#national identity as pathology

[opencommunion]

one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

[gremio0]

your limbus oc looks SO cool do you have any info on him.... he compels me i want to know more about him

HI HELLO thank you for opening the floodgates I have a lot to say about Bentinho actually. in the wise words of oomf I’m like a vampire and need to be invited into talking about my ocs otherwise I physically cannot do it

Don’t expect any structure from this I’m not particularly sure half of the words I’m saying even exist

Alright. So.

He’s based on the book Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis (actually my favorite author of all time! I have a physical silver medal from a national literature olympic on this shit). Though it’s not really possible to directly translate the title, “Dom Casmurro” is a nickname given to Bentinho in his old age, “Dom” being a mockery of his high status and “Casmurro” meaning something between “stubborn”, “spiteful” and “grumpy”. His full name Bento Santiago is also interesting with “bento(a)” being a rarely used word for “holy” (as in “holy water”/“água benta”) and “Santiago” being derived from the word for “saint”, neither of which actually fucking apply to him; “Bentinho” is the diminutive form of the name. As an LCB Sinner, Bento is kind of an insufferable little bitch who I created with the explicit purpose of suffering the consequences of his actions as much as possible because he doesn’t get nearly enough shit in the book for being such an asshole all the time.

The Sinner Bentinho has a rather erratic demeanor, always literally and figuratively looking over his shoulder. He’s an arrogant and bitter man who doesn’t seem to be looking forward to much in his life. Although he does his best to maintain an appearance of collected elegance, his paranoia and jealousy often slip through the very plentiful cracks for all to see. He’s distrusting of most of everyone, and a pathological liar; talking to him can be rather difficult if you’re not careful with your words, as he has a way of finding non-existent malice in every other sentence, but it’s not particularly difficult to gain his favor if you know how to stroke his ego.

As for general Limbus stuff:

He has Midnight Green (#004952) as his signature color, and I generally use ☕️ as the emoji to represent him. The reference should be clear if you’ve read Dom Casmurro <33

He does not have a sinner number yet, but I’ve been considering #18 (because Machado de Assis, and consequently Bentinho, lived around the 1800s)

The word engraved in the hilt of his rapier, “Desprezo” (NOT to be confused with “depressed” it’s happened too many times by now) is, in portuguese, the feeling of despising something or someone.

His base EGO is called “Tu Serás Feliz”; “You Shall be Happy"

In his LCB Sinner Identity, he has Lust, Pride and Envy sin affinities.

His Canto is called “The Truth Revealing”. It would be placed somewhere from mid to end game, as the way it’s structured would require Bento to already have established relationships with the other sinners. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the philosophy he presents in one of the earlier chapters in the book: “life itself is much like an Opera”. Notably, the majority of it takes place in a theater, visually inspired by the Rio de Janeiro municipal thetaer. I’ve reduced the cast of the book a bit to focus on the conflict between Bentinho, Capitu and Escobar, though characters like Ezequiel, José Dias and Dona Glória also play a part.

He has a lot of associations with opera and theater but it’s hard to elaborate on those without a full summary of his Canto. Maybe one day.

I think that’s just about enough information for a decent introduction but I’d be very happy to elaborate if there happen to be any questions. wink wink nudge nudge. He’s been very rudely occupying my brain without my consent for the past few weeks and I doubt he’ll be going away any time soon. He should die one of these days that would be great.

[the-shipper-center]

*. ! MY DNI LIST 🌟

Disclaimer !! DNI lists are made so you can know what kinda of people i don't want following me or even trying to befriend me. I know I can't control who is gonna rb, see, or like my posts all the time, but I can block ppl who follow/dm me. DNI lists are not up to debate or discussion. I will not reply to ppl starting arguments about what they think is wrong about my DNI. My DNI is hella long, and i'm proud of that 🌟 Note: it may have some typos.

!! DNI IF YOU ... 🪻

Queerphobe:

— Hold beliefs that are queerphobic.

— Support conversion therapy or believe in the pathologization of queer identities.

— Attack people’s pronouns( is against xeno/neutral/neo or graphic pronouns).

— Radical feminism (radfem) and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF), transmed(A person who believes that medically-diagnosed gender dysphoria or medical transition are essential traits of being transgender), transcum(A person who believes that gender dysphoria is an essential trait to being transgender).

— Deny the validity of xenogender identities or believe that only neurodivergent individuals can be xenogender.

— If you deny trans individuals access to gender-affirming care, whether medical, psychological, or social.

Racist and xenophobic:

— Support or spread white supremacy, neo-Nazism, anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Indigenous, anti-Latino, or ethnic nationalism.

— Use racial slurs, mock ethnic traditions, or engage in cultural appropriation.

— Deny the existence of systemic racism or dismissed movements like Black Lives Matter.

— Has xenophobic beliefs against immigrants or foreign cultures.

— Advocate for fascism, Nazism, or far-right extremism.

— Promote harmful conspiracy theories that demonize marginalized communities.

— Engage in or support political violence against minorities or dissenters.

— Spread antisemitic conspiracy theories or rhetoric.

— Support Zionism or justify actions that harm Palestinian people.

— Defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or promote Russian propaganda.

— Support Israeli policies that lead to the oppression of Palestinians.

MAP/NoMAPs:

— Support MAPs, NoMAPs, Zoopride, or any notion that minors and animals can give consent to sexual interactions or relationships.

— Deny that paraphilic individuals can seek recovery or that their paraphilias might harm others.

— Anti-para that believe that paraphilics should be "killed" or harmed.

— Pro contact of any kind.

— Believe that paraphilias are just harmless kinks, ignoring the need for recovery when they are causing harm.

— People who use terms like "cp," "cheese pizza," "kiddie corn," etc, when referring to CSEM.

Misogyny or sexist:

— Disrespect people for their gender and if you perpetuate harmful stereotypes about gender roles—such as believing women should solely fulfill domestic responsibilities or that non-binary individuals are invalid.

— Support or excuse rape culture and dismiss the prevalence of gender-based violence. If you believe that victims are somehow responsible for the violence inflicted upon them or if you make jokes about sexual assault.

— Deny the existence of trans individuals or refuse to accept them as their identified gender. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge the identities of trans individuals or insists on misgendering them is not welcome here.

— Spread harmful myths about trans individuals, such as calling trans people “predators”. If you hold the belief that victims of harassment or assault are responsible for the actions taken against them based on their behavior, clothing, or choices, you are perpetuating harmful narratives that silence victims and protect perpetrators.

— If you believe that certain traits or behaviors should be confined to specific gender(such as associating emotional expression with weakness in men or suggesting that ambition is unbecoming in women).

— If you promote toxic masculinity, it refers to cultural norms that encourage men to be aggressive, unemotional, and dominant while discouraging vulnerability and compassion. If you believe that men should conform to rigid standards of masculinity that harm not only women but also men themselves, you are contributing to a harmful environment that perpetuates violence and emotional repression.

In Kink:

— Shame others for their kinks or sexual preferences. Everyone has the right to explore their sexuality without judgment, as long as it involves consenting adults.

— If you are an adult who interacts with or attempts to involve minors in kink-related activities or discussions, you are crossing an ethical and moral line.

— Think that kink should not be in pride.

— Advocate for the normalization of kink in inappropriate spaces. Respecting boundaries is key; discussing kink should happen in contexts where all participants are consenting adults and comfortable with the topic.

In Fandom & Others:

— If You harras people over fiction.

— If you think that AO3 should be censored.

— If you mock or invalidate individuals who engage in reality shifting.

— If you invalidate or attack those who identify as alterhuman(individuals who feel a connection to non-human identities or experience their identities in non-human ways) such as Therian, otherkin, dollkins and more.

— If you actively express disdain or negativity towards the furry community.

— If you engage in shipping real individuals, such as celebrities or public figures, especially in ways that invade their privacy or misrepresent their relationships. It's okay if they publicly expressed that they are okay with it.

— If you think that it is valid to identify as "kin" of real individuals, such as celebrities or historical figures. Additionally, claiming kinship with deities, gods, or religious figures(such as Jesus).

— If you enforce strict criteria on who can be considered a part of a fandom or who can engage in certain shipping practices.

— Mock or ridicule individuals for their interests or passions.

— Mock people's boundaries.

— If you can't tell the difference between real life and fiction.

— If you propagate stereotypes that characterize fandom members as obsessive, socially awkward, or harmful, you contribute to the stigma surrounding fandom culture.

— If you target individuals who identify as lolicons, shotacons, or lolishos by calling them pedophiles. Not all individuals who enjoy or engage in lolisho content condone real-life harm against minors.

— If you express disdain for self-shippers.

— If you harass or belittle self-shippers who have s/os that are characters fictionals minors, animals, or with incestuous dynamics.

— Pro/neutral about AI.

[khalidistan]

It seems like every year I end up writing an iteration of the same idea. But here I am! Writing it again! If you haven’t seen the tweet that sparked this conversation, I’ve screenshotted the tweet and artwork below. It’ll help inform this discussion. Full piece under the cut.

It would help to check out my essay from 2021 about the emasculation of Abdul Ali from Squid Game, since both pieces share similar references.

Maryam Khalid writes “Orientalist notions of the masculinity of the ‘Eastern’ male as uncivilized also inherently ascribe primitiveness, ineptness and a certain amount of weakness to the barbarized ‘other.’” Those doomed to the mythical Orient are automatically placed lower in masculinity than their white and colonial counterparts.

The reason for this emasculation is to defang them, to ensure they can never attain the same power conferred by white masculinity and to maintain racial purity: “This feminizing divests the male body of its virility and thus compromises its power not only to penetrate and reproduce its own nation (our women), but to contaminate the other's nation (their women) as well” (Puar, 99).

To be South Asian is to be pathologically queer, irrespective of the one’s true sexual orientation. “The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness” by virtue of being from the Orient (Said, 103). There is already a robust amount of artwork depicting Pavitr with tons of gold jewelry and piercings, which to the West are typically feminine accessories. This essentially reduces Pavitr to a stereotype of South Asian culture.

Fanworks use the bejeweled, indulgent, exotic, and sultry attitude as a short-hand for their perception of South Asia. They are “caricatures stripped from movies like Disney’s Aladdin, the Arcana or people’s sexual fantasies about our men,” as allahrakhi writes in her essay on fandom's reception of Claude von Riegan from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a character similarly mischaracterized by virtue of his brown identity.

Puar describes that the (implied white) nation defines “upright, domesticatable queernesses that mimic and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out-of-control, untetherable queernesses” (47). Nonwhite queerness is “untetherable,” leaving white queerness as “domesticatable.” This inability to engage brown queerness forces brown queer people to assimilate into white queerness.

In fandom’s and society’s mind, there is no such thing as a queer South Asian without them discarding their brown identity and adopting white queer practices, behaviors, and aesthetics. Queer South Asians are “either liberated (and the United States and Europe are often the scene of this liberation) or can only have an irrational, pathological sexuality of queerness” (Puar, 13).

Which brings us to the recent depictions of Pavitr in fanworks, stripping him of his masculinities to render him as a vapid, neutered, and yes, whitewashed queer boy, completely unrecognizable from the source material.

Interestingly, this reduced masculinity co-exists, paradoxically, with the idea that men from the Orient are simultaneously aggressive, belligerent, and violent. Elgin Brunner writes: “Such a framing—the association of the enemy with barbarism, as opposed to the self, which is civilized—includes two, often simultaneous, moves, that is: the ‘hypermasculinization’ of the enemy on the one hand, and his ‘effeminization’ on the other… The very same opponent is, by virtue of being categorized as a cowardly barbarian, rendered effeminate.”

The flip side of the effeminate brown man is the hypermasculine brown man, which can be seen through Miguel, one of Across the Spider-Verse’s antagonists. Both instances of brown masculinity confiscate personhood from characters who would have otherwise offered rich, nuanced, interesting perspectives to the story and to the audience.

It would be myopic of me to not mention the implicit genderings of other nonwhite ethnicities in this discussion. Brown men hold a unique positionality to other nonwhite men in a racial triangulation I’d like to examine further in another essay for the future. Brown men can either be gendered the way that East Asians are (feminine, asexual, neutered, timid, obedient) or the way that Black people are (hypersexual, predatory, dangerous, aggressive). Both misgenderings are in opposition to the “ideal” male gender, which is of course, the white man. This fallacy is why we see Hobie depicted as cruel, mean, and irritated in the exact same artwork from earlier.

Many people in this artist’s quoted replies have accused the artist of being white. I have seen some criticisms of the backlash, that people shouldn’t assume the artist’s ethnicity. I think both opinions miss the point: anyone can be orientalist. Membership within a nonwhite ethnic identity does not absolve the individual of perpetuating orientalist or racist depictions of characters of color.

As Edward Saïd said, “Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient” (Orientalism, 20). That is to say, if you write and depict the Orient and people from the Orient, you have to consider your positionality in relation to the Orient. Naturally, this would mean that white people should always be cognizant of their depictions of Orientals. But East Asians can also orientalize, whether it is other ethnic groups like South Asians; or self-orientalization. Similar can be said for South Asians who self-orientalize.

Khalid writes “Gendered identities do not exist independently of other factors, and must be viewed as intertwined with, for example, race or ethnicity if we are to understand the hierarchical organization of identities.” There is no examination of gender without an accompanying racial context. And Pavitr’s emasculation in fandom certainly requires a critical eye for both race and gender, lest we repeat the same dehumanizing characterizations of him in further fanworks.

Works Consulted:

Brunner, E. M. (2008). Consoling display of strength or emotional overstrain? the gendered framing of the early “War on terrorism” in transatlantic comparison. Global Society, 22(2), 217–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600820801887223

Khalid, M. (2011). Gender, orientalism and representations of the ‘other’ in the War on Terror. Global Change, Peace & Security, 23(1), 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2011.540092

Puar J. K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press.

Said, E. W. (1994). Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition. With a new preface by the author. New York, Vintage Books.

[eeveecraft]

This Blog's Stance on Radqueers

Just had to block an account saying that you can't be pro-endo but be against radqueers. Why? Well, I recently discovered what a radqueer is, and I'd like to enlighten you, so you don't make the mistake of mistaking them for something they're not.

What's a Radqueer?

Well, if we input that question into a search engine:

The fact that the fucking MAP Wiki pops up as the third result is already concerning!

This is what the Radqueer Wiki states:

Radqueer is the term used to refer to a radical political movement that advocates for paraphiles, transids, and other ostracized identities to be accepted in mainstream queer spaces. The term was originally coined in late 2021 by now deactivated Tumblr user foucault-divine-mephisto as a response to "the puritanism, hypocrisy and general rejection in the Queer community regarding a range of marginalized and stigmatized Queersexualities (paraphilias), internal identities (transage, transabled, transill/transnoso, transpecies, alterhumans/transnonhuman etc) and behaviours (social, sexual eccentricity etc). " Since its original coinage in 2021, the community made a steady increase in popularity, though never branching out of obscurity.

Oh? Paraphilias? You mean... as the National Library of Medicine defines it:

Paraphilias are persistent and recurrent sexual interests, urges, fantasies, or behaviors of marked intensity involving objects, activities, or even situations that are atypical in nature. Although not innately pathological, a paraphilic disorder can evolve if paraphilia invokes harm, distress, or functional impairment on the lives of the affected individual or others. A total of eight Paraphilias are listed in the DSM V and include pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sexual sadism, sexual masochism, frotteurism, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism.[1]

If you thought zoophilia was missing, don't worry, it's under "Other specified paraphilic disorder," as stated in this Advances in Psychiatric Treatment paper.

Oh. Yeah, including those paraphilias. So... why are we wanting to allow people with conditions that makes them far more likely to hurt children and animals into queer spaces? And if you think the Radqueer Wiki isn't also including paraphilic disorders in the definition, well, here's one of the definitions from the good ol' MAP Wiki:

RadQueer is unconditionally inclusive of: ALL trans-x/transid identities (and supports all their social and medical transitions) ALL paraphilias and the multiplicity of their related contact stances (anti-contact, complex-contact, neutral-contact, restricted-contact, pro-contact). — Pro-c’s on “potentially harmful paraphilias” (if acted upon) are completely welcomed in the RadQueer community if they stay behaviorally non-offending/non-active. Ex-offenders are welcomed too! Debating on contact stances is totally acceptable as long as it doesn’t directly incites to committing offenses ~

Oh? You're skeptical because that's from the goddamn MAP Wiki? Fair enough. This one's from Radqueer Info's carrd:

Here's more elaboration from their FAQ:

So, to summarize: a radqueer is someone who is accepting of ALL paraphilias, including paraphilic disorders, and other "controversial" identities. There's other things they accept that are eyebrow-raising at minimum, but let's stay on topic.

Why is This Bad?

Let me make it clear, as the National Library of Medicine stated, paraphilias are not inherently harmful. It's paraphilic disorders like pedophilia and zoophilia where it leads to the harm of others or the person with the disorder is when it becomes an issue. Being accepting of paraphilic disorders can normalize these behaviors and also convince the person with the disorder that they don't need help. This is like MAPs saying fucking pedophilia belongs under the queer umbrella, and hopefully, you all know why that is a massive fucking NOPE.

Conflating queerness with literal disorders that compel a person to harm children, animals, and/or non-consenting adults is quite frankly, fucking insulting. Being queer does NOT make you more likely to harm others, it does NOT urge you to harm others. A grown dude consensually having sex with another consenting grown dude is NOT the same as a grown man violating a child, period, I can't believe I have to fucking state this.

And just to draw back to my original statement, this is also NOT the fucking same as being pro-endogenic. Endogenic systems, like queer people, are NOT more likely to harm others because they're endogenic. Does me having five Dragons in my head make me more likely to torture some non-consenting person for sexual gratification? No. But if I'm sexually attracted to such a prospect, then yes, that makes it more likely for me to do it.

Notice the language I've used throughout this post, I'm saying having these disorders makes you more likely to engage in harmful behaviors, it does NOT guarantee someone with these disorders WILL do these horrible things. Experiencing attraction is not a crime, nor do thought crimes exist, but acting on this attraction is. A pedophile is not an inherently evil person, but they become one when they act on their attraction and ruin a child's life for good. Same goes with other paraphilic disorders.

Instead of being allowed into the queer community and offered the same acceptance as non-disordered identities, these people should be redirected into getting treatment and help before they do end up causing irreversible harm. However, if they haven't done any harm, they shouldn't be demonized and harassed. Harassing and demonizing these people just causes them to recede further into harmful thinking and behaviors, and it will cause them to seek solace with other people who will encourage that thinking (Think of the "MAP Pride" movement as reference).

And especially with "accepting" these paraphilic disorders, it allows communities based around them to form, which allows echo chambers to form that can make someone with a paraphilic disorder even MORE likely to become a perpetrator. It's like being around a bunch of binge drinkers. If you're around a bunch of binge drinkers for long enough, you're far more likely to start binge drinking yourself.

So yeah! You can absolutely be pro-endogenic and anti-radqueer. I'm anti, "Allowing people who are at higher risk for harming people on the same level as queer people." Like, do you not see how harmful of a connotation that is? It's equating queerness to literal disorders, harmful disorders at that. And after all the queer community's done to prove we AREN'T disordered/inherently harmful, conflating that with paraphilic disorders that are defined by harm is such a slap to the face.

Conclusion

There's other issues with the radqueer label that I could bring up, but this post is long enough as it is, and I hope the stuff I have listed is enough reason already to not like this label. It is important to be inclusive, but not inclusive to the point where innocent people are harmed because of it. Now that I know what radqueer actually is, I'm definitely concerned by their presence in the endogenic tags, and I don't think it's a good idea to welcome them with open arms.

If we happen to have any radqueer followers, I really hope you read this post in full and see where I'm coming from. If you still don't agree, you're free to unfollow! I don't want people who are fine with allowing people with paraphilic disorders in queer spaces instead of encouraging them to get help following this blog.

7-19-2024

[dailyanarchistposts]

On tranarchism and intellectual oppression

In November 2019, at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris, Paul B. Preciado presented a speech to around 3,500 psychoanalysts. By stating “Can the monster speak?”, Preciado (2020, n.p.) invited an academy of psychoanalysts to recognize the norms that psychoanalysis produces and reproduces, despite its subversive character in relation to modern biomedicine/psychiatry. In his words, “it is the normative heterosexual psychoanalysts who urgently need to come out of the closet of the norm”. Preciado poses as a trans body,

to whom neither medicine, nor the law, nor psychoanalysis, nor psychiatry recognize the right to speak with expert knowledge about my own condition, nor the possibility of producing a discourse or a form of knowledge about myself. (Idem, n.p.)

Preciado’s critique is addressed to academic rigour which, despite claiming to be neutral, operates as an exclusionary instrument that nullifies knowledges produced by ‘others’. No wonder, then, that during his speech, several of the psychoanalysts in the auditorium began to react verbally and to turn their backs and leave, refusing to exercise what underpins the psychoanalytic clinic — that of listening. This is the expression of Otherness (Kilomba, 2019), associated with the idea of Other (Morrison, 2019), whereby the modern self grants itself the ability — or the authority — to inferiorize the one it designates as Other.

It is worth wondering whether, during the drafting of the ICDs and DSMs, the trans individuals taken as research objects had a voice in defining transsexuality, or in conceptualizing cisgenderity in the official documents. Similarly to the national State defending its fictional borders with militarism and legislation, biomedical knowledge materializes, in its official documents and care protocols, the naturalization of cisgenderity and the pathologization of transsexuality. An example of this is the current brazilian legislation up until 2018, according to which, in order for a trans person to change their name and sex on their civil documents, they had to present psychiatric and psychological reports attesting to their transsexuality.

As Bakunin (1975, p. 48) pointed out, “what is true for scientific academies is equally true for all constituent and legislative assemblies”. Only on the basis of pathology would a non-normative gender identity be legitimized. Another example of universalist science being used to legitimize State violence is Operation Tarantula, which took place in 1987, when police forces took to the streets of downtown São Paulo (Brazil) to arrest transvestite sex workers, claiming, although without any evidence, that they were committing the crime of venereal HIV infection. This is ‘scientific’ knowledge being used to legitimize institutional violence against trans people.

It is not uncommon for insurgencies by trans movements to be dismissed as violent, as attacks on society or on the heterosexual bourgeois family. However, a distinction must be made between State violence and revolutionary violence — the latter being a form of self-defense. When Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera threw bricks at New York police officers during the StoneWall Riot (1969), they were defending themselves against the everyday racist and sexist violence that prevented them from freely walking the streets of the city. Not surprisingly, numerous trans movements with political strategies aligned with revolutionary anarchist ideals, especially self-determination, direct action and mutual support (Kropotkin, n.d.), emerged and/or received greater visibility after 1969. Furthermore, the naming of cisgenderity is a clear affront to this institutional power. If, until the mid-1990s, the antagonism of transsexuality was normality, from that moment on, with the term ‘cisgenderity’, this antagonism dissolved — and this term was rejected by scientific academia, especially in gender studies. The transfeminist movement was largely responsible for introducing the concept of cisgenderity in Brazil, motivating the union of countless trans organizations against intellectual oppression.

Intellectual oppression, for Bakunin, seemed to be one of the most arduous to overcome, for what determines an individual’s intellectual capacity are scientific academies whose institutional power exceeds the individual’s power to question them. It is this same institutional power that determines what ‘true’ transsexuality is, in its numerous and biased diagnostic criteria. The direction that trans movements adopt in relation to scientific academies is not to claim legitimacy or freedom, because “the one who restrains is just as trapped as the one whose movements are hindered by the ropes” (Preciado, 2020, n.p.).

It would not be coherent to plead for freedom, as freedom should not be granted, since it is, according to Bakunin, indivisible. By naming cisgenderity, we confront an academy that determines dichotomies between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, which inferiorizes the different and imposes itself authoritatively in order to legitimize the Law. The fragility of the law is revealed by exposing the existence of an intellectual oppression that pushes us to the ‘outside’ of universities, since our presence on the ‘inside’ is far too damaging. If Malatesta (2009, p. 04) defines a government as “[...] an authoritarian organism which, by force, even if it is for good ends, imposes its own will on others”, it is clear that trans movements oppose precisely the imposition of gender and sexuality norms — which, as we have seen, are reiterated by the forces of the State.

Our preferred definition of tranarchism would elucidate the proximity between anarchist principles and trans emancipation strategies. Another concept that stands out in this proposition is self-determination. If, as Pfeil (2020, p. 146) writes, “the freedom of a people is its capacity to govern itself, in the anarchist perspective, to define its own future, then the freedom of a body is its capacity to self-determine [...]”. Self-determination is dear to both trans movements, in the sense that we do not need institutional legitimization to affirm who we are, and anarchist movements.

Tranarchism highlights individual and collective self-determination as a fundamental trait in the struggle for liberation. As Bakunin understood that one’s freedom is not limited, but expands with the freedom of others, likewise we understand that one’s self-determination only expands with the self-determination of others. Not surprisingly, mutual support is notable among trans movements in LGBTIAP+ shelters, autonomous care initiatives, orientation programs to facilitate access to health care and the modification of documents (Idem, 2020).

Just as, according to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (1993, p. 23), “Anarchists believe the first step toward self-determination and the Social revolution is Black control of the Black community”, the same is reflected in trans movements for social emancipation and combating State violence. Despite these remarks, Jeppesen & Nazar (2012) observe a scission between feminist/queer anarchisms and a supposedly ‘cisheteronormative’ anarchism, which would not consider ‘identity’ issues to be relevant to the popular struggle. However, anarchist movements have grown largely as a result of feminist and queer organizations in their strategies to confront State domination. It is in opposition to this separatism that our thoughts on tranarchism — an anarchism that does not reproduce the institutional normativities of modernity — are based.

[probablyasocialecologist]

When it comes to gender theory, scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were informed by eugenics “made strong statements about the social and political role of women, claiming all the while to speak for the scientific truth.” They typically referred to women’s reproductive capacity as a natural indication of their divinely ordained social role. Social, political, and religious ideologies informed the scientific beliefs of this time period, which is not dissimilar to the widely held beliefs of current gender/sex psychologists. It can be argued that the father of modern psychology himself, Sigmund Freud, in his quest to validate psychoanalysis as a legitimate science, reproduced the social opinions of his time in his psychological theories. His theories about femininity, in particular, have been criticized by feminist thinkers for the ways in which his frameworks position femininity as fundamentally incompatible with subjectivity, thus cementing women’s passivity and subordination as a psychological disposition that explains and justifies their social position under patriarchy. Although psychology has developed considerably since Freud, his work remains foundational to the field, and informs the ongoing structural violence of psychiatric pathologization experienced by marginalized subjects. Psychoanalytic concepts have become embedded in clinical, academic, institutional, and colloquial language, influencing the epistemologies of neurosexists and feminists alike. We continue to see bioessentialist reasoning about sexual difference employed in the name of feminism. Notably, bioessentialism informs contemporary discourse about trans rights. For example, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERF) refers to a radical ideology that equates womanhood with biological sex, and maintains a bioessentialist stance to discriminate and incite violence against trans women, and to exclude trans women from women’s spaces.  Proponents of trans exclusionary radical feminist ideology espouse the conviction that women are a group with a singular shared experience of womanhood based on the patriarchal violence experienced by people with vaginas. It arose out of the work of anti-porn feminist writing like that of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in the 1970s, which centered the ways in which cisgender women’s bodies are uniquely subjected to sexualized violence. The objectification and sexualization of the cisgender female body was the main concern in this discourse, and as such, postmodern perspectives that disrupt bioessentialist ideas about gender and the body have been received as an existential threat to the objectives of this radical ideology. Third wave feminist discourse and theories, like intersectional feminist theory, have disputed the idea that bodily or physical similarities are experienced in the same ways socially and culturally (e.g., at intersections of race, class, ability, nation, gender identity, and sexuality). When it comes to trans discourse, it is important to recognize the ways in which non-normatively gendered bodies with any perceived association to femininity or womanhood are subjected to patriarchal and sexualized violence. Heteronormativity and rape culture affect more than just cisgender women. To weaponize a binary understanding of gender against women with diverse experiences of womanhood is to collude with the oppressive forces of the colonial, white supremacist hetero capitalist patriarchy.

[astra-galaxie]

"Any time, my boy! If you need more help, I shall be here!" - Rhys Wells

Biographical information

Full Name: Rhys Wright-Wells

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Status: Alive

Age: 70 (season 4)

Birth: 1820

Race: Human

Nationality: Welsh

Origin: Cardiff, Wales

Residence:

Concordia, USA

Cardiff, Wales (formerly)

Profession(s):

Doctor

Coroner

Family:

Amelia Wright (wife)

Richard Wells (son)

Arthur Wright (stepson)

Unnamed wife (deceased)

Affiliation(s): Concordia Flying Squad

Profile

Height: 6'0" Age: 70 (season 4) Weight: 178lbs Eyes: brown Blood: O+

Rhys is a tall gentleman that bears a strong resemblance to his son Dick with nearly identical facial structure and build, but Rhys has more facial hair and is entirely silver-haired. He wears a white lab coat, a dark green dress shirt, brown slacks, black shoes and a black bow tie. Lastly, a pair of brown-framed glasses sit over his brown eyes.

Synopsis

The father of Richard "Dick" Wells, stepfather of Arthur Wright and husband of Amelia Wright-Wells, Rhys is a physician hailing from Wales. His first wife, Dick's mother, died when the boy was barely more than a toddler. Following her death, Rhys and Dick moved to Concordia for a new, better life. Here, Rhys established a medical practice and began serving the community.

A few years after moving to Concordia, Rhys met Amelia Wright at a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the local theatre. He's not ashamed to admit it felt like love at first sight, but he was still nervous to pursue a new relationship even though his first wife had been deceased for years. He was worried Dick would think he was trying to replace his mother, so they took things slow, starting as friends until they were ready to take the next step. And when their relationship had gotten serious enough to introduce each others' children, Rhys was glad the first meeting had gone well. His son was ecstatic at the idea of finally having a little brother, and Arthur seemed interested in having an older brother, too.

Eventually, Rhys and Amelia married, uniting their two families into one. Life was great for the Wright-Wells family. Of course, they had their issues, but their love stayed strong through it all. As his sons grew up, Rhys encouraged them to pursue their dreams which led to Arthur joining the police academy and Dick entering medical school. He was proud of the paths both of his sons had chosen and was even prouder when they announced they would be founding members of Concordia's new Flying Squad.

During the current timeline of the series, Rhys made his first appearance when he stepped in as temporary coroner after Dick became a suspect in Heartbroken. While his primary profession is family medicine, Rhys holds a pathology degree and is a certified coroner. He has always told his sons that he would be there if they needed his help. So, he assisted the Flying Squad with the case and was happy to hear that Dr. Hart's killer had been caught even if who it was and the reason for the murder were heartbreaking…

After the case was solved, he, Amelia, the Flying Squad, and their families attended Kilian Bontemps's equestrian performance. He also met Jason's mother, the first and only recipient of Hestia's Heart. Seeing how the invention had replaced the woman's heart was fascinating, and Melaina welcomed him to read her files to learn more about the medical marvel. Rhys also promised to keep Dick from overwhelming her as his son was even more excited about the invention than his father was.

More to be revealed in Murders of The Past

Organization(s)

Concordian Flying Squad

Rank: Coroner

Story Information

First appeared: Heartbroken

Trivia

He is based on an IRL doctor I work with

Amelia was hesitant to take her husband's surname when they married due to past trauma involving changing her surname. So, Rhys offered to hyphenate his name with her if she chose to take the Wells name. Their sons didn't hyphenate their names like the couple did, and to this day, most people still refer to Amelia as a Wright, while people call Rhys a Wells

He still operates a medical practice, though he only does family medicine now. But he does also practice other fields like obstetrics and gynecology

Rhys and Dick did and still do experiments together. Rhys isn't as crazy as Dick is with his experiments, but he still supports his son's endeavours and is always there to patch Dick up after an experiment backfires. And while he'll always worry about his son's safety, Rhys knows Dick would never intentionally put himself in danger in the name of science… Most of the time!

He is good friends with Leopold Rochester. This is also the friend he was referring to in Heartbroken when he says he knows one of the World Exhibition sponsors

Disclaimer: Character design was created using Rinmarugames ! I have only made minor edits to the design! Background courtesy of CriminalArtist5

Links to my stories:

The Case of the Criminal (Ao3/Wattpad) Killer Bay (Ao3/Wattpad) Where in the World are the Killers? (Ao3/Wattpad) Murders of The Past (Ao3/Wattpad)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

In a mixed ruling for transgender students and their right to privacy, a California judge has blocked a school district's policy that would have required educators to forcibly out transgender students to their parents in San Bernardino County. The ruling, which mostly went against Chino Valley Unified School District, means that the school will no longer be able to violate transgender students rights to equal protection based on their transgender status alone when it comes to forced outing policies. However, the school’s attempt to get around those policies by requiring notification on all “official and unofficial” school records is allowed to stand, and the judge ruled that students do not have a right to privacy with respect to gender identity more generally. The original policy would have required a transgender student’s parents be notified if they requested to use a different name or pronoun or use a bathroom that differed from their assigned sex at birth.

[...] The judge explicitly ruled that parts (a) and (b) were unconstitutional under California law: “Since it is undisputed that there is nothing wrong or pathological with being transgender or gender non-conforming in and of itself, the old policy in this case is not narrowly tailored. This is true because the district could have adopted a policy which focused on the existing problems (bullying, mental health, psychological distress, any drastic behavior changes, etc.) instead of focusing on the protected group,” said the judge. However, the policy was subsequently revised to remove references to gender identity, keeping only the requirement that parents be notified of all changes to “official or unofficial” school records. Despite the state’s argument that this section of the policy was enacted with animus and would still achieve the same goals as the original provisions that targeted transgender individuals, the judge allowed it to remain in effect—even acknowledging this point. As a result, the school district’s policies are still likely to lead to the outing of transgender youth to their parents.

Chino Valley USD’s anti-LGBTQ+ forced outing policy was ruled by a judge to be unconstitutional, but allows a more general parental consent workaround to take effect.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: Judge rules schools cannot forcibly out trans kids to their parents

The Advocate: Judge blocks California school district’s transgender outing policy

[teas-of-trin]

“The monstrous mother is a figure who harms rather than nurtures her children. She stands for a transgressive woman who subverts the image of a loving devoted mother and challenges the constructions of normative femininity… Like the monstrous mother, the missing/dead female is often depicted with sordid family history and trauma. The missing/dead female narrative stands both as a parallel and in contrast to that of the monstrous mother. Both narratives are used to navigate complex issues of femininity, motherhood, criminality, and agency.”

“Flynn’s thrillers are structured around female characters who constantly walk the line between victimhood (due to these characters’ long and distorted history of personal and family trauma) and agency (as perpetrators of vicious crimes). The oscillation between the female identities of the victim and the criminal creates the tension, reinforces the mystery and is central to the plot of Flynn’s thrillers.”

“Both works depict female characters  as bad mothers and/or in constant struggle with their mothers—Camille and Amma are in a battle of survival with their mentally unstable mother in Sharp Objects…In both works, the “bad mother” and the “dead girl” are significant for the characterization of the female criminal and the conflicting questions of victimization and agency.”  

“The “Pathological Mommy”…is an integral component in Flynn’s thriller scheme. The focus on motherhood sheds light not only on family dynamics and the economic and class background within the family but also on issues of femininity, womanhood, and the perception of the sociocultural standards of good versus bad mother.”

“Barbara Creed also argues that when a woman is defined as monstrous, it is often related to her role as a mother. Creed speaks of various faces of the “monstrous feminine”: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the witch, the vampire, and the possessed woman. In terms of the monstrous mother, Creed described her as the “parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end.””

“ Gillian Flynn situates the monstrous mother at the heart of her narratives as a figure who pushes the boundaries of the representations of women, particularly criminal women in the thriller genre.”  

“Flynn’s work also casts doubt on female victimhood by portraying female characters who perform the role of the victim from a position of dominance (Amy in Gone Girl) or assume a victim identity but one that is tied to or born out of criminality (Amma in Sharp Objects). This confusion between victimhood and criminality in the portrayal of female characters allows for complex female representations and demonstrates how they struggle with a difficult and traumatic family history. This uncertainty, as far as the roles of women are concerned, is also evident in the missing/dead girl trope found in Flynn’s work.”

“…missing/dead female narrative, which reveals the cultural obsession with missing or dead, often murdered, [white] females suffering a violent death. It exposes the morbid fascination with stories of missing abused, tortured, and murdered women as well as the interest in their bodies, especially the sight of discarded, wounded female bodies. It points to…”wound culture,” which is a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.” Trauma, as far as “wound culture is concerned, becomes the “switchpoint” between bodily and psychic functions and between the private and the public, where the body is the signifier of the “national malady of trauma and violence”. The female body in crime narratives is often a site of investigation as well as trauma for those involved in her death… the “dead girl” presents “existential knowledge” and a kind of purity that stands in sharp contrast to the violence committed against her. Girls are shown as “wild, vulnerable creatures who need to be protected from their own sexualities.”

“Brofen speaks of the cultural stereotype of the dead female victim where she is “killed again” in representation; the threat of both death and femininity is “recuperation by representation […] because this means appeasing the threat of real mortality, of sexual insufficiency, of lack of plenitude and wholeness.” Claiming that because “death is at work in the cultural construction of femininity” the death of the woman becomes a “social sacrifice,” and the “ equation between femininity and death is such, that while in cultural narratives the feminine corpse is treated like artwork, or the beautiful woman is killed to produce an artwork, conversely, artworks emerge only at the expense of a beautiful woman’s death and are treated like feminine corpses.””

“Flynn uses the missing/dead female in both Gone Girl and Sharp Objects to highlight the centrality of the female body and the link between criminality, trauma, and femininity. This way Gone Girl and Sharp Objects reveal the gender ideologies that surround women in relation to media and violence. The conjunction between the trope of the missing/dead girls and the malevolent mother in these two narratives is performed through female protagonists who represent complex dynamics of agency and victimization and, at the same time, in relation to the trauma that lies behind these dynamics.”

-From, Monstrous Mothers and Dead Girls in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Gone Girl by Maysaa Jaber. [Part 1]

[termagax]

what r radqu—rs and can you share the blocklist

radqueers or radinclus are a "radically inclusive" internet community that typically (though not always depending on the individual) includes:

support for transid - meaning "trans-race"/trace, "trans-age", "trans-ability", "trans-nationality" and ect, basically insisting that any part of a persons identity is either cis or trans (for example if a radinclus was born russain they might call themselves cisrussian, whereas if one "feels they should be" or "identifies as" russain theyd call themselves transrussian) for basically every thing you can thing of ranging from very racist concepts like trace to ableist ones (transamputee and transcancer (or any transillness) are some of the most egregious ones ive seen people genuinely using) to things that are just silly and harmless like trans-aesthetics

being "pro-para" meaning "pro-paraphilia". what someone defines as a paraphilia can range from literal crimes to like, bdsm, but almost always includes the Big 3 - pedophilia (or MAP or MAA (minor attracted person and minor attracted adult) or whatever they call themselves), incest, and zoophilia. pro-para can be either "pro" or "anti" contact, meaning they either support the big 3 interacting w/ the targets of their paraphilia or they dont.

being profiction/proship/anti-harrassment to some degree

all of this is supported through the lense of Inclusivity, basically, as well as pathologizing basically any human experience. if youve ever thought a goth was cool but dont dress that way, congrats! youre a transaesgoth and its basically the same as being transasian, so you should support ALL transids to maximize your inclusiveness. if youre a minor with a crush on any adult, real or fictional, youre an AAM, an adult-attracted minor, which is OBVIOUSLY the counterpart to MAA, so you should defend and feel safe around pedophiles because you're basically the same thing!

its a community that preys on left-leaning young peoples desire to be a good and kind person, exacerbates their insecurities by encouraging labelling every exerience with a definition and flag, and puts them into direct company with people who, proudly, want to hurt them. we can argue the ethics of being transid all day, but any community that encourages kids to publicize their sexual activies and mingle with openly sexual adults and tell them that its safe and natural for adults to express sexual interest in them is beyond fucking redemption in my opinion.

that said, no i cant give a blocklist. ive blocked hundreds of these people over the years and a LOT of them are young teenagers whose names i do not feel comfortable directing an audience towards, esp. because hate campaigns never help get these kids out of these situations and tend to make them rely harder on their supportive communities. if you want to block a bunch of them, id reccomend going thru the radinclus and transid tags and just going hogwild.

[thecurioustale]

Let's GLORIFY OBESITY: Why Fat Liberation Is Way More Important and Timely Than You Think

(If you enjoy this essay, please share it!)

I'm quite certain that one of my most controversial convictions is that fat people are awesome. Not just valid and worthy of dignity and rights and access to society—that's a given and not open for discussion—but actively incredible and awesome.

Now, of course, this isn't unconditionally true: There are always bad eggs in any basket. Don't take away from this essay the idea that I am saying that fatness gives someone an excuse to be horrible.

But what I do mean is that fatness does not inherently detract from a person's intelligence, personality, beauty, vibrancy, ambition, etc. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I also mean that:

Recognizing the integrity and awesomeness of fatness, fat people, and fat bodies isn't something you have to fake.

You can appreciate fat bodies for their own sake. You can dig the softness, the heft, the squish, the jiggle, the warmth, the "fluffiness." You can admire the aesthetics of fat bodies in motion and at rest. You can perceive the world differently through the firsthand or secondhand experience of fatness, much like how learning a second language or having a disability enables you to see things in our society that you were blind to before. You can draw from the wellspring of power and jubilance that is the lifestyle of a body that does not pathologically reject and ration food—the sharing of meals, the ecstasy of eating, the exultation in fullness. You can even let yourself see fatness as a badge of character, for no fat person goes through life on Easy Mode when they are a member of a persecuted class, so if someone is fat it means they're like a war veteran: They've seen some shit, and probably dealt with no shortage of dark pathways in their own minds.( Such is the power of internalizing a societal bigotry.)

There are so many ways to dig fatness. And doing any of these things—admiring fatness in any way—is an important polarization against injustice.

I'm into fat people, myself. It's an orientation in my sexual identity. I like being fat. I like fat partners. I like seeing fat people in daily life. Fat people are hot! However, I say that fat people are awesome, and I live that philosophy in my life, not only because fatness is a part of my own sexual orientation, which was how I first got introduced to the wider world of fat admiration and fat liberation, but because doing so is a preemptive attack against the bigotry and dehumanization that is marshalled against fatness. If you're fat or know someone who is, then you know the horrible things that so many people say about fat people and do to fat people—including about and to themselves if they happen to be fat personally. Some of the worst anti-fat bigots are fat people and ex-fat people! 😢

Anti-Fat Bigotry Transcends Partisan Alignments

I often judge a person's character by their attitude toward fatness, because anti-fat bigotry is not in the national discourse and is not politically aligned. While fat liberation and fat admiration do have their intellectual home on the political left, and the fat community composition is significantly more liberal than conservative, it's still a very niche community, and doesn't attract allies and supporters from the broader mainstream left the way that social justice movements against sexism and racism and classism do. In fact, anti-fat bigotry is one of the most powerful bigotries in the world where mainstream progressivism still hasn't yet identified the bigotry as bigotry, and therefore doesn't recognize it as an injustice. We still have tons of left-wingers sounding like straight-up fascists when they talk about how fat people are diseased and need to be legally penalized and societally erased. Hence the usefulness of a person's attitude toward fatness as a judge of character.

By the way, this exercise of judging character isn't just useful in advancing fat liberation or in knowing who your allies and enemies are on a personal level. When you find a progressive like this, who hates fat people, you know that they are an unreliable ally and don't actually understand the reasons that left-wing issues are valid and important. You know this is someone to learn from and be wary of as an example of those who are at high risk of betraying the movement down the road and doing great harm to liberal causes from within.

Fat is not a traditional partisan issue. Across the political spectrum and beyond it, there is a widespread failure to empathize with fat people regardless of how one identifies politically. We expect proud, gleeful hatred toward innocent groups of people from fascists, but it's very disappointing when it comes from liberals—and it makes their language about inclusiveness, humanization, and peaceful coexistence sound hollow and sanctimonious when these same mouths spout hateful lies and slander and violent rhetoric against fat people.

By the same token, you sometimes see fat acceptance coming from people on the right—perhaps an indicator that one is ripe for deradicalization and deconversion out of the right-wing worldview.

The Bigotry Itself

In my experience, almost everyone—including among fat liberation activists, let alone the general population—suffers from a great deal of internalized fatphobia and holds prejudiced views against fat people. Most people still regard fatness as both inherently bad and a voluntary choice, and from that ethical boondoggle of a combination most people proceed to grade fat people as reprobates who should be punished for their ethical crimes by being cut off from society: no disability accommodations or healthcare except whatever a fat person can pay out of pocket; no right or even a reasonable expectation of gainful employment, romance and love, and meritorious social standing. Fat people are written off as unworthy in every respect, and are often disparaged as ugly, stupid, smelly, selfish, wasteful, greedy, and so and so forth.

Thereby does the bigotry reveal itself: The state of being fat doesn't inherently tell another person any of those things. All of these judgments are pre-judgements, or rather prejudices, and are all done without actually meeting the fat folk in question, saying hello to them, getting to know them a little bit, and learning the first damn thing about their actual lives.

And so the anti-fat bigot, or anyone who is under the spell of fatphobia, misapplies to fat people the same ethical condemnation as we would rightly impose upon fascists and murderers and traffickers. Most of the time, the rhetoric about fat people is that they are subhuman, and it carries the implicit or sometimes even explicit desire for fat people to die. That's another dead giveaway that we're not dealing with a rational hatred: Fat people as a group haven't done anything remotely deserving of the death penalty.

Most anti-fat bigots don't see their view of fat people as problematic. Unsurprising: Most bigots never see their bigotry for what it is. And when we fail to empathize with others, we seldom recognize that we are failing. We don't recognize that there's even something there to be failed!

And I hate to break this to you, Gentle Reader, so gird yourself and turn off your auto-defensiveness reaction. But if you are seeing this, you are almost certainly a part of the problem. Because virtually everyone who isn't an ardent fat liberation activist—and even many of those who are—is a part of the problem. You have learning and self-realization and empathizing and personal growth ahead of you.

A (Brief) Rebuttal of the 4 Main Arguments Against Fatness

There is nothing wrong with being fat.

No, stop: I can see you disagreeing already. Just stop. There is nothing wrong with being fat.

I know what you want to say: It's bad for a person's health. It's a drain on the economy. It's destructive to the environment. It's a sign of poor character.

These are the four classical arguments against fatness. In one form or another, almost every anti-fat slur and condemnation comes from at least one of those four sources.

I'm not here today to do battle with these arguments. Ultimately, the stance I am laying out today is that even if all four arguments were completely true it still wouldn't matter: Anti-fat bigotry would still be wrong. It's a red herring to spend time and energy debunking these arguments. The haters are never moved by reason or evidence, and the rest of us don't need to waste time on the sideshow of invalidating the illogic of their hate.

Yet there is something in the human spirit which has a knack for recognizing elephants in the room, and I think if I didn't address these arguments at all it would be interpreted by many people as a sign that the anti-fat bigots actually have the truth on their side. So, here is my very quick crack at it:

All four of the arguments against fatness possess elements of truth, but are imprecise to the point of being functionally false. And while a whole book's worth of rebuttals could be written on each of these four arguments, I'll just deliver the bottom lines:

Health

"Health" is complicated, and the intersection of fatness and health is much more ambiguous in the medical literature than we popularly believe it to be. Many fatphobic and fat-bigoted professionals within the academic community and healthcare sector obscure this fact further by abusing their authority to conduct unsound or unethical research or misrepresent valid research on the basis of their warped worldview.

If you delve into the research literature—and I have looked at hundreds of studies in my lifetime—you see a few consistent themes emerge, and for convenience I will contextualize these as I go:

Most research suffers from poor variable control and/or poor survey setup or experiment design, and therefore can't tell you what it is really saying. In other words, it isn't necessarily saying anything. (This is a problem across science, not just on this issue.) And when this happens, you'd be amazed at how much a ubiquitous societal prejudice can skew the data. You might think "Individual studies may be bad but they can't ALL be bad, right?" And you'd be forgiven for thinking that, but in fact, when prejudice is concerned, they absolutely can be systematically bad (if not universally bad down to the very last study).

Anti-fat bigotry in the medical and scientific establishment absolutely does corrupt a lot of research. For instance, there were a number of studies that came out during the pandemic pointing out that overweight and obese people made up most COVID hospital patients in the US—roughly 78%. That's such a bad number that they listed obesity as one of the major risk factors for COVID complications. Except for one little thing: The incidence of overweightness and obesity in the US is about 73%. If fatness had no bearing on COVID complications whatsoever, we should expect 73% of hospitalizations to be among overweight and obese people. So 78% isn't far off. And when you factor in that hospitalizations overwhelmingly skewed older, and that older adults on average are heavier than younger adults, the relationship is actually inverse! Being overweight or obese meant you were slightly LESS statistically likely to be hospitalized! But no one reported on that, and no one in the medical establishment seemed to notice it. Instead we got the narrative that COVID will kill yer fat ass dead.

When you ignore the media coverage, and the studies' own titles and abstracts, and look at the data themselves, the data do not generally support the claim that "Being fat harms your health." The claim that they actually support is "Being fat is generally associated with health problems at a higher rate than not being fat is." This isn't semantics; this is a critical distinction. It's like the difference between claiming that "Being black makes you a criminal" versus "Being black is generally associated with higher rates of criminality." The latter phrasing—which is what the research literature can actually support—opens up a whole world of epiphanies when it comes to wrapping our minds around the fact that the societal prejudice against fatness has completely distorted how we see and interpret fatness in our society. This is a very deep topic, but the bottom line is that we are oversimplifying both the concept of fatness and the concept of health, as well as severely underestimating the sociological dimension present. The true interaction between fatness and health is very complex in ways that substantively bear on how we should conceive of the issue.

One notable exception to the above is that the research literature does seem to suggest pretty persuasively that fatness itself—adipose tissue in the body—produces hormonal outputs that exacerbate inflammation in our bloodstreams. And this exception is a great example of the rule I was just laying out: Here we have a case where fatness, itself, directly harms people's health. Except it doesn't! It's not the fat. It's the inflammation in the blood stream caused via the hormonal products that fat cells produce. You see what I mean? Anti-fat bigotry defines "fatness" qualitatively as an essentialist, fundamental aspect of a fat person's identity. But it's not. Fatness is just the top-line label we give to a much more complex system of biochemistry and biomechanical phenomena. And the reason this is important is that, given that weight-loss diets are so ineffective and life is better anyway if you're able to eat well, it's a lot easier to imagine "Let's do something about those hormones or about the inflammation directly" than it is to imagine "Let's 'solve' fatness itself." We already know this works: Controlling for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, for instance—which are associated with fatness—drastically reduce the health problems that are also associated with fatness, all without actually changing the fact that the person is still fat. Advances in medicine and equitable healthcare can go a very long way toward treating the health problems associated with fatness without actually forcing fat people get thin and stay thin.

The actual health penalties that are associated with (if not actually caused by) fatness are not nearly as significant as commonly believed. The data show that if you're 20 or 50 or even 100 pounds "overweight" by normative standards, you're still likely to live more or less a full natural lifespan and have more or less the same use of your body that you would have otherwise. The losses to both lifespan and "health" more broadly are marginal. Age, not fatness, is the great predictor of health problems. And that's not surprising: Our bodies literally fall apart as we get old. That's what they've evolved to do. Also, while there is an argument to be made that losing even one year of life, or one year's worth of mobility, is no small thing, not only is some of this recoverable through other health management measures (such as physical activity and good nutritional intake and the reduction of life stressors), but it's also not what anti-fat bigots are claiming. They're not saying "Oh, you're gonna die at 71 instead 72." They're saying, of perfectly healthy 30-year-olds, "Yep, that person's got 5 years left max." Even the very fattest people, the ones who get dragged through the mud the worst of all by the haters, don't fit the stupid delusional worldview of the haters. Extremely fat people, 500, 600, 700 pounds, are still a lot healthier and live a lot longer than we generally believe—especially if any health conditions they do have are well-managed and they have a good social support system and access to good healthcare. Same as for anyone! And, for the record, the percentage of people who actually weigh that much is vanishingly small. Most "obese" people are in the high 100s and low-to-mid 200s.

Fatness is also associated with numerous positive health effects. By the same logic, we can't read too much into this without getting deep in the weeds, but don't think it's a strictly one-way street. Fatness exists in the first place as an evolutionary adaptation, and evolution is famous for piggybacking multiple benefits onto a given physical trait. Fatness does more than just feed us in lean times and keep us warm in the cold and cushion us from rocks. To some extent it potentially has protective influences on our joints and organs, on our bones, and even on our mental acuity and mood. Haters love to point out that being fat increases your risk for other types of cancer (or, we should say, "is associated with an increased risk"), but there are other types of cancers where the trend is reversed!

I personally do think that it's likely that having a moderate amount of excess fatness in some people, and having a massive amount of excess fatness in most people, does cumulatively "use up" the body faster. Not much faster, not unless you're really, really big or have underlying health issues that would have given you problems even if you'd been thin. But a little bit faster. And to that I say: So what? Like, really: Whose business is it but yours? We mustn't fall into the puritanical trap of valuing the state of being alive over the quality of life and our freedom to be true to ourselves.

The bottom line: All of the above is a red herring because one's health status has no bearing on their worth as individuals or on their right to expect equal treatment in society.

Economics

The basis of this argument is that being fat costs the economy a lot of money. If you look at sensationalist studies, that number is positively goofy, usually in the hundreds of billions or sometimes even trillions of dollars annually in the US alone. This is despite the average American adult weighing only 25 or so pounds above the top of their "optimal BMI" (ugh) range, and the total of all healthcare spending in the US being estimated around $4.3 trillion. Doesn't add up, does it?

The economic costs of fatness, to the extent they actually exist—and this is almost certainly far lower of a number than the ludicrous ones that are commonly cited—are often incurred not in the way that bigots think. What bigots think is that fat people are getting sick all the time and therein missing work and needing more healthcare. I'm sure this does happen, almost certainly not nearly to the extent the haters believe. For one thing, fat people get sick for reasons that have nothing to do with being fat, and once they enter the healthcare pipeline they are exposed to higher costs at every turn.

Systemic injustice is expensive in all the ways that are so well-documented with other persecuted groups, in terms of the mental anguish of community and institutional discrimination; the economic exclusion of discrimination in hiring and the workplace; and the mistreatment of fat people by healthcare professionals and stigmatization of fat people by society, such that fat people often put off their healthcare needs until those needs are more severe and thus more expensive, only to then be screwed with by their healthcare providers leading to further costs and delays in their proper treatment (if you're fat you've probably experienced what it's like to come in for a bad flu and be told that what you really need is to lose a few pounds).

Fat people have a harder time attracting clientele, venture capital, performance bonuses, and yadda yadda we've heard this before for queer people, female folk, people of color, and so on. And fat people are marginalized more often and more readily, again with results very familiar to us from other marginalized groups.

The economic argument also has a headwind to fight in the macroeconomic perspective. To the extent fat people do consume more, they are drivers of the economy, not drains on it. If they're going out to eat more, that's a lot of jobs created.

One of my favorite examples of anti-fat bigotry in the economic context is the tale of airplane seats. We've all heard this story: Some hater comes along and is like "I had to sit next to a FAT person and they were flowing all over me and took up half my seat! Fat people should have to pay for two seats!"

First of all, that's already the policy of most airlines: If there isn't an empty seat immediately available, fat people will usually be rebooked on another flight or asked to purchase a second ticket.

But second of all: Do you know what I say to people who tell that story: "You should thank fat people, because they are subsidizing the cost of your plane ticket."

It's true. Airliners shrink seats to ghastly dimensions, as small as they can realistically get away with, in order to maximize the number of passengers they can carry per flight. This allows for tickets to be sold at a lower price. But by literally squeezing some people out, and forcing those people to have to buy two seats, what the airlines are doing is setting airfares artificially low at the expense of fat passengers.

You can't morally censure your customer base; that's not capitalistic. Your customers are your customers, and if they're fat then they're fat. By designing seats too small for a great many of them, you're making fat people pay for a percentage of other people's tickets every time they are forced to buy a second ticket for themselves.

Of the four arguments, I think the economic one is probably the stupidest of the lot, because no matter how you look at it, it just doesn't add up. Any economic drain that does exist is basically just a reflection of anti-fat bigotry against people at a societal scale.

Hater: "Look at how expensive fat people are for society!"

Me: "Look at how expensive society makes it to be fat!"

The bottom line: Fat people work. The whole schtick about them being slovenly and lazy is a slanderous lie. Fat people go to work, put in their hours, and come home. Even many fat people who are too fat to do most jobs still usually find jobs to do, at rates comparable to that of the general population. We work, we pay in, and we demand our due.

Environment

"How can you eat that cheeseburger when there's a climate crisis on?! Didn't you know that cows are the leading cause of global warming!?!?!?!"

Ah, the environmental argument...perhaps the most disingenuous of the four arguments.

As an advocate for affordable access to meat that is raised with at least a modicum of humaneness, I often come across the anti-fat argument in the context of meat's impact on the environment. That's a topic for another day, though I will say that meat is not as bad for the environment as you probably think, because that point is relevant here.

The core of the environmental argument against fatness is that fat people consume more food and food production is bad for the environment. Both of these statements are generally true! What isn't true is the conclusion that anti-fat bigots draw: Therefore, fat people are bad for the environment.

This is because it's a matter of absolute scale and of lifestyle priorities. If fatness is harmful to the environment then everything we do beyond bare subsistence is harmful to the environment. The key question is "How do we manage and mitigate our footprint?" Environmental stewardship is critical, but there will always be a cost to our presence here on Earth.

Using computers and phones, or driving cars, or having children, or keeping pets, or playing video games, or buying local food (with all of its environmental inefficiencies), or using hot water...all of these things put strain on the environment.

You can't with a straight face say that fatness is environmentally wasteful and then go about your life drinking wine and petting your dog and flying on airplanes to spend weekends at ski resorts. If you do, you're both an idiot and a shitty person.

In the grand scheme of people's ecological footprints, there is actually relatively little wastefulness in the extra calories that fat people typically consume and the extra clothing fabric and other goods that fat people typically go through as a result of their size. We do far more harm to the environment by throwing away food that we let go bad than we do by fat people eating more food than thin people.

I say this often because I find it so compelling, but one of the very first things that people do when they are coming out of third-world poverty due to economic development or immigration is buy more and better food. Of all the things they could do with their money, more and better food is consistently one of the very first things.

That says a lot to me about what humans really, truly need in their lives. It is a horrifying line of thinking to imagine that humans should deprive themselves to the barest level of subsistence on something like food. That is no way to exist, and the people who call for it are usually not good people.

The bottom line: Is there room for us to be more environmentally-friendly concerning our food consumption patterns? Sure! But that's irrelevant. The environmental argument by the haters is not that thin people are bad for the environment. It's that fat people are bad for the environment. And that argument is crap. No we're not. On the list of things that humans do that are bad for the environment, "being fat" is way, WAY down the list.

Character

Lastly, anti-fat bigots will often attack fatness as an inherent character flaw, and will usually associate it with other traits like being dumb, lazy, smelly, etc.

Let me give this argument the consideration it deserves: Hate is hate. And anyone who makes this argument is a hater. And that's the end of the story.

There is no credible argument here. The one kernel of truth to it is that, yes, some fat people are horrible. Because some people are horrible. Fat or thin, there are always bad people out there. And sure, in some people their horribleness can manifest in the form of fatness among other things. But it's not particularly common—and certainly not on the level that you typically see in works of fiction, where fatness is often a stand-in for villainy. There's nothing about liking to eat that really plugs closely into a failure mode of character.

In my experience in the fat liberation and fat admiration worlds, some of the fat people there are horrible. But it's not because they're fat. It's because they were horrible people to begin with, and in that community are able to use their fatness to achieve power and attention and authority. They often have a lot of internalized fatphobia, leading them to be particularly cruel to those who are close to them. But that's not a blight on fatness: That's just the tragedy of the human species.

The bottom line: Being fat doesn't say anything about a person's character.

We Need to Glorify Obesity

So, once more with feeling: There is nothing wrong with being fat. Unless, I suppose, you want to argue that humanity itself is a blight on the planet and we should all be exterminated, in which case you're probably even worse of a person than if you had just stuck to being an anti-fat bigot.

Like I said before, I come into the fat liberation movement by way of sexual identity: I think fat people are sexy. I enjoy being fat, and I have always preferred fat partners. A significant minority of humanity feels the same way; that's diversity for you. You don't have to be into it yourself, but liking fatness is a valid identity to have. And there are all kinds of non-sexual reasons for liking fatness too, which I mentioned earlier.

Yet on the subject of fat sexuality, I have seen bigots compare liking fatness to liking cancer. I have seen it characterized as slowly committing murder, or of growing fat oneself as slowly committing suicide. And on top of that, whenever anyone says that they think fat is sexy, they are invariably and immediately lumped together in the minds of bigots with those occasional lunatics who we see on the news who use fatness as a pathway of abuse in their relationships—as if abuse never occurs if fat people are not involved, or as if one bad egg in a group means that every egg is bad. The fallacy and stupidity of these illogical mindsets speak for themselves. There are definitely abusers and criminals who are into fat. Just like there are abusers and criminals who aren't. But fatness—including the celebration of fatness and the pursuit of overeating and/or weight gain—are perfectly normal and healthy in the context of a mutually respectful and consenting relationship. It's not the subject of this essay, but let no one say otherwise.

The actual reason I mention my own background here is that most fat liberation activists aren't fighting for anything positive. They're mostly female fat folk who've been worn down their whole lives at the intersection of being fat and female, and just want fair treatment and to be left alone, and maybe even occasionally be called beautiful when they put on a nice new outfit. Most of them are not actually pro-fat and in fact harbor a great deal of self-loathing and internalized fatphobia—as shown by how derisive many of them behave toward other fat people, and how hateful some of them become if they do manage to lose weight. Most of them have no love of fatness whatsoever, and are merely forced into it by virtue of being unable to readily lose the weight, and are fighting not for the advancement of a cause but rather to break free of the hate and prejudice inflicted upon them.

That's no way to center a movement. Sexual equality doesn't come by chanting "Women aren't horrible!" Racial equality doesn't come by chanting "Black and brown people aren't horrible!" Fat people, it shouldn't have to be said, aren't horrible! And, obviously, the voices of victims and survivors of anti-fat bigotry need to be heard and prioritized as a central pillar of the fat liberation movement. But "We're not horrible"! is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it, and the testimony of survivors isn't sufficient in itself to lift us beyond the negative: We need fat pride, fat acceptance. We need, as the bigots are always morally panicking about, to glorify obesity!

And for that we need to hear from the people of all sizes who have good things to say about fatness: good things to say about people who happen to be fat (many of whom live rich and full lives and whose fatness is often a reflection of that or even an active factor in achieving the good life); good things to say about fatness itself (the softness, heft, warmth, comfort, and size); good things to say about particular fat bodies (fat bodies can be strong, attractive, powerful, majestic); and good things to say about the experience of life as a fat person ("I'm here and I take up space, and I'm a pretty cool person!").

Once again, a broader movement has essentially failed female folk by forcing most of the work onto them. Fat liberation isn't just for female-bodied or feminine-presenting fat people. Fat liberation is for EVERYBODY: all sexes and genders, all races, but more importantly all shapes, abilities, sizes, and weights. Thin people need fat liberation too, just like males need sexual equality and white people need racial justice. Whenever prejudice persists, we all get hurt, both directly and collaterally and through seeing the people we care about get hurt.

What Can You Personally Do?

This essay isn't a screed and it's not meant to just be an interesting curio for reading. I would hope you contemplate these ideas and take some of them with you into your daily life. Here are some things you can do to advance fat liberation and fat admiration.

Pride

Let's start by talking about "pride." I can already hear many of you saying: "But I don't want to be proud of being fat. Being fat isn't something that one should be proud of."

To which I would reply: In the long term, I hope we can deprogram you of that. Because being fat is definitely a valid thing to be proud of! Think of it like hair: A great big head of hair, lovingly grown and groomed, is absolutely something for others to be proud of in themselves and admiring of in others, even if you personally don't like long hair and wouldn't want to have lots of hair yourself.

And in the more immediate term, you don't have to pretend to be proud if that's not where you're at. One is not required to be proud of their fat.

But what you can do is not get in the way of other people's fat pride. If you engage at all in fat pride discourses, be a signal booster and not a signal jammer.

Also, spreading fat pride has another benefit besides the pride itself: It disrupts bigotry channels. It's like community activists singing over the voices of fascists at a Neo-Nazi parade and drowning them out. If the claim of anti-fat bigots is that one can't be proud of being fat, then pride neutralizes their rhetoric on the spot. It also normalizes fatness and the celebration of fatness among impressionable young people whose minds are still coalescing into a worldview. Will they learn to hate their bodies and spend their whole lives at war against themselves, or will they learn that their bodies are an immense source of strength and satisfaction?

Fat pride is about more than letting your belly spill out of a bathing suit at the beach. It's about setting an example to others of what is possible and what life has the potential to look like.

Support Fat People in Public

Praise, compliment, and support fat people in all the ways you would do if they were thin. In practice, this often involves fat people's clothing and their willingness to "put themselves out there" in public.

Encourage fat people to do things that they would otherwise want to do if they were thin but don't because they are ashamed of being fat. Life is too short not to be true to yourself! Go on that bike ride. Go to that beach party. Go to that buffet. Assuming the logistics are workable—i.e. that they're not going to be institutionally excluded by things like seats that don't fit—be an ally and champion for fat people in public. And when there is institutional fat discrimination at work, do what you can to find out about it in advance and find workarounds so that your fat friends, fat family members, or fat self won't be excluded from events on a functional basis.

If you are dating a fat person, I cannot stress how important it is to be proud of them in public, and to be for them and supportive of them. The top complaint of fat people about their romantic partners is that their partners are embarrassed to be seen with them; this is especially true in mixed weight relationships where the female partner is the only fat one. Don't you dare be embarrassed to be seen with your love in public. Pride the shit out of that! This is someone you love; they are more important than the sneers and jeers of a thousand random strangers. And don't put the onus on your partner to stand up for themselves: Be a partner in legitimizing their existence in public spaces.

Don't do anything that is going to feed into a fat person's internalized fatphobia or their fear of social backlash. Instead, provide solidarity. If you're at a party or a dinner and they want more food, then have more food together with them. If they're afraid to be seen in their bathing suit because it's too revealing, then make sure your bathing suit is revealing too.

Gatekeeping

Treat people on a case-by-case basis first and foremost, but here are some general rules of thumb, especially for how you interact with strangers, casual acquaintances, family members, and colleagues:

Don't treat fat people like they have to pay for admittance into the community. Don't check fat people's health, diet, or lifestyle. It doesn't matter if they eat nothing but salads or nothing but Twinkies. It doesn't matter if they run five miles a day or can't even walk across their own house. Don't validate the prejudice that the only good fat is "healthy" fat. Fat people are allowed to be unhealthy at no penalty to their community standing or their value as individuals.

Don't call foods or dietary habits "healthy" or "unhealthy"; that's all a bunch of normative bullshit that is so inaccurate as to be useless. All foods are healthy in the right context, and all foods are unhealthy in the right context. And fatness and weight gain are not inherently unhealthy.

Don't question people's movies or reasons for being fat, staying fat, or getting fat.

Don't try to exploit new or existing fatness in people's bodies as a deviation that makes them unworthy of belonging and acceptance.

Don't ask people their weight. Don't attach people's real or perceived weight loss to compliments on their appearance. Don't ask people who've gained weight if they are pregnant.

Don't validate diet culture or weight loss rhetoric. Diets do not work; more than 90% of people who lose weight eventually gain it back. Sure, if you live in a country with an active famine, then there's nothing you can do; you don't have a choice. And if you're in the military or the fire department, or if you're a marathon runner, then sure, it's probably worth trying to maintain a lower-body weight for the time being. But these are the exceptions. Weight loss is not a valid solution for most people; stop treating it like one.

Don't celebrate or glorify weight loss. Don't antagonize it either—it's their body, and if they lose weight that's their business—but don't reinforce unethical social norms that value thinness over fatness. Don't participate in that.

There are a lot of don'ts here, and that's not a coincidence: The rule for gatekeeping in general is "Don't." Let people be as they are. Find something to judge in them that's actually worth judging, like their political views or their participation in community-building.

Fat-Shaming

Most of all—this is the most important thing—shut down anti-fat language and stereotypes. "Diet talk," "self-fat-shaming," "food shaming," anything that validates the prejudices against fatness. Shut it down. Don't just refuse to participate in it: CALL IT OUT. Shut it down.

We all know fat-shaming when we see it. It can take courage—and sometimes the battle is not worth fighting; I get it; but don't let "sometimes" be "all the time." Be present as a pro-fat force; be a shield and ally to others. And be harsh in your judgments of fat-shaming speech and behavior. When you hold back, the haters win.

Discrimination retreats when haters fear that they are outnumbered and unpopular.

Fat Positivity

One of the easiest and most affirmative things you can do to support fat liberation and fat admiration is to to cultivate positivity in your life surrounding fatness.

I've long called myself a "tummy elemental." I love tummies; I think they are impossibly cute. I tend to like all the same things about tummies that most people hate about them. And because of my consistency and flamboyance about it, my friends all know that I am the person to turn to when they have pro-tummy sentiments that they want to share.

There's a lot you can do to cultivate fat positivity in your life. You can make mealtimes a no-shame zone, and deliberately eat till you are content and encourage others to do the same. You can boost fat voices and messaging in your social media circles. You can (with a little common sense and restraint) compliment fat people in public when they're looking great or doing cool things. Basically, any negativity vector surrounding fatness has an opportunity to become a positivity vector.

Look in the Mirror

Last of all, if you're fat, and you struggle with self-acceptance, all of the above applies not only to your treatment of others, but to how you treat yourself.

It's not a lie, or fake, to treat yourself like a human being. If you have a fat body, that's your body. It's YOUR body. All the power and personality you will ever have, all the beautiful ideas and moments, will all travel through your body. Your body is YOU. We don't actually have separate souls living off in La La Land. Our bodies are 100% of who we are. And if your body has a lot of extra fat on it, or just a little bit, then your relationship with your fatness is really just a proxy for your relationship with yourself. Do you love yourself? Or do you hate yourself?

Many people are meant to be fat, perhaps even most people. In lieu of food scarcity and intense physical toil, our bodies naturally grow an abundance of flesh and hang onto it. In this case, your fatness says that you are living in good times. That's not a bad thing! And for everyone else, for the people who aren't meant to be fat: If you remove the stressors and hate from your life, the excess fatness will probably mostly go away on its own. You can't do that through dieting and make it stick, but if fatness is your body's response to hardships in your life, then stop treating your fat like it is personally responsible for all that. Focus on making life improvements elsewhere, and the fat will take care of itself. And don't hold it against the people who are supposed to be fat for continuing to be fat.

We all have our bad days. The days where we wake up and feel ugly. Those are unavoidable. But the rest of the time, you're gonna have to learn how to look at your fat body and think that it's one of the most beautiful sights in the world, and treat it with love and respect. Because to not do so is nihilistic and desolate. Your body is you. Your fat is you.

Support Fat Perspectives and Representation in Fiction!

Some of you reading this may not know that I am an author! I write science fiction and fantasy. You can learn more about it here.

I am primarily here on Tumblr to build enthusiasm for my creative work, and if you enjoyed this essay I would love it if you checked out some of my other posts, which usually aren't so overtly political, and if you were to stick around if you like what you see.

I try, very hard I do, in my fiction to be a voice for bringing fat liberation and fat pride into focus. Fat issues are almost completely absent from our science fiction and fantasy. I raise these issues from many different angles in many different lights, and I incorporate a great many fat characters into my work, some of them quite prominently. I don't try to speak for anyone else on this Earth who has their own experience to share, but I do serve as a cheerleader for fatness and as a scourge of the bigots who for too long have been able to get away with their vile hatred with no accountability. And fiction is a powerful way to do this. I don't write "pro-fat fiction" per se; I write "fiction written by a pro-fat person." Fatness isn't what the plotlines of my stories turn on. But it is just quietly, beautifully there, challenging assumptions and breaking down preconceptions.

I am also mindful of the fact that there are not enough male voices in this space. Like I was just saying, fat liberation is increasingly seen as a "women's" issue. It's not; it's a human issue that also happens to intersect with misogyny. We are all caught up in it. We all have a responsibility to do something about it.

I may be agender, so I can't actually help to make fat liberation a men's issue from within the masculine world, but I am male-bodied and am taken for a man whenever I am seen, and that's close enough. If you're a man or male-bodied, know that your voice in this can carry far.

Whatever your sex or gender, fat liberation and fat pride are a cause you can join. If you're a progressive and believe in justice for all, then it's a cause you are ethically compelled to join, whether or not you have a single nice thing to say about fatness. And if you are just a decent human being who wants to alleviate the suffering and injustice inflicted upon others, fat lib and fat pride are also worth your attention. Anti-fat bigotry doesn't usually get counted among the world's biggest prejudices, but it absolutely is. The harm it causes is very widespread, and wounds very deep in the people it strikes.

It is so hard, I have learned, for most people to take a principled stand on the right side of history, because in day-to-day life people are motivated by their vehement tribal affiliations and their desperate need for belonging. If you are capable of reading this and parsing what I am saying, you are already well ahead of the general population. You have an opportunity to rectify your failure to empathize. You can question your beliefs, confront your biases, deprogram your prejudices. The cause is always worthy and it isn't going anywhere. But you can help speed it along.

And in addition to standing up in real life, you can support artists like myself who work to advance justice through the realm of fiction. So forgive me a shameless Patreon plug; I am not rich and every little bit of support helps.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Markle and Harry will go to where they feel treated with importance and stature and that is as fully fledged icons for anti-Monarchists and Britain haters with the long term aim of pitting themselves against King William and Queen Catherine by u/ElectricalAd9212

Markle and Harry will go to where they feel treated with importance and stature, and that is as fully fledged icons for anti-Monarchists and Britain haters, with the long term aim of pitting themselves against King William and Queen Catherine They have nowhere else to go, no relevance, are loathed everywhere, except amongst people like the PM of Jamaica who is leading the departure of Jamaica from the Commonwealth Realms, something that has always been inevitable, and hasn't happened for some curious reason until now.What do they crave? They crave genuflection and importance and power and relevance.They have none of that anywhere, outside now a very niche sector, which is a vague anti-British, anti-Monarchy, 'woke' identity politics, full of theories of racial conflict etc.This could grant them access to attention, possibly money and funding from radical NGO types, supposed 'importance', a certain niche in America especially.It also enacts vengeance fantasies, which is at the heart of the narcissist psychopath, and Harry, who has fantasised about murdering his father in the past, and so would be very happy to go along this road.It also sets them up for their claim that they are 'true royalty', on the assumption that future belongs to the 'progressive' theology, and would allow them to wage divisive culture wars inside Britain.They would want to be seen as de-facto 'royalty' of various Commonwealth nations, even as they devote themselves to dismantling the Commonwealth.Its a weapon, and being used as a weapon. But radical politics will only take them so far. They are both stupid and both pathological. At some point, this will intersect with 'narratives' of Russia, China, radical extremists in the middle east and elsewhere, who are aligned with the hate of the anti-British, anti-West narratives of the 'decolonise' ideologues.That will segue on some level into anti-West theology, and anti-Americanism.Prepare for them to become even more toxic than they were before. This takes them to a whole new level. American elites will not just actively distance themselves form Markle and Harry. They will probably work against them too.In the meantime, it just shows that they are both clinically psychotic and hateful.They will intend to use their children in the culture war in future.But most of all, Markle and Harry will be looking ahead.Markle will be thinking, perhaps Charles will not be around much longer.And they are in their minds setting up weaponry to use against King William and Queen Catherine.A culture war arsenal, using racial politics and 'progressive' historical BLM type agendas to use against them.Their desire most of all, is to harm William and Catherine. Markle will he happy, and encouraged, by Catherine's health issues.This is how the minds of psychopaths work.This is really why they should have been removed from the Line of Succession.​​ post link: https://ift.tt/qOEy4AR author: ElectricalAd9212 submitted: January 24, 2024 at 05:12PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

[girlactionfigure]

By: Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Underneath the positions of pro-Palestinian progressive Westerners lies a conglomerate of presuppositions and assumptions that are rarely openly discussed or mentioned. One of such major presuppositions is that Palestinian terrorism, the indiscriminate murderous violence /1

targeting mostly defenseless Jewish civilians, is a core part of the Palestinian identity and a normative Palestinian behavior to be expected. As such, this behavior can not be blamed on Palestinian society or institutions but on Israel and Israeli action, which controls the /2

structure of power from which the Palestinian identity emerged. In this position, highly intelligent people discover the most troubling aspect of the conflict but only to dismiss it. This form of humanistic bigotry against the Palestinians came to justify their worst /3

inclination and disregard the lives of Israeli Jews, ending up being one of the most dehumanizing positions towards Israelis and Palestinians. This position is not new but has become a core intellectual habit of the international left since the canonization of the works of /4

Frantz Fanon as a Bible of decolonization. According to Fanon, the murderous rampage of the colonized man against the colonizer is the quintessential act of self-liberation. The blaze of wrath and anger that ends in murder is nothing but the birth pains of freedom. In other /5

words, the struggle, no matter how violent or extreme, is an existential condition and an ontological urgency. These ideas, which started in the circles of the French Left in the 1950s to justify Algerian acts of extreme violence against the French colony, became a solid part /6

of the international left, taught in the most prestigious academic institutions to generations of leftist activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and others. These ideas, the epitome of dehumanization and pathological misanthropy, were not born yesterday and are /7

parts of the major intellectual edifice of leftists' social and political thought. The proliferation of such intellectual pathologies is what ultimately enables armies of American and European journalists, diplomats, aid workers, NGO officials, and others to totally accept /8

the prevalence of violence, icons of death, and the valorization of cruelty in Palestinian culture, both popular and high, and in education. This leads to the interesting simultaneous recognition and dismissal of the most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, /9

the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, as the central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols. The final result is an international behemoth made of international institutional structures established and financed to /10

purportedly solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while, in effect, ignoring its core issue. Palestinian media, religious, political, and educational institutions are left to daily indoctrinate members of the Palestinian society into believing that the meaning of their /11

identity is existential victimhood which could be exited only through the total and complete destruction of Israel done by way of blood, death, and sacrifice. Anyone who dares to examine Palestinian education, media, literature, poetry, music, etc., would not be able to ignore/12

the unsubtle presence of such violent ideas in Palestinian national symbolism and Palestinian self-image. This is ultimately the root cause of the total insolubility of the conflict. Until this conversation becomes a central component of any efforts seeking peace and /13

stability, the problems of terror, violence, the loss of innocent Jewish lives, and the indoctrination of Palestinian youth will continue.

I also would not be honest if I don't address the other side of the coin, the people with whom I stand on most issues, the pro-Israel camp. Many in that camp do see with clearer vision the problem with Palestinian identity and its content of terrorism. Yet, they refuse to make /

any distinction between the Palestinians as humans and the Palestinians as Palestinians. That is, they accept to see the Palestinians exactly the way Palestinian radicalism insists on seeing the Palestinians, walking landmines waiting to explode to totally erase Jewish existence.

They accept the Palestinian self-dehumanization as the ontological truth of the Palestinians: final, exclusive, and irreversible, and not as humans who are trapped into a terrible story made up by generations of mad intellectuals and sadistic tyrants. This leaves nothing but a

a security problem against which Israel must remain strong. No will, no wish, no effort, and no thought are spent about the possibility of helping the Palestinians wake up from their self-imposed nightmare and discover a different way to be Palestinian. Just to reiterate,

I'm not talking here of people who think, feel and talk only in leftist cliches. Those don't see or understand such complex problems anyways. I'm talking about the non-cliche ones who despite understanding the monumental weight of culture and identity refuse to deal with

them seriously.

@HusseinAboubak

[haggishlyhagging]

But Americans now spend 93% of their time trapped indoors. Businesses are trying to attract a "skilled work force" by providing a "quality outdoor experience." The society (some, but the who and the why of those "some" is a story for another time) men created to enshrine their supremacy, valorize the power to control over the desire to cooperate, and reverently baptized "civilization," is soul-destroying. It's pathological. Necrophiliac. Capitalism, man's latest scheme for efficient extraction, is nothing if not adaptable. So adaptable, and so capable at co-opting and swallowing up any idea or liberatory movement which poses a real threat, that it's managed to naturalize itself. We believe implicitly that what we have—humans separate from and above nature, some men separate and above other men, all men separate and above women, the will to mastery and subjugation defining all—is what's inevitable, that an economy based on hierarchies of exploitation is simply inescapable. Fighting it is a simpleton's exercise in futility. The inimitable Dr. Jane Clare Jones summed up what she called "the economy of entitlement" in relation to the dogmatic, quasi-religious, demand that women acquiesce—immediately and without question—to every dictate of the newly postmodernized politics of gender identity, and it couldn't more perfectly delineate the belief system which is now eating Earth alive, flaying Her, setting Her ablaze like the witches who came before: "The readiness of people, both male and female, to identify with and elevate the pain of males not being given what they want, over and against the females who tell them "no," is the psychic substance that greases the wheels and gears of the whole patriarchal shit-show. And it is the psychic substance that serves to justify, exculpate, and explain away any violence used to press male claims." The extracting of more water, more minerals, more nutrient-rich soil overrides the need for living beings to keep being. The desire for more wood, more flesh, more energy, overrides the need of indigenous people to keep their way of life, to not to be relocated to civilization's slums. The majority of U.S. Federal prisoners incarcerated under "domestic terrorism" laws are environmental activists. Over the past 15 years, the number of murdered environmental defenders has more than doubled around the world, mostly in nations whose ruling classes are rushing to join ours in its orgy of consumption. The correlation between global ecological destruction and the international onslaught against women's rights is too strong to be some terrible coincidence; the same monster is devouring all.

-Agnes Wade, “Ecocide, Biocide, Femicide... Omnicide. The Final Stage of Patriarchy” in Spinning And Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century

[dailyanarchistposts]

Conclusion

Medical institutions are a reflection of the cisnorm — and not only because ambulatory clinics demand that our performances conform to cisgender molds, but also because all spaces that are not specifically designated for trans people are veiled as being designated for cis people, with racial, class and various bodily segregations. Trans clinics are not exempt from this. The people who apply for the transsexualization processes and usually undergo the various stages of evaluation, as Bento has shown, are those who, to some extent, fit into a cisgender social reading, or — truthfully or not — claim to desire it. Medical authorities do not give up their place as authorities. The institutional walls continue to protect the determinations of what is or is not ‘being trans’, of how we should or should not be treated, of what access we can or cannot have. The annihilation of trans subjectivities falls under the concept of epistemicide, insofar as any possibility of self-determination and knowledge production about transsexuality by trans people is annulled.

Since the early 2000s, with the insurgence of trans social movements in Brazil — such as the National Association of Travestis and Transsexuals (ANTRA) or the Brazilian Institute of Transmasculinities (IBRAT) -, popular pressure on pathologization has been strong, but only achieved results by the end of the first decade. The ICD-11 and DSM-V have modified its sections on transsexuality. However, they continue to catalog trans identities as something-not-quite-right, whereas cisgenderity remains unnamed. We still depend on medical approval to access surgery and hormone therapy. The authority of “scientific opinion” remains, even after changes to the ICD and DSM. This shows us how institutions operate: not without authority, not without hierarchy, not without a clear dynamic of subjection.

The government-regulated trans clinics express the materialization of cisgender norm. The means by which we can access health care are the same ones that force us into a violent normativity. And these are the same forces that compel us to introject cisnormative trans subjectivities, based on the dynamics of culpability and segregation (GUATTARI; ROLNIK, 1996). In general terms, there is no possibility of social emancipation that passes through institutional hands, whether it be the government’s so-called ‘assistance’ of dissident people, affirmative policies aimed at marginalized groups, or the provision of minimal services that seek to protect trans people from violence. The monoculture of knowledge (SANTOS, 2014) is a constant that underpins different institutionalized spaces. Even though these ambulatory policies and institutional initiatives of “care” can be fruitful, it cannot be denied that every institutional apparatus, once it represents the arms of the State, operates to maintain segregation. The “care” provided by trans clinics translates into epistemic violence, the erasure of subjectivities and the imposition of the cisnorm. The name change protocols offered by registry offices and the judicial system cause embarrassment, inaccessibility and vexatious situations.

One cannot fight for freedom except from it and using it as the main instrument (BAKUNIN, 2021); one cannot defend the emancipation of dissident bodies through institutions, as this would be the same as striving for freedom by means of the very same instruments that produce imprisonment. Only through libertarian means — that stand against the authoritarianism of institutionalized scientific knowledge — can we glimpse emancipation.