literally what the fuck do you mean its still january. how is that remotely possible. its been six months minimum

Amnesia (2016) by the outstanding German artist Rolf Ohst

If you tell transmascs to detransition (even as a “joke”) you’re transphobic, btw. If you openly state that you would respect us more as “girls” you’re transphobic, btw. If you constantly equate transness with femininity and get mad when someone pushes back on it you’re transphobic, btw. If you view feminine transmascs as “basically cis” you’re transphobic, btw. If you exclude transmascs from your activism you’re transphobic, btw. I hope everyone stops beating around the bush and just labels you for what you are: a transphobe, plain and simple.

straight trans men i love you. youre not invading the lgbtq community by being trans and straight. you're not a predator for dating women. you're not a predator for loving women as a man. youre not "boring". you're not any less trans or queer than gay/bi trans men. youre not the enemy. your transition doesnt make you a traitor to lesbianism. youre not acting as "conversion therapy" to lesbians and youre not "turning" straight women gay. you deserve to be affirmed in your gender AND sexuality

i need trans allies to really internalize the idea that masculinity in girls and women is punished by society. gender nonconformity is never rewarded. women being allowed in some circumstances to wear pants is not an example of "masculinity" being rewarded. women had to fight for a long fucking time in order to be able to wear pants and in many western households and non-western countries, women are still forced to wear dresses. we are still a long ways off from any kind of gender equality or acceptance of gender nonconformity.

People see progress and decide everything before that didn't happen, tbh. They decide the long painful battle didn't happen, and they decide the current battle isn't real as a result.

As far as they're concerned, got the freedom to wear pants in a few places? Wow you're now officially 100% free of all oppression revolving around masculinity!!!

Exactly, oppression is working differently in different places.

I don't have enough fingers to count the amount of times I had other girls come to me and tell me they're being forced to wear skirts because "that's what girls do" and that was recent. There was a whole era of my life where school uniforms were not a thing. Imagine telling me something as ridiculous as "you're allowed to wear pants so you're not oppressed" and then in my second year of highschool, guess who was forced to wear skirts because uniforms came back. it was girls and anyone perceived as one. 🙃

My mother tells me stories of growing up in the 50s and 60s, of finally being allowed to take off the hats and gloves in school... how it felt like rebellion and freedom.

My mom told me about how part of why she learned to fight was to protect people who didn't conform. It was not uniform years but people were still being openly harassed for dressing wrong. People have ended up in the hospital or died for the "sin" of dressing wrong in school.

Adam tells me tales of 1980s middle school where he used martial arts to protect people being picked on for their looks etc. And he effectively rules lawyered the school principal so his defense was logical. I want to be able to argue like a lawyer.

"You broke his hand?"

"He went to punch me in the head, I leaned into it."

"Why did you break his collarbone on his other side?"

"To stop him from punching me in the head again."

"...okay, that's fine. But you didn't have to go to that extent."

"Well, he won't be able to hurt other people, which was my goal."

...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As a lawyer logic kind of person myself, this exactly. So many times my mom got called up for this exact stuff.

That reminds me, heaven forbid I react poorly to being hugged from behind by my coach as a kindergartner I guess. Instant kick in the jewels. 😔

My mom: so what did he do

Principal: he hugged her from behind, the response was absolutely unnecessary-

Mom: there you go, that's why she did it. She kept telling you all to not touch her, maybe you should listen.

Lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The fact that “dolls having a tea party” has stuck around in the public consciousness is fascinating to me.

Like, back in the Old Days that would be a way that women would actually socialize.  So if a girl had a doll tea party, she was imitating her mom / other contemporary women.

But these days contemporary women don’t have tea parties. So now, the idea of “dolls having a tea party” is an echo of an extinct behavior, only repeated and referenced because it used to be so prevalent.

So a Barbie in a big hat themed for a tea party is a bit like if they made Transformers that turned into stagecoaches and horse-drawn buggies.

Like I wouldn’t buy the fuck out of stagecoach transformers

the circle is complete

hey so I actually don't think you should be breathing that much, like don't you already breathe enough? it isn't a good look to be inhaling and exhaling that much. idkk I'm just worried about your health, you know how many toxic chemicals are in the air :/ if you want I can surgically take out one of your lungs so that you won't breathe as much! you'll feel much better :) omg do you see that guy over there trying to catch his breath that's so funny haha he's breathing so much hold on I'm gonna film him real quick so my friends and I can all laugh at him later! hey so I heard about this new thing called "suffocation" and it's supposed to help you not breathe as much isn't that great? I mean yeah people die from that but at least we found a cure for the breathing epidemic! btw all of this is so normal

piss on the poor website

saw a radfem post about how there's no female version of emasculation. bestie yes there is

"masculinity is empowering and dominant and femininity is degrading and restrictive. there's no humiliating way of being stripped of chains" i want you to look women of color & disabled women in the eyes and tell them this. that there is no humiliating way to be stripped of your womanhood.

people are reblogging this again so I wanna add that on top of women of color and disabled women you can also just talk to trans men&mascs and nonbinary and intersex people raised female about this.

it's very funny to me whenever people who insist they are the final voice for Trve Feminism and have such an accurate understanding of misogyny, also completely ignore how much the cover-up of the violent policing of failed womanhood plays a role in patriarchy. babe stop believing everything the patriarchy says!!!!! IT IS LYING TO US CONSTANTLY!!!!!!!!

lots of good talk in the notes of different ways different groups are affected by this (lets call it unwomaning, but feel free to workshop lol). but! i want to prompt us to go a little deeper. clearly, this does happen, and it happens to a lot of different people. so how can people - and not just any people, but feminists - claim it doesn't? why does nearly everyone understand the concept of emasculation, but unwomaning is a non-topic?

ill talk about my own ideas later, but i wanna hear yall discuss this!

#I feel like it might be bc the 'normal' or expected reaction to emasculation is to take out your anger on someone beneath you to reaffirm#your masculinity#but for women once you are unwomaned you are supposed to disappear#or be disappeared#there's not a way to gain it back in a womanly way bc to be a woman is to be passive not active#taking something back is too masculine#is a catch 22 ig

really interesting observation!! i think you are onto something here.

another way of putting it might be: manhood is something that must be fought for and proven and claimed, but womanhood is something that must be (or at least appear) natural and effortless, so much so that it can happen quietly in the background. at least, that is the public front we are supposed to be invested in.

Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

I mean honestly everything that Arab traveler said lines up with the Arctic areas, except the white hair part, I don't know where that originates from, or if it's accurate

If I had to guess, maybe they had albinism? Or maybe it's one of those cases where kids sometimes start out with one hair color and develop a different one when they get older. This is all conjecture, but something to consider.

Still really cool tho

guys, the traveler just wasnt used to blondes

Also, languages develop words for colors over time so they get grouped with the closest one. That's why people with orange hair are called redheads. The word for red is generally the third color that gets a name. There wasn't always a word for the color orange, but there have almost always been people with orange hair.

And the Romans in Rome were fascinated by the Celtic slaves brought back from the British Isles because of their fair hair and skin.

For the sake of "I would not believe it either if I didn't live here" kind of context, this is a perfectly normal hair colour for children where I'm from. It darkens to a dark ash blond/sand brown when they grow up.

So what I learned from this is even in modern times, people don’t know or believe that Scandinavians are just that pale and blond without jumping to “albino” first

You wouldn’t have believed the 10th century Arab guy either.

these new MLB rules where they can use 8 different pitchers across multiple timelines simultaneously are getting out of hand

i keep adding “squirtle” to the phrase “i’m dying” whenever i say it

“i’m dying, squirtle”

i don’t know why????????? is it a reference i’ve forgotten or am i just fu ckin tatched in the head who knows

mandarin clementine tangerine whoever named the citrus family did an amazing job

water for my animal

t4t did not originate as a high-minded "trans women prioritizing trans women" philosophy. it did not originate as a specifically transfem phenomenon.

it literally originated as the craigslist personal category where all the cruisers and sex workers posting in t4m/t4w and browsing m4t/w4t could let off steam by fucking each other instead, free of cis bullshit. yeah, mostly transfems, but transmascs too.

it was always about fucking, and about a temporary exclusivity, but not necessarily a permanent one. most of the people posting t4t ads fucked cis people regularly too. but they wanted to fuck another trans person tonight.

the category wasn't always listed, either. trans people just started putting it in our ads until CL finally put the category in the listings. here's an archived view of new york craigslist casual encounters in 2013 and 2014, showing around when it got added. (different cities added it at different times.)

anti sex worker legislation killed craigslist personals, if you want this kind of straightforward community space back then you better get out there and fight for your sex worker comrades.

lest i be accused of pissing on the poor, it is demonstrably true that much trans vernacular originates in transfemme circles and then spreads to//is appropriated by the so-called "trans community" at large. that said, it is also demonstrably true that craigslist is the origin of the term t4t in the early 2000s, even tho t4t as a philosophy was articulated earlier than that by authors such as casey plett ( a trans woman ) and lou sullivan. ( a trans man ) this is attested in numerous places, the most authoritative of which is in a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, a publication founded by susan stryker that remains the only peer-reviewed journal on trans studies. there are lots of folk etymologies out there and trans women's culture is still often stolen, reappropriated, its origins obscured, but this simply isnt one of them.

what the hell are they stealing from us girl. our "culture" is radical body autonomy. are they stealing the concept of radically changing their body and the way they move through the world? good, i hope they keep doing that.

legitimately, what the hell are any closed practices among trans women? there's medical care (should be freely available to all who want it) and stereotypical hobbies (obviously open) but it's not like we've got Special Secret Tgirl Rituals. there's like... memes and in-jokes, but what do i care if a trans guy jokes about programmer socks, it's a joke (and a boring played-out one at that.) what is there to appropriate. the whole fucking point of transness is to be open to all who want it.

like, the only thing i can think of is specific slurs, but those aren't "our culture," they're slurs. insults against us that we would like people who aren't targets of them to refrain from using out of respect.

what are you doing out here putting "trans community" in scare quotes. we will never get our freedom from separatism, *especially* when the separatism gets so extreme that we're not even including *other trans people* in our definition of community. we will by definition always be a significant minority with a porous relationship to the majority - it's not like we could all just teleport to an island and be left alone, we will birth cis children and they will birth trans children, forever. trans people, and trans women, will only be free when we are in full community with each other and with cis society. something that will require a radical change in what "cisness" means, where it's no longer built around violent enforcement of sexism, but like... cis people are still gonna exist after you do that.

separatism is an utterly nonsense political strategy for minorities that aren't defined by lineage/heritage. (for ones that are defined by lineage/heritage, i have no comment, that's not my conversation.) it was stupid when lesbians did it in the 70s and it's stupid when we do it. it's stepping on a rake for no reason.

i hope somewhere out there a trans guy is calling himself a femboy while humping a blahaj wearing nothing but thigh-highs and a choker and he's having a blast.