak for all people like them, and to bring attention to issues relevant to their identity. So where geography or economic liberty make it impossible for one to contribute to their own liberation in this way, the movement is paralyzed between one side demanding that the marginalized lead and the other pushing for neoliberal concessions. Any work towards solidarity or on issues that de-center whatever identity class(es) is en vogue are promptly dismissed as de facto prioritization of the over-privileged, and a re-centering on cis feelings, het feelings, white feelings, etc.

Adolph Reed Jr. describes the failure of identity politics to do more than “center” certain groups of people:

“And here’s a practical catch-22. In the logic of antiracism, exposure of the racial element of an instance of wrongdoing will lead to recognition of injustice, which in turn will lead to remedial action—though not much attention seems ever given to how this part is supposed to work. I suspect this is because the exposure part, which feels so righteously yet undemandingly good, is the real focus. But this exposure convinces only those who are already disposed to recognize.” (source)

What is anyone to do? Answer: no one knows. If you don’t show up to every poorly planned collegiate protest, your silence is violence. If you show up and dare to speak to the media or any of the other attendees scowling at you from a safe space away, your privilege is showing. Privilege is critical. We’re supposed to be analyzing it, coming to terms with it, learning about it, really, really thinking especially about it.

We’re supposed to be more inclusive, but not in a way that demographically restructures the leadership of our group specifically to be inclusive, because that’s tokenizing. We need to be in community with marginalized groups, but not in a way that seems like we’re eager to work with them just to be in community with them. We need to check in with local trans leadership on everything, but not in a way that asks them to help effectively direct everything we do. Side note: the same trans feminists who devised the aforementioned drinking game also came up with a translation for “local trans leadership.” It means: “In a few months from now, I’ll have almost been out as trans for a whole year.” Also, the trans community has never consented to leadership or appointed anyone to be our leader. Repeat for every LGBT+ organization negotiating our lives without us in the room.

Neither intersectional activists nor liberal reformists dare attack the structure of capitalism. Even when the coveted voices of trans women of color spell it out. Alyssa Pariah writes in her post The Elusive TWOC:

“I, TWOC in the flesh, do not feel the pangs of interpersonal bias or microaggressions. I’ve endured immense abuse and trauma in my past. What facilitated my healing and resilience was a materialist analysis of the world that relocated my anxiety from individuals to institutions. Namely our economic system, capitalism, and its necessity to perpetuate poverty stricken conditions and perceived scarcity that give rise any number of antagonisms I’m faced with.” (source)

Instead liberalism devotes itself to magical and positive thinking: Getting state recognition of same-sex monogamy will end violence against Queer people. Saying especially trans women of color will actually change things, just like shouting I believe in full equality transformed GetEQUAL from the group that derailed trans-inclusive civil rights goals for DADT repeal into a group that young activists sincerely believe is an “antiracist and trans-centering” national org.

Both sides are partially there. We need structural targets and goals. We need recognition of marginalized communities. The key that is missing is the connection between these two. Capitalism is the power structure that defines our oppression and that enchants the society that marginalizes us.

Vampirism in lieu of a united front is ineffective.

In his essay What Makes Call-Out Culture So Toxic, Asam Ahmad writes:

“In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing. For instance, most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.” (source)

Ahmad’s observation connecting call-out culture to the prison industrial complex is so critical because by nature, the individualist punishment inherent to these politics fails to propose radical change, such as prison abolition, preferring instead to raise concern over disproportionate treatment. In essence, disproportionate treatment rather than structural oppression becomes the key to the call-out analysis, just as the activists whose Holocaust denialism inspired this essay asserted. Liberals purport that someone is privileged or a worthy target of being called out because they unfairly receive some socioeconomic surplus value. This is the turning on each other that Lorde noted in the 60s, and the distance Reed Jr. critiques.

To leftists however, the issue must be the structural world–the prisons, the death camps, the rape culture, the criminal injustice system, imperialism, state-validated family structures, capitalism, etc.–not merely the observation that some people are affected by these structures more or less than others. That liberal identity politics and call-out culture both focus on disproportionate treatment rather than structural oppression exposes the policing and reformism at their root. Call-out culture mirrors the cultural of criminal punishment it has not yet escaped from.

Pariah continues:

“Focusing our ire on people who receive privilege instead of people who dole it out is a losing strategy for ending oppression. This idea flows from post-structuralist academic theory that sees collective struggle against domination as largely misguided; That locates interpersonal interactions as primary sites for transformation. Smells like rugged individualism to me. Tumblr has taken this heady theory, and parsed it out for disaffected users to reblog. How convenient for people in power. I imagine Goldman Sachs loves this garbage. […]. I actually want to fucking win. The TWOC you love and adore in the abstract does not think that collectively shit talking problematic individuals constitutes radical community. Concerted actions and campaigns against the power structure does. But will you help me do it?” (source)

That question sticks with me because I feel it, and I wonder the same thing. Does today’s young trans community, with all its cissexist-sumptions that erase right over who I am and who I have been since before they were born, have the good sense to learn from the mistakes myself and older generations have made, and put in the work to change things now with us? The instant gratification offered by social media–where so much of call-out culture and identity sectarianism is born and stays–is alluring. But angry Facebook posts haven’t yet in thirteen years changed the economic system that forces young trans women into survival trades or crowd-sourcing fundraisers for medical needs. Everything being taught right now as common wisdom on the performance of politics–the idea that it isn’t our responsibility to educate cis people, that we don’t need allies, that we must be centered at all times, that emotional outbursts directed at other activists are okay–who benefits from this? Step back and look. Who benefits from this complete toxicity?

I’m tired of us dying, and self-destructing, and repeating the same politics that have failed us for decades now. Are you? Will you help me do something different?

In his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampires’ Castle, late economist Mark Fisher explained his concept of the Vampires’ Castle to describe liberal identity sectarian politics:

“The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.” (source)

For the longest time, vampirism was my go to political strategy. It was a way to taste power as a trans person in particular. It was also largely a function of age. We come out of the public school system (and into a world where we have more freedom to explore transness, Queerness, and other identities) with so much conditioning about the select civil rights narratives approved by the state. And if we wind up in college or organizing with other young people, we are further subjected to liberal academia’s cultural focus.

The alienation of capitalism is at work here. But unless we question and study power, unless we study theory and history, we would never know it. Liberalism traps itself in identity–in identifying the problem, but offering no solution out of it. The result is the vampirism Fisher and so many others encounter. The vampires are different identity classes competing to be centered, to be recognized–by the state and by others. By nature, this is a reformist politic that appeals to the state and the community for aid, while offering venom and the vague promise of general social good in return.

Vampirism requires a constant outing, or constant undressing not unlike capitalist demands in the West and now in China as well, that Muslim women uncover themselves for the visual gluttony of the population. If we wish to talk on gay issues, we must constantly out ourselves as gay. If we wish to express an opinion on trans issues, we must constantly out ourselves as trans. Our identities are fragile and constantly under suspicion, especially if our politics or lived experienced de-center them.

Over the last decade, I have observed how this has materially translated to endless fundraisers for individual trans people’s living and medical expenses, but never the political follow-through to attack the economic system that necessitates either trans struggles or the more or less same struggles of other people to begin with. The imperative question is not what have you done for trans women today? but what are you doing so that ten years from now we won’t be fruitlessly asking the same question?

Perhaps there is a radicalism in collaboration as trans people, but over time that radicalism looks to me more like naming and fighting the economic system that defines the social parameters of gender in such a way that our lives are slowly extinguished in punishment for transgression. Capitalism and state regulation of gender are my issues, not cis people. And these issues additionally connect us to international feminist and men’s struggles for liberation from gendered exploitation as well.

In Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 speech at a Gay Liberation rally in New York, she even emphasizes that she is assisting imprisoned gay and lesbian people who presumably are not trans as well. Her underlying message then should be understood as one of solidarity across rather than segregated by identity. Contrary to this, in the last 13+ years I’ve observed and participated in so much horizontal vitriol directed at cis people rather than the structural locations of our oppression. This fight continues to be so personal and so embodied, with some activists even asserting transphobia is an innate, as if biological, feature of being cis. Yet the trans women of color these activists especially tokenize and objectify into a rallying cry continue to be murdered. Anti-Queer, misogynist, and racist violence persists. A binary sex system is still physically coerced by the state. We are still gendered by the state and capitalism. So many populations are affected by these issues, and here we are so warped by identity sectarianism that we would rather keep reviving a failed individualist call-out culture and TERF-esque micro-separatism than de-center ourselves long enough to build an effective coalition to achieve our mutual interests.

In the off-campus workforce, these politics are readily identified as utterly absurd. Want to know why the “white working class” doesn’t support shitty neoliberal candidates? Want to know why janitors don’t show up en masse to hear college kids bemoan the “violence” of not being asked about their pronouns before class or the difficulty of finding a “living wage” job that allows them to “follow your dreams”? Want to know why I roll my eyes and stop listening when you complain about having to work as a server because no one is hiring in your made-up interdisciplinary liberal arts field?

The answers are in the self-elevating alienation, hubris, and class denialism characteristic of liberal politics. And no, the solution is not for the working class to pay you a living wage (no less) to deliver a privilege-checking sermon on gender concepts or how all white people are racist, rendered devoid of any discernible class analysis or relationship to the economic source of exploitation faced by all workers.

With exceptions for ignorant individuals and geographic outliers that distort a wider demographic selection, the workforce is a naturally diverse climate where we work (and are exploited for the surplus value that can be derived from our labor) across bounds of ethnicity, sex, sexuality, ability, etc. Likewise, the flow of production along the supply chain carries capital across boundaries of nation and cultural identity. As such, a worker-owned world is by necessity one of solidarity across the arbitrary categories of identity and capitalist-state, rather than one where working class sub-identities are pitted against one another. Undeniably, our experiences are different in these terms, but the nature of that difference is economic, and not merely interpersonal.

As Taylor writes in Race, Class, and Marxism:

“Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of the differences.” (source)

Speaking specifically as a working class disabled transqueer person, I don’t have the luxury of driving away would-be allies, being visibly femme or trans all the time, or restricting my activism to solely working on trans-specific issues. Before I get to be trans in the world, I am already disabled and dependent on medication to live. I must work to pay for that medication and for food. Most people also must work for shelter. And all of these conditions determined by capitalist class relations take place before we even get to interpersonal or structural conflicts around race, gender, gender identity, sexuality, ability, etc. My intention is not to say that race, gender, etc. are irrelevant, but rather that our class conditions precede them and are fertile soil for a solidarity that could also address identity-specific issues.

A leftist politic must seek to do more than simply identify difference where it exists. For instance, while slavery and other forms of wage theft through capitalism continue to disproportionately affect people of color and women around the world, our imaginations are weak if we stop ourselves at the goal to create more equitable exploitation. Rather, we all stand to benefit from ridding ourselves of the exploitative system all together. This goal post necessitates an analysis that goes beyond reductive analyses of workers based on identity groupings like race or sex.

By my reckoning, for too long we have embraced a timidity regarding opposition to capitalism. Leftists have embraced a limited tactic of lessening commitment to Marxist-Leninist values in exchange for appealing to burned out and exploited liberals. Potential camaraderie with isolationist or working class conservatives is abandoned in favor of the toxicity of liberal identity bickering. And those on the left who hold to an anticapitalist analysis are paradoxically the ones accused of sectarianism. The amount of political leeway granted these liberals is an essential endorsement of their capitalist denialism.

And while some choose pessimism, I choose faith that exorcising our global capitalist demons will lead to a more equitable society–post-racist, post-sexist, post-ableist, post-all the poisons capitalism has indoctrinated us with. Beyond the shadow of profit maximization, worker micro-management, resource theft, manufactured competition, and inane commodity differences, another world is possible. This world necessitates centering the working class, unity, not separatism, and an ethic of patience towards solidarity, not vampirism towards correctness. It is the most intersectional yet tangible goal post I can conceptualize, and the only way I believe it is possible to exit the mire of both liberal identity sectarianism and the structural world identity politics fail to dismantle.

I’m learning and adapting. I hope you are too.

(Re-)Sources

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