Home Field Advantage

the "you aren't friends" really sells it.

If you haven’t found your people yet, please know they are out there. Someone is thinking about meeting someone like you. And I hope you find your people soon. 🌸

agricultural engineer at my work grew up on a farm in a time when being a farmer also meant being a carpenter (his words) and a couple days ago a piece of stupidly crucial wood equipment broke in our lab and i helped him build a new one in like 2 hours thats actually very sturdy and looks like it was actually done right on the first try because it was and i realized how incredibly powerful of a skill it is to be able to make like, a competent set of shelves, a piece of handmade equipment to specifications, etc and be able to at least have an idea of how to make bigger things and i cannot stop thinking about it now. like he was telling me about how when he was in college it was required for engineering majors to learn how to make the stuff they were designing so he had to take proper woodworking and metalworking classes too and they dont do that as much anymore. and how he has relatives that run a woodshop and build like tables and standing clocks and stuff. imagine somebody asking you for a table or clock and you can just make it and it looks nice and works well for a long time and you can fix it if it breaks. maybe im just gen z but whoa

whenever anyone says they are “okay with gay people as long as they don’t make it their whole personality” it makes me so sad.

firstly, we should not merely be tolerated. secondly, you’re clearly homophobic and your tolerance extends only so far as your comfortability for that which is different. finally, why should we not make out personality who and what we love? i would rather be defined by my love any day than hatred or indifference.

Ace dragon :D I’m really happy with how this one came out

Amrita Sher-Gil, Sumair (1936)

If I’d ever been aborted the effect on me would be exactly indistinguishable from if I’d never been conceived, which could have happened any infinite number of ways. It doesn’t matter because I wasn’t that fetus. I’ve never been a fetus. The meat and guts I’m using came from a fetus but I wasn’t there for that time period. The development of my physical vessel is not an event I was present for and anything that might have happened to it is as relevant to me as whether my parents just went to sleep instead of starting that up. If you care about aborted embryos you’re a goddamned idiot and should grow the fuck up.

building off of this post, people love to say that “trans men want to keep going into in women’s spaces after they transition because they just want to have the best of both worlds!” but in my experience, there are four main reasons that a trans man might use a “women’s space” after they transition:

do any of those sound like “evil men rubbing our dirty little hands together making plans for how we’re going to get male privilege without losing access to women’s spaces” to you? they sure don’t to me!

i think it’s pretty reasonable that we want to transition without losing the ability to access the resources we need, keep ourselves safe, keep up the relationships we’ve built, and express all facets of who we are. all of those are really, like, pretty basic parts of having good life and we shouldn’t be expected to give them up when we transition.

and honestly, if you claim to care about trans people, you should not be so attached to the gendering of these spaces that you’re willing to deny trans men those things for the sake of upholding gender restrictions. anyone who prioritizes the sanctity of gender segregated spaces over the safety, health, and well-being of trans men is a fucking transphobe. (yes, even if you’re trans yourself.)

and that’s what really gets me about all of this — the vehemence with which people are willing to defend those spaces being entirely and inflexibly gendered, despite how enforcement of gendered spaces has hurt trans people time and time again. gendered spaces have literally always been set up in ways that force trans people to break the rules; some trans men might break those rules in ways that don’t make sense to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for us to do so! it just means you might feel weird about it and that’s okay, discomfort won’t kill you.

“but using women’s spaces after transitioning to male defeats the purpose of transitioning! the whole point of transitioning is to be able to live as a man!”

and who are you to tell trans men what the point of our transitions should be? what if the purpose of us transitioning is just to live the happiest and most fulfilled life possible, and forcing ourselves into unsafe spaces or denying ourselves access to important resources or cutting ourselves off from important people in our lives or pushing down the more complex parts of our genders would “defeat the purpose of transitioning” for us? what if being able to go where cis men go is just one part of a much bigger journey, not the end goal?

if you really want to talk about “defeating the purpose,” let’s talk about how policing which gendered spaces trans men can access defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from policing which gendered spaces trans people can access, because it allows the policing of trans people in gendered spaces to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether. let’s talk about how using “evil men invading women’s spaces” rhetoric against trans men defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from using it against trans women, because it allows the rhetoric to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether.

the point of saying “let people decide which gendered space is right for them” isn’t to make sure everyone uses the one aligned with their “true gender,” it’s to let people do what’s best for them without punishing them for their choice. sometimes the best choice is one that seems wrong from the outside, and you need to learn to live with that.

i just think we as a community need to be more hostile toward people who think upholding the sanctity of a gendered space is more important than giving trans people the freedom to move through the world without being punished for existing in those gendered spaces. that kind of thinking is fucking dangerous and it’s weird as hell that some of y’all are so comfortable with it being directed at us.

moral of the story: stop giving so much of a shit about where a trans man decides to piss or see a doctor or hang out or whatever else. even if you think he doesn’t belong there, he probably has a good reason to be there anyway, and that reason is frankly none of your damn business.

Adding to/elaborating on this: if the seller has professional negotiating experience, they will interpret your lowball offer as a signal of what your true target price is. If you pitch too low, they won't bother to continue with you and will exit the conversation, usually by saying the price is firm (even if it isn't). If you pitch too high, you will end up paying more than you needed to because their counter-offer will be higher than it might otherwise have been. As OP indicates, a common expectation is that your true price is midway between the advertised price and the lowball offer. (This can vary culturally and over time, so pay attention to patterns as you gain experience that's specific to your market). So when you're deciding what to offer, ask yourself if you're willing to pay that halfway price, and adjust accordingly. You'll have more successful purchases and save everyone a lot of time.

That's very true.

When it comes to Marketplace (and yard sales, for that matter, but let's go with Marketplace for now) there's two main groups of sellers: people who are trying to get rid of things, and resellers.

People who are trying to get rid of things are usually expecting to take a loss. It's reasonably likely they bought the thing new and are just trying to get a little bit of that price back. They often just want the thing out of their house, so they're more eager to get it gone than they are to get a great price for it. You want to emphasize your willingness to make a concrete pickup plan and get it out without hassle. These are the people you will get incredible deals from. But they also may go wildly off-script, because they don't do this a lot.

Resellers, on the other hand, are trying to turn a profit. They have a number that they cannot go below, and they usually have more negotiating experience. They do need to sell their product, but they're going to be more savvy about it. However, the logistics of managing facebook marketplace sales and pickups gets time consuming, so they may cut you a better deal if you're interested in multiple items.

The way to tell the difference is by looking at what else the seller has listed. If it's only a few things, that all seem like the same person might have picked them out for themselves, they're probably just trying to get rid of stuff. If they have a lot of listings, with not a lot in common between items, they're reselling. Neither group is good or bad, but knowing the difference in the seller's likely goal is going to help you figure out what strategies to use when negotiating.

its one thing for a woman to blow off steam about how shes treated at the hands of the patriarchy, to say ‘god i hate men’ and leave it at that, its quite another to genuinely believe that anything (arbitrarily) associated with men or masculinity is, in and of itself, bad, and anything (arbitrarily) associated with women or femininity is, in and of itself, good. For sure, feel free to engage in positivity around the things that women are so often shamed for, but when you see people saying that stuff is inherently ‘divine’ or that certain body parts are blanket ‘bad’ or ‘evil’…maybe just ask yourself why someone would pass that kind of judgement on a concept or object that has no inherent moral weight.

this is so cute 🥹

maybe this is insensitive but i think if it's such a problem to see puppy masks or bdsm harnesses at pride for u well i think you could probably just look away into a different direction. like i feel like you can just turn yr head and it won't be a problem probably anymore.

they actually make some really cool products that can help keep you from seeing stuff you don’t want to see!

Highly recommend picking up something like this if you want to keep yourself from seeing kink when you’re out and about- it is a very strict preventative measure that should work completely.

sorry but it’s actually so horrific how little of a sense of community people have, how little regard they extend towards the other humans around them. killing people for being loud on the subway or turning around in your driveway. loading your gun and waiting at the door because a child ran your doorbell unexpectedly. ring cameras, neighborhoodapp, community watch group Facebook pages. you’ve assigned yourself the role of the one true peacekeeper and casted everyone else around you as a threat to be controlled. there’s no connection or love or compassion. just a deep distrust and hatred.

and the people who face the most significant consequences from this are the ones who are already deemed as outsiders. people of color, especially Black people, disabled people, people with mental illnesses, homeless people.

and so many people are willfully promoting this complete alienation from each other. the obsession with true crime, the hatred directed at children for existing in public spaces, the policing and controlling of where homeless people are allowed to be / what they’re allowed to do, the constant fearmongering about public transportation. you are building a society of FEAR. you are conditioning yourself to distrust everyone around you. you need to make an active, conscious effort to engage with the world and the life around you in a healthy manner.

people who believe radfems are just “women with opinions” and not the sum of their very harmful belief systems are the reason why so many are blind to the nazi dogwhistles entrenched in terf ideology. boiling the issue down to “women with opinions” is a way of calling misogyny where there is none in order to halt all arguments against what they’re truly saying. essentially, it’s a strawman designed to derail a legitimate criticism of their beliefs and the damage those beliefs cause people. 

what Nazi dogwhistle are “entrenched” in radical feminism?

it is honestly so absurd and sad that someone would think of a bunch of (exclusively) women, would be violent and comparable to nazis. It’s honestly so effing disrespectful. People who fought the nazis would be disgusted and abhorred to hear you compare a group of women who want to retain language to name ourselves and to retain and build our rights and dignity, to that disgusting regime. You should be ashamed of yourself. 

ah yes, blatant shaming with no real argument or defense. this is brilliant! It’s like the condescending “I’m not mad I’m just disappointed” speech given by parents to their six year olds lol. clearly trying to claim a moral high ground, virtue signaling, attempting one of the oldest recruitment tactics in the book, attempting to devalue my word, and then attempting to once again do the same thing I stated above. which is create a strawman that derails the real argument, avoids criticism, and undersells the entire situation and argument at hand as a way to “defend” a lesser argument that they actually can manage. which is of course completely irrelevant to what is really being said about the real basis of radical feminism. that’s how you avoid a debate you know you can’t win, folks. you just start a smaller one that you’ve engineered in your favor.

see this? this is redefining the movement. it’s a broad generalization of what terfs argue based on how terfs see themselves and want to be seen, which means it’s a biased generalization of the terf movement, coated in pretty words to make it sound appealing to both themselves and susceptible onlookers. 

this is the hook. 

it’s a means of signaling to others a moral stance they would find agreeable, to mask the finer details of radical feminism which seek to harm, outcast, and demean women. by making it appear milder and more helpful than it is, they create a moral panic and have a decent little shield to hide behind when the real criticism hits. you can bring down all the evidence in the world of them causing direct harm and they’ll still pull this out of their asses, only with increasingly offensive terms as the façade drops.

@deepgreenrad you do realize that there have been actual nazi dogwhistles within terf rhetoric for years now? do some research. and if it’s so horrifying perhaps you should take a good look at where you stand in all of these issues.

also “exclusively women”

where?

where, when I have seen countless men, who are usually right wingers, buddying up with terfs, sharing their viewpoints, quoting them and their dog whistles, etc?

terfs can argue all they want that those men “aren’t radfems” but they are still using their exact talking points and hyping up terf content.

but terfs can’t acknowledge that part, bc then their argument that any criticism of these talking points is purely out of hate for women falls apart.

There were literal neo Nazis at the terf demo in the UK yesterday.

The terfs stole a progress flag from protesting trans supporters and cut out the triangular section that makes up the trans rep, intersex rep, and black/brown lgbt people rep.

Yup I shared that picture.

Disgusting. Racist and intersexphobic along with the obvious transphobia. Unsurprisingly the woman on the left is the author of a transphobic book and, as far as anyone is aware, is cishet 🙃

And yeah I’m not surprised at all about neo-nazis. They very regularly buddy up with terfs, at these kind of rallies and in general.

Assuming for the moment that these questions are being asked in good faith (a fairly weak assumption, given the source), here’s a non-exhaustive list of elements of TERF ideology that either are Nazi dogwhistles on their own or are easily co-opted by Nazis:

neither of the terfs are deactivated yet and @deepgreenrad may also be a nazi

I also have experience with opabinia and can confirm that her tactic is to ask questions, as she did with op, on a variation of “how is what you said true?” like when I made a post about Rowling and she came disregarding the very obvious terfs dni tag on it and asked “hey op how did Rowling attack trans rights?” like 😀😀😀 duh??? So i blocked her right away because then and there i just knew she didn’t really want to make discourse, and she didn’t care what i would answer, she just wanted to wait until i responded and then dismiss every single point that i could possibly make. Another hook, as op so appropriately called it.

Yeah she likes to come in and play the “I’m being reasonable and calm here” card, so if someone responds angrily she and her little crew can play the respectability politics game and go “see? the transes are crazy and violent”.

okay so i can Not say this with 100% certainty but it has been confirmed that rowling is on tumblr and it has been Very hinted at that opabinia is her. i saw the post a While ago when i was looking for something to be mad about and came across her blog that was talking about how rowling confirmed on twit that she has a tumblr, and some radfem said more or less that she bet her money it was opabinia and opabinia rb’d it w a like “oh hahaha whatttt😉😉” type thing

That would explain why she hasn’t been taken down yet (well, her current blog. Her blogs have been deleted in the past), even though we have no concrete proof.

I don’t know where this quote is from, but it’s very relavant: “If you have 1 Nazi having dinner with 9 other people, you have 10 Nazis at the table.”

If you don’t kick Nazis out the moment they show up, congrats. You’re a fucking Nazi.

And to paraphrase John Green: The Venn Diagram of TERFs, Radfems, and Nazis is a fucking circle.