You Guys Hate Nuance

crazy how people assume trans guys dont know if we had short naturally coloured hair and a basic style we'd "pass better." "you want tips on how to pass? no more fun piercings, jewelry, anything feminine, dyed hair, nail polish or nice things for you!" thanks but I choose joy and whimsy x

Fellow trans men I need you to know that shitting on other trans men is not going to make people who hate trans men like you.

Sure, they’re nice at first. After all, you’re One Of The Good Ones. You’re not like those other trans men and transmascs. You’re not some cringe achillean soft boy playing the ukelele and listening to Cavetown. You’re not gonna date a straight man and detransition for him in a few years because you’re actually trans and not some stupid girl trying to be trendy. You understand your issues don’t matter as much as everyone else’s and you spend your time uplifting everyone else and shutting down any of those insufferable pooner fakeboys claiming otherwise. You don’t even listen to them directly, you let everyone else tell you what they’re saying so they don’t contaminate you.

But one day you’re going to step out of line. You’re going to disagree with someone on something and you won’t be able to just sit back and shut up on it. Or you’ll do something you didn’t even realize would be an issue. But you’ve done it. You’ve said it. And now your status as One Of The Good Ones has evaporated into nothingness. You’re just another Aiden now. You probably sing shitty bedroom pop songs about wanting to be a bug. They’re imagining you in their heads as having a picrew icon with the toothpaste mlm flag. Hell, give it two years and you’ll be a terf and that’s assuming some cishet dude’s dick doesn’t turn you into a cishet girl.

Then you’ll have two options. One is to realize it never mattered how hard you tried to convince these people you were worth listening to or caring about by playing the part they wanted and being their token, they still ultimately never cared about you and you made a mistake throwing other transmascs and trans men under the bus. Your other option is to dig yourself deeper, deny deny deny, and then hope you can find acceptance in a new group where the same cycle of events will repeat.

Only one of those options will let you heal.

saw a video of a woman suffering postpartum psychosis who couldn't be around the baby for safety and one of the comments was "it's supposed to take a village to raise a child" and this really is such a good example of why community support is so important and how the nuclear family fails to address a child's needs. a child's parents even when they are 'good' parents are simply not always going to be available physically and emotionally when needed for a variety of reasons, and the less stress added to these situations, the better it is for everyone, including the child.

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

“nobody is making you do this” i am driven by unnatural forces you will never even begin to comprehend

Your daily reminder you can download a FREE copy of Stone Butch Blues off of Leslie Feinberg’s website

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free