i don't care how uncomfortable you are around cis men, queer cis men still need places to go, and sometimes, those spaces will be shared with yours. disabled and neurodivergent queer men and queer men of color especially need a place to go. the queer community isn't the "fuck cis men" community. that is the rad fem community. if you think cis men and people who read as cis men are inherently "too scary" or shouldn't be allowed in queer spaces, you joined the wrong community.

additionally: hi, trans woman here. who gets called a cis man by the queers around me pretty consistently. literally no matter what im wearing or doing or what my makeup, nails, clothes look like. trans girls will come up to me and compliment my partner for having such a gnc cis boyfriend. just wanted to say: well i cant say that but im gonna say: dont do this shit.

also it becomes real fucking clear after a while of this that its not even "cis men bad" in their heads, its "anyone im not attracted to is bad" and theyre only attracted to skinny white femme. cis men bad is just a "progressive" label for pushing white supremacist ideals.

not to fucking mention how "cis men bad" forces trans men who could be mistaken for cis to disclose their trans identity. which a cis guy could just lie about anyway so like. whats the end game here are we gonna start doing genital checks or can we all just settle the fuck down and believe that if somebody showed up to the queer event they prolly belong there and its none of our fucking business why

okay last thing, sorta unrelated, but if u never dated a woman with a beard then i think ur a loser and beneath contempt. okay i love you byyyyye

thank you so much for this addition- this is exactly what i was implying when i said that people who "read" as cis men also need safe spaces to go and should never have to disclose their trans or cis status in order to be able to find safety. this mentality disproportionately affects trans women and trans men. this affects trans people way more than it does cis people- people project their idea of what a cis man "looks like" on to whoever they want to without discretion. you summed it up perfectly. thank you

Id also like to add, if it's not a big deal, to not act bad towards people you view as straight men either. There are a million reasons why someone you perceive as a man could be with or interested in people you perceive as women. Trans men, bi men, intersex men, ace/aro men, gender fluid people, trans women being interpreted wrong, non binary people being interpreted wrong, butch women being interpreted wrong, straight guy who loves his queer partner/family/friends, GNC straight guy who can only be safe in queer spaces, it doesn't matter. You cannot no matter what expect people in queer spaces to disclose what "kind" of queer they are just because you don't value them based on appearances.

Also also, being in a queer space while not being hot to you personally is not a reason to act as though they are predatory. Id argue in fact the more conventionally attractive someone is the easier it is for them to get away with abusing others.

Stop calling it women’s healthcare stop calling it women’s healthcare stop calling it women’s healthcare stop calling it women’s healthcare stop calling it women’s healthcare

If you read "maybe it's not helping us if the only thing boys and young men see from equity-seeking spaces is how they, personally, are to blame for everything and we actively hate them and they're garbage, regardless of behaviour, their own experiences/situations/marginalizations, and maybe we need to address that"...

...and you immediately interpret that as "you're telling me I have to prioritize never hurting men's feelings" and so on....

....maybe stop and consider that there are in fact a range of ways to treat people and interact with people and even work for change that include more options than "any criticism at all hurts feelings and is not allowed" and "people who have a characteristic that is more privileged than mine in society can be rightfully subjected to anything I want to do or say to them and I don't have to think about the impact, accuracy or justice of anything I say, ever."

Like there are some other options here. Human communication and consideration allows for a whole range in between these two comical yet so often foregrounded extremes.

Another fascinating facet of this post so far is that people really are inserting quite a lot of . . . .assumptions into what I'm saying.

For instance those who are objecting are really frequently jumping in to talk about white men and while firstly white guys are still potentially subject to class, disability and economic marginalization and can even, you know, be trans and intersex (I as a woman from a professional middle-class home who has her Masters' degree do in fact hold economic, educational and class privilege over a guy with highschool or equivalent who's been working as a stocker for a grocery store his whole life; that's a simple fuckin' fact, my darlin's*), I did not say a damn thing about ethnicity or race in my original post.

That's what I meant when I said "regardless of their own experiences/situations/marginalizations."

"Men" includes disabled men, gay/bi/pan/ace men**, trans men, intersex men, Latino men, Indigenous men, Black men, and I pulled those three out specifically because of current topics but also obviously all other racialized men, a bunch of men I have probably forgot what the categories even are (sorry, it's been a long day, it's not because they aren't important it's because my brain is full), it is a huge fucking tent and they all are, you know: men.

Just another, you know, minor note.

(*it doesn't stop being fucking ablism because the target is a guy.

Nor does it stop being ablism because the guy in question isn't aware that the way the world is fucked so that he has to keep doing work despite agonizing joint/skeletal/muscle pain, so that his print disability fucks up his job prospects, so that his stutter messes with his life, so that . . . . and so on, because he has not realized that this makes him part of a potential solidarity group? Doesn't stop it being marginalization because of disability. Just as a Fucking Tip.)

(**if you fucking start anti-ace discourse here I will just block you. Fuck off.)

Honestly, what's been strange to me about the "how dare you" responses to this post is that they've mostly been denying that this actually happens. People absolutely swearing up down and sideways that nobody (except terfs, they say, in a staggering no-true-scotsman position from people who seem to hate men every bit as much as terfs) is just unloading on men unless they do something wrong! And therefore, this post must be saying that unloading on men is wrong even when they've done something evil!

So is it poor reading comprehension? Do they see "You can't treat men like garbage all the time just because they're men" and "That doesn't mean you have to refrain from criticizing their positions when they're wrong" and smush the two together to arrive at "You can't criticize men even when they're wrong"?

Because otherwise, I am forced to conclude that the response comes from people being livid at the idea that they have to stop treating men like garbage, and their response is to deny that anyone is doing that .........while defending the position that it would, in fact, be okay if they were, because obviously those men deserve it.

Edit: Actually, I went through the angry reblogs and all the sudden it makes sense.

Marytylermoar is, in fact, a radfem. Scrolling well into her blog shows that she often, often posts fairly subtle radfem talking points - most directly anti-kink, but plenty of quieter ones. So she reblogged the post with a nasty comment about how people only yell at men (or, apparently, anyone) when they do bad things.

Feather, as OP, reblogged that take calling it out as wrong.

In a staggering twist of irony, someone else reblogged that particular chain arguing that only TERFs and trauma victims are yelling at men for not having done anything wrong, and accusing OP of hanging out with TERFs. (I don't know if they specifically reblogged it from Marytylermoar, since they've deleted it since.)

I want 50 movies about her

THE BIT WITH THE EMPEROR IS SO GOOD

So, to summarise this case, for those who haven't been paying attention: Indigo is the major bookstore chain in Canada. It's billionaire owner, Heather Reisman (together with her husband, Gerry Schwartz, who's also a dick, but that's not important here) is the founder of a "charity" called the HESEG Foundation, which pays for foreign volunteers in the Israeli Defence Force to settle in Israel after their terms of service is up. Naturally, this attracted major political controversy and calls for boycott after the IDF started its genocide in Gaza last year. Last fall, a group of protesters defaced an Indigo storefront in Toronto with red paint and posters accusing Reisman of funding genocide. This was immediately and near-uniformly decried in the Canadian media as an "antisemitic attack", even though the posters did not even mention Reisman's Jewish heritage. The Toronto Police Department announced that it was investigating it as a "hate crime", and a few days later, 11 protesters, including several university professors, were arrested by more than 70 Toronto police in pre-dawn raids normally reserved for drug busts and organised crime. Since then, all charges were dropped against 4 of them, and the strongest charge, criminal harassment, was dropped against all of them (due, of course, to how utterly, obviously insubstantial it was); meaning that there's a massive, well-publicised trial complete with predawn raids and over 70 police officers, to hold seven people to account for public mischief.

Now it's come out that Reisman spoke to the Toronto police chief twice on the day of the attack, and the defence wants the police chief to testify as to what these conversations were about. They also want the court to order Reisman to produce records as to the exact nature of HESEG's activities. Naturally, her lawyers are now accusing them of trying to turn the trial "into a political soapbox".

Anyways, the long and the short of it is, billionaires can apparently just ring up the chief of police and get predawn raids by over 70 officers conducted in cases of misdemeanour defacement of property. Also, if you're in Canada and you're buying books for anyone this holiday season, for God's sake, get them at an independent bookstore.

Oh, incidentally given that one of the charges is "conspiracy"; a lot of them don't even know each other.

If your vision for the deradicalization of right-wing men begins and ends with "other men telling them that that's gross and to stop it" then I'm sorry, you do not understand how masculinity works.

"Men who hold patriarchal status" and "men who are feminists" are two groups who overlap less than you want them to. I'm sorry. That's not solely because men are so happy with patriarchal status that they don't want to risk it by policing misogyny/queerphobia/racism, It's because being misogynistic, queerphobic, and racist, end expressing other forms of toxic masculinity(and often abusively so) are part of how people establish and maintain patriarchal status. The men who have the ability to stop this via nothing but peer pressure are the very people who are doing it. That's by design. And engaging in feminist intervention is, in and of itself, usually the abrupt end of that status and its associated power to persuade misogynistic men.

Like, I have worked in blue collar jobs as a notably queer person. It was pretty much a constant deluge of verbal abuse. In my experience, most blue collar work environments are exploitative, abusive, and bigoted, and very gleefully so. On the occasions I have spoken up about someone saying something that was super fucking out of line (asking me which of the girls walking by was hottest. We were installing a portable classroom at a middle school), believe it or not, they completely failed to be shamed! Because nobody else on the crew gave a fuck. *I* was the weird one. They ghosted me. A full blown company ghosted me. I suddenly didn't have a job anymore because they just straightforwardly stopped telling me where the next job site was.

Like, this doesn't mean that it's your job to do it, but this vision you have of these big groups of men where everyone is on the fence and there is precisely one shit stirrer who can be shut down by a brave feminist man who can single handedly set the example for all these other guys...you are high. You are describing an "everybody clapped" level absurd scenario. Most of these truly virulent misogynistic guys either have zero friends, because, you know, our society is atomized to fuck, or they are in a group where the feminist guy is actually the weirdo who can be shut down and ostracized much, much easier than the misogynists, because there is no such thing as a man misogynists respect who stands up for women.

You might be saying "well, we're talking about longstanding personal relationships, actually. Like, they need to have to want to spend time with you and then, as a side effect, you can mind control them out of being a threat to us."

Problem with that being:

1: Many feminist men also have no friends, see the atomized society above.

2: Feminist men already stopped hanging out with men who make rape jokes because why the fuck would we want to spend time with them.

3: That isn't just because we respect women so hard. We are in many cases talking about men who are also deeply queerphobic, heirarchical, violent and abusive to other men. What initially drew me to feminism and women was a lack of heirarchical squabbling and constant bullying, and the ability to be openly queer. A lot of men who came to feminism did so because they knew that the patriarchy was not a place they would find success or acceptance. These are not the men who are gonna be able to change right wing minds.

4. Men do not view themselves as a monolith. There is no universal brotherhood of men. The actual meaning of the term "Fragile masculinity" is that men are constantly expected to prove that they are deserving of the status of being a member of their own gender. There are large swathes of men--including most of the men who you'd look to as examples of good, feminist men who you want to undertake this project--who are considered failed men, sissies, f****ts, soyboys, ect. They are. Not. Going. To. Convince. These. Men. Of. Jack. Shit. Much less successfully *shame* them. Jesus.

I know all of this sucks. I know it would be cool to be able to just point at a group and have them be responsible for the work. But nah. It's gonna have to be a societal project, one that will probably outlast all of us. Sorry. The thing you want these men to do is, absolutely, the morally correct thing to do. But presuming that it would be effective is, and once again I am so sorry about this, just ignorance of how these social groups function.

picketing terf conferences is OUT, releasing 6000 live crickets into the audience of a terf conference and watching chaos erupt as everyone scrambles to evacuate is IN

it occurs to me that this sounds like a shitpost if you don't have the context that this is a real thing that actually happened in the uk yesterday

It's such a mervyn peake dead rat poem morning

One of the poems ever.

Matt Yglesias seems to think the only thing for the Democrats to do is to lurch as far to the right as possible and throw trans people under the bus, but I think this is stupid; MAGA candidates not named Trump ran behind their peers, plenty of Democratic policies passed in the form of ballot initiatives, and many Dem candidates outran Harris by at least a little bit. AFAICT the election was genuinely a backlash against incumbency and not a repudiation of Democratic policy positions generally.

Which sucks! But it also implies you shouldn’t screw over members of your core coalition to try to seize ground already firmly occupied by reactionaries. People with reactionary politics will vote for the brand name version, and you run the risk of alienating people who up til now voted for you. The problems liberals have relate predominantly to messaging in a fragmented media environment and the uniquely troubled circumstances of 2024 than they do to an electorate disgusted by trans women in sports or pandering to people who use the phrase “toxic masculinity.”

And LGBT people are a key part of the Democratic coalition now, which is part of what makes MattY's suggestion so ludicrous. (Even aside from the obvious moral reasons that Democrats should support LGBT rights anyways.) That link puts them as voting Democrat at a rate of 86%, levels only exceeded by black women!

Exit polls placed LGBT voters at 8% of the electorate, meaning a little under 7% of ALL American voters are legbutts who consistently vote blue. If the Dems across-the-board lost even half of that, in pursuit of "moderation", then far from helping them, that'd just be another massive, massive handicap. "Dems lose another 4% of the voters" would result in a far redder, even-more Republican-dominated US electoral map.

Source

Like clockwork…

hey in case you didn't know trans inclusive terminology in healthcare is not about protecting peoples feelings, it's to stop insurance companies from going "well it says here that hysterectomies are a procedure performed on WOMEN and you keep insisting that you're a MAN so we do not in fact have to cover that have a nice day and eat shit"

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?

hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

I dye my hair red so that statically speaking more people who want to see me bleeding will talk to me.

"women are tainted by their previous sexual encounters" doesn't become less openly misogynistic just because it's said by a woman btw

this is what shopping for literally all clothes are like if you're at all "plus" size

Let’s fight back and never let people ruin our day!! If they people gets mad about it, That’s on them! Good luck! 🏳️‍⚧️