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Mariette Pathy Allen, TransCuba (a series capturing the daily lives of the transgender and GNC community in Cuba), 2012-2014.

In 2005, Castro proposed a project, which became law three years later, to allow transgender individuals to receive free, legal sex reassignment surgery and change their legal gender.

#intersection

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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

#intersection

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i couldn't even appreciate the artistry behind the clothing designs this year at the met gala because my bitterness and anger toward the exorbitantly wealthy has grown too much to be contained i try to say ooo pretty gown but all the black hateful bile starts oozing out from under the lid of its container. 7 months of genocide and the largest homeless camps my city has ever seen and food banks in the universities and baby formula locked behind glass and stomach gnawing guilt over a $7 latte and rent is always late and always behind on electricity bills uh ohhhh summer is here time for another wild fire. oooo pretty gown. the next met gala theme will be bear spray and what happens is i bear spray inside the gallery. i can't even force a sort of healthy detachment anymore like "haha oh well i guess that movie actor is rich it's not like they're an ultra wealthy bazillionaire oooo pretty gown" they're all worms to me vile beasts i look at them in their isolated imagine john lennon covid song bubble and i feeeeeel the milk of human kindness curdling within me. how can you smile at the camera. we are all dying girl. isn't there a protest not even a block away from you guys? protesters and riot cops and homeless ppl in the streets. i guess that's unfair you guys deserve a night of glitz and glamour and getting away from it all as if you're not constantly away from it all. girl we are dying. sick sick world. sick dying world. anyway i didn't watch the met gala this year

#socialism

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First you procrastinate on the task because it is not a big enough deal to get done urgently. Then you procrastinate on the task because it has become such a big deal that doing it is overwhelming. You would think that this implies a middle point where it is just big enough of a deal to get done easily, however the inherent perversity of the universe's causal geometry prevents this

#not left

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This is a genuine question no harm meant, but why do transwomen dislike it when people say they hate men? Like I'm a man hater (due to personal experience), but I don't group transwomen in because you aren't men and I dont see you as men... Maybe I'm just confused though but this is something I never really understood

first off i’m gonna swing in and say… we do not? i mean sure definitely some of us do but we’re a complex and varied group with a lot of different opinions. you may as well be asking me why Canadians like hot sauce or why astronauts don’t like horror films any time you ask me why trans people do or don’t like something.

secondly — i think you’re missing the woods for the trees here because that certainly ain’t my experience. if anything, trans women bitch louder and more openly about men than any other gendered group i can think of. i can think of a few reasons you might have come to this conclusion, though

you might find us having a problem with any attitude that acts as if the problem with men is of a biological nature. because it isn’t; it’s social. any attempt to locate the source of the patriarchy within the human body is reactionary drivel and transphobic by necessity. you MIGHT have seen trans girls having problems with people saying men are Like That because of testosterone etc. i think that “why” is pretty obvious here!

something else trans girls will often take umbrage with is attempts to criticise men that actually still reinforce oppressive ideas about gender. Julia Serano wrote that from a transfeminist perspective there are two types of sexism — traditional sexism (the belief that men are superior to women, femininity is lesser than masculinity etc) and oppositional sexism (the belief that men and women are two completely separate, non-overlapping, untransgressable groups), and both of these are used to victimise and oppress trans women,

you even fall into that in this ask! you state that you don’t “include” trans women in the category of men when you talk about hating men — don’t you see the subtle threat here? you COULD decide trans women are men and subject us to your righteous hatred of men — but you don’t, because to you we’re not men. you see why treating gender groups as rhetorical categories in this way might bother trans women? you demonstrated deftly here that recognition of our womanhood is dependant on how other people think about us. “I don’t see you as men” but you could choose to, decide to at the drop of a hat, and you could use that to violate us and get away with it scott free. This is an enormous part of how transmisogyny functions in day to day life.

additionally — you know i used to be a boy, right? like ok maybe i was never a man, i wasn’t in the closet long enough as a teenager to live as a man, but i did live as a teenage boy and so did almost every other trans girl on earth. many trans women right now are living as men. i think treating “men” as this discrete, concrete category of Evil People who occasionally shit out a “Valid Woman” to be adopted by the other side is transphobic; it absolutely upholds that oppositional sexism we were talking about earlier, for one. a lot of people are both men and women; this isn’t just a niche identity (although there’s fucking thousands of people identifying as gender fluid, bigender, genderqueer these days, so not even niche) but a material reality for a lot of people (even those who aren’t non-binary.)

i — and almost every trans girl i know — look at men as a category that intrinsically DOES include some trans girls, actually. every trans girl who hasn’t hatched yet and even many who have live years and years as boys or men — you may be including them as women “in your mind” but that’s such a binarist lie to tell yourself — you’re not on the look out to see perceived cis boys as anything but cis boys even if you personally rhetorically understand trans women to be women. you’ve opened the back door to sneak a few trannies into Fort Girl instead of, yknow, dismantling the idea of the gender binary.

so maybe it’s not that trans girls hate people talking about how they “hate men” — a lot of us do too — maybe it’s more to do with the fact that you’re acting like gender has two teams, Men vs Women, and you are very graciously allowing us to be a part of The Good Team (which definitely has no problems with how trans women are treated, historically (hint: this is sarcasm, cis women are as violent and oppressive to trans women as cis men are)) even though we were born in the disgusting Male Side. we don’t take too kindly to that.

#intersection

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"Rent should be no more than 30% of household income" is a really funny and roundabout way to say "property owners as a class are entitled to 30% of gross wages"

#socialism

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I refuse to reblog callout posts because I'm a prison abolitionist

#intersection

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Worms : It's a Wonderful Life :: Germs : It's a Genderful Life

#not left

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Sincere question: is it possible that always focusing on the same guy whenever these callouts happen, even though to my knowledge he's not usually the one actually behind them, might be kind of a racist thing.

I might have my details wrong

no lol

#intersection

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tyler neotrances/ardourie is a smol bean 20 year-old minor who haplessly smears a random transfem as a pedophile every month. he can't help it, he just has to. it's to combat racism

#intersection

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The fact that maia "literally leaked the no-fly list" crimew keeps getting wrapped into this insane callout post bullshit over fandom fuckery and imaginary pedo ring conspiracy theory bullshit by Tumblr's most radical genderfag kweers is insane. Fucking joke of a website.

#intersection

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just noticed that the tumblr report function has removed the option to report someone who is not yourself being harrassed, while having added the option to report someone for ban evasion. surely, this change has no ties to the mass harrassment campaigns against transfeminine users on this site that said users and their supporters would like to report, and which have led to transfem users getting mass reported themselves to the point of fraudulent bans /s

#intersection

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its so funny when people are like "omg she's just using her status as a trans woman as a shield against criticism!". hey check out myawesome magnetic shield that attracts every bullet in a 100 mile radius

#intersection

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You can download the report here

Some of the testimonies:

#socialism

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After i came out as trans i had a few friends say they'd always suspected.

I know they were trying to be supportive, but part of me wanted to shake them and demand to know why they never said anything.

I figured out what i am in high school and promptly buried it as well as i could.

I suffered alone with this for over a decade, convinced i could never tell anyone the truth for as long as i lived. I did awful things to my psyche to maintain the lie.

And you knew? You saw my suffering and said nothing?

Fuck the trans prime directive bullshit. Who does it help when you treat my existence as something unspeakable?

Why do we have to suffer through this alone?

#intersection

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#not left

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Just reached a line in my re-read of Red Dwarf that would make a great little Stellaris anomaly. Thought you'd enjoy imagining it as an anomaly too.

"There was, thankfully, nearly 2000 gallons of irradiated cow's milk, and Lister had insisted the dog's milk be flushed out into the vacuum of space, where it had instantly frozen, leaving a huge dog-milk asteroid for some future species to ponder over."

I do enjoy that :) thanks

#not left