radical statement here but people in red states aren’t subhuman and they don’t deserve to suffer and die because they have shitty state governments

also telling them to “just move” is not useful

move? and go where, bitch? rent is $300 in rural NC

went to a discussion led by elliot page earlier today and there were many good things said but at one point the other presenter asked him "what's a cool thing about yourself that has nothing to do with being trans?" and he said "uhh this is all I've got going for me" and then paused before adding "if anyone has three oranges, I can juggle"

The correction is killing me

the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

#you have to know the rules so you can break them with intention and precision#otherwise your work will never be truly transformative

literally the first step in jazz is to get the original piece down, that's the only way you can riff in a way that works

One of those ‘pick two pills’ things but it’s things I actually want

*president, vice president, secretary, or treasurer- or your schools equivalent to these

reblog for reach/bigger sample size!!

nobody freak out but im about to start generating some large translucent red circles upon the floor to indicate an incoming AOE attack

You show up for your first day at Copyright-Free Magic School. As you're going through orientation, you're informed that all new students get a school-assigned familiar that they are responsible for housing and maintaining. The staff member assures you that your assigned familiar is appropriately chosen and reflects you in some way.

Spin this to find out yours. (Remember, you are responsible for maintaining this familiar in your dorm room.)

I commissioned this gorgeous art of my favorite book from @samglyph, you can find their ko-fi here!

In 2011 an elderly german trans woman filed a lawsuit regarding the Transsexuellengesetz (TSG) that regulated change of civil status and name for trans people. It required you (among other things) to get two indepedent psychological evaluations, to have had genital surgery and to be "provably" sterile. The trans woman filing the lawsuit had planned to enter a civil partnership with her partner, a woman, which would have been impossible at the time; they would have had to marry (which was a purely heterosexual thing back then I swear I'm not old) with her deadname and everything in the register. The lawsuit concerned the fact that due to her health, getting surgery was out of the question for her. The german constitutional court ruled the requirements of having to have had surgery and being sterile unconstitutional discriminatory, struck them from the law and advised the law makers to draft up a new law. All's well that ends well, right?

Well, at this point I would like to point out, that, apparently, according to that reasoning, requiring trans people by law to be sterile was not thought to be discriminatory against trans people as such, but only against those who would not be able to be permanently sterilized.

Anyway, the court demanded a new law to be put in place, and nothing happened for 12 years. Only last year a new law (the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, self determination law) was drafted and finally implemented this year, in 2024.

At this point I should probably mention that these laws exlusively regulate name change (which in germany is much more difficult than a lot of other places) and civil status, not medical transition. Regulating medical transition is up to health care providers and health insurances, which in general tend to sort of follow international standards. So in general, if you want to get on hormones the official way, you need a diagnosis that until the implementation of the ICD 11 on January 1st 2022 was called Transsexualismus MzF/FzM (Transsexualism MtF/FtM) and was categorized as a personality disorder. Ironically, often psychologists that specialize in trans people tend to immediately slap you with the diagnosis when they find out that you're desperate enough to DIY, because from their perspective it's of course safer to take hormones under supervision, though that really depends on how sympathetic your psychologist is. Anyway, being trans used to be a personality disorder until two years ago.

So, back to the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. The core of the self determination law is basically the abolishment of the psychologicalizing and medical requirements to change your name and civil status, which is good. However. It guarantees much less rights than the TSG once that process is over.

Both laws, in theory, make it a finable offense to reveal a trans persons trans status, if the person in question has changed their name and sex entry through the respectuve law. But the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, while raising the fine, undermines this in several ways. In the draft of the law was originally a paragraph that required the citizen's centre where you filed for the change to inform every single law enforcement and intelligence agancy of your name change. You know, just in case you're a criminal, and not at all to have the state have lists of trans people. This was struck from the final version, because it wouldn't have lasted a second in court.

What was not struck from the law, however, were a paragraph specifically targeting refugees, and two paragraphs specifically targeting trans women:

The paragraph targeting refugees is, sadly, an accurate representation of the rising nationalism and racism, and typical in how callously it is implemented in law. If a refugee, or any other foreigner, changes their name and gender per law, it can, up to two months after fact, be nullified, if the person is about to get deported. In my opinion this is obviously done to stop appeals against deportation that are based on the fact that it is illegal to deport a person to a country that is currently persecuting a group that that person belongs to, by detransitioning them on paper (though I am not a lawyer and thus can't say for sure, but like it is extremely blatant).

There is another paragraph that is entitled "effects of changing name and entry of sex" that explicitly says that the legal sex and name are required to be used in legal relations but not in matters concerning sports, health and more general, the body. A lot of ink has been spilled about how just assuming that a person on HRT will react to every medical problem and intervention in the same way as a perisex cis person who had been assigned the same gender at birth can be very dangerous, so I won't rehash that argument here. It gets worse, though. The paragraph also states that the Hausrecht (I'm not sure how to translate this as I'm not the lawyer, but among other things it's the right of the owner business or place to manage who is allowed to attend and how they have to behave etc etc) is unaffected by the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz and completely up to the individual/organization, basically implying that discrimination against trans people is not discrimination. The draft of the law comes with a paper expanding on the reasoning of the law. The part that justifies that section talks exclusively about trans women. The most prominent example uses a hypothetical women's sauna and states that the law justifies banning trans women from establishments like this, and women's shelters, of course. Explicitly mentioned is a legal reasoning called "desire for protection of the intimate personal realm and personal security". Just to be clear: this is the german legislative authority explicitly saying that the mere presence of a trans woman ought to be treated like the presence of someone who has made actionable threatened or harassed you. The paragraph itself can be employed against all trans people equally, but the official reasoning is to keep trans women out of women's spaces, and, because of how it is worded, public spaces as well.

The other paragraph that singles out trans women concerns military service: if you change your sex entry within two months before a war breaks out, it will be nullified if that nullification makes you male and thus draftable. It doesn't say whether trans men will be drafted, though. In this case transitioning to be a woman or to be divers (if you were wondering, the three legal genders: male, female, diverse), is explicitly cast as a threat to the safety and orderly functioning of the state. By transitioning I am depriving the state of cannonfodder and thereby threatening its very security.

People on tumblr and twitter have a tendency to talk about gender and identity as completely divorced from reality. Whether I chose to identify as a trans woman or not, psychologists diagnosed me with transsexualism anyway. I never had a choice about this. If somebody has a problem with me in public the german state, with the new law, explicitly and actively encourages them to get the people responsible for the space in question to remove me from it, simply for existing. And it encourages those people in positions of authority to accommodate them. To be trite, I have to consider this every fucking single time I take a piss in a public toilet, which is basically every time I have to be outside for longer than like 2 hours, because even I have to hydrate sometimes. The number of trans women that outright refuse to go see a doctor for almost anything, even unrelated to the law, just because of how they are being treated, is distressingly high. For a lot of us there just doesn't seem to be a point.

In 2021 an iranian trans woman, Ella, commited suicide by lighting herself on fire at the Alexanderplatz. She had been living in germany since 2015. Nazis regularly deface her grave. If you look at the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz you can see the nationalist, racist and transmisogynist attitudes that led to her death enshrined in law.

It's not like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz is all bad, but I find it hard to appreciate its good point. If you compare it to the old TSG, what sticks out to me is that the TSG required sterilization in addition to surgery and everything. Maybe I'm just so fixated on that because everybody is usually (and with good reason) exclusively talking about the two expert evaluations that were required, quite expensive, and paved the way for a lot of harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards trans people. But in my opinion the sterilization reflects an old attitude towards queer people: eugenics. We should not have children or families. The law was implemented by the BRD in 1981, but you can clearly still see the underlying logic inherited from the early pseudo-scientific ideologies that also motivated the nazis: the so called "bloodline" should be kept clean. Sorry. I hate myself for typing out these words. There could also be a different justification for it, namely to guarantee the integrity of the sexes as distinct categories, but that is not less eugenicist, as it too is about encouraging patrilinear, heterosexual reproduction and discouraging everything else and sterilizing anybody who doesn't fit that pattern. But two things can be true at the same time.

The Selbstbestimmungsgesetz in contrast does not attempt to regulate reproduction as far as I remember (though laws about gay and lesbian parenthood are still extremely restrictive). Instead it seems to be driven by culture war concerns: open hostility towards refugees and a lot of attention paid to the supposed dangers trans people in general and trans women in particular pose to society. Pandering to neo-fascists and TERFs, who decry the law as an evil, decadent poisoning of society anyway.

WAS IST DENN HEUTE LOS ZUM FICK

Hey Germany, this is like the 15th ominous shitpost I see, this is starting to scare me! I don’t understand german or german politics. Can anyone tell me what’s going on? French newspaper are making it sound like a mild thing, like oh, the coalition isn’t working, let’s have early elections. But that’s NOT the vibe I’m getting from all the memes!!

uhfedsjs no thats basically it. chancellor fired the finance minister and wants to seek a vote of confidence in january to make way for elections by march. the 3-way coalition is unpopular and this whole breakdown isn't a huge surprise, but announcing it on the night after trump's re-election is just insane timing. besides, only 2 months ago the afd (far right party) became the first party of its kind to win a state election since the nazi era, and they're polling second nationally at the moment, so new elections sound more than a little scary right now

@the-bibrarian important context: the finance minister is a neoliberal asshole who for 3 years has done his best to sabotage the coalition and constantly refuses to compromise or cooperate. He wants tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and absolutely does not want money going to things like retirement benefits, healthcare, defense/support for Ukraine and so on. He's smug, arrogant and overall just insufferable. Seeing him being fired for the first time in his life was immensely satisfying (despite the likely consequences).

UPDATE:

It has been revealed that the FDP (neoliberal party) and in particular ex finance minister Christian Lindner have deliberately caused the government to fall apart. They've been planning this since September. The original plan was to wait until Friday (the firing happened on Wednesday), when chancellor Olaf Scholz would have been out of the country for an EU function. The FDP would then have withdrawn their ministers from the government and made it all fall apart; and because it would have been difficult for Scholz to react from out of the country, they would have gotten to control the narrative. Scholz apparently heard rumors about this and what happened on Wednesday was a last-second attempt at damage control; if the government had to fail, at least it would be on the chancellor's terms.

The FDP did this because the governing coalition is unpopular and detrimental to them in particular, to a point where they have to worry about not making it into the new parliament at all.

Should I remind you that, historically, extremist and antidemocratic actors are the ones benefitting most from political instabilitiy.

Christian Lindner plotted to overthrow the government and put our democracy in jeopardy because his party is doing bad in polls.

SOURCE: Zeit.de, unpaywalled article here

my friends held an intervention for me to "stop asking intimidately specific questions". i tried to explain that i am just a good listener but there is apparently "a line between follow-up questions during small talk and interrogation tactics that gets crossed sometimes". turns out my curious nature is "scaring the hoes"

when i asked for examples i was told that "do you think your tendency to show appreciation through restoration is part of a greater life philosophy or is that coincidental?" and "is your communication with allied forces satellite or radar based and is it vurnerable to cyber attacks?" are apparently "inappropriate questions to ask someone you just met at a club". but i disagree. as if you wouldn't be a little bit curious about the answer? yeah that's what i thought

[ID: question by anonymous: did they answer the question though ///end ID]

the navy officer i asked about cyber attacks did answer my question very thoroughly. he also answered other questions such as "when refueling on sea, which boat is the primary course holder?" and "would switching to another government branch affect your retirement benefits?" and generally provided a lot of information over the course of a fascinating hour that as a former government employee myself i am pretty sure he should not have told me. but i also think he would have told me his social security number if i asked nicely (i didn't, I was busy learning about the tactical advantages of speedboats).

the guy obsessed with boat refurbishment that i asked about his tendency towards preservation gave me a really haunted look, said "holy fuck" and then after a moment of consideration "i think i am too drunk. i'm going home" and proceeded to leave. in my defense, it was well and truly meant as genuine curiosity and not as the attempt at psychological warfare it turned out to be. he unfortunately did not answer my question.

...he was also the catalyst for the intervention i received.

OP your friends are 100% wrong and “that person at the bar who asks you the question that makes you rethink your whole life because they Actually Listened” is a long, storied and honourable place in the pantheon of strangers you will meet. Sounds like you’re doing a bang up job, well done.

its almost 2025 we HAVE to do something about music

we have to fuck it

we have to fuck it

we have to fuck it

I'm curious...

Reblog to make the post go 'round and all that. Maybe explain in the tags or replies why you're using the theme you're using if you want.

And if you're not aware yet, you can change your theme in the Settings>Dashboard section.