"Kill them with kindness" Nah, fuck that, CRICKET BAT π πππ*SMACK* πππππππππππππππππππππ*SMACK*πππππ*SMACK*πππππππππππππππππππππππ*SMACK*πππππππππππππππππππππππππ*SMACK*πππππ*SMACK*ππππππππππππππππππ
it is so fucking exhausting and annoying how white women, including and maybe even especially in progressive and leftist spaces, continue acting like they are not themselves still beneficiaries of tremendous privilege simply because they endure sexist or misogynistic discrimination. being a woman does not excuse the fact that you are still white and you still reap the benefits of being white! you do not get to "but sexism!" your way out of being held accountable for saying and doing racist shit!
I want my gay rights now! - Marsha P. Johnson (NYC Pride Parade, 1973)
Iβve had a few different people in my inbox asking me why I view these terms the way I do. In particular, why I claim itβs intersexist. So, I thought Iβd lay out a few examples, so everyone can understand where Iβm coming from.
Imagine an intersex woman. She was assigned female at birth by her doctors, and was able to go about her childhood as a woman with no inclination that anything was amiss. Sure, she didnβt experience certain parts of puberty, but puberty was different for everyone, right?
But, later in life, she learns she has Turner syndrome. This is an intersex condition where a woman has only one X chromosome, rather than the usual two.
Soon after she learns this, she finds that laws are being made to attempt to keep trans women out of womenβs spaces (often specifically sports) which use chromosomes as a defining factor of womanhood.
Would this intersex person be considered βtransmisogyny affectedβ? She has been raised as a cisgender woman with no problems regarding being βclockedβ, but she is also a direct target of transmisogynistic laws. She lies in a gray area.
Now, letβs go to another intersex person. Imagine an intersex man with PAIS. AIS is an intersex condition where babies are born with testes and XY chromosomes, but their body is immune to or canβt respond to androgens (which includes testosterone). Intersex people with partial AIS (PAIS) often develop a vulva and clitoris during puberty.
This intersex person identifies as a man, and he was assigned male at birth. However, his body does not produce testosterone, and he went through a feminizing puberty. To the average eye, he appears to be a woman now because of this.
Would this intersex person be considered βtransmisogyny affected?β He was assigned male at birth, and now appears to be a woman, much like many transfems. However, if many saw how he looks now, stating that he is a male, they would probably clock him as transmasc. He was raised as a boy until puberty, and then faced astrozcization from his peers when he began a puberty that feminized him. What he was facing was a form of intersexism where transmisogyny was playing a huge part. Does his childhood matter? Can one become TME over time, when they were TMA as a child? Again, he lies in a gray area, where the answer is not quite so simple.
What about the βoppositeβ, per se β an intersex woman who had a masculinizing puberty? She has aromatase deficiency, which means that many βmaleβ hormones (which would usually be converted to βfemaleβ hormones) would remain unconverted. She identifies as a woman, and was identified as a female at birth and was raised, until puberty, as a female. But now, she would be clocked as a trans woman upon looking at her. What does that make her? Is it different from the previous example? How and why? This intersex person also lies in a gray area. How she should be described with these terms is not clear.
And keep in mind, these are all relatively simple examples. All of the examples I listed self-identify as cisgender. But there are intersex people who are trans in any direction you can imagine.
If that last example identified as a trans woman, because she is now clocked as one, would you be able to say sheβs wrong for that? What about if she identified as transmasculine, because of her experience with puberty? What if sheβs multigender, bigender or genderfluid, and says sheβs both transmasc and transfem because of her complicated experiences? Would that make her a TMA transmasculine person? But I thought that transmascs were all TME? Thatβs how itβs so often framed, anyway.
The reason why these questions are so difficult to answer is because these terms were not made with intersex people in mind. Very real intersex transfems were pushed to the wayside in favor of centering the perisex view of transgenderism. Intersex people are nothing but an inconvenient little afterthought, annoying perisex people with their demand for βinclusionβ and βconsiderationβ. (As per usual.)
You cannot simply make a new gender binary and say, βNo, really, this time everyone fits into these two categories! Forcing people to confine themselves to these two rigid labels which are shown as opposites, and as never interacting, will definitely include everyone this time!!β No matter what the contents of the new binary is, itβs not going to work, because sex and gender alike are too complicated for that. There will always be people in the gray area.
This isnβt even getting into the fact that these terms, for all intents and purposes, seem to have been popularized by and associated with the Baeddelism movement around 2017, which was essentially βRadical Feminism 2: Weβre Trans Women, So Itβs Fine!β This movement is known for chronic villainization of trans men and non-binary people who arenβt transfem. (They act like this with cis people too, but noticeably less so than they do with non-transfem trans people. How curious.) Think along the lines of how regular radfems treat all men (and who they deem to be men) as inherently morally disgusting scum who deserve to be attacked.
Methinks that maybe these terms arenβt the neutral, fact-based descriptors of oppression that many people nowadays tout them to be, considering that.
So, yeah. βTransmisogyny exemptβ and βtransmisogyny affectedβ as terms: not even once. Listen to intersex people, stop trying to make sex and gender into binaries, and for the love of God, stop drinking the queer seperationist koolaid!
"But why do you let your disability stop you?" Because that's.... what disabilities... do. That's... literally the basic definition... of being disabled... A disability impairs your ability to function. That's what the term means. That's the main thing
Please, for the love of god, leave me CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS!!! If you think itβs implied, I promise you that to me it is not. If you give me poorly worded or vague directions Iβm gonna spend half an hour stressing over the potential different ways to interpret them and either become paralyzed with indecision or inevitably interpret them the least correct way possible
"everyone should care about accessibility because most people will become disabled at some point in their life" is a logical argument and I understand its popularity
however, everyone should care about accessibility because disabled people are fellow human beings living in the same society as you who deserve the same rights as you
thank you good night
Prince!xavier on your wedding night hiding from duties. Cs the only duty he has rn is pleasing his wife tfπ
you can tell which people involve actual compassion in their political stances and which don't by how they respond to things happening to real people and not hypothetical scenarios.
earlier I was reading the comments section of a reddit post that screenshotted this woman's post in a religious community where she basically says she's pro life but now conflicted because she could die from having another baby (also her husband is blatantly abusive and uses her as a baby machine, but she talks about him like it's normal). so I opened the comments (of the post with the screenshot, not her original post) and there's a lot of people joking around and saying she should die basically because she's stupid for being against abortion and she should consider this "god's punishment". now judging by how this woman describes her role in her marriage she's quite clearly abused and currently willing to possibly sacrifice her LIFE for her husband. and as someone whose dad also treats women like this and uses religion as an excuse I had sympathy for her despite her "pro life" stance (I mean it's not like she's a politician passing anti abortion laws lol). I tried to comprehend the comments joking about this post but I couldn't. I can't find the situation funny. and it makes me realize some people's political convictions are very surface level. it's just about fun clapbacks on social media. no one is treated as a real person.
Another thing I've noticed working as a children's librarian is like... kids get so Paralyzed By Choice and the adults in their lives never really register why. Like, for example, we have little scavenger hunt sheets in the children's section and when a kid completes it, they get to pick out a cute eraser from our prize basket. We also have a little toy prize chest as part of our "1000 books before Kindergarten" challenge for when kids complete 100 books--and kids will spend minutes carefully picking through everything while their parents are shooting us anxious looks like "sorry they're taking so long! I know this is silly and it's completely ridiculous that my child is taking so long to choose between a bath toy and a cube puzzle because these are cheap and arbitrary objects! Hurry up, Harper! Just pick something! You're embarrassing me!!" But in the kids' perspective, they already have so little control over what objects come into their lives, and in this case, the object represents labor and effort on their end, so of course they feel they must choose very carefully. I've always been an anxious and indecisive person, so it's striking to see how being rushed really doesn't help that and really only makes it harder for kids to figure out what they want.