gendercity

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if you legitimately believe in the concept of porn addiction you're a reactionary btw.

#porn

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Having been diagnosed in adulthood because I needed accommodations, I really take issue with the idea that not being diagnosed with autism as a child puts adult autistics at a disadvantage. A childhood diagnosis is practically a guarantee of abuse in the form of ABA or other forms of abusive “therapy” (read: torture). It’s kind of incredible to me how little awareness of this there is among low-support-needs adult autistics when we all justifiably rail against Autism Moms—they are the way they are because that’s the way the mother of an autistic child is “supposed” to be. It is socially and materially rewarded to be abusive and controlling in the way they are! That’s why they get blog/YouTube/book deal money...

#ableism #autism

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Leslie Feinberg

Transsisters: The Journal Of Transexual Feminism Volume 1, Issue 7. Spring 1995

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It’s fairly conspicuous to me that when k/ink-critical people claim that survivors who engage in kinky sex/BDSM are retraumatizing themselves, that there’s an assumption that none of these survivors, or other survivors, have been traumatized or abused via acts and symbols associated with “normal, healthy” sex. In effect, a demand is being made for traumatized people to actually engage in unwanted sex acts at the threat of humiliation, exposure, and ostracism, by people who seem extremely keen on being in that role.

#kink

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the stats are about the US:

According to CAP’s nationally representative 2020 survey data of LGBTQI+ adults, LGBTQ+ intersex individuals, when compared with their LGBTQ+ peers who are not intersex, experience higher rates of stigma and discrimination and high rates of engaging in behavior to avoid exposure to discriminatory treatment, such as avoiding going to the doctor.

[…]

Sixty-nine percent of LGBTQ+ intersex respondents reported experiencing some form of discrimination in the year prior, roughly two times the rate of discrimination reported by LGBTQ+ nonintersex respondents (35 percent).

Key Issues Facing People With Intersex Traits (be aware that for this survey there are 75 intersex respondents and 1,439 nonintersex respondents)

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“as a [insert demographic here]” damn bro nice standpoint epistemology however i think you will find that actually being intellectually honest and engaging with difficult ideas and attempting to arrive at a consistent ethical and logical framework might result in a better opinion.

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Watching Tumblr fall into purity culture and callout frenzy once again, as if people don’t have actual shit to worry about outside of Catholicism 2: Electric Boogaloo

#site culture

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You can tell when someone doesn't really have a strong ethical framework beyond a shallow "Listen To [Oppressed Person]" because they'll hear one person go "Healthcare should be universal" and another go "Racism is great" and they'll be like "Well they're both trans... :/"

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i really don't care if homosexuality "exists in other species" or if people are "born that way". it doesn't matter. because even if being gay were a choice it's a good choice to make

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“Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.”

- Charity Heartscape

Linked above and briefly quoted is an article from Charity Heartscape, a trans woman, detailing her experiences with the “Predatory Trans Woman” myth and how it stirs abusive harassment even within LGBTQIA+ communities. This is usually done in a hasty mob with little thought, a fervor whipped up on the basis of insular community protection. But so often trans women are accused of the most heinous things possible with zero evidence, and forced out of their existing support structures over little more but rumor. This focused forced isolation alongside pervasive harassment in other forms is part of the science - people have a method for embracing transmisogyny in such a manner, and in dissecting her experiences Charity brings to the forefront some of the major components of this harassment and how it happens.

If you claim to care about trans-feminine people or trans women at all, you need to read this and understand it. You need to be able to see what transmisogyny is and what forms it takes. You need to listen to us.

“So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem.”

#transmisogyny #readings

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#antisemitism #shootings #news

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« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

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Also just. Since I’m rambling about sex work today, we need to get rid of the idea that the person who purchases sexual services or products are all somehow evil and exploiting the sex worker.

I’ve had clients that became friends! I’ve had clients who were disabled and wanted companionship, who were gentle and kind people. I’ve had clients who cried to me and thanked me for allowing them to just exist without expectations. I’ve helped clients realize they’re gay or trans. I’ve had many, many many more positive experiences than ever negative ones with sex work specifically. Because the truth is, people are shitty to sex workers, but the majority of those people aren’t clients! And there are shitty clients, and abusive ones, but not as many as there are shitty and abusive retail customers in a 20 minute span working as a cashier on a busy day.

A lot of sex workers aren’t doing sex work just because it’s the only tolerable thing they can do to survive. I LOVE sex work, when all my spoons are there for it. I have more fond memories and funny stories from sex work than I even have memories of past jobs at all.

And I think it should be more normalized for more people to support sex workers by purchasing their services! Sex workers support each other constantly but because of this idea that sex work is all bad and evil and all the clients are evil abusers, it holds back more good people from supporting us! Like god I’d love to have more queer clients, more women, more types of people! But as long as we keep demonizing the profession AND the clients, that ain’t gonna happen huh

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“When I first worked in the factories of Buffalo as a teenager, women like me were called “he-shes.” Although “he-shes” in the plants were most frequently lesbians, we were recognized not by our sexual preference but by the way we expressed our gender.

There are other words used to express the wide range of “gender outlaws”: transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers, bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes or berdache-a European colonist term.

“We didn’t choose these words. They don’t fit all of us. It’s hard to find an oppression without a name connoting pride, a language that honors us.

In recent years, a community has begun to emerge that is sometimes referred to as the gender or transgender community. Within our community is a diverse group of people who define ourselves in many different ways. 

Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes-a wonderful problem.” —Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation. 

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[“In September 1937, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI (who was emotionally, if not sexually, involved with his assistant, Clyde Tolson), wrote an article called “War on the Sex Criminal” that was published in the New York Herald Tribune and widely reprinted. Hoover’s article was clearly inciting fears of the more public homosexual:

The present apathy of the public toward perverts, generally regarded as “harmless,” should be changed to one of suspicious scrutiny. The harmless pervert of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and murderer of tomorrow. . . . The ordinary offender [turned] into a dangerous, predatory animal, preying upon society because he has been taught he can get away with it.

These attacks, always in coded language that never mentioned “fairy,” “pansy,” or “homosexual,” were primarily aimed at homosexual men. Illinois, California, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio almost immediately passed “sexual psychopath laws,” and other states followed. Over the next decade, more waves of “sex panics” spread across the country and similar laws were passed. The laws differed in detail from state to state, but usually allowed the courts to incarcerate suspected “sexual psychopaths” for undetermined periods of time in mental institutions. These laws were broadly written, and the definition of “sexual psychopath” always remained vague so that it could be applied as indiscriminately as possible.

Sexual psychopath laws, clearly influenced by social purity concerns, almost always presumed children were being victimized. By the mid to late 1940s, “during the nationwide campaigns against sexual psychopaths, the terms child molester, homosexual, sex offender, sex psychopath, sex degenerate, sex deviate, and sometimes even communist were used and became interchangeable in the mind of the public.” The conflation of vague “sexual deviancy” with homosexuality and child molestation set up what was to become a widely accepted myth: that male homosexuals were innately driven to seduce or sexually assault male children. This myth was a strong influence in shaping the public discussion about homosexuality well into the twenty-first century.

The more public homosexuals became, the more they were believed to threaten society. Many women and men felt that personal, and even community, safety would more likely be secured by fighting for a right to personal privacy rather than a right to public security. This emphasis on privacy dovetailed with the accepted sentiment, and mandate, that all sexuality was private. Mandated privacy of sexual expression was what social purity activists, vice squads, and religious leaders were attempting to achieve in their attacks on all public manifestations of desire and fantasy in popular culture. What they could not ban or eradicate, however, was the individual, private imagination.”]

Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

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screaming and crying and throwing up do you understand that among autistic people with postsecondary degrees (aka graduated from college) less than 70% are employed and among those, the average monthly income is less than $850? and among autistic people who graduated with a high school diploma (not a special education completion certificate, which is different, but were successful enough in general education classes to earn a standard diploma) earn on average $8.90 an hour, and work fewer than 15 hours a week? and this is just among people who can work. 42% of us have never worked at all by age 25.

just because a few (mostly white, mostly male) autistic people work in tech doesn't mean that our poverty rates aren't abysmal. elon musk does not fucking represent us.

#autism

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