mouthporn.net
#trans – @marnz on Tumblr
Avatar

take a hike

@marnz / marnz.tumblr.com

J. she/they, 30s, pnw. also known as myownremedy on ao3.
Posts
Avatar
reblogged
sgtjamesrogers
Avatar
catboybiologist

Stockpile HRT now.

Avatar
lesbiantestsubject

To my brothers on T I know this is gonna be harder for you so please listen up:

First, if your doctor is open to it, ask for the 2000mg/10ml vial, you'll need to be careful to keep it clean and free of contamination from the stopper, but the expiration dates will typically be a year plus. Please specify the 10ml vial and not a three month supply, the difference is minimal but important.

Next, have it sent to a busy, understaffed CVS (most of them are busy and understaffed). If your insurance doesn't cover CVS use GoodRx, at time of writing it should be about $50. Our system by default makes us mark the 10ml vial as a 28 day supply regardless of the dosage because we cannot guarantee a beyond use date beyond that (as I said, non-zero chance of contamination, use a 90 degree angle and a alcohol pad every time and you'll be fine). Only the most stickler of pharmacists or technicians are going to bother changing it - if they even know the system workaround to bypass it.

Then, come to refill it the next month. If they marked the first fill as 28 day supply (you can see on your label in the lower right near the price) it will process without any red flags in the system and will again will likely slip by all but the most stickler of pharmacists and techs. If they marked it as something longer just explain that your doctor told you to discard the vial after 28 days per USP guidelines and so you were a good boy and already threw it out, this should work against all but the biggest douchebag of a pharmacist. If that fails and your doctor is cooperative, have them call the pharmacy and authorize an early fill - if that doesn't work try another pharmacy.

If all goes well you'll probably be able to fill two to three vials in a row before anyone starts to question things.

I cannot speak for other pharmacies, but in general retail pharmacy is kind of a shit show right now so a busy store in another chain is also probably going to just go by USP even if their instincts or morals tell them to be jerks about it.

If anyone has any questions or if you need advice on a situation I didn't cover please DM me anytime, or hell send me an anon ask if you're shy. If anyone's insurance requires a non-CVS pharmacy and you can't afford the $50 let me know and I can find a tech at another pharmacy to see if they have any advice that would be relevant to their chain.

To my transfemme sisters, you've got it a little easier. Have your doc send your meds with a 12 month supply to a pharmacy you don't typically use, use GoodRx if you have to, none of the usual drugs in a transfemmes HRT regiment should be extremely expensive. Tell them you're going out of the country in a week or two and would like to purchase the entire year's supply at once. A year's supply of 2mg estradiol tabs taken four times daily (the max dose I've ever seen) is $75 on GoodRx at CVS right now. They'll probably need to order more tabs in but again only the biggest stickers are gonna question it. (You can also send to your usual pharmacy if you don't take any other meds, but I recommend not returning for at least a year just to be on the safe side. It's not illegal, but again you could run into some stickler pharmacist who calls your bluff and refuses further fills or tattles to your doctor or something.)

Again, please please please don't hesitate to send me DMs or asks if you have any questions or need specific advice.

#reblogging in case it is helpful to anyone#resources#reference#trans
Avatar
reblogged
gatheringbones
Avatar
bisexualfemme
Quotes about femme [queer] men in Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, p. 32 & p. 300.
Avatar
samarashoot

[id: “The other femmes – male and female – looked at me differently. As the world beat the stuffing out of us, they tried in every way to protect and nurture our tenderness. My capacity for tenderness was what they’d seen.”

“I ran my fingertips over the dark wood near my thigh. ‘I love them so much, too. But what gets it for me is high femme. It’s funny – it doesn’t matter whether it’s women or men – it’s always high femme that pulls me by the waist and makes me sweat.’”]

#leslie feinberg#stone butch blues#trans#queer#trans history#queer history#queue it
Avatar
reblogged
gatheringbones
Avatar
drakefisher
Let me tell you what femme has meant for me and what it could mean for everyone. Let me stretch the word.
Let's say that femme is dispossessed feminity. It's the femininity of those who aren't allowed to be real women and who have to roll their own feminine gender.
Rolling their own is what cis-femme lesbians did in the fifties. By class and by sexual preference, they were dispossessed of real womanhood. For what woman is complete without money or a man? So they learned how to improvise, how to sew; how to turn a thrift-store sow's ear into a vintage silk purse.
Rolling their own is what contemporary femme dykes do. Invisible in straight spaces and frequently trivialized in queer ones, they must voice their femininity in a way that does not get shouted down or ignored. No easy task.
Rolling their own is what drag queens and trannies do and have always done. For what woman is complete without hairless skin and a cunt? We too learned how to improvise, and when we were mocked as caricatures of real women, we often became skilled caricaturists, owning the insult, engulfing it.
And this is what femme gay men do, too. Dangerously visible in straight space and often ridiculed in gay male space, femme gay men take shit from all sides. The straights dish it to them because they're visible. Second-wave feminists dish it to them because they're both feminine and male, and have thus sinned twice. Other gay men dish it to them for acting like, well, chicks.
What these groups share, aside from a fondness for eyeliner, is the illegitimacy of their femininity. That's how I understand femme: badass, rogue, illegitimate femininity. It's the femininity of those who aren't supposed to be feminine, who aren't allowed to be, but are anyway.
Second-wave feminists used to slander both feminine dykes and transsexual women as "female impersonators." And this is true. What they missed is that female impersonation is what femme is. Femmes can only impersonate real women because we are, by rules beyond our control, not real women. But broke-ass homos, trannies, and drag queens won't be real women until patriarchy is smashed, heterosexism is on its knees, and class counts for nothing. Until then, we are other. Our cleavage is an uncanny valley. And the more passable and invisible we are—the more like real women we find ourselves seeming—the greater our supposed deception.
This sucks. We don't mean to be deceptive. But, like Jessica Rabbit, we're just drawn that way.

— Elizabeth Marston, "Rogue Femininity" from Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman, 2011)

#elizabeth marston#ivan e coyote#to read#femme#trans#queer#this made me feel sooooo full of love for all of the femmes in my life
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
gatheringbones
Avatar
gatheringbones

[“[“So Great Straight White Male Writer 2 said to Great Straight White Male Writer 1: Who is your ideal audience?

And Great Straight White Male Writer 1 said: Everyone in my ideal audience is dead.

And, just when I thought that Great Straight White Male Writer 1 might elaborate, and say something predictable like “my grandmother” or “that elementary school English teacher who taught me everything,” it got worse. Because then he added, “You know, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare”—I’m serious, that’s what he said! Here he was onstage in a gorgeous turn-of-the-century theater with hundreds of people in the audience who had each paid $20 to see him, but no, none of us mattered, it was only about all those long-dead men of the canon.

It’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to literature than questions about audience. Then again, it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to literature than literature.

When we write on our own terms, with all the specificity, nuance, complication, messiness, contradiction, emotion, confusion, weirdness, devastation, wildness and intimacy, when we write against the demand for closure or explication, we write against the canonical imperative, and instead write toward the people who might actually appreciate our work on its own terms. I mean we write toward our selves. We also write toward change. A canon is a cannon is a canon. Wait, don’t shoot me, I’m already dead.

Over and over again we are told that in order to make our work accessible, we have to speak to an imagined center where the terms are still basically straight, white, male, and Christian. When we write on our own terms, and by this I mean when we reject the gatekeepers who tell us we must diminish our work in order for it to matter, we may be kept out of the centers of power and attention, this is for sure. And yet, if writing is what keeps us alive—and I mean this literally—if writing is what allows us to dream, to engage with the world, to say everything that it feels like we cannot say, everything that makes us feel like we might die if we say it, and yet we say it, so we can go on living—if this is what writing means, then we need to write on our own terms, don’t we?”]

#mattilda bernstein sycamore#trans#on writing#to read#I do not think Shakespeare would be reading those guys
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
gatheringbones

[“To be a lesbian can mean erotic desire, sex acts, and political identity. However, I flounder at what this or any other identity means when applied to myself. Identity seems to be a guide to performance, the very thing I have at long last escaped— at least for a time— in my relationships. “Lesbian,” which cannot hope to define all the complexities of my identity, nonetheless may serve as a type of shorthand to represent an aspect of my public performance of self.

As I enter into a relationship with a new woman friend, I begin to experience what it means to be a lesbian— not because I am a lesbian, but because I am performing what passes for lesbian. I am a woman being with another woman in an intimate relationship. As I walk down the street in Albuquerque with my lover, I begin to feel the heat of public scorn, I begin to feel the consequences of simply walking down the street with an arm around my lover. I begin to experience what it is to be a lesbian. I begin to know the real risk of imminent danger to myself and my lover. I begin to know the oppression of presumed immorality, of a hostility that poisons casual encounters for no reason, with no warning.

I could walk down that same street, the one that brought me fear yesterday, by myself, and escape the oppression. The difference is not in who or what I am but in my performance. Yesterday I performed a lesbian act, and for it I am damned. Today my lover and I are less publicly demonstrative, and we are presumed to be simply two women. There is no hostility in sight. The lesson of identity as performance is vivid.

At the same time, calling myself lesbian is a decision I make— a political decision— about how I will associate with others. It’s about what role I choose to play. Will I assert my belonging with others who call themselves lesbians? Will I expect admission to spaces closed to all but those calling themselves lesbian? Will I expect to be treated in the same manner as those who call themselves lesbian? Will I defend this identity against all who challenge my right to claim it for myself? And will I present myself as an object of attraction to lesbians, and will we love, touch, play, sleep with, suck, and fuck each other?

[...] As I move into tomorrow and consider my politics and where to place my activist effort, I have to remember that oppression is not based on what I am but rather on what I am presumed to be. Oppression does not ask how you wish to be identified. It takes one look, nails a label to you, and proceeds to dispense perverse justice upon your body. I don’t have to feel like a lesbian to suffer the consequences of being presumed one. I just have to look like one.

Identity serves a crucial role in the emergence of any liberatory movement. It provides a haven for those seeking liberation along the dimension being challenged. By claiming a new transgressive identity, those challenging the status quo can identify with one another for collaborative effort and mutual support. In claiming the identity, there is a presumption of some shared oppression and some common desire to stand against the imposed suffering. The new identity can be a rallying point for the formation of new alliances and coalitions.

Within a more established movement, identity too often becomes a limiting factor used to exclude others and assert control over the movement’s agenda. For years now, some within the gay liberation movement have used the term sexual orientation as an identity-defining litmus test to exclude gender queers and narrow the scope of queer activism.

Because this is such a repressed society, we find liberation through liberated identities. Once we’re free, we’re able to really grow and develop politically, and then we can learn to appreciate the pitfalls of identity and to surf identity. Identity-based movements need to grow beyond the identities that established them, because basing a movement on an identity always privileges those who sit in judgement of who gets to be included and fails to liberate those at the margins.”]

Nancy Nangeroni and Gordene MacKenzie, from Performing Translesbian

#oh wow#nancy nangeroni#gordene mackenzie#lesbian#trans#queer#identity#to read#queue it
Avatar
reblogged
gatheringbones
Avatar
genderqueerpositivity
I coined the term “genderqueer” back in the 1990s in an effort to glue together two nouns that seemed to me described an excluded and overlooked middle: those of us who were not only queer but were so because we were the kind of gender trash society couldn’t digest.
A prominent gay columnist immediately attacked me in print for “ruining a perfectly good word like ‘queer.’” (Harrumph!)
Joan Nestle, Claire Howell, and I then used the word for the title of our anthology of emerging young writers. But I don’t think anyone expected the term or the concept to really catch on.
Then one year I was attending the Creating Change conference and using the (wonderfully gender-neutral) bathrooms, and saw someone had posted a sticker on the wall that read, “A Genderqueer Was Here!” I thought, Hmm … that’s really interesting. Someone is using that not as a descriptor, but as the basis for their identity. So it begins.
Fast-forward about 20 years and I was just reading Matt Bernstein’s anthology Nobody Passes, and in it writer Rocko Bulldagger bemoans the term’s very existence, declaring, “I am sick to death of hearing it “
Such is the arc of a new idea.
But if you opened your eyes at all, you could see all this coming a long way off.
At Camp Trans, outside the now-defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I’d meet one young person after another simply known as “boychik,” “demigirl,” “transmasculine,” “tryke,” and any number of exuberant genders few of us had contemplated.
Camp Trans itself was always overrun by one set of teens and 20-somethings explaining patiently, if exasperatedly, to their lesbian mothers — who’d brought them in tow to experience the beauty of womanhood — that they needed to move beyond their transphobia and accept trans people as women and not men. And a totally different set of teens and 20-somethings were joyously destroying by example the categories of men, women, lesbian, and  transgender.
We’ve spent almost 40 years fighting for a bunch of identity categories that are based entirely on the implicit acceptance that there are two and only two basic sexes, with the associated possible gender identities and sexual orientations that come from them.
And now young people are about to blow all that up.
I was reminded of this while watching Showtime’s hit TV show Billions, which introduced a new character, Taylor, whose gender I was having fun trying to puzzle out.
Taylor is an intense, brilliant intern, who wears a shirt, tie, and buzzed crew cut, but otherwise has no identifiable landmarks by which the viewer might navigate the gender terrain.
Finally, they are introduced to Bobby Axelrod, the head of multibillion-dollar hedge fund Axe Capital.
As played by Asia Kate Dillon, they reply: “Hello, sir, my name is Taylor. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’”
Cutting-edge stuff. And a signpost for where the gender dialogue is going. Just like when student Maria Munir, 20, came out to a nonplussed President Obama as “nonbinary.”
In a recent article at Refinery29, Dillon explained that they didn’t just read for the part. As they read the part, “I did some research into non-binary, and I just thought, Oh my gosh, that’s me… When I read the script for episode two and I saw the ‘they, theirs and them,’ that’s when the tears started to well up in my eyes. Then when I read Axe’s response, which is, ‘Okay,’ and then the scene just continues, that’s what ultimately moved me to full-fledged tears.”
This is powerful stuff. And it’s only the start. The trans movement is going to have to accommodate and open the boundaries perhaps more than it would like.
But if it’s the job of young people to expose and explode their elders’ paradigm, these young people are off to a wonderful start.
“Hello. My name is Riki. My pronouns are ‘they, theirs, and them.’“

Riki Wilchins, “Get to Know the New Pronouns: They, Theirs, and Them

Source: advocate.com
#riki wilchins#genderqueer#trans#queue it
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
steveyockey
There’s this ridiculous thing that I think is a big part of a lot of pre-egg-crack trans journeys and certainly was for me: “Just because I hate being a man and wish I could be a woman, or a totally different person, doesn’t make me trans, because I’m not already transitioned.” Which is absurd, but you invent ways to protect yourself from what will be a trauma. You’ve learned through subliminal and not-so-subliminal codes that your family or your friends or your culture are telling you, “Don’t blow up your life like that.” Repression, in this really sad way, is a survival mechanism. I don’t know that I would be alive if I had my egg crack in 1998 in my childhood bedroom. That would have been too dangerous a thing to realize about myself then.
[Making] the film was a very raw and scary journey toward becoming comfortable with myself as an artist. I always thought of myself as a “professional fan”: someone who could get really excited about other people’s art, but, for whatever reason, the idea of making my own art always felt shameful. The process of working on the film and saying to myself, “Yes, I’m trans, and I need to transition to have the life I need to live,” are all one thing. It happened while I was writing the script, and that is the shame I’m unpacking in this movie. When Casey first talks to JLB, she says, “For a lot of people, I know the change that you go through when you take the World’s Fair Challenge is a really big change, like you turn into a clown or an evil vampire”—these simple genre metaphors that we see in body horror movies. But Casey says about herself, “It’s not like that for me. It’s making me different. It’s making me bad.” And the word “bad” is a really important key to the film, because it’s not as simple as Casey role-playing the person she wishes she could be. She is expressing a part of herself that has a level of catharsis and autonomy denied to her in her IRL life, but she’s not at a stage yet where she can explore that outside of fiction and detangle that from feelings of disgust at herself.

Jane Schoenbrun speaking to Sam Bodrojan for Filmmaker, “Portal to Portal: Jane Schoenbrun on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” April 14, 2022.

#jane schoenbrun#we’re all going to the world’s fair#to read#trans#film
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
communistkenobi

we never should have let cis people get away with “sex is biological, gender is social”

Avatar
hummerous

can someone explain this one pls

Avatar
communistkenobi

sure thing! It’s a fairly mainstream “trans-inclusive” opinion that while sex is still biological (which is to say, binary, “real,” outside of social opinion, it exists in nature), gender is socially constructed. This frames being transgender as having a socially constructed gender that ‘conflicts with’ biological sex. This conforms to mainstream psychiatric models of transgenderism, which frames trans people as having an identity disorder or something psychologically wrong with us that makes us ‘want to have a gender that is different from our biological sex.’ It is a handy way of conceding that gender is social while still maintaining the belief that sex is a real biological thing. It is very common among doctors, cis allies, policy documents about trans inclusivity (the ones I’ve read, anyway), and is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience.

I really dislike this framing for several reasons - one is that it is in fact arguing that gender is biologically based by tying it to our ‘natural sex’ (if our gender ‘conflicts with’ our sex, then gender is still biologically based, and if the reason you want to change your gender is because of mental illness, then a desire to change one’s gender can only be gained through psychological abnormality). It also maintains sex as something that is real, unchanging, natural, and universal across space, time, and culture. It is none of those things -

  1. sex can change (HRT, surgery, and so on changes our sex, in fact it’s called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and HRT is comminly understood as initiating a ‘second puberty’),
  2. sex is not binary - a belief that it is binary is what constructs the category of ‘intersex,’ ie people who don’t fit this supposed universal sex binary, and this construction produces medical violence against intersex people by positioning them as medically defective/abnormal,
  3. sex is not ‘real’ in the sense that the category of ‘sex’ is a social construction that bundles a complex series of properties of the body (external genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, etc) together by claiming they always 100% coincide with each other and form a coherent whole (this is not true, ‘sex’ is a spectrum because sex refers to many, many things). You can read the work of Julia Serano, a trans biologist who has published many open access essays on this subject. I believe she recently published a piece critiquing the idea that gametes are binary
  4. The process of assigning sex at birth does not even follow this supposed scientific fact properly, because we don’t run chromosome checks on infants, we don’t do ultrasounds on them to see what their internal organs look like, we don’t measure their hormone levels, and so on. Sex assignment at birth is a social process of doing a quick genital inspection of infants and then writing down their sex on birth records based on that inspection, and if those external genitals don’t conform to binary understandings of sex (eg the infant is intersex), these genitals are surgically altered to fit this binary model. I believe Adamson describes this in Beyond the Coloniality of Gender as preparing children for a life of ‘good heterosexual sex’ (this is a paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote)
  5. Because sex is a socially constructed category, it is not universal, because social constructs are dependent on the social context they arise in. I’ve read a number of papers from postcolonial/decolonial scholars in particular critiquing this supposed universalism as a form of colonial domination (María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, Sally Engle Merry’s Colonial and Postcolonial Law, Boris Bertolt’s The Invention of Homophobia in Africa, Jenny Evang’s Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, B Binaohan’s Decolonising Trans/Gender 101. These last two aren’t postcolonial works but they’re very instructive for understanding sex assignment as a deeply oppressive and non-scientific practice: Heath Fogg Davis’ Sex Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique and Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices)

essentially, “sex is biological, gender is social” is a massive cop-out that still accepts the framing of binary sexual biological legitimacy, which is the foundational belief that produces transphobic violence and discrimination in society. I really like Judith Butler’s framing of it Bodies That Matter: if sex is this supposedly biological reality that can’t change, but our understanding of sex is only always in reference to our social interpretation and application of it in the world (eg gender), then sex is also socially constructed

#queer#trans#thanks so much for this concise run down op#queue it
Avatar
reblogged
queerpyracy
Avatar
meshugenist
Transfeminine Science
Transfeminine Science is a site for information on hormone therapy for transfeminine people.
Transfeminine Science

this website is seriously fucking awesome it's got a shit ton of aggregated transfem endocrinology information

it's got comparable doses for different ROAs

an injectable estradiol simulator/steady state finder (sadly missing the functionality of a loading dose option but that's fine)

and scientific articles about various different minutiae of hrt

seriously awesome website please give it a look and explore some, it's got a shit ton of other tools and links

#trans#reference#resource
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
gatheringbones

[“How are we showing up for each other, and how come it sometimes feels so hard to do so? The language we have to describe exhaustion in the context of coalitional political work—burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, self-care—doesn’t quite grasp the complicated reality of working to make one another’s (deeply interwoven) lives more livable in the broader context of institutional disinvestment and systemic harassment and discrimination that produces mutually resonant forms of traumatization and triggering.

I think through how we might begin to move beyond the rhetoric of burnout and toward a logic of postscarcity in order to do justice to the methods of collective support that we have spent decades actively inventing and elaborating—and to render them more robust. This necessitates really grappling with questions of care—how we understand it, how we measure it, how we account for it.

For far too long, both hegemonic and resistant cultural imaginaries of care have depended on a heterocisnormative investment in the family as the primary locus of care. Let me use a colloquialism from my years in the South: this ain’t right. Another colloquialism: this shit is fucked.

To state the obvious: some of us have okay relationships with our families of origin, but a whole lot of us don’t. A lot of us don’t have families, full stop. We lost them somewhere along the way. They rejected us. We had to escape them in order to survive. We cobbled together some network of support, some other kind of care web, instead. We might call that a family, too—a family of choice, a family constructed through consent rather than accident and forced relation. But whatever our relationship to family—the word, the construct, the ongoing practice of building one—it’s also obvious that our ability to flourish is reliant on forms of care that outstrip the mythic purported providential reach of the family.

One thing—maybe the main thing—I’m trying to do here is think about what care actually looks like in trans lives. This means decentering the family and beginning, instead, from the many-gendered, radically inventive, and really, really exhausted weavers of our webs of care.”]

hil malatino, trans care, 2020

#hil malatino#trans#to read#thinking about this a lot in regards to the union as well
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
gatheringbones
“Part of the dream of queer is that it potentially has no opposite. Straight is the opposite of gay. Queer is a rejection of both. Queer was one of the first words that spoke to me as the dream I needed in order to survive. I don’t know if trans is the same as queer, I mean I know it is and I know it isn’t—I know there can be a gloriousness to the potential of trans as a reimagining beyond conventional gender expectations. If queer laid my foundations, a trans analysis rearranged the structures and gave me the space to breathe again. Transgender: to bend, mend, extend, and transcend.
The explosion of trans identities in the early-2000s challenged my own assumptions, including the assumptions that once felt like challenges, and it wasn’t just the transfeminine spectrum that gave me hope in fluidity. I’d always believed that masculinity could only be the enemy, but then there were the trans fags who showed me something beyond the predetermined, a masculinity negotiated and transformed, a flamboyance through choosing a bodily language of one’s own making. A freedom, but not a freedom from accountability. The meanings of queer and trans are constantly shifting—this is part of the allure. At once identities that declare an end to borders, and identities that constantly build walls, challenging enough to derail conversations and at the same time empty enough to use in the name of a TV show or nonprofit.
One problem with the politics of representation is that often it’s about who is represented, but not what. I’m not saying we don’t ever need an us and them. I know this is how many of us find one another, dance with the scars into arms that might hold not only to harm. I don’t think there always needs to be an invitation to join us, I don’t think this has to be the case, but I do think this should always be an option. I do think a world without borders is a dream we must hold onto—personally, politically, intimately, explosively, expressively.”
There is incredible beauty to the naming and claiming so often found in these worlds, but also there’s a frightening territorialism. I don’t want to become the cops, I want to end policing in all its forms. This is the dream that queer and trans worlds have helped me to imagine.”

mattilda bernstein sycamore, the freezer door

#mattilda bernstein sycamore#queer#trans#yeah.#queue it
Avatar
reblogged
queerpyracy
As a rape survivor, I understand the need for safe space together – free from sexist harassment and potential violence. But fear of gender variance also can't be allowed to deceptively cloak itself as a women's safety issue. I can't think of a better example than my own, and my butch friends', first-hand experiences in public women's toilets. Of course women need to feel safe in a public restroom; that's a serious issue. So when a man walks in, women immediately examine the situation to see if the man looks flustered and embarrassed, or if he seems threatening; they draw on the skills they learned as young girls in this society to read body language for safety or danger.
Now, what happens when butches walk into the women's bathroom? Women nudge each other with elbows, or roll their eyes, and say mockingly, "Do you know which bathroom you're in?" Thats not how women behave when they really believe there's a man in the bathroom. This scenario is not about women's safety – its an example of gender-phobia.
And ask yourself, if you were in the women's bathroom, and there were two teenage drag queens putting on lipstick in front of the mirror, would you be in danger? If you called security or the cops, or forced those drag queens to use the men's room, would they be safe?
If the segregation of bathrooms is really about more than just genitals, then maybe the signs ought to read "Men" and "Sexually and Gender Oppressed," because we all need a safe place to go to the bathroom. Or even better, let's fight for clean individual bathrooms with signs on the doors that read "Restroom."
And defending the inclusion of transsexual sisters in women's space does not threaten the safety of any woman. The AIDS movement, for example, battled against the right-wing characterization of gay men as a "high-risk group." We won an understanding that there is no high-risk group – there are high-risk behaviors. Therefore, creating safety in women's space means we have to define unsafe behavior – like racist behavior by white women towards women of color, or dangerous insensitivity to disabilities.
Transsexual sisters are not a Trojan horse trying to infiltrate women's space. There have always been transsexual women helping to build the women's movement – they are part of virtually every large gathering of women. They want to be welcomed into women's space for the same reason every woman does – to feel safe.

Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond

#leslie feinberg#trans#transgender warriors#bathroom harassment#transphobia
Avatar
reblogged
queerpyracy
Avatar
depsidase
Avatar
a-great-immortal

This is why I get so tired about “whose a real women” and “are transgender people real” and the like because it’s so irrelevant. We have group or people that have an insane suicide rate and we have a solution that reduces that by an insane amount.

No matter how you slice it no theoretical reason nor gender rhetoric can change the gender affirming care is improving more lives than it’ll ever hurt

Avatar
aster-is-confused

i think this belongs here too

all the statistics are massively in favor of gender affirming care no matter how you slice it.

Avatar
rowanjasper

Adding to that last one bc that statistic made me feel nervous post top surgery- post surgical depression is an extremely common response to ALL SURGERY. You feeling really bad in the weeks after gender affirming care does NOT mean you made a mistake or even that you're part of the regret statistic. Those knee surgery and back surgery folks also got it too!!

#trans#gender affirming healthcare#medical industrial complex#hate to be a downer but if we as a society truly cared about preventing suicide we would fix poverty and homelessness and prisons#and also introduce universal healthcare#and that is the purpose of our struggle! and affirming and protecting gender affirming healthcare is part of it!#queer
Avatar
reblogged
theinternetcultureproject
Avatar
staff

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

  • The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
  • Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
  • Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 
  • Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
  • When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

  • Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
  • Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
  • Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

Avatar
jv

ok, I had a quick chat with some of the people who authored this post, so I'm just posting this so it appears in the notes of the original staff post so some people reading around may see it.

  • This is not a 'official staff post reflecting staff position on something', this is something a bunch of trans automattic employees have done on their own.
  • They asked HR to be able to post their thoughts without facing reprisals.
  • The person who is covering for Matt as CEO while he's on sabbatical said yes.
  • That's Toni Schneider, who not only is not an employee, he is one of the earliest investors in automattic and a board member, and he will be interim CEO just for the next couple of months, so he doesn't need to fear from any backlash from Matt.
  • On the other hand, the people behind this post will have Matt as their boss again once he's back next May, so this is incredibly brave.
  • As "not an official whole-staff" post but something authored by a small subset of staff, they can't promise anything, just that they are trying to get things to improve. But they are individual members of Staff, and not even any of the big bosses.
  • Also they obviously can't either fire Matt, make him step down, or make him face any consequence: He's their boss and the owner of the company they work for.
  • Have I said how absurdly brave is to post this talking about something the guy that owns the company that employs you has done?
  • This post makes me fucking emotional.
#tumblr#trans#god! what goes on!#can the board fire Matt
Avatar
reblogged
dngrcpckwithmurdericing
Avatar
enbycrip
Avatar
enbycrip
#hmmmm#trans#history#is it fair to call castration gender affirming surgery if it’s in a religious ritual context??#we really can’t know either way and I wouldn’t want to ascribe modern identities & understandings of gender onto#people from thousands of years ago. still the source link has some very cool facts! there were clearly#many many identities present in this society 💞💞#trans history#queer#queer history
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
mouthporn.net