#IMMIGRANTS!!! THIS WOMAN IS AN IMMIGRANT

[chicago-geniza]

OK @amarocit I did, unfortunately, read the article, and the answer is she does not think we breed humans like cats per se but she does

Learn her mother was a Holocaust survivor at age 34 when her parents divorce

Have an identity crisis because "Jewishness is inherited matrilineally," and her parents had "baptized a Jewish baby," despite her mother's conversion, implying like. An ontological quantum of Jewishness stored in maternal RNA or something

Have another identity crisis when her mother takes ethnicity and religion separately and says at most she is half-Jewish (ethnically) and it doesn't count (halakhically, religiously) because she was raised Catholic, baptized, and her mom converted

Her cats offer consolation in this trying time

She describes her Jewish heritage as a "motley pedigree" and compares it to her cats, who are half-Burmese and half-mutt

She begins genealogy research. One cat dies. For some reason she feels compelled to get a "real, honest-to-goodness Burmese cat," adds some Orientalist flourish about Myanmar, describes the cat as "imperious"

Veering uncomfortably close to race science & fin-de-siecle anthropology language about closed Jewish communities/lack of intermarriage here, Krysia

She needs to prove her Jewishness to herself by way of Ancestry dot com

This is the most Polish article on the planet

Whatever the fuck this is:

Fin

#I'm writing an essay about this awful article and how it is uh. Very reflective of Poles who find out about #Jewish ancestry etc etc etc #How it ties into national historical Discourse comma politics personal identity and also #IMMIGRANTS!!! THIS WOMAN IS AN IMMIGRANT #it's all there #assimilation and its discontents #Her mom even kept her gentile nom de guerre - something I wrote about assimilated Polish Jews doing

[notbecauseofvictories]

My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.

She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?

(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)

And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.

(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)

But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.

It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.

By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.

And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.

It might be the most human impulse we have.

#I of course went on a tangent about henry darger because I love darger and he was also pulling/tracing/finding inspiration in local ads #I was also thinking of the scenes in banshees of inisherin where gleeson plays the fiddle in the bar and the woman sings #clearly not professional! nowhere near mozart. #but you know what? those people are making art. they are engaged in the most human thing you can possibly do #my mother once talked about how when she was growing up in the chicago area the irish immigrants would sing and play at parties #and her mother (one generation removed from immigration) would scoff #because who did they think they were! they weren't professionals. they were making a spectacle of themselves. #''and then it died out. no one sings and plays at parties anymore'' she said quietly #celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge

[inkskinned]

Genuine question, because I don't know a lot about the topic and you're:

If someone identifies as non-binary and genderfluid, which from what I've gathered means something like "human" instead of male or female, doesn't that imply that women are not humans , like whole complete people with richer inner lives? And why is a dislike for (performative) femininity combined with a preference for things that are stereotypically associated with maleness an indicator that one is genderfluid? Does that mean a woman is only a woman if she loves to do make-up, wants to be a mother, only wears skirts, dresses and high heels, shaves daily, is always kind and never angry, has long hair, hates to get dirty and so on? Because I have never met a woman who's exactly like that in my life, but plenty who liked gaming, sports, being loud, opposed to shaving & make-up, who wore pants every day.

I do not believe this is a genuine question, but I'll answer it as if it was, just in case other people have to deal with this, and would like someone who is patient enough to give them the words. The argument you're making here is something that already stems from a deep logical fallacy in the beginning argument. You assume "If you are neither A nor B, and instead C, you think that A cannot be C."

It is a logical fallacy to say "X implies Y" when it does not do so. By this logic, I also believe men are not human. By this logic, I believe only nb people are human.

Some - but not all - rectangles are squares. Some - but not all - animals are dogs. Some humans are nb.

I have given no information about how I present, nor my interests. I am not going to give you that information, because it's irrelevant. What I need you to understand is that, again, you are making the incorrect logical assumption that "If a person dislikes X and likes Y, they must be Z." For all you know, I dislike performative masculinity and like stereotypically feminine preferences.

You then assume your own statement is correct and move forward with your logic as if I had debated you. This is not a "genuine question" about how nb people work, this is assuming being nb is based on a series of preferences.

As a teacher, I do think it's important to tell you: even if this is coming from a genuinely confused place: you are conducting bad research. You begin with an inherently flawed question, as it biased and assumes a position I must defend against - "why don't you see women as people?" Then you make logical conclusions about my personhood and experiences and ask inflammatory questions as if you were debating me, which I am not interested in doing.

If you were my student, and genuinely curious about how nb people see gender, I'd have no trouble with you asking an out nb content creator. If you're really trying to collect information, ask honestly, without personal bias. Here's some examples of what a genuine question would have looked like: - Do your preferences play into your gender identity? - How has being nb informed how you see femininity and masculinity? - What tools do you use to express your gender?

You are mistaking gender expression and gender roles as being part of my identity.

You are most crucially mistaking being nonbinary as being part of the binary and having to exist "in opposition" to other genders in order for it to "make sense". One of the most freeing things about realizing I was nb is that I don't exist in opposition to anything - and also that all gender works similarly.

Gender is a describing word, and this can be confusing for some people. In general, we tend to learn describing words in binary - short/tall, old/young, kind/mean. Therefore, there are (many) people who think - feminine/masculine must be oppositional. Gender is also a feeling word - and again, these are words that can be taught in opposition to each other. Hungry/sated, happy/sad, feminine/masculine.

But because gender is such a rare type of word - feeling and describing - it exists outside of binary. It exists more like art exists.

Green can exist in opposition to red, but it also just exists as its own color. Blue is a part of green, but it is also a part of yellow - blue is still its own color, and yellow is still its own color, and green is still its own color. One painting titled "still-life with fruit" may be a series of vague colors and boxes. Another may be a hyper-realistic singular plum. They are both how the artist expresses their personal vision of the fruit. They might even be by the same artist! And although we may compare them, they are not opposites.

One song by Hozier is not in opposition to one song by Britney Spears. They are different styles, not oppositional styles. You may choose to see them as oppositional - but that is your personal opinion, and not fact. And some people may feel and experience those songs as being actually incredibly in-line with each other.

This is why we say: gender is a spectrum. That all gender roles are made up. Personality, interests, and experiences may shape how someone sees and feels their gender, but it does not define how they see and feel their gender.

When we question gender roles and gender expression like this, it tends to make people upset. People like me tend to make people upset. So much bigotry is based on the lie that "feminine" and "masculine" are oppositional. Opposition is rigid and important - it keeps white hegemonic structures in power. I don't have time or space in this post to talk about how rigid gender roles/enforced gender expression rules are not just sexist but also racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, and bigoted; but I really recommend you do the research on how disruption of the gender binary might put the patriarchy at risk.

The thing you feel trapped by - that "being a woman" is a complicated series of rules - is exactly the kind of thing a nonbinary person would agree with you about. We have to fight hard to be recognized for what is a basic truth about our identity - of course we don't believe that gender expression is equivalent to gender identity.

And truth be told... I think you kind of knew that. I think you kind of knew all of this. I am going to hope that you are young. I'll tell you this: I was raised by someone who was a far-right extremist catholic asshole. I certainly didn't have the research/knowledge/exposure to interrogate this stuff honestly until I was probably 23.

I am so much happier now. I hope one day you get the same opportunities as I had. I hope you choose to move away from bigotry.

love u anyway. all this in kindness only.

#to be deleted #do i accidentally give my short lesson on gender here? yeah #<3 in this u can tell exactly the age that i taught for 15 years lmao #but also like. #yeah you got me.... i have never met a woman before and i totally think women are only fembots #meanwhile every person who has ever read my writing: #every 3rd week this bitch is on her bullshit about how unfair gender rules for women are #this is actually more to help other nb people whom i KNOW get questions like this #than it is to inform the anon #who like v clearly is not doing this in good faith #this is just like the 10th one i got like this #that first logical jump of - you think ur not male or female but human so therefore #women aren't people #was just SO wild .... like #yeah!!! that's totally a normal thing to assume! #do you think people who are like ''well yeah im from america #but i wouldnt consider myself to be from any particular state'' #are actually saying ''i don't think states are american'' #hell when i say #im cuban but i obvi grew up in america im just the daughter of an immigrant #nobody is like -- well. raquel. that means u think no americans live in cuba huh #anyway love u bye #okay to reblog #!! #love u

[silvyavan]

Public Service Announcement

Charlotte and Yami are beauty and the beast, yes, but it is CHARLOTTE who is the BEAST. She is the one who is cursed, and the one who causes an incident from said curse, and the one dependent on roses, and the one who is saved in the last minute by the beauty through understanding her.

Yami is the beauty, the man with a head as dense as a brick and tits as thick as pound cake. Put some respect in his name and stop making him the beast when he is, in fact, the beauty.

#black clover #black clover manga #this is the psa because i have beef with much of bc shipping both twitter and tumblr sphere wise #but nowhere near as bad as how ive seen the racist stereotypes play into yamichar #yami is not the beast i beg yall crack open a classical reading of beauty and the beast #charlotte is in fact the beast and if you cant admit it then i seriously need you to reread the series #she is the definition of petty and unhinged white woman and yami gets a pass because charlotte sees that he dgaf about her status or beauty #this is the gospel i preach and i beg yall to take a step back and wonder why yall are so ready to put the immigrant guy in the beast role #when Charlotte is the one who fits it thematically #charlotte roselei #yami sukehiro #yamichar #silv writes

[africanrefugeeswelcome]

A German woman dedicated to the black cause

#germany #berlin #german woman #german girl #blond girl #refugees welcome #blacklivesmatter #africanrefugees #africanrefugeeswelcome #african immigrants welcome #end sars #protest

[sneakydraws]

Since that gothic anthy piece I've been thinking about a whole gothic rgu au... I'd really have to dig in deeper into indian-british history in order to develop this further (and to dress everyone more accurately) but I'm tentatively placing this in the 1830s... Akio could be an indian nobleman who worked with/for the east india company... Maybe did some shady stuff for it and was rewarded with a lavish mansion in the uk... Utena is some plucky orphaned girl who becomes his protégé... Anthy is the woman hidden away in the attic... But utena glimpses her at night... Mrs rochester core...

#revolutionary girl utena #akio ohtori #utena tenjou #anthy himemiya #this is just a rough proof of concept i could see some variations too #like maybe anthy instead of being hidden away is posed as akios servant and utena finds out later they're siblings #and maybe akio instead of immigrating from India himself is the son of someone who did #or the son of a british officer and an indian woman #the old decaying mansion is a gothic staple so itd fit more if it wasnt new and built for an upstart #and maybe it could be the 1850s instead of the 1830s to coincide with indian rebellion against colonial rule #and maybe utena could be a servant akio seduces so its more a la jane eyre #and maybe utena is in mens clothes rather than just vaguely masculinised womens clothes...... #much to ponder! but i think the base concept is solid #since holding onto past glory and unnerving architecture and incest are such big staples of gothic fiction #and since the presence of indian characters would make sense in Victorian england

[everythingsinred]

can we PLEASE stop tolerating the "god forbid women do anything" jokes when it comes to ACTUAL nonfictional atrocities. its not funny when youre talking abt real life murder, abuse, and exploitation and im tired of seeing it

#toxic femininity and all that.... #this is why its dangerous to put women in automatic 'assumed victim' positions #and men in automatic 'assumed perpetrator' positions #the whole men are bad women are victims thing needs to stop rly. #there is no inherent moral value in femininity or masculinity #these jokes make me sick. #woman serial killer murdered x amount of innocent men that shed never met before! and the internet decides shes a girl boss #not to mention the racial aspect that often goes into it w white women killers often targeting immigrant men #i hate the internet i hate radical feminists who blindly support every horrible thing every woman has ever done. i dont get it #little anya things #i just unfollow every single blog that posts anything that sounds like that lmao. good bye

[river-of-wine]

A bonus Molly sketch from my gilded cage things! Given the circumstances for Molly in particular during chapter 4 and the fact that Dutch being the way he is would likely just use her as an accessory for the evening I can’t imagine her having a good time, but at least the dress is pretty

#rdr2 #molly o’shea #I’ve thought about this a lot #she would not get a second away from him I’m sure #he can’t stand her even breathing the wrong way around him at that point but having a woman with him would make him seem less suspicious #which is a big thing during that mission #so molly would just be hanging onto his arm all evening unable to go anywhere or speak to anyone by herself #I’d get into how she would also not be received well by many people there especially if she approached them alone #because she is Irish and these are a bunch of rich people and it is 1899 #I have a lot to say about the importance of molly being an Irish immigrant as an Irish person myself #but I don’t feel like giving a history lesson here #so to condense my thoughts a little molly would have been stuck with Dutch the entire evening #surrounded by people who probably have an inherent dislike for her once they hear her speak #or ignore her in favour of whatever Dutch is saying #which is pretty similar to how the gang already treats her #so even once she finally leaves camp it’s just the same #there is more I could say especially regarding the dress itself but that’s too long to write here #fanart #digital art #sketches #my art

[cookinguptales]

now that I'm done imagining a jar of peanut butter, can I just say that I love that Shane and Ryan have shifted away from traditional true crime to just shootin' the shit about weird-ass mysteries?

I always liked the "let's talk about weird mysteries" aspect of buzzfeed unsolved, but being real with you, I'm uncomfortable with true crime and the culture surrounding it. like... as someone who lost a loved one to a violent (and temporarily unsolved) crime, I've seen firsthand how internet theorizing can make a traumatizing time even harder and like. it's fucking rough, man.

I get that it makes money and all (which... is a whole other can of worms) but when you view human suffering as entertainment, it's so easy to forget about the real people who will actually be affected by what's put out there on the internet.

so I'm happy that Shane and Ryan seem to be leaning a lot more into "wow, some unhinged shit happened! how fucked up is that?" on mystery files. more of this, please!!

#watcher #mystery files #also like... anyone can make money off true crime if they're charismatic enough #which means that often those narratives end up mirroring real-life prejudices #I remember when my friend died people online were accusing his wife of doing it #solely because she was an immigrant #people kept talking about her shady accent and how she probably married him for his money and to get a green card or whatever #and how her wording was sometimes confusing so she must be lying #what money??? number one #she was ESL number two #but also this woman literally watched her husband bleed out and people all over the world were accusing her of murdering him #they figured out what happened later (shocker she was telling the truth the whole time) but it was so heartbreaking to watch #I hate that people feel entitled to the worst moments of strangers' lives y'know? #and to make MONEY off that... #bruh if someone ever tries to fucking make money off my murder while putting on makeup or whatever #I will haunt the fuck out of them #I don't even know if I believe in curses but I'll find a fucking way

[lovinnelily]

Y'all do know you can't make Jason be NOT white without changing his whole character, right?

For other characters, yes, because their physical appearance are not that influential in their story, on how they are viewed by people, on their personality formation — you can have a black/asian/indigenous/arab/brown/latino/etc Nico and yes, the hate he gets will have a undertone of racism but at the same time nothing significant on his story, motivation or personality will need to change. This is also true for other characters: Clarisse risks repeating the "aggressive WoC" stereotype but the character itself doesn't change.

This isn't true for Jason, whose main character trait is how he is perceived by others and how he showcases himself to others based on that perception. (specially with how little effort Riordan put on him besides making him perfect-er Percy who's somehow also weaker and less important than him).

Let's not pretend a black, Arab, indigenous, Asian, Latin man, etc, in the USA would ever be treated with the universal reverence Jason gets from New Roma, you can't have the illusion of perfection and most of all, of invincibility they have about him when you see him suffering racism or xenophobia in the middle of a mission. Nothing in his life has ever gone wrong, that's his image, destined to be king, he is supposed to have no weakness on his peers eyes.

He is not trying to prove people wrong, he is trying to prove them right; he isn't worthy despite their prejudice, on the contrary, he only tried to make himself worthy to fulfill their expectations. He can't be a woman or an immigrant or have a visible disability or any other thing that strays him from a perfect ideal by western society standards, and be that same character.

#Different from the other white character in the series he was never questioned or doubted #There's a presumption of perfection with no exceptions that society doesn't give to us (women poc immigrants visible minorities in general) #His privilege (handsome white man with no visible disability son of Zeus etc) also prevented anyone from worrying for his well being #This illusion/expectation of him having no weakness/being untouchable pushes himself too far and clouds his judgment. #I headcanon he didn't even consider the possibility of myopia because that wouldn't fit Jason Grace Son of Jupiter so it wasn't an option #And you think it'd be the same character after facing racism? Because ain't no way he'd be praetor without going through racism #I think I'd love him nonetheless since I'm very weak to the whole golden boy tearing himself to save the world but it'd be a new character #jason grace #I know racism in USA is different from here but I know how different a “non-racist” white person treats me and treats my white friends #Also for him to not be an entirely different character if PoC would be incredibly disrespectful and racist on its own #It would fail to recognize the difference in how we are read (and written). I hate that a lot. #I remember that when Cody told Brandi “I see no color” she told him “then you don't see me” and that's so fucking striking #We ARE different. treated differently. if you act like you don't see it then you also turn a blind eye to the violence that comes from it #This is straying from my point I got a bit heated banalization of things I care about usually does that to me #Point is please don't change Jason on the very few things that man actually bothered writing about him #I actually think this is true about Octavian too. A lot of what he is allowed to do would not be possible if he weren't a white man. #Same for Rachel Elizabeth Dare. I mean you can work around making her poc but it will truly be pushing A LOT #Let's put it this way: a woc doing a street performance is perceived very differently from a white woman doing a street performance. #Specially in the eyes of cops #Pjo

[cjbolan]

At the risk of projecting … are Mary P and Jake technically immigrants? Book 3 Mary’s subplot is eerily reminiscent of women who marry outside their culture then immigrate to their spouse’s country and often struggle to assimilate.

Later Jake and Mary P move to a human town. It’s possible Jake faced similar struggles adapting to life with a different species.

#yet another reason Mary P reminds me so much of my own mom #and my grandma for that matter #Emily Windsnap was written by a woman and IT SHOWS #Liz Kessler #Emily Windsnap and the castle in the mist #middle grade fiction #middle grade books #books #immigration

[lattebiscotti]

why am i expected to hold these men's hands at work while i have to also do my job and theirs and still been asked to do more!!!!!!

#like of course as a woman and as an immigrant i am held at a different standard than men. i am aware of that. #some days i am more aware than others #diocane lo posso dire

[olive-garden-hoe]

My expressions of affection are getting out of hand

While watching rottmnt with my wonderful patient mom I turned to her and said “I want to chew them up and put them in a blender so I can drink them and I will kiss this creator in the lips the second I meet them”

She gently pat my arm and asked if I wanted to turn it off

#just neurodivergent things #child of immigrants #I meant it positively #but I can’t say (affectionate)/pos to my fucking mom #love her but poor woman CANNOT understand #still appreciate the efforts tho don’t get me wrong #support your child’s hyperfixation/special interest #rise of the tmnt #rottmnt #tmnt 2012 #actually neurodivergent #actually neurodiverse #living with adhd #adhd problems

[schnuffel-danny]

you can tell Vlad is the child of an immigrant mother because there's something deeply wrong with him

#children of immigrant moms deserve financial compensation stg #being the child of an immigrant woman should count as a diagnosis I am not kidding #(speaking from experience)

[liskantope]

Since I have a continuing history of keeping up with IDW-ish podcasters on YouTube (Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, etc.) who occasionally do episodes on trans issues as well as a spotty history of clicking on videos with clips of Jordan Peterson, the algorithm recommends a lot of videos on "transgenderism" and "the trans debate" and so on to me. A noticeable and (to my thinking) really concerning aspect of the whole set of issues is how reliably anyone who expresses interest in debating or even critically discussing trans issues is, um, on one general side of them, and how little debating or critical discussion there seems to be available. I avoid clicking on videos with titles involving "transgenderism" or "transgender ideology" or "the trans debate" and other tribal buzzwords for a bunch of reasons, but I decided to make an exception the other day when I saw a video entitled "DEBATE: does transgender ideology threaten liberal values?" (a terribly-phrased question, like most debate questions are) because it appeared to be... an actual debate! With people on both sides showing up! (Though apparently not among the audience, which by the sound of it was entirely on the anti-trans side.)

So of course, as I should have fully expected, this debate only supported my conviction that the rhetoric of nearly everyone on all sides of this is just terrible. The only nuanced and halfway decent debater here was Peter Tatchell (on the trans rights side), and some of even his arguments were used to catch him in a bind later on (more on that later). The debate as a whole was generally a bit of a -- I can only use the term shitshow here -- with debaters (mainly Freda) interrupting each other, the (seemingly entirely anti-trans) audience heckling the trans-rights debaters, and the somewhat awkward and ineffectual moderator mostly failing to keep everyone in order. Well, what better could I have expected?

Marc Glendening (on the anti-trans-rights side) had less to say than everyone else and was basically just a robot trying to churn out dry legal summaries of the situation and spouting claims about free speech rights being taken away that I find extremely dubious as phrased by him (I don't know too much about what's going on in the UK, but if we took Marc's depictions of the situation at face value, they do not jibe with his teammate Helen's completely lack of inhibition in misgendering Freda in a video-recorded debate!).

Helen Joyce was the only person involved that I was familiar with from before, since many months ago I watched an episode of Coleman Hughes' podcast where he interviewed her, thought she had some reasonable points and liked her overall rational manner of arguing, but lost any sense of her credibility because of her completely unbending and extreme absolutism. YouTube had been recommending me videos with her ever since (I really hate how stubborn the algorithm is), and I had refused up until now to click on anything involving her again. In this debate I saw the same extremist tendencies and genuine TERFiness (up until fairly recently my exposure to TERF ideology was mostly indirect as something people on Tumblr criticized and I was beginning to wonder how much of it was actually out there in force and what it really looks like -- it seems to have plenty of force in the UK and Joyce is probably one of the gentler examples I suppose!) and also saw a rational and dignified approach which I admire but unfortunately didn't lead to actually good arguments. There is plenty of room for rebuttal to Helen's arguments from my perspective, and of course almost none of that material was ever rebutted by the other side, which again doesn't surprise me given how little (in my experience of watching/reading criticisms of, say, JKR's arguments) people on the trans rights side seem to actually directly address certain types of opposing arguments. I can't decide which bothers me more: Helen's repeated comments about how the rest of the debaters went through male puberty and therefore their male voices enabled them to talk over her (easily refuted, mainly in the case of the trans women sitting on the other side, and meanwhile neither of the men ever interrupted or talked over her, but nobody addressed this, and it places Helen across my personal "too borderline-misandristic for me to feel comfortable hanging around her" line), or her claim that those men who do insist on trespassing women-only spaces have proved that they are among the dangerous ones because they don't care about women's boundaries (a very dangerous mentality, and displaying exquisite lack of theory of mind, and again nobody tried to rebut it).

Freda Wallace is... a complete mess, and I think an embarrassment to her cause. She spoke a lot (while delusionally muttering that Helen wouldn't stop talking), and very little of what she had to say comprised actual argumentation but was more of a semi-incoherent jumble of points that often ended in punchlines that seemed to be deliberately phrased into ridiculous and bizarre statements perhaps crafted to be provocative and eliciting scorn from the audience. She frequently interrupted all three of the debaters generally with childish and semi-irrelevant ad hominems, even eventually visibly pissing off her own teammate Peter. Freda appears to be exactly the caricature of aggressive, loud, attention-seeking, obnoxious, shameless, hedonistic, fetishistic trans woman that J. K. Rowling types seem to imagine among trans activists. ("So, when I fuck men, with my female penis, in fetish clubs, it is my choice. It doesn't matter what you think. And those men support Sex Matters, because in public they will, but in private, they'll fuck me [ending in a smug grin]" is... I guess technically a way that someone can talk during a recorded public debate, but maybe shouldn't be recommended? I didn't notice until I read the comments later how a minute or two after that, her teammate Peter repeated tries to get her to stop interrupting, then gently grabs her arm as she lifts her glass of wine again saying, "No more drink.") If the trans-rights organization involved wanted to strengthen transphobia and transmisogyny in particular, they probably could not have chosen a better trans woman to put on their team. There's something to discuss here (although if I tried to develop where I speculatively want to go with this, I might quickly get myself into hot water) about how difficult it seems to be to get a member of the trans community to participate in an event like this, and how it requires the very thickest-skinned type of personality which unfortunately in this case also coincides with the most loud and shameless. (This is a very under-developed and perhaps sloppily-phrased point that I probably shouldn't be leaving in this post!)

As I said earlier, Peter Tatchell, along with many of his arguments, I actually liked; he seems like a pretty cool guy all around. He did get backed into a corner at one point through an audience member's question: he had repeatedly made the argument that excluding male-bodied people from women's shelters because men are more likely to be violent was choosing to treat an entire group based on a generalization and that he was against this on principle (compare to refusing to allow immigration from certain groups because some tiny minority of them is more likely to be dangerous, etc.), and he was asked whether he wasn't generalizing in the exact same way by being in favor of excluding cis men ("all men, as you identify who's a man") from women's spaces. At first Peter seems to misunderstand that the questioner is talking about cis men and be trying to duck the question, but eventually he is backed into acknowledging the question and taking the stance that "people who present as men" should be excluded from women's bathrooms but trans women shouldn't -- a position that sounds quite blatantly transphobic in more than one way by the lights of much of trans activism! Also, Peter's stern coldness in stopping Freda from interrupting him with disagreement during his point about transness showing in people's brains says all we really need to know about his opinion of his own teammate, and I do kind of feel bad for him for having been paired with her, which I imagine was not his choice.

I looked briefly through the comments section to see if there was any discussion of why the video (annoyingly) cuts off abruptly before the end of the event (which wound up mentioned only once that I could see). Never have I seen a sea of comments so 100% skewed in favor of one side of an issue and in one direction: how amazing Helen Joyce is (and with a heap of derogatory and sometimes extremely transmisogynistic comments about Freda Wallace -- they go further than Joyce did by naming her Fred, a few do call her Freda and use feminine pronouns, but in at least one instance someone's use of "her" was "corrected" in a one-word response by another commenter!). It makes me wonder what happens to create a section of hundreds of comments that are literally 100% on one side -- is there a sort of tipping point when one side becomes a strong enough majority that everyone on the other side is just afraid to comment, or gets downvoted to invisibility by the rating system? Either way, this debate strikes me as weak enough on the pro-trans side that trans right activists probably wouldn't want to advertise it on YouTube.

Anyway, very very discouraging for anyone who would like our public discourse on this set of issues to stop being more of a complete mess than the public discourse on pretty much every other contentious social issue has been.

#trans issues #terfs #helen joyce #freda wallace #immigration #trans women are women and freda is a woman #but sorry the validity of “female penis” is going too far for me #and is deliberately provocative like most of freda's language

[maddy-ferguson]

you can't even say leftist white people need to go fuck themselves without someone mansplaining racist voters to you anymore

#just had this happen to me on twitter. what's crazy is i don't even think the guy meant anything by it he's just annoying as hell like do #you think i dont know that poor people vote for them in part because they think the left betrayed them (in 65 years we've had TWO socialist #presidents for a total of...19 years and yes objectively they betrayed the people who voted for them. the last one from 2012 to 2017 had #EVERYTHING the two chambers the regions the cities literally the majority of everything was left-wing and the only good thing that happened #was: gay marriage but not after 10 months of debate where homophobia was rampant. macron was literally his minister of economics. like #awful awful man. anyway) what's very annoying and frankly condescending (to poor people voting for the far-right) is that they also do it #because they're RACIST and xenophobic like respect them enough to acknowledge that it's not an innocent silly mistake the woman that #prompted the tweet that prompted my tweet is 60 years old! she's an adult! she's lived a life! she knows racism is supposed to be bad! #like i'm very sorry that i don't think being poor is a good reason to hate immigrants muslims and people of color and to think we're great #replacing you by literally just being here #(did you know that the great replacement theory comes from the french far right...pas mal non c'est français) #there's something VERY sinister about only thinking about everything with a socioeconomic lens like just because they're poor doesn't mean #they can't be our political enemies lmao #and like i say: brf slt