"Now that non-binary and nonconforming gender identities and bodies exist, I believe it will become much easier for children to remain whole intersex people."
I really want a better and more reliable enby equivalent of "girl" or "man." I know out here in Cali, people see "dude" as effectively neutral, and in some gay circles the gay "gurl" is effectively gender neutral, but that doesn't carry everywhere. I just love to be able to drop the distance and be like, "I hear you, gurl!"
Of course, it's a minor thing and I can always try to use other phrases that are a bit more bulky. I just keep finding more and more that I want us to develop more extensive terminology for us non-binary folks that doesn't just refer back to the binary (though playing with that can still be fun).
Being any kind of sexuality - gay, straight, bi, pan, asexual, lesbian, anything - is entirely a matter of SELF-ID. There is literally no other way to assign these things.
So how do we work out socially who is who in all this and get along?
Its simple: we simply believe what people say about themselves. No one has any problem with this idea - not least for themselves.
Until, that is, it comes to trans (especially in the West). Then, somehow, the whole idea of just believing people is forgotten as if somehow it doesn't work. Even though SELF-ID is perfectly normal and acceptable to literally everyone on the planet in lots of other areas.
It's been a few weeks since I launched it so we're bumping my GoFundMe again! I'm looking to raise funds to help cover costs for my gender affirming surgery. If you're able to donate it's greatly appreciated. If you can't, even just sharing it around is a huge help 🧡
Remember when that gender critical said trans people only started existing a few years ago?
Remember when the TERF said gender neutral pronouns are new?
Remember when "real" gays said they were against new inventions like queer and trans?
I present you a London Gay Liberation Front poster from 1971, over 50 years ago. Don't believe the lies of modern hatemongers. Because the only time they're not lying is when they're not speaking.(Credit to Mallory Moore for spotting this.)
If a government or institution or coercive social force (such as police, courts or prisons) can oppress ANYBODY then a government or institution or coercive social force can oppress EVERYBODY.
And so that is why we should defend ANY AND ALL people who are oppressed because, with a change of opinion or purpose, their oppression is our oppression.
The aim must then be a political set of relationships in which it is as impossible as it can be to oppress at all.
"This is not, and has never been, a fight of and for the cross-gendered alone. LGBTQ+ protests and rallies do not take place to espouse the rights of specific and singular communities alone. They are about and for everyone because if someone, anyone, any institution acting with and on the authority of force, can take away a trans person’s freedoms or a gay person’s freedoms or a cross-dresser's freedoms THEN THEY CAN TAKE AWAY YOURS TOO.
The point here then is that we, as a social set of relations, fight against the coercion of others because that coercion, IF IT EXISTS, can, with a change of opinion or purpose, very quickly become the coercion of us.
So its never about stereotypical good guys and bad guys either because, more simply, its just about the organisation, through relationships, of ALL OF US."
(Black Dog: Jolly Roger's Sex and/as Politics, forthcoming from this author)
Transgender hate is a specific historical and cultural phenomenon in its own right.
Far from being a "natural" (or even usual) response to "unnatural" behaviour, it is a cultural response (a response based in the values of a specific culture or cultures) to culturally articulated phenomena.
No one "has" to hate on this basis. It is a decision articulated according to cultural values and social scripts.
One might then ask what about certain aspects of Western culture make cross-gender, cross-sex, cross-dressing and sexual minorities those thought worthy of hate according to Western cultural values? Which values are doing this and how do we counter them?
This morning I have been reviewing some cases of people arrested for cross-dressing (they may or may have been "trans". Since they are historical it is unlikely they could have had this self-understanding).
In doing so, it just hit me with full force how nuts it is to arrest a person FOR WEARING THE WRONG CLOTHES. I mean, seriously? Is this what it has come down to? A man may not wear a dress because its a threat to civilisation? A woman may not wear a suit lest the nations crumble?
Its barking mad. And yet there is case after case of this stuff in human (and more especially Western) history.
What essential to maintain social understanding is being transgressed when one wears "the wrong clothes"? Why must gender-appropriate clothing be physically enforced? What's going on?
"Our earliest ancestors do not appear to have been biological determinists. There are societies all over the world that allowed
for more than two sexes, as well as respecting the right of individuals to reassign their sex. And transsexuality, transgender,
intersexuality, and bigender appear as themes in creation stories, legends, parables, and oral history."
It was inevitable that there would be a gender critic who wrote "At least Russell Brand knows what a woman is" but are you sure you really want it to be "someone who gets pestered and forced into sex"?
Gender criticism is no brand of #feminism whatsoever.
Today I wrote 5,000 words on "posttranssexuality" (and its political consequences) based on the classic essay "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" by Sandy Stone which is regarded as one of the founding essays of transgender studies.
This essay was written over thirty years ago but its basic point (in my reading at least) is that "passing" or seeking to pass is entirely understandable but ultimately socially and politically inauthetic and based in the binary thinking and discourse that binds and controls all of us.
Thus, not passing, refusing to be domesticated and assimilated, is the more authentic and honest political course of action.
There is no safety, as the twentieth century proves admirably, in the notion “I was made this way so leave me alone.” The twentieth century in fact proves that you will be subjected to genocide for being “made this way”. So "biology" cannot save you. It can only condemn you.
Your defence, as a consequence, is, was, and always will be, a continued vigilance and better, more cooperative politics than those who would oppress you. Find friends and work with them for your common protection. Your survival depends on it.
Q: Why are you playing a character and not just being the real you on here?
A: Because "the real me" would still only be a character exactly like any other. All of us are fictions of a self; it just depends which fiction we want to go along with. There is no real me or real you, no essential, true or real self, no description of us which is not just a story someone tells about us.
Men are 100% XY chromosomes and women are 100% XX chromosomes. FALSE.
Men and women are completely hormonally distinct. FALSE.
There is a male brain and a female brain and these can be 100% distinguished in imaging scans. FALSE.
Human beings either produce large gametes (women) or small gametes (men). FALSE.
How you decide if you see a man or a woman in public on 99.9% of occasions is a matter of chromosomes, hormones, brains or gametes. FALSE. None of these things are available for inspection on these occasions.
A TRUTH
On the overwhelming majority of occasions whether someone thinks you are a man or a woman or not is a matter of if you pass socially as either of those things according to cultural customs. It relies on prior social cues and understandings and has nothing to do with whats in your jeans or your genes.
Are gender critics being stupidly disingenuous or gormlessly thick when they argue that "trans activists" say that "gender identity" is an "unprovable feeling" and that such people claim that "anyone who says they are a woman is a woman"?
I have to tell these bobble-headed chuckle fucks that I've spent almost every waking hour of the last two months reading books exactly on the topic of gender and NO ONE EXCEPT THEM is making the argument that "gender" is "a feeling".
(Psssst! Gender is a socially constructed relationship. Its nothing innate or essential about a body. This is anything but "a feeling" and cannot be decided by one person by themselves since an unavoidable component of any gender is BEING TAKEN FOR IT BY OTHERS!)
"In different times, places and cultures, people construe sexualities and genders in their own individual ways as societies and communities. There is no one way to do this and there probably has never been either given our diverse and evolutionary heritage. The claim to objective sexual, gendered or biological reality is then a POLITICAL claim first and foremost, a matter of politics and politicking."
("Black Dog: Jolly Roger's Sex and/as Politics", forthcoming)
Wer sind die Zielgruppen?
⚧️🤕 trans und/oder nicht-binäre Personen,
die in den letzten drei Jahren eine noch am selben Tag zu behandelnde Verletzung/Erkrankung hatten, sowie
🚑 🏥 medizinisch Ausgebildete,
die in den letzten drei Jahren haupt- oder ehrenamtlich in einem medizinischen Notdienst gearbeitet haben
Given how many iterations of this set of sloths there's likely to be, I figured I'd group 'em up when posting, rather than just bombarding you all with dozens upon dozens of sloths!