Since people seem to like my pride outfit!

Woah woah this has 1000 notes. I'm super flattered and I will bench press each and every one of you.

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"

Just in case people don't know how real of a problem this has been, i can provide an example.

When I was early transition (2012), I literally had to choose between changing my gender maker or ever having the hope of getting a hysto covered by insurance. This was also when no other trans related surgeries were covered by literally any insurance in the US, so hysto was the one you might be able to get with medical reason, but only if you hadn't changed your legal gender yet. (All top surgery and bottom surgery and such were completely out of pocket no matter who/where you were or what insurance you had in the US.)

I elected to change my gender marker because that was integral to keeping me safe in [state] whenever I showed my ID.

To get a hysto in my current, "progressive" state, in 2021, i was only able to do it at all by changing my gender in the medical and insurance system back to F (used to not be able to do that - was only able to change it back because of progres in trans healthcare). Like they literally could not refer me for the procedure unless my gender marker was F, or even refer me to the surgeon. To this day it remains incorrect on my chart because it's the only way I can access obgyn care at all.

Literally none of this would be a problem if procedures and body parts were not divided by an arbitrary category of legal sex, and if terminology was specific to bodies.

Link to original tweet

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

The local queer centrum asked us all to support the ban on conversion therapy in the EU initiative, so now it's My Job to do it seriously.

We still need so many signatures. Damn. So. Many. Signatures.

Come on people, we can do this!!

To my fellow European moots and followers, please sign this initiative to make conversion therapies illegal in all the EU.

We need 1M signatures and there's only 100k.

Just in Madrid, more than 1M people attended the PRIDE event. It's time to put our efforts where our words are.

Hey! Thank you for sharing this! There was an unexpected surge of notes on this post, and you are the one who caused it.

Re: Pride attendance: I don't know about Madrid, but here in Luxembourg, it made me seriously angry how the people organizing it didn't mention this initiative in their speeches. They pose demands to the state each year, and this year, banning conversion therapy was one of them. You'd think that they'd at least mention that, hey, by the way, you could totally do something about that, but no, they just said that the Government should ban conversion praxis, anyway, let's party. There were so many people at that event! We could have had the signatures for our country together then and there pretty easily. Instead, we only got, like twenty new signatures? I believe. Not sure. I did check it at the time, but it was a while ago, I forgot the exact number.

Thank you!! I wasn't seeing that much activity in Spain regarding this topic, and neither on my dash here in Tumblr so I decided to give it a boost.

If just like 15% of the people going to these big prides voted, I think we would be already over the million votes...

Keep sharing please!!

There is a pro-transgender Labour revolt against health secretary Wes Streeting. You can sign the letter.

Labour health secretary Wes Streeting has continued the transphobic policies of the previous Conservative government. Now Labour members have published and open letter anyone can sign.

Wes Streeting has said:

“This ban [on puberty blockers] brings the private sector in line with the NHS. We are committed to providing young people with the evidence-led care that they deserve”.

Evidence shows that blockers are of great help to young trans people, as it gives them some breathing space before puberty changes their bodies in traumatic ways.

Streeting is either lying about what medical research on trans people says or he has not done his homework. As a gay man he should know how oppression and erasure works.

The letter states:

You can read and sign the letter here.

See also:

Wes Streetings Tweet: An Analysis #BWOT Wes Streeting sparks fury after defending ban on puberty blockers for trans kids The World Professional Association for Transgender Health with severe critique of the UK Cass review on transgender youth

By Jack Molay.

Happy anniversary, Stonewall riots! Stay revolutionary!

"School districts that don’t respect transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don’t align with their gender identity could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the issuance of a final rule under Title IX to protect people in public schools from sex-based discrimination and harassment. The announcement marks a significant update in federal efforts to combat sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. During a call with reporters, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona emphasized the administration’s dedication to ensuring that Title IX effectively serves all students by providing safe, welcoming, and rights-respecting educational environments."

Read the full piece here

this is really big for us actually

Title IX is a cornerstone of protection for women, girls, and gender/sex minorities in schools, I saw it used so many times in the 17 years I was in school to enact real consequences for sexual harassment. The Obama administration added "guidelines" to include gender identity but they were more like suggestions. This is REAL. All those states and school districts that have passed anti-trans policies in the last few years will HAVE to abide by this. Coming in the wake of things like Nex Benedict's case, this might actually force schools to pay attention to harassment of LGBT kids. And they're working on an addendum protecting trans kids' right to play on the correct sports teams.

I'm... this feels like a tide changing. We'll see how it plays out on the local level, but I have seen Title IX work in my own life. I know people who have been removed from sports teams or classes, even removed from an entire school because they harassed or assaulted someone. It's not perfect and I've also seen the process fail to fully protect victims. But it's incredible to me that future queer kids could see their rights considered important like that. Queer rights are intertwined with women's rights, trans rights are feminism, and it's actually a big deal that the government is acknowledging that!!

Also, though, if Trump is elected he will try to walk this back. Part of this change is just undoing damage that his education secretary did 6 years ago (including forcing victims trying to invoke Title IX to testify in a live hearing rather than private meetings... about their experience of SEXUAL HARASSMENT... Biden's changes just removed that part) So I hope we can make progress before that happens, if it does.

Not to undermine the message, because yes, especially locally, votes count - but the only reason they were able to avoid the veto-override was that a couple more Republicans changed their votes from when they originally passed the legislation.

So, actually this is more "vote and" adding to the message rather than undermining, because at least one of those Repubs said her changed vote was due to people in her district contacting her and urging her not to support the override. So vote AND contact your reps.

(Kansas Reflector is a good source for KS news for those interested)

Because I circulated a call to action about it here that got some traction: to those of you who contacted Maine legislators when it counted, thank you— it worked. Maine just passed sanctuary-state-level protection for trans rights.

"irreversible side effects of HRT" all of life is irreversible. i cannot go back a single second in time

also i know what i want. i know the risks. everything has risk. i am already living! why am i living half a life because of what YOU fear? stop talking down to transsexuals

made a visual for this one 😎👍

The Cass Review, and what we can do about it

The UK government is making decisive moves toward banning trans healthcare outright. The NHS says it is adjusting its policies to be in line with the "cass report", a pseudoscientific report written by a transphobe that goes as far as to claim that little boys playing with trucks and little girls playing with dolls is biological, and which disregards dozens of scientifically sound previous studies into HRT and trans healthcare in order to reach its conclusions that trans healthcare for under 25s should be effectively eliminated.

This is genocidal. These moves will kill countless young trans people. I would not have made it to 25 if healthcare wasn't available and I know so many other trans people wouldn't have either.

The mainstream reporting in the UK is keeping itself ideologically cohesive by claiming that trans people exist, nobody hates them, and they're very rare, and the big problem is the explosion of new cases of not-really-trans people who are clogging up the system (this is a lie, the system has been intentionally slowed by malicious neglect, it isn't even a resource issue, the clinics have far more capacity than the number of patients who are let through)

Once again, this is genocidal and is actually a commonplace methodology of genocide. The nazis asked GRT people to help them understand which Traveller families were "real" travellers and which were the fake ones, since they insisted it was only the fake ones who were the problem and who had to be exterminated (because a lot of nazi GRT policy was based on American indigenous reservation policy).

Labour, the main opposiiton party in the UK, has announced it will "follow the Cass Report", and implement these restrictions on trans healthcare once in government.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone in the UK who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for Labour unless they reverse position on this, and to be clear about this: Labour will not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win.

Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people in the UK, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so young trans people can survive this medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practicing the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

fuck

I'll have more to add to this post later I have to get to therapy I just got really mad when I saw the news this morning

Okay I'm back. Therapy went well thanks for asking

I want to preempt here the thoughts that I know it's easy to have when this stuff feels overwhelming, that community organising "isn't enough" or it's too small to make the necessary change.

One of the ways that states maintain asymmetry in conflict with marginalised people is the dependence that the community has on resources the state controls. In concert with capitalism, the modern neoliberal state has disempowered and aliented individuals to a point where so much of the basics of survival and feeling like a human being feel out of our hands, and as soon as you start even just sharing regular meals with people that you're in community with you feel infinitely freer. But I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about healthcare.

Controlling the entire supply and distribution chain of HRT is how the state is able to say with such ease and swiftness that trans people can't have it. The power to reverse that is in the hands of the trans community and cis allies, if they simply begin to build community structures. The advantage of the state disappears, the independence and autonomy of the community materialises. The ability to meaningfully negotiate how any group of people engage with, delegate responsibility to, and consent to the power and policing of the state is in direct proportion to that people's abiliity to be self-sufficient, that's why controlling the land is so important to states, but the same logic applies in every part of our lives: food, work, housing, community, public space access, HEALTHCARE

So

Writing a constitution for your trans assembly doesn't have to mean policing the space and it absolutely must not mean that everyone who enters aligns perfectly with the constitution and is ideologically pure. Purity is the antechamber of fascism. Writing a constitution for the organisational structure of an assembly means figuring out core values and processes. It means that the people who come into your space can depend on the space to operate in the ways that you have laid out and for there to be clear expectations for their behaviour in the space, without being rules to access the assembly.

For example your assembly might be a sober space, and that doesn't have to mean that you're turning away trans people at the door because they smoked a joint on the way, but it means that the assurance of no ongoing drug use at the event makes it a safe place for people in recovery to attend and have their voices heard. You can create structure and assume the temporary responsibility of that structure to facilitate the assembly without ingraining power or authority over others, and such power that you do wield is mitigated by explicitly communicating your values and org processes.

For example, outlining conflict resolution values and processes doesn't mean that you will act as a community resolution service, it means that if anyone has problems with someone taking the mic at the assembly there is a clear framework through which they can take issue and if someone is allowed to speak at the assembly it means that your organisation is satisfied that any issues are resolved, or you're indifferent, or whatever stance you've taken in your constitution, but not that you're "platforming" or supporting someone that someone's friends don't like. Explciit frameworks and structure allow distancing from the interpersonal in this way.

Structures emerging from assemblies are going to be born out of people authentically discussing the issues that affect them rather than an abstracted group (even if they're a group within a marginalised community) taking on the responsibility to be the architects of liberation, which has various advantages. For one, the paternalism of radicals is often hard to spot from the inside, but the way that activists and more politicised members of a group take on the responsibility to be the ones making it all happen is a huge stunting force against anything actually happening because of the distinction and therefore alienation being made between the politicised and non-politicised community members (this is why it's good to offer free food at your assembly and anything else that can give it a bit more social pull). Structures born out of assemblies benefit from the insights of "ordinary" non-politicised community members which are frequently free of the prefigurative political frameworks the politicised members will apply that can make opportunities for organising slip through the cracks. At the same time, the politicisation of those non-politicised members is a huge part of the aim and itself a huge benefit of giving people a space for discussion. The structures that will come out of a democratic assembly to tackle the problems discussed therein will comprise new and old organisers who are all invested in getting something done in a way that a recruit to an org set up by politicised actors to tackle a problem won't.

The opportunities for solidarity abound too. Many trans people have experiences with sex work and are currently sex workers. Many radical trans people don't or aren't, because a lot of radicals come from comfortable positions that have kept them away from the economic pressures trans people experience to do sex work (be it survival or for example saving for surgery). A trans assembly is more well-equipped to produce a structure to support and protect trans sex workers than the radical politicised factions of either trans or sex worker communities. Furthermore, someone with experience in creating and maintaining a community democratic space like this is well-equipped to cross into another community and help to create one like it there, at which point you could even convene to discuss community solidarity with the full force of both assemblies.

Consciousness raising is a fantastic thing for the organisers of an assembly to approach that doesn't risk calcifying power in community positions too. Some amount of consciousness raising is the natural result of holding an assembly, but you can take proactive steps too. If the organisers who facilitate the assembly also facilitate a reading group (maybe right afterwards for those who want to stick around, or maybe not if that would be too tiring) there is immediately a direct route for the politicisation of community members through a social avenue, and you're not positioning yourselves as teachers or big brain theory geniuses, you're learning together.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.

Writing this up into a proper thing and putting it as a public post on my patreon because I realised people without tumblr simply can't access it properly

I've put it up as a public patreon post now, expanded with a little more on assemblies but largely the same as above

the idea of public restrooms as "women's spaces" continues to confound me. you know who I hope is in a public bathroom when I go in?? no one. I would prefer no one else be in the bathroom. and if someone else is in the bathroom I am going to ignore them as much as possible. I did not go into the bathroom to connect with other women. I went into the bathroom to piss and/or shit. it's a toilet's space, not a women's space. shut the fuck up and let trans people piss and shit in peace. let's all continue to avoid eye contact with each other and any and all interaction in the toilet's space.

In light of recent events, let’s not forget that H. Bomberguy is responsible for driving a formerly-beloved transphobic TV writer into a downward spiral that cost him his career and his family… all by playing Donkey Kong.

He raised so much money to help people!

if there was a trans girl that had a 1% chance of bursting into flames and searing me alive if i had sex with her, i would still do it. that's what it means to believe in trans rights.