#understand the assignment

[sapphirenightshade]

As women, society has always told us that the worst thing that we can be is disliked, but when that society now threatens our right to exist, there is no other choice than to stand up and fight to protect our autonomy and our communities.

[swiftthisway]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by melanie nyema (@melanienyema)

[trixiesol-blog]

[six-of-cringe]

Once when I was in college I needed a picture of my fish for an assignment, but the fish lived at home so I text my brother to send me a picture and he asks "how close of a picture" and I say "pretty close" and he sends me this

[heartorbit]

if we could stay connected, just like this

[chaos0pikachu]

sorry but I so don't care that venom might not be in the mcu cause where the fuck would he and eddie even fit in the mcu? there's no chaotic sexy energy in the mcu i'm so sorry like the mcu's idea of sex is two dry pumps on a beach with ppl so pretty they might as well be ai generated the horniest thing they've done in their films is had steve rogers in a boob shirt and then they finished his story by becoming joe biden Venom would eat some cop's skull and the avengers would literally shit themselves they'd be like "OMG EDDIE YOU CAN'T GO AROUND EATING COPS" and Eddie would be like "I didn't that was my husband" and then John Watson would show up and be like "I'm an ally so I totally understand but also we don't allow the eating of law enforcement here" and Venom would try to eat John Watson while eddie calls the avengers neolibs in his head like THEY DON'T FIT IN THE MCU

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Vibes based grading system.

(for @epistemologys, who wanted some post-canon, teacher WWX)

[tending-the-hearth]

HE’S GOING TO FORGET EVERYTHING EXCEPT FOR HER NAME 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[egophiliac]

swipes everything else off of the table to yell about diasomnia flower bookmarks

(I gave Silver one too :D)

[cosmicdreamgrl]

seokjin x vogue korea

[lizardkingeliot]

file this under moments in amc's iwtv that permanently altered my brain chemistry

[elodieunderglass]

[mumblesplash]

You're my favorite person on this entire goddamn webbed site for the sheer uniqueness of your posting energy. Most people on tumblr (and social media in general) have a very vibes-based approach to constructing posts and interacting with communities - finding common ground in shared experiences. Conversely, you seem to go about the task of posting with the air of a particularly enthusiastic scientist - not that you're someone Other, or that you have any less love for the posting game in general, just that all of your posts seem very specifically crafted to test what portions of a take or an idea will resonate (positively or negatively, both are equally valuable) enough with tumblr's userbase to generate the most responses. We are the neverending supply of extremely susceptible lab rats and you are the person in a lab coat taking detailed notes on our behavior when you drop a new item into our enclosure. Sometimes the rats argue back, but that's just as crucial a part of the scientific process as anything else.

Also your poems fucking rule. Please keep doing what you want forever, because it's clearly working for you as-is.

[womenofnoise]

Alrighty then

[cherylblossom]

#Book!Lucy Gray singing 'Pure As The Driven Snow' AFTER Coriolanus kills Mayfair Lipp

“I know you killed Mayfair to protect me. Me and the rest of the Covey.” She rested her forehead on his chest. “I'll never be able to thank you for that.” He stroked her hair. “Well, she's gone for good now. You're safe.”