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the emotion i just experienced is kind of indescribable

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stoner older sister who makes you smoke a joint with her for the first time just so she can watch your low tolerance already gullible self turn into a mentally checked out mess for her to take advantage of

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I certainly think that those who can bring themselves to should cheer for them, yeah. I think those who can't should set aside the desire to laugh and condemn though. Legitimately, unless you think all of those people should die and are willing to do something to make that happen (and if you do, more power to you, live your convictions) you will need to make peace with the fact that these folk will keep living. Strategically, if you want people to actually stop being cultists and fascists, they either need to die, or they need to be brought back in to society and allowed to stop being cultists and fascists.

There were some comments about how Nazis didn't stop being Nazis at the end of the war. That's partially true. Plenty of people who voted for the Nazi party did go on to disavow, share about their experiences, show actual moral change. Much more in East Germany than in West Germany. The Allied Powers, and the United States in particular, were pretty invested in not actually getting rid of fascism. It's not that people couldn't denazify, it's that denazification was actively discouraged and inhibited.

Look up any literature on cult deprogramming, please. Absolutely crucial to it is community. I see folk saying "they need to be accountable" and "it's their responsibility" and like, sure, kind of. But in accountability, accountable to who? Accountability requires people to be accountable to, and actions they expect you to take to settle the account. And sure, they need to take responsibility for uprooting the shit in them, but like. Nobody does anything alone, and that goes double for cultural work. They will find people who will offer to help them, one way or another, or they will die, and it's better for us all if it isn't fascist grifters of a different stripe who are the only ones who accept them. Isolation kills; that's something these fascist movements take advantage of in order to recruit and manipulate people.

You don't personally need to provide community for these folk leaving MAGA, but someone will, and it's better for you if you have some control over what community they get.

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.

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This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.

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metroid is about isolation

but metroid is also about learning to do trick jumps from random animals who celebrate when you get it right, and about saving them even as the planet shudders under your feet

and metroid is about lowering your gun when you meet the last of a species who's only just hatched, and gently holding out your hand

and metroid is about accidentally calling the name of someone you care about, who you thought you'd lost, and finding out they've been with you the whole time

and about a little scribble of a child with their parents tucked into the corner of a grand mural

and about the gifts left behind by others because they may be gone before they get to meet you, but that won't stop them from helping you

metroid is about love actually

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relmartist on Instagram🌈

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Also like credit scores are absolutely both a) surveillance and b) very literally a form of social credit score. Yes, primarily around debt related social interactions, but given near everything in the States is mediated through debt to one degree or another that's basically just all society level social interactions. And you are absolutely punished for having a low one.

I will forever find it funny the way Americans are so scared of "Chinese surviellance" like bro you live in THE surviellance state

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i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

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…The post has been made unrebloggable so I can’t address OP directly but goddamn I cannot say nothing.

When trans men talk about wanting/needing access to “women’s” spaces, that’s not us wanting to be treated like a type of woman. What the fuck.

Ideally I wouldn’t step foot in a women’s space not just because I’m a man and I don’t want to be in one if I can help it but because there wouldn’t be gender segregated spaces in the first place.

Really, you need to be asking why a space is women’s only when you encounter it. Because a lot of times the reason for it is just plain wrong. An OBGYN clinic may be called a “women’s health clinic,” but trans men often have the anatomy those clinics are meant to provide care for. There’s no reason for it to be women’s only besides cissexism and transphobia. A DV shelter? Often excludes men because women are seen as the victims of domestic violence and men aren’t even though men are capable of being abused. This only serves to keep abuse victims seeking help from accessing it, and by the by, if a men’s shelter does exist, they probably don’t let trans men in either because of transphobia. For a trans man being abused and seeking help, often the options are detransition and hope someone will help you or go back to your abuser who will force you to detransition. A lesbian group? Listen, if someone has been going to the same group for ten years, has cemented himself in, and this is his primary social group, then realized he’s a trans man after those ten years, and your response is “hey congrats on coming out as a guy, now leave every social group you’ve ever known and hope you can start over completely with a new one that may or may not accept you anyway,” you’re a dick. Trans men who spent years of their lives as lesbians before realizing what gender they are shouldn’t have to become socially isolated just to maintain a status quo that never accounted for gender variance. I can keep going.

All this is not to mention nonbinary people who may be both men and women or who may sometimes be men and sometimes be women. What’s the rule for if a genderfluid person enters a women’s only social group and then their gender shifts to man? If a bigender person who’s both a man and a woman wants to attend a women’s social gathering, are they allowed in due to being a woman or barred due to being a man?

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With this latest round of discourse being "trans men shouldn't complain about being kicked out of women's spaces", I felt the urge to write up a relatively long post regarding the topic, as I feel it is a long tangled mess and involves a significant amount of people simply talking past each other.

To begin, what is a woman's space? I ask this, because "women's spaces" often fall under one of three categories: medical services, social services, and social gatherings. Of the three, trans men need access to nearly everything if not everything included within "medical services" and "social services". These things often need to be considered co-ed anyway, but are still considered "for women" and often are labeled things like "women's health" or "women's defense". Social gatherings- things such as book clubs, concerts, festivals, and other similar outings- can have a nuanced and complicated history when it comes to the inclusion, or exclusion, of trans men.

As an example- I am a binary, gay trans man who has not yet been sterilized. If I become pregnant and need to seek out social services, I must do so via my provider's "Women and Babies" department. I am neither of those things, and yet regardless of whether I am completing or terminating the pregnancy, I must label myself a woman in order to receive care. If I wish to have a pap smear, receive birth control, or investigate my chances of ovarian and cervical cancer, I must do so via the "Women's Health Clinic". I am not a woman, but I must label myself as one in order to discuss sterilization options. Many trans men who have had their gender markers changed prior to sterilization have reported difficulty even booking an appointment, as well as difficulty convincing their insurance to pay for this appointment due to a discrepancy with gender markers vs gendered care. Many have discussed the realities of being a pregnant man, whether they remained pregnant until their child was born, or whether they terminated said pregnancy with an abortion.

It should come as no surprise that the statistics for trans men receiving quality gynecological care are abysmal. It should be equally unsurprising to hear how many trans men have died from botched abortions, untreated miscarriages, infections and cancers of the uterus and cervix and ovaries, and complications during pregnancy or birth. We belong in this space, despite it being labeled "for women", and the only thing pushing us out has done is quite literally what's been killing us.

This is, of course, not even taking into account the numbers of trans men who have been forced to become pregnant via their husbands or families as a means to detransition them, and those who have become pregnant as a result of corrective rape. There is a saying among trans men of my age- it isn't "we all know a guy this has happened to", it's "which of us haven't experienced this? who among us doesn't fear this? who will it happen to next?"

Which brings me to my next point: women's social services. As with women's medical care, nearly everything labeled "for women" as a social service must be inclusive to trans men. Shelters for domestic violence survivors, rape crisis centers, self defense classes, family planning, these are all things that honestly should already be co-ed. But, many times, they are exclusively targeted towards women. I understand why, I do. But with trans men being statistically more likely than cis women to experience the need for these services, it seems a cruelty to close their doors to a vulnerable demographic reaching out for help.

Where should trans men in crisis go? Shutting the door to us without addressing the reason we need to access these resources gives us a single ultimatum: detransition, or die. Go back to being a woman, or die knowing the likelihood that a woman's name will adorn your headstone, and "daughter, wife, mother" will be said in your obituary. Much like the medical services, this incomplete answer has lead many trans men to their deaths. Whether by their own hands, or by their attackers'.

But there are other social services out there that perhaps are not as dire. Women's scholarships, colleges, all girls schools. Girl Scouts, women's sport leagues, gym memberships. Trans men don't need access to these, right?

Well... is the trans man in question out? Has he been living as a man, or is he still closeted? Is it safe for him to come out? Does he pass, or has he just bought his first binder and given himself his first buzz cut? Is he living under the control of his parents, or is he able to freely decide for himself the type of person he'd like to be and the type of life he'd like to live?

You see, I was a Girl Scout once. And, if we are to believe to our core that trans men are men even before they know the words "transgender", this means I was a boy in a girl's space. I didn't know that being transgender was an option for me at the point where my troop disbanded, and another leader to replace the first within my local area was not found until after I had aged out.

But also... I was in 7th grade when my troop disbanded. Two years later, I would learn the word "transgender", and suddenly everything would make sense. Two years later, I would come out to my parents and my sisters. To put this into perspective, I graduated high school in 2010. The Boy Scouts officially allowed cisgender girls and transgender people of all genders to join all programs in 2019.

I was not expelled from my Girl Scout troop. My leader simply stopped showing up to meetings, and my troop disbanded to go our separate ways when leadership could not find someone quickly enough to replace her. But... if this had not happened, I would have been a recently out transgender boy in a girl's social service, still wearing push up bras and frilly shirts because that's all my parents would buy me until I became an adult and moved out and had a job with my own money to re-purchase myself a wardrobe. Indistinguishable from any of the others, outside of what went on inside my own mind.

I would not have been accepted into the Boy Scouts, if Girl Scouts had been taken from me as abruptly as it was from a different transgender boy in the same state I was born and raised. Which would have left me with... nothing. Neither. And the only reason I even joined the Girl Scouts was because I had wanted to join the Boy Scouts and the local troop had refused to allow me, because they had labeled me a girl.

I don't believe I'm the one that coined Schrodinger's Gender, but I do reference it often. In this situation, one is both a boy when it hurts, and a girl when it hurts. Even if that gender label changes by the second, the point is to use your gender and your assigned sex to hurt you.

But then, why do these services even have to be gendered to begin with? After all, Boy Scouts just updated to be The Scouts, and has removed (on paper) the insistence on gendering.

Well... I certainly agree that the majority of gendering these services is at this point a concept that needs to be reformed, but I'm unconvinced that we will be able to completely integrate without addressing the reason they were segregated by gender in the first place.

Women's gym memberships are gender segregated for two reasons. Women and girls- and anyone labeled as women and girls, regardless of true identity- are frequently not afforded the same access to resources as cisgender men and boys. Women and girls- and anyone labeled such- are frequently at high risk of predatory sexual behavior and physical violence. Both of these problems are symptoms of a larger system of misogyny at play, and both of these problems directly affect trans men especially those who have not transitioned in a way that makes them pass for cis men.

Regardless of the truth of my identity, the reality is that I was seen as and treated as a girl when it came to physical fitness, and thus barred from the same activities freely offered to the boys. Regardless of the truth of my identity, I have experienced predatory sexual behavior from cis men as young as 8 or 9 years old, continuing past when I came out and began to transition socially.

If the problem is not addressed, cis women cannot re-integrate with cis men. But, additionally, if the problem is not addressed, the choice still remains clear for trans men. Detransition, stay closeted, or go without.

A common complaint of trans men is the invisibility and erasure our demographic faces. It should be easy to see why this happens. The problem of a misogynistic society is one that continues to this day, and without addressing the problem we cannot hope for success in creating a more inclusive space. At the same time, trans men are being pushed out and isolated as they realize they must make a choice.

As for social gatherings, such as a woman's retreat or a woman's music festival? Of course, it may sound odd to say that a trans man should feel welcome there. But the truth of the matter is the majority of the trans men asking for the ability to stay are trans men who have been within that space for years already, prior to coming out, prior to realizing some things about their genders, prior to taking their first steps as men.

I'm pretty good friends with an older butch who told me that I am the first person they ever told that they were a nonbinary man. This person is in their 50s. They're married. But the wife doesn't like it, and they love their wife too much to cause friction in the relationship, so they keep it to themselves, and they keep quiet, and they don't say anything about being transgender, but in their head they aren't a woman. This person is not a woman, by their own insistence. Should this person be forcibly ejected from their local lesbian community, which they and the wife helped form decades ago? Should they divorce their wife, since that would make her not a lesbian anymore?

What harm is it, truly, to allow this person to stay? Social isolation kills people. The trans man suicide statistics are just as abysmal as any of the others I've mentioned here. Forcing someone to burn 20, 30, 40 years of their lives and their friends and their achievements because they are finally living as themselves is a deeply hurtful and isolating experience.

The majority of trans men asking to be included in these spaces are not trans men like me- who never really jived with the idea of womanhood and distanced ourselves as much as possible the moment we saw the opportunity. They are men like my friend, often existing outside of the binary, often with a deep love and appreciation for womanhood despite realizing that perhaps the label does not fit them as well as they once thought. They often have many years of connection, entire lives spent intwined in these spaces.

What good does it do to chase them out? What harm does it to do let them stay?

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Every stitch holds a memory;When we upcycle, we honor the hands that came before us and the future that depends on us. Fashion should be a legacy, not landfill.♻️🧡

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@theabigailthorn is my cat's favorite Blorbo. Nessa gets very excited ears as soon as she hears her voice, and will raptly watch the screen in a way that otherwise only birds will do.

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number one lie about feminizing hrt is that it’ll make you less horny

do NOT believe them when they say that, they are WRONG, you will find yourself grinding against the corner of your bed to the thought of things that are physically impossible at best and more often than not ethically problematic

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Looking at the current situation, it sure seems like American Hegemony is being systematically dismantled as part of an agenda to destroy America's stature in the world. And there's a temptation to look for the strings to see who is doing it.

But what if that's not the case? What if this is just an emergent result of putting in power a group of people who know nothing but exploitation and destruction and are emotionally incapable of seeing value in growth and preservation?